Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland

By Scott Shane and Scott Shane

Book Overview

A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year

A riveting account of the extraordinary abolitionist, liberator, and writer Thomas Smallwood, who bought his own freedom, led hundreds out of slavery, and named the underground railroad, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist, Scott Shane. Flee North tells the story for the first time of an American hero all but lost to history.

Born into slavery, by the 1840s Thomas Smallwood was free, self-educated, and working as a shoemaker a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. He recruited a young white activist, Charles Torrey, and together they began to organize mass escapes from Washington, Baltimore, and surrounding counties to freedom in the north.

They were racing against an implacable enemy: men like Hope Slatter, the region's leading slave trader, part of a lucrative industry that would tear one million enslaved people from their families and sell them to the brutal cotton and sugar plantations of the deep south.

Men, women, and children in imminent danger of being sold south turned to Smallwood, who risked his own freedom to battle what he called "the most inhuman system that ever blackened the pages of history." And he documented the escapes in satirical newspaper columns, mocking the slaveholders, the slave traders and the police who worked for them.

At a time when Americans are rediscovering a tragic and cruel history and struggling anew with the legacy of white supremacy, Flee North -- the first to tell the extraordinary story of Smallwood -- offers complicated heroes, genuine villains, and a powerful narrative set in cities still plagued by shocking racial inequity today.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250843219
• ISBN13: 9781250843210
• Release Date: September 2023
• Publisher: Celadon Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A fascinating history of The Underground Railroad and the story of an extraordinary hero

Flee North chronicles the incredible life of Thomas Smallwood, a formerly enslaved man who helped hundreds of slaves escape to Canada at great risk to himself and his family. He coined the phrase "The Underground Railroad" and was one of its architects. Smallwood worked with a young white abolitionist, Charles Torrey, to organize mass escapes of enslaved people from Washington, Baltimore and surrounding areas, enabling them to flee north to safety. Although Torrey's efforts were recognized and commemorated, Smallwood was a forgotten hero until the author's meticulous research unearthed the details of his life and publications, many of which were found buried in a library warehouse. Not only did Smallwood free hundreds of enslaved people, but he also wrote, under a pseudonym, scathing, witty editorials for a northern newspaper which mocked local slave owners and traders and exposed their secrets. Flee North is fascinating because it tells us the story of this extraordinary, intelligent man, Thomas Smallwood, but it also discusses the horrors of slavery and the hypocrisy and moral failing of a nation which promoted the ideals of freedom while denying it to many of its citizens. The toxic white supremacy that promoted and allowed slavery, has also led to racial strife and injustice in the present-day United States.