Search Results

Traces the development of nonviolent theology in the fugitive slave narratives published by the abolitionist movement. The new genre of the “fugitive slave narrative” grew out of the creative encounter between escaped slaves and white abolitionists between 1836 and 1860. These texts – most famously the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass – made the practice of sentimental identification increasingly complex, as readers were asked to identify with the full humanity of former slaves. They also expressed a radical theology by asserting that slaves possessed the imago dei even before they were enslaved by human violence.

The bill signed by President Millard Fillmore in 1850 was designated an amendment supplementary to the act of 1793. Essentially, it expanded federal power over the interstate rendition of fugitive slaves at the expense of state power to intervene in the process. Thus, anyone taken into custody as a fugitive slave was cut off from the traditional legal resorts of an accused person. As for extralegal action, the new law made it more hazardous by increasing financial penalties and adding the threat of imprisonment. The law of 1850 never could have been passed except as part of a grand design of compromise at a time of national crisis. It was utterly one-sided, lending categorical federal protection to slavery while making no concession to the humanity of African Americans or to the humanitarian sensibilities of many white Americans.

Drawing from the exceptional stories of hundreds of Texas fugitive slaves, this chapter examines how runaways navigated the geography of slavery and freedom in that state in the antebellum period. It places Texas in the growing Atlantic historiography of runaway slaves, and considers the unique circumstances under which enslaved people fled in the southern borderlands. A new available digital resource, the Texas Runaway Slave Project, which features more than 1,800 documented escape attempts by Texas slaves, is the basis for this study. The chapter delves into the wealth of information available in newspaper metadata, analyzing the minutiae of runaway slave advertisements, including publication decisions, word choice, content repetition, and variation, in order to supplement traditional demographic analyses of fugitive slaves.

During a nineteen-year period after Beanland had finally been dismissed, more than half of the adult men at the plantation (at least thirteen out of 25 adult males) fled at least once. These fugitives fled, on average, on more than three separate occasions. Thus, the total number of flights was at least forty during the same period. Occasionally a fugitive voluntarily turned himself in to a well-disposed white man who he hoped would protect him from a brutal overseer. Flight was dangerous — one fugitive received buck shot in his thigh when he returned at night to fetch clothes for a comrade; sleeping out in the woods led more than once to serious illness. Recapture was normally punished by a severe whipping. Flight never, apparently, led to permanent escape. Yet it was the principal safety valve that gave Polk's slaves a vent for their discontent.

This chapter reexamines the legal and sometimes violent contest between antislavery and proslavery forces regarding enforcement of the federal fugitive slave code in the urban North. It argues that recent scholarship on this subject has made clearer that northern vigilance committees and abolitionists were remarkably successful in pursuing various legal and political strategies on the ground, even in cities with strong anti-black, proslavery sentiment and even after passage of the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Relying on personal liberty statutes, sympathetic juries, targeted mobbing, and a host of other tactics, the vigilance movement largely succeeded not only in frustrating slave catchers on northern territory but also in protecting their own operatives from violence and legal repercussions.

Slave flight in the antebellum South did not always coincide with the political geography of freedom. Indeed, spaces and places within the U.S. South attracted the largest number of fugitive slaves. From the forests that bordered plantation districts (where slaves remained hidden and maintained by local slave communities) to southern cities (where slaves attempted to pass for free blacks), a majority of fugitive slaves strove for freedom by disguising themselves within the slaveholding states rather than risk long-distance flight attempts to formally free territories such as the northern U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This chapter examines the experiences of fugitive slaves who fled to southern cities between 1800 and 1860. It touches upon themes such as the motivations for fleeing to urban areas (e.g., slave families dodging forced migration), the networks that facilitated such flight attempts, and the ways in which runaway slaves navigated sites of “informal freedom” after arrival in urban areas. Whereas some scholars have approached this group of runaways mainly as “absentees” or “truants” (temporary runaways), this chapter argues that throughout the South, many fugitive slaves who hid out in towns and cities were in fact permanent refugees from slavery—at least by intent, and often by outcome.

