The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom

by Wilbur H. Siebert

Siebert was a professor at the Ohio State University from 1891-1935. His research material on the Underground Railroad, collected over a period of fifty years, includes survey responses, interviews, and copies and notes from books, diaries, letters, photographs, newspapers, biographies, memoirs, speeches, annual reports, trial records, census records, and legislation. He organized his research by state and county, eventually binding his notes in volumes by location.

His classic work, The Underground Railroad from Freedom to Slavery, published in 1898, still is the subject’s most comprehensive study. His version of the story portrayed a loosely organized network of individuals who through various means aided tens of thousands of slaves obtain their freedom, with most being sent to Canada. This story conformed closely with the personal narratives of former participants like Levi Coffin, William Still, and Eber Pettit, as well as Robert Smedley, whose book was based on participants’ accounts.

The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad: First-Person Narratives of Escapes to Freedom in the North
edited by Charles L. Blockson

Numerous books have been written about the Underground Railroad. That secret avenue to freedom was taken by an increasingly large number of daring runaways from the beginning of the nineteenth century through the frenzied rush in the decades between the Fugitive Slave Act and the outbreak of the Civil War. Rarely, though, has the story been told from the viewpoint of the central characters, the fugitive slaves. Why did they risk death for freedom, and how did they make their way out of bondage? The answers are indispensable to an understanding of the real Underground.

 In the pages of this book the reader will meet and come to know the major personalities in this dramatic and too-little known chapter in American history. Harriet Tubman as the Moses of her people struggles steadfastly to achieve her heaven-directed goals. Frederick Douglass escapes from slavery in Maryland to become the most eloquent spokesman for freedom in print and on platform here and abroad. Sojourner Truth, near penniless, still manages to get the funds to continue her unremitting rescue work. Thomas Garrett, a white Delaware Quaker, refuses to budge an inch from his abolition principles while living and working in a slave state.... William and Ellen Craft, a married couple, escape slavery by traveling openly through the public highways of the antebellum South in that most convincing of disguises--master and slave. The wealthy and well-born Charlotte Forten is here, recording riots in Boston, along with that most piteous and desperate black mother, Margaret Garner, ready to sacrifice her child rather than see her returned to slavery.

From Midnight to Dawn

From Midnight to Dawn: The Last Tracks of the Underground Railroad

by Jacqueline L. Tobin

From Midnight to Dawn presents compelling portraits of the men and women who established the Underground Railroad and traveled it to find new lives in Canada. Evoking the turmoil and controversies of the time, Tobin illuminates the historic events that forever connected American and Canadian history by giving us the true stories behind well-known figures such as Harriet Tubman and John Brown. She also profiles lesser-known but equally heroic figures such as Mary Ann Shadd, who became the first black female newspaper editor in North America, and Osborne Perry Anderson, the only black survivor of the fighting at Harpers Ferry. An extraordinary examination of a part of American history, From Midnight to Dawn will captivate readers with its tales of hope, courage, and a people’s determination to live equally under the law.

Passages to Freedom

Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory
edited by David W. Blight

Few American stories have such staying power as the tales of courageous slaves escaping from bondage through a rudimentary network of hiding places and way stations. These stories of enormous risk, of black leadership and white cooperation, of many thousands of journeys to freedom, have become a part of American historical consciousness. How much of the great story of the Underground Railroad is real, how much is legend and mythology, and how much is verifiable? Passages to Freedom is the single-best illustrated treatment of slavery, abolitionism, and emancipation, and seeks to answer these very questions. Artfully displaying illustrations and artifacts together with essays by leading American historians, the book explores the wealth of lore about the Underground Railroad that grew in the national culture after emancipation. Both the text and images examine why these stories endure—and need to endure—in our American culture.

