Escape to the City
eBook - ePub

Escape to the City

Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South

  1. 272 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Escape to the City

Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South

About this book

Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. While all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migrants, runaway slaves that sought refuge in the urban South were antebellum America's undocumented people, forging lives free from bondage but without the legal status of freedpeople. Spanning from the 1810s to the start of the Civil War, Müller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved Black people in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities.

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Yes, you can access Escape to the City by Viola Franziska Müller in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & North American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction: Rethinking Slave Flight
  9. Chapter One: The Urgency to Escape
  10. Chapter Two: The Making of the New Fugitive Slave
  11. Chapter Three: Receiving Communities, Illegality, and the Absence of Freedom
  12. Chapter Four: Navigating the City
  13. Chapter Five: Finding Work, Remaining Poor
  14. Chapter Six: Urban Politics and Black Labor
  15. Conclusion: The Ambiguities of Illegality
  16. Notes
  17. Bibliography
  18. General Index
  19. Index of Names
  20. Index of Occupations and Work