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The Fugitive's Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts. By Kathryn Grover. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2001. Pp, xiii, 350. $39.95.)
Reading Kathryn Grover's The Fugitive's Gibraltar, one is constantly impressed by the quality of the research and by the author's resourcefulness in penetrating the factual confusion deliberately and understandably cultivated by New Bedford's many fugitives from slavery. Grover finds people who had made a point of not being found, people who routinely changed their names and misled census takers, an often transient population whose strategies for evasion sent some on lengthy whaling voyages and others to the goldfields of California. Apart from some notable exceptions like Frederick Douglass and Henry Box Brown, few left elaborate accounts of themselves. Indeed, celebrities were less crucial to the safe haven of New Bedford than were admirable but obscure figures like Nathan Johnson and William and Lucinda Bush. In recovering these lives, Grover gives a sense of how much richer and more intimate black history of the antebellum North might yet be, especially where, as here, the work is aided by the conscientious...