Holden, Vanessa

English

University of Kentucky

University of Kentucky UKnowledge History Faculty Publications History Summer 2018 [Review of] Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker, eds., A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016. Pp. 286. $34.99 (paper). Vanessa Holden University of Kentucky, vanessaholden@uky.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/history_facpub  Part of the African American Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. Repository Citation Holden, Vanessa, "[Review of] Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker, eds., A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016. Pp. 286. $34.99 (paper)." (2018). History Faculty Publications. 12. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/history_facpub/12 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the History at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact UKnowledge@lsv.uky.edu. [Review of] Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker, eds., A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016. Pp. 286. $34.99 (paper). Digital Object Identifier (DOI) https://doi.org/10.1086/698555 Notes/Citation Information Published in The Journal of African American History, v. 103, no. 3. © 2018 Association for the Study of African American Life and History The copyright holder has granted the permission for posting the article here. This book review is available at UKnowledge: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/history_facpub/12 k a ro l yn sma rd z f ro s t and v e t a sm i th t u ck e r , eds. A FluidFrontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the DetroitRiver BorderlandDetroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016. Pp. 286. $34.99 (paper)The Underground Railroad lives in the American popular imagination throughtales of courage, narrow escapes, and bravery on the part of ordinary citizens.Hidden passageways on remote farms, clever hiding spots disguised as every-day objects, coded language in quilts, and the nineteenth century’s technolog-ical marvel, the railroad, all meet, creating a lush mental landscape for manyAmericans. Recently, runaways and the network of African Americans, alongwith their white allies, who helped fugitives on their journey to freedom havebeen the subject of a hit television program onWGNChicago titled Underground.With it, public interest in the topic of US slavery, antebellum antislavery activ-ism, and the history of the Underground Railroad has peaked. In the spring of2017 a new national park, the Harriet TubmanUnderground Railroad NationalHistoric Park, opened on Maryland’s eastern shore. Tubman was also recentlyannounced as the new face of twenty-dollar bank notes in the United States,again contributing to the popular attention paid to the importance of the fugi-tives and the communities that helped them to escape enslavement. But even asthis history is being dramatized and institutionalized, historians have so muchmore to uncover about the Underground Railroad.In recent years, works such as Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom: The HiddenHistory of the Underground Railroad (2016) and Cheryl Janifer LaRoche’s TheGeography of Resistance: Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad(2014) have persisted in separating truth from myth by highlighting the com-munities and individuals who aided fugitives as they traversed hostile environ-ments on their way to freedom in the free states and Canada before 1865. Thework of countless local historians at sites across both the United States and Can-Book Reviews 473ada has also been invaluable in preserving the memory of ordinary individ-uals who took extraordinary risks to seek freedom, help others along the way,and sustain communities despite the constant threat of violence, displacement,and kidnapping and sale to the South. Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta SmithTucker, editors of A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Rail-road in the Detroit River Borderland, have compiled a collection of essays thatdemonstrate the significance of the Detroit River region in the history of theUnderground Railroad, black transnational activism, and borderlands histo-ries that are exciting, useful, and generative.As the editors make clear in their introduction, the volume engages the his-tory of the Underground Railroad broadly by acknowledging extensive “outmigration of African Americans in search of freedom from slavery and racialoppression, whether they were assisted or not” (5–6). They focus on the experi-ences, histories, and lives of African Americans and Afro-Canadians both in theDetroit River region and around Lake Erie. While they initially entered into theproject as one way to demonstrate the region’s worthiness of UNESCO recog-nition, the volume moves beyond making a clear case for the importance of theDetroit River region to the history of the Underground Railroad. The editorsand their contributors propose a new way to think about the region by engag-ing other fields. The authors included in the volume employ the approaches ofborderlands scholars to explicate a new history of black transnationalism. Thetitle of the volume comes from the work of Afua Cooper, a contributor to thevolume, who uses the term “fluid frontier” to “denote the highly transnationalnature of black life along the Detroit River border” (6). Along