Abolitionists, Smugglers and Scapegoats: Assistance Networks for Fugitive Slaves in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1836-1861
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyses the nature of assistance networks for slave refugees absconding from Texas to the Mexican border between 1836 and 1861. It argues that, by contrast with the more densely organized Underground Railroad that connected the US South to the northern states and Canada, structures of assistance remained fairly loosely organized and inconsistent in the Texas-Mexican borderlands, in great part due to the almost complete absence of an established and influential abolitionist network in its midst. A wide variety of actors facilitated slaves’ escape attempts to the Rio Grande/Bravo, for multiple reasons. In this expanding slavery frontier, ideological grounds to support fugitive slaves largely coexisted with economic incentives, self-interest and socio-economic proximity. Convinced abolitionists, low-skilled Mexican workers, German settlers, smugglers and frontier bandits shaped weak, unstable and ambiguous assistance networks in which the boundaries between protection, violence and exploitation often overlapped.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".