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9781469671062 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. While most readers may think about the northern United States and Canada when considering most likely destinations for enslaved people in search of freedom, Mueller convincingly demonstrates that the cities of the South were important sites of refuge for countless enslaved persons."--Journal of Southern History "Escape to the City offers a freshly interdisciplinary example of how urban history, labor history, immigration studies, legal history, and the study of slavery together can offer new ways of considering the experience of fugitive enslaved people in the antebellum period. . . . Standing as an interdisciplinary evaluation of the antebellum experience of enslaved people seeking freedom, [Mueller's work] is recommended to any scholar seeking to engage in new ways of considering freedom."--North Carolina Historical Review "Mueller has provided a valuable resource for scholars of history at every level and should spark further exploration of the topic of unfreedom."-Journal of American History
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