The recent Black Lives Matter protests and the movement's fierce response to centuries-old systemic racism in the United States sprang spontaneously from the shock effect of videos showing George Floyd pinned by the neck for nine and one-half minutes under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer while he lamented again and again, “I can't breathe.” He repeated these words twenty-seven times before expiring. In 2014, Eric Garner, also African American, died pronouncing these same words while being held in a chokehold by a New York police officer, also white. In his farewell address to the British people delivered in London on March 30, 1847, Frederick Douglass declared, “Every bayonet, sword, musket, and cannon has its deadly aim at the bosom of the negro: 3,000,000 of the coloured race are lying there under the heels of 17,000,000 of their white creatures” (1982b, 22). Recalling the well-known cry of the enslaved, Douglass then declaimed, “How Long! how long! O Lord God of Sabaoth!” (25). By the time Douglass left England, he was no longer a fugitive from American slavery, for his British friends had bought his freedom. As he took leave of his audience, Douglass told them he was returning to his country to continue the battle “for the sake of my brethren” (51). In his Narrative of 1845 he wrote of his escape from the slave shores of Maryland, “It was life or death with me” (1994, 89). This essay returns to the freedom narrative as a site for constructing an archaeology of the motto that defined not only the Age of Revolution but also the freedom narrative as a liberation genre: “Liberty or Death!” By choosing liberty and risking death, well over 150 fugitive authors in a span of thirty years created the first genre in U.S. literature aimed at declaring that Black lives mattered.The freedom narrative, which the scholarly tradition has misleadingly called the slave narrative, was the first discursive genre in U.S. literary history to challenge the legitimacy of a federal constitution that shielded Black slavery throughout the nation. After regretting the lack of a national literature in America, Theodore Parker in his address “The American Scholar” observed, “Yet there is one portion of our permanent literature [. . .] which is wholly indigenous and original; [. . .] that could be written by none but Americans, and only here; I mean the Lives of the Fugitives” (1907, 37). In a curious note to Parker's label “Lives of the Fugitives,” the editor in 1907 cited as examples the life stories of Douglass and Samuel Ringgold Ward (specifying “those works published between 1830–1860”), but also the highly inflammatory “Walker's Appeal” (Parker 1907, 504). It is true that David Walker's self-published 1830 pamphlet, which he addressed “to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” covers the thematic spectrum of “the inhuman system of slavery, [which] is the source from which most of our miseries proceed” (1830, 6). But Walker offers no account of his personal trajectory in and out of bondage. In the freedom narrative, however, the author's personal life history is typically interwoven with their denunciation of slavery. In other words, the narrative is the argument. But in his Appeal Walker turns this on its head and makes argument the narrative.And yet, it is precisely Walker's conceptual fireworks that pinpoint the freedom narrative's primary structuring impetus and raison d’être. Toward the end of his Appeal, Walker cites the famous words of the Declaration of Independence on the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to girder his own radical “either/or” commitment: “I therefore ask the whole American people, had I not rather die, or be put to death, than to be a slave to any tyrant [. . .]?” (17). In his Appeal Walker frequently goads the colored people of the world to make a decision: You must choose either liberty or death. Either one or the other; nothing in-between. As a result of this extreme choice, Walker argues, the slave's status changes from brute to human, “For what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead” (82). Citing Jefferson and other slavocratic ideologues who claimed that Africans are little better than cattle, Walker calls on the enslaved to rebel against their beastly wretchedness: “Now, I ask you, had you not rather be killed than to be a slave to a tyrant, who takes the life of your mother, wife, and dear children?” (30). He repeatedly chastises his people with the cry, “Are we MEN!!