Slavery and the Enslaved at the Frontiers of Freedom

Abstract

Slavery and the Enslaved at the Frontiers of Freedom Joshua D. Rothman (bio) Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 2020. 365 pp. Maps, notes, and index. $32.00. William G. Thomas III, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 418 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $35.00. It might be tempting to dismiss The 1776 Report, published in January 2021 by the "President's Advisory 1776 Commission," as one among many desperate efforts by hangers-on to cling to relevance as the Trump administration came to its miserable end. Purporting its "intention of cultivating a better education among Americans in the principles and history of our nation," the 1776 Commission, formed just a month prior to releasing its report, included almost no professional historians at all, and none trained in the history of the United States. Its assessment of the American past is not a serious and considered analysis so much as it is a paean to a supposedly "exemplary nation" committed to "universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent." Explicit in its desire for "patriotic education," the report's ostensible commitment to "the facts of our founding" is a thin and unconvincing disguise for simplistic nationalist propaganda.1 Yet even the clumsiest propaganda can have power. That is especially so when it comes tethered to a political movement with millions of adherents determined to use an understanding of the past like that advanced in The 1776 Report as a cudgel to bury central elements of the American experience. Most particularly, the efforts of the 1776 Commission are intended as a retort to "The 1619 Project." Launched by The New York Times in 2019, that project posits the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia as a metaphorical national founding and asks us to imagine an American history that puts racial slavery and its aftermath at the narrative center. But the authors of The 1776 Report, like their ideological accomplices launching assaults on the alleged teaching of "Critical Race Theory," would instead have Americans believe that [End Page 40] the institution of slavery, the imposition of disfranchisement and segregation, and racism itself were merely "challenges to America's principles" rather than fundamental constituent elements of the history of the United States.2 The contentions made in The 1776 Report with regard to American slavery will be familiar to anyone masochistic enough to follow what passes for historical debate in most corners of social media. The Report maintains that slavery was not a uniquely American institution, that most of America's founders saw slavery as unfortunate and hoped for its abolition, that the Constitution made compromises with slavery but was ultimately an antislavery document that laid the groundwork for slavery's destruction, and that the United States was a leader among western countries in bringing slavery to an end. Alternately irrelevant, questionable, or outright false, this series of dodges also sees far greater significance in the dithering, bargaining, and arguing among white Americans than in the lives of enslaved people whose numbers increased more than sixfold between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The work historians do in classrooms and archives may sometimes feel inadequate to the task of combatting the distortions and denials of America's racial past and present. But they are the best tools at our disposal, and ceding the field is not a viable option. Fortunately, we continue to see an outpouring of scholarship demonstrating the wrenching ambiguity of the nation's founding principles. Equally important, we see the impact that ambiguity had on Black Americans who struggled to overcome enslavement, who laid claim to the freedom that the United States proclaimed as universal but provided as racially particular, and who sometimes found ways to seize that freedom when they were refused it, profoundly altering the nation's course in the process. In A Question of Freedom, William Thomas III examines hundreds of legal actions taken by enslaved families in pursuit of their own liberation, focusing especially on freedom...