It is all too easy to accept the popular image of the Underground Railroad in antebellum America as a few stalwart white abolitionists putting themselves in jeopardy to aid helpless and benighted runaway slaves. Literature and, more latterly, film and television have perpetuated the stereotype. Cheryl Janifer LaRoche's new book attempts to correct that one-dimensional view of the Underground Railroad by stressing the crucial involvement of free blacks in Ohio, Illinois and Indiana.

LaRoche blends history and archaeology to recover the now lost communities of free black people that were often the first stop for escaped slaves once they had crossed the Mississippi or Ohio rivers. This is important work, and the author is to be praised for her multidisciplinary approach to the task. Aside from wading through what extant documents there are, she has used oral histories imaginatively and where possible looked at the physical remnants of these black communities on the ground. The story of these communities in themselves is comparatively unknown. Often they were founded by free blacks forced from their original southern homes by restrictive laws on movement and property holding in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The communities they forged offered sanctuary to newly escaped slaves from the South, both helping them to avoid recapture and giving them the means to continue journeying north. Many of the communities suffered discrimination and marginalization during the nineteenth century, and after the abolition of slavery gradually dissolved via outward migration to larger cities.

An important section of the book deals with the importance of landscape and physical geography to the Underground Railroad, showing how the Railroad was shaped by caves, waterways, actual railroads, and iron forges. In addition the social geography was also crucial, with the isolation of these black communities often providing greater protection from white society. Although touched on in the text, one aspect of this that might have been explored in greater depth is how this continued a pattern seen in the slave states. Recent work on marronage has demonstrated precisely the same dependence on natural landscapes (caves, swamps, forests, and waterways) for fugitives from slavery. The same point could be made regarding the community organizations that helped to establish the Underground Railroad. The Church was perhaps the most prominent of these, followed by educational and Masonic institutions, but this was also happening to a significant degree in the South. The AME Church and the African Baptist churches were secretive loci of resistance activities throughout the South. Only able to operate with white toleration, they could not overtly oppose slavery, but instead acted to provide either leadership for the black community, educational opportunities, or even a hiding place for fugitives. Studies of the black churches in the south, of which there are several, together with studies of the free black communities in places like Balitmore, Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans, should be read in conjunction with this volume to gain a fuller, rounder, picture of resistance by free blacks to enslavement.

Overall, this volume is to be welcomed. It fills out the picture of the operation of the Underground Railroad, offering an important corrective to the prevailing image. It is well researched and well written, with relevant and useful maps and an extensive bibliography.