Harriet Tubman:Imagining a Life

Harriet Tubman: Imagining a Life

by Beverly Lowry

Best known as a hero of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has been the subject of hundreds of books for young people. Full-scale biographies, however, have been scarce, though three — by Jean Humez, Catherine Clinton and Kate Clifford Larson — have appeared since the year 2000. “Harriet Tubman,” the novelist Beverly Lowry’s contribution, is labeled a biography, but the subtitle, “Imagining a Life,” qualifies that claim. In an author’s note, Lowry painstakingly explains her decision “to emphasize the visual elements of Harriet’s story — what things looked like, places and clothes, faces, plants, the sky — and to thread information from the sources” listed in her bibliography “in order to come up with one version of what life might have been like for the American hero Harriet Tubman.” She also makes us aware that Tubman was one of the first American celebrities to market her own story for profit, so the first full record of her life contains material that she and her original biographer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, thought would sell.

Fictionalized biographies are troubling to readers who want to know at all times what’s fact and what’s invention. Lowry signals, unobtrusively but clearly, when she is gliding into the imagined phases of her narrative. Particularly in the first half of the book, this method produces vivid scenes of Tubman’s life as she (might well have) lived it.

Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross around 1822, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She was the property of Edward Brodess, an unprosperous farmer who staved off bankruptcy by hiring out or selling his slaves. First hired out at the age of 6, Minty, as she was known, was beaten for poor performance of housework she’d never been taught to do. Her hire-masters tried using her to check muskrat traps, and kept her wading through cold water during a bout of measles until she collapsed. Still, she preferred outdoor labor. In her early 20s, she made a deal with one of her hire-masters, Brodess’s stepbrother A. C. Thompson, which permitted her to find her own jobs and keep whatever earnings were left after both Thompson and Brodess had satisfied their claims.

When Tubman was 13, her skull was fractured by a two-pound lead weight launched in a dispute between an overseer and another slave. Brodess promptly tried to sell his damaged property, but found no takers. Minty recovered but soon began having visions and conversations with God. She had witnessed the Leonid meteor shower of 1833, a revelation of falling stars that many thought portended a great upheaval in the order of things. In later life, Tubman would claim she had always known how to follow the North Star, which led to freedom.

On the non-astral plane, she also learned, much later in life, that a term in Brodess’s great-grandfather’s will should have set her mother, and her mother’s children, free at age 45. As it happened, she did not have to wait that long. At 26, when she heard that Brodess was trying to sell her again, she asked God to kill him. He died about a week later. His widow was still more desperate to raise money by selling slaves. Minty, now married to John Tubman, tried to escape with three of her brothers in September 1849, but they lost their nerve. A few days later she went alone. After crossing to freedom she took her mother’s name, Harriet.

A year later, Harriet returned to rescue family members who had been put up for sale. Slaves who were not her relatives asked her to help them escape too. The recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Act meant that escapees could be recaptured even in the North. The Underground Railroad ramped up in response, now conveying fugitives all the way to Canada.

Relying on her visions, her sixth sense for danger and her colloquies with God, Harriet ran extraordinary risks in her numerous returns to slave territory, once (in an episode rendered well by Lowry) brushing elbows with her former master A. C. Thompson. Slaves began calling her Moses, after her habit of singing “Go Down Moses” to discreetly announce her presence. John Brown, with his more martial bent, called her “General Tubman.”

By the outbreak of the Civil War, Tubman had gotten most of her family north, and become a symbol of the possibility of freedom to a great many more. Though she would become a star on the abolitionist lecture circuit, she always had to struggle to finance her expeditions and to support the growing circle of family and friends she had helped establish in Canada and upstate New York. Though she served in the United States Army as a scout and spy, the government would repeatedly deny her a pension. In 1865 she was severely beaten for refusing to leave a whites-only car on a train from Philadelphia to New York. After a slow recovery, she returned to her large dependent household, begging for food when she couldn’t find work. Under these circumstances, in 1868, she began collaborating with Sarah Bradford in the marketing of her legend.

