The Mexican–US War ends with the top half of Mexico – and its people – subsumed into the voracious US empire. A new musical genre – the Corrido – emerges from the new borderlands. The California Gold Rush produces a wealth of song from as far east as Scandinavia and as far west as China. US nativists sing against the arriving Germans and Irish Catholics, but they reserve their greatest musical venom for the Chinese in the form of the “John Chinaman” minstrel stereotype. Against such vicious representations, we have the Songs of Gold Mountain to reflect the true humanity of Chinese immigrants. In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, songs of women’s suffrage resound across the landscape, including those of Sojourner Truth. The Hutchinson Family Singers become the first US “supergroup” with their abolition songs, and Black challenges to the minstrelsy of E. P. Christy, Stephen Foster, and others continue, not only through the oratory of Frederick Douglass and songs of the Underground Railroad, but also through the operatic accomplishments of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.As the country careens toward the irrepressible schism of civil war, song becomes a highly supercharged, sectional arena.

The third chapter explores slave flight to spaces of semi-formal freedom in the antebellum North. It analyzes why freedom seekers sought to risk their lives to escape the South rather than flee to nearby spaces of informal freedom; how they did so; their settlement processes; and how they fared in the legal quagmire of rendition and reenslavement. It begins with an examination of enslaved people's perilous northbound journeys, emphasizing the particular reasons some freedom seekers sought free soil and some semblance of legal freedom from slavery. It then delves into refugees' experiences settling in and sustaining themselves in the northern states, with an emphasis on their integration into northern free black communities. The chapter concludes with an extensive discussion of the ambiguous legal status of fugitive slaves in the Northern United States and how conflicts over legal rights and the conditions for rendition developed over time, often stimulating mass civil disobedience to federal fugitive slave laws and de facto protection from reenslavement.

The fourth chapter examines slave flight to spaces of formal freedom in British Canada and Mexico from the 1830s through the 1850s. These two destinations for refugees from American slavery shared important similarities but also differed by degrees. The chapter explores why some enslaved people sought to flee the United States altogether; how they settled into new communities; and the risk of both extradition and illegal recapture by slave catchers and agents from the antebellum South. The chapter is structured thematically, beginning with a comparative examination of the journeys of freedom seekers to both international jurisdictions. The chapter then delves into the settlement experiences of refugees in Canada and Mexico, underscoring the stubborn prejudice with which especially refugees in Canada were confronted, as well as their economic opportunities. The chapter ends with an extensive discussion of the threat of extradition. Both countries refused to sign extradition treaties for fugitive slaves with the United States. In Mexico, however, the threat of reenslavement was higher due to illegal raids and incursions by southern slaveholders into Mexican territory.

From his early days in slavery until the outbreak of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass had been active in the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad was Douglass’s longest and most sustained form of activism, foundational to all other aspects of his abolitionist thought. Douglass’s encounter with the Underground Railroad began with his earliest experiences of slave resistance – of secret communication, mobility, and running away. It continued with his own attempts to run away to the North. As a northern abolitionist, Douglass became a leader in the Underground Railroad. He helped hundreds of runaways, unifying slaves’ secret, underground resistance with the public work of antislavery agitation. Underground work proved crucial to the formation of Douglass as a thinker. He learned to read and write underground. Moreover, he developed his literary style and political philosophy – his ideas about women’s rights, internationalism, and direct action – through praxis in the Underground Railroad.

Thousands of free and self-emancipated African Americans crossed the international border in Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) in the 1830s and 1840s. But did they actually experience the legal equality and freedom from oppression they hoped to find? This chapter explores the reflections of migrants and observers on what life was actually like for African American emigrants under the British flag. It shows that while racism and educational inequity were pervasive enough in Upper Canada to slow the rate of free African American emigration to the province, the government’s ongoing commitment to protecting self-emancipated individuals and to ensuring the legal equality of black subjects ensured that Upper Canada’s reputation as a beacon of liberty steadily increased in the years preceding the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

This chapter explores and explains the origins of the Underground Railroad to Canada. In 1830, Ohio’s legislature decided to implement the state’s longstanding but disused Black Laws, barring African Americans from many of the rights enjoyed by their white neighbors. Shortly thereafter, anti-black rioting in Cincinnati forced thousands of black residents to flee their homes. In response, many black Cincinnatians gathered together to explore where they might go to start their lives anew. The U.S. North? Mexico? Haiti? Liberia? Situating their decision-making process in a landscape of expanding free-soil options abroad, this chapter argues that their ultimate decision – Upper Canada – was not a foregone conclusion. By reaching out to the province’s Lieutenant Governor, they secured a promise of legal equality that not only made Canada their most enticing option, it paved the way for Canada to become the foremost international destination for fugitive slaves and free people alike.

