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Recounts the journey of Black slaves to freedom via the underground railroad, an extended group of people who helped fugitive slaves in many ways.

This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist accomplices, Cheryl Janifer LaRoche focuses instead on free African American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom occurred. This study foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. LaRoche demonstrates how landscape features such as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this examination of the \"geography of resistance\" tells the new, powerful, and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own liberation in the midst of oppression.

An engagingly written, meticulously documented study of antislavery ferment just north of the Mason-Dixon line in a region of geographical, economic, cultural, and historical \"edges\". In On the Edge of Freedom, David G. Smith breaks new ground by illuminating the unique development of antislavery sentiment in south central Pennsylvania-a border region of a border state with a complicated history of slavery, antislavery activism, and unequal freedom. During the antebellum decades every single fugitive slave escaping by land east of the Appalachian Mountains had to pass through the region, where they faced both significant opportunities and substantial risks. While the hundreds of fugitives traveling through south central Pennsylvania (defined as Adams, Franklin, and Cumberland counties) during this period were aided by an effective Underground Railroad, they also faced slave catchers and informers. \"Underground\" work such as helping fugitive slaves appealed to border antislavery activists who shied away from agitating for immediate abolition in a region with social, economic, and kinship ties to the South. And, as early antislavery protests met fierce resistance, area activists adopted a less confrontational approach, employing the more traditional political tools of the petition and legal action. Smith traces the victories of antislavery activists in south central Pennsylvania, including the achievement of a strong personal liberty law and the aggressive prosecution of kidnappers who seized innocent African Americans as fugitives. He also documents how their success provoked Southern retaliation and the passage of a strengthened Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. The Civil War then intensified the debate over fugitive slaves, as hundreds of escaping slaves, called \"contrabands\" sought safety in the area, and scores were recaptured by the Confederate army during the Gettysburg campaign. On the Edge of Freedom explores in captivating detail the fugitive slave issue through fifty years of sectional conflict, war, and reconstruction in south central Pennsylvania and provocatively questions what was gained by the activists' pragmatic approach of emphasizing fugitive slaves over immediate abolition and full equality. Smith argues that after the war, social and demographic changes in southern Pennsylvania worked against African Americans achieving equal opportunity, and although local literature portrayed this area as a vanguard of the Underground Railroad, African Americans still lived \"on the edge of freedom.\" By the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was rallying near the Gettysburg battlefield, and south central Pennsylvania became, in some ways, as segregated as the Jim Crow South. The fugitive slave issue, by reinforcing images of dependency, may have actually worked against the achievement of lasting social change.

In the 1800s, the Underground Railroad was a system of secret routes and safe places to hide for black slaves trying to escape to freedom. This astonishing book details the evidence that led up to the acceptance of slavery as well as the rejection of it.

Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered.Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women's proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.Sylviane A. Dioufis an award-winning historian specializing in the history of the African Diaspora, African Muslims, the slave trade and slavery. She is the author ofServants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas(NYU Press, 2013) andDreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America,and the editor ofFighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies.

\"The Road to Dawn tells the improbable story of Josiah Henson, a slave who spent forty-two years in pre-Civil War bondage in the American South and eventually escaped with his wife and four young children, travelling 600 miles and eventually settling with his family as a free man across the border in Canada. Once there, Henson rescued 118 more slaves and purchased land to build what would become one of the final stops on the Underground Railroad, a 500-person freeman settlement called Dawn. He was immortalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe in her 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.\"--Provided by publisher.

