Bound for Canaan: Three posts in one!

Fergus Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan is a terrific book.
Bordewich chronicles the story of the Underground Railroad from when it was just a handful of Quakers helping hide runaway slaves to the organized network of abolitionists it became in the decades before the Civil War. He deals with their methods; the often brutal opposition; accounts of runaway slaves, both successful and failed; the mixed attitudes towards blacks from the Railroad’s “conductors” (who ranged from anti-slavery and anti-black to genuinely open to a multiracial society); and backstories of the railroad’s volunteers, from Quakers to escaped slaves and free blacks (the black participation is much higher than I realized. I highly recommend this one.
2)Regarding my post about Confederacy supporters among modern conservatives, I find myself even more disdainful of them now. Bound for Canaan makes me aware that if men such as Walter Williams and Thomas Lucente want to oppose unreasonable, oppressive government, they could just as easily do it by invoking the abolitionists.
Free speech? Advocating abolition was illegal in much of the South.
Fair trials? Abolitionists who were caught helping slaves escape often received outrageous sentences.
Limited government? The Fugitive Slave Act not only forbade abolitionists from aiding runaways, it mandated that private citizens could be forced to help catch and turn over runaway slaves, regardless of their personal beliefs and whether they lived in a slave state or free state.
That would seem to make a pretty good cause for “small government” pundits to champion. It has the added advantage of being the moral side in the debate over slavery.
Yet instead, Lucente and Williams side with the slaveowners rather than slavery’s opponents.
That’s creepy.
3)One of the things that leaped out at me reading the book was the stories of people who decided, in an instant, to stand against slavery. One teenager sees a group of slaves go by, heading for the frontier and imagines what it would be like if his father were dragged away from the family like that. In that instant he became a dedicated abolitionist.
Another man, neutral at best, swings to abolition when he sees a female runaway captured in front of him.
In Creating Characters, writer Dwight Swain observes that people are capable of so many surprising acts, fictional characters could plausibly do just about anything; the only difficulty is making it real enough for readers believe. These instant conversions are a good example of that: Sure, it happens in real life, but making it feel real to readers is a lot more tricky.
Heck, making me feel it in fiction is a stretch. The idea that the young boy, in one single instant, makes a decision that guides his life, is the kind of characterization I usually hate: I find the “single determining incident,” as I call it, way overdone and usually very unconvincing.
Thinking of stuff I’ve read, and stuff I’ve written, I think there are factors that make it more plausible:
•It’s within the character’s range of action. A 13 year old deciding in an instant to devote himself to slavery is easier to believe than a 50 year old lifelong slaveowner; the latter will take a much bigger push to change.
•It’s at the start of the book. If it’s setting up for the story, I think readers will give your characterization more leeway, the same way you can start a plot with a coincidence but not resolve it that way.
•You can see in hindsight that the character was moving that way all along. Though if you can’t see it and the changbe is still believable and you can’t see it, that’s much more striking, of course.
•You’re incredibly talented. The better you can tell your story, the more plausible these remarkable events will become.
I’m not sure if I could pull off something like that boy’s story. But now that I think about it, it might be interesting to try sometime.