Bound For Canaan: The Underground Railroad And The War For The Soul Of A merica by Fergus M Bordewich

Bound For Canaan: The Underground Railroad And The War For The Soul Of A merica by Fergus M Bordewich

An important book of epic scope on America's first racially integrated, religiously-inspired political movement for change--The Underground Railroad, a movement peopled by daring heroes and heroines, and everyday folk

For most, the mention of the Underground Railroad evokes images of hidden tunnels, midnight rides, and hairsbreadth escapes. Yet the Underground Railroad's epic story is much more morally complex and politically divisive than even the myths suggest. Against a backdrop of the country's 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 country's 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 country's first racially-integrated, religiously-inspired movement for social change.

FERGUS M.BORDEWICH is the author of seven prior nonfiction works, including The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Created the Government; America's Grand Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government; and The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government. Douglas and the Union-Saving Compromise; Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the Battle for America's Soul; and Washington: The Creation of the American Capital. He and his wife, Jean Parvin Bordewich, who works in philanthropy and writes plays, live in San Francisco.