Lowry, a white Southerner, makes painfully sure we know she knows that slavery was a Bad Thing. The hardships Harriet Tubman suffered in the North come through just as clearly through uncommented description. Though she insists her work is not scholarly, Lowry’s dramatic retelling seems thoroughly researched, and she succeeds in animating the icon that Tubman helped to make of herself. “I am as proud of being a black woman,” she told the conductor of the train where she was beaten, “as you are of being white.” That pride shines through in the marvelous photographs of Tubman that illustrate the book — images that, amplifying Lowry’s words, show forth her indomitable desire to be herself in freedom.

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman
by Judith Bentley

Harriet Tubman, Moses of Her People is the biography of one of America’s greatest women. Harriet Tubman is most famous for her work escorting slaves north on the Underground Railroad, work that earned her the name Moses. Not only an abolitionist, she also worked as a spy and a nurse for the Union army during the Civil War and then became involved in the women’s suffrage movement after the war. She risked her life and safety to bring her family and friends north, never losing a passenger from her “train.”

Coming of Age in Mississippi

Coming of Age in Mississippi
by Anne Moody

When Anne is four years old, she and her mother, Toosweet, her father, Diddly, and her younger sister, Adline, live in a two-room shack on a plantation. None of the shacks of the black plantation workers has electricity or indoor plumbing, while the Carter family’s house has both. At night, when the white family’s house is the only one lit up, Anne’s mother says the plantation owner is counting money he made off of them. While Anne’s parents are out working in the fields during the day, George Lee, Toosweet’s eight-year-old brother, watches Anne and her sister inside. Resentful of having to babysit, George Lee hits the girls and one day accidentally sets the wallpaper on fire while trying to scare them with matches.

Amid anxieties over money, the fire, and the death of his best friend, Diddly eventually leaves the family for an affair with Florence, a lighter-skinned black woman. Toosweet and the children, who now include a son, Junior, eventually move to at least six different houses over the next six years. Toosweet works as a waitress at a café for blacks, and then as a maid for white families. Toosweet’s family is constantly hungry, often eating only bread and beans supplemented by table scraps from Toosweet’s white employers. Still, Anne does exceptionally well in school. In the fourth grade, Anne begins working part-time cleaning the houses of white families. She will continue working until her senior year of high school, spending most of her after-school hours doing menial jobs in order to put food on the family’s table. Most of her employers are fairly easy to get along with. The Claibornes even encourage Anne in her studies and ask her to eat with them at their table. But Mrs. Burke, a nasty woman and a racist, makes life difficult, especially when her son Wayne grows close to Anne. Mrs. Burke finally accuses Anne’s brother Junior of stealing in order to get back at her, relenting only after leaving both children shaken. Anne quits.

Meanwhile, Anne has begun to attract the attention of the boys in her high school and the men in her community. When she outgrows her school dresses, she wears jeans, which she cannot afford to replace even when they grow tight. She becomes so popular with the boys that she is elected homecoming queen. Diddly even provides Anne with a beautiful gown, making the homecoming parade one of the few joyful moments of her young life. When Anne is still very young, her mother develops a romantic relationship with Raymond Davis, with whom she has four more children. Raymond’s family, especially Miss Pearl, Raymond’s mother, looks down on Toosweet because she has darker skin than they do. Yet Anne enjoys their new home in Centreville, and especially Centreville Baptist Church, the upscale church Raymond’s family attends. When Anne’s mother wants her to attend their old, poorer church, Anne gets into the first of many serious conflicts with her mother.

In the summer of 1955, when Anne hears that Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy visiting from Chicago, has been brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman, she becomes acutely conscious of the racial inequality around her. As a younger child, she struggled to understand the inequity between the races, and she gains no more understanding of this fact as she grows older. She wonders if there are any real differences between blacks and whites, save for the fact that the black women clean the white women’s homes.

