JERMAIN WESLEY LOGUEN

Helping those who ran from slavery—just as he had.

In 1860, more than two decades after Jermain Wesley Loguen (1813–1872) fled Tennessee, he received a letter from his enslaver, Sarah Logue. In exchange for $1,000 and the cost of the horse Loguen had taken north, Logue would “give up all claim I have to you.” Loguen, who had established himself as an abolitionist, minister, and central figure on the Underground Railroad in Syracuse, New York, did not equivocate: “Did you think to terrify me by presenting the alternative to give my money to you or give my body to Slavery? Then let me say to you, that I meet the position with unutterable scorn and contempt.” Despite the looming threat of a return to slavery, sanctioned by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Loguen remained a “defiant fugitive,” believing that “purchasing” his freedom “denied that freedom was his God-given right.” A Texas State University historian, Murphy argues that Loguen saw himself as a regional leader rather than a “national figure” and that “these lesser-known reformers” can help “flesh out our understanding of Black activism” beyond “singular, exceptional figures who brought the needs of this community to the forefront of the American consciousness.” Murphy’s point is well taken, but the community organizer/great man dichotomy does not provide the most productive framing for a biography of Loguen, whose life spans this dichotomy rather than falling on one side or the other. Murphy effectively places Loguen within the context of a community of activists working together—notably in carrying out the “Jerry Rescue” (the subject of Murphy’s previous work The Jerry Rescue, 2014), in which Black and white residents of Syracuse liberated a fugitive who had been arrested by federal marshals. And yet, Loguen worked directly with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, published a popular narrative of his own life, was lauded as “King of the Underground Railroad,” and was “an important voice for a generation of Black Americans.”

A welcome and necessary account of a fugitive from slavery.