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While Boston figures prominently in the history of the American abolitionist movement, historian Murphy’s fourth book is noteworthy for reminding readers of the broader reach of Northern abolitionist activities beyond New England. Teenager Jermain Wesley Loguen escaped from a rural Tennessee plantation after experiencing cruelty, witnessing cruelty to his fellow enslaved, and seeing families fragmented and sold because plantation owners considered them commodities. During his escape, Loguen nearly fell through the frozen Ohio River. But he crossed Indiana, Michigan, and Canada, arriving in Syracuse, New York, where he and his wife, Caroline, managed one of the busiest hubs on the Underground Railroad. Loguen also became an AME Zion pastor and bishop, crisscrossed the North tirelessly advocating for free African Americans, recruited African Americans to enlist in the Union Army, and then recruited African Americans as teachers and pastors to help newly freed enslaved people in the South. Murphy’s vivid, well-organized, and deeply researched book brings Loguen to life. She deftly sketches familiar and less well-known events around the life of a man nicknamed “The King of the Underground Railroad,” describing the Railroad’s mechanics, Loguen's friendships with Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists, and his role in the rescue of Jerry, a fugitive slave, in Syracuse.

Kirkus
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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 workThe 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. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.