“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.

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.

Freedom Interrupted

2018 ◽  
pp. 251-274
Author(s):  
James David Nichols
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

Scholars have long suggested that nineteenth-century runaway slaves turned the U.S.-Mexico border into a line of freedom. However, as this chapter argues, such an interpretation of the border is somewhat problematic. A closer examination of the history of northern Tamaulipas explains why. From 1820 onward, African Americans began to arrive to that region in search of freedom and a changed racial milieu, but this process was deeply fraught. U.S. American jurisprudence could continue to affect Mexican space formally and informally from the outside, greatly troubling Mexican sovereignty and its foreign relations in the process. Hence, the freedom found by African Americans in Mexico—guaranteed by Mexican law—was never particularly secure in practice. This chapter builds upon the previous chapter and provides an in-depth analysis of a specific case study of fugitive slaves’ struggles for freedom in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North America ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
The U.S

Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Freedom in North America examines and contrasts the experiences of various groups of African-American slaves who tried to escape bondage between the revolutionary era and the U.S. Civil War. Whereas much of the existing scholarship tends to focus on fugitive slaves in very localized settings (especially in communities and regions north of the Mason-Dixon line), the eleven contributions in this volume bring together the latest scholarship on runaway slaves in a diverse range of geographic settings throughout North America—from Canada to Virginia and from Mexico to the British Bahamas—providing a broader and more continental perspective on slave refugee migration. The volume innovatively distinguishes between various “spaces of freedom” to which runaway slaves fled, specifically sites of formal freedom (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished and refugees were legally free, even if the meanings of freedom in these places were heavily contested); semi-formal freedom (free-soil regions where slavery had been abolished but asylum for runaway slaves was either denied or contested, such as the northern U.S., where state abolition laws were curtailed by federal fugitive slave laws); and informal freedom (places within the slaveholding South where runaways formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations and pass for free). This edited volume encourages scholars to reroute and reconceptualize the geography of slavery and freedom in antebellum North America.

The U.S. Coastal Passageand Caribbean Spaces of Freedom

2018 ◽  
pp. 275-316
Author(s):  
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Migration Routes ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Slave Revolts ◽  
Domestic Slave Trade

In November 1841, the U.S. slaver Creole transporting 135 slaves from Richmond to New Orleans was seized by nineteen slave rebels who steered the ship to the British Bahamas, where all secured their liberation. Drawing from this well-known story as a point of departure, this chapter examines the understudied maritime dimensions of British free soil policies in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on how such policies affected the U.S. domestic slave trade and slave revolts at sea. In contrast to the more familiar narrative of south-to-north fugitive slave migration, this chapter sheds light on international south-to-south migration routes from the U.S. South to the circum-Caribbean.

The Unlikely Environmentalisms of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Michelle C. Neely
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Food System ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Antebellum Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Imagination ◽  
The U.S

Against Sustainability argues for a transformation of our environmental ethics and our environmental imagination. The introduction demonstrates that the manifest difficulties of centering transformative environmental ethics in mainstream U.S. environmentalism are compounded by the hegemony of the sustainability paradigm. Sustainability captures a well-meaning impulse to ensure the stable persistence of human societies over time, yet its reassuring emphasis on stability comes with a high cost: sustainability prizes continuity with pasts the Anthropcene reveals as environmentally and ethically problematic. The introduction illustrates the limits of future-oriented paradigms dominated by pastoral thinking by reading contemporary critics of the U.S. food system against their nineteenth-century counterparts. An archival approach to industrial farming and animal agriculture proves that many of their hallmark practices originate in the antebellum period or earlier. The introduction ultimately argues that an honest reckoning with the history of U.S. environmental ideas and practices compels us to recognize the imbrication of many of our most cherished environmental ideals with the systems that produced the problems to which they apparently respond: capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. If we want something different—for ourselves and for the planet—we will have to imagine it, and we will have to build it.

Contradictions in Creating a Jihadi Capital: Sokoto in the Nineteenth Century and Its Legacy

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murray Last
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Field Site ◽  
Rural Town ◽  
Political Center ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sokoto Caliphate ◽  
A Site ◽  
The U.S

Abstract:The Sokoto caliphate in nineteenth-century northern Nigeria was an astonishing episode in the history of Africa: a huge, prosperous polity that created unity where none had existed before. Yet today its history is underexplored, sometimes ignored or even disparaged, both within Nigeria and in Europe and the U.S. Yet that history is extraordinary. Sokoto town was, and still is, an anomaly within Hausaland; built speedily on a “green-field” site as both a trading and a political center for the caliphate, it is a site of pilgrimage that to this day remains a rural town with no monumental buildings or fine edifices. As a by-product of a religious movement (jihad), Sokoto thus represents many of the dilemmas that faced and still face radically reforming Islamic groups if they expand rapidly and go to war. Thus Sokoto history remains deeply significant for modern Nigeria.

Seeking Freedom in the Midst of Slavery

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-136
Author(s):  
Damian Alan Pargas
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
The Political ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Fugitive Slaves ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The U.S

Slave flight in the antebellum South did not always coincide with the political geography of freedom. Indeed, spaces and places within the U.S. South attracted the largest number of fugitive slaves. From the forests that bordered plantation districts (where slaves remained hidden and maintained by local slave communities) to southern cities (where slaves attempted to pass for free blacks), a majority of fugitive slaves strove for freedom by disguising themselves within the slaveholding states rather than risk long-distance flight attempts to formally free territories such as the northern U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This chapter examines the experiences of fugitive slaves who fled to southern cities between 1800 and 1860. It touches upon themes such as the motivations for fleeing to urban areas (e.g., slave families dodging forced migration), the networks that facilitated such flight attempts, and the ways in which runaway slaves navigated sites of “informal freedom” after arrival in urban areas. Whereas some scholars have approached this group of runaways mainly as “absentees” or “truants” (temporary runaways), this chapter argues that throughout the South, many fugitive slaves who hid out in towns and cities were in fact permanent refugees from slavery—at least by intent, and often by outcome.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Jason W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Science Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Naval Officers ◽  
The U.S

The introduction established the main argument of the book, which is that the U.S. Navy’s charts and its chart-making throughout the nineteenth century were integral to the expansion of American oceanic empire even as such effort exposed the limits of science practice, seafaring, and war-making in a dynamic, dangerous marine environment. The Navy and the broader American maritime world’s encounter with the ocean, mediated through science, was integral to the way mariners, navigators, and naval officers thought of an emerging maritime empire first in commercial terms and, by the late nineteenth century, in new geo-strategic terms. The introduction also places the larger work within the historiographies of military, maritime, and naval history as well as environmental history and the history of science and cartography, seeking to establish historiographical and methodological bridges among these sub-fields.

Introduction

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery A. Jenkins ◽  
Charles Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Political System ◽  
Organizational Politics ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Majority Party ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

This book investigates the history of organizational politics in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1789 to the present. It argues that the history of how speakership elections developed was driven by a desire to establish an organizational cartel in the House. It examines the centrality of the party caucus for the organization of the House, and more specifically how the majority party came to own the chief House officers, especially the Speaker. It also discusses two themes about Congress and its role in the American political system: the construction of mass political parties in the early nineteenth century and the role that political parties play in guiding the agenda of Congress today. This chapter provides an overview of the data and methods used by the book as well as the chapters that follow.

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