scholarly journals Intermarriage in the Quilombo: Southey’s Republic of Runaway Slaves

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
Valentina P. Aparicio
Keyword(s):  
Runaway Slaves

Against Slave Power? Slavery and Runaway Slaves in Mexico-United States Relations, 1821–1857

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-170
Author(s):  
Gerardo Gurza-Lavalle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The South ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The Us ◽  
El Alto ◽  
Upper South ◽  
Lower South

This work analyses the diplomatic conflicts that slavery and the problem of runaway slaves provoked in relations between Mexico and the United States from 1821 to 1857. Slavery became a source of conflict after the colonization of Texas. Later, after the US-Mexico War, slaves ran away into Mexican territory, and therefore slaveholders and politicians in Texas wanted a treaty of extradition that included a stipulation for the return of fugitives. This article contests recent historiography that considers the South (as a region) and southern politicians as strongly influential in the design of foreign policy, putting into question the actual power not only of the South but also of the United States as a whole. The problem of slavery divided the United States and rendered the pursuit of a proslavery foreign policy increasingly difficult. In addition, the South never acted as a unified bloc; there were considerable differences between the upper South and the lower South. These differences are noticeable in the fact that southerners in Congress never sought with enough energy a treaty of extradition with Mexico. The article also argues that Mexico found the necessary leeway to defend its own interests, even with the stark differential of wealth and resources existing between the two countries. El presente trabajo analiza los conflictos diplomáticos entre México y Estados Unidos que fueron provocados por la esclavitud y el problema de los esclavos fugitivos entre 1821 y 1857. La esclavitud se convirtió en fuente de conflicto tras la colonización de Texas. Más tarde, después de la guerra Mexico-Estados Unidos, algunos esclavos se fugaron al territorio mexicano y por lo tanto dueños y políticos solicitaron un tratado de extradición que incluyera una estipulación para el retorno de los fugitivos. Este artículo disputa la idea de la historiografía reciente que considera al Sur (en cuanto región), así como a los políticos sureños, como grandes influencias en el diseño de la política exterior, y pone en tela de juicio el verdadero poder no sólo del Sur sino de Estados Unidos en su conjunto. El problema de la esclavitud dividió a Estados Unidos y dificultó cada vez más el impulso de una política exterior que favoreciera la esclavitud. Además, el Sur jamás operó como unidad: había diferencias marcadas entre el Alto Sur y el Bajo Sur. Estas diferencias se observan en el hecho de que los sureños en el Congreso jamás se esforzaron en buscar con suficiente energía un tratado de extradición con México. El artículo también sostiene que México halló el margen de maniobra necesario para defender sus propios intereses, pese a los fuertes contrastes de riqueza y recursos entre los dos países.

“Design His Course to Mexico”

2018 ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Mekala Audain
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Contested Spaces ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The U.S

In the mid-1850s, Texas slaveholders estimated that some 4,000 fugitive slaves had escaped south to Mexico. This chapter broadly examines the process in which runaway slaves from Texas escaped to Mexico. Specifically, it explores how they learned about freedom south of the border, the types of supplies they gathered for their escape attempts, and the ways in which Texas’s vast landscape shaped their experiences. It argues that the routes that led fugitive slaves to freedom in Mexico were a part of a precarious southern Underground Railroad, but one that operated in the absence of formal networks or a well-organized abolitionist movement. The chapter centers on fugitive slaves’ efforts toward self-emancipation and navigate contested spaces of slavery and freedom with little assistance and under difficult conditions. It sheds new light on the history of runaway slaves by examining the ways in which American westward expansion and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands shaped the fugitive slave experience in the nineteenth century.

“Odious” Abolitionists and “Insolent” Runaways

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebekah M. K. Mergenthal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Indian Country ◽  
Runaway Slaves

In the 1840s and 1850s, local slaveholders, runaway slaves, and Shawnees and their missionaries attached different meanings to the border between the territory of the Shawnees and the state of Missouri, between Indian Country and the United States. The inhabitants’s complicated and contradictory understandings of this borderland helped construct their identities, and the meanings they ascribed to the border resonated beyond their specific locality. A closer focus on this thirty-mile-long border exposes its meaning for people on each side and for those who crossed it. The line also had broader significance because national politicians intended it to differentiate U.S. and Indian territories. The border separated the Shawnee and Missouri settlers, and politicians believed it would prevent interactions in the area. However, other border residents had their own ideas and did what they could to make the boundary more permeable. The line mattered, but it resonated in unexpected and telling ways because of what people tried to do with and along it.

