Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland

A riveting account of the extraordinary abolitionist, liberator, & writer Thomas Smallwood, who bought his own freedom, led hundreds out of slavery, & named the underground railroad, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author & journalist, Scott Shane. Flee North tells the story for the first time of an American hero all but lost to history.

Born into slavery, by the 1840s Thomas Smallwood was free, self-educated, & working as a shoemaker a short walk from the U.S. Capitol. He recruited a young white activist, Charles Torrey, & together they began to organize mass escapes from Washington, Baltimore, & surrounding counties to freedom in the north.
They were racing against an implacable enemy: men like Hope Slatter, the region's leading slave trader, part of a lucrative industry that would tear one million enslaved people from their families & sell them to the brutal cotton & sugar plantations of the deep south.
Men, women, & children in imminent...