Escape Betwixt Two Suns: A True Tale of the Underground Railroad in Illinois by Carol Pirtle (review)

Ramage's book is the final chapter, "The Grey Ghost of Television and Film/, in which Ramage explains how fame replaced controversy after Mosby's death in 1916. Mosby's popularity in the twentieth century and the romanticism surrounding his image is a topic worth explaining, and one that this reader wishes Ramage would have expanded. Although this book is strong on narrative, it offers enough analysis and engagement in historical debate to interest serious students of the Civil War and military history in general. Gmy Ghost: The Life of Col. fohn Singleton Mosby will prove a rewarding read for Civil War buffs and those interested in an ambitious, but engaging, description of his exceptional story. Stephen Rockenbach University of Cincinnati Carol Pirtle. Escape Betwixt Two Suns: A Tme Tale of the Underground Railroad in Illinois. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. 141 pp. ISBN: OS0932300I (clothL $39.95. ISBN: oS093230IX (paper), $16.95. In August IS42, thirty-one-year-old Susan ("Sukey") Richardson gathered her three young boys and nineteenyear -old Hannah Morrison, then led their escape from their master Andrew Borders, a wealthy farmer in southwestern Illinois. Sneaking through woods and along summer-strangled creek beds, Susan took them to the nearby village of Eden and William Hayes's dairy farm. Hayes was already known as an Underground Railroad "conductorJl and may have prearranged the slaves' escape; or the slaves may have just shown up at Hayes's place because of his reputation. In any case, Hayes now took an extraordinary risk. Most conductors transported fugitives to the next "station" ten or twelve miles northward. But William Hayes shepherded Susan and her four charges ninety miles north to St. Louis, then via packet boat another 130 miles up the Illinois River to Farmington, in Knox County, where on September 5, IS42, he left them in hiding with local abolitionists. Had the f'ugitives kept moving north they might well have claimed freedom and remained unknown to history. But a Chicago-based abolitionist paper, the Weste1'11 Citizen, heroized Susan's story and the "considerable excitem.ent" surrounding her escape. This was evidently why a proslavery Knox County Justice of the Peace soon "collected a gang/, tracked, and jailed the fugitives, and how Andrew Borders, who apparently hadn't a clue where to seek his runaway chattels, soon arrived in Knox County to reclaim. them. Pause the story here. A common assumption holds that following the Northwest Ordinance of 17S7, Illinois entered the Union as free territory and, in ISIS, as a free state. But French settlers following on Marquette's heels had long since brought slaves into Illinois, as had early American settlers arriving from Tennessee and Kentucky. Spring 2001 Andrew Borders was one such example: "Sukey" was evidently part of his wife's dowry and one of several slaves they brought into Illinois just before statehood. As for the state's new constitution that barred the peculiar institution , Carol Pirtle shows that Illinois officials typically looked the other way, rationalizing slavery as an accepted practice while Illinois masters hid their chattels under cover of the state's laws governing indentured servants. In IS42 Borders' five black bondservants were tallied among 234 others in Randolph County, many facing lifetime slavery under the euphemism of indenture. Indenture's awful lie may well have fueled Susan Richardson's determination to run. Digging in local records, Pirtle reveals that Hannah Morrison's mother, Sarah, whom Borders had purchased in IS25 from an Illinois Secretary of State, had fled one year earlier, in IS4I, after "the Major" had fractured her arm in an angry rage. Borders tracked but never reclaimed Sarah and then sued a farmer for allegedly harboring her. That legal process established that Sarah had worked off her indenture a year before escaping in IS42 but that Borders had refused the woman's pleas for freedom. Pirtle's research shows, Similarly, that when Susan Richardson ran she was one year shy of completing her own indenture but undoubtedly feared Borders would pull the same trick on her. Borders had also threatened to sell her three boys into southern slavery. Spending several hundred dollars to reclaim his runaway property...