Thèses sur le sujet « Fugitive slaves – history »

This dissertation is a systematic investigation of fugitive slave advertisements aiming to understand the nature of fugitives’ rebelliousness in Georgia and Maryland between 1790 and 1810. Hitherto, historical inquiry pertaining to slave fugitivity has focused on other states and other times. This study provides a close reading of 5,567 advertisements pertaining to runaway slaves and analyses extracted data pertaining to the prosopography of 1,832 fugitives and their fugitivity. Its main research questions focus on advertisements as manifest records of rebellion. Who were the fugitives? What do the fugitive slave advertisements reveal about enslaved people’s contestation of slaveholders’ authority? The principal findings are as follows. First, the typography and iconography of fugitive slave advertisements were expressly intended to undermine the individualism and agency of enslaved people. Second, with regard to Georgia and Maryland, while there were spikes between 1796 and 1798 and 1800 and 1801, fugitivity was a daily occurrence, and thus a normative act of rebellion distinct from insurrection. Third, quantitative analysis indicated fugitives were typically young males, in their twenties, likely to escape at any time of the year; Georgia fugitives were more likely to escape in groups. Fourth, qualitative analysis of advertisers’ descriptions of fugitives revealed evidence of challenges to their authority. Depictions of fugitives’ character and remarks or notes on their behaviour constitute evidence of observed characteristics. From the advertisers’ perspective slaves were at their most dangerous when they could read and write or when they were skilled in deception. The “artful” fugitive in particular possessed many skills, sometimes including literacy, which could be used to defy the power that kept him or her in subjection. Fifth, further investigation established clear linkages between literacy and fugitives’ rebelliousness. Qualitative studies to date speak of slave literacy’s theoretical liberating and empowering effects but do not provide tangible accounts of who the literate slaves were or consider literacy as a factor in rebelliousness. The dissertation identified 36 literate slaves in Maryland and 9 in Georgia, and statistical analysis suggested 3.6 percent of US fugitive slaves were literate. Finally, it was evident that literacy was part of a larger contest to circumvent slaveholder authority and attain self-empowerment. Fugitivity itself was the outcome of a history of contestation that might be hidden from history were it not for the advertisements themselves.

In the antebellum period Richmond, Virginia newspapers ran advertisements for runaway slaves. Most of the ads concerned individuals absconded from outlying counties, distant regions of the state, or nearby states. These short notices have been used frequently to describe and discuss runaways and the link between flight and freedom in Virginia. In contrast to the brief newspaper entries the Daybook of the Richmond Police Guard, 1834--1844 provides names and detailed descriptions of nine hundred-thirty-five runaways all of whom lived in the city and were reported within the city precincts during one ten year period. The Daybook is a hand written record consisting of entries made by the Watchmen on duty each day. its pages are "A Memorandum of Robberies and Runaways" for the whole city and in addition to fugitive slaves list lost and stolen clothing, food, textiles, bank notes, fires and murder. Chapter 1 discusses the historiography of runaway slaves and the ways that the Daybook data allows a close examination of African American resistance in an urban setting. Chapter 2 explores the geography and look of the city of Richmond in the 1830s and early 40s. Chapter 3 closely examines the fugitives themselves, and Chapter 4 explores the context of laws and restrictions under which the black population, slave and free, lived. Chapter 5 describes the varied strategies the enslaved population, bound in kinship and friendship to the free black population, used to successfully hide within the city and segues into the transcribed complete text of the Daybook of the Richmond Police Guard. 1834--1844.

