South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

by Alice L. Baumgartner

A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico

The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837.

In South to Freedom, historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery's future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Race, Civil War, African American, Latin American History

368 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 2020

About the author

Alice Baumgartner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California, where she teaches courses on 19th century North America.

Reviews

[Raymond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Baumgartner’s South to Freedom covers the history of slavery in Mexico and the United States from the 1820s through the end of the U.S. Civil War. It pays specific focus on Mexico’s slavery policies, which were much more progressive compared to the United States’ policy. Mexico abolished slavery almost 30 years before the United States did. I learned a lot in this book, it was very well researched. My only issue is that I incorrectly assumed that the central focus of the book would be on the slave's perspective of escaping to Mexico. There is some of that in the book but it is part of the larger story of slavery's impact on these two countries and their relationship. I wanted to read more of the slave's journeys to freedom in Mexico.

[Chrisl · Rating 3 out of 5]

12-3-2020 - Just started a new library book 'Black Sun Rising' - it appears to link directly to those elements of history that attracted me to 'South to Freedom'
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
Quoting from introduction of BSR:
"Black Sun Rising takes place on the Mexico-Texas border in 1851. Historical fiction written in style that could be describes as western 'noir', it is a recounting of the Seminole Indian migration from Florida to Oklahoma and Texas to Nacimiento in the Mexican state of Coahuila and also the story of the fugitive slaves from the American South who came to be known as Black Seminoles ..."
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Library of Congress assigned Dewey catalog #306.362 (Slavery) for 'South to Freedom' - on library shelves in the Social Science section, rather than History.
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quotes from the Introduction:

p1 - " ... Not only had Mexico abolished slavery, but its laws freed the slaves of 'other countries' from the moment they set foot on its soil."

p3 - "Two options awaited most runaways in Mexico. The first was to join the military colonies, a series of outposts that the Mexican government established to defend its northeastern frontier against foreign invaders and 'barbarous' Indians. The second was to fill Mexico's labor shortage by seeking employment as servants and day laborers. Both alternatives came at a cost ..."
"Runaways who escaped to the North also found that their 'freedom' was abridged, just as it was in Mexico. ..."

p4 - "Determining how many enslaved people actually reached Mexico is difficult. My estimate ... between three and five thousand people--considerably fewer than the thirty thousand to one hundred thousand runaways who crossed the Mason-Dixon Line."

p4 - "Black slavery took root in ... Mexico ... at the end of the sixteenth century, when a series of epidemics decimated the indigenous population ... Between 1580 and 1640, New Spain imported more slaves than any other European colony ... except Brazil."

p5 - "By the time Mexicans took up arms against Spain in 1810, Mexico's population of eight million included only around nine to ten thousand black slaves. Though the enslaved population was comparatively small, Mexican leaders could not abolish slavery outright. Like the United States, Mexico was founded on two competing principles: liberty and property."

p5 - "Between 1824 and 1827, more than half of Mexico's states promised that the children born to enslaved people would be free--a free womb law that would end slavery within a generation. Meanwhile, Mexico's Congress prohibited the introduction of enslaved people to the republic, promising freedom to illegally imported slaves from the moment they set foot on the national territory.

p7 - " ... this book weaves together three narrative threads. The first examines why the United States permitted human bondage to expand without check across the Southern territories. The second explores why Mexican leaders restricted and eventually abolished slavery, and the profound consequences that these policies had for the United States. The third takes up the lives of some of the thousands of slaves who Mexico ..."

p8 - "Mexico was so unstable that forty-nine presidents took office between 1824 and 1857 ..."
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Index useful -
Some quoted content - the kind of info I was seeking:
p167 - "Northern Mexico was poor and sparsely populated. During the winter months, Comanches and Lipan Apaches crossed the Rio Grande to rustle livestock from Mexico, and the garrisons posted to the frontier lacked even the most basic supplies to stop them. Local militiamen had no saddles. ...
Town councils pleaded for more gunpowder. Desperate to restore order, Mexico's Congress passed a law ... 1846, that established a line of forts on the south bank of the Rio Grande. According to the law, foreigners who joined the military colonies would receive land and become 'citizens of the Republic' upon their arrival.

p168 - "This new policy caught the attention of Wild Cat ... leader of the Seminole Indians. After General Andrew Jackson invaded Florida in 1818 ... the US Army drove the Seminoles and their black allies (known as Black Seminoles) onto a reservation ... In 1833, another treaty removed them to the Creek reservation west of the Mississippi. There, the Creeks denied the newcomers land and sold the Black Seminoles into slavery in Arkansas and Louisiana. Eventually, the Seminoles and their black allies had had enough. Sometime around November 10, 1849, Wild Cat convinced over three hundred men, women, and children to leave Indian Territory--what is now Oklahoma--and head south. ... In return, the Seminoles pledged to take up arms against the 'wild' Indians.

p170 - " ... In exchange for their taking up arms ... the inspector general promised them seventy thousand acres near Guerrero and Monclova Viejo in northern Coahuila, along with financial subsidies, agricultural tools, and work animals. The terms seemed generous, but the Seminole delegation asked a final question. They needed assurances that Mexico was, in fact, 'a free country.' Eighty-four of the 351 who had accompanied Wild Cat to Mexico in 1849 were black."

p170 - "Several months after arriving in Northern Coahuila, Wild Cat returned to Indian Territory to recruit more emigrants. The task proved easier than expected. During his absence .. Creek and Cherokee slave hunters repeatedly seized blacks from Seminole country. ..."

