Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 by Damian Alan Pargas

Abstract

Pargas’ thoughtful new book is not quite what it seems. Its title notwithstanding, Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 is not a comprehensive new history of fugitivity from North American slavery. It does not attend to every variety of freedom seeking; military service with the British during the War of 1812 in return for postwar liberty is, for instance, noticeably absent. Nor does it assess the political significance of freedom seeking in the sectional crisis and the coming of the Civil War. Instead, Pargas has delivered something no less useful—a new and conceptually powerful spatial analysis of fugitivity. Taking a continental approach, Pargas delineates three spaces of freedom for African Americans seeking liberty from slavery: (1) spaces of informal freedom, (2) spaces of semiformal freedom, and (3) spaces of formal freedom.This differentiation is fresh yet wholly intuitive. Spaces of informal freedom were those locations within nineteenth-century slave states in which enslaved people could try to pass for free by disguising their identities and origins—urban centers like New Orleans and Baltimore, or maroon communities like those in Virginia and South Carolina. Spaces of semiformal freedom encompassed those states north of the Mason–Dixon line in which legislatures (or, occasionally, the judiciary) had begun the process of abolishing slavery. Fugitives from slavery arriving in these jurisdictions could live in de facto freedom, though the threat of capture and rendition under the terms of federal fugitive slave laws meant that that their liberty was fragile and potentially reversible. In contrast, the only reliable guarantees of formal freedom for fugitives from slavery existed beyond the borders of the antebellum United States, typically in British Canada and Mexico.Pargas’ tripartite territorial typology certainly has its limitations. The legal jeopardy of those who escaped slavery by manumission was more modest than that of those who simply took to their heels; the emancipatory experiences of these two groups should not be confused or collapsed. Likewise, in stark contrast to those who resettled in southern Ohio or southern Pennsylvania, fugitives who escaped to the most northerly regions of the free soil states—say, New England, Michigan, or Wisconsin—generally enjoyed robust protection from re-enslavement before the passage of Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Furthermore, Canada and Mexico achieved free-soil status only belatedly—Mexico in 1829 and Canada in a drawn-out process that was not complete until 1834—and quality of life for Black newcomers to these two legal sanctuaries varied enormously.Nonetheless, by imposing coherence on something that was, in his own estimation, “messy and exceedingly complicated,” Pargas provides scholars and students alike with a clear and usable set of tools to think about space, migration, and security (7). To do so, he musters an array of methods and approaches. On the one hand, Freedom Seekers is a legal and constitutional history of Black liberty in which statutes and court cases loom predictably large. On the other hand, it is also a human history attentive to motivation, opportunity, and contingency. Black actors from James Somerset to Margaret Morgan play prominent roles throughout; Pargas takes pains to remind readers that enslaved people were never passive passengers on the Underground Railroad. Quite the contrary. They were self-emancipators. They freed themselves.Freedom Seekers is never flashy. The language is generally flat; no one would ever mistake Pargas’ prose for poetry. Some of the terminology (for instance, slaves, masters, and runaways) is also unhelpful and outdated. Yet the analytical payload delivered between these covers is remarkable. Pargas’ book not only builds upon his 2018 edited volume about the same subject but also effectively synthesizes the profusion of recent work about practical abolition by Baumgartner, Harrold, Walker, Blackett, Churchill, and many others.1