Flee North

A riveting account of the extraordinary abolitionist,liberatorand writer Thomas Smallwoodwho bought his own freedomled hundreds out of slaveryand named the underground railroadfrom Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalistScott Shane. Flee North tells the story for the first time of an American hero all but lost to history. Born into slaveryThomas Smallwood was freeself-educatedand working as a shoemaker a short walk from the U.S. Capitol by the 1840s. He recruited a young white activistCharles Torreyand together they began to organize mass escapes from WashingtonBaltimoreand surrounding counties to freedom in the north. They were racing against an implacable enemy: men like Hope Slatterthe regionΓÇÖs leading slave traderpart of a lucrative industry that would tear one million enslaved people from their families and sell them to the brutal cotton and sugar plantations of the deep south. Menwomenand children in imminent danger of being sold south turned to Smallwoodwho risked his own freedom to battle what he called ΓÇ£the most inhuman system that ever blackened the pages of history.ΓÇ¥ And he documented the escapes in satirical newspaper columnsmocking the slaveholdersthe slave traders and the police who worked for them. At a time when Americans are rediscovering a tragic and cruel history and struggling anew with the legacy of white supremacythis book — the first to tell the extraordinary story of Smallwood — will offer complicated heroesgenuine villainsand a powerful narrative set in cities still plagued by shocking racial inequity today.