[Gautam Bhatia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning historical account of how American slaves escaped the plantations and sought sanctuary in Mexico.

The book weaves together individual stories with the larger political conflict, and shows how Mexico's unwavering anti-slavery stand - that came at the cost of losing half its territory and multiple wars to the United States - ultimately contributed to the unraveling of slavery in the US itself.

The book is paced like a thriller, the prose is beautiful, and the stories will haunt you. Above all it's a book about hope, and it reminds you that there are times in history when people - and even governments - stick to their principles and do the right thing for the right reasons, even at great personal cost. It's difficult not to be moved to tears when you read about how ordinary Mexicans risked their own lives to ensure that marauding Southerners would not be able to recapture escaped slaves and take them back to the US (just one of many examples).

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are all familiar with the Underground Railroad leading slaves to freedom in Canada. But what about the other direction? What about slaves fleeing south into Mexico? That is the topic of this book. The author makes the case that many fugitive slaves were overlooked fleeing into Mexico during the Civil War years. Overall, I found the book to be very readable; the chapters were concise and the narrative brisk. It was a worthy effort and well worth the time spent.

[Porter Broyles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh man, this is such a difficult book to review.

On the one hand, this is the book that Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Mythaspired to be. I absolutely deplore that book. The authors of that book relied upon emotional outrage and preached to the choir in controverial language. South to Freedom uses rational thought and experience to show that Texas history is not as prestine as the Texas Gov would like us to believe. South to Freedom would be a book that I would highly recommend to anybody interested in the role of slavery in Texas. It does not present anything radically new that you can't find in other books, but it does present Texas' history from a perspective that most people have not encountered.

This boks does an excptional job at talking about how Mexico and it's Anti-Slavery stance affected Stephen Austin's colonies, the early Texas Republic, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War.

To this extent the book would have earned 4, MAYBE even 5 stars. So why do I only give it 3 stars?

Because the book perports to be about the slaves who escaped to Mexico.

Some books are written at a 30,000 foot level---high level over view of the subect. Some at a 5000 foot level---mostly at a high level. Then some are written at sea level---focusing on specific people/event.

The title implies the later 2. Either it is a high level review with specific details; or it is at sea level talking about specific slaves that escapes. In the first half of the book, we only encounter 3 named slaves. The first escaped New Orleans and feld to San Antonio (which was part of Mexico at the time). We don't encounter another named slave until after the Texas Revolution when Joe and his compatriot flee to Mexico. While the story of Joe, one of the few survivors of The Alamo, is told, the escape to Mexico merits only the concluding paragraph of the chapter. The revelation of these slaves is not new.

This book was at the 30,000 foot level. Unfortunately, it did extremely little to talk about slave who escaped to Mexico. It does not talk about how slaves escaped. While an underground railroad existed in the North, no comperable system existed in Texas.

One of the big issues missing in the book was how slaves escaped to Mexico before Mexico allowed empressario's to work towards populating the Texas territory. The book The Mexican American Experience in Texas: Citizenship, Segregation, and the Struggle for Equality does a great job at introducing the idea about how slaves fled to Mexico. In that book, we discover that escaped slaves were granted certain priviledges and rights upon their arrival in Tejas Mexico. They were able to become property owners, inter-marry with Mexicans, and even hold political offices.

That book talks about some of the challenges that newly arrived Americans faced when confronting community leaders who were either escaped slaves or descendents of such. The fact that Mexico did not allow for the "one drop rule", challenged white communities. That book talks about how between 90-95% of the American immigrants to Texas came from slave states. It covers the challenges the Republic of Texas had to navigate ofter gaining independence.

This book did not mention any of that in it's history.

If this book was present as a book about Texas-Mexico and how the role of slavery affected their relationship, it would have been a 4 or 5 star review. As written and the lack of development of the title's thesis, it merits just 3.

[Cynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I discovered this book, my brain popped: Of course! All kinds of illegals cross borders throughout history. And the Rio Grande has been an entry and exit point since who knows when.

That was not the last surprise finding. Here I found a book I have long waited for. Mexican, Texan, American South, trans Rio Grande histories meld and weave together within this text. That this melding and weaving was done well in storytelling, explanation, and understanding.

