Overview

This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different “spaces of freedom” that fugitive slaves inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. South, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Contributors use three main categories of freedom to compare and contrast various aspects of slave escape in the period between the revolutionary era and the U.S. Civil War. They investigate sites of formal freedom, regions in which slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free; sites of semiformal freedom, areas in which abolition laws conflicted with federal fugitive slave laws; and sites of informal freedom, places within the slaveholding South where runaways formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations. The essays discuss slaves' motivations for choosing these destinations, the social networks that supported their plans, what it was like to settle in their new societies, and how slave flight impacted broader debates about slavery. This volume redraws the map of escape and emancipation during this period, emphasizing the importance of place in defining the meaning and extent of freedom.

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9780813056036

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Reviews

""An original and complex rendering of the phenomenon of slave flight. . . . Makes an important contribution to the expanding conversation on American slavery.""--Journal of American History ""Moves the discussion of fugitive slaves forward by recognizing that their experiences were as varied as American slavery and should be consulted by scholars of North American slavery at all levels.""--Choice ""The well-researched and wide-ranging essays complicate our understanding of how, when, and where fugitive slaves throughout North America risked life and limb in search of freedom.""--H-Net ""A new primer for scholars searching to complicate the consistently dominant narrative of the Underground Railroad as a singular and secure pathway to racial liberation.""--Journal of Southern History

An original and complex rendering of the phenomenon of slave flight. . . . Makes an important contribution to the expanding conversation on American slavery. --Journal of American History Moves the discussion of fugitive slaves forward by recognizing that their experiences were as varied as American slavery and should be consulted by scholars of North American slavery at all levels. --Choice The well-researched and wide-ranging essays complicate our understanding of how, when, and where fugitive slaves throughout North America risked life and limb in search of freedom. --H-Net A new primer for scholars searching to complicate the consistently dominant narrative of the Underground Railroad as a singular and secure pathway to racial liberation. --Journal of Southern History Reveals compelling accounts of how freedom changed over time and space. . . . Encourages us to reconsider what advertisements reveal about the past. . . . Offer[s] the next generation of scholars a strong foundation upon which to stand. --Historian Sophisticates our understanding of the geography of freedom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. . . . A great contribution to the field, as it not only gathers the different directions that slaves took but also brings to light new ones. --Civil War History A stimulating collection. . . . The essays in this volume range from reevaluations of the historical literature about runaways to presentations of exciting new research. --North Carolina Historical Review Impressive. . . . A stellar volume that contains several important historiographic interventions and will spur additional research. --Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research

Author Information

Damian Alan Pargas is the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Professor of History and Culture of the United States and the Americas at Leiden University. He is the author of The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South and Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South.

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