with the vol-ume’s focus on African American life and history, it is this exploration of theback-and-forth between both banks of the Detroit River, the vibrant free blackcommunities on both sides, and the activism of former fugitives that makes foran exciting intervention in the field of Underground Railroad history.The editors divide the volume into five sections to highlight the work of con-tributors who take up related themes. They provide brief introductions at thestart of each that help guide the reader. Part I, “Crossing Boundaries,” includeschapters by both editors that take readers from the early colonial period throughthe 1833 Blackburn Riots in Detroit sparked by attempts to return fugitives toslavery and reshaping the legal and social history of the region in the 1830s.Veta Smith Tucker’s “Uncertain Freedom in Frontier Detroit” recounts the storyof the Denison family as they sought to legally establish their freedom in De-troit and Upper Canada at the turn of the nineteenth century. Their story spansnational borders and territorial governments, making the case that much ear-lier studies of fugitives and the Underground Railroad are both possible andnecessary.The Journal of African American History474Karolyn Smardz Frost takes up this transnational history at the start of theWar of 1812 that saw both the US Northwest Territory and Upper Canada playimportant roles in the global imperial conflict involving their parent empires.Amidst war and a redefinition of legal structures and borders, African-descendedpeople made bids for freedom all over the Detroit River region. The dramaticstory of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn’s truly transnational fight to remainfree after their escape from slavery in Louisville, Kentucky, illustrates the com-plex interplay between two jurisdictions and the important role of AfricanAmericans in defining it. The section concludes with Bryan Prince’s legaland diplomatic history of extradition from Upper Canada to the United Statestitled “The Illusion of Safety: Attempts to Extradite Fugitive Slaves from Can-ada.” Instead of out-migration, the chapter focuses on legal and diplomatic at-tempts to pull African Americans back across the border between the UnitedStates and Canada. Along with the stories of individuals, the legal history ofthe region makes a nice bookend to the section and reinforces the argumentsof Tucker and Frost.Part II, “Communal Voices,” has chapters that highlight the vibrant com-munity life of African Americans and African Canadians in the region. IreneMoore Davis chronicles significant African Canadian settlements, their institu-tions, and communities in her essay “Canadian Black Settlement in the DetroitRiver Region.” The section also includes two perspectives on African Ameri-can religious life in the area. Barbara Hughes Smith details the significant rolethat African American churches played in Detroit’s resistance campaigns in“Worship Way Stations in Detroit.” Adrienne Shadd focuses on the transnationalcharacter of black Baptist congregations and their international efforts for “BlackFreedom” in “Extending the Right Hand of Fellowship: Sandwich Baptist Church,Amherstburg First Baptist, and the Amherstburg Baptist Association.” Both stud-ies take into account the significant role of faith communities in the history ofresistance in the region. Savvy community leaders intentionally built transna-tional strategies with their respective communities to battle racist discrimina-tion on both sides of the Detroit River while working toward “black liberation”in the form of equal rights. Moving beyond being houses of worship and meet-ing places for community events, churches in the region were politically active.“Inspired Transnationalists,” Part III, includes Afua Cooper’s “The Voiceof the Fugitive: A Transnational Absolutist Organ,” Roy Finkenbine’s “A Com-munity Militant and Organized: The Colored Vigilant Committee of Detroit,”and Margaret Washington’s “‘I Am Going Straight to Canada’: Women Under-ground Railroad Activists in the Detroit River Border Zone.” Afua Cooper’soffering chronicles the careers of Henry and Mary Bibb, with a particular fo-cus on Mrs. Bibb’s editorial prowess, as they established the Voice of the FugitiveBook Reviews 475and sought to foster community development in Canada. While Henry Bibb isthe more famous of the two, Mary Bibb, née Miles, contributed to the vibrantand important abolitionist paper Voice of the Fugitive in many significant ways.Finkenbine and Washington’s contributions focus on important actors acrossthe Detroit River in Michigan, from the Colored Vigilant Committee’s effortsto protect African American life in Detroit to figures familiar to Americanists—Sojourner Truth and Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Both essays focus on the contri-butions of African American abolitionists to community building within a trans-national context. As with the other sections, the lives and work of AfricanAmericans and African Canadians, and not the stories of benevolent whites,are at the center of Michigan and Canada’s Underground Railroad history. Thissection also presents juxtaposed gender histories of abolition, with Cooper andWashington highlighting the work of female abolitionists and Finkenbine’s his-tory of the Colored Vigilant Committee as a study of black men’s organizations,especially given the group’s ties to black Freemasonry.