In popular and academic discourse, the American Civil War has never really ended in the United States. For the first century or so after the resolution of the military conflict, most white Americans, including historians shaped by the resurrection of white supremacy, factored slavery as being somewhere between a negligible factor to one of many contributory variables that eventually pushed the nation to war. During the United States' Civil Rights era, as the American academic community began to more closely scrutinize its own racist proclivities, scholarship improved in both depth and breadth. The resulting work made plain that slavery was not solely one of many causal factors, but it was the cause-virtually everything that divided the North and the South to the point of war stemmed from slavery and debates about slavery. Understanding slavery as the central issue was a vital shift in historiography. What, or rather who, was often lost in that shift was the enslaved themselves and the significance of their actions. Though historians finally centered the institution of slavery on the economic, political, and cultural stage of the antebellum United States, what the people enslaved by that institution did has only more recently begun to push onto center stage. Over the last 20 years, starting with the 1999 publication of John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger's Runaway Slaves, historians' realization of the outsized impact of escaping slaves on national events has been growing deeper and broader. Kate Larson's Bound for the Promised Land, Stanley Harrold's Border War and Eric Foner's Gateway to Freedom are a few of the notable works that have laid a solid foundation for the case that Black people seeking to escape slavery shaped the course of the nation up to and through the American Civil War.(1) R. J. M. Blackett's The Captive's Quest is the latest and perhaps most detailed work that places enslaved African-American women, men, children along with their black and white allies centre stage. It would be easy to mistake this book as being primarily about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which does indeed have a leading role. Much of the action and reaction revolves around whether to enforce it, how to enforce it, and how different actors responded to one another when enforcement was attempted. However, starting with the

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