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    Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
    Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
    Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
    Audiobook9 hours

    Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

    Written by Eric Foner

    Narrated by JD Jackson

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    They are little known to history: Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist newspaper editor; Louis Napoleon, a furniture polisher; Charles B. Ray, a black minister. At great risk they operated the underground railroad in New York, a city whose businesses, banks, and politics were deeply enmeshed in the slave economy. In secret coordination with black dockworkers who alerted them to the arrival of fugitives and with counterparts in Norfolk, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Albany, and Syracuse, underground-railroad operatives in New York helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Their defiance of the notorious Fugitive Slave Law inflamed the South. White and black, educated and illiterate, they were heroic figures in the ongoing struggle between slavery and freedom.

    Making brilliant use of fresh evidence-including the meticulous record of slave rescues secretly kept by Gay-Eric Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJan 19, 2015
    ISBN9781622315918
    Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad
    Author

    Eric Foner

    Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and the author of several books. In 2006 he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. He lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for Gateway to Freedom

    4/5

    36 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The Underground Railroad was the metaphorical name for the system of routes and safe houses that enslaved Black Americans used to escape slavery and find some modicum of safety in free states of the North and in Canada. I expected the book would primarily, but that was not the case. Instead it focused on the work of abolitionists, both free Black and white, who organized the Underground Railroad, as well as the work of Black people who emancipated themselves and then worked to help others. It focuses specifically on activity in New York City, so some of the most famous abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, are only mentioned tangentially where their stories intersect with the city. This history of the Underground Railroad is particularly focused on how abolitionism, antislavery, and freeing the enslaved was affected by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The book is an interesting prism on how many different people - often ordinary and uncelebrated - worked to help free thousands of people from the bonds of slavery from the 1830s to the 1860s.
    • 4/5
      Erc Foner's book is less the comprehensive history of the Underground Railroad that its subtitle might suggest than a history of what he terms the "Metropolitan Corridor" -- the network that passed through or near New York City. This is because of the discovery which inspired the book: the "Record of Fugitives" kept by Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist journalist who in the 1850s helped assist hundreds of slaves escaping bondage. Yet this important source and the events it chronicles serve as just one part of the book, as Foner goes back further to describe the beginnings of the informal networks that arose in the 1830s to both aid fleeing bondsmen and to prevent the seizure by slave catchers of free blacks off of the streets of New York. Through his description of the people involved and the often dramatic events in which they were involved he illuminates the efforts of a group of Americans who undertook great efforts to make the promise of freedom real for thousands who were denied it by the color of their skin. It's a story that deserves to be told, and it's one that Foner tells well.
    • 4/5
      A good but brief account of the origins of the Underground Railroad and when it was at its height before the American Civil War and its winding up shortly thereafter. Could've used more first hand accounts of runaway slaves.
    • 3/5
      I found this a very interesting story. I learned a lot. Great as an audiobook.
    • 4/5
      Foner’s reevaluation of the Underground Railroad, using some relatively recently unearthed materials; the book starts out as largely white political history, then in its last part delves more deeply into the activities of the people, many of whom were free blacks, who risked their freedom to help others become free. Although I didn’t think the book hung together all that well, there were some memorable points. As always, no matter how important the cause, the narcissism of small differences was in effect and there were competing factions of abolitionists. The infinite capacity of people—particularly oppressors—to delude themselves about the world was on full display in the slaveowner who wrote in his diary about how his escaped slave must have been kidnapped and then induced to perjure herself when she testified that she wanted to leave (this was important because non-fugitive slaves brought by their enslavers to free states became free); also in the slaveowner who wrote to an escapee, many years after his escape, that she’d give up all claim to him for $1000 and that she’d raised him as if he were her own son. I was reminded that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was probably the worst legislation enacted by any American government ever; it provided that the written statement of a slaveowner that a person in custody was their escaped slave was conclusive evidence of that claim and paid commissioners more when they sent a person (back) into slavery than when they refused to do so. I was in addition worryingly reminded of our present political polarization when Foner recounted how the North and South grew further apart and began to take opposing each other as almost a good in itself. New York City shows itself as an inhospitable place for escaped slaves; the white businessmen of the city got too much of their wealth from trade with the South to be sympathetic to abolition. And this I didn’t know: abolitionism and the commercialization of Christmas are connected, because abolitionists raised a lot of funds by selling luxury goods (many sent from the UK by antislavery societies there) in pre-Christmas sales—“buy to help the slaves” was an actual slogan.
    • 3/5
      Nowadays the popular notion of the Underground Rail Road seems to consist of this: a tight network of white and black abolitionists rescuing escaped slaves from all over the south in a highly coordinated way. This novel interjects a much needed dose of reality into the modern day myth. While certainly some slaves did escape from the deep south, the majority escaped from the boarder states and Virginia. Slaves escaped in a variety of ways as well. On foot, riding horses or in wagons, by ship and sometimes even mailing themselves north in crates. It also may surprise modern readers to learn that it was no unusual for slaves to make their escapes with another slave or even in groups. Gateway to Freedom is a fascinating read. The history of the Underground Rail Road is one shrouded in a good deal of myth. Which is unfortunate, as the reality ends up being far more interesting.