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Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Amazonas
This work analyzes the slaves escapes in the Amazonas of the 19th century second half. Fragments of life found in different movements of escape from captivity, were related to the intricate web of social, power, economic and cultural relations in which slaves were bound. Slaves were the least privileged class social in a excluding social structure, and escaping was a way to redefine captivity. In the period 1850-1870, when there were no laws for emancipation and a few master granted manumissions, many escaped, pressing radically. From 1870, when it was created laws and funds to emancipation, especially the 28th September 1871 Law that freed those born from that date lead to a decrease of escapes. Through hard work, the women slaves (far beyond the men slaves) sought, through legal ways, freedom. Thus, retained autonomy from the old masters, without necessarily breaking relations. In exchange for protection, shelter and education to the "naive", allowed the continued use of child labor. In baptism, chose as godparents to their children the family members of masters and public figures. It was fictitious kinship networks that was used to protect their children from a precarious freedom. In this context, passed away to be a very effective strategy to redefine the conditions of live by himself .
O presente trabalho analisa as fugas escravas no Amazonas da segunda metade do século XIX. Os fragmentos de vida encontrados, em diferentes movimentos de fuga do cativeiro, foram relacionados as intricadas relações sociais, de poder, econômicas e culturais vivenciadas pelos escravizados que, localizados nas camadas mais baixas de uma estrutura hierarquizada e excludente, fugiam e redefiniam o cativeiro. No período de 1850-1870, quando não existiam leis emancipacionistas e raros senhores concediam alforrias, muitos fugiram, pressionando de forma radical. A partir de 1870, quando se criaram leis e fundos para emancipação, em especial a Lei de 28 de Setembro de 1871 que libertou os nascidos desde então, as fugas diminuíram. Através do trabalho árduo, as escravas (bem mais que os homens) buscaram, por vias legais, a liberdade. Com isso, mantinham a autonomia frente aos antigos senhores, sem necessariamente romper relações. Em troca de proteção, abrigo e instrução aos ingênuos , permitiam a continuidade do uso do trabalho das crianças. Nos batizados, escolhiam como padrinhos de seus filhos os familiares dos senhores ou figuras públicas. Eram redes de parentesco fictício que protegiam os filhos de uma liberdade precária. Nesse contexto, fugir passava a ser uma estratégia pouco eficaz de redefinir as condições de viver sobre si.

History
Ph.D.
This dissertation examines the conflict over slavery and freedom in Philadelphia from 1820 to 1847. As the northernmost southern city in a state that bordered three slave states, Philadelphia maintained a long tradition of abolitionism and fugitive slave activity. Conflicts that arose over fugitive slaves and the kidnapping of free African-Americans forced Philadelphians to confront the politics of slavery. This dissertation argues that until 1847, Pennsylvania was in effect a slave state. The work of proslavery groups, namely slave masters, their agents, white and black kidnappers, and local, state, and national political supporters, undermined the ostensible successes of state laws designed to protect the freedom of African-Americans in Pennsylvania. Commonly referred to as “liberty laws,” this legislation exposed the inherent difficulty in determining the free or enslaved status of not only fugitive slaves but also African-American kidnapping victims. By studying the specific fugitive or kidnapping cases that inspired these liberty laws, one finds that time and again African-Americans and their allies forced white politicians to grapple with the reality that Pennsylvania was not a safe-haven for African-Americans, regardless of their condition of bondage or freedom. Furthermore, these cases often precipitated into desperate rescues and bloody riots on the streets of Philadelphia; these civil wars in miniature reflected the negotiated and compromised realities of living while black in the city. Ordinary African-Americans living in Philadelphia bore the burden of comity, or friendly relations between states, by practicing what I term “street diplomacy”: the up-close and personal struggles over freedom and slavery that had local, state, and national ramifications. In a larger sense, street diplomacy in Philadelphia magnified the stakes of national comity, i.e. the Union, by showcasing how dividing states by their condition of bondage remained impossible due to permeable geographic borders that fostered perpetual fugitive slave and kidnapping crises. Thus, this dissertation argues that African-Americans and their allies’ struggles with slave-masters, slave-catchers, kidnappers and proslavery politicians disrupted the best efforts of white politicians to maintain a compromised and compromising Union.
Temple University--Theses

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2008.
Title from file title page. Wendy Venet, committee chair; Glenn Eskew, Charles Steffen , committee members. Electronic text ( 284 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed October 9, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-284).

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Fundação Carlos Chagas
This research was done at, located at the cities of Cavalcante, Teresina and Monte Alegre, northeast of the State of Goiás. As from references of Anthropological Theory, tried to describe this Hiding-place of fugitive Negro Slaves and its people considering their caracteristics of identity, of culture, social, economical and historical. Investigated and analyzed above all the role of women, through their cultural atitudes and routine, foccusing the relations they have with themselves, with their partners, with their group and with their past, trying to understand the meaning of " being a woman" in this context. The method used was open country work, preceded of bibliographical survey associated to research of documents
Esta pesquisa foi realizada no quilombo kalunga, localizado nos municípios de Cavalcante, Teresina e Monte Alegre, nordeste do Estado de Goiás. A partir de referenciais da teoria antropológica, buscou descrever este quilombo e sua gente nas suas características identitárias, culturais, sociais, econômicas e históricas. Investigou e analisou sobretudo o lugar da mulher, através de suas práticas culturais e sua rotina, enfocando as relações que estabelecem entre si, com seus parceiros, com seu grupo e com seu passado procurando compreender o sentido do ser mulher nesse contexto. O método utilizado foi o trabalho de campo, precedido de levantamento bibliográfico e associado à pesquisa de documentos