This chapter explores highly publicized episodes of international free-soil border crossing by land and by sea in the 1830s and 1840s. It was during these decades that the so-called Underground Railroad to Canada became a recognizable feature of the American anti-slavery landscape. Anti-slavery advocates publicly and volubly celebrated each instance of former slaves escaping the reach of slave-holders, and the publicity generated by border-crossing slaves inspired abolitionists to see Canada as a beacon of black freedom. Cumulatively, the successful escape of fugitive slaves to Canada, Mexico, and the British West Indies also catalyzed international diplomatic crises that permanently altered the geopolitical map of slavery and freedom. While millions remained enslaved during the antebellum era, the efforts of fugitive slaves to claim their freedom transformed international free-soil havens into powerful symbols of freedom and escape.

Beacons of Liberty starts with Madison Washington, the enslaved man who led a famous shipboard slave rebellion in 1841, and Mary Ann Shadd, the first black woman newspaper editor in North America. Their stories introduce the importance of international free-soil havens to the U.S. anti-slavery movement. Free-soil havens abroad were places where slavery had either been curtailed or abolished by law or by local practice. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century they emerged in places like Haiti, West Africa, Upper Canada, Mexico, and various new republics throughout Central and South America. Over five decades characterized by changing social conditions and evolving geopolitical relationships within and beyond the United States, international free-soil havens were often defined in very different ways by different people. The Introduction to this book explores what international free soil came to represent for slaves, free black people, and white reformers with impressive ideological diversity regarding the question of black freedom.

Tensions over American slavery came to a head with the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. It drove many African Americans – free and fugitive alike – away from their homes in the North for fear that the law’s strict new policies on fugitive slave recovery would increase the likelihood of being captured or kidnapped into southern slavery. Using the wildly popular anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a guide, this chapter explores how the Fugitive Slave Act affected anti-slavery views regarding fugitive slaves, international free soil, and the Underground Railroad. It introduces readers to differing viewpoints and heated controversies surrounding the novel’s influence on the anti-slavery movement and it shows how the northward migration of tens of thousands of fugitive slaves contributed to a full-blown “Canada Culture” within the anti-slavery movement of the early 1850s.

While always hostile to white demands that they expatriate, free black northerners considered emigrating on their own terms, as an affirmation of their dual identity as black and American. Even as stalwart integrationists such as Frederick Douglass criticized his peers for betraying their enslaved kin, emigrationists such as Martin Delany, Mary Ann Shadd, and James Theodore Holly debated the true purpose of black exodus, as well as the most desirable destination, concurring only in their dislike for the ACS and Liberia. Where to go? Canada, for its proximity to the United States? The Niger Valley, for its connection to their African ancestry? Or Haiti, the one black-run state in the Western Hemisphere, and a bastion of black militancy? As emigrationists duly divided, exploring and settling distant lands, they were shocked to realize just how American, even “Anglo-Saxon” their assumptions really were – and how much they had to call on much-resented white assistance. And so, like white colonizationists, they entered the 1860s praying that some more powerful entity would assume the onerous task of fostering African American emigration.

This chapter considers what sort of duties are generated by the right of resistance and how they might attach to affluent persons. This chapter begins by distinguishing duties of resistance from more often discussed non-ideal duties of justice and assistance. There might be significant similarities between these various groups of duties, but distinguishing them puts the agency of resisting agents in the foreground.

It argues that there are three categories of negative duties: non-intervention, one ought not to directly interfere with resisting agents; non-collaboration, one ought not to assist institutions dedicated to crushing resistance; non-obstruction, one ought not to interfere with organisations assisting resistance. The duties are neither too excessive or too permissive.

There are also positive duties to support resistance. These duties appear to be rather demanding, as shown in the example of French citizens prosecuted for assisting illegal immigrants, but they might be acted on in various non-criminal ways, such as supporting ‘sanctuary city’ policies. These duties may require sacrifices, but the alternative is to allow people to live under much more onerous burdens.