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Sydney H. Gay was also a major figure over at Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, as was George Ripley, Charles A. Dana, William H. Fry and thers . . . the lot of them not only critics of slavery but of capitalism, as they understood it at the time. All were major popularizers of the ideas of Charles Fourier, Proudhon and others . . . including Marx, whose writings the Tribune regularly published. This worth mentioning because of the interesting way in which the anticapitalist dimensions of antislavery thought are so easily glossed over. While Foner's point is well taken, it is hard to separate the amorphous "underground railroad" can every be separated from the activities of the runaways. In the end, their importance isn't a matter that can be easily quantified. Numbers always fluctuated as circumstances changed. And there's a sense--reflecting the outrage of the slaveholders--that those assisting the escapees were mostly white. While that may have been true in some places and times, free blacks and former runaways had always been the backbone of it . . . and the ever neglected Indian nations, some of which never cooperated on the subject of slavery. For us, the takeaway has to be how what these relatively small numbers did ultimately dissolved one of the most well-established institutional practices in the world. Solidarity! Mark L. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
