Overview

In Pursuit of Freedom is a pioneering study of advertisements for fugitive slaves published in the early American South. Recovering, reconstructing, and reimagining stories that fugitive slaves compelled enslavers to advertise in print when they fled, the book unearths articulations of agency and expressions of resistance by enslaved persons. Drawing on a database of nearly six thousand advertisements, Wallace challenges the historiographical tendency to interpret escape as a rebellious response to the conditions of enslavement by emphasizing the agency behind freedom-seekers’ decision to escape. In Pursuit of Freedom explores the complexities of fugitivity—a phenomenon that Wallace defines as a “transitionary moment” in a wider freedom struggle as fugitive slaves distanced themselves, physically and psychologically, from bondage—in the Upper South (Maryland) and Lower South (Georgia). In so doing, Wallace illuminates what fugitive slave advertisements can tell us about slavery in those regions, the lives of those who fled, and the actions of the enslaved in the early American republic.

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9780820375489

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Reviews

Wallace's in-depth analysis of fugitive slave ads in Georgia and Maryland in the early national period offers new insights into what actions prompted those ads, as well as what political impact the actions of the enslaved had on the system of slavery. -- Richard J. M. Blackett * author of Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle *

Wallace's in-depth analysis of fugitive slave ads in Georgia and Maryland in the early national period offers new insights into what actions prompted those ads, as well as what political impact the actions of the enslaved had on the system of slavery. -- Richard J. M. Blackett * author of Samuel Ringgold Ward: A Life of Struggle * Wallace's history of freedom seekers in Maryland and Georgia broadens our understanding of fugitivity in the early Republic. In its quantitative and qualitative analysis of enslaved African Americans who protested slavery with their feet between 1790 and 1810, In Pursuit of Freedom makes an important contribution to scholarship whilst bridging the divide that exists between Lathan A. Windley and Gerald W. Mullin's seminal studies and John Hope Franklin and Schweninger's examination of resistance and agency in antebellum America. -- Antonio T. Bly * author of Escaping Bondage: A Documentary History of Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century New England, 1700-1789 *

Author Information

SHAUN R. C. WALLACE is a senior lecturer in U.S. history at the University of Bristol. His research on fugitive slaves in Georgia and Maryland included the creation of the Fugitive Slave Database, a unique digital archive preserving one of the largest collections of fugitive slave advertisements published between 1790 and 1810.

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