Securing Niagara (1852–55)

2020 ◽  
pp. 344-395
Author(s):  
Richard Haw
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Suspension Bridge ◽  
The United States ◽  
Railroad Bridges ◽  
Long Span ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Egyptian Architecture

The Niagara contract was a fitting judgment on John’s career to date, and the bridge itself was a triumph, eliciting praise and admiration from all over the globe, for both its handsome Egyptian architecture and the soundness of its design. It took four years to build and was the world’s first railroad suspension bridge, or at least the first successful one, fully demonstrating the strength and effectiveness of the suspension plan for heavy-going freight. It also compared very favorably with Robert Stephenson’s recently completed Britannia Tubular Bridge, the British engineer’s rival solution to the problem of long-span railroad bridges. A lifelong, committed abolitionist who wrote extensively about the evils of slavery, John also appreciated the impact his bridge had (somewhat incidentally) on the institution of slavery. Harriet Tubman (among others) used John’s bridge numerous times in the late 1850s to lead runaway slaves out of the United States and into British Canada.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Free Blacks ◽  
Underground Railroad ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
The North ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The Law ◽  
Upper South

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, although in effect less than two decades, was one of the nation’s most controversial federal laws. Designed to provide southern slaveholders with greater assistance in the return of runaway slaves, it angered northern whites and blacks, divided communities, and yet still failed to assuage slaveholders’ concerns. Designed to calm sectional tensions as part of the Compromise of 1850, the law propelled the nation closer to war. Both the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 affirmed the rights of slaveholders to claim enslaved people who escaped into free states or territories. But enslaved people continued to seek freedom, and over time the number of those willing to aid them grew, eventually developing into the loosely organized network known as the Underground Railroad. Slaveholders, especially in the Upper South, annually lost an untold number of slaves to escape. Not all freedom-seekers were successful, but the costs were great nonetheless. To slaveholders, every escaped slave who made it North represented a loss of hundreds of dollars, and perhaps more importantly, spurred others to follow in his or her footsteps. Often associated with states’ rights ideology, white southerners demanded and eventually got what some scholars have called the greatest exercise of federal power before the Civil War. The enhanced federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 expanded on the earlier law in several important ways. It created a new position of commissioner who was appointed, not elected, and was paid ten dollars each time he sent an accused fugitive into slavery, only five dollars if he found the claim to be insufficient and ordered the accused released. The act also strengthened the penalties for helping fugitives escape or interfering with rendition; it explicitly stripped all rights from the accused; and stated that bystanders could be called upon to assist in slave recapture. Response to the law varied. Enslaved people continued to escape bondage. Fugitives living in the North and even free blacks felt threatened and organized for self-defense; thousands left for Canada. Abolitionists, black and white, protested in writing and speeches; some engaged in bold rescues of individuals claimed as fugitives. Many white northerners abided by the law, although for others the idea of being turned into de facto slave catchers pushed them toward opposition. Rather than settle the issue of fugitive slaves, the Law served to divide the nation further.

On the Run: Runaway Slaves and Their Social Networks in Eighteenth-Century Cochin

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-87
Author(s):  
Alexander Geelen ◽  
Bram van den Hout ◽  
Merve Tosun ◽  
Mike de Windt ◽  
Matthias van Rossum
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
And Control

Abstract Despite growing attention to the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian Archipelago worlds, the debate on the nature or characteristics of slavery in these regions has been left largely unsettled. Whereas some scholars emphasize the existence of harsh forms of hereditary slavery similar to those found in the Americas, others argue that the nature of slavery in Asia was urban, status-based, and milder than in the Atlantic world. This article explores case studies of slaves escaping in and around the Dutch East India Company (VOC) city of Cochin. Studying court records that bring to light the strategies and social networks of enslaved runaways provides new insights into the characteristics of slavery and the conditions of slaves in and around VOC-Cochin. The findings indicate that the social and everyday conditions under which slaves lived were highly diverse and shaped by the direct relations between slave and master, influenced by elements of trust, skill, and control. Relations of slavery nevertheless remained engrained by the recurrence of physical punishments and verbal threats, despite sometimes relatively open situations. This reminds us that easy dichotomies of “benign,” “Asian,” “household,” or “urban” versus “European,” “Atlantic,” or “plantation” slavery obscure as much as they reveal.

scholarly journals Disappearing from Abolitionism's Heartland: The Legacy of Slavery and Emancipation in Boston

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (S28) ◽  
pp. 145-168
Author(s):  
Jared Ross Hardesty
Keyword(s):  
Rural Economy ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Men ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article examines why Boston's slave and free black population consisted of more than 1,500 people in 1750, but by 1790 Boston was home to only 766 people of African descent. This disappearing act, where the town's black population declined by at least fifty per cent between 1763 and 1790, can only be explained by exploring slavery, abolition, and their legacies in Boston. Slaves were vital to the town's economy, filling skilled positions and providing labor for numerous industries. Using the skills acquired to challenge their enslavement, Afro-Bostonians found freedom during the American revolutionary era. Nevertheless, as New England's rural economy collapsed, young white men and women from all over the region flooded Boston looking for work, driving down wages, and competing with black people for menial employment. Forced out of the labor market, many former slaves and their descendants left the region entirely. Others joined the Continental or British armies and never returned home. Moreover, many slave owners, knowing that slavery was coming to an end in Massachusetts, sold their bondsmen and women to other colonies in the Americas where slavery was still legal and profitable. Thus, the long-term legacy of abolition for black Bostonians was that Boston's original enslaved population largely disappeared, while the city became a hub of abolitionism by the 1830s. Boston's abolitionist community – many the descendants of slaveholders – did not have to live with their forefathers’ sins. Instead, they crafted a narrative of a free Boston, making it an attractive destination for runaway slaves from across the Atlantic world.

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