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9781469671055 Academic Inspection Copy

Escape to the City

Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South
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Viola Franziska Muller 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, Muller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved African Americans in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities.
Viola Franziska Muller is a social historian at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany.
A fascinating exploration of the experiences of fugitives from slavery . . . . Escape to the City is an important contribution to the scholarship on slavery, labor, and urban life. Muller's work is worthy of a wide audience."--Warren E. Milteer Jr., Journal of Southern History
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