Escape to the City

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262 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 4 halftones, 5 maps, 1 graph, 7 tables

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-7106-2
Published: October 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-7105-5
Published: October 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-7107-9
Published: September 2022

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Viola Franziska Müller 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, Müller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved Black people in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities.

About the Author

Viola Franziska Müller is a social historian at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany.
For more information about Viola Franziska Müller, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"A work of political economy at its best. Müller sets aside the traditional narrative of slavery to freedom and explores the mobility, networking, and labor of the runaway slaves who chose to stay in the South, focusing on how they lived and survived in a complex social environment."—R. J. M. Blackett, author of The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery

"Through rigorous research, lucid prose, and striking tabulation, Müller plots new spatial approaches toward fugitive slaves' flight to antebellum southern cities that breathe life into these neglected historical actors through lived experiences, context of flight, and arresting comparison with contemporary refugees."—Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, author of Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America's Coastal Slave Trade