Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America ed. by David Alan Pargas

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America ed. by David Alan Pargas Aurélia Aubert Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America. Edited by David Alan Pargas. Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8130-5603-6. 330 pp., cloth. $90.00. Seminal works such as John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (1999) have defined the Underground Railroad along a South–North axis as slaves pursued freedom in the North or in British Canada. Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America sophisticates [End Page 79] our understanding of the geography of freedom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the push for the expansion of slavery especially after the Age of Revolutions, slaves pushed back, as Pargas puts it in his introduction, by “fleeing in every possible direction” (11). And as the eleven contributors to the volume show, the North and Canada were not the only places of freedom for runaway slaves. Even when enslaved men and women headed north, their search for freedom was more racially diverse and socially complicated than expected in the traditional narrative of the Underground Railroad. For instance, Roy E. Finkenbine explores how freedom-seekers passing through Ohio to reach Canada benefited from the cooperation of and, at times, sanctuary with Native Americans still present in Indian Country between 1795 and 1843. With Finkenbine’s work including Ohio tribes, the Underground Railroad becomes a “triracial enterprise.” Gordon Barker explains that when American slaves reached Canada, which had become a beacon of freedom especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, many African Americans experienced unanticipated levels of discrimination in Ontario, which even forced some to return to the United States. Yet, for many slaves, as a black Texan pointed out, “there wasn’t no reason to run up North” to be free. “All we had to do was to walk, but walk South” (234). Kyle Ainsworth, Mekala Audain, and James David Nichols turn the Underground Railroad southward to include Mexico on the mental map of freedom-seekers after President Vicente Guerrero abolished slavery in 1829. There, too, however, freedom was fragile. If American slaves could cross the border to Mexico, Nichols explains, so could slave catchers. In an innovative essay, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie expands overseas the borders of freedom flight, as he examines the Coastal Passage—the maritime domestic slave trade along the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf Coast. Kerr-Ritchie gives another example of how when bad weather occasionally forced American slave ships off course and near British-controlled Caribbean islands, American slaves seized the opportunity offered by free-soil policy. Slave flight, as Pargas puts it, “was truly a continental phenomenon” (11). Others did not cross international borders, reaching freedom in the heart of the slave South, either near plantations or in Southern cities. In urban areas, where runaways often tried to pass as free, or while hiding in the woods sometimes for years at a time, they were not legally free, but rather free in practice, even if it required constant vigilance. Pargas, Viola Franziska Müller, and Sylviane A. Diouf explain that some slaves chose to stay in the South, where their freedom was under constant threat, to remain close to their loved ones still in bondage. Between formal freedom and family, these runaways chose family. [End Page 80] Herein lies another contribution of this book, as it describes the different degrees of freedom that runaway slaves achieved. The contributors distinguish between places of formal freedom, such as Mexico and Canada, where slavery had been abolished and runaways could benefit from free-soil principle; places of semiformal freedom, such as the Northern states, where the Fugitive Slave Act posed the threat of extradition and reenslavement (although, as Matthew Pinsker argues, the act was all but a dead letter by the 1850s); and informal freedom in the South, where runaways had to carve out their autonomy regardless of the law. These differing degrees help us reconceptualize the geography of freedom in North America after the Age of Revolutions and remind us that slaves constantly redefined their freedom based on the surrounding legal regimes. While...