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Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South

Online ISBN:
9781469671086
Print ISBN:
9781469671062
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South

Viola Franziska Müller
Viola Franziska Müller
University of Bonn, Germany
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
4 October 2022
Online ISBN:
9781469671086
Print ISBN:
9781469671062
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

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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