Fugitive Slave Research Articles

역사, 인종, 젠더와 ‘쌍안경 비전’ - 데이비드 브래들리의 『체니스빌 사건』

David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident deals with how John Washington, a black male historian, excavates five generations of his family's history and restores the histories of his family and black Americans buried by dominant narratives. This paper first examines the resistance narratives of John's ancestors that he discovers through 'counter-memories' such as Old Jack's storytelling and the records kept by his father and great-grandfather. It then examines how John, frustrated by the limitations of Western historical methodology, uses historical imagination and African notions of death to uncover his father’s suicide as well as the deaths of his great-grandfather and fugitive slaves. Thus it is revealed that employing both oppositional epistemologies leads John to confront the truth of his family history. Furthermore, the paper explores how John's hatred of whites and women begins to unravel as he unearths his family history and begins to move away from fixed ideas about race and gender. Through John's transformation, Bradley suggests a shift in perception that does not favor either of the opposing perspectives, but rather connects the dots between them, as an attitude which American society should seek for in the post-civil rights era when racial tensions still persist.

Dénètem Touam Bona, Fugitive, where are you running?

Fugitive, Where are you Running? is a collection of essays, most of which were previously published in French, by writer, philosopher and curator Dénètem Touam Bona. The author's inclination to straddle geographic and conceptual lines is reflected in the scope, exuberance and poetic verve of the volume. The first three chapters ('Return of the Maroni', 'The Art of the Fugue', 'Manhunt') lay the conceptual foundation by foregrounding categories of marronage, fugitivity and fugue. The fugitive slave is presented as the figure that haunts the establishment of capitalist modernity and the only possible 'line of flight' from it. The fugue is the art of subtle evasion from the prisons of racialised capitalism and an alternative to the triumphalist politics of armed liberation struggles. Touam Bona proposes an impressionistic, rhapsodic and allegorical travel through the various incarnations of the maroon community - with its spontaneous and horizontal modes of organisation and accretion - and capitalism's death drive to surveil and suppress them. The following two chapters track the iterations and repression of fugitivity in the present, by engaging with technologies of migrant surveillance at the border ('Heroic Land', which mixes critique and fiction) and the space of Mayotte, a French department in the heart of the Indian Ocean, increasingly securitised and excised from the histories of flux that characterise this region ('The Impossibility of an Island'). The sixth chapter ('Cosmo-poetics of the Refuge') returns to the book's central theme of the maroon rebellion, connecting it to Afro-diasporic spirituality and performance. The final extended chapter ('Liana Dreaming') turns to environmental concerns, by foregrounding the figure of the liana as the point of resistance to colonial penetration and weapon of maroon resistance. In Caribbean cultures, the liana and the vine bring together collective bodies and communities. Against colonial tropes of taming, erasure and penetration, the power of the forest itself generates plant-induced visions of unsubmission.

Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South

Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South

The Lost President: A.D. Smith and the Hidden History of Radical Democracy in Civil War America

At the very outset of her deceptively titled book, Ruth Dunley admits that the subject of her biography, A.D. Smith, is a person of “secondary historical importance." Even so, she is drawn to him by the mystery involved in attempting to uncover his life story. Her journey of discovery, recounted in The Lost President, is a long and challenging one. Her persistence in pursuit of that story is impressive and unyielding. In the end, Dunley succeeds in uncovering a life dedicated to republicanism as a would-be president of Canada, a judge who declared the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional, and a tax commissioner in the Sea Islands of South Carolina who sought to give land to former slaves during the Civil War. Throughout, Smith, argues Dunley, was a representative man of the Jacksonian era. He was moved by its vision of the possible and subject to its many contradictions. But, above all, he was a radical Democrat, committed to the principles of majority rule and opposed to the empowerment of the few.