When Anne first hears about the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), a forbidden organization in rural Mississippi, she begins to contemplate how the racial inequalities around her can be overthrown. Meanwhile, however, her own struggles with her family are more pressing. Toosweet feels that Anne is starting to look down on her, especially when Anne changes her name from Essie Mae to Annie Mae because she thinks Essie Mae sounds like a name for barnyard animals. Anne’s family does not understand Anne’s growing interest in the civil rights movement; in fact, they are afraid of it. Anne spends her last three summers of high school in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, doing menial jobs for more money than she could earn at home. Eventually, Anne can no longer stand the family, especially Raymond, and she storms out and moves in with her father, Diddly, and his wife, Emma. Emma and her family are light skinned, but do not hold themselves above anyone, and Anne grows close to them.

Anne accepts a basketball scholarship to Natchez College, a suffocatingly conservative Baptist college in Mississippi. There, Anne has her first boyfriend. She eventually transfers to Tougaloo College for her final two years of college. At Tougaloo, she joins the NAACP, in spite of the strong protests of her mother. The local sheriff even tells Anne’s mother that Anne must not attend NAACP events or it will mean trouble for her family. Nonetheless, Anne becomes active in the NAACP and the civil rights movement, despite her family’s impassioned pleas for her to quit.

Anne participates in the famous sit-in at the lunch counter of the Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi. She later works as a CORE (Coalition for the Organization of Racial Equality) activist in rural Madison County, Mississippi, where she and the other activists are the targets of violent threats. After exhaustive work, Anne concludes that the movement has not improved the lives of people in Mississippi. It has focused too much on voter registration and even political theater, such as the Freedom Vote, a mock vote intended to protest disenfranchisement of blacks. Instead, Anne wants the movement to focus on economic issues, such as helping black farmers buy their own land. At the end of her memoir, twenty-three-year-old Anne is getting on a bus to Washington. The bus is filled with volunteers who all seem far more exuberant and younger than she. As they sing “We Shall Overcome,” Anne wonders if blacks will ever really overcome racism.

Race Matters

Race Matters
by Cornel West

Thought-provoking essays that address a number of controversial issues of concern to African Americans. West analyzes such subjects as nihilism in black America, the crisis of black leadership, affirmative action, black-Jewish relations, sexuality, and the legacy of Malcolm X. His writing style is scholarly and sparse-he does not waste words, and his prose is easy to read. Yet his viewpoints are radical and passionately felt. He is not afraid to speak frankly and, while he presents many criticisms, he also offers many solutions. Not everyone will agree with his point of view, but if one of his objectives is to make readers at least think about the problems he has dissected, then he has succeeded admirably.

West's work has been described as a "polemical weapon that attempts to transform linguistic, social, cultural, and political tradition to increase the scope of individual development and democratic actions." West's writing, speaking, and teaching weaves together the American traditions of the Baptist Church, transcendentalism, socialism, and pragmatism.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
by Harriet Ann Jacobs

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the first full-length narrative written by a former woman slave in America. Harriet A. Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813. She was a house servant, and constantly fearful of sexual predation from her master. She bore two children by another man whom her master despised. Her plight was made worse by her master's wife, whose jealousy seemed to know no bounds. Finally she ran off, and hid for seven years in a narrow part of an attic. When the opportunity arose, she was able to flee north on a steamboat, with the cooperation of its sympathetic captain. This narrative is considered one of the great works of African American women's literature. It is a book that one cannot put down, a book that is immensely informative and inspiring, a book, which, like other classic slave narratives (e.g., John Brown's Slave Life in Georgia), demonstrates the resistance of slaves to every aspect of their enslavement. White readers may cringe, for they will see the criminality behind what is called Southern "heritage," and will be stirred by a recognition of the dignity that slaves maintained by active resistance and by refusing to be brainwashed.