While the Spanish/Mexican peons/peones had it bad, they had some recourse to legal process. When things became too bad at a hacienda or plantation, the peones could leave without being hounded down and returned. They were free to find better working conditions, move closer to family and friends. The new Mexican consititution asserted that there was no slavery in the land held by Mexico. Those slaves owned in the US who fled to Canada found that occassionally Canada did not want a former slave. The stated reason was often that a particular slave was of poor character even when a former slave had stolen only enough to survive on the way to Canada. Considering this huge difference in perspective of slavery and human character why more did not flee south over the Rio Grande. . . . .If only. . . . If only . . .If only.

[Teri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alice Baumgartner's South to Freedom looks at the institution of slavery in Texian lands during the nineteenth century. While the book's underlying theme centers on the fact that enslaved people in the South not only ran north along the Underground Railroad, they also ran south, to Mexico where slavery was abolished and any person who was enslaved would be free as soon as they stepped into the border of the country. Throughout much of the 19th century, Texas was a battleground. To the south, free Mexico threatened the designs of norteamericans, or people of what is modern-day America, that was attempting to move into the area to establish cotton plantations on the backs of their enslaved people. To the north were abolitionists attempting to end the institution of chattel slavery. The battles between all of these forces played out between the borders of the Sabine River in northern Texas and the Rio Grande. Baumgartner posits that the institution of slavery, particularly the fact that runaway slaves or Freedom Seekers headed to Mexico to gain freedom was the driving force behind the Texas Revolution, the Mexican-American War, and the US Civil War.

Baumgartner leans heavily on research from 30 different archives throughout northern Mexico to retell the history of Mexico and Texas from 1824 to the Civil War from the perspective of the men who fought for Texian lands and to protect or abolish slavery. Although the main theme is based on the Freedom Seekers, the book is less about the actual lives of the slaves found among the archives and more about the men who attempted to protect slavery by breaking away from Mexico.

Where Baumgartner certainly makes a case for Freedom Seekers being a factor in the cause of the US Civil War, I do not think it was the main reason or the only reason. This book is certainly an important part of Civil War and borderlands historiography and fills a gap on an overlooked topic. There is certainly room for a more specific look at the Freedom Seekers. One focus that is lacking within Baumgartner's book is the role of gender in the fight for and against slavery in Texian lands leaving another gap in the historiography.

[JRT · Rating 4 out of 5]

After only a few pages in, it became clear that the title of this book is mostly a misnomer. “Freedom” did not await enslaved Africans who escaped from the U.S. South to Mexico. Rather, what they found was different degrees of servitude and oppression in the form of indentured service or conscripted military service. However, this books leaves little doubt that Mexico’s “anti-slavery” posture stood in stark contrast to its neighbor to the north, and as such, served as geopolitical and national leverage for the young nation. It also helped to shape and facilitate momentous events in the United States itself, including its westward expansion and ultimate Civil War.

This book is ultimately about African autonomy—both asserted and denied. Africans asserted their autonomy by running away from slave plantations in the U.S. South, but were ultimately denied autonomy by the places they ran to, notwithstanding the fact that they would not longer be considered “chattel slaves.” Mexico’s reasons for opposing chattel enslavement indicate that despite its oppositional position to the United States, Mexico wasn’t all that different from the behemoth to the north. For one, Mexico wanted to distinguish itself from both Spain and the United States by formally ending slavery. This would give Mexico the moral high-ground and legitimacy in the eyes of other republics during the time. In short, Mexico’s apparent anti-slavery posture (at least relative to the United States) was rooted in its desire and aim to protect its national sovereignty, not out of any love or solidarity with enslaved Africans. This is very similar to the political reasons for the North’s pursuit of slave abolition during the Civil War. Further, Mexico’s decision to accompany the gradual abolition of slavery with the eradication of racial classifications—all the while ignoring the impact of centuries of race-based slavery and oppression—cemented Mexico as yet another center for Black subjugation in the Americas.

This book provides a deep dive into the early history of Texas as a Mexican state, independent republic, and finally, an American state. In doing so, the book shows how slavery was central to the formation of Texas as both an independent republic and an annexed American state. Further, Texas—being the essential cause of the Mexican-American war—also led to the annexing of huge swaths of land to the West (in what used to be Northern Mexico), setting the stage for the “free soil” conflict that led to the American Civil War. At the heart of all of this sectional and national conflict was the unflappable spirit of enslaved Africans who insisted on running to wherever they could grasp a modicum of “freedom.” Not enough was said about this fact.

Finally, this book explores the fascinating and vital relationship between imperialist expansionism, preserving slavery, and maintaining political parity in the United States. When these aims conflicted and broke down, succession and Civil War became inevitable. I recommend this book to anyone interested in how these dynamics interacted with one another.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting, well written and well researched, this history of the little known drive of slaves to escape from the southern plantations of the United States to Mexico sheds light on the often ignored, certainly not taught in schools, interconnected histories of the United States and Mexico in the 19th century. It’s shocking and embarrassing how much the desperate need of white norteamericanos to keep a hold on their assumed right to black people as property led to the invasion and theft of the entire northern reach of the new Republic of Mexico. It’s equally as embarrassing to note how much sooner and how much more fervently the Mexicans believed in the abolition of slavery than we did in the U.S., especially given the nature of our perpetuated notion of superiority.

