Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America
by: Bordewich, Fergus

Hardcover. NY, Amistad/HarperCollins, 3rd pr., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 540 pages, b&w illustrations, index. 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.