Black Folk Here and There, Vol. 2

Black Folk Here and There : An Essay in History and Anthropology, Volume II
by St. Clair Drake

To the Jews of pre-Christian Palestine, Black people were sometimes friends and sometimes enemies, but never objects of racially based derision or contempt. The ancient Greeks categorized people not as Black or white, but as ''civilized'' or ''uncivilized.'' In the Muslim world, many slaves were Blacks, but so were many soldiers, several prominent rulers, and an occasional saint. Armed with such facts gathered during a lifetime of research, St. Clair Drake in his final work, Black Folk Here and There, submits to the test of history a wide range of theories that attempt to explain what happens when Black people and white people interact and why color prejudice may arise.
In this volume, Drake challenges theories claiming that negative attitudes toward blackness and Black people, which emerged from centuries of racial slavery, have always prevailed. Drake finds telling evidence of color prejudice and equally telling evidence of its absence or irrelevance.

Black Folk Here and There, Vol. 1

Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, Vol. 1
by St. Clair Drake

Professor Drake's Black Folk Here and There is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history and legacy of slavery and race in the contemporary world. This book provides the best review of the specialized literature on race and slavery, making available a great deal of knowledge heretofore confined to university libraries. St. Clair Drake was one of the deans of Black Studies as well as American Sociology, and he applied that rare background to an analysis and evaluation of modern theories of race and racism. His main targets are the theory of black inferiority and the theory of universal black contemptability. Did every civilization develop racism against "blacks"? In order to challenge that idea presented by some psychologists and historians, including the prize winning Professor Carl Degler, Drake reviews the history of Egypt, Ethiopia, Europe and Christianity in the Middle Ages, slavery and Islam, and the rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade. And he finds that there was no universal contempt for blacks. The evaluation of blacks throughout the ages, depended on their status in various civilizations. The high point of black social and cultural status was in ancient Egypt and Ethiopia as well as during the Middle Ages as revealed in such folklore as Prester John and the Black Madonna. However, with the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade as the modern world took shape, Black Africans took on a distinct ly degraded social and cultural status that was spread by modern communications throughout the world. In terms of encyclopedic knowledge on this subject and hard hitting analysis, Drake's study is unrivaled! As a professor of history, I use it as the best introduction to the global problems of race and racism left behind by modern slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. No one knew this subject or wrote with the scope as did Professor Drake.

The Negro Soldier

The Negro Soldier: A Select Compilation

"The Loyalty and Devotion of Colored Americans in the Revolution and War of 1812"
by William Lloyd Garrison

"Historical Notes on the Employment of Negroes in the American Army of the Revolution"
by George Henry Moore

"Missing Pages in American History, Revealing the Services of Negroes in the Early Wars of the Unites States of America, 16-41-1815
by Laura Eliza Wilkes

A series of essays outlining the positive contributions of black slaves and freemen to the early wars in American history.

Renegade History of the United States

A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

In this groundbreaking book, noted historian Thaddeus Russell tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free.

In vivid portraits of renegades and their “respectable” adversaries, Russell shows that the nation’s history has been driven by clashes between those interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing their own desires—insiders versus outsiders, good citizens versus bad. The more these accidental revolutionaries existed, resisted, and persevered, the more receptive society became to change.

Russell brilliantly and vibrantly argues that it was history’s iconoclasts who established many of our most cherished liberties. Russell finds these pioneers of personal freedom in the places that usually go unexamined—saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, and even behind the Iron Curtain. He introduces a fascinating array of antiheroes: drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women’s liberation, including “Diamond Jessie” Hayman, a madam who owned her own land, used her own guns, provided her employees with clothes on the cutting-edge of fashion, and gave food and shelter to the thousands left homeless by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; there are also the criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America’s sexual culture.

Among Russell’s most controversial points is his argument that the enemies of the renegade freedoms we now hold dear are the very heroes of our history books— he not only takes on traditional idols like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, but he also shows that some of the most famous and revered abolitionists, progressive activists, and leaders of the feminist, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the vibrant energies of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the drag queens who founded Gay Liberation.

This is not history that can be found in textbooks— it is a highly original and provocative portrayal of the American past as it has never been written before.

Inhuman Bondage

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
by David Brion Davis

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, David Brion Davis has long been recognized as the leading authority on slavery in the Western World. Now, in Inhuman Bondage, Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in this definitive account of New World slavery.

