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

In her excellent new book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, Alice L. Baumgartner argues that "enslaved people who escaped to Mexico and the antislavery laws that entitled them to freedom contributed to the outbreak of a major sectional controversy over the future of human bondage in the United States" (p. 7). In making this case, Baumgartner tells three stories. One charts the expansion of slavery across the U.S. South; another traces the road to abolition in nineteenth-century Mexico, and the anxiety that road engendered in U.S. slaveholders and politicians; still another reconstructs the lives of those who escaped bondage in the United States for freedom in Mexico. The resulting book is a rarity among students of antebellum U.S. politics: a narrative in which the actions of Mexican politicians, soldiers, and citizens figure prominently.

With literary elegance and narrative pace, Baumgartner pulls English- and Spanish-language sources from both sides of the border, and she does what she can to recover the few fugitives who left archival traces in their southern gambits for liberty. Still, the "runaway slaves" of the subtitle remain more political abstraction than lived experience in the body of the text. Baumgartner's bigger success is the geographic reorientation of the U.S. sectional crisis. As the toxic marriage of slavery, cotton, and politics constricted antislavery hopes in the United States, slaveholders in Mexico—more outnumbered and isolated than their northern counterparts—lost ground during the 1820s and 1830s. She argues that the Texas Revolution "inaugurated a new era of antislavery activism in Mexico," if only because Mexican officials blamed the war on slaveholding "Texians" and desired to undermine their independence movement from within (p. 111). Afterward, Mexico's Congress prohibited slavery across the nation, an act that eventually led to the U.S. annexation of Texas. Annexation in turn provoked the Mexican minister of relations to prohibit runaways from being returned to the United States. By midcentury, Mexico's Congress had formally made its territory a "mechanism of emancipation" by promising freedom to any slave who set foot on Mexican soil (p. 166).

The road to emancipation in Mexico was uneven, and the realization of freedom for escaped slaves was not always what they imagined. The rise of an antislavery republic to the south mattered all the same. It mattered not just for the several thousand people who made it to Mexico but also for the shifting landscape of slavery in the south-central United States. Slaveholders in the region feared moving large numbers of slaves across the Colorado River. Proslavery officials in Washington, D.C., obsessed over Mexico's race-blind promise of freedom and citizenship. And U.S. northerners, including David Wilmot, began to oppose the reestablishment of slavery where it had already been abolished by positive law, as it had been in the newly ceded territories from Mexico. As Baumgartner's book makes clear, events like Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) did not unfold in a vacuum. Roger B. Taney penned the decision, and U.S. Americans received it, in a country that shared a border with another whose new constitution enshrined the "freedom principle," whose authorities sought to undermine slaveholders' property rights, and whose civilians took up arms to defend African Americans from re-enslavement (p. 214).

"By almost every metric," explains Baumgartner, "the United States was stronger than Mexico," a fact that has led many people, then and now, to assume the U.S. government operated independently and in ignorance of its southern neighbor. "But Mexico's relative lack of power," she concludes, "did not mean that it was powerless" (p. 8). South to Freedom reveals that Mexico, in the realm of antislavery efforts at least, was able to exert power, too—and in the process affect the fates...