“Resilient Families” are examined in Part IV, where the focus shifts from in-stitution and movement building to the personal stories of families of fugitivesand individual freedom seekers. Kimberly Simmons and LarryMcClellan’s “Bridg-ing Rivers: Caroline Quarlls’s Remarkable Journey” and Debian Marty’s “OneMore River to Cross: The Crosswhites’ Escapes from Slavery” each trace thejourney of fugitives from the US South through the networks and communitiesfirst introduced in Parts I and II. In both studies the reader encounters churches,individuals, and institutions that other contributors to the volume placed in his-torical context. Carol E. Mull’s “The McCoys: Charting Freedom from Both Sidesof the River” tells the story of a family that moved from Western Canada toYpsilanti, Michigan, in the opposite direction of most fugitives and migrants inthe region. The McCoys’ story includes fugitivism, freedom in Canada, and amove west to the United States in hopes of finding economic opportunity ineastern Michigan. Along with contradicting the tale of migration and fugitivismwith which most readers are familiar, the story of the McCoy family includestheir negotiations for freedom in Canada, despite its hostile racial climate. Through-out the volume, African Canadian history remains important, andMull’s accountof the McCoys contributes much needed insight into the life of fugitives afterachieving freedom on the other side of the Detroit River.The final section, “The Trumpet Sounds,” has only one chapter, Louis A.Decardo Jr.’s “The Useful Frontier: John Brown’s Detroit River Preface to theHarper ’s Ferry Raid.” This is also the only contribution to center on the activ-ities of a white abolitionist. Decardo characterizes John Brown’s vision for free-dom and abolition as transnational by charting Brown’s efforts to drum up sup-port and recruits in the Detroit River region during a tour of Canada West. Asa bookend to the volume, the chapter demonstrates the place that the regionThe Journal of African American History476held in the minds of the broader abolitionist community and its significance toperhaps the nation’s most famous abolitionist of all. This account of Brown’stime in the region highlights a meeting between Brown and Frederick Doug-lass in Detroit in 1859, one much earlier than Douglass’s autobiography atteststo, during which Douglass learned of Brown’s plans for his Harper’s Ferry raid.Decardo’s account of this meeting brings together prominent Detroiters dis-cussed in earlier chapters, the nation’s most famous former fugitive, and themost recognizable abolitionist. Douglass and his Detroit colleagues declinedto join Brown then and there. Their independence, resolve, and savvy whendenying Brown support demonstrates the claims at the heart of the volume’sargument—African Americans and African Canadians built communities andinstitutions transnationally to sustain themselves with and without help fromwhites and their ideas of African American advancement.At the end of the collection, Frost and Tucker provide a thorough bibliograph-ical essay that includes extensive notes for both secondary scholarship in the fieldsin which the volume intervenes and primary source materials. This allows theeditors to expand the volume’s reach to the history of fugitivism, from the broaderGreat Lakes region down into the Ohio River Valley and throughout Canada.They cite Underground Railroad history on both sides of the border and chal-lenge scholars to consider the Detroit River region and the Niagara River region,another watery boundary, as a way of expanding the field. The collection shiftsthe regional focus from Ohio or New York to the Northwest Territory/Michiganand Upper Canada/Canada West, demonstrating that African American fugi-tives and their allies fostered the communities that supported runaways wellpast their initial arrival. The volume’s contributors document community con-nections, institutions, and kinship networks that reached back and forth acrossnational borders by design, revealing groups and institutions that played a signif-icant role in shaping the region’s political, legal, diplomatic, and social history.Employing the term “borderland” helps the editors and contributors to dis-cuss the Detroit River region as a permeable zone between two colonial territo-ries, and later established states and provinces, through which African Ameri-cans and African Canadians moved frequently along with their ideas, writing,and support for black freedom and advancement across generations. The fu-gitives’ journeys from the US South were not one-way ventures, but paths thattook whole lifetimes to traverse and negotiate, maintained by deep connec-tions across national boundaries, guided by a persistent resolve to realize theirfreedom.Vanessa Holden, University of KentuckyBook Reviews 477

[Review of] Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker, eds., \u3cem\u3eA Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland\u3c/em\u3e. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016. Pp. 286. $34.99 (paper).

https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&amp;context=history_facpub

[Review of] Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker, eds., \u3cem\u3eA Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland\u3c/em\u3e. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2016. Pp. 286. $34.99 (paper).

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