Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement

ISBN: 0060524316

Author: Fergus M. Bordewich

Condition: New

An important book of epic scope on Americas first racially integrated, religiously-inspired political movement for change-The Underground Railroad, a movement peopled by daring heroes and heroines, and everyday folkFor most, the mention of the Underground Railroad evokes images of hidden tunnels, midnight rides, and hairsbreadth escapes. Yet the Underground Railroads epic story is much more morally complex and politically divisive than even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the countrys westward expansion,which brought together Easterners who had engaged in slavery primarily in the abstract alongside slaveholding Southerners and their slaves, arose a clash of values that evolved into a fierce fight for nothing less than the countrys soul. Beginning six decades before the Civil War, freedom-seeking blacks and pious whites worked together to save tens of thousands of lives, often at the risk of great physical danger to themselves. Not since the American Revolution had the country engaged in an act of such vast and profound civil disobedience that not only subverted federal law but also went against prevailing mores.Flawlessly researched and uncommonly engaging, Bound for Canaan, shows why it was the Underground Railroad and not the Civil Rights movement that gave birth to this countrys first racially-integrated, religiously-inspired movement for social change.

• Paperback with portraits of people portrayed in this book 540 pages