Covert cultivars and clandestine communities: rice and the making of an Afrodescendant peasantry in Maranhão, Brazil

ABSTRACT Rice is a keystone crop of the peasant farming system of Maranhão, Brazil. Its origins can be traced to the food fields of fugitive slave communities that proliferated throughout the Amazonic frontier during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maranhão was the setting for a rice plantation economy, which knowingly exploited enslaved West African rice growers. Plantation runaways carried rice to maroon (quilombo) communities where the esteemed dietary staple was planted. Oral histories commemorate the role of enslaved African and Afrodescendant women in quilombo rice transfers and the subsistence practices that shaped the rice-based peasant farming systems of the African Diaspora.

Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South by Viola Franziska Müller (review)

Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South by Viola Franziska Müller (review)

The Golden State’s Veiled Dichotomy

Abstract Visions of the West and specifically California as a free domain captivated many Americans leading up to, during, and after the Gold Rush. This perception was a myth that did not mesh with the reality of the blatant slavery and racism that existed there. This dichotomy remained largely veiled since then, only to resurface as recent scholarship revealed that California was not a shining beacon of virtuousness in the mid-nineteenth century. This article explores the impact of California’s overt tolerance for racism and slavery during its formative years of statehood. The legislated but unjust denial of civil rights to the state’s Black community also impacted its Chinese, Californios, and Indigenous peoples, with the latter group enduring horrific genocide. Their collective struggle for equality in a free state remained entangled in a web of statewide bigotry and White dominance that permeated all three branches of the state government. Interwoven with such inconsistencies is the scandalous development of San Quentin prison, a financial sieve that facilitated the slaveholding lessee’s largely unreported for-profit kidnapping and sale of two Black inmates (one a slave and the other a freeman) in 1855. The active racism, the cases of free and fugitive slaves being returned to their owners under the state’s own unique fugitive slave law, and the abduction of these two Black prisoners echo similar behaviors in slave states. They lay bare the myth of a free California that was, on the contrary, connected to the national slavery conundrum and was not the glowing outpost of freedom often described then in the eastern press and still believed by many, even today. Suffice it to say that the origins of the current reparations movement for California’s eligible Blacks can be traced to the mid-1850s history of California.

CLASSICAL DIFFUSION

At Howard University, the only historically Black university in the United States with a Classics department, campus leaders decided in 2021 to eliminate that department after a three-year review of its academic programs. The response was vehement and swift, with students, faculty, and alumni condemning the decision as a case of administrative overreach. The philosopher Cornel West described the divestment from the Classics curriculum as a ‘spiritual catastrophe’ for the institution. Few missed the irony that Toni Morrison, one of Howard's most celebrated alumni, studied with Frank Snowden, Jr., a renowned professor of Classics, and received a ‘minor’ in that field as an undergraduate; or that the central inspiration for Morrison's Beloved was a fugitive slave woman named Margaret Garner who became known as ‘the modern Medea’ for having decided (in 1856, in flight from her master's agents) that it was better to kill her children than see them returned to enslavement in the American South. Others would point to the long tradition of transformational Black thinkers who admit to having been inspired by the classics, including Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fugitive Slave Renditions and the Proslavery Crisis of Confidence in Federalism, 1850–1860

Fugitive Slave Renditions and the Proslavery Crisis of Confidence in Federalism, 1850–1860

Ear Training for History: Listening to Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Double-Voiced Aesthetics

Bend your ear to Saturday, 23 July 1853. On that morning, America's first Black concert vocalist and operatic singer, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, performed at Stafford House, home of prominent English Abolitionist the Duchess of Sutherland, during her UK tour. Born into captivity on a plantation in Mississippi and raised free in Philadelphia, Taylor Greenfield's voice sounded out the fever pitch of America's conflict over slavery. A multioctave singer, she smashed boundaries for race and gender as a Black woman who sang “white” vocal repertoire across registers heard as both female and male. Writing on an early public performance in 1851, one newspaper reviewer summed up the revolutionary threat of Taylor Greenfield's voice by stating “we can assure the public that the Union is in no degree periled by it,” meaning of course, that the Union was. Whether received by pro- or antislavery audiences, Taylor Greenfield's voice was understood to peal out Black emancipation. In his 1855 review of Taylor Greenfield's New York Tabernacle performance, James McCune Smith went as far to compare Taylor Greenfield's voice to the firearms employed by escaped slaves defending their freedom against the Fugitive Slave Act.

