I love it when a book opens the door on a subject to which I haven’t previously been exposed. This wonderful book by Professor Alice Baumgartner is such a book. Not only does it shed light on the movement of enslaved people taking their freedom by going south to Mexico, but it also gives us a short history of slavery and antislavery in Mexico itself. While the so-called “Fugitive Slave Law” in the United States was a legal guarantee that any enslaved people who escaped to the free states of the United States would be returned to their enslavers, “Mexico’s laws offered no such guarantees. Not only had Mexico abolished slavery, but its laws freed the slaves of ‘other countries’ from the moment they set foot on its soil.” [p. 1] In the United States there was a network of antislavery activists helping escaped enslaved people known as the Underground Railroad. “There was no official Underground Railroad to Mexico, only the occasional ally; no network, only a set of discrete, unconnected nodes. Some fugitive slaves received help while making their escape–from free blacks, ship captains, Mexicans, Germans, gamblers, preachers, mail riders, and other ‘lurking scoundrels.’ Most, though, escaped from the United States by their own ingenuity. They forged slave passes to give the impression that they were traveling with the permission of their enslavers. They disguised themselves as white men, fashioning wigs from horsehair and pitch. They stole horses, firearms, skiffs, dirk knives, fur hats, and, in one instance, twelve gold watches and a diamond breast pin. And then, while either gathering oysters or collecting firewood or walking to a camp meeting, they disappeared.” [p. 2]
Once they reached Mexico, their struggle wasn’t over. They then had to make a living there. “Two options awaited most runaways in Mexico. The first was to join the military colonies, a series of outposts that the Mexican government established to defend its northeastern frontier against foreign invaders and ‘barbarous’ Indians. The second was to fill Mexico’s labor shortage by seeking employment as servants and day laborers. Both alternatives came at a cost. The demands of military service along the northeastern frontier constrained the autonomy of former slaves. Runaways who worked a servants endured other forms of coercion. In parts of southern Mexico, such as Yucatán and Chiapas, indentured servitude sometimes amounted to slavery in all but name. Even in regions where the labor system differed from human bondage, coercion continued in other forms. In northern Mexico, hacienda owners enjoyed the right to physically punish their employees. Farther to the south, in San Luis Potosí, Querétaro, and Zacatecas, indentured servants often had no choice but to work on haciendas because their alternatives were far worse. These labor systems were coercive, even though the mechanism of coercion was economic necessity rather than physical violence.” [p. 3]
After Professor Baumgartner gives some similarities between the Underground Railroad and the escapes to Mexico, she tells us, “For all of their similarities, the northern and southern routes differed in one important respect: numbers. Determining how many enslaved people actually reached Mexico is difficult. My estimate, based on scattered and incomplete Mexican sources, puts the number somewhere between three and five thousand people–considerably fewer than the thirty thousand to one hundred thousand runaways who crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. The number of slaves who reached Mexico was undeniably small. Still, each escape was important in its own right. And their collective story had strategic and political significance out of all proportion to the numbers involved. Their experiences reorient our understanding of the Civil War, showing that one of the most distinctively ‘American’ events in US history was in part ignited by the enslaved people who escaped to the south and the laws by which they claimed their freedom in Mexico.” [p. 4]
Mexico had its own period of legalized slavery. “Black slavery took root in the viceroyalty of New Spain (as Mexico was then known) at the end of the sixteenth century, when a series of epidemics decimated the indigenous population that had provided the bulk of the viceroyalty’s labor force. Between 1580 and 1640, New Spain imported more slaves than any other European colony in the Western Hemisphere except Brazil. But after 1640, a decline in sugar prices and an increase in the indigenous population slowly shifted New Spain’s labor system away from black slavery. As former slaves became free laborers, they formed black militias; they joined lay religious organizations known as cofradías; they worked as butchers and barbers, domestic servants and ranch hands; and they married people of European and indigenous descent. By the time Mexico took up arms against Spain in 1810, Mexico’s population of eight m illion included only around nine to ten thousand black slaves. Though the enslaved population was comparatively small, Mexican leaders could not abolish slavery outright.” [pp. 4-5]
