Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America

Abstract

<italic>Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America</italic> examines and contrasts the experiences of various groups of African-American slaves who tried to escape bondage between the revolutionary era and the U.S. Civil War. Whereas much of the existing scholarship tends to focus on fugitive slaves in very localized settings (especially in communities and regions north of the Mason-Dixon line), the eleven contributions in this volume bring together the latest scholarship on runaway slaves in a diverse range of geographic settings throughout North America—from Canada to Virginia and from Mexico to the British Bahamas—providing a broader and more continental perspective on slave refugee migration. The volume innovatively distinguishes between various “spaces of freedom” to which runaway slaves fled, specifically sites of <italic>formal freedom</italic> (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished and refugees were legally free, even if the meanings of freedom in these places were heavily contested); <italic>semi-formal freedom</italic> (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished but asylum for runaway slaves was either denied or contested, such as the northern U.S., where state abolition laws were curtailed by federal fugitive slave laws); and <italic>informal freedom</italic> (places within the slaveholding South where runaways formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations and pass for free). This edited volume encourages scholars to reroute and reconceptualize the geography of slavery and freedom in antebellum North America.