Story of the Underground Railroad to Mexico gains attention

[douglas9]

HOUSTON (AP) — While researching U.S. Civil War history in South Texas, Roseann Bacha-Garza came across the two unique families of the Jacksons and the Webbers living along the Rio Grande. White men headed both families. Both of their wives were Black, emancipated slaves.

But Bacha-Garza, a historian, wondered what they were doing there in the mid-1800s.

As she dug into oral family histories, she heard an unexpected story. The two families' ranches served as a stop on the Underground Railroad to Mexico, descendants said. Across Texas and parts of Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas, scholars and preservation advocates are working to piece together the story of a largely forgotten part of American history: a network that helped thousands of Black slaves escape to Mexico.

“It really made sense the more I read about it and the more I thought about it,” Bacha-Garza said of the secretive route.

Like the more well-known Underground Railroad to the north, which helped fugitive slaves flee to Northern states and Canada, the path in the opposite direction provided a pathway to freedom south of the border, historians say. Enslaved people in the Deep South took to this closer route through unforgiving forests then desert with the help of Mexican Americans, German immigrants, and biracial Black and white couples living along the Rio Grande. Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, a generation before President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

But just how organized the Underground Railroad to Mexico was and what happened to former slaves and those who helped them remains a mystery. Some archives have since been destroyed by fire. Sites connected to the route sit abandoned.

“It’s larger than most people realized,” Karl Jacoby, co-director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, said of the route.

Slave owners took out newspaper ads offering rewards and complaining that their “property” was likely heading to Mexico, Jacoby said. White Texans banished Mexican Americans from towns after accusing them of helping slaves escape.

https://www.chron.com/news/article/Story-of-the-Underground-Railroad-to-Mexico-gains-15571606.php

[SallyHemmings]

1. Thanks for posting!

This makes a ton of sense.

I had fantastic history professors but this never came up.

[Kind of Blue]

2. Deeply satisfying. I thought from North to St. Augustine, Florida was the only one.

It does make good sense and I'm suspecting that more and more of these stories will surface.

There was an excellent 45 minute video accompanying the story of St. Augustine a few years ago but the documentarians have since put it up on iTunes, no longer free to view. I'm just about positive that it was covered in The 1619 Project.

The story begins 40 years before Jamestown was founded with a man by the name of Pedro Menendez, an admiral in the Spanish fleet. He oversaw the enterprise to establish what would become “La Florida” or the modern day southeast region of the United States (Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana).

In the beginning stages of St. Augustine, its founders did not intend it to be a colony rich in diversity. Menendez originally signed a contract with the Spanish crown to bring 500 slaves to Florida to develop a sugar plantation economy, but that never happened. What resulted was a multi-ethnic town with a group of people whom — unless you held a Spanish bloodline to protect — did not treat others unfairly. Ironically, it would take more than 400 years before the Supreme Court brought this idea to fruition.

In the late 1600s word spread of a better life to the south. The first “fugitives” escaped the Carolinas and made it safely to St. Augustine.

By 1693, the Spanish strategically issued what appears to be the first civil rights legislation in the New World to counter British expansion. The Edict of 1693 stated any slaves fleeing from the British would be given sanctuary. As a result, the first Underground Railroad was created and headed south, not north, like many believe.

The gruesome path stretched 376 miles from Charleston to St. Augustine, but if slaves made it to the St. John’s River, they were considered free. Some even traveled from far away as New York in the 1700s.

This eventually led to the first settlement of African descent in America built by the Spanish, Fort Mose. However, the site was controversial for years and was considered by some as historical revisionism.

https://www.yourbasin.com/journey-2016/fight-for-freedom-an-american-story/

[GeoWilliam750]

4. Very interesting

[GeoWilliam750]

3. Thank you for posting