Gateway to Freedom, Eric Foner
Gateway to Freedom, Eric Foner
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Gateway to Freedom
The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad

Author: Eric Foner

Narrator: JD Jackson

Unabridged: 9 hr 3 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/19/2015


Synopsis

They are little known to history: Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist newspaper editor; Louis Napoleon, a furniture polisher; Charles B. Ray, a black minister. At great risk they operated the underground railroad in New York, a city whose businesses, banks, and politics were deeply enmeshed in the slave economy. In secret coordination with black dockworkers who alerted them to the arrival of fugitives and with counterparts in Norfolk, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Albany, and Syracuse, underground-railroad operatives in New York helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Their defiance of the notorious Fugitive Slave Law inflamed the South. White and black, educated and illiterate, they were heroic figures in the ongoing struggle between slavery and freedom.

Making brilliant use of fresh evidence—including the meticulous record of slave rescues secretly kept by Gay—Eric Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. 

About Eric Foner

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he earned his BA and PhD. He has written a number of books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America, including Forever Free and Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men. His Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 won the Bancroft, Parkman, and Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and remains the standard history of the period. In 2006, Eric received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching at Columbia University. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians.


Reviews

Great stories of heroic black Americans escaping slavery and the noble whites who helped them. Reading the book is heartening. It’s an astonishing tale meticulously pieced together from disparate sources. Author Foner came across the papers of Sidney Howard Gay, Corresponding Secretary at the Americ......more

Goodreads review by Mark

Interesting but not quite what I thought. I thought this would be about the composition of the Underground Railroad, how it was set up and then the use of the UGRR to free Blacks from the South. However the book spent a great amount of time on the laws which established the rights of Slave Holders t......more