Let My People Go by Henrietta Buckmaster. This seems to have been Buckmaster’s first book. It came out in 1941, and recounts the highly dramatic and complex story of slavery in America, of the forces that sought to hold onto it and the forces that wanted to abolish it. Here is history where congressional acts, culminating in the Fugitive Slave Act, could lead to death or bondage, even for people who should by any measure be considered free. If we think our country is polarized now, this book will wake us up to just how bad polarization can become. Long before the Civil War, people of both races faced life and death decisions in seeking their own freedom or in following their consciences.
This work also disabuses anyone of the notion that the slaves were docile and submissive; rather, they were ingenious in using their limited agency to fight the slavocracy. Their two main tools were insurrection and the Underground Railroad, which operated from 1804 up to the War, both terrifyingly dangerous. Revolts were crushed, but they continued nonetheless. A Virginia slave named Gabriel, perhaps influenced by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, almost succeeded in 1800. His effort led to 36 hangings. Here is part of Buckmaster’s description of the revolt led by Nat Turner in 1831.
“The next twenty four hours were a comprehensive answer to slavery. Murder, murder, murder. No outrages, no rapes, no mutilations –just a blow on the head of men, women, and children who bore a white skin; all, that is, but a nonslaveholding white family whom Turner pointedly spared.”
Even when the tide turned, Turner remained at large, hiding for months in the woods until he was apprehended and executed. “He never lost his sense of destiny. His body was given over to the surgeons for dissection. His skin was boiled down for grease.”
As to the Underground Railroad, the stories recounted here are more harrowing than the ones told with magical realism on the TV series on the Underground Railroad. The true story on which Harriet Beecher Stowe based the escape of Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin depicts a young woman who really did cross the river jumping from one block of ice to another, carrying her infant, to flee her pursuers.
Among the white abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison emerges as particularly heroic. As a young man, after being jailed for his views , he went to Boston and founded the newspaper The Liberator, which stirred the consciences of the north in tandem with Mrs. Stowe. Of course the most fiery is John Brown.
Buckmaster writes with passion and authority. She does not spare the details of the political struggles in Congress. This book is exhaustive, exhausting , and heartbreaking. I wish it could be made into a TV series. This story is with us today and we cannot escape being part of it.