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those rare books that combines superb scholarship and actually adds to one's knowledge in an area that many people are interested in. Yes, there was a southern route for the underground railroad which went to Mexico. Professor Baumgartner has a good grasp of Mexican history combined with an appreciation of the politics of the US-Mexican border as well as the political history of the US in the period - none of which is always straightforward. But even with those complications the book is very readable.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched and written history of Mexico and its fight against slavery in the Americas.

[Stephanie Calvert · Rating 5 out of 5]

It isn't often I read a book that reorients my understanding of a historical topic. It is also one of the most engaging and accessible monographs I've read in some time and a must read for my educator friends.

[Jacques Coulardeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

BLACK LIVES MATTER MORE THAN EVER

This book is essential on the fight against slavery in the USA and south of it in Mexico. People who Are educated in the subject of the Civil War, what came before and what came after? know Mexico had played a role in the struggle. But it is mostly neglected and mostly if not only the underground railroad goes north and to Canada. The book which is very well documented and tries to be exhaustive, was a real necessity for us to really understand how the USA got into their Civil War and how the constitution was from the very start crooked because it did not settle the problem of slavery, considering that it was a question to be answered at state level, which meant there was no possible constitutional solution without an amendment specifying the fundamental answer to the problem because it was a problem, in the Southern states, in the USA, in the world, and first of all at this last level in Mexico.

Imagine it actually led to an invasion of Mexico by some French army sent by Napoleon III, a French emperor who was elected president of the French republic in 1848 but then seized power in December 1851 and got rid of the republic and replaced it with an empire. Victor Hugo, in a pamphlet, called him, The Little Napoleon, as opposed to the Great one, Napoleon 1st. And he went into exile for twenty years. And that French emperor sent some Austrian prince to become the emperor of Mexico. Simply ridiculous. But it shows how hot the debate on slavery was, with Mexico who had gotten rid of it, and the USA who could not find a solution. The present book gives all the details of this long history from the independence of Mexico in 1821 to just after the end of the Civil War.

Only maybe one shortcoming due to the modernity of the treatment of this past historical situation. The author assumes that it is simply accepted by everyone that slavery is a barbaric act, but she should have definitely given more flesh to the slavery camp in the USA and actually quoted with more emphasis a man like John C. Calhoun who theorized the possibility of having a democratic society with the majority of its population in slavery. The reference is Athens, mind you, and Ancient Greece. He is typical of this arrogant aristocracy of the USA, a real aristocracy for whom slavery was nothing but a means of production like the river that rotated the wheels of watermills, or the steam engine that moved trains and ships, with only one difference: the slaveowner could kill, with or without, torture before the final act, his slaves, and strangely enough, though women had no civil rights at the time, they could very easily do the same with any of her husband’s slaves. Check Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave for detail.

In the same way I am amazed that Toni Morrison’s Beloved is not in any way quoted because it shows the dramatic traumatic and unforgivable crime slavery is. And we must not forget that slavery can exist here and there including in our democratic countries. Many illegal immigrants, at times even legal immigrants, and of course all refugees are most of them exploited so brutally that we can wonder if this is not a modern form of slavery, and what about the Dalits in India, whose number we do not even know for sure, except that they are counted in hundred thousand, several hundred thousand. And what about the compulsory, hence forced work most prisoners in US prisons, state or federal prisons alike, have to perform to pay for their lodging and food, with a pittance left in their prison piggybank, a few cents for every dollar earned.

I am afraid I have encountered many people, among them many young people, who just do not want to expand any communication or discussion on the nasty and graphic details of slavery, and in the many books I have read on the subject the sexual exploitation of slaves is generally reduced to women to make them pregnant to produce one more slave, maybe two if twins. So, let’s have a good old gang episode to have a better chance to get two false twins. But any slave could be used by any white man, or boy as soon as twelve years of age, for their own pleasure, and by any slave I mean woman, man, girl, and boy. And a good whipping afterwards if the user (certainly not a customer since he does not pay for the service) is not satisfied with the said service.

Then you may understand why a mother could kill her own children when caught up by the slavecatchers after their escape, and you could understand the determination of slaves to escape. It is too much taken for granted.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

[Dree · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book to be fascinating--Baumgartner shows how US and Mexican history are so intertwined. I learned a lot about Mexican history from this book--many of the names, like Santa Anna, I was familiar with. But the details and links to American and world history--and American slavery--were new to me. I took a Latin American history class in college, and it was all about Spain, Bolivar, and Argentina (the professor was from Argentina); I also took a Civil War class, and it was largely about the legal runup and battles (we read Battle Cry of Freedom. We did not spend much if any time discussing Texas/Mexico.