Stephen E. Young. Our Brother Beloved: Purpose and Community in Paul’s Letter to Philemon

Stephen E. Young. <i>Our Brother Beloved: Purpose and Community in Paul’s Letter to Philemon</i>

On Psyche and Psychology: A Reflection

The story of Cupid &amp; Psyche in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses has long been valued for its literary qualities and philosophical implications. This study sets the story in the slave-owning culture to which it originally belonged. It pays special attention to the portrayal of Psyche as a runaway slave, and examines this construct through reference to the extensive body of Roman law that governed the treatment of fugitive slaves in real life. To support the story’s documentary potential, a comparison is drawn with a modern classic story of escape from servitude, Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

The “Indians of Palmares”: Conquest, Insurrection, and Land in Northeast Brazil

Abstract This article examines a group that has received little scholarly attention: the Indigenous people of Palmares, the site of one of history's largest fugitive slave communities, defeated by the Portuguese in 1695. What studies do exist emphasize origins: Did Indigenous people help build the fugitive settlements of Palmares? I instead focus on the post-1695 period, when competing actors sought land in the interior regions that the settlements once occupied. Shaped by displacement and diaspora, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some Indigenous people rebelled, while others referenced their role as conquerors of Palmares to make land claims. Though discursive representations of Indigenous roles as conquerors rarely prevented material dispossession, the communities persisted despite remarkable challenges. Their trajectories indicate new ways to think about Palmares and Indigenous history and provide suggestive points of comparison with Spanish America and better-known examples from the Age of Revolution.

A Right to Speak: Formerly Enslaved People and the Political Antislavery Movement in Antebellum America

By running away, fugitive slaves have long been recognized as important figures in exacerbating sectional tensions and sparking the Civil War. But the political impact of runaway and formerly enslaved people extended well beyond their absconding. This essay explores how their lives in and escapes from slavery powerfully influenced the growth of formal antislavery politics. Fugitive and former slaves, along with their white political allies, used their experiences of enslavement to build political opposition to slavery. Formerly enslaved men became vocal speakers for political abolitionist coalitions, convincing listeners to support antislavery politics. Women escapees from slavery, too, pushed white antislavery politicians to adopt more visceral political language. Former slaves' political activism brought a humane dimension to antislavery politics, forcing the nation to see the political struggle against slavery through their eyes and experiences.

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

“If Ever Saints Wept and Hell Rejoiced, It Must Have Been Over the Passage of That Law”: The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in Detroit River Borderland Newspapers, 1851-1852

ABSTRACT The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 raised the stakes for antislavery Whites and people of African descent in the United States by making resistance to slave catchers a federal crime. This study uses historical theme analysis to examine the rhetoric employed by newspapers in the Detroit River Borderland, which connected Michigan to Canada West, to promote or resist the Fugitive Slave Act from 1851 to 1852. While the Canada-based Voice of the Fugitive, edited by the formerly enslaved Henry Bibb, and the Michigan Christian Herald, a Baptist antislavery newspaper in Detroit, argued that the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional and immoral, the proslavery Detroit Free Press supported the Act. These differing stances evince the divisiveness of the Fugitive Slave Act, which had been developed as a compromise measure a decade before the US was divided by civil war.

Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South by Viola Franziska Müller (review)

Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South by Viola Franziska Müller (review)

Rethinking Slavery's Abolition in Ceará Through an Engagement with maritime Marronage