—I ask you, O my brethren! are we MEN?” (19).The enslaved had only to turn their gaze southward, to the Haitian republic, to imagine the liberating possibilities of their decision. From the outset the main thrust of Walker's Appeal is “to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!!” (5). Once invested with this spirit, Walker's sleepwalkers would become, in Douglass's words, “slumbering volcanoes” (Douglass 1982a, 151). The decision to embrace “Liberty or Death” has consequences, for as Walker indicates, “Do not actions speak louder than words?” (15). Fully aware of historical precedent, Walker evoked the slogan “Liberty or Death” firmly convinced that the separation between word and action, intention and deed, could be bridged. The words of his appeal were meant and understood to be performative. In effect, Walker's pamphlet turned the South into a hornet's nest, which he fully intended: “I expect some will try to put me to death, to strike terror into others, and to obliterate from their minds the notion of freedom” (25–26). Walker's either/or injunction proved to be a totally disruptive act. It rallied Black leaders in the North and pushed many of them to assume a militant stance of violent resistance. It also may have led to Walker's mysterious death in Boston on August 6, 1830.In Douglass's powerful “slumbering volcano” address of 1849, in which he recounts the successful revolt of Madison Washington and eighteen other enslaved on the Creole brig in 1841, he writes, “Suiting the action to the word, in an instant his guilty master was prostrate on the deck, and in a very few minutes Madison Washington [. . .] had the mastery of that ship” (1982, 155). This liberatory struggle to compound word and action informs all three versions of Douglass's autobiography and goes to the heart of the freedom narrative's purpose (Boelhower 2019, 101–132). Under the banner of “Liberty or Death,” passage from word to action could not be any more radical, for the slogan itself is a battle cry: promissory if not immediately effective. As we see in the following, the slogan's words have a force of their own. The fugitive is buoyed up by their unconditional appeal. By appropriating them, the enslaved person, whether man or woman, is invested with the motto's intrinsic potency. Recounting his first attempt to escape slavery with two friends in his 1845 freedom narrative, Douglass writes, “In coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed” (1994, 74).In his 1853 Atlantic-world narrative “The Heroic Slave” Douglass returned to the example of Madison Washington, who recalled the fathers of the American Revolution when rebuking the white mate of the Creole brig: “You call me a black murderer, I am not a murderer: God is my witness that LIBERTY, not malice, is the motive for this night's work” (Douglass 2015, 48). In his famous speech (1843) calling on the enslaved of the South to resist, Henry Highland Garnet had already evoked the name of Madison Washington (“that bright star of freedom”) and his fellow insurgents on the Creole, noting, “Nineteen struck for liberty or death” (2004, 187). It was now time for those in bondage to do likewise: “In the name of the merciful God! and by all that life is worth, let it no longer be a debatable question, whether it is better to choose LIBERTY or DEATH!” (186). By 1845 the freedom narrative, then known as the fugitive narrative, was a well-established genre and could be read as a direct response to Garnet's appeal.Before proceeding to an archaeology proper of the slogan “Liberty or Death,” it may be helpful to recall the generic features of the text type under examination. As the counterpoint of the two conventional labels—the slave and the fugitive narrative—suggests, the genre is informed by contrasting structural impulses: (1) a case-study review of the tyranny and horrors of life under slavery; (2) an account of the fugitive author's personal trials and her/his subsequent escape to freedom. The genre actually derives its unique identity from the friction caused by these two opposing purposes: the first, stressing the outrages of slavery's systemic features; and the second, offering a plot line that defies that system through flight and freedom. On the one hand, the author relies on description, exposition, and cases to create an inventory of slavery's despotism; on the other, he or she relies on action and events to dramatize the author's personal trajectory leading beyond the world of bondage to freedom.By favoring the label slave narrative, scholars inadvertently emphasize the topical effects of slavery's “reign of terror” (Williams 1838, xv) as the genre's prevailing code, while by opting for the label fugitive narrative, she implicitly favors the transgressive and liberatory trajectory of, for example, a William and Ellen Craft as they speed toward Philadelphia, “our first city of refuge” (Craft 1860/1969, 313). Although scholars have conventionally used the term “slave narrative” as a generic label, most of the titles of these works highlight escape over slavery. Moreover, it cannot be thought that when speaking of their former enslavement the fugitives failed to celebrate their death-defying run to freedom. Not only the Crafts but also Harriet Jacobs and Henry Box Brown became and remain famous for their legendary freedom stories.To be sure, the