This book should be required reading in school. Heartbreaking yet eye opening. This really shows the strength of one man. Such a brilliant read. Obviously, well researched.

This was such a surprise! I stumbled into it and was granted an ARC of this from NetGalley. So glad. The story was intense and enlightening. One of the better Civil War era books I’ve read. Will recommend to friends for certain. The story of Josiah Henson was very deserving of this work.

When I left the movie theater after watching "The Passion of the Christ" I thought it was the most graphic and most realistic portrayal I had ever seen. Then I wondered but was it really worse then the movie? As I read The Road to Dawn I knew it was the most graphic book I have read about slavery in the US but I also wondered if it was really far worse.
The treatment of Josiah Henson and his family was abominable. It was forty years of dehumanizing treatment from his birth to his freedom in Canada. I wondered what my attitude would have been and how I would have treated Josiah and others. The thought that my family tree took root in the North gave me hope that I would have been against slavery and would have treated him as a fellow human. However, that thought did not remove the shame I felt as a citizen of a country that allowed this institution and even made it illegal to help a runaway slave.
This book is a powerful expose' on slavery and the guilt we bear. Following the example of the prophet Nehemiah we need to confess the sins of our forbears, even if we would have acted differently.
This book is also a reminder of the power of a word from God. I believe the Bible is the word of God and its power was shown in a message that Josiah heard. A message he was able repeat twenty years later when he gave an account of his conversion.
Unfortunately Jared Brock also shows the flaws of Christian people who seek to build their own kingdom at the expense of the Kingdom of God. There was fighting between Christian groups about who got to claim the school and one of the early supporters of Josiah Henson and his projects used the vision of Josiah to support himself and his family.
Even with all the stuff going on the story of Josiah was picked up by a writer named Harriet Beecher Stowe and became the basis for Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that changed the US.

Very interesting book! Highly recommend this read. Josiah Henson was the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. His story is shared in vivid detail and although it can be difficult to read, it is most timely. Thank you, #NetGalley, for the opportunity to read it!

Thank you to Perseus Books, Public Affairs and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
I have always been interested in the slavery and civil war era. I am a Canadian and enjoyed reading about the events that took place very close to where I currently live. In the past I have mostly read books dealing with the American side of this time period so it was very informative to see how Canada played a role. Would definitely recommend this book to any one who wants a more global view of this time in history.

This Biography of Josiah Henson, a man who proved the ideal to pattern her hero in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, takes up where that classic leaves off. Josiah, though not able to read or write until he was an adult, managed to enhance the lives of nearly everyone he met. He managed the marketing and the fields for his owner for years, and once he and his family escaped and made their way to Canada he took that innate intelligence and used it to help other blacks make the transition into an independent life. I love that he was able to do the World's Fair in London, and travel all over the US and Canada preaching his common-sense approach to surviving as independent, self reliant persons in a world of whites. I especially loved the school at Dawn. Think what this man could have achieved if he had been allowed an education!

This is a book I will treasure, and will keep in my research shelf. Jared A. Brock is an author I will follow.

I received a free electronic copy of this biography from Netgalley, Jared A. Brock, and Perseus Books, PublicAffairs, in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.

"The Road to Dawn" is a biography about Josiah Henson, who lived from 1789 to 1883. He was born a slave in Maryland and remained a slave for 41 years. In real danger of being sold to a brutal master in the Deep South, he ran away to Canada with his wife and four young children. This was before the Underground Railroad, so he had to forge his own way north with occasional help from kindly strangers. As a preacher concerned for his fellow ex-slaves, Josiah raised money and convinced other ex-slaves to build a town (Dawn) with a school (British American Institute) to help former slaves build a new, prosperous life. He created a successful farm out of wilderness, preached a circuit, encouraged the town's development, raised funds for the school, dictated a popular memoir, and told many famous people (including Harriet Beecher Stowe) his story and about the horrors of slavery.

The author used Josiah Henson's memoirs, newspaper articles, lawsuit records, and such to find details about his life. In addition to talking about Josiah's time as a slave, the author included stories about how cruel slavery could be in general. Even once free, Josiah had a hard life as people who resented his influence and his methods of helping others repeatedly tried to ruin his reputation. The author focused on Josiah's fundraising tours and the battles waged over who got to run the British American Institute--which Josiah never did, though he raised funds for it.