In the mid-1850s, Texas slaveholders estimated that some 4,000 fugitive slaves had escaped south to Mexico. This chapter broadly examines the process in which runaway slaves from Texas escaped to Mexico. Specifically, it explores how they learned about freedom south of the border, the types of supplies they gathered for their escape attempts, and the ways in which Texas’s vast landscape shaped their experiences. It argues that the routes that led fugitive slaves to freedom in Mexico were a part of a precarious southern Underground Railroad, but one that operated in the absence of formal networks or a well-organized abolitionist movement. The chapter centers on fugitive slaves’ efforts toward self-emancipation and navigate contested spaces of slavery and freedom with little assistance and under difficult conditions. It sheds new light on the history of runaway slaves by examining the ways in which American westward expansion and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands shaped the fugitive slave experience in the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines how black Bay Staters in the 1850s strove to claim “manhood” and “citizenship” by representing themselves and their ancestors as agents in history. This endeavor was especially pressing after 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act made African Americans vulnerable to slave catchers, even on the professedly free ground of the North. In this context, Crispus Attucks, who had largely been forgotten in early national commemorations of the Revolutionary War, assumed his place as black America's finest example of patriotism and heroism. The leading figure in the effort to recover the agency of Attucks and other black patriots was William Cooper Nell, an abolitionist, integrationist, and historian who published The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in 1855. This chapter interprets the revival of interest in black Revolutionary heroism in the context of the struggle for African American civil rights in Massachusetts, with particular attention to the effort to allow black men to serve in the militia.

This chapter examines how the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law politicized the fugitive slave issue on a national scale. With the sectional conflict increasing, and the fugitive slave issue at the heart of compromises designed to resolve it, local newspapers began covering fugitive slave cases extensively, creating a new body of evidence just as the local Underground Railroad was becoming more secretive due to legal liabilities. Fugitive slave cases that previously would have only received limited local attention now might be publicized across the North and South. In Congress, Representative Thaddeus Stevens and Senator James Cooper gave important speeches on the Compromise. In southern Pennsylvania, this process as well as the 1840s legal struggle over fugitive slaves culminated in the Christiana riot and the resulting treason trials of William Parker and Christian Hanway, which helped unseat a sitting governor and almost caused sectional rupture.

This chapter explores the meaning of fugitive slave freedom in Canada West during the antebellum and Civil War era by examining the legal framework relating to slavery and race that emerged in what is now modern-day Ontario. Changes in statutory law, jurisprudence, and British free soil diplomacy will be addressed, revealing the evolution of Canada West as a safe haven from which few fugitive slaves were taken by slave catchers or state-sanctioned extradition. The chapter discusses what freedom on the ground meant for early black Canadians in terms of political rights, access to courts, education, landownership, employment, religious worship, participation in the militia, and the enjoyment of public places and services. Particular attention is given to the agency exercised by fugitive slave refugees and other black Canadians in shaping their own freedom and building new lives for themselves and their children, in sustaining Canada West as a beacon of freedom for others still enslaved in the American South, and in combatting race prejudice, which at times differed little from that prevailing south of the border.

From the establishment of the Greenville Treaty Line in 1795 to Wyandot removal in 1843, northwest Ohio constituted a “land apart” from the waves of white settlement that overwhelmed the eastern part of the Old Northwest. Native Americans—primarily Shawnee, Ottawa, and Wyandot—constituted the dominant population there, in what was often referred to as “Indian Country.” This region lay astride the primary northbound routes traversed by fugitive slaves from Kentucky, western Virginia, and beyond, heading to Canada via the Detroit River borderland or the western half of Lake Erie, and freedom seekers were frequently assisted by Native Americans. This chapter explores two regions in particular. One is the stretch of Ottawa villages along the Maumee River, where runaways were welcomed and protected, then taken to Fort Malden, Upper Canada, each year when Ottawa warriors went to receive their annual payment of goods for fighting on the British side during the War of 1812. The other is the Wyandot Grand Reserve at Upper Sandusky, which sponsored a maroon village of fugitive slaves called Negro Town for four decades. These two case studies serve as a point of departure for arguing that “Indian Country” was a unique space of freedom.

