Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America

Abstract

Running from Bondage by Karen Cook Bell examines the understudied subject of runaway female slaves during America's revolutionary era. The author begins this very good book with a series of questions around which she builds her argument: “How did Black women advance their own liberation during the Revolutionary Era? What regional variations and similarities existed in the flight of enslaved women … How does Black women's flight fit into the larger narrative of slave resistance?” (p. 17). Building upon the research of such scholars as Sylvia Frey and Gary Nash, Bell argues that Black women actively resisted enslavement by fleeing from owners and seeking permanent freedom for themselves and their children. Furthermore, she asserts, “it is imperative to see Black women as visible participants and self-determined figures” in the first wave of abolitionism that began during the American Revolution (p. 160). Relying on runaway advertisements as her key source, Bell organizes her book thematically and chronologically, beginning each chapter with an advertisement focused on a particular enslaved woman. Chapter 2, on prerevolutionary fugitive women, for instance, opens with a 1770 advertisement concerning a literate mulatto woman named Margaret. After disguising herself in men's clothing, Margaret escaped from Baltimore. The publication further explains that she “has been in Barbados, Antigua, the Grenades, Philadelphia” (p. 44). Viewing Margaret's story as “a microcosm of the lives of other fugitive women,” Bell then discusses how, within a rapidly changing Atlantic world, ideas of freedom led other Black women to acts of self-emancipation (p. 45).