The heart of the book looks at slavery in the American South, describing black slaveholding planters, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, the daily life of ordinary slaves, the highly destructive slave trade, the sexual exploitation of slaves, the emergence of an African-American culture, and much more. But though centered on the United States, the book offers a global perspective spanning four continents. It is the only study of American slavery that reaches back to ancient foundations and also traces the long evolution of anti-black racism in European thought. Equally important, it combines the subjects of slavery and abolitionism as very few books do, and it connects the actual life of slaves with the crucial place of slavery in American politics, stressing that slavery was integral to America's success as a nation—not a marginal enterprise.

A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage offers a compelling portrait of the dark side of the American dream.

Mugabe

Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe's Future

by Martin Meredith

Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe in 1980 after a long civil war in Rhodesia. The white minority government had become an international outcast in refusing to give in to the inevitability of black majority rule. Finally the defiant white prime minister Ian Smith was forced to step down and Mugabe was elected president. Initially he promised reconciliation between white and blacks, encouraged Zimbabwe's economic and social development, and was admired throughout the world as one of the leaders of the emerging nations and as a model for a transition from colonial leadership. But as Martin Meredith shows in this history of Mugabe's rule, Mugabe from the beginning was sacrificing his purported ideals--and Zimbabwe's potential--to the goal of extending and cementing his autocratic leadership. Over time, Mugabe has become ever more dictatorial, and seemingly less and less interested in the welfare of his people, treating Zimbabwe's wealth and resources as spoils of war for his inner circle. In recent years he has unleashed a reign of terror and corruption in his country. Like the Congo, Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Zimbabwe has been on a steady slide to disaster. Now for the first time the whole story is told in detail by an expert. It is a riveting and tragic political story, a morality tale, and an essential text for understanding today's Africa.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Although the American anti-slavery movement had existed at least as long as the nation itself, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) galvanized public opinion as nothing had before. The book sold 10,000copies in its first week and 300,000 in its first year. Its vivid dramatization of slavery’s cruelties so aroused readers that it is said Abraham Lincoln told Stowe her work had been a catalyst for the Civil War.

Today the novel is often labeled condescending, but its characters—Tom, Topsy, Little Eva, Eliza, and the evil Simon Legree—still have the power to move our hearts. Though “Uncle Tom” has become a synonym for a fawning black yes-man, Stowe’s Tom is actually American literature’s first black hero, a man who suffers for refusing to obey his white oppressors. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a living, relevant story, passionate in its vivid depiction of the cruelest forms of injustice and inhumanity—and the courage it takes to fight against them.

Harriet Beecher Stowe first published her groundbreaking novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 as an outcry against slavery after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. The book sold more copies than any book other than the Bible and caused Abraham Lincoln to exclaim upon meeting her, during the Civil War, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

Bury the Chains

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

by Adam Hochschild

In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on today, from wall posters and mass mailings to boycotts and lapel pins. This talented group combined a hatred of injustice with uncanny skill in promoting their cause. Within five years, more than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat the chief slave-grown product, sugar; London's smart set was sporting antislavery badges created by Josiah Wedgwood; and the House of Commons had passed the first law banning the slave trade.
However, the House of Lords, where slavery backers were more powerful, voted down the bill. But the crusade refused to die, fueled by remarkable figures like Olaudah Equiano, a brilliant ex-slave who enthralled audiences throughout the British Isles; John Newton, the former slave ship captain who wrote "Amazing Grace"; Granville Sharp, an eccentric musician and self-taught lawyer; and Thomas Clarkson, a fiery organizer who repeatedly crisscrossed Britain on horseback, devoting his life to the cause. He and his fellow activists brought slavery in the British Empire to an end in the 1830s, long before it died in the United States. The only survivor of the printing shop meeting half a century earlier, Clarkson lived to see the day when a slave whip and chains were formally buried in a Jamaican churchyard.

