Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland by Scott Shane (review)

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• Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland by Scott Shane
• Rita Reynolds

Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland. By Scott Shane. (New York: Celadon Books, 2023. Pp. [x], 340. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-250-84321-0.)

The history of the American abolitionist movement has primarily been understood through the eyes of fugitive slaves, who told their stories using oral or written accounts, and of white northerners, who were morally and religiously opposed to the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the American Antislavery Society are central historical figures on the subject. Within Garrison’s circle, moral suasion and pacifism [End Page 612] were the fundamental tools used in the struggle to rid the United States of the peculiar institution.

However, recent scholarship, such as Manisha Sinha’s A Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, 2016), reconstructs the considerable role that free Black people and fugitive slaves played in the antislavery movement. In a similar vein, Scott Shane’s book Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland tells the largely overlooked story of Thomas Smallwood, a former slave, shoemaker, and radical abolitionist who lived in Washington, D.C. Smallwood, despite the personal danger associated with assisting fugitives, helped hundreds of enslaved African Americans escape from the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland to the northern states and Canada in the 1840s.

Smallwood’s fascinating story is a unique one. With the help of white abolitionist Charles Turner Torrey, Smallwood personally assisted groups of African Americans to safely navigate the arduous journey out of the slave South. In one typical instance, he guided five fugitives to freedom in 1842. According to Shane, conducting routes of the Underground Railroad—a term Smallwood coined in print—was just one of Smallwood’s roles as an antislavery activist. Smallwood and Torrey believed that depriving masters of their slave property was not enough. The two men used the abolitionist press to taunt and admonish the owners of the slaves they had helped obtain their liberty. Writing under the pen name Samivel Weller Jr., Smallwood chided and embarrassed individual slave masters for their inhumanity, brutality, and greed. He also used the column to comment on the discrimination that free and enslaved African Americans faced in antebellum America. With help from Torrey, who was the editor of an Albany, New York, abolitionist newspaper, Tocsin of Liberty (later called the Albany Weekly Patriot), Smallwood took the unusual step of having his column mailed to the masters of slaves he had helped escape. Shane rightly argues that “in his blunt, shrewd, often sardonic analysis of American racism as the enduring plague that underlay slavery, he [Smallwood] was far ahead of his time” (p. 5). Based on surviving evidence, Shane supports Thomas Smallwood and Charles Torrey’s estimation that they guided about four hundred slaves to the North and Canada in the 1840s.

Shane’s fascinating and well-written biography reconstructs Smallwood’s story from an unpublished autobiography and the 1842–1843 published columns printed in the abolitionist press. Fleeing North is a worthwhile and entertaining read for anyone interested in the history of radical abolition and the Underground Railroad.

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