The March 26, 2010, edition of The Wall Street Journal featured a review of the new University of Illinois Press book Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War.
Until recently, few scholars have examined the relationship between the Underground Railroad, abolition networks, and the broader currents of political and social change. Graham Hodges in “David Ruggles” and Scott Christianson in “Freeing Charles” Âdramatize these relationships by Ârecovering forgotten, heroic ÂAfrican-Americans whose actions helped create fault lines in the spread of Southern slavery.
