Slaves drove wagons of cotton to market in Brownsville, Texas, and then slipped across the muddy river to Matamoros, Mexico. That is far fewer than the estimated 30,000 to 100,000 enslaved people who crossed the Mason-Dixon line to reach free northern states and Canada.īut from the vantage of an East Texas plantation, liberty was a lot closer in Mexico.Įnslaved sailors and stowaways from New Orleans and Galveston, Texas, jumped ship in Mexican ports. "This history is to me most surprising because it shows us the side of Mexico as a place that actually was contributing to global debates about slavery and freedom," Baumgartner says.įrom the 1830s up to emancipation, she estimates 3,000 to 5,000 enslaved people fled south and crossed over to free Mexican soil. She says Mexico in the 19th century is often regarded as "a place defined by poverty and political instability and violence" - and is rarely given credit for its role in providing a safe haven for runaway slaves. Treasury ponders putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill to commemorate her role in the northbound underground railroad, new attention is being paid to this southbound route.Īlice Baumgartner, a historian at the University of Southern California, is the author of a groundbreaking new book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War.īaumgartner's groundbreaking new book, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, was published late last year. The flight of runaway slaves to Mexico is a chapter of history that is often overlooked or ignored.
"I'm very proud to be a Webber," she says.
It amazes me to learn the underground deal - I had no idea at all," says Webber-Vasques, 70, who recently learned the story of her forebear John Ferdinand Webber from her daughter-in-law who has researched family history. "I don't know why there wasn't anything that we would've known as we were growing up. Thousands of enslaved people fled plantations to make their way to the Rio Grande, which became a river of deliverance.
Turns out her great-great-grandparents, who are buried there, were agents in the little-known underground railroad that led through South Texas to Mexico during the 1800s. In a forgotten cemetery on the edge of Texas in the Rio Grande delta, Olga Webber-Vasques says she's proud of her family's legacy - even if she only just learned the full story. Roseann Bacha-Garza (left), a borderlands historian, stands with Olga Webber-Vasques at the grave of the latter's great-great-grandfather, the abolitionist John Ferdinand Webber, in the family cemetery.
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