An important book of epic scope on America’s initial racially integrated, religiously inspired motion for change

The civil war brought to a climax the country’s bitter division. However the origins of slavery’s denouement can be tracked to a courageous band of ordinary Us citizens, dark and white, slave and free, who joined forces to produce what would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that occupies as romantic a place in the country’s imagination as the Lewis and Clark about Bound for Canaan: The Epic Tale from the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Privileges Movement expedition. The true story of the Underground Railroad is a lot more morally complicated and politically divisive than also the myths recommend. Against a backdrop from the country’s westward expansion arose a fierce clash of beliefs that was nothing at all less than a battle for the country’s soul. Not since the American Trend had the country engaged within an work of such huge and serious civil disobedience that not merely challenged prevailing mores but also subverted federal law.

Bound for Canaan tells the stories of women and men like David Ruggles, who invented the black underground in New York City; striking Quakers like Isaac Hopper and Levi Coffin, who risked their lives to construct the Underground Railroad; as well as the inimitable Harriet Tubman. Interweaving exciting personal stories using the politics of slavery and abolition, Bound for Canaan displays how the Underground Railroad provided birth to this country’s initial racially integrated, religiously influenced movement for public change.