    • 5/5
      Once again the eminent historian Eric Foner has written a fascinating and important history that helps set the record straight about the period in America before, during, and after the Civil War. While this book focuses on the escape of runaway slaves and especially the support and/or obstacles they encountered in New York City, he places his study within the wider context of American politics at the time.New York was an important and active center of underground railroad activity. When William Seward was governor, the state enacted several “personal liberty” measures that, inter alia, decreed that any slave entering the state except a fugitive automatically became free. In addition, New York was the home of the largest free black community at that time, making it attractive for fugitives who would need help if they got as far as that state. It also had a sizable liberal white community of abolitionists.But there were undeniably many New Yorkers who made fortunes from the slave trade, either directly or indirectly through the cotton industry, and who therefore objected to any acts to alienate the southern states. New York’s “Journal of Commerce” (still in print today), called for repeal of the personal liberty laws of New York and for abandonment of the clearly (to them) absurd idea “that to rob our neighbor of his slave … is a Christian duty.” These businessmen even wanted to allow slavery to spread to the West, all to appease the planters who made them so wealthy.Foner’s account of the efforts of slaves to get north to freedom emphasizes that, although there were many heroic whites who helped, even their efforts would hardly have been possible “without the courage and resourcefulness, in a hostile environment, of blacks,” ranging from those northern free blacks who served on abolition committees to “the ordinary men and women” who watched for fugitives and did what they could to house them, feed them, and direct them to safety. Because there was a great deal of prejudice against blacks even among abolitionists, black men and women were restricted to jobs at the bottom of the economic ladder, working as maids, waiters, cooks, mariners, and dock workers. Ironically, those same jobs put them in a great position to learn about new fugitives and to help them. This leads to Foner’s point that unlike the impression many Americans have, the phrase “underground railroad” was a metaphor to refer to “an interlocking series of local networks” using a variety of methods - both legal and illegal, to assist fugitives, helping them in many cases to make their way to Canada, where they would not be subject to detection and re-enslavement. Trains had little to do with the process, and moreover, many of the activities of underground railroad were not strictly “underground” at all, but widely publicized. [The South had a different definition of “Underground Railroad” - one North Carolina newspaper called it “An Association of abolitionists whose first business is to steal, or cause to be stolen, educed or inveigled . . . slaves from southern plantations; . . . to steal him from an indulgent and provident master; to carry him to a cold, strange, and uncongenial country, and there leave him . . . to starve, freeze, and die, in glorious freedom.”]Foner documents that most fugitives came from the Upper South, since it obviously presented a shorter distance for them to make their way successfully to the North. Nevertheless, and ironically, it was the Upper South that remained in the Union, and the Lower South that decried the “fanatical warfare [of the North] on the constitutional rights of property.”Foner also wants to make the point that the resolution of the slavery issue in America should not be seen only as a matter of the whites freeing the slaves; the slaves themselves played a large role in impacting the political dialogue about "liberty" and "freedom" and in taking advantage of any opportunities that presented themselves to take up their rightful role as "people" instead of "property." The Lower South hated the fugitive situation not only for the obvious one of losing the monetary value of this “property.” A runaway slave gave lie to the notion, much promulgated by Southerners, that life was not difficult under slavery or that slaves were not “contented.” But in fact, many of their own advertisements for runaway slaves gave them away, for the notices included identifying marks of the slaves that were clear indications of abusive treatment, such as visible scars and mutilated body parts.In another interesting twist, the fugitive slave situation made white Southerners vigorous proponents of federal action to override local laws in order to ensure the return of slaves to their “owners.” For all that Southerners claimed in later years that the Civil War was about “state’s rights,” they were vigorously in favor of federal hegemony in the interest of perpetuating slavery.Thus the actions of runaway slaves powerfully affected the national debate over slavery and union, especially because the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 ratcheted up the tension between North and South and became a key point of contention in the succession crisis that followed.Much of the book tells the stories both of individual slaves who made the perilous journey north, and of those who helped them, and how they did so. But Foner's constant intermixing of these stories with a meta-level analysis ensures that we never lose sight of what each and every brave and perilous action meant for the future of the country. Discussion: There are so many interesting aspects of Foner’s book that should be a part of every student’s history lessons (as should his analyses in other books of the Reconstruction period, even more mired in myth than “the Underground Railroad”). You will even discover that the practice of holding gift bazarres around holiday time to encourage gift exchanges originated as a money-raising idea of abolitionists. For while some runaways needed just enough funds to get them to Canada, others needed to be purchased from their owners when that was the only way to save them from being taken back to the South. (The fate of these recaptured slaves is also very noteworthy. Their owners spent a great deal of time and money to get them back, but then of course they didn’t want them anymore, so they would sell them further South. This allowed owners to recoup their money, punish the slave, and buy someone more docile the next time around.) Tragically, as Foner conveys, some of the best “characters” in this story have so little written about them. I would love to know more, for example, about Louis Napoleon, a black porter who seemed to have been everywhere helping fugitives; when he died, he was credited with having helped over 3,000 escape!The viciousness and inhumanity of Southern slave owners really doesn’t get enough attention in history books. While Foner doesn’t specifically attack them, by showing the human costs to slaves so clearly and compassionately, he gives both groups their “due.”Evaluation: Nothing that can make a lover of excellent history more happy than a new book by Eric Foner. His findings are meticulously researched, and yet he invests his work with so much passion and imbues his words with such a strong sense of justice denied, that one never feels a moment of not being totally invested in learning what he has to share.