The Violence of the Underground Railroad

For many years, the story of the Underground Railroad has been wrapped in a romantic nostalgia of sorts. School children are told about the efforts of Harriet Tubman or other popular narratives of narrow escape such as those included in Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) or Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). These stories are recounted with moments of heroism and risk, but they never hinge on the absolute violence employed to retrieve fugitives. Robert Churchill's The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America is a welcome addition to abolitionist historiography. His thesis is simple, but potent: The Underground Railroad is a story of violence. Slave catchers trekked into northern and free Black communities to retrieve "stolen property." Their violent confrontations with Black and white residents enraged all those around them. In abolitionist history, violence could serve as the protagonist or, as Churchill argues, "violence is a current that runs through every fugitive account and every Underground activist reminiscence" (p. 3).

Churchill contends that slave catchers who pursued fugitives into the North brought with them "a Southern culture of violence that sanctioned white brutality as a means of enforcing racial hierarchy and Black subordination and upholding masculine honor," but their presence compelled an array of responses in the four distinct regions he examines (p. 5). Divided into three parts, The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America begins with the origins of the Underground Railroad and ends with the start of the Civil War, examining cultures of violence in the slave-holding South, the Borderland, the Contested Region, and the Free Soil Region. In six chapters, Churchill traces the attempts to aid fugitive slaves beginning just before the Underground Railroad was established. He next examines fugitive rescues and responses in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, and New England. He explores Northerners open defiance and resistance to slave catchers and determination to defend Black enclaves and communities. Churchill's concluding chapters address the evolution of the Underground Railroad as a result of the revamped Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. He offers examples of how resistance to slave catchers became so persistent that returning Black people to the plantation South became nearly impossible in certain regions that included abolitionist strongholds. I was impressed by Churchill's lengthy appendix, which covers nearly seventy years of fugitive slave rescues from 1794–1861, where the majority of the outcomes resulted in freedom. I have no doubt certain scholars and students will find both the book and its appendix useful and instructive.

However, overall, I found Churchill's work fell short of his promising and sophisticated goals. He wants readers to understand the Underground Railroad in the context of "a geography of violence, a shifting landscape in which clashing norms of violence shaped the activities of slave catchers and the fugitives and abolitionists who defied them" (p. 3). I needed the author to flesh out his interesting and provocative ideas more. At times, his connections felt fragmented and unclear. For example, Churchill mentions notable fugitive cases such as Margaret Garner, The Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, the Jerry Rescue or the taking of Anthony Burns in Boston. These are well known and consequential fugitive slave cases, but they are not granted sufficient context for the gravity or impact they have in the movement. He moves from incident to incident and altercations to confrontations, but he does not dwell long enough on any episode to give readers the depth of what resistance, violence, and rescue truly meant and what they accomplished for the movement and the eventual demise of slavery. In his text, Black people are acting and moving, but seldom given voice or the volume their contributions deserve.

I anticipated his work would expand upon the brilliance of the late historian Stephanie Camp. Her work on a "geography of containment" in Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and...