Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground by Barbara J. Fields

The case will be made that enslaved African Americans carved new spaces of freedom within southern cities, with the assistance of free black communities.

This article concentrates on runaway slaves in Baltimore and Richmond, two cities which had large African-American populations. Few scholars have examined the various strategies employed by self-emancipators to remain concealed from the authorities. The concept of illegal freedom will be applied, which stands in contrast to the legal freedom that could be obtained on free soil. The developments of the time provided more slaves with new opportunities to escape slavery by fleeing to free black communities. Yet for most enslaved people living in the US South it was a period of intensification and expansion of human bondage. For many African-American slaves, it was an age of emancipation. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, free black communities within the slaveholding southern states emerged or were bolstered as a result of an increase in manumissions. Contrary to common assumptions that self-emancipation by flight was only possible to regions outside the southern states, this article argues that many slaves actively took and preserved their freedom by hiding amongst free African American populations in urban areas.

Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground by Barbara J. Fields