From the Mountains to the Bay: The War in Virginia, January–May 1862 by Ethan S. Rafuse (review)

Abstract

69 committees and their allies, as well as their wide-ranging approach to reform. Unlike the educated, middle-class activists of the American Antislavery Society, Black men headed the VCs, and worked with runaways, porters, sailors, ship captains, boardinghouse keepers, Black and white women, local Black residents, and antislavery societies to aid fugitives. VC members’ critical engagement with American society meant they were involved in other movements such as women’s rights, prison reform, and efforts to come out of mainstream churches. Through their writing, fugitives and VC members also had a profound and lasting influence on American culture. Olsavsky offers a persuasive new interpretation of vigilance committees as an integral force in the abolitionist movement. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, vigilance committees engaged in aggressive and violent confrontations with slavecatchers and the law. As Olsavsky shows, their actions radicalized and intensified the antislavery movement. John Brown depended on VC members and their knowledge in planning his raid on Harpers Ferry. In Olsavsky’s account, this violent action was not a break from the pacifism of many abolitionists, but the culmination of the revolutionary ideas and actions of fugitives and vigilance committees.