Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America by Fergus M. Bordewich (review)

BOOK REVIEWS teriors figure in her anecdotes,as do local custorns and culture, such as the timing of social calls. She found frontier clothing amusing, describing in detail how it failed to meet eastern fashion standards. Among her close descriptions are those of two infants'ensembles ( 22021 ). She also described cooking methods and everyday menus. The usual breakfast consisted of execrable"coffee, boiled at length and then settled with an egg; corn dodgers, cooked in a skillet covered in coals; and too much meat, usually game. The day' s other meals,dinner and tea or supper,were much the same, except that they might also include fruits or sweets. She noticed that Illinoisans had an unconquerable aversion to food that is not served hot and fresh from the cooking vessel" and did not care much for bread, especially if it was not fresh from the oven. She found 4 1 1• • 1 the game meat aelicious, as a general rule, but she objected that the excessive use" of coffee and determined that meat on the frontier was unhealthy ( 218). John Hallwas's introduction provides biographical details, which are especially helpful because the internal chronology of the memoir is vague. In the years before publishing her book in 1846, Farnham worked in New York State as a reformer, publishing her views on the rehabilitation of criminals and her arguments for giving women a larger role in society. She put her prison reform ideas in practice as matron ofthe Sing Sing Prison in New York, and must have refined her political ideas and literary taste while interacting with such notables as William Cullen Bryant ,Margaret Fuller,and Horace Greeley. Farnham's energetic and reformminded personality shows in the dialogues and internal commentary she includes in Life in Prairie Land,such as this aside in a story about a dinner party embarrassment: my philosophy of life... [ is] adopting heartily,and at once, whatever way seems clearly to be right, no matter how much it may conflict with preconceived feelings or opinions" ( 121). As Hallwas points out,Farnham saw women as " the key to cultural improvement " on the frontier and elsewhere xxv).She devoted considerable energy to her descriptions of women who degraded their families by cooking in filth, raising children like animals, or refusing hospitality to strangers, and contrasted such women with those ( like her sister and herself)with whom " the ruder and less pleasant conditions of life in a new country had been softened down by innumerable little arts and resources." Sarah MeNair Vosmeier Hanover College Fergus M. Bordewich. Bound for Canaan : 1be Underground Railroad and tbe War for tbe Soul ofAmerica.New York: Harper Collins Publishers,Inc., 2005. 560 pp. ISBN 0060524316 ( cloth), $ 27.95. T A lith the opening of the National V V Underground Railroad Freedom Center on August 3, 2004, numerous scholars began to reexamine the origin, development, impact, and leg·acy of the Underground Railroad. Subsequently,a plethora of studies on this subject have been published, mostly from a local, re80 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY gional, or biographical perspective. In contrast, Fergus M. Bordewich' s book is the first comprehensive and nationwide study of the Underground Railroad movement in over one hundred years In Bound for Canaan, Bordewich moves away from the common, romanticized interpretation of the Underground Railroad embedded in the imaginations of most Americans. Rather, he argues that the underground movement rested on the shoulders of extraordin·ary personalities "who combined their " radical ideas about race and political action with traditional notions of personal honor and sacred dutv" ( 4). Bordewich contends , moreover, that the Underground Railroad, along with the larger abolition movement, was a direct contributing cause of the Civil War" ( 6). This powerful and detailed volume is divided into four sections. In the first two pBOUND.forCANAAN 1 Tbe ' UNDERGROUND d RAILROAD and tbe Warfor tbe Soul ofAmerica FEROUS M. BORDEWICH parts Bordewich shows how the system of enslavement was linked to the expansion of the nation trom its inception to the antebellum period. The author also illustrates that during these years numerous African Americans and progressive whites sought to create strategies and organizations to resist the institution of slavery For example, the author notes...