This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different “spaces of freedom” they inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. North and South, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Using newspapers, advertisements, and new demographic data, contributors show how events like the Revolutionary War and westward expansion shaped the slave experience. Contributors investigate sites of formal freedom, where slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free, to determine the extent to which fugitive slaves experienced freedom in places like Canada while still being subject to racism. In sites of semiformal freedom, as in the northern United States, fugitives’ claims to freedom were precarious because state abolition laws conflicted with federal fugitive slave laws. Contributors show how local committees strategized to interfere with the work of slave catchers to protect refugees. Sites of informal freedom were created within the slaveholding South, where runaways who felt relocating to distant destinations was too risky formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations. These individuals procured false documents or changed their names to avoid detection and pass as free. The essays discuss slaves’ motivations for choosing these destinations, the social networks that supported their plans, what it was like to settle in their new societies, and how slave flight impacted broader debates about slavery. This volume redraws the map of escape and emancipation during this period, emphasizing the importance of place in defining the meaning and extent of freedom. Contributors: Kyle Ainsworth | Mekala Audain | Gordon S. Barker | Sylviane A. Diouf | Roy E. Finkenbine | Graham Russell Gao Hodges | Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie | Viola Franziska Müller | James David Nichols | Damian Alan Pargas | Matthew Pinsker A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

Approaching the period of 1880-1930 in American literature as one in which the processes of rethinking the past were as prevalent as wholly "new" works of art, this collection treats the century's long turn as a site that overtly staged the tension among conflicting sets of values--those of past, present, and the imagined future. As the authors of this collection demonstrate, the literature from the century's turn is irreducible to the characteristics either of the nineteenth or the twentieth centuries; rather, it is literature of dual practices and multiple values that embodies elastic qualities of historical plurality--a true literature in transition

Introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different 'spaces of freedom' that fugitive slaves inhabited, this volume also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the US South, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Examines the experiences of runaway slaves in North America, conceptually dividing the continent into three distinct 'spaces of freedom'.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner tells the story of how, between 1830 and 1860, three remarkable men from New York city - a journalist, a furniture polisher, and a black minister - led a secret network that helped no fewer than 3,000 fugitive slaves from the southern states of America to a new life of liberty in Canada.

The Quarters and the Fields offers a unique approach to the examination of slavery. Rather than focusing on slave work and family life on cotton plantations, Damian Pargas compares the practice of slavery among the other major agricultural cultures in the nineteenth-century South: tobacco, mixed grain, rice, and sugar cane. He reveals how the demands of different types of masters and crops influenced work patterns and habits, which in turn shaped slaves' family life. By presenting a broader view of the complex forces that shaped enslaved people's family lives, not only from outside but also from within, this book takes an inclusive approach to the slave agency debate. A comparative study that examines the importance of time and place for slave families, The Quarters and the Fields provides a means for understanding them as they truly were: dynamic social units that were formed and existed under different circumstances across time and space.