genre is undoubtedly a variable combination of an extended exercise in exposition and a compelling adventure story, but we must not forget that the two discursive strategies ultimately represent a sequence and an outcome. The slave narrative label is decidedly partial and fails to reflect the intentions of the titles given to these works. William Craft explains that in the South “the law says a slave shall have no higher appeal than the mere will of the master,” so that when the latter decides to buy “a beautiful and virtuous girl, [. . .] she cannot escape, unless it be by flight or death” (1860/1969, 279). Ellen Craft was such a girl, one who chose flight over suicide. When the abolitionist landlord of the boardinghouse where the two Crafts were staying in Philadelphia saw them together as man and wife and not as “young cotton planter and his n-----,” he would not believe them: “But, after some conversation, we satisfied him that we were fugitive slaves, and had just escaped” (315). The point is well taken, freedom and not slavery waited at the end of the day.By approaching the freedom narrative as a site of mnemohistory and resonance chamber for the Black Lives Matter movement, we will be poised better to appreciate the role fugitives as a social movement played in creating the political crisis that led first to the notorious Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and then forward to the Civil War and the antislavery amendments to the Constitution—the so-called second American Revolution. As James Pennington, the “fugitive blacksmith,” declares in his published narrative, “[N]o power in this world will arrest the exodus of the slaves from the South” (1969, 205). In their study of runaway slave advertisements, Franklin and Schweninger conclude, “Whatever the specific cause or causes, tens of thousands of blacks each year demonstrated their discontent by going on the run” (Franklin and Schweninger 2000, 48). The causes, all of which were inherent in the slave system itself, were many, but they basically boiled down to one basic motive: “merely to be free” (Franklin and Schweninger 2000, 42).As the war wore on and the Union army advanced deep into Southern territory, those working on the plantations began to leave en masse. In her narrative of slavery days, Annie L. Burton writes, “I saw all the slaves one by one disappearing from the plantation (for night and day they kept going) until there was not one to be seen” (1909/2018, 20). Before the war, most runaways on the cotton and sugar plantations in the deep South were outlyers, staying away for a few weeks or months or even years. When and if they returned, they could expect a severe whipping and then to be sold away, but this did not prevent them from running away again and again. It took Mattie Jackson's mother seven attempts before she finally escaped to freedom (Jackson 1866/2006, 69). As the fugitive Francis Fedric declared in his narrative, “I never in my life knew a slave who did not wish to escape” (1863/2010, 82).Perhaps there is not a more astonishing account of the fugitive's indomitable will to be free than that of Wallace Turnage, who escaped five times before reaching the Union lines (2007). Joining other fugitive toughs such as James Williams (1838), Frederick Douglass (1994), Solomon Northup (1853/1996), and William Green (1853), Turnage, too, exchanges blows with the white man: “I had made up my mind to fight him.” After wrestling with the overseer for two hours, Turnage comments, “He could not do any thing with me” (2009, 218–19). Then the overseer calls for help and Turnage is tied down and given ninety-five lashes to his already scarred back—but he runs away yet again. The practice of outlying was such a common form of resistance because in the rural areas it was almost impossible to find a way to escape to the distant North or west to Mexico or to some Southern port city. But there were endless ways to buck the system in spite of the vigilant prison society in which slaves particularly in the deep South found themselves. While the historian Eugene Genovese argued for an accommodationist agenda of Black life under slavery, the historians Herbert Aptheker and Kenneth Stampp argued that even small gestures of resistance should be counted as attacks on the slavocracy (Breen 2015, 3–5). In line with the resistance historians, the outpouring of freedom narratives begs to be construed as part of a tradition of Black liberation history.Apart from the slowdowns, stealing from the master's smoke house, damaging his property, poisoning the soup, claiming illness, and taking to the woods for a spell, the words “Liberty or Death” coved in the bosom of millions of enslaved laborers. As Douglass declaimed in his London farewell address cited earlier, “At the first tap of a foreign drum [. . .] millions of slaves are ready to rise and to strike for their own liberty. The slaveholders know this; they