South to Freedom

Starred review from September 28, 2020
Baumgartner, a history professor at the University of Southern California, debuts with an eye-opening and immersive account of how Mexico’s antislavery laws helped push America to civil war. After Mexico gained its independence in 1821, the country’s leaders enacted a series of reforms to bring slavery to a gradual end and in 1837 abolished slavery altogether. (Baumgartner notes that in parts of Mexico, “indentured servitude sometimes amounted to slavery in all but name.”) Though far fewer American slaves escaped to freedom across the southern border than on the Underground Railroad to the North, Baumgartner writes, Mexico’s laws contributed to the drive to annex Texas in 1845, which in turn gave rise to the free-soil movement and led to the founding of the Republican Party and its antislavery agenda. Baumgartner draws incisive parallels between U.S. and Mexican history on issues of race, nationalism, and imperialism, and recounts surprising stories of escapees, including a group of Black Seminoles welcomed as colonists in the border state of Coahuila, as well as 28 African Americans who fought with an artillery company in Tampico in the Mexican-American War and received their naturalization certificates from the Mexican president himself. This vivid history of “slavery’s other border” delivers a valuable new perspective on the Civil War.

October 1, 2020
Capable study of the escaped slaves who fled from the U.S. to the Republic of Mexico before the Civil War. Mexican law both "abolished slavery and freed all slaves who set foot on its soil," making it an attractive if not widely used place of refuge. This proved a threat to bordering and nearby slave states, especially Texas and Louisiana. The former, as history professor Baumgartner writes at length, broke away from Mexico so that newcomers from the South could keep their slaves. While runaways to Mexico enjoyed freedom in the legal sense, notes the author, they had limited choices: They could enlist in the military to defend "a series of outposts that the Mexican government established to defend its northeastern frontier against foreign invaders and 'barbarous' Indians," or they could become day laborers and indentured servants, which "sometimes amounted to slavery in all but name." By Baumgartner's estimate, only some 3,000 to 5,000 enslaved people crossed the Mexican border, joining a small remnant population of Blacks, whose ancestors had been brought to Mexico as slaves in the 16th and 17th centuries, before the practice was formally outlawed. While some Mexicans, adhering to political ideals of liberty and property, resisted emancipation, it was finally made law in 1837, just after Texas' independence. So threatening was this liberty that, Baumgartner writes, it provided the rationale for the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845, which led to war with Mexico. Similarly, she attributes the earlier conquest of Spanish Florida to the fear that slaves would flee there as well. Baumgartner focuses on these big-picture developments while also telling the stories of some of those who found freedom in Mexico--e.g., a runaway who returned to Texas not because, as a newspaper put it, he "has a poor opinion of the country and laws," but instead to guide his enslaved brothers across the border. A lucid exploration of a little-known aspect of the history of slavery in the U.S.

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November 1, 2020

Inspired by a research trip, Baumgartner (history, Univ. of Southern California) examines the long-overlooked story of American slaves who escaped to Mexico in the years before the American Civil War. This southern route to freedom was not as large or as organized as the Underground Railroad. Enslaved persons who escaped to Mexico had to do so entirely on their own, and often, in creative ways, for example, by forging slave passes or by impersonating white men. Once they made it to Mexico, former slaves served in the Mexican military, worked as laborers, and became part of the community. Baumgartner also explores the closely related histories of Mexico and the United States in the 19th century. The issue of slavery led to enormous tension between the two countries and to conflicts such as the Texas Revolution, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican-American War. These events also fueled the division within the United States, a division that eventually led to the American Civil War. Baumgartner brings to life the stories of slaves who escaped to Mexico and how they made it to freedom. VERDICT Well-written and well-researched, this work is recommended for those interested in causes of the Civil War, Mexican-American history, and human rights.--Dave Pugl, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL

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