Summary of Flee North by Scott Shane: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland

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Summary of Flee North by Scott Shane: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland

 

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Flee North is a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of Thomas Smallwood, an American abolitionist, liberator, and writer who led hundreds out of slavery and named the underground railroad. Born into slavery, Smallwood was free and self-educated by the 1840s. He and Charles Torrey organized mass escapes from Washington, Baltimore, and surrounding counties to freedom in the north. Smallwood documented the escapes in satirical newspaper columns, mocking slaveholders, traders, and police. The book offers a powerful narrative set in cities still plagued by racial inequity today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookRix
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9783755454717

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Summary of

Flee North

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Summary of Scott Shane’s Book

A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland

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Summary of Flee North by Scott Shane: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland

By GP SUMMARY© 2023, GP SUMMARY.

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This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Scott Shane’s Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland designed to enrich your reading experience.

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Prologue

Thomas Smallwood, a Black shoemaker, organized a mass escape from slavery in Washington, D.C. in 1842. He and his white partner, Charles Torrey, took 15 enslaved people from their slaveholders' houses on a sweltering August night, taking French leave. One of the fleeing families had to overcome a poignant obstacle: a daughter who had been assigned to stay up all night in her enslavers' bedroom beside the baby's cradle. The cradle rocker's enslaved mother managed to spirit her daughter from the bedroom without waking the baby or its parents.

The fugitives managed to gather as planned that night but their liberators had run into trouble procuring the getaway wagon and horses to pull it. They had to hide for an extra day with Smallwood's help, scattered around the city in the homes or sheds of trusted friends, keeping an eye out for their angry enslavers and the bounty-hunting police who prowled for runaways.

As the suddenly bereft slaveholders realized what had happened, there was pandemonium. The wagonload of enslaved people had a value on the auction block of some $200,000 in today's dollars. They vanished simultaneously from households all over Washington—a heist on the scale of a major bank robbery. The slaveholders organized a pursuit, assuming the fugitives had departed the first night, but were puzzled to find no trace of them on the roads and rough trails north of Baltimore.

Smallwood celebrated the runaways and mocked their oppressors in a column he wrote for an abolitionist newspaper in Albany. He addressed the enslavers who had just suffered such a painful loss and those who had fled to freedom in the north, most of them to Canada.

Thomas Smallwood and Harriet Tubman were two prominent abolitionists who aimed to help people escape slavery and start a new life in the north. They forged an escape network that became a model for radical action up to the Civil War, operating a decade before Harriet Tubman. Smallwood was a daring activist and writer, self-taught and selflessly motivated. He forged an enterprise that was breathtakingly audacious, working courageously together to liberate people in Washington, Baltimore, and beyond, helping them flee north.

However, their efforts were met with dire consequences. Smallwood and Torrey knew they were engaged in a deadly serious enterprise, making dangerous enemies. Their adversaries included not only the slaveholders Smallwood portrayed as hapless and degraded, but also the slave traders who operated from Washington's mall and Baltimore's harbor. These human traffickers were directly competing with them for Black bodies, and every person who successfully fled north was one more who could not be sold south.

Hope H. Slatter, the region's leading slave trader, had agents combing the towns and countryside, buying and carting away in shackles those the slaveholders deemed excess labor or a source of easy cash. On October 21, 1842, Slatter signed the paperwork for his latest shipment south, enslaved men, women, and children, ages one to forty, to be sold to the highest bidder and dispatched to the cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South.

The stories of Smallwood and Torrey and Slatter capture the contrasting possible fates that awaited the men, women, and children held as property in slavery's mid-Atlantic borderland. They could try to flee north, with great difficulty and at huge risk to their lives and safety, or stay put, enduring physical or sexual abuse their enslaver might perpetrate. However, the irony was that if the enslaved were caught trying to escape to avoid the hazard of being sold south, their punishment would often be exactly that. This intertwining of the domestic slave trade and the underground railroad continued to the Civil War.

The Most Inhuman System That Ever Blackened the Pages of History

Thomas Smallwood, born into slavery in 1801 in Prince George's County, Maryland, was a Black man who excelled in literacy and political consciousness. His childhood memory of learning the Alphabet and spelling baker and cider surprised his white and Black neighbors, setting him apart from other enslaved children. Smallwood's memoir, written in 1885, focuses on his luck in the owners he got through a will and a wedding.

Smallwood's parents were separated permanently from him in early childhood, either due to estate settlement dictates or being sold to a slave trader. His sister, Catharine, was inherited by Sarah Ferguson, who married John Bell Ferguson, a Methodist minister who frowned upon slavery. Ferguson chose not to grant Thomas his freedom but instead told him to work and gradually pay off the $500 debt.

In 1815, Ferguson filed a document pledging to free him when he turned thirty, which Smallwood found fair. He later spoke fondly of Ferguson and insisted on carrying out his end of the bargain to the letter. Smallwood's gratitude to Ferguson was due in part to John and Sarah's decision to teach him the English alphabet and spell in two syllables.

Smallwood's memoir highlights the abyss of intellectual darkness that the African race in America