Journal of Southern History

Robert H. Churchill’s The Underground Railroad and the Geography of Violence in Antebellum America analyzes the connection between the Underground Railroad and the violence that fugitives encountered in various regions of the North. “The story of fugitives from enslavement and of the assistance that they received from the antislavery activists who would come to style themselves the Underground Railroad,” Churchill asserts, “is a story of violence” (p. 3).

To understand the Underground Railroad, Churchill argues, one must understand the “culture of violence” that prevailed in four regions ranging from the border South to New England and much of the northern United States (p. 4). The cultural norms that sanctioned the use of violence in the border South were quite clear: whippings, beatings, and even harsher punishments were justified in the name of maintaining the slave system and white supremacy. The second region Churchill identifies is the tier of northern counties just above the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. These borderland communities seldom contested the operations of slave catchers and the violence that they employed to capture freedom seekers. The reception of slave catchers was distinctly different in the third region, what Churchill calls the “Contested Region”—the northern two-thirds of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (p. 7). Here, community sentiments [End Page 121] insisted that slave catchers follow legal procedures and avoid violent methods of capturing fugitives. Slave catchers who violated these norms encountered resistance from these communities that opposed the flagrant use of violence. Finally, the fourth region, which Churchill designates as the “Free Soil Region,” encompassing New England, much of New York, Michigan, the environs of Chicago, and Wisconsin, rejected the culture of southern violence and offered open assistance to freedom seekers (p. 10).

Churchill offers a sophisticated analysis of how these cultures of violence changed as the Underground Railroad evolved between the 1830s and 1860s, particularly in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The collision of regional cultures happened most dramatically in instances of fugitive renditions and rescues. Churchill has developed an extensive database that attempts to record every rendition and rescue during these decades. In this effort he has gone beyond the work of Stanley W. Campbell, whose book The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill, 1970) has been the standard work in the field for fifty years. Churchill argues convincingly that Campbell’s interpretation that the North was either supportive or indifferent to the Fugitive Slave Act is misleading. Churchill’s evidence shows that there was much more resistance to the act than Campbell found. Only in the border region of the free states do Campbell’s findings hold true. But elsewhere after 1850, northern communities increasingly rallied to the cause of the fugitive and violently opposed renditions.

Churchill contends that the Fugitive Slave Act was ultimately a failure in that it could not be enforced throughout much of the North (the number of rescues almost tripled after 1857). The reason for this failure was the change in attitudes in the Contested Region, which had once tolerated fugitive renditions as long as they were carried out according to legal procedures. By 1860, however, communities in this region had become alarmed by the proslavery violence that accompanied slave catchers. They had been exposed to “the brutality and arrogance of the violence of mastery” (p. 230). They came to change their cultural values to align with their Free Soil neighbors to the North in assisting freedom seekers and resisting slave catchers.

Churchill’s fine study will be of interest to students of the Underground Railroad and more generally of the sectional crisis. He offers a wealth of examples and case studies to buttress his analysis of changing cultural attitudes about violence...