On March 11, 1854, the people of Wisconsin prevented agents of the federal government from carrying away the fugitive slave, Joshua Glover. Assembling in mass outside the Milwaukee courthouse, they demanded that the federal officers respect his civil liberties as they would those of any other citizen of the state. When the officers refused, the crowd took matters into its own hands and rescued Joshua Glover. The federal government brought his rescuers to trial, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court intervened and took the bold step of ruling the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional.The Rescue of Joshua Gloverdelves into the courtroom trials, political battles, and cultural equivocation precipitated by Joshua Glover's brief, but enormously important, appearance in Wisconsin on the eve of the Civil War.H. Robert Baker articulates the many ways in which this case evoked powerful emotions in antebellum America, just as the stage adaptation ofUncle Tom's Cabinwas touring the country and stirring antislavery sentiments. Terribly conflicted about race, Americans struggled mightily with a revolutionary heritage that sanctified liberty but also brooked compromise with slavery. Nevertheless, asThe Rescue of Joshua Gloverdemonstrates, they maintained the principle that the people themselves were the last defenders of constitutional liberty, even as Glover's rescue raised troubling questions about citizenship and the place of free blacks in America.

Perhaps one of the most harrowing journeys in US history, traveling the Underground Railroad was dangerous, long, and often very uncomfortable. Men, women, and children often had to walk hundreds of miles to safe houses, usually at night, and stay in cramped quarters until it was safe for them to keep moving. Readers learn what it was like to travel on the Underground Railroad through the eyes of a child escaping slavery.

In response to the abject failure of the Supreme Court's Batson v. Kentucky1 decision and intensified by the racial justice protests of 2020, states across the country have enacted legislative changes or adopted new rules aimed at significantly reforming or even abolishing peremptory challenges.2 Indeed, in 2022, Arizona became the first state in U.S. history to take the dramatic step of entirely eliminating peremptory strikes, reflecting a growing belief that drastic reform is necessary to rectify systemic racial discrimination in jury selection.3 In his excellent article, Complicating Racial Justice Narratives: The Peremptory Elimination Debate, Daniel S. Harawa comprehensively examines the current debate surrounding peremptory challenge elimination. At common law, the right to strike some number of venirepersons came nearly concomitantly with the Magna Carta and the expanded use of jury trials.12 Under the original practice, in felony criminal trials the Crown enjoyed unlimited peremptory challenges while criminal defendants had just thirty-five challenges.13 This inequitable allocation proved problematic in practice, as Crown prosecutors regularly struck all jurors suspected of favoring defendants, leading to credible allegations of jury stacking.14 Because of this, in 1305, Parliament passed the Order of Inquest, finding the Crown's use of unlimited strikes objectionable and eliminating prosecutor peremptories altogether while maintaining the accused's thirty-five strikes.15 From this asymmetric right, the ability to strike jurors arbitrarily grew over the centuries into a celebrated protection against the Crown. The right to peremptory challenges remained closely guarded into the nineteenth century and was gradually extended to Black Americans via personal liberty laws enacted in the North.23 In 1840, New York and Vermont led the way by passing statutes that granted the right to trial by jury-including its customary incidents, such as peremptory challenges-to alleged fugitive slaves.24 The purpose of this expansion was unabashedly to frustrate the first federal Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1793.25 Consider, for instance, abolitionist Horace Mann's critique of the second, more stringent Fugitive Slave Act enacted in 1850,26 in which he demanded judicial process for the accused and listed \"the right of peremptory challenge\" as among those \"noble barriers . . . against the oppression of a powerful Government, and the malignant passions of powerful men. \"27 Northern jury nullification of the Act was incredibly effective.28 In fact, the strategic expansion of jury trial rights-including peremptory challenges- was so effective in frustrating federal law that it contributed directly to the sectional tensions that ignited the Civil War.29 Following the Civil War, Radical Republicans in Congress significantly expanded peremptory challenges at the federal level, extending them to misdemeanor charges, to civil litigants, and to prosecutors.30 Although the legislative record is silent on the precise rationale, the context suggests that one purpose was to equip federal prosecutors and Black litigants with tools to combat the lawlessness of racist jurors, particularly in cases involving racial violence.31 Between 1870 and 1873, the Department of Justice achieved remarkable success in prosecuting white supremacist violence: federal prosecutions increased nearly twelvefold, and integrated juries returned guilty verdicts in over 90% of these cases-almost twice the conviction rate in other federal criminal trials.32 So effective was this campaign that one federal officer in 1872 reported that the Department \"was on the verge of destroying the Klan.