By Constance Garcia-Barrio
Manuel Luis Del Fierro, living in his native Mexico, threatened to shoot two slaveholders who had crossed from the U.S. into his nation and entered his home. The kidnappers wanted to whisk away Mathilde Hennes, a Black woman who had fled from slavery, writes Alice L. Baumgartner in “South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.”
Del Fierro, the man of the house, shouldered his rifle and ordered them to release Hennes, who was screaming. One kidnapper fled, but the other one was arrested and thrown in jail.
In another incident, “…four town councilmen in Coahuila,” a state in northeast Mexico, shot a slaveholder attempting to take a Black fugitive back to the U.S. From the early 1800s through the end of the Civil War, Mexico’s rise as an anti-slavery republic unsettled slaveholders and made the country a haven for Black bondsmen fleeing from the U.S., especially those from the Deep South.
For Mexico, this stance meant an about-face from previous centuries. From the 1530s, New Spain’s territories depended on enslaved Black people to build roads, dig privies, raise crops, keep house, and more, Baumgartner points out. Historians estimate that just 4% to 6% of kidnapped Africans went to British North America, while the rest labored in the Caribbean, Brazil, and Spanish America.
A racial hierarchy developed where social status depended on one’s percentages of Black, Indigenous, and white blood. Certain professions were reserved for people of European ancestry, but in some cases, talented people of color could purchase a certificate of whiteness. Paintings from Spanish colonial times show the social strata.
When revolutions swept Spanish America in the early 1800s, Mexico began abolishing slavery. By the 1820s, as slave-state/free-state tensions roiled the U.S., Mexico was well on the way to abolition. Different factors could have played a part in that stance, Baumgartner notes:
The fear of enslavement was made real by news of Mexicans being kidnapped and sold into slavery in the United States… [In addition] ordinary Mexicans took up arms against kidnappers because fugitive slaves [from the U.S.] defended the frontier, added to the labor force, and formed part of the local community.
Black freedom seekers who reached Mexico worked hard, learned Spanish and sometimes changed their names to cover their tracks. For example, a fugitive named Dan began calling himself “Dionisio de Echevaria,” Baumgartner wrote.
Pressure from the southern U.S. to extend slave-holding land led to war between the U.S. and Mexico. In 1836, Tejas, today’s Texas, which belonged to Mexico but had American settlers, declared independence from Mexico, in large part because the Anglo settlers wanted to introduce slavery. Mexico opposed it. Anglo Texans rebelled. During the Texas Revolution from October 1835 to April 1836, North American settlers won independence from Mexico. In 1845, Texas was annexed by the U.S., and in 1846, it became a slave state. However, Mexico continued to claim Texas as part of its land, which led to the Mexican American War from 1846-1848. Mexico lost, and ceded Upper California and New Mexico to the U.S.
In 1853, U.S. President Franklin Pierce, eager to gain more land that permitted slavery, hatched a scheme to invade Cuba. The enslaved Black people had raised sugar and tobacco in this Spanish colony since the 1500s. Pierce backed down, faced with opposition in the U.S. and abroad.
While Black freedom seekers continued escaping to Mexico, clashes like Bleeding Kansas, guerrilla warfare between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces from 1855 to 1859, took place in the U.S.
Even after the Civil War ended, Colonel Joel Bryant, a bitter former Confederate officer determined to hold on to his Black laborers, made the mistake of taking them to Mexico, Baumgartner writes. Soon after Bryant’s arrival in Chihuahua, northwestern Mexico, the U.S. consul sent a Black servant to Bryant’s house to tell Bryant’s former bondsmen they were free.
In “South to Freedom,” Baumgartner writes in a lively, entertaining style, building vivid scenes:
“Martin was picking cotton on James Kirkham’s plantation in the summer of 1819 when he mentioned his plan of escaping to New Spain to another field hand… Another slave—a woman named Fivi—stopped her washing to listen. Richard Moran, an older man with a peg leg, agreed to accompany Martin.”
Baumgartner also provides copious notes and careful references to historic documents. She acknowledges her debt to historian Kenneth Wiggins Porter, author of “The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People, the Negro on the American Frontier” and other works. Baumgartner cites Porter’s work on Nacimiento de los Negros (Birth of the Blacks), a village about 115 miles from the Texas border inhabited by Mascogos, descendants of Black Seminoles who escaped from slavery in the United States.
One wishes that “South to Freedom” included more stories of freedom seekers and perhaps fewer political details, but one senses that Baumgartner made the most of what available documents offered.
In discussing the resistance of enslaved Black people in New Spain, Baumgartner might have mentioned San Lorenzo de los Negros, now called Yanga. This city in Veracruz, Mexico, is named for Gaspar Yanga (1545-1618), an African who governed a settlement of fugitives. Yanga and his men outmaneuvered Spanish colonial troops in a battle in 1609. The city still has a vibrant Afro-Mexican culture.
Most history of freedom seekers — like Philadelphian William Still’s “The Underground Railroad”— centers on those who escaped to Canada. “South to Freedom” fills a glaring gap with rigorous scholarship and compelling writing.
South to Freedom, Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, Basic Books, 2020.
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