Riding south to freedom
While most slaves escaping the Southern states went north, said Richard Grant in Smithsonian Magazine, thousands traveled over the Rio Grande to seek refuge in Mexico.
BEFORE THE CIVIL War, numerous enslaved people made the treacherous journey to Mexico in a bold quest for freedom that historians are now unearthing. Until recently, the southbound Underground Railroad, as some scholars call it, has been largely overlooked, mainly because it left so few traces in surviving records.
No one who escaped slavery by going to Mexico wrote a firsthand account of the experience, as Frederick Douglass and others did about escaping north. And though the journeys of enslaved people to Mexico are of the utmost importance, the scale of the southern migration was more modest, numbering between 3,000 and 10,000 people, compared with an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 who fled north of the MasonDixon Line.
But scholars have begun to uncover a wealth of information about the southbound freedom seekers. Perhaps no one has done more to advance our understanding than a historian named Alice Baumgartner. In 2012, as a Rhodes scholar studying violence on the U.S.-Mexico border in the early and mid-19th century, she was hunting through state and municipal archives in northern Mexico. She found plenty of documents about cattle rustling and Lipan Apache raids, but she also came across records of a completely unexpected kind of violence—between American slave catchers crossing the Rio Grande and Mexicans who fought against them.
Baumgartner, now an assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California, found correspondence from four councilmen from the Mexican border town of Guerrero, who pursued, shot, and killed a slaveholder who had kidnapped a runaway. In 1851, the residents of another village in the state of Coahuila took up arms to stop a slave catcher named Warren Adams from abducting a Black family. Months later, the Mexican Army posted a sizable force and two artillery pieces on the Rio Grande to prevent a group of 200 Texans from crossing the border to seize runaway slaves.
Baumgartner kept uncovering information that surprised and fascinated her. After independence from Spain, in 1821, “Mexico passed these really radical antislavery laws, and Mexicans at all levels of society were serious about enforcing them,” she told me. “This was well known by enslaved people on the U.S. side of the border.” Indeed, more than three-quarters of the fugitive slaves caught in Texas between 1837 and 1861, she learned from a database of runaway slave notices, were heading to Mexico.
THE EARLIEST EXAMPLES of slaves escaping south are from the late 17th century. In the Carolinas, enslaved men and women ran away from the rice plantations to Spanish Florida, where they were able to arm themselves against their former enslavers. In 1693, King Charles II of Spain decreed that all fugitive slaves would be free in Florida. In 1733, a caveat was added: To gain their freedom, fugitives had to convert to Catholicism and declare loyalty to the Spanish crown.
After the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, the de facto border between the United States and New Spain was the Sabine River, in presentday East Texas. (This border was formalized in 1819.) It’s impossible to say how many enslaved people made it across the Sabine, but we know that slaveholders in Louisiana complained about escapes to New Spain. Thomas Mareite, a French historian at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, has found evidence that 30 slaves from plantations on the Cane River near Natchitoches left for New Spain in October 1804. Nine crossed the Sabine River, and a string of similar escape attempts followed.
Even though slavery existed in New Spain, American runaways were usually granted asylum by the Spanish authorities, because the American form of slavery was regarded as far more brutal and dehumanizing. In New Spain, for example, slaves were subjects of the Spanish crown, not property, and it was illegal to separate husbands and wives or to impose excessive punishments. A fugitive named Rechar who made it across the Sabine declared that “the harshness of American laws” as well as keeping his family together were the reasons for his escape.
In 1821, after Mexico won its independence, it opened the northern frontier state of Tejas (as Texas was then called) to Anglo-American settlers. Many of those settlers brought Black slaves and established American-style cotton plantations in present-day East Texas. This set up a conflict with the Mexican government, which banned the importation of enslaved people in 1824. The Anglo colonists routinely ignored the law.
In 1836, Texas won independence from Mexico and, now an autonomous republic, enshrined slavery in its constitution. Mexico fully abolished slavery the following year. In 1845, Texas joined the United States as a slave state. Then came the MexicanAmerican War of 1846–48. Defeat forced Mexico to relinquish all or parts of the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.
In 1849, Mexico’s congress decreed that foreign slaves would become free “by the act of stepping on the national territory.” This soon became common knowledge among enslaved people in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and what would later become Oklahoma. They envisioned what historian Mekala Audain, an associate professor at the College of New Jersey, calls a “Mexican Canaan” across the Rio Grande—a promised land where they could be free.
Escaped slaves made the arduous journey through Texas. They stowed away on boats leaving from Galveston and New Orleans for Tampico and Veracruz. In the 1850s, a dozen slaves were reaching Matamoros, Mexico, every month. Two hundred seventy
arrived in Laredo, in Tamaulipas (now called Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo, Texas) in a single year. American diplomats kept pressuring their Mexican counterparts to sign extradition treaties, which would return runaway slaves to their owners, but Mexico flatly refused—in 1850, 1851, 1853, and 1857.
