Fergus Bordewich

FERGUS MADIGAN BORDEWICH was born in New York City and raised in Yonkers, New York. In addition to Washington: The Making of the American Capital, he is the author of Bound for Canaan, The Story of the Underground Railroad; Killing the White Man’s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century; My Mother’s Ghost, a memoir; and Cathay: A Journey in Search of Old China. His articles on American history have appeared in Smithsonian and American Heritage. As a journalist, he has also traveled widely in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and has written on human rights and other issues for The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Readers Digest, and other periodicals. Bordewich was raised with the Underground Railroad, or at least with its legend. He grew up in Yonkers, New York in a neighborhood adjoining one that was reputed to have been settled by fugitives who had come north via the underground. (In the course of his research for Bound for Canaan, he was disappointed to learn that this story had no more basis in fact than do many vague underground legends attached to homes and localities scattered across the northern states.) The story nonetheless had a powerful impact on him, as myths often can. In June 1998, Bordewich visited the site of the Dawn Institute, founded in 1841 in southern Ontario, a school and refuge for fugitive slaves, and a terminus of the Underground Railroad. He tried to picture the men and women who had found safety and hope there, and who had gone on to build new lives for themselves in freedom. Who were they? What had driven them to risk death by taking flight? What had they left behind? How had they gotten here? Who had helped them across the racial landscape of nineteenth century America, through the war zone of antebellum politics, a field of battle within which fugitive slaves had no power, few rights, and little hope for protection? Bound for Canaan began with those questions.