2021-05-13
Addressing the historical “silence” around Black enslaved women fugitives.
In a scholarly study derived from meticulous research, historian Bell digs deeply into advertisements for fugitive slaves that appeared in periodicals across Colonial America. In addition, she picks through an impressively varied set of other relevant primary sources “such as petitions, letters, county books, parish records, official correspondence, diaries, and plantation records,” seeking “to restore human dignity to a group of persons who have long been denied their dignity.” In a five-part study, each presenting an actual case of a fugitive woman slave, the author moves chronologically, beginning in pre-Revolutionary America, and she shows how slaves gradually responded in greater numbers to the increasingly vocal rhetoric of emancipation and fled their enslavers, in both the North and the South. The most instances of fugitive flight occurred at the height of the Revolution, writes the author, “due to the breakdown of oversight and state authority.” Many fled to the British side as a result of Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of November 1775 as well as the Philipsburg Proclamation issued by British Army Gen. Sir Henry Clinton in June 1779, both of which “offered freedom to slaves who would aid the Loyalist cause.” The author extracts these inspiring stories from the text of the advertisements, which revealed physical and personality characteristics of the women as well as details about clothing and companions. The charts and statistics demonstrate a host of sobering facts—e.g., that despite the Revolutionary rhetoric and growing “anti-slavery sentiment,” the number of slaves in the U.S. Colonies doubled from 1760 (325,000) to 1790 (698,000). Ultimately, Bell effectively situates Black enslaved women’s flight into the larger narrative of slave resistance, providing a useful addition to the academic literature that may find a narrow audience among early American history buffs.
Scholarly, to be sure, but the author’s archival excavation is to be commended.