Most northbound runaways were on foot and unarmed, but many southbound freedom seekers, especially from Texas, rode horses and carried guns. “It was a reflection of the culture and the most effective strategy,” says Audain. “They could travel faster, defend themselves, and hunt for food.” Escaping on horseback probably also helped to neutralize the much-feared bloodhounds and other slave-hunting dogs; the dogs had no clear scent to follow and likely couldn’t keep up with horses over long distances.
Baumgartner has noted the ingenuity many escaping slaves showed. “They forged passes to give the impression they were traveling with the permission of their masters. They disguised themselves as white men, fashioning wigs from horsehair and pitch. They stole horses, firearms, skiffs, dirk knives, fur hats, and in one instance, 12 gold watches and a diamond breast pin.”
For the great majority, the journey south was an improvisation, a wayfinding through an unknown and hostile geography. They lived by their wits on a constant knife-edge of danger; for those on foot, the journey could take months. Often pursued by their enslavers, or hunted by slave patrols, with a bounty on their heads that any citizen might attempt to collect, they had to find food and water and contend with the Texas climate—well over 100 degrees in summer and subject to sudden, freezing “blue norther” storms in winter. Native Americans were another threat.
The most dangerous part of the journey was the Nueces Strip—a 100- to 150-mile expanse of remote, thorny, rattlesnake infested brush country between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande. It contained few roads or settlements, which made it hard to navigate and find food, and very little water. There was no slavery this far south in Texas, because the risk of slaves escaping to Mexico was too great. Black people were highly conspicuous and immediately suspected of being fugitives.
For Audain, the most affecting stories are those that end with drownings in the Rio Grande. “I think of all the effort they put into planning their escapes, walking hundreds of miles across Texas, and managing to avoid kidnappers and patrols,” she says. “They somehow survived these challenges, only for their journeys to end not with freedom, but with death.”
MOST RUNAWAYS ARRIVED in Mexico with little or no Spanish. A few were able to establish themselves as merchants, carpenters, and bricklayers in Matamoros and other cities. For the great majority, however, there were two options. They could find work as servants or day laborers on ranches and haciendas. Or they could risk their lives once again by joining military colonies.
These were fortified outposts established by the Mexican government to defend its northeastern borderlands from devastating raids for livestock, captives, and plunder by Comanches and Lipan Apaches. In return for such military service, according to a law passed by Mexico’s congress in 1846, foreigners, including runaway slaves, would receive land and full citizenship. Historians know little about the experiences of African Americans in these military colonies, with one significant exception.
At a colony in Coahuila were Black Seminoles, descended from free Black people and slaves who had run away from Georgia and the Carolinas and allied themselves with the Seminole Indians in Florida. They had fought with the tribe in the three Seminole Wars against the U.S. Army. When they were finally defeated, the Seminoles and Black Seminoles were forced onto the Creek reservation in Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma, with most arriving by 1842. The Creeks denied the newcomers land and started capturing Black Seminoles and selling them into slavery in Arkansas and Louisiana. By 1849, says Baumgartner, “the Seminoles and their Black allies had had enough.”
The Seminole leader Wild Cat, with the assistance of John Horse, leader of the Black Seminoles, led more than 300 men, women, and children, including 84 Black Seminoles, from Indian Territory south to Mexico. In northern Coahuila, the Mexican government granted them a 70,000-acre military colony with work animals, agricultural equipment, and financial subsidies.
Runaway slaves started arriving before the colonists had finished clearing fields and building their wood-frame houses. One man named David Thomas had escaped with his daughter and three grandchildren. In 1850, a group of 17 arrived, asking to join the Black Seminoles. By 1851, there were 356 Black people living at the colony, and threequarters of them were runaway slaves. At a moment’s notice, all the adult males had to be ready to fight against the Comanches or Apaches, arguably the most formidable Native American warriors on the continent.
In her book, Baumgartner describes an early-morning scene at the outset of a military campaign: “bright-kerchiefed heads appeared in the low doorways of the houses; women unhobbled the horses, slipping bits into their mouths. Then the men emerged, a powder horn and a bullet pouch slung across a shoulder, a machete or a horse pistol in hand.”
The Black Seminoles, known as Mascogos in Mexico, had a well-earned reputation as superb trackers and fighters. On foot or on horseback, according to the historian Kenneth Porter, who gathered their oral histories in the 1940s, the stronger men would use muskets as clubs. “They beat down buffalo-hide shields, splintered lance shafts, and rammed the iron-shod stocks into their enemies’ astonished faces.” Others used machetes to hack off spear and lance points, and then decapitate their foes.
In a battle known in the oral history as “the big fight,” 30 or 40 Black Seminoles defeated a much larger force of Comanches and Apaches, and much of the fighting was hand-to-hand combat.
Descendants of the Black Seminoles and the runaways who joined them are still living in the town of El Nacimiento de los Negros (literally The Birth of the Blacks) in northeast Coahuila. Every year on June 19 they stage a celebration with dancing and barbecues. The women dress up in long, polka-dot pioneer dresses. The children sing songs in an old African American dialect of English that can be found in Negro spirituals. Only recently, according to Baumgartner, did the villagers learn their tradition is connected to Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. “In Nacimiento,” she says, “it’s called Día de los Negros or Day of the Blacks.”