We tend to think of runaway slaves in antebellum United States as heading north on the Underground Railroad. In the southern states, the closer choice was to Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1837.

In The Commonwealth Club's California Book Awards gold medal winner for nonfiction, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, author Alice Baumgartner tells the important but little-known story of Mexico's radical anti-slavery stance and how it affected slaves in the United States as well as how it might have mitigated the Civil War.