When we remember the end of slavery, we tend to give credit to white politicians arguing over the Emancipation Proclamation in Washington, D.C., or to a white general telling enslaved people in Texas that they are free (the moment marked by Juneteenth, the annual commemoration of emancipation being celebrated today).
But these images are incomplete. They leave out the African Americans who had been working to end slavery for generations before the Civil War, many of whom have been all but lost to history, forgotten pioneers on a lost frontier. These were some of our first abolitionists, living on the rough edges of the Northwest Territory — a region what later became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin - but their actions changed the whole nation.