A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after abolition, traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North's largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s, vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city's underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Foner presents fresh information -- including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition," person by person, family by family.
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Summary: A history of the loosely defined movement known as the Underground Railroad in and around New York City.
Eric Foner is one of the preeminent historians of the Reconstruction era. His book on Reconstruction and his book on the Constitutional Amendments passed during Reconstruction are both well worth reading. I would classify Gateway to Freedom as a less critical but still helpful book. There is a lot of mythology around the Underground Railroad. Gateway to Freedom is working to demythologize how organized it was (it wasn't very organized) while maintaining that the work that was done was dangerous, especially for Black people (whether free or formerly enslaved).
Gateway to Freedom concentrates on New York City. It may not be well known, but New York City broadly supported slavery. The mayor of NYC at the start of the Civil War floated the idea of joining the Confederacy, mainly because so much of the economy of NYC was centered on slavery or products derived from slavery. According to another book I am currently reading, while there were many Black residents of NYC, Philadelphia had the largest Black population of any city in the US until well after the Civil War.
Several books I have read this year overlap with Gateway to Freedom in part. A new biography of Sojourner Truth has a lot of overlap because Sojourner Truth was a slave in New York until she left her enslaver and she sued for the freedom of her child. And she remained in New York for years later. Christian Slavery discusses several of the exact same events, most importantly, a slave rebellion in NYC and the movement of Christians to evangelize those who were enslaved, especially through educational outreach in NYC. Until Justice Be Done is about the movement for civil rights between the US Revolution and the start of Reconstruction, which is precisely the same period as Gateway to Freedom. Both books touch on issues of transportation, fugitive slave laws, and citizenship rights. And the biography of Thaddeus Stevens, even though he was not ever a resident of NYC, his biography also touches on similar issues. The ability to get different nuances of overlapping issues is very helpful.
Similar to one of my observations from reading fairly widely about the 20th-century civil rights movement, many of the important figures are fairly unknown. Many people know at least the names of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. But names like William Still and Sydney Gay are unknown to almost anyone. Trying to help free the enslaved was dangerous, but part of the story is the investment of their own time and financial resources, which meant they could not use that time or resources for other purposes. Those who worked with the Underground Railroad were often on the edge of poverty (if not in significant poverty themselves) because they gave their time and money to those needing help instead of keeping it for themselves.
Another point that keeps coming up in histories of this era is that while many white figures did give time and money, they often still did not face the same potential for physical violence. Legal processes were just different between racial groups. Also, many abolitionists opposed slavery but not white superiority. Few wanted to mix socially, for instance. A final brief point is that legal representation matters. One of the problems of the fugitive slave laws was that there were no due process rules in many cases. This allowed many people to be kidnapped into slavery because the assumption was that all Black people were presumed to be former slaves, and the courts, especially after the Dred Scott decision, did not accept any testimony of Black people. That being said, white lawyers like the Jay family, who did represent those that were being accused of being runaway slaves or those that were being discriminated against on public transportation, were significantly crucial to changing laws and public opinion. The law has always been both important to maintaining slavery, segregation, and discrimination as well as important to bringing an end to them.
