Author: Alice L. Baumgartner
The Underground Railroad to the North promised salvation to many American enslaved before the Civil War. But thousands of people in the south-central United States escaped enslavement not by heading north but by crossing the southern border into Mexico, where the institution of enslavement was abolished in 1837. In South to Freedom, historian Alice L. Baumgartner tells the story of why Mexico abolished the institution of enslavement and how its increasingly radical antislavery policies fueled the sectional crisis in the United States.