And why was that so? “Like the United States, Mexico was founded on two competing principles: liberty and property. In both countries, enslavers insisted that enslaved people be counted as chattel–that is, movable property. Slaveholders in the United States capitalized on this logic to argue that any interference with slavery amounted to a violation of ‘property’ rights. In 1787, when the Continental Congress prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River, disgruntled slaveholders convinced the territorial governor that the measure did not apply to enslaved people already in the region. Eleven years later, the US Congress rejected a bill to abolish slavery in the Mississippi Territory, after slaveholders around Natchez made clear that they would sooner revolt than submit to such a measure. In 1804, Congress succeeded i prohibiting the importation of slaves to the Louisiana Territory, but reversed course the following year in the face of resistance from slaveholders. Pressured not to interfere with the ‘peculiar institution,’ Congress hesitated to abolish slavery or even to enact gradual emancipation policies.” [p. 5]
She then looks at the Mexican situation. “In Mexico, slaveholders also opposed any interference with their ‘property,’ but local and national authorities did not comply with these demands as often as politicians in the United States. The threat of a revolt convinced Mexico’s leaders that the only way to ensure political stability was to bring slavery to a gradual end. Between 1824 and 1827, more than half of Mexico’s states promised that the children born to enslaved people would be free–a free womb law that would end slavery within a generation. Meanwhile, Mexico’s Congress prohibited the introduction of enslaved people to the republic, promising freedom to illegally imported slaves from the moment they set foot on the national territory. In 1829, Mexico’s president tried to end slavery by executive decree, but Mexico’s Congress overturned the decree less than two years later, in the face of resistance from cotton growers, mine operators, hacienda owners, and sugar refiners.” [pp. 5-6]
There was a fly that got into the ointment, however. “As Mexican politicians tried to enforce their gradual emancipation policies, Anglo-American slaveholders who had moved to the province of Téjas in the 1820s and 1830s realized that the future of slavery was not as assured in their adopted country as it was in the United States. In the fall of 1835, the Anglo colonists revolted, and a year later, declared their independence. The Texas Revolution confirmed the danger that slaveholders posed to Mexico. In 1837, Mexico’s Congress prohibited slavery across the nation. This abolition policy boosted morale among Mexicans, galvanized international support for Mexico, and encouraged slaves in Texas to revolt or escape. But Mexico’s attempts to undermine slavery in Texas gave credence to rumors that another foreign power–Great Britain–was scheming to promote abolition in Texas, in violation of the Monroe Doctrine. To prevent such interference, the US Congress voted in favor of annexing Texas in 1845. Within a year, war broke out between Mexico and the United States.” [p. 6] That war led to new territory added to the United States and new controversies over slavery in the United States, taking us further along the road toward the Civil War.
Professor Baumgartner tells us, “This book makes the case that enslaved people who escaped to Mexico and the antislavery laws that entitled them to freedom contributed to the outbreak of a major sectional controversy over the future of human bondage in the United States. To make this argument, this book weaves together three narrative threads. The first examines why the United States permitted human bondage to expand without check across the Southern territories. The second explores why Mexican leaders restricted and eventually abolished slavery, and the profound consequences that these policies had for the United States. The third takes up the lives of some of the thousands of slaves who escaped to Mexico in defiance of their enslavers, bringing forceful but forgotten figures into the light.” [p. 7]
She does a wonderful job in giving us the historical context of Mexico’s abolition and the flight of escaped enslaved people into Mexico. The book follows the history of slavery and its abolition in Mexico chronologically, including the Texas Revolution and its later annexation into the United States. She takes us through the Mexican War and the acquisition of territory from Mexico along with the resulting arguments and compromises over extending slavery into that territory. The book goes through the Civil War and into the Mexican Claims Commission after the war, and includes the French occupation of Mexico and Napoleon III’s installation of Maximilian as emperor, followed by his deposition by Benito Juarez and his followers.
This book is outstanding. It gives us a perspective and historical events most US citizens never learn in schools. If you are a serious student of history, I highly recommend this book for you. It’s deeply researched and solidly grounded in primary sources.
Student of the American Civil War 