This thesis examines how the law dealt with international fugitives. It focuses on formal extradition and the cross-border abduction of wanted criminals by police officers and other state officials. Debates over extradition and abduction reflected important issues of state power and civil liberty, and were shaped by currents of thought circulating throughout the imperial, Atlantic, and common law worlds. Debates over extradition involved questioning the very basis of international law. They also raised difficult questions about civil liberties and human rights. Throughout this period escaped American slaves and other groups made claims for what we would now call refugee status, and argued that their surrender violated codes of law and ideas of justice that transcended the colonies and even the wider British Empire. Such claims sparked a decades-long debate in North America and Europe over how to codify refugee protections. Ultimately, Britain used its imperial power to force Canada to accept such safeguards. Yet even as the formal extradition system developed, an informal system of police abductions operated in the Canadian-American borderlands. This system defied formal law, but it also manifested sophisticated local ideas about community justice and transnational legal order. This thesis argues that extradition and abduction must be understood within three overlapping contexts. The first is the ethos of liberal transnationalism that permeated all levels of state officials in British North America/Canada. This view largely prioritised the erosion of domestic barriers to international cooperation over the protection of individual liberty. It was predicated in large part on the idea of a common North American civilization. The second context is Canada’s place in the British Empire. Extradition and abduction highlight both how British North America/Canada often expounded views on legal order radically different from Britain, but also that even after Confederation in 1867 the empire retained real power to shape Canadian policy. The final context is international law and international legal order. Both extradition and abduction were aspects of law on an international and transnational level. As a result, this thesis examines the processes of migration, adoption, and adaptation of international law.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
The complicated state wherein ex-slaves found themselves, as depicted in the narratives of Bibb, Jacobs, and others, problematizes the dualistic relationship between North and South that the genre’s structural components work to enforce, forging an odyssey that, although sometimes still spiritual in nature, does not offer the type of resolutions that might easily persuade fellow slaves to abandon their masters and seek a similarly ambiguous identity in the so-called “free” land of the North. For blacks and especially fugitive slaves, such restrictive legal provisions provided an “uncertain status” where, writes William Andrews, “the definition of freedom for black people remained open.” In those slave narratives that dare to depict the limits of liberty in the North, this “open” status is particularly reflected in the texts’ discursive terrain itself, which portends a series of candid observations and brutal details that actively work to deconstruct any sort of mythological pattern associated with the slave narrative genre, thereby offering a more expansive view of the experience for most fugitive slaves. The Life of William Grimes, a particularly frank and brutal diary of a man’s trials within and without slavery, is one such slave narrative, depicting a journey that, while more consistent with the general experience of ex-slaves in the antebellum U.S., often works outside the parameters of traditional, straight-forward slave narratives like Douglass’s. “I often was obliged to go off the road,” Grimes admits at one point in his autobiography, and although his remark refers to the cautious path he must tread as a fugitive slave, it might just as well describe the thematic and structural characteristics of his open-ended autobiography. Reputedly the first fugitive slave narrative, the publication of Grimes’s Life in 1825 initiated the beginning of a genre whose path had not yet been forged, which likely contributed to its fluid nature. At the time of his narrative’s publication, Grimes’s self-expressed testimony of injustice under slavery was about five years ahead of its time; it wouldn’t be until the 1830s that the U.S. antislavery movement would begin to consciously seek out ex-slaves to testify to their experience in bondage. Once this literary door was open, however, antislavery sentiment became for many early African American authors “a ready forum” for self-expression. Whereas in twenty years’ time Douglass would take full advantage of this opportunity by drawing inspiration from a number of already established narratives, Grimes as an author found himself singularly “off the road” and essentially alone in new literary territory, uncannily reflecting his sense of alienation and helplessness in the North after escaping from slavery aboard a cargo ship in 1815.

