Freedom's Seekers

Essays on Comparative Emancipation

Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780807154717
• eBook ISBN: 9780807154731
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie's Freedom's Seekers offers a bold and innovative intervention into the study of emancipation as a transnational phe-nomenon and serves as an important contribution to our understanding of the remaking of the nineteenth-century Atlantic Americas.
Drawing on decades of research into slave and emancipation societies, Kerr-Ritchie is attentive to those who sought but were not granted freedom, and those who resisted enslavement individually as well as collectively on behalf of their communities. He explores the many roles that fugitive slaves, slave soldiers, and slave rebels played in their own societies. He likewise explicates the lives of individual freedmen, freedwomen, and freed children to show how the first free-born generation helped to shape the terms and conditions of the post-slavery world.
Freedom's Seekers is a signal contribution to African Diaspora studies, especially in its rigorous respect for the agency of those who sought and then fought for their freedom, and its consistent attention to the transnational dimensions of emancipation.

PART ONE:
EXPERIENCES

CHAPTER 1
Self-Emancipators across North America

Although a slave without men’s right am I, My will of steel can reach the starry high.

—ANTARAH

[To organize in America] would greatly endanger the liberty of thousands of self-emancipated persons.

—HENRY BIBB

Sam Castle (son): What are Borders? Maurice Castle (father): It’s where one country ends and another begins.

—GRAHAM GREENE

Most fugitive slaves in nineteenth-century continental North America did not leave the colonial or independent polity. Slave escapees in British Canada, Spanish Florida and Mexico, and independent Mexico stayed within national/ colonial boundaries. Most scholars agree that fugitive slaves escaped southern U.S. slavery for local, regional, or northern destinations during the antebellum era.¹ Whether they traveled near or far, slave runaways carved out niches of freedom within the territorial confines of the colonial society or nation-state. Their search for the starry high was confined to national parameters, albeit ones in which borders between bondage and freedom were constantly shifting.

At the same time, however, a significant number of self-emancipators crossed national borders in search of permanent freedom. Some crossed international borders in continental North America.² We begin with examples of self-liberators crossing borders in search of individual liberation. During the nineteenth century, territorial conflict abounded between the British, Spanish, Americans, and Mexicans. This conflict provided a gateway to freedom for thousands of self-emancipators who gravitated toward free areas beyond the borders of the U.S. republic, including Spanish Florida, independent Mexico, and British Canada. This demographic undercurrent deserves greater attention than it has received thus far. The second section of this chapter examines the consequences of these activities in the diplomatic arena, especially attempts to agree on international treaties to extradite and prevent fugitive flight. The role of self-liberators in provoking these agreements has not been sufficiently understood, and the conventional treatment of these treaties within national frameworks ignores their transcontinental context. The third part analyzes the contributions of self-emancipators to antislavery mobilization across borders. These organizing efforts in different nations, colonies, and territories took place because such efforts were either illegal or difficult to accomplish within the existing confines of the nation-state. The concluding section examines the creation of free settlements across borders, especially in Florida, Canada West, and Mexico. These black communities served as beacons of freedom and were among the first post-emancipation settlements on the North American continent.³ This chapter’s major objective is a cross-national examination of movement, law, activism, and community-formation in support of the practice of transnational history.

I. SOUTH AND NORTH OF THE BORDER

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, imperial tensions between the British and the Spanish facilitated self-emancipation from the British mainland colonies of South Carolina and Georgia to Spanish Florida. In 1688 and 1689, for instance, colonial officials noted that fugitive slaves had sought refuge in the Spanish colony.⁴ In 1728, English planter Thomas Elliott and others requested government assistance because they had “fourteen Slaves Runaway to St. Augustine.” That same year, the colonial governor of South Carolina complained to the London colonial office that the Spanish were “re-ceivieing [sic] and harbouring all our Runaway Negroes.”⁵ The extent of this flight, together with the usefulness of fugitives as laborers, translators, and settlers, encouraged the Spanish to establish a fugitive slave settlement near Saint Augustine called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose in 1739. Although the English established the colony of Georgia as a buffer during the early 1730s, this simply transferred the fugitive “problem” to the southern border of the new colony. The fugitive “problem” disappeared with the British annexation of Florida in 1763, when fugitive slaves were no longer able to seek Spanish asylum, until Florida was returned to Spain at the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783.⁶

