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South to the Promised Land
Before the Civil War, numerous enslaved people made the treacherous journey to Mexico in a bold quest for freedom that historians are now unearthing
Diana Cardenas, a high school English teacher from Pharr, Texas, stands in her small family cemetery between the Rio Grande and the new border wall. Stylishly dressed and coiffed, wilting slightly in the heat and humidity, she holds up a photograph of her grandmother. “Her name was Adela Jackson, and we were close,” she says. “She loved to come here, and tell me stories about our family history, and all the runaway slaves we helped and took across the river into Mexico.”
Until recently, the southbound Underground Railroad, as some scholars call it, has been largely overlooked, mainly because it left so few traces in surviving records. No one who escaped slavery by going to Mexico wrote a firsthand account of the experience, as Frederick Douglass and others did about escaping north. Nor were they interviewed by researchers, or recruited by antislavery organizations. And though the journeys of enslaved people to Mexico are of the utmost importance, the scale of the southern migration was more modest, numbering between 3,000 and 10,000 people, compared with an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 who fled north of the Mason-Dixon line.
But in recent years scholars have begun to uncover a wealth of information about the southbound freedom-seekers. For example, they’ve learned that while there was no organized network of assistance, no celebrated “conductors” like Harriet Tubman guiding them to the next safe haven, slaves escaping to Mexico did sometimes receive help along the way.
Diana Cardenas’ great-great-great-grandfather, who died in obscurity, was among the staunchest allies of slaves escaping south. “He was a white man from Alabama named Nathaniel Jackson,” says Cardenas. “He married a slave that he freed, Matilda Hicks, and they came out here in covered wagons in 1857. She already had three children by another man, and she had seven more with Nathaniel.”
Cardenas produces a faded, blurry, copied photograph of Matilda Hicks, her great-great-great-grandmother, as an old woman, tall and thin and wearing a white dress.
“Nathaniel bought 5,535 acres of land right here by the river and established the Jackson Ranch,” says Cardenas. “There were Black, white and mixed-race people all living together, raising cattle in a place that was very remote, where they could be left alone. The runaways knew they could get help here—food, clothing and work if they wanted it. Nathaniel was a nice, generous, courageous man, a humanitarian. He would cross them into Mexico in boats.”
The history of southbound runaways, preserved in scattered fragments, presents scholars with enormous challenges of research and interpretation. Perhaps no one has done more to advance our understanding than a historian named Alice Baumgartner. In 2012, as a Rhodes scholar studying violence on the U.S.-Mexico border in the early and mid-19th century, she was hunting through state and municipal archives in northern Mexico. She found plenty of documents about cattle rustling and Lipan Apache raids, but she also came across records of a completely unexpected kind of violence—between American slave catchers crossing the Rio Grande and Mexicans who fought against them.