In late January 1881, a group of anti-slavery raftsmen blockaded the port of Fortaleza to slave traders declaring that enslaved persons would no longer be shipped to Brazil’s southern plantations out of Ceará’s northeastern harbor. The blockade was a decisive moment in the rising abolitionist movement in Brazil and culminated in slavery’s abolition in Ceará in 1884, four years before the national prohibition of the institution. Traditional narratives on slavery’s abolition in Ceará emphasize the development of a middle-class led, radical abolitionist movement in the province while lionizing the role played by Francisco José do Nascimento, a free man of color, in leading the raftsmen’s charge against human trafficking. Recent research on the raftsmen’s blockade highlights the role played by the formerly enslaved man José Luiz Napoleão in the anti-slavery strike. This article revisits the 1881 anti-slavery strike and places it in the context of maritime marronage in nineteenth century Brazil. By probing the long tradition of fugitive slaves using their access to the sea and their skills as sailors and boatmen to escape slavery and relocate from one province to another, this article demonstrates that the world of maritime labor provided opportunities and challenges for slave resistance, and fugitive mariners created a culture of contesting the geography of slavery in Brazil.

South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner

Reviewed by: South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner Mark Smith (bio) South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. Alice L. Baumgartner. New York: Basic Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1541617780. 384 pp., cloth, $32.00. Fugitive slaves from the United States who ran to Mexico during the antebellum period “reorient our understanding of the Civil War, showing that one of the most distinctively ‘American’ events in US history was in part ignited” by these freedom seekers (4). Such is the central thesis of Alice L. Baumgartner’s brilliantly written but sometimes interpretively frustrating book. The stories of the fugitives are utterly compelling, but the extent to which runaways to Mexico “contributed to the outbreak of a major sectional controversy over the future of human bondage in the United States” remains murky (7). Those who made it to Mexico did so without the help of anything resembling an underground railroad. Their escapes were assisted by the occasional ally, not facilitated by a system or formal network. These fugitives escaped and made it to Mexico by their own wits, and it is these stories, the tales of courageous men and women, that Baumgartner captures brilliantly. Runaways were greeted with one of two options. Some joined the military outposts that the Mexican government had established to defend their nation’s northeastern frontier. Others traded their enslaved status for indentured servitude and worked as servants or on haciendas. In this respect, fugitives in Mexico were not unlike those who made it to the US North. After all, courtesy of the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, runaways who managed to get above the Mason-Dixon line found themselves in a condition of what Frederick Douglass called “doubtful liberty.” Still, differences abounded, and Baumgartner sagely reminds us of the powerful antislavery inflections at work in the Mexican national government. After the Texas Revolution, for example, the Mexican Congress abolished slavery; in 1849, it passed legislation making free any enslaved person from another country who stepped foot in Mexico. Nor did Mexico agree to any extradition treaties. Plainly, these antislavery currents perturbed Southern slaveholders not least because these policies threatened their expansion and held the real potential to disrupt slavery in the US borderlands. The backbone—interpretively and stylistically—of Baumgartner’s study is in the poignant, endearing, and inspiring stories of enslaved men and women who escaped to Mexico. Baumgartner has a superb eye for the revealing detail and evinces a deep tenacity when it comes to ferreting out stories long buried in far-flung archives. She is also extremely adept at unpacking the complicated legal [End Page 428] histories of slavery in the US and Mexico and does a superb job toggling between the two without losing sight of why slavery was and was not permitted in different places at different times. But historians interested in evidence beyond beautifully crafted stories will be disappointed. For example, Baumgartner cannot tell us how many enslaved people from the United States made it to Mexico. “My estimate,” she ventures, “based on scattered and incomplete Mexican sources, puts the number somewhere between three and five thousand” (4). While she is right to suggest this is far less than the tens of thousands who escaped to the US North, it is nonetheless frustrating that she offers nothing to document this guess. Yet for Baumgartner, the numbers do not matter, because while the “number of slaves who reached Mexico was undeniably small,” she believes that “each escape was important in its own right” (4). Critically, “their collective story had strategic and political significance out of all proportion to the numbers involved” (4). This may well be true. But while it is surely the case that fugitive slaves to Mexico “contributed” to the sectional tensions that led to the US Civil War, many things “contributed” to the coming of that war and to varying extents. Historians of the sectional conflict are under some obligation to stake their case about causality with more precision than Baumgartner’s interpretive framework can muster. Mark Smith University of South Carolina, Columbia Mark Smith MARK SMITH is...