In 1848 Willow, a fifteen-year-old educated slave girl, faces an inconceivable choice -- between bondage and freedom, family and love -- as free born, seventeen-year-old Cato, a black man, takes it upon himself to sneak as many fugitive slaves to freedom as he can on the Mason-Dixon Line.

An account of African-American life in the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, based on first-person narratives, contemporary documents, and other historical sources.

"The University of Colorado erroneously recognized Dr. Ruth Cave Flowers as its first Black graduate. In 1918--six years before Flowers's graduation--Lucile Berkeley Buchanan Jones received her bachelor's degree. McLean introduces this woman who lived through an extraordinary time and rectifies the omission from institutional history"--Provided by publisher.

At the time of the Civil War, one of every eight people living in the United States was considered the legal property of someone else. Men and women, black and white, risked their lives to carve an elaborate network of escape routes out of slavery that became known as the Underground Railroad. A loosely organized group of deeply committed individuals who employed everything from secret codes to false-bottom wagons to bring fugitives out of bondage...

"The conclusion of the Civil War marked the end of slavery and of the Confederacy, but also the beginning of the monumental challenges of how to readmit the southern states into the Union and how to ensure the liberty of over three million newly freed African Americans. This program examines the antebellum struggles of Congress to rebuild the south as an equal and free society by means of the Reconstruction Amendments. It also looks at social and...

"In this first critical study of female abolitionists and feminists in the freedmen's aid movement, Carol Faulkner describes women's radical view of former slaves and the nation's responsibility to them. Moving beyond the image of the Yankee Schoolmarm, Women's Radical Reconstruction demonstrates fully the complex and dynamic part played by Northern women in the design, implementation, and administration of Reconstruction policy. This absorbing account...