Baumgartner's thesis--which I don't think she spells out in full--is that the Mexican-American War was the result of Mexico's outlawing slavery AND giving instant freedom to any enslaved person who set foot on Mexican territory. American southerners had moved into Tejas--with their slaves--looking for good cotton-growing land. They wanted Tejas for the US, where they could be certain of keeping their "property". As Mexico's laws became more specific regarding freedoms and they refused to pass any kind of fugitive slave law, norteamericanos in Tejas became more and more antsy about being able to recruit more slave-owning immigrants. Slave owners in Louisiana become more antsy as more slaves ran for Mexico.

Even after the Mexican-American War results in major territory loss for Texas, American slaves were still able to run for Mexico, and they did. The numbers do not seem particularly large--but they are still very relevant. And they were very relevant to American politics.

This is not a region (Texas/Louisiana/Mexico) that is covered in many American history classes in high school or college (unless you are in Texas--but I do not know what/how they teach this time period). This book fills yet another gap in my American and world history knowledge.

Random fact: the only Emperor of Mexico was the uncle of Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination started WWI. He got played by one of the Napoleons and Mexican conservatives.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

My mistake in approaching this book was thinking it was a memoir type of escaped slaves. While some stories of individual slaves are included, this is a deep dive nonfiction piece on the policies of slavery in Mexico and the US, particularly Texas and Louisiana, and how those differences affected their relationship.

I was saddened at how much I learned in this book - that only shows how sorely lacking American education is when it comes to slavery. I had no idea Mexico played such an integral role in the freedom of escaped slaves. I should say "freedom" is used in the most technical sense, as despite being granted it, they were still often forced into indentured servitude where they were still beaten by their masters or military service. They were not granted the freedoms they were owed which is tragic.

While I generally prefer accounts of the slaves themselves, I appreciated Baumgartner's approach because she combined both the legal history, which I am usually bored by, and personalized then with individual accounts of slaves. A good example is the story of Honorine, an escaped slave from Louisiana. She was betrayed at every turn, and I was able to understand how the laws at that time affected her life.

If you're interested in history or slavery, this is an excellent resource. Thank you to NetGalley and Basic Books for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Sara Broad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alicia Baumbgartner's "South to Freedom" is most generally about how Southerners attempt to spread slavery and prevent fugitive slaves from escaping to Mexico led to the takeover of what is now Texas and ultimately the Civil War. More specifically, Baumgartner dives into Mexican political history and their strong opposition to slavery, despite Mexico's own relationship with indentured servitude, and how they refused to return any fugitive slaves to slaveholders once they crossed Mexico's border. Also, this book provides a necessary analysis into how slaveholders' attempts to colonize Texas and spread slavery into new territories had in causing the Civil War. It also confirms for me how much more Northerners cared about preventing Southerners from asserting the rights of individual states to extend slavery rather than ending slavery for moral reasons. This is a really important read for getting a deeper dive into US politics and history and the country's relationship with Mexico.

[Julio Rojas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The inhabitants of Mexico are used to the caravans of migrants that cross the country in search of a better future in the United States. The border between the United States and Mexico has always been a contested and porous space, where identities are constantly recreated. The book South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, by Alice L. Baumgartner, tells the history of hundreds of African Americans who found freedom not north but south of the border, and the crisis that this freedom caused in the political institutions of the United States in the years before the Civil War.

The journey commences in the early nineteenth century. The book takes us along the border between New Spain and the United States, which later becomes the border between the independent territory of Texas and Mexico, and then the border between Mexico and the United States—a border that resulted from an expansionist war motivated by the defense of slavery, establishing relations between slavers from Louisiana and Texas, enslaved African Americans, US congressmen, and Mexican politicians. Baumgartner tells us about the development of abolitionist policies in Mexico and the ways these were taken advantage of by the enslaved in the United States and exploited by the Mexican government to declare itself morally superior to the powerful neighbor to the north, who became a defender of slavery. In Baumgartner's words: “Antislavery was a powerful weapon in the hands of a weak government” (p. 74).

The author uses an impressive referential apparatus. She collects advertisements offering rewards for escaped slaves, American and Mexican newspaper material, diplomatic correspondence, and personal diaries. During her research she visited more than forty national and municipal archives. Some of her sources forced her to track and triangulate information that originated on one side of the US-Mexico border and was completed on the other side.

Baumgartner's style is elegant and fluid. Her pen connects the lives of the enslaved and their attempts to achieve freedom with the political transformations that took place on both banks of the Rio Grande. Individual lives, processes, and systems appear in the narrative as meant to transform each other. It is an academic book with high informative value, written in an engaging manner that makes this work the kind of history book that laypeople buy in bookstores. The author generally begins and ends the twelve chapters of the book with anecdotes or exemplary stories that summarize or exemplify the central ideas of the chapter. The first chapter, for example, begins with a phrase typical of an adventure novel, “No one knew how the two sailors escaped,” creating a dramatic effect that motivates us to continue reading (p. 1).

