Gateway to freedom
Subtitle: the hidden history of the underground railroad
By: Eric Foner
Edition: Large print edition.
Series: Thorndike Press large print nonfiction; Thorndike Press large print nonfiction series
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 495
ISBN-13: 9781410478511
Copyright date: 2015
Subjects: Underground Railroad; Fugitive slaves; Antislavery movements; History
Description: A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North's largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s, vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city's underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Foner presents fresh information -- including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.
Notes: Originally published: New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 399-491).
Table of contents: title: Rethinking the underground railroad; title: Slavery and freedom in New York; title: Origins of the underground railroad : the New York Vigilance Committee; title: A patchwork system : the underground railroad in the 1840s; title: The Fugitive Slave Law and the crisis of the Black community; title: The metropolitan corridor : the underground railroad in the 1850s; title: The record of fugitives : an account of runaway slaves in the 1850s; title: The end of the underground railroad.