The author also talked about Harriet Beecher Stowe's books and the Civil War. Though Stowe loosely modeled Uncle Tom on Josiah Henson, Josiah's life was different than the character's in many ways. I realized this, but I also had expected an inspirational story. Instead, the first part was hard to read because the author wanted to paint a vivid, graphic picture of the torture slaves sometimes endured. The second part was just depressing. Rather than focusing on all the good done, it focused on a good man being torn down while giving his all to help others. Overall, I'd recommend this book, but just realize that the whole thing is a sad story.

Josiah Hensen, a man every Canadian should know about!

This book is about the real life of Josiah Henson, a former slave, who was made famous by Harriet Beecher Stowe's infamous Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book which was influential in provoking anti-slavery anger in the northern United States and Britain against the American South. Josiah Hensen is the inspiration behind the character of Uncle Tom, and many people called him Uncle Tom throughout his life, though this book makes it clear that he is not Uncle Tom, but his own person with his own name and unique story.

This book "The Road to Dawn" can be broken up into a a couple parts. The first part introduces the culture that Josiah was born into as a child of African slaves in Maryland, and follows Josiah as he grows up a slave and what leads him to eventually escape for freedom in Canada. The second part gives a detailed history of Josiah in Canada as a Fugitive Slave and Free Man and what he did with the rest of his long life.

I enjoyed the first part of the book the most as it was fast-paced and somewhat exciting. The author gave an eye-opening and bare-bones look at the slave culture in America prior to the Civil War. It points out how the blacks were oppressed not only physically, and emotionally but mentally and psychologically as well.
The author shows this particularly well by writing this;
"Slave owners discouraged the recording of the birthdates of the slaves, because one of the most effective tools of slave oppression was ignorance. A slave with knowledge of the wider world is a slave who can cause problems. A slave with a memory of the past and vision of the future is dangerous."
I appreciate the thoughtful look as Josiah wrestled with his conscience over whether to escape or not, showing how the ingrained cultural thinking and Christianity of the day influenced his thoughts and actions, as shown by this the author here:
"On one hand, for a slave in his relatively privileged and powerful position, it was an entirely rational choice to 'get along' and make the best of his situation until he could legally change it. On the other hand, he knew slavery was fundamentally evil and should be abolished. Josiah weighed the benefits of accepting his slave status and working within the system to improve his family's lot versus the risks of actively resisting. It was not an easy choice."

The second part after he escaped to Canada was harder for me to read through, as there was a lot of politics and whatnot as Josiah endeavored to build up a community called Dawn in Canada, that would help educate others that had escaped to freedom. I was glad that I did read through it all and am impressed by the author as he certainly did his homework! He was able to show that it wasn't an easy road to start living free, by any stretch and there was lots of opposition and betrayals, peppered with faithful support and admiration. Josiah's life was no fairy-tale, there wasn't a Happily Ever After once he reached freedom. He experience a great amount of heartbreak and toil for naught--He never achieved what he had envisioned Dawn to be for his people. However, as we read through his life story we see that he used his freedom well as he had promised he would.

He left a lasting and impressive legacy, one of honor, kindness, generosity and selflessness, that begs us to pick up where he left off!

In all I would rate this book 3.5 stars as I enjoyed the content and the history and learning about Josiah, however found the latter half of the book to be rather bogged down, confusing and hard to read at times. I do hope that Josiah Hensen becomes a nationally known name, and that his story is taught to our children in schools across Canada.

I never realized how much I didn't know about Uncle Tom's Cabin until I read Jared Brock's book The Road to Dawn. To think that I grew up in such a historical area and yet the schools I attended ignored it. It makes me somewhat angry to have that part of history, especially in the town I grew up in, overlooked merely because of a person's skin colour. But Brock did an incredible job of tracing the life story of Josiah Henson (known as Uncle Tom) and managed to keep me riveted to the very end.

Josiah Henson was an incredible man trapped in slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe based her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, on him. His escape from slavery, along with his devotion to God, shaped the rest of his life as he worked to abolish slavery.

Brock has done an extensive job retracing Josiah's history. I commend him for the obvious long hours of research he put into this book. It shows. Amazingly, in the 21st century, we are still dealing with slavery in many parts of the world. We need a book like this. It needs to be part of our high school curriculum. It should be mandatory. This is one book you need to read.