In 1854, acting as a federal commissioner under the Fugitive Slave Law, Suffolk County probate judge Edward Greeley Loring returned the alleged runaway Anthony Burns to slavery. In protest, antislavery activists petitioned legislators to exercise a little-used power to demand that the next governor remove Loring from state office. For three years, Know-Nothing governor Henry J. Gardner refused to do so, and Republican Nathaniel P. Banks removed the judge in 1858 with considerable reluctance. For both men, and for their parties, Loring's ordeal had ideological significance beyond his personal fate. This dissertation traces this significance to a lasting debate between conservatives and radical reformers over the principle of judicial independence from popular influences. Advocacy of elections for judges and other reforms went back to the Jeffersonian era, but antislavery activists took up the theme to protest judicial submission to the 1850 fugitive law. They joined earlier critics who condemned the state judiciary as a self-serving clique. Loring, who owed his position to family, social, and political ties, made an exemplary villain despite his efforts to show objective fairness during the Burns trial. Radicals demanded his removal in the name of popular moral sovereignty, while conservatives defended him in the interest of judicial independence. The radical implications of removal were somewhat muted by the Personal Liberty Law of 1855, which lent the campaign some statutory authority. The states-rights aspect of the controversy, however, remained divisive even after Republican victories made the judge's fall a reasonable certainty. The final debates over Loring in 1858 exposed a continuing conflict between conservatives and radicals within the Republican party that had already hindered its early development. Loring's story as a whole illustrates the enduring significance of Jackson-era reform politics beyond the acknowledged demise of the Jacksonian party system.

In my thesis, “Commandeering Aesop’s Bamboo Canon: A 19th Century Confederacy of Creole Fugitive Fables,” I ask and answer the ‘Who? What? Where? When? Why?” of Creole Literature using the 19th century production of Aesopian fables as clues to resolve a set of linguistic, historical, literary, and geographical enigmas pertaining the ‘birth-place(s)’ of Creolophone Literatures in the Caribbean Sea, North and South America, as well as the Indian Ocean. Focusing on the fables in Martinique (1846), Reunion Island (1826), and Mauritius (1822), my thesis should read be as an attempt capture the links between these islands through the creation of a particular archive defined as a cartulary-chronicle, a diplomatic codex, or simply a map in which I chart and trace the flight of the founding documents relating to the lives of the individual authors, editors, and printers in order to illustrate the articulation of a formal and informal confederation that enabled the global and local institutional promotion of Creole Literature. While I integrate various genres and multi-polar networks between the authors of this 19th century canon comprised of sacred and secular texts such as proclamations, catechisms, and proverbs, the principle literary genre charted in my thesis are collections of fables inspired by French 17th century French Classical fabulist, Jean de la Fontaine. Often described as the ‘matrix’ of Creolophone Literature, these blues and fables constitute the base of the canon, and are usually described as either ‘translated,’ ‘adapted,’ and even ‘cross-dressed’ into Creole in all of the French Creolophone spaces. My documentation of their transnational sprouting offers proof of an opaque canonical formation of Creole popular literature. By constituting this archive, I emphasize the fact that despite 200 years of critical reception and major developments and discoveries on behalf of Creole language pedagogues, literary scholars, linguists, historians, librarians, archivist, and museum curators, up until now not only have none have curated this literature as a formal canon. I also offer new empirical evidence in order to try and solve the enigma of “How?” the fables materially circulated between the islands, and seek to come to terms with the anonymous nature of the texts, some of which were published under pseudonyms. I argue that part of the confusion on the part of scholars has been the result of being willfully taken by surprise or defrauded by the authors, or ‘bamboozled’ as I put it. The major paradigmatic shift in my thesis is that while I acknowledge La Fontaine as the base of this literary canon, I ultimately bypass him to trace the ancient literary genealogy of fables to the infamous Aesop the Phrygian, whose biography – the first of a slave in the history of the world – and subsequent use of fables reflects a ‘hidden transcript’ of ‘masked political critique’ between ‘master and slave classes’ in the 4th Century B.C.E. Greece.

This archive draws on, connects and critiques the methodologies of several disciplinary fields. I use post-colonial literary studies to map the literary genealogies Aesop; use a comparative historical approach to the abolitions of slavery in both the 19th century Caribbean and the Indian Ocean; and chart the early appearance of folk music in early colonial societies through Musicology and Performance Studies. Through the use of Sociolinguistics and theories of language revival, ecology, and change, I develop an approach of ‘reflexive Creolistics’ that I ultimately hope will offer new educational opportunities to Creole speakers. While it is my desire that this archive serves linguists, book collectors, and historians for further scientific inquiry into the innate international nature of Creole language, I also hope that this innovative material defense and illustration of Creole Literature will transform the consciousness of Creolophones (native and non-native) who too remain ‘bamboozled’ by the archive. My goal is to erase the ‘unthinkability’ of the existence of this ancient maritime creole literary canon from the collective cultural imaginary of readers around the globe.

Dissertation