The underground railroad in the midwestern borderlands.

Abstract

The underground railroad is of obvious interest to public historians, if only because it is so popular with and familiar to the public. (Just go into your local library and count the children’s books on Harriet Tubman.) But it’s been mostly ignored by academic historians, acutely so if you consider the avalanche of recent work in closely related fields—slavery, abolition, and African American history. The problem—and the dividing line—is sources: The documentary record academic historians expect to rely on rarely exists. Determined researchers have made do with what is available—local histories and newspaper articles dating mostly from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, along with oral reports. All these kinds of sources inform two new books on underground railroad activity in four midwestern states—Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio—that shared a border with slavery. These border regions were volatile. As the first place hit by escapees traveling north, the borderlands had more fugitives from slavery than elsewhere. But the southern tier of all four states had been settled heavily by Southern immigrants, so locals were more likely to sympathize with the pursuing slaveholder than the runaway. All of these states enacted ‘‘black codes’’ at some point, either barring African American immigration outright or institutionalizing discrimination.