understand it well enough” (1982, 46). There was plenty of historical precedent to back him up. In early 1776 around eight hundred runaway slaves had joined the Royal Ethiopian Regiment of the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore (Israel 2017, 41). In the War of 1812, thousands more fled to the British forces and fought in their ranks. By the end of the Civil War there were an estimated forty thousand freed men, women, and children huddled in Uniontown, Washington, DC, alone. About 180,000 Black men served in the Union army and navy, and “nearly 80 percent were former slaves recruited in the South,” David Blight notes (2009, 93, 159). Recognition of antebellum Black self-emancipation as a social movement helps us to requalify the genealogy of the freedom narrative by considering it in the broader light of the Age of Revolution (Armitage and Subrahmanyam 2010; Scott 2018; Armitage 2007; Pybus 2006; Blackburn 2011), rather than regarding it merely as a product of white abolitionist mediations and an intertextual continuum of the American autobiographical tradition (Foster 1994; Davis and Gates 1990).That said, no other literary genre was as single minded as the freedom narrative in extending the revolutionary Spirit of 1776 well into and beyond the Age of Jacksonian democracy, when that spirit was all but forgotten (Taylor 2021). Much of the early scholarship on the freedom narrative has emphasized its entangled indebtedness to U.S. abolitionist editors (Andrews 1986; Fisch 2007). It is time that literary scholars begin to read these narratives in relation to the Black community, both enslaved and free. In truth, the antebellum fugitive was in a position to recount her/his story not because a Northern editor was there to tell them what to say but because they had freed themselves. While Northern abolitionists often cited the natural rights values of the Declaration of Independence and occasionally proclaimed the slogan “Liberty or Death,” the fugitives actually lived them in body and person, as many a runaway slave advertisement betrayed (Weld 1839). Self-emancipation made the printed story possible. Without the fugitive's courageous flight there would have been no storyteller to begin with and no freedom narrative genre. Indeed, what characterizes this text type more than any other structuring element, as we show in the following, is the buildup to the fugitive's resolve to choose freedom over slavery—at the risk of dying in the attempt.The standpoint of interpretation from below that I am calling for focuses on the multiple ways in which ties with family, kin, the slave quarters, Black exhorters and sages, and urban free Blacks supported fugitive authors in their struggles to read and write, be respected, make future plans, and ultimately, embrace the life-changing precept “Liberty or Death.” While William Wells Brown quells his desire to run away for the sake of his enslaved sister and his mother, both encourage him to escape. In a dramatic parting scene with his mother, who has been sold down South after a failed attempt to escape, she tells him, “My child, [. . .] you have ever said that you would not die a slave; that you would be a freeman. Now try to get your liberty” (Brown 1848/2014, 39). In his narrative about slave life on a Georgia plantation, a young John Brown is enlightened by John Glasgow, an older and well-traveled slave, who, Brown said, tells him, “If I ever could get to England, where he came from, and conducted myself properly, folks would respect me as much as they would a white man” (1855, 24). After a long and occasionally comic attempt to escape to England, which he believes is just the next town over, John Brown finally reaches Liverpool on August 10, 1850. Especially for male freedom seekers, the radical decision to escape from slavery tends to turn their story into a road narrative: “I set out once more on my travels, with the full determination either to gain my freedom or to die in the attempt” (93).The slave quarters were a rich source of information about what was going on not only in the big house but also in the Caribbean, the new slave states, the abolitionist North, and even across the ocean (Scott 2018). The whispered words “Canada” and “England” beamed as much light and hope as the North Star. Everyone bound to a fifteen-hour day in the cotton fields would probably have heard of the name Toussaint Louverture, “the first independent revolutionary leader of stature” in the Americas (Hobsbawm 1977, 91). During and after the American and French Revolutions and the Revolution of 1848 in Europe, talk of liberty and equality was everyday fare in taverns and on the streets both south and north. As Vincent Harding writes, “These were the years of black insurrections in Martinique, Cuba, Antigua, Tortola, Jamaica, and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, and black people in the States were not oblivious of them