“I consider them very important because it tells us the story that even when their flight was not recognized or when those individuals don’t leave records, the history still existed,” says Maria Esther Hammack, a doctoral candidate in history at UT Austin.īorn and raised in Mexico, Hammack knew Mexico abolished slavery decades before the U.S. Their stories, too, are worth preserving. “But if they had a horse, and if they had a gun, they could make their way through.” “There’s not a lot of running water at all between those two rivers, there’s not a lot of shade, and it’s very hot,” says Roseann Bacha-Garza, a lecturer at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and the co-author of Blue and Gray on the Border: The Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail. Still, crossing the Nueces Strip-a lawless span of brush country stretching 150 miles between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande-was hazardous. Historian Thomas Mareite has studied possible routes that fugitives escaping slavery took across Texas in the decades before the Civil War. “Those who did faced a lot of risks-mobs, lynching, brutal punishment.” “People were speaking out against slavery in Texas before the Civil War, but not that many people,” Mareite explains. But historical records are scarce: Runaways and their supporters carefully covered their tracks in the face of violence and persecution. Mareite mined municipal, county, and state archives military and court records and newspaper articles and “runaway slave” ads to uncover freedom seekers’ stories. Others opted to make examples of those who helped escapees by publicly whipping or hanging them. Slaveholders were sometimes dismayed by the help Mexican laborers offered Black escapees, to the point that some Texas towns expelled Mexican workers from their jurisdictions altogether. Their empathy, experience crossing the border, and Spanish made them able guides and intermediaries for runaways seeking to abscond south. Though technically “free,” Mexican migrant workers often labored with slaves and developed personal relationships with them. sought refuge, Mareite has found that most of the assistance offered to runaways-directions, guidance, supplies, or shelter-came from fellow Black people, sympathetic Mexican laborers, and to a lesser extent, German settlers who opposed slavery. In his studies of how enslaved people in the U.S. As a result, assistance networks for fugitives in Texas tended to be loose and unstable, says Thomas Mareite, a French historian at Leiden University in the Netherlands. And, considering the number of free Black people in pre-Civil War Texas never rose above a few hundred, hiding in plain sight wasn’t possible. Nineteenth-century Texas wasn’t home to abolitionist societies eager to help runaways. But getting there required navigating slave states without the support or protection that was sometimes available in free states. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, making it an obvious destination for freedom seekers from Texas and other states, such as Louisiana and Mississippi. “We need to figure out what the Texas story of the Underground Railroad was and maybe come up with a new term or a new label to describe the movement for freedom in the Lone Star State,” Berry says. Racing south across unforgiving country, runaways-often armed and on horseback-faced daunting odds in a gauntlet of wilderness, slave hunters, and lawmen. Historians are still unearthing tragic and triumphant tales of Texas freedom seekers, but it’s clear the Underground Railroad’s reputation for coordinated networks of abolitionists hiding people in barns doesn’t square with the historical reality in Texas. Racing across unforgiving country, fugitives from slavery faced a gauntlet of wilderness, slave hunters, and lawmen. “It’s in the stories of self-liberated enslaved people who were finding ways to get to Mexico, finding ways to get on boats and get to the Caribbean, finding ways to escape and go farther west.” Yet, “the story of freedom in Texas is bigger than Juneteenth, and it started well before June 19, 1865,” says Daina Ramey Berry, chair of the University of Texas at Austin History Department and author of The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. When Texans think of emancipation, Juneteenth is more likely to come to mind-the holiday commemorating the 1865 date when Union soldiers landed in Galveston and announced emancipation. The state’s landscape is bare of monuments to resistance and flight, of the names or narratives of enslaved people who liberated themselves or died trying. But Texas is seldom mentioned in this sweeping narrative of Black pursuits of freedom.
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