The Underground Railroad is one of the most taught topics to young schoolchildren, and every American is familiar with the idea of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada and the North with the help of determined abolitionists and even former escaped slaves like Harriet Tubman. The secrecy involved in the Underground Railroad made it one of the most mysterious aspects of the mid-19th century in America, to the extent that claims spread that 100,000 slaves had escaped via the Underground Railroad. Of course, from a practical standpoint, the Underground Railroad had to remain covert not only for the sake of thousands of slaves, but for a small army of men and women of every race, religion and economic class who put themselves in peril on an ongoing basis throughout the first half of the 19th century, and in the years leading up to the war.

The Northern version of the Underground Railroad included many “stations,” at the farms and homes of free Black people, or Quakers, or other whites for whom slavery was an abomination and who were willing to help guide slaves on to the next station. However, it must be remembered that slaves on the run went in all directions, not just north. After the bloody cataclysm in Haiti, some slaves escaped by sea to the new nation there. A few escaped to the Bahamas or other British colonies after Britain abolished slavery in 1834. More than a few mixed-race slaves escaped and simply vanished into the general population, the phenomenon called “passing”. A few joined mixed-race communities in out-of-the way places

Thousands of slaves escaped to a place not normally associated with the Underground Railroad: Mexico. Mexico’s fight for independence began in 1810 and was not achieved until 1821. The revolutionaries proclaimed the equality of all of New Spain’s peoples and abolished slavery as well, although there were only a few thousand slaves left. The initial revolutionaries were defeated, but the rhetoric and its idea of freedom continued to resonate. A Mexican president, himself partly of African ancestry, declared slavery over in 1829.

Things got more complicated when Texas became an independent republic in 1836, and after about a decade, it became a slave state. The border shifted again after the Mexican-American War, and each of these changes affected the status of slaves and how slaves sought freedom. Partly for those reasons, the Underground Railroad to Mexico was never as organized as the route to Canada was, and it involved far fewer slaves, with historians guessing perhaps 5,000 to 10,000 in total. It did not involve Quakers and Northern abolitionists, but it did involve Tejanos (Mexican Americans in Texas), Mexicans, German settlers in Texas, and to an extent the Comanches and other native peoples. It also involved other factors such as Mexican revolutions, and the war between Mexico and Texas that gave Texas independence. On top of that, there was something of a flow the other direction: Mexican peasants escaping debt peonage by crossing into Texas.

The Mexican escape route was not a migration of Canada’s magnitude, and escaping to Mexico required a significantly longer amount of time, but it was a very real alternative for those slaves who lived in the Deep South and thus had less of a chance to flee north to Canada. Delores Preston stated the obvious when she wrote that “chances of escape improved when slaves were close to free Africans, rivers, free states and territories, foreign borders of nations that prohibited slavery and the slave trade, or where runaways congregated”. Thus, for many slaves in the Deep South and the Southwest, Mexico and Texas were the leading choices, even though slavery was legal in Texas as well.