How Canada Became the Main Termius of the Underground Railroad

On Sunday, July 3, 1831, the day before Independence Day, Thornton and Ruthie Blackburn executed a daring daytime escape from slavery in Louisville, Kentucky. Thornton's "owner," Judge John Pope Oldham, immediately sent his son in pursuit of the runaways. The Blackburns had two days of unhindered travel, so William Oldham could not overtake them. Nearly two years later, Judge Oldham joined by Virgil McKnight, Ruthie's "owner," authorized agents to apprehend the Blackburns in Detroit. However, the Blackburns' determination to escape slavery and take charge of their own lives would eventually win them complete freedom. In I've Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, Karolyn Smardz Frost reconstructs the Blackburns' dramatic escape and efforts to re-enslave them—matching suspense with painstaking research.

McKnight and Oldham filed lawsuits seeking redress from the owners of the steamer, Versailles, and the ship's captain, Monroe Quarrier, who broke the law by approving the fake "free papers" that Thornton presented to him when he and Ruthie boarded. Quarrier swore "their papers seemed entirely correct," admitting, in effect, that he had made an innocent mistake when he approved the Blackburns' passage (p. 127). This trial lasted fifteen years and ended in a decision that awarded Judge Oldham's sister-in-law, Susan Brown, $600 for the loss of Thornton and McKnight $400 for the loss of Ruthie. Frost followed many legal cases before finding Thornton and Ruthie's freedom finally sealed in Canada. Frost acknowledges that court documents pertaining to the Blackburn escape were recorded in "dry legal" language, but Frost's reconstruction is lively (p. 125).

With the curse of slavery behind them, the young Blackburns settled in Toronto and became prosperous, well-connected members of the community. Though he never acquired print literacy, Blackburn participated in anti-slavery organizations and turned the labor he performed in slavery into an enterprise—Toronto's first cab business. The Blackburns had no children; therefore, when Lucie died in 1895, five years after Thornton, the Blackburn saga came to an end. Since no letters, diaries or memoirs were left behind, memory of the Blackburns in Toronto slowly extinguished till 1985 when Frost, the lead archaeologist at the Sackville School site, first learned about them. After unearthing material fragments of the long, productive lives of Lucie and Thornton Blackburn in Toronto, Frost's odyssey back to nineteenth-century Louisville to recover the couple's lost history began.

To reassemble the Blackburns' complete story, Frost read voluminous legal documents left by their "owners." Frost explains these legal documents and the strategies provoking them comprehensibly; however, Frost also derives personal motives, desires and beliefs from these documents. Here Frost's history slides into murky waters. Intent on recounting more than the Blackburns' flawless escape and their owners' recapture attempts, which are well documented, Frost attempts to reconstruct the Blackburns' lives plus the historical age in which they lived. When the Blackburns' history grows faint, Frost dives into a history of slavery itself from the perspective of its champions and opponents on both sides of the Ohio River and the Great Lakes.

To satisfy all these ends, Frost's narrative often assumes near-epic proportions covering "12 decades" from 1776 to 1895 and encompasses genealogy, slave narrative, biography, archaeological travelogue, sectional ideology, social history, and international law. As a result, Frost's narrative asserts much more than a scholarly reader can readily accept. When it concentrates on legal documents, historical chronology, and sectional, national and international statutes, however, I've Got a Home in Glory Land succeeds as an authoritative scholarly treatise built around a slave couple's ordeal. The narrative's greatest strength—an abundance of richly researched detail—is also its greatest weakness. In addition to essential archival data, the narrative includes a profusion of incidental and, often, nonessential details. This review will focus on the...