Cities of Refuge : Slave Flight and Illegal Freedom in the American Urban South, 1800-1860 Issue Date: 2020-01-16 23

Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/82707 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation. Author: Müller, V.F. Title: Cities of refuge : slave flight and illegal freedom in the American urban South, 1800-1860 Issue Date: 2020-01-16 23 Chapter One The Changing Landscape of Freedom Many slave narratives, written by formerly enslaved people after they achieved freedom, give insight into how black Americans felt when they first realized that they were enslaved, and all of them explicitly deal with the longing for freedom. Louis Hughes, author of Thirty Years a Slave, recalled that within his enslaved family, “It had been talked of (this freedom) from generation to generation.”75 Lunsford Lane, who later bought freedom for himself and his family, accounted that “When I began to work, I discovered the difference between myself and my master’s white children.” Early on, Lane also recognized the realistic fear of being sold south which “seemed infinitely worse than the terrors of death. To know, also, that I was never to consult my own will, but was, while I lived, to be entirely under the control of another, was another state of mind hard for me to bear.”76 The longing for freedom was not informed by material conditions. Frederick Douglass made that clear when he stated: “whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free.”77 Enslaved people at all times and in all places wanted to be free. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the geography of slavery in the Americas was radically transformed in such way as to greatly enhance opportunities to escape slavery. This transformation paradoxically entailed the destruction of slavery in some parts of the hemisphere, and its expansion and entrenchment in others. Whereas the institution came to be abolished in the US northern states and a number of countries and regions like British Canada, Mexico, Central America, and several places in the Caribbean, from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, it grew in the southern US. During the antebellum period, the United States of America constituted the largest slaveholding republic in the world. By 1860, shortly before the legal abolition of the institution of slavery, they held nearly four million men, women, and children in bondage. These people were trapped in a system that commodified their 75 Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave. From Bondage to Freedom. The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter. Autobiography of Louis Hughes (Milwaukee: South Side Printing Company, 1897), 78-79. 76 Lunsford Lane, The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. Embracing an Account of His Early Life, the Redemption by Purchase of Himself and Family from Slavery, and His Banishment from the Place of His Birth for the Crime of Wearing a Colored Skin (Boston: J. G. Torrey, 1842), 7-8. 77 Douglass, Narrative, 99. 24 bodies, reduced them to chattel, rendered them legal property, and put them to forced labor as a natural state of servitude. As observed in the introductory chapter, the same period also witnessed significant increases in escapes of enslaved people. Why? In order to answer this question, this chapter will discuss the four factors that precipitated slave flight—diminishing opportunities to legally exit bondage, the expansion of slavery, the intensification of the domestic slave trade, and the growth of the free black population. Since the free black populations as receiving society feature prominently in this account of slave flight, they will be given particular attention in this chapter. Why did they have an interest in helping slave refugees and, hence, in carving spaces of freedom? What was their legal status and how did it shape the freedom refugees were able to find in southern cities? It will be shown that running away was neither the only nor the best way out of bondage, yet for thousands of enslaved people it was a tangible option. Manumissions: A Closing Door With the settlement in the Chesapeake Bay, Englishmen laid in the first decade of the seventeenth century the cornerstone for a process of colonization, exploitation, and expropriation that would eventually culminate in the founding of the first republic in the Americas. In the course of the American Revolutionary War, which lasted from 1775 to 1783, the United States of America proclaimed independence from Great Britain. The colonies, and later the country, whose economy was built upon coerced labor, had introduced the first enslaved people from the western coast of Africa in 1619. In the almost 250 years to follow until the institution was finally abolished in 1865, slavery continuously evolved, as did the experiences of the people held captive.78 In the Age of Revolutions (c. 1774-1849), Enlightenment ideals, most visible in the American, French and Haitian Revolutions, had major impacts on the institution of slavery. According to historian David Brion Davis, the shift of moral consciousness that took place at this time led many people in Europe and in the Americas to regard slavery as a symbol of “all the forces that threatened the true destiny of man.” Religious convictions among certain groups were a large component of these changes in morality. Apart from some minor sects who began to try and live their lives free from sin (which also included the sinfulness of slavery), the Quakers were the one religious group who gradually developed sophisticated and realistic opposition towards slavery and achieved sufficient economic and political power to make their claims heard.79 The reassessment of the legitimate treatment of the poor, the weak, and the different led, among other changes, to challenging the physical treatment of slaves, which came to constitute 78 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 13, 29. A selection of literature on the American Revolutionary War includes Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution 1763–1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); and Richard Middleton, The War of American Independence, 1775–1783 (London: Pearson, 2012). 79 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41-48. 25 a step towards a critique of slavery itself.80 A mix of ideological change paired with the pressing for freedom by black people and an economic loss not too painful for slaveholders ultimately led to the prohibition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery as an institution in various states, nations, and countries throughout the Americas. These included the American northern states, all of which had either abolished slavery or introduced gradual abolition schemes by 1804.81 The Age of Revolutions also had a profound impact on slavery in the southern states, although with a different outcome. Instead of emancipating all enslaved people by formally ending slavery, manumission and self-purchase schemes were facilitated, which liberated thousands, even as bondage remained intact. Enslaved people themselves played an active role in this process. The Revolutionary era was a turbulent time that furnished African Americans with new opportunities to contest their bondage. Many slaves took the chance to flee from slavery or to exchange military service for their freedom. Others actively pressed their owners for manumission or used the possibility to purchase their own or family members’ freedom.82 In the southern states, moral concerns regarding slavery during this time coincided with a weakening tobacco production, which had been the backbone of slavery in Virginia, the largest and oldest slave society of the new country. Although historian Manisha Sinha has underlined that it was mainly thanks to abolitionist mobilization, revolutionary ideology, and slave resistance that spurred individual manumissions, decreasingly fertile soils in the Upper South made tobacco-based slavery seem doomed after the Revolution. In 1782, Virginia enacted an ordinance to ease former legal constraints on manumissions. Between that year and 1806, ten thousand bondspeople benefitted from this legal relaxation.83 Manumissions, whereby slaves were officially and legally set free, had always been a part of the system of slavery. Historians have explained that the possibility to manumit was in many aspects in the interest of masters. It offered a motivation for their bondspeople “to behave well,” provided the slaveowners with a reward mechanism, and, in the case of self-purchase, allowed them to negotiate with their slaves higher prices than the market prices. 84 Consequently, the prospects of manumission for a few could be used to maintain the subjection of the masses. The reasons why slaveowners set their bondspeople free or allowed them to “purchase” their own freedom varied from a cash-payment over satisfaction of what was perceived good and loyal service to religion, ideology, or a self-understanding of a “benevolent” slaveholder. 85 Thanks to religious and ideological considerations, which in the Age of 80 Kolchin, American Slavery, 65-66. 81 On gradual abolition in the North, see, for instance, Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); and James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 82 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 219-224. 83 Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 66, 85- 86. 84 Robin Blackburn, “Introduction,” in Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed.

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