The establishment of a slaveholding U.S. republic did not reduce national rivalries and guaranteed the continuation of self-liberation. During the War of 1812, international conflict between the United States and Great Britain facilitated the southward escape of slaves to Spanish Florida. Self-emancipators continued to flee the plantations and farms of the southeastern seaboard, with mixed results. Some obtained and retained their freedom by mixing with the Seminole Indians and fought in two major wars (the First and Second Seminole Wars) to protect their way of life. Others were either returned to American slavery or re-enslaved by American Indians. The area was annexed by the United States in 1819 and eventually made safe for emigrant slaveholders with the establishment of Florida as the twenty-seventh state in the Union in 1845.⁷

Two years after the annexation of Florida, the Spanish Empire was further weakened by the loss of one of its oldest and most valuable colonies. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, enslaved Africans worked the cities, mines, plantations, households, and stores of New Spain.⁸ The expense of slave labor, together with the difficulties of supply and high mortality rates, resulted in the gradual demise of slavery by the early nineteenth century. Between 1810 and 1821, Mexico fought and won its independence from Madrid. The same year as independence was declared, a commission estimated fewer than three thousand slaves in the new nation, mostly located in the coastal areas of Veracruz, Acapulco, and elsewhere. On October 13, 1824, the federal government abolished the slave trade. Between 1825 and 1827, several states outlawed slavery. On September 15, 1829, President Vincente Guerrero issued a decree abolishing slavery throughout the Mexican republic. The decree was passed to commemorate national independence, enhance “public tranquility,” and restore natural rights to all.⁹

It is clear that this sequence of events encouraged slaves to invest the United States–Mexico border with, as one scholar puts it, “liberationist significance.”¹⁰ The U.S. continental slave trade from the 1810s onwards brought hundreds of thousands of new slaves into the expanding southwest regions of the national republic.¹¹ After the winning of Mexico’s independence in 1821, slaves crossed the Rio Grande. Benjamin Milam, an early frontier settler, complained to Joel Robert Poinsett, the first U.S. minister to Mexico: “I have been in the frontiers of Texas for some time and have observed that the stait of Louisiana [since 1812] have lost a grait maney slaives that have taken refuge in this Republick of Mexico.”¹² Free soil south of the Rio Grande continued to attract freedom’s seekers after abolition in 1829.

During the mid-1830s, slaves were reported to have headed west across the Sabine River in search of free soil, much to the chagrin of Texan slaveholders.¹³ War on the borderlands often proved conducive to slaves’ self-emancipation. In April 1836, Mexican General José Urrea recorded in his diary: “Fourteen Negro slaves with their families came to me on this day and I sent them free to Victoria.”¹⁴ In December 1844, twenty-five mounted and armed slaves departed from Bastrop for Mexico. Around seventeen had been caught by early January, but seven to eight made a successful escape.¹⁵ Union officers marching to the Rio Grande in 1845 recorded “three slaves of officers have run away.”¹⁶

It is hard to estimate exactly how many slaves crossed into Mexico after the abolition of slavery. Colonel John S. Ford, Texas Ranger, journalist, and politician, estimated that the 3,000 fugitive slaves from Texas who were living in Mexico in 1851 had increased to 4,000 by 1855.¹⁷ One former slave from Virginia informed journalist, abolitionist, and future public-park designer Frederick Law Olmsted of some 40 escapees during a three-month period in 1854.¹⁸ Rosalie Schwartz suggests “several thousand” ex-slaves inhabited Mexico by the 1850s.¹⁹ What is certain is that slave self-emancipation to Mexico was not popular with Texan slaveholders. In May 1855, the San Antonio Herald lamented: “Something should be done to put a stop to the escape of Negroes in Mexico.” Four years later, the same newspaper declared: “We have often wondered why some bold and enterprising men in our state do not club together and go into Mexico and bring away the large number of fine likely runaways known to be not far over the line, forming a pretty respectable African colony.”²⁰

Slaves continued to self-liberate across the borderlands during the American Civil War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 had ended the U.S. war with Mexico, setting the international boundary along the southern edge of Texas on the Rio Grande. After the Confederate states’ creation in 1861, this border served as the new southern nation’s sole land frontier with a neutral nation.²¹ Cotton, weapons, and supplies crossed the new border; so did self-liberated slaves. Jacob Branch, a former slave in Texas, witnessed these crossings: “After [the] war starts lots of slaves runned off to git to de Yankees. All dem in dis part heads for de Rio Grande river. De Mexicans rig up flat-boats out in de middle river, tied to stakes with rope. When de culled people gits to de rope dey can pull deyself ”cross de rest de way on dem boats. De white folks rid[e] de Mexican side dat river all de time, but plenty slaves git through, anyway.”²²

