At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, & Shifting Identities in Washington, D. C. by Tamika Y. Nunley

Abstract

Reviewed by: At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, & Shifting Identities in Washington, D. C. by Tamika Y. Nunley Terri L. Snyder (bio) Washington DC, Slavery, Black women, African Americans, Fugitive slaves, Freedom At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, & Shifting Identities in Washington, D. C. By Tamika Y. Nunley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 254. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95; ebook $22.99.) Tamika Y. Nunley's powerful new study, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C., is the first comprehensive history of Black women in the nation's capital. The book analyzes the struggles of enslaved, fugitive, free, and refugee women to pursue strategies for liberation from the turn of the nineteenth century through the tumultuous years of the Civil War. As women strived for a never-certain liberty, they articulated their own epistemologies of freedom and a radical vision of equality and citizenship. Each chapter of At the Threshold of Liberty examines one of the institutions that Black women and girls encountered in their struggles for liberty in the District of Columbia—slavery, fugitivity, courts, schools, streets, and the government. This might suggest a topical approach, but chronology is fundamental to Nunley's history. The book begins in 1800, when the majority of African Americans in the District were enslaved, and traces the rise of Washington as an entrepôt of the domestic slave trade. It concludes in the 1860s, when the nation's capital had been radically altered by the expansion of its free Black population, abolitionism, emancipation, sectional strife, and the confluence of its Black community, Black refugees, and Union soldiers during the Civil War. Nunley analyzes the lives of Black women in the broader context of the contradictions of early Washington as the capital of a slaveholding republic. D.C. was a thorny nexus of possibilities for Black women to navigate, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free. Black women labored in the District, engaged in fugitivity, challenged their enslavement in courts, forged community networks and support groups, and fashioned their own economies. D.C.'s Black Codes and courts sought to control the Black population. Strict documentation of free status was required, and the criminal justice system targeted African Americans who assembled for leisure, socializing, and politics. Meanwhile the courts eliminated hearsay as evidence for freedom suits, and proslavery and antislavery mobs clashed repeatedly over high-profile fugitives, escape attempts, and the formation of schools for Black girls. Thus, whether enslaved or free, [End Page 300] Black women and girls in the District were subjected to multiple forms of surveillance, threats of violence, and legal reprisals. Nunley relies on a range of sources, including runaway advertisements and newspaper accounts, abolitionist records, court cases, African American memoirs and letters, and she demonstrates how Black Washingtonians, and Black women in particular, built institutions that laid the groundwork for African American liberation. Three conceptual innovations structure At the Threshold of Liberty: navigation, self-definition, and improvisation. For Nunley, the idea of resistance is too reductive to effectively capture the subjectivities of Black women in early D.C. Instead, she examines how women navigated the conditions of slavery, fugitivity, freedom, and refuge to assert, if not reinvent, themselves. The experiences of cooks, runaways, petitioners for freedom, schoolgirls, prostitutes, schoolteachers, and war refugees can be brought together through this framework in which asserting a name, running away, or pursing an education can all be seen as aspirational ends toward self-definition as liberty. Whatever their aspirations, however, women and girls faced barriers that required them to be improvisational in pursuit of the lives that they sought to create. In addition to its scope, context, and conceptualization, At the Threshold of Liberty has other exceptional features. Some shards of evidence are stubbornly opaque. In other instances, Nunley uses them to great advantage, such as her treatment of the account of Jane Johnson drawn from William Still's The Underground Railroad (1872). Legally knowledgeable of the possibility that jurisdictional change could lead to freedom, Johnson, aided by Black abolitionists in Philadelphia, sought freedom from her enslaver. Johnson lost her court battle in D.C., surrounded by the...