As antebellum Virginia became the main point of departure for the domestic slave trade and enslaved people increasingly ran the risk of being sold and deported to the Deep South, the free black population of Richmond, Virginia, was substantially augmented by an influx of fugitive slaves from the surrounding countryside who attempted to escape slavery by illegally passing themselves off as free. At the same time, the city became an important industrial site, stimulating an incessant demand for factory workers (both men and women) and domestic servants in the households of the growing white merchant class, thereby significantly expanding employment opportunities for black residents. These developments provided opportunities for slave refugees to hide amongst the free black population, pass for free, and find work in the booming labor markets of the city. Following up on the previous chapter, this chapter zooms in on a specific case study and focuses on the residential and economic integration of slave refugees in the Antebellum South, the interdependence of free blacks and fugitive slaves, and the intermingling of the lower classes within the bustling urban environment of Virginia’s capital city. Drawing from police registers, runaway slave ads, and court documents—all of which reveal illuminating details about the lives of runaway slaves and their interactions with the free black population—it reveals how fugitive slaves navigated an informal freedom in ways similar to the migration experiences of today’s illegal immigrants.

Like other slave-owning societies, Romans were extremely anxious about slaves illegally escaping their condition. This fear is evident in their laws and literature, and derived from Roman social norms and expectations. Fugitive slaves undermined the new imperial order established by Augustus, and blurred the dichotomy between slaves and free people. The Roman state expended considerable energy into stopping slave flight, with an unusually high level of coordination between different levels of government and police authority (emperors, senate, governors, local magistrates, landowners, civilian police, public slaves, harbour guards, out-posted soldiers). The main legal source for this assertion, Digesta 11.4, is tested against other types of evidence (papyri, Latin novels, the Saepinum inscription).

This chapter examines the attempt of antislavery activists to contest the fugitive slave issue legally in Pennsylvania's courts. If Pennsylvania judges could be induced to rule for fugitive slaves in doubtful cases, then perhaps the flow of fugitives reclaimed could be stemmed, and the price of recovery could be driven too high for Southerners. Southerners would quickly respond by bringing their own legal cases against those who helped fugitive slaves; this chapter examines three notable local cases and also applies scientist Garrett Hardin's “tragedy of the commons” concept to why Southern slaveholders continued to recover their slaves from south central Pennsylvania even when such action would likely make it very difficult for subsequent slaveholders to do so. Pennsylvania's personal liberty laws restricting the recovery of fugitive slaves would also irritate Southern slaveholders until the Civil War, and contribute significantly to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.

This chapter explores the impact of a series of fugitive slave cases in southeastern Pennsylvania in the wake of the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. It also explores the role of the area's black communities as they organized to defend the fugitives in their midst. Such actions exacerbated political tension in the state as well as increased conflict between Pennsylvania and the slaveholding states to the south. What happened in this area of Pennsylvania was also played out in other sections of the North.

This chapter goes into detail about the border environment, south central Pennsylvania's ties to the South, and the various communities which made it up. Early fugitive slave cases are discussed, as are routes and participants in the area's Underground Railroad (such as William Wright's family). Fugitive slave ads in Gettysburg newspaper are used for evidence, as are local court records. It shows how that in the border North (border Pennsylvania), community social and economic ties with the South could complicate taking a strong stand on slavery or fugitive slaves.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, a woman who disliked confrontations, who rode over unpleasantness with optimistic goodwill and turned aside anger with humor, found herself, as public opinion brewed over the Fugitive Slave Law, consumed with a rage unlike anything she had ever experienced. Her intense feelings were the more oppressive for having no outlet. Men made the laws and shaped the public opinion of the land, and women who found themselves morally repelled by their work had little recourse. Women engaged in rather extraordinary acts of civil disobedience, provoked by laws that they themselves had had no part in making. As the temperance crusade moved from the podium to the ballot box with the passage of the first legal constraint on the liquor trade, the “Maine Law” of 1851, women who had been active in temperance societies keenly felt their disfranchisement.