The author overestimates—perhaps following the ideas of the historian Frank Tannenbaum—the real possibilities of slaves achieving freedom within the Spanish Empire and exposes an overly optimistic view of Spanish legislation, which was always extremely difficult to enforce in overseas territories. Tannenbaum defended the idea that Iberian slavery was more moderate than that of other colonial empires; this thesis, however, has been disproved by historians of plantation slavery. When comparing the situation of the enslaved populations of New Spain and the United States, Baumgartner appears to stand by Tannenbaum’s ideas.

In some passages and chapters, the author offers too many details about the formation of the North American states or about some individual trajectory of a politician or slave owner, causing the reader to lose the central thread of the narrative. Likewise, readers might appreciate a chapter that contained the experiences of African Americans who found freedom—no matter how contingent—in Mexico. These stories are scattered throughout the book in such a way that it is difficult to draw patterns, similarities, or comparisons between the various experiences of the escaped slaves.

Baumgartner uses twelve chapters to discuss the experiences of African American slaves fleeing first to New Spain, and then to Mexico, in search of freedom. The author chronologically unfolds the conflicts around slavery and the escape to freedom, the formation of Texas as a slave society and the defense of slave property, the war between the United States and Mexico, and the Civil War.

Closing the book, one realizes that they did not read a story about escaped slaves, at least not primarily about escaped slaves. Baumgartner has written—from the perspective of the development of the tensions of the southern slave system, its quarrels with the abolitionist North, and the diplomatic conflicts with Mexico—a story about the contradictions that led to the American Civil War, rescuing in the process fragments of the life stories of some enslaved who fled to the South. The author also rescues the importance of abolitionism and the defense of antislavery principles in the foreign policy of the Republic of Mexico, a subject on which Mexican historiography has not abounded.

South to Freedom tells a binational history that captures the contradictions that arose around slavery in Mexico and the United States, leading to the Texas Revolution (1835-36), the US invasion of Mexico (1846-48), and the Civil War (1861-65). Due to its vast scope and the masterful way the author interweaves both national histories, this book should be on the shelf of any historian interested in the early history of the Mexican republic, American slavery, or the American Civil War. Furthermore, Baumgartner has changed decisively the one-sided vision that portrays the US-Mexico border, offering hope only to those crossing to the North. Freedom was also found South.

https://networks.h-net.org/node/2720/...

[Bobby Gibbs · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely gripping account of a neglected portion of the history of Texas and the United States. The writing is very clear and well structured. The research is compelling and personalizing.

[Allison Waterman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my second time through this book. I read it a couple of years ago for an “Institution of Slavery” graduate History class, and I just reread it for a “Border Issues” graduate History class.

As a writer, historian, political scientist, and teacher of English, for me, the use of pathos - such as individual people’s stories - to drive home facts is an attractive way to consume historical information. “South to Freedom” is not fiction although it can read like that because of the personal nature of the stories Baumgartner relays. I find this to be his a brilliant tactic because it keeps me engaged with the literature. Writing a historical survey of slavery in 19th century U.S. and Mexico, its binational effect on both countries, and how it contributed to the American Civil War through personal stories was extremely effective for me. I've have countless people tell me "History is so boring" when I say I have a BA in History and am pursuing a second MA with a concentration in History. Among the complaints that accompany that is the dryness of the textbooks. Having formerly enslaved people's personal accounts expands the audience of this book, which may have been one of Baumgartner's goals. I see the book as a narrative about slavery, abolition, and the American Civil War that tells a story about enslaved people. Therefore (for me), it makes sense to include the stories about those people.

Now, having said all of that, I also asked myself: Does the inclusion of these stories make Baumgartner less trustworthy? Does she manipulate the reader’s emotions to gain the reader’s trust? For me, the answer to both of these questions is "no." There are 79 pages (!!!) of “Notes” that show all of the very extensive research Baumgartner used to write this book. There are also many primary sources which speaks to the level of veracity the author is offering.

This book is an absolute treat to read. It’s also heart wrenching so be warned haha!

[Robert Daguillard · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite part of this book was reading about northern Mexican communities that defended fugitive former slaves, in the 1850s, from raiding parties crossing over from Texas. Sometimes, citizens would take up arms to defend their towns; at other times, they'd ride in pursuit after posses had kidnapped former slaves; and on occasion, Mexican and Seminole detachments would even cross into Texas and free captives who had been brought back from Mexico.

Before reading South to Freedom, I had no idea: that several thousand African-Americans had found refuge from slavery in Mexico; or of the extent to which Mexico's abolition of slavery in 1837 had influenced political calculations related to the peculiar institution north of the border. The - necessary - historical background the author provides sometimes reads like a standard U.S. history textbook chapter. However, she makes clear the intense pressure Mexican abolition put on U.S. slave states even after the Mexican War. Put simply, northern states simply refused to allow slavery to take hold in former Mexican territories, on the grounds that the institution had been abolished there prior to the Mexican War. That consideration, in turn, had a major impact on developments in the decade prior to the U.S. Civil War: The 1850 Compromise, Kansas unrest, and so forth.

