Book Review

Canada and the United States

Historians' sensitivity to class, gender, race, and culture has over the past generation produced increasingly sophisticated portraits of the past. This is the case in regard to evaluations of the struggle over slavery that preceded the American Civil War. When Dwight L. Dumond published a history of the antislavery movement in 1961, he included a chapter on southern "migrants to the free states." In that chapter he focused on "cultivated men and women," all of whom were white and only a couple of whom were women. Now, in a book whose title is superficially similar to that of Dumond's chapter, Philip J. Schwarz focuses on ordinary men and women, black, white, and of mixed race, who left antebellum Virginia for the free states.

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Schwarz has previously written on legal aspects of slavery in Virginia. Here he draws on an array of court records, government documents, census returns, genealogical materials, and secondary sources to seek meaning in the experiences of those "who consciously migrated against slavery" (p. 3). By leaving Virginia for the North, he asserts, these migrants "helped shape American character" (p. 4), weakened slavery in Virginia, strengthened antislavery forces, and found varying degrees of freedom for themselves. Throughout the book, Schwarz emphasizes interracial contacts among slaves and masters, among slavery's opponents, and particularly among family members. Other historians, such as Victoria E. Bynam, have used accounts of biracial families to explore social constructions of race. Schwarz is more concerned with the families' relationships to place and their genealogy.

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