Like Hochschild's classic KingLeopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains abounds in atmosphere, high drama, and nuanced portraits of unsung heroes and colorful villains. Again Hochschild gives a little-celebrated historical watershed its due at last.

The Black Jacobins

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

by C. L. R. James

A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World.

This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and in the process helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.

Haiti's revolution has always been a point of pride for people of African descent around the world. It was in Haiti that slaveholding European colonizers were finally driven away at the hands of the island's black population. The Black Jacobins dramatically and powerfully recounts the events that led up to the bloody and history-altering Haitian revolution of 1791-1803.

The revolution began in the wake of the Bastille and ended in the French colony of Santo Domingo, one of the wealthiest colonies in the world due to its rich natural resources and its importing of cotton, indigo, and coffee. Forever tied with the revolution is Toussaint-Louverture, a barely literate slave who united the slaves and mulattos of Santo Domingo and led them against the ruling population of the colony, as well as French, Spanish, and English forces, to alter the fate of millions of people and shift the economic currents of three continents.

"In 1789 the French West Indian colony of Santo Domingo supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave-trade.... The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves." In 1791, after decades of inhumane and savage treatment by their "masters," the slaves revolted-led by one man, Toussaint-Louverture. "One of the most remarkable men of a period rich in remarkable men. The history of the Santo Domingo revolution will therefore largely be a record of his achievements and his political personality.... Between 1789-1815, with the single exception of Bonaparte himself, no single figure appeared on the historical stage more greatly gifted than this Negro, a slave till he was 45 [sic]. Yet Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint."

King Leopold's Ghost

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

by Adam Hochschild

At the turn of the century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a genocidal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River. Ultimately slashing the area's population by ten million, he still managed to shrewdly cultivate his reputation as a great humanitarian. A tale far richer than any novelist could invent, King Leopold's Ghost is the "absorbing and horrifying account" (Los Angeles Times) of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century's first great human rights movement.

Born the son of a mining company executive, Adam Hochschild visited apartheid-era South Africa during his teens and observed the injustices of racism. He subsequently became active politically, joining the civil rights movement, demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and co-founding the activist magazine Mother Jones. His National Book Award-nominated Bury the Chains is a fascinating look at the British abolitionist movement of the late 1700s.

A Slave No More

A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Own Narratives of Emancipation
by David W. Blight

Slave narratives, some of the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five post–Civil War narratives surviving. A mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group with the publication of A Slave No More, a major new addition to the canon of American history. Handed down through family and friends, these narratives tell gripping stories of escape: Through a combination of intelligence, daring, and sheer luck, the men reached the protection of the occupying Union troops. David W. Blight magnifies the drama and significance by prefacing the narratives with each man’s life history. Using a wealth of genealogical information, Blight has reconstructed their childhoods as sons of white slaveholders, their service as cooks and camp hands during the Civil War, and their climb to black working-class stability in the north, where they reunited their families.

In the stories of Turnage and Washington, we find history at its most intimate, portals that offer a rich new answer to the question of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom. In A Slave No More, the untold stories of two ordinary men take their place at the heart of the American experience.

Both Washington and Turnage, near contemporaries, wrote vivid accounts of their lives as slaves and the bold bids for freedom that took them across Confederate lines and into the waiting arms of Union soldiers. Recently discovered, both texts have been reproduced by Mr. Blight as written, with misspellings and grammatical errors intact. Mr. Blight…has also provided an extended preface that provides historical context, fills in biographical gaps and extends the life stories of both men past the Civil War, when their manuscripts break off abruptly, to their deaths in the early 20th century. Two remarkable lives, previously lost, emerge with startling clarity, largely through the words of the principal actors themselves.

WALLACE TURNAGE (1846–1916) was born in Snow Hill, North Carolina, and spent his adult life in New York City and Jersey City, New Jersey.

JOHN WASHINGTON (1838–1918), born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, worked as a house and sign painter in Washington, D.C., after his escape. He retired to Cohasset, Massachusetts.