The Writings of Thomas Smallwood

A long-forgotten Black abolitionist who liberated captive workers by the wagonload, brilliantly satirized slaveholders, and gave the underground railroad its;name. Thomas Smallwood was a shoemaker by day and an organizer of mass escapes from slavery by night. Twelve years after purchasing his freedom from slavery, Smallwood took to the press and, over a 16-month stretch starting in 1842, pseudonymously published newspaper dispatches ridiculing and excoriating enslavers by name and offering sobering reflections on the depravity of slavery. With the pen that Smallwood called his “lash,” he leveraged mockery to flip the oppressive racial power structure of America. These dispatches, in which Smallwood was the first to use "underground railroad" in print, are the only accounts of escapes to be published in real time, imbuing Smallwood’s subversive wit with urgency and defiance. His 1851 memoir is prescient on the United States'' tormented entanglement with race.

Product details

• Authors: Henry Louis Gates, Scott Shane, Thomas Smallwood
• Assisted by: Scott Shane (Editor), Scott Shane (Introduction), Henry Louis Gates (Editor of the series)
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 10.02.2026
• EAN: 9780143138389
• ISBN: 978-0-14-313838-9
• No. of pages: 208
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 197 mm x 13 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; USA, Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, Biography: general, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Slavery, HISTORY / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877), c 1800 to c 1900, United States of America, USA, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, History of the Americas, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, Slavery & abolition of slavery, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / African American & Black, Slavery, enslaved persons and abolition of slavery