Alain Guillot

Life, Leadership, and Money Matters

328 Alice Baumgartner: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

About Alice Baumgartner

Alice Baumgartner received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2018. Her book project, South to Freedom, uses the story of American slaves who escaped to Mexico during the nineteenth century as a lens for understanding Mexico’s rise as an antislavery republic and its overlooked significance to the United States.

Baumgartner received a B.A. in History from Yale University and an M.Phil in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Her March 2015 article in the Journal of American History, “‘The Line of Positive Safety’: Borders and Boundaries in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1848-1880,” won the Louis Pelzer Award from the Organization of American Historians and the Bolton-Cutter Prize from the Western History Association.

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South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

A brilliant and surprising account of the coming of the American Civil War, showing the crucial role of slaves who escaped to Mexico.

South to Freedom by Alice Baumgartner

The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American slaves before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped slavery not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where slavery was abolished in 1837.

In South to Freedom, historian Alice Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished slavery and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States. Southerners hoped that annexing Texas and invading Mexico in the 1840s would stop runaways and secure slavery’s future. Instead, the seizure of Alta California and Nuevo México upset the delicate political balance between free and slave states. This is a revelatory and essential new perspective on antebellum America and the causes of the Civil War.

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