Branch’s recollection is striking for several reasons. Many scholars have noted fugitive flight to Union lines during the American Civil War, but less so border-crossings to Mexico. Furthermore, Branch depicts Mexicans helping slaves escape from Texas, although without any explanation as to why they would do so. The reasons included the belief that a weakened slave institution in Texas would limit American territorial expansion and the establishment of military colonies of ex-slaves and Indians would serve as a useful protective buffer.²³ In addition, this account suggests that slaves were not deterred from self-liberation despite regular patrol efforts to prevent escapes. Finally, Branch’s account is vivid: slaves pulling themselves across the river in the hot sun while patrols ride up and down the other side chasing down and shooting fugitives. No wonder he recalled it in such detail more than eight decades later.

Mexican freedoms long continued to resonate in the memories of African Americans. Former slave Felix Haywood of San Antonio, Texas, told an interviewer: “In Mexico you could be free. They didn”t care what color you was, black, white, yellow, or blue. Hundreds of slaves did get to Mexico and got on all right. We would hear about ”em and how they was goin’ to be Mexicans.”²⁴ Sallie Wroe recalled her father escaped by paddling a bale of cotton across the Rio Grande.²⁵ There is something rather poetic about a slave crop serving as a vehicle of liberation. In the modern era, Mexico still held promise for gifted artists like African American Elizabeth Catlett, who relocated to Mexico in the late 1940s after which she became a prominent and successful sculptor and print-maker until her death in 2012.²⁶

Mexico’s free soil before American slaves had several consequences. First, slaveholders in the United States repeatedly sought extradition treaties with Mexico to include the return of fugitive slaves from the 1820s through the 1850s and repeatedly failed. There is little doubt that this failure fueled slaves” cross-border self-emancipation efforts. Second, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 transformed the continental United States into an empire of slaveholder’s property rights. This made it harder for self-liberators to elude southern slaveholders because of the federal government’s complicity in supporting the latter’s pursuit of human chattel. Those who crossed either the southern border into Mexico or the northern border into Canada were guaranteed greater security. Third, it was these slaves’ self-emancipation actions that transformed Mexico into a powerful symbol of freedom and antislavery. The fact that some were captured, others died in the attempt, and still others ended up eking out miserable lives in their new domicile should not detract from the importance of the original motivation. After all, there are not many reports of fugitive slaves in Mexico volunteering to return to U.S. slavery. As the Greek slave Aesop is reputed to have quipped: better beans in freedom than bread in slavery.

Former slaves and free blacks in the United States also crossed northern borders into the British colony of Canada. This became particularly pronounced in the years following the passage of British colonial abolition during the 1830s. Robin Winks estimates some 12,000 fugitive slaves living in British Canada by 1840.²⁷ But the real exodus occurred during the 1850s. As a result of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 in the United States, many fugitive slaves and free blacks left the northern states for the comparative safety of Canada. It has been estimated that about 3,000 fugitives relocated in the months immediately following ratification of the law. Self-liberators Anthony Hollingsworth, Daniel Lockhart, Fred Wilkins, and Jerry McHenry— all rescued from American slave catchers—relocated to Canada. Those who aided and abetted their escape, like Samuel Ringgold Ward and John Lisle, also crossed over to Canada to avoid federal prosecution. In his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, Ward explained that he and his family decided to move to Canada because of the lack of prospects in the United States and the possibility of incarceration for assisting in the escape of fugitive Jerry McHenry from Syracuse, New York, in contravention of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act: “ I had already become hopeless of doing more in my native country; I had already determined to go to Canada. Now, however, matters became urgent.”²⁸ Furthermore, numerous self-liberators worked their way via the Underground Railroad through the midwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan into the southern reaches of Canada West. This region bordering the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair contained the counties of Essex and Kent. Many towns in the area—Windsor, Sandwich, and Amherstburg—saw a large increase in their black populace. Scholars estimate between 40,000 and 60,000 persons of African descent were living in Canada by 1860, with some historians claiming a populace of more th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Language
• Chronology
• Introduction: Was U.S. Emancipation Exceptional?
• Part One: Experiences
• Part Two: Lives
• Epilogue: Freedom’s Seekers Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index