Mexico’s wavering policies on slavery encouraged both slave owners and the enslaved.
The admission of Texas to the union as a slave state ultimately tipped the balance in favor of the free states.
A few years ago, I visited the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center on the high banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati. Not only is this large, modern and well-curated museum a highly recommended tourist stop, but it also symbolically faces the other side of the river and the former slave state of Kentucky — a physical fact impossible to forget as one imagines the horrors and hopes experienced by those who fled from bondage in the South.