or of their promise” (2003, 84). Closer to home, planter refugees from Haiti came with their slaves in waves to the port cities of the South. “By 1795, as many as twelve thousand Dominguan slaves had entered the United States” (Egerton 1993, 47). The virus of the Haitian Revolution had become endemic to the slave South; Toussaint and Dessalines, household words.In the Age of Revolution oppressed people around the globe passionately cried out, “Liberty or Death,” breathing in these sacred words from the air around them. As a speech act, the slogan's implications were so forceful and self-evident that it would be hard to say which came first, the battle cry or the Age. Before examining its effectiveness as a motivating vow for fugitives from slavery, let me cite a few of the memorable rebellions in which “Liberty or Death” became a people's rallying cry. The Haitian Revolution, which erupted in the same year as the publication of Paine's The Rights of Man, was “a struggle for ‘Black Power’ in an Atlantic world dominated by slavery and a system of white supremacy under the flags of competing European colonial powers” (Forsdick and Hogsbjerg 2017, 9). As Philippe Girard notes in Toussaint Louverture, those who joined the nascent revolution in Sant-Domingue fought under the motto “Liberty or death,” which also served as the banner of other Atlantic revolutions (1843/2016, 158, 115). After the French were expelled from the island, it was General Dessalines who demanded that the color white be removed from the Haitian flag and in place of the initials R. F. (République Française), “Liberty or Death” be inscribed (James 1989, 365).On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry gave a famous speech in St. John's Church, Richmond, in which he declaimed, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” These words quickly spread to the other twelve North American colonies and helped to unite them against the mother country by radicalizing their options: Either be slaves to the King or a free people. Henry was not thinking of abolishing slavery when he gave his speech, but on August 31, 1800, an enslaved artisan named Gabriel, who was born in 1776, stood ready to lead an insurrection that would complete the job. Douglass Egerton writes, “As he marched into the city [Richmond] he planned to carry a flag inscribed with the words ‘death or Liberty’” (Egerton 1993, 51). After a slave named Pharoah told his master about the conspiracy, the militia were quickly alerted and some thirty or forty suspects were rounded up and jailed. As one insurgent said at his trial, “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put on trial” (Egerton 1993, 102).As an enslaved youth, Denmark Vesey had worked on a sugar plantation in Haiti. He was then bought by Joseph Vesey and served him in the slave trade for nineteen years, until Denmark bought his freedom and settled down as a carpenter in Charleston, South Carolina. There, in 1822, Vesey “organized the most elaborate and well-planned slave insurrection in the history of the United States” (Robertson 1999, 4, 5, 7–9). Having recruited around 9,000 bondmen in his army, he planned to capture the federal arsenal in Charleston, slaughter the white population, and burn the city to the ground. Then he and his liberation army would seize some ships in the harbor and sail to Haiti. According to David Robertson, Vesey told his fellow insurrectionists that “they must be as unified as the revolutionary ex-slaves of Haiti” (10). Vesey's plans for June 16 were discovered before he could carry them out, thanks to two Black informers; then followed the hurried execution of thirty-five conspirators, while hundreds of others were imprisoned. Although Vesey left no personal record behind and did not speak at his trial, he died, in the words of Henry Highland Garnet, “a martyr to freedom” (2004, 187). Black leaders in the antebellum United States frequently evoked Vesey's heroic example in their calls for violent resistance. In his 1863 broadside “Men of Color, To Arms!” Douglass declaimed, “Remember Denmark Vesey of Charleston” and quoted the popular words by Byron, “Who would be free themselves must strike the first blow” (1999, 526–27).Unlike Vesey's conspiracy, Nat Turner's got beyond the planning stage. On the night of August 21, 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner and a band of six insurgents began exterminating whites on the farms. As they went along from farm to farm, Turner attracted around seventy-five more recruits. By the time the uprising was suppressed, his army had killed fifty-five white people. It was the bloodiest slave revolt in the country's history. On the eve of the revolt, Turner questioned one of the new recruits named Will about why he wanted to join them. According to Turner's Confessions, Will answered that “his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty as dear to him” (Gray 1831, 12). Turner