Meanwhile, Mexico took pride in its position as a haven for former U.S. slaves, to whom it generally granted the benefits of its fairly liberal naturalization policies. However, flight to Mexico, if successful, often proved a mixed bag for former slaves, as work on haciendas came with conditions that amounted to servitude in all but name. All in all, a fascinating book about a too little known part of Mexican-U.S. relations.

[Fred Dameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once you read this book you will no longer believe the B.S. the GOP puts out about history, especially Texas history. First: Southerners who had broken the law escaped to Texas and brought their slaves. This was against Mexico's laws, since it's revolution against Spain in the 18 aughts. But that didn't bother these criminals, Bowie, Austin, Travis et all. In many ways the Texan revolution was really the first volley in the war of abolition that would end at Appomattox Court House. That war continued through the U.S. Mexican war that added California and the New Mexico territories. And the addition of these territories to U.S. states was a further thorn, or bullet, into the slave states ability to keep the legislature of the the U.S. even, slave v free. Also, the idea that a bunch of supposed illiterate monkeys, the Mexican Government, could decide for themselves that slavery should be abolished was just to much for the southern plantation owners to take in. They could not believe that brown people could come up with such high level thinking as Northern whites or English. The work also tells stories of plain Mexicans, who saw their negro neighbors as friends and family, who took up arms to keep slave holders or slave catchers from kidnapping these negro neighbors back to slavery. Or Mexican Governors who defended the former slaves and imprisoned those who came to collect their property and their agents. SO if you are ready to have your mind cleared of GOP history that slaves wanted to be enslaved, this is a MUST read.

[Moses · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly spectacular. This should be required reading in Texas. US History classes talk a lot about the Underground Railroad to the North that helped people escape slavery, but I had never heard of anyone fleeing south from slavery until Baumgartner's book. Baumgartner shows that the southern route of the Underground Railroad was very real and in fact played a major role in international relations throughout the antebellum period. While the Fugitive Slave Act required northern states (at least in theory) to return escaped slaves, Mexican law declared every person free from the moment they set foot on Mexican soil. This helps explain why southerners in the US were so intent on conquering Mexican territory and why slavery was never common in the Rio Grande Valley (too easy to escape). Baumgartner's writing is clear, engaging, and accessible, bringing history to life. She integrates historical topics that are often treated separately in a way that deeply changed my understanding of the place I live. Her telling of Texas' independence story has also made me want to read Forget the Alamo: The True Story of the Myth That Made Texas , which I'd been curious about for a while. I would highly recommend South to Freedom to anyone interested in American or Mexican history.

[Eduardo Santiago · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much more than the jacket blurb suggests. This was a sobering high-level look at regional, national, and international factors that shaped today’s world. Both discouraging and inspiring; complex and nuanced. I have a much greater understanding for the difficulties involved in balancing morality, law, and governance. (Spoiler alert: morality does not always win).

Most fascinating to me was the delicacy with which good leaders need to tread: slaveholders and defenders of slavery are obviously subhuman vermin, but there were a lot of them and they were powerful; policymakers were forced to make horrible tradeoffs in order to avoid riots and ouster. Depressingly reminiscent of the suffering today in Palestine, Ukraine, and the U.S. South, none of which can be fixed (right now) because of the preponderance of subhumans in positions of power.

Almost as fascinating is the snowballing consequences of even minor policy actions: even though the absolute number of enslaved Blacks who fled to Mexican territory was a small fraction of those who fled North, the Mexican government’s freedom principle — slavery shall not be recognized within their borders — had enormous repercussions on U.S. territorial expansion and ultimately on the U.S. Civil War.

Impeccably researched and referenced. Elegantly written, and with compassion. Baumgartner is a phenomenal writer, historian, and legal scholar. I can’t recommend this book enough.

[Joe Keefhaver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baumgartner relates the largely untold story of African-American slaves who escaped to freedom, not north, but south to Mexico. The author also discusses the rarely addressed history between our country and Mexico, a history that has usually had unpleasant repercussions for Mexico. Although plagued by unstable governments, the nation of Mexico established and tried to implement an equality among its people. In the United States, on the other hand, the idea of all men being created equal was never taken seriously despite what the Declaration of Independence said. Blacks often encountered less than perfect situations in Mexico, but that was also the case for escapees who fled to the "free" North or Canada. The book reveals the deep stain of slavery, which profoundly influenced politics of the U.S. in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Slavery is also stated as the reason Anglo settlers rebelled against Mexican authority in Texas to establish an independent country and then seek annexation into the United States. The desire by Southerners to expand slavery played a significant role in the Mexican War, a conflict that resulted in Mexico losing half of its territory to the U.S.

[Darlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up because of the research I did for my book WHAT THE PARROT SAW, which dealt with a "reverse underground railroad" where enslaved people fled Florida by boat for the British islands in the Caribbean. They also fled to Mexico, and author Alice Baumgartner gives us an extensively researched history exploring the role Mexico, Texas independence, and enslaved people seeking freedom in the south played in pushing the United States into the inevitable conflict of the Civil War.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to readers at this point to learn, once again, that much of what we were taught in our US history classes needs to be re-examined. Books like South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War are the tools we need to be better educated about our nation's history, and how it's still playing out today along the border with Mexico and our attitudes toward our neighbor to the south.

[Colin Maloney · Rating 4 out of 5]

South to Freedom offers a different perspective on US pre-civil war history by focusing on the differences not between the Northern and Southern States but instead between the United States as a whole and Mexico. And the differences are not insignificant. Mexico abolished slavery in 1837, nearly three decades before the United States. Furthermore the same year (1857) the the United States Supreme Court refused to acknowledge African Americans as citizens in the Dred Scott decision , Mexico ratified a new constitution which opened up citizenship to all regardless of race.

One of the most intriguing topics Baumgartner discussing is the thousands of enslaved African Americans who fled to Mexico rather than taking the underground railroad to the Northern free states. A important difference was that while African Americans remained at risk of recapture in the North due to the Fugitive Slave Act, Mexican law guaranteed freedom to escaped slaves and expressly prohibited their extradition back into slavery.

South to Freedom will teach you much about both US and Mexican history and will make appreciate just how intertwined our two nations' pasts are.

[Nss2108 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a transnational history of slavery between Mexico and the United States, and looks at slavery as one of the major driving forces that led to the Texas War of Independence, particularly given the early drive towards emancipation in the new republic of Mexico. What was revealing, as somone who is pretty well read on the time period, is the role that Mexican opposition to slavery played in US slavery politics, namely the big sectional divide after the Mexican American war and the collapse of the compromise system where South and North added slave and free states to match each other. Baumgartner argues that the Mexican government's emancipation of slaves in former Mexican territories foreclosed the possibility of further expansion of slavery into the territories, essentially steering the South and North into conflict, and providing Northern abolitionist curious congressmembers with a stronger argument. There were some other interesting stories threaded through, and it also looks at the role Mexico played as a safehaven for slaves. It's a really interesting story that provides a good complement to any US focused narratives about the causes of the Civil War.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about U.S. and Mexican history in the early- to mid-1800s, told through the lens of slavery. The most interesting part, though it accounts for a small part of the book, is the story of slaves escaping to Mexico with mixed results. We tend to think of the Underground Railroad only running north, but it also ran south to Mexico and to Florida when it was under Spanish control.

Although Mexico was way ahead of the U.S. when it came to abolishing slavery, it was not quite so quick to override U.S. slaveholders' claims of property rights for fear of U.S. invasion. When Texas revolted, Mexico responded by welcoming escaped slaves. The Texas revolution was about protecting slavery. The Mexican-American War was about expansion of territory, which provoked the continuing debate over whether new territories/states should be slave or free. And so on.

This seems to be a very well researched book and I'd recommend it to anyone who has a serious interest in this topic. For me it was too much like a textbook to be enjoyable reading so I confess that I skipped over a lot of the parts about congressional debates.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is great, and it definitely seems like something undergrads could handle reading (or an excerpt). Baumgartner does a good job staying on the main argument, and she keeps the chapters short too which allows the reading to hum along at a nice pace. The best thing is it makes it much easier to understand the reality of the 1820-60 decades, when the southern US was not just dealing with a free north and free Canada, but was actually (essentially) sandwiched between TWO free republics. And while the fugitive slave laws made life dangerous in the north, Mexico was refusing to pass extradition laws. It's true that in terms of pure numbers, way more people were running north, but Baumgartner makes a good case for how important Mexico was in the minds of both southerners and northerners.
I also really liked the chapter aligning American Civil War history with the saga of Ferdinand Maximilian in Mexico. The whole Maximilian story makes so much more sense when you remember that everything is happening with the US Civil War in the background.

[Sheila · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hidden chapter of American history--"American" including, not excluding Mexico and Mexicans. Historians have uncovered records of up to 5,000 enslaved Africans escaping across the border to freedom in Mexico--a country way more revolutionary and progressive than the US.

Read this book with The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin and Black Reconstruction in America by WEB Du Bois. The book includes many inspiring stories of Mexican judges and most importantly, of ordinary Mexicans defending the freedom of escaped slaves, and sending white US slave owners and bounty hunters packing.

You'll discover that Andrew Jackson was a despicable, violent racist, and that the Texas Rangers were, as Grandin describes them, not much better than the KKK. The Mexican American War, which the US won in 1848 was a victory for slavery and US colonialism in which Mexico was forced to cede Texas, New Mexico, and California. (White slave owners in Texas only fought to be a US State because Mexico outlawed slavery.)