R. J. M. Blackett's Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery, published by the University of North Carolina Press, is an ideal text for graduate and undergraduate students of American history, as well as a valuable text for historians.

Blackett's subject is the contributions of African Americans, enslaved and free, in the struggle for freedom as represented by African American participation in the Underground Railroad. Blackett begins by demonstrating the ways in which African American slaves engaged in self-emancipation, both as runaways and in Canadian and British courts. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law is discussed as an indication of the rising tensions in the North and outside America regarding the South's insistence on maintaining the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Blackett includes examples of interesting cases tried in court, such as the rights of a ten-month-old child born in a free northern state to parents who were discovered to have been, at one time, runaway slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law required that the parents be returned to slavery in the South. The child remained in the North.

The text goes on to illustrate how the volatile political climate resulting from a presidential pledge to enforce the Fugitive Slave Laws resulted in the creation of symbols of defiance and symbols of freedom. The title of the book puts the focus on action and the act of creation. To change hearts and minds, Quakers abolitionists and others who refused to support what they saw as a morally indefensible law were willing to risk political anarchy and created new symbols, including the “slave as victim,” to advance the cause of freedom. Blackett's text expands readers' understanding of this time period by adding to this national history local events from major cities in the South of the 1850s, allowing readers to see the degree to which African American slaves sought to take their cause into their own hands, and make their own bids for freedom.

Blackett's text shows the ways in which the Quakers were an important component of the Underground Railroad while also expanding the reader's knowledge of the part African Americans played as agents of change. For example, while the text discusses the role of well-known and well-chronicled Quaker abolitionist William Still as the driving force behind the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, it also discusses the role of Joseph Bustill, an African American schoolteacher who formed the Fugitive Aid Society, which assisted escaped slaves to “hide in plain sight” by blending runaways into the locus of the free black community. Additionally, the text includes discussion of the operation of the Underground Railroad in Chester County, where of the 132 Underground Railroad total agents, 101 were Quaker and thirty-one were free African Americans.

The text also discusses the ways in which the activities of free African Americans and abolitionists (British, Quaker, and others) challenged the national government to make a choice: end slavery or end the union. Symbolically, what linked the North and the South, across the political landscape of the late 1850s, was an invisible railroad staffed by black and white agents, financed in part by British abolitionists. Blackett shows the profound effect this symbol had on politics in the years leading up to the Civil War.

The text brings to life individual stories not readily available in anthologies of nineteenth-century American literature or history. These counternarratives help flesh out readers' understanding of the “real” Underground Railroad, which had already become the stuff of myth and legend in the 1850s. The propagation of myth and symbol aided the cause of freedom, but overshadowed the contributions of the very real men and women who emancipated themselves or were themselves agents. Mythmaking is revealed to be one of the tools in the political toolbox used to “make freedom happen.” The counternarratives Blackett includes are not meant to detract from the valuable work done in the past. Instead, the text brings to life new stories by sifting through newspaper accounts of local events so that contemporary readers of history can see a broader picture: the legacy of the Underground Railroad and how perceived political needs to stir up enough tension to force national discussion and action may have excluded the contributions of African Americans in the struggle for freedom. The text is distinctive in that it shows how the politics surrounding slavery and the freedom movement impacted the reporting of the activities of African Americans invested in the cause of freedom both during the heyday of the Underground Railroad and in the years that followed. It is also distinctive because of the way in which it uses historical research through the files of long-forgotten and defunct local newspapers to tell the story of slaves who were not writers or working with Quakers or abolitionists who then wrote up their stories in the service of political activism.

Blackett's text ends with the importance of memory and remembering the past, not just to honor the past but as an instructional tool for the present. Quoting William Howard Day, a newspaper editor of the 1850s, Blackett makes clear how accounts shared in long-forgotten small-town newspapers “write again the history of this land, telling us of the past and of the present” and, indirectly, the part such new stories played in creating a political climate that resulted in “a re-written Constitution” where “justice and freedom are guaranteed.”