then asked if he thought he would obtain it: “He said he would, or loose [sic] his life” (Gray 1831, 12). Of the first eleven whites killed, six were dispatched by Will. Dubbed the “executioner” for his vehement hatred of slavery, Will died in battle at the Harris farm (Breen 2015, 38, 71). When Turner was brought to court and arraigned, he pleaded “Not guilty; saying to his counsel, that he did not feel so” (Gray 1831, 20). Reading out the death sentence to Turner, the judge said, “Your only hope must be in another world” (21). Turner had first set the the day of his uprising on July 4, the day celebrating the nation's independence, but had postponed it due to a fever. On the day of the uprising, his hope was placed not only in God but also in the field of battle and the “either/or” vow of a soldier named by the court records simply as Will.We would be mistaken to predicate the fugitive narrator's self-emancipation merely on a politico-philosophical idea. For the resolve to choose “liberty or death” sprang above all from below, from the dehumanizing conditions of slavery as a total system aimed at subduing the enslaved to obedient hands and bodies. That said, the freedom narrative became a vanguard genre not because it witnesses only to the victimization of enslaved Black laborers and house servants, but primarily because its narrators had courageously risked their very lives to be free. Douglass in his 1845 autobiography captured the sequence of these two pivotal features of the genre when he wrote, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall now see how a slave was made a man” (1994, 60).Time and again, fugitive narrators, both women and men, described enslaved life as a total system, and in doing so they named names, places, situations, and precise incidents. Foremost among their themes were bloody and sadistic whippings, being sold away from family, working under a cruel overseer, succumbing to a rapist master, going hungry, being poorly clothed, working long hours under the task system, and not a few killings, maimings, and suicides. Many of these instances were presented as eyewitness cases involving family, kin, or a fellow worker, often in highly sensationalist language, but testimony for all of that. To be sure, these scenes come with the paraphernalia of torture: chains, neck rings, the stocks, iron weights, bull whips, patrols, jail time, and other systemic devices to ensure submission.The main purpose of the slave system was to break the enslaved person's will and, if necessary, their body. Indeed, the embrace of “liberty or death” often begins as a sudden physiological reaction. Many a fugitive author resolves to escape on the spur of the moment rather than be whipped yet again or witness the further humiliation of a loved one. Throughout her narrative, Linda Brent (Harriet Jacobs's alter ego) struggles to fight off the predatory designs of her patriarchal master. Unable to bend her will, an exacerbated Dr. Flint screams at her, “Do you know that [. . .] I can kill you, if I please?” (1860/1973, 39). After endless confrontations and seven long years hiding out in a cubbyhole at her grandmother's, Linda determines to escape. As she informs her woman-identified reader: “I resolved that, come what would, there should be no turning back. ‘Give me liberty, or give me death’ was my motto” (101, my emphasis). Taken directly from Patrick Henry, the motto becomes a shield for her and a militant condensation of all her unspoken yearnings. By pronouncing it, she means to qualify her escape politically and cast it in the human rights tradition of both the Spirit of 1776 and the revolutionary Atlantic. In effect, she is calling the women of her antislavery network to battle, thereby transforming her erstwhile secret life into a public campaign (Yellen 2004, 157–89). Or as a newly freed Mattie Jackson put it after learning to write, “Manage your own secrets, and divulge them by the silent language of your pen” (1866/2002, 66). Douglass was not the only fugitive narrator to cite Patrick Henry's motto as a means to characterize his decision to break from slavery rather than be broken by it. Both Harriet Jacobs (alias Linda Brent) and Douglass adopted the motto to mark their personal escape as something much more significant: a political act of rebellion and the emergence of a public persona.The radical nature of the fugitive's either/or decision is inherent to the motto “Liberty or Death,” but some authors explicitly underscore its significance as event. Describing his fifth and final attempt to escape slave territory and the no man's land between the Confederate and Union lines, Walter Turnage writes, “Now as I come so near being caught that night and day [. . .], I resolved that I would try to get from that side of the river; it was death to go back and death to stay there and freedom was before me; it could only be death to go forward if I was caught and fr