Flee North
A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year
A riveting account of the extraordinary abolitionist, liberator, and writer Thomas Smallwood, who bought his own freedom, led hundreds out of slavery, and named the underground railroad, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Scott Shane. Flee North tells the story for the first time of an American hero all but lost to history.
Born into slavery, by the 1840s Thomas Smallwood was free, self-educated, and working as a shoemaker a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. He recruited a young white activist, Charles Torrey, and together they began to organize mass escapes from Washington, Baltimore, and surrounding counties to freedom in the north.
They were racing against an implacable enemy: men like Hope Slatter, the region’s leading slave trader, part of a lucrative industry that would tear one million enslaved people from their families and sell them to the brutal cotton and sugar plantations of the deep south.
Men, women, and children in imminent danger of being sold south turned to Smallwood, who risked his own freedom to battle what he called “the most inhuman system that ever blackened the pages of history.” And he documented the escapes in satirical newspaper columns, mocking the slaveholders, the slave traders and the police who worked for them.
At a time when Americans are rediscovering a tragic and cruel history and struggling anew with the legacy of white supremacy, this Flee North -- the first to tell the extraordinary story of Smallwood -- offers complicated heroes, genuine villains, and a powerful narrative set in cities still plagued by shocking racial inequity today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Shane (Objective Troy) brings to vivid life the exploits of abolitionist Thomas Smallwood in this exhilarating account. Born into slavery in Maryland in 1801, Smallwood eventually bought his own freedom, established a shoemaking business in Washington, D.C., and at the age of 40 decided "to wage his own personal war on slavery," orchestrating the escape of hundreds of enslaved African Americans to freedom in the North and Canada. He often personally led them, but also established, with the help of allies including white abolitionist Charles Torrey, the beginnings of the covert network known as the "underground railroad"—a phrase Smallwood himself coined. It originated as an imaginative joke—or "running gag," as Shane calls it—that recurred in Smallwood's many "laughingstock letters" to an abolitionist newspaper published in Albany, N.Y. For two years, from 1842 to 1843, the paper (where Torrey was editor) published these scathing and erudite dispatches from Washington, in which Smallwood (writing as "Samivel Weller, Jr.," a reference to The Pickwick Papers) boasted about the success of the rescue missions while taunting and shaming the "bereft" slaveholders, many of whom were members of the federal government. As the police closed in, suspecting Smallwood of being the mysterious Weller, he had to make his own intrepid escape to Canada. This astonishing and propulsive narrative rights a historical wrong by returning Smallwood to prominence. It's an absolute must-read.
