South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to Civil War by Alice Baumgartner (review)

On February 1, 1850, Anastacio Elua was kidnapped from Tamaulipas by a Texas slaveholder who claimed Elua was a fugitive slave. Shortly after, Mexican authorities produced evidence declaring Elua was the son of a man who had claimed his and his family’s freedom in Mexican Texas in the 1820s. Mexico then requested the Texas enslaver set “Elua at liberty” (219).

South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War is a ground-breaking monograph that explores the ways Mexico protected individuals such as Elua and thousands of others who escaped to Mexico to be free. Alice Baumgartner examines Texas as a space adjacent to freedom—Mexican freedom. By decentering Anglo-settler experiences and utilizing a wealth of key sources, principally from archives in Texas, Louisiana, Northern Mexico, and Mexico City, she centers Black and Brown actors and the varied ways abolition from below, from Mexico, shaped Texas, from before the Texas Revolution to the Civil War.

South to Freedom investigates Mexico as an antislavery republic and how refugees from slavery accessed liberty, protections, and citizenship in Mexico. The book’s arguments are threefold: that Mexican support for abolition threatened U.S. slavery; that the extension of slavery into Mexican territories ignited the sectional crisis that led to the overturning of the Missouri Compromise, the outbreak of violence in Kansas, and the birth of the Republican Party; and that enslaved people who escaped to Mexico were influential in paving the road to the U.S. Civil War.

In twelve engaging chapters, the author buttresses her arguments. Chapter 1, “Defending Slavery,” highlights how slavery, freedom, and territorial expansion shaped not only the American South but also the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Chapter 2, “The Meaning of Liberty,” studies the various meanings of liberty that took shape primarily across the Texas borderlands and in Mexico. Chapter 3, “The Right to Property,” presents the differences between U.S. and Mexican views on human property and the clashes these created for both countries’ political and diplomatic relations. Chapter 4, “An Antislavery Republic,” and chapter 5, “In Accordance with the Laws, They are Free,” traces Mexican abolitionism and its consequences on the U.S. and on Texas before and after it broke away from Mexico.

Chapters 6 through 10, “The Texas Revolution,” “Annexation,” “Compromise Lost,” “Liberty Found,” and “The Balance of Power,” heavily engage with Texas history. These delve into the role that Mexican abolitionism and its “emancipatory promise” (220) played in shaping not only the United States, but also Texas, Texas slavery, and Texas anti-Mexican sentiment and laws before 1865. Baumgartner asserts that “the Texas Revolution was a conflict between slavery and freedom” (119) and further states that within the processes that fueled the Texas Revolution and the U.S.– Mexico War, slavery played a major role. These conflicts, the author contends, prompted Mexico to find “victory in defeat,” served to engender Mexican abolition efforts, and helped the country attain “moral power through the rejection of slavery” (8). Mexico not only helped prevent the further “expansion of slavery to the Southwest” but also “where it was expanding most rapidly” notably across Texas (164). Chapter 11, “Citizenship,” reveals the pathways by which citizenship could be secured by the formerly enslaved in Mexico and how U.S. diplomats tried “without success to undermine the promise of freedom in Mexico” (204). The final chapter, “War,” concludes with a retelling of the road to Civil War, one inclusive of the roles Mexico and Mexicans played in the conflict and its aftermath, emancipation.

South to Freedom is essential reading. It promises to inspire further research and future work on the underground railroads that crossed Texas and led enslaved people to Mexico.