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The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery. By R. J. M. Blackett. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 511. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $32.99.)
Richard J. M. Blackett, an eminent historian of black abolition and the Civil War, attempts to provide a comprehensive history of the fugitive slave controversy in this book. Based primarily on research in local newspapers from the period, a method pioneered by Stanley Harrold in his award-winning Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (2010), this book takes a deep dive into the numerous instances of enslaved people voting with their feet against slavery in the decade before the war. Combining that research with a reading of most (though not all) of the historiography on the subject, Blackett, like several historians in the recent past, seeks to understand the history of the Underground Railroad, long dismissed by academic historians as the stuff of self-serving myth and memory. It is only after the publication of Fergus Bordewich's landmark Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (2005) and countless local histories by independent scholars and historians that the history of the Underground Railroad has come into its own. Today, some of the best historians of this period-both young and established-are writing new and exciting histories of fugitive slaves and their allies.
Blackett begins his book with the passage of the Fugitive...