Tens of thousands of people escaped slavery in the antebellum South. While the bulk of scholarship has focused on those who fled to the northern states and outside of the country, the majority actually stayed within the South. My new book, Escape to the City, tells the stories of the men and women who found refuge in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond.
Staying in the slaveholding states, fugitive slaves could not expect to ever be legally free. Always wary of being caught, many moved clandestinely towards and within the cities. As I show, fugitives used false papers to conceal their identities, or tried to avoid law enforcement and contact with authorities because they were not able to produce documentation at all. They camouflaged themselves among the (free) Black population, which tended to congregate in the South’s larger cities. Runaways’ mobility, knowledge of the broader world, and the complicity of Black Americans were important preconditions for avoiding the reach of slaveholders and police.
The fact that so many absconders from slavery stayed in the South invites us to rethink the meaning of “freedom” as the overarching theme of American history. Not all historical accounts are optimistic and recognize freedom as a linear or expeditious process. Yet, they often do see freedom as the ultimate goal that, even if unachievable, guided Americans’ lived experiences. In Escape to the City, I propose that freedom cannot fully capture the struggles of Black antebellum southerners. Following runaway slaves into the cities of the South shows that the way we typically understand notions of freedom in the context of American slavery—foremost legal freedom—was not on their minds as an ever-present, all-encompassing goal. Rather, the highest priority of most people was to be self-asserted, meaning to live socially and economically independently from a master or mistress who held a claim to their labor, families, and places of residence. This was also possible in the South.
Those who went to southern cities remained within the jurisdiction of the very slaveholding society that stipulated that they were slaves; their legal status did not change. Therefore, the lives that these men and women built for themselves had no basis in law. Their sheer presence in the cities was illegal. This brings them close to present-day undocumented migrants, a consideration which implies that they were living somewhere without the authority to do so.