Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Grant, Jordan D

Titel

Slavery's Fugitives: Runaways, Slave-Catchers, and Reenslavement in the United States, 1787-1850

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In the early United States, few figures posed a greater threat to the institution of slavery than fugitives from bondage. Through locomotion, fugitives claimed their freedom and autonomy. Slaveholders, in turn, fought to prevent these runaways’ escapes and pull them back into bondage. Building upon decades of study of the “Underground Railroad” and enslaved African Americans’ journeys out of slavery, “Slavery’s Fugitives” advances a new history of one of the railroad’s inversions: reenslavement. Reenslavement was the dynamic, contested process through which slaveholders and their allies—slave-catchers—tried to re-exert control over former bondspeople.Like slavery itself, reenslavement in the United States was rooted in force but structured by law. As this study traces, beginning in the revolutionary era, slaveholders invested a huge amount of their economic wealth and political power into the project of weaponizing the law and its governance against fugitives. Through constitutional provisions, statutes, and judicial decisions, slaveholders outlawed self-emancipation and campaigned to make the pursuit of fugitives from bondage the right and responsibility of all white Americans, as well as one of the principal functions of the American state.But slaveholders were not the sole architects of reenslavement. This dissertation contends that fugitives shaped the law of reenslavement just as profoundly as the slave-catchers who pursued them across every landscape in the nation. In the slaveholding states of the U.S. South, fugitives evaded capture and sabotaged the governmental procedures used to reinscribe enslavement on their persons. In the U.S. North, backed by free Black communities and white and Black anti-slavery activists, fugitives continued this direct resistance; they also fought to secure new laws and precedents that, combined, eroded the legal bulwarks that slaveholders erected to prevent their liberation. Fugitives’ legal opposition to reenslavement was so successful that it drove Southern slaveholders to pursue ever more extreme remedies for fugitivity over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—the final of which was disunion.“Slavery’s Fugitives” reaches back into the long history of slavery and freedom in colonial North America, but it centers on the pivotal era between the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the approval of its successor, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In order to excavate slaveholders and fugitives’ rival uses of the law, the dissertation places the familiar sources of legal history alongside materials that capture how the law was experienced, negotiated, and ultimately created by ordinary Americans, including local, state, and federal government records; contemporary newspapers; the records of anti-slavery organizations; the personal papers of Southern enslavers; and the histories and personal narratives left behind by enslaved African Americans. When combined, these sources reveal how the law became both a shared language and a common battleground for enslavers and fugitives in the United States.