Moving Toward Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans - Hardcover

O'Donovan, Susan Eva

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593657047 ISBN 13: 9780593657041

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A magisterial, groundbreaking new study of the lives of enslaved Americans on the cusp of the Civil War that places them—and their hard-won political knowledge—rightly at the center of the fight for freedom

The enduring image of American slavery has been of workers trapped on plantations, shuttling from squalid quarters to the fields and back again, or confined to the homes of abusive owners, constantly under surveillance and restriction. But if that were the whole picture, how would black Southerners have organized into such a formidable force the moment war erupted?

With Moving Toward Freedom, eminent historian Susan Eva O’Donovan radically widens the lens to reveal a new landscape of the slaveholding South: one in which enslaved workers were not pinned in place but mobile, deployed as laborers—and even as captains—on steamboats and ferries, or as teamsters transporting staple crops across the expanding country, or as ladies’ maids waiting on their mistresses on European vacations. While performing brutal and involuntary work, O’Donovan argues, enslaved Americans managed to accumulate the crucial experience and knowledge that they would use to bring about their own liberation.

Piecing together an extraordinary archive of letters, travel passes, receipts, and other documentation of lives in which literacy was illegal, O’Donovan allows her subjects to speak for themselves as they move through markets, jails, waterways, gold mines, and foreign lands. In so doing, O’Donovan demonstrates that slavery’s incredible profitability depended on a fundamentally unsustainable balance between commercial imperatives and slaveholders’ drive for control—one that enslaved workers eventually succeeded in using to their advantage, bringing slavery to its knees.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susan Eva O’Donovan is an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis. She is the author of Becoming Free in the Cotton South and coeditor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, part of the ongoing scholarship of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. She is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer and the codirector of the Memphis Massacre project, a public commemoration of Reconstruction.

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1.

The Freedom of Rivers and Roads

When the enslaved fugitive John Brown slipped ashore at New Orleans in early 1850, he knew he needed advice. He was lost. Brown had decided to make a bid for freedom after the death of a dear friend, John Glasgow, a British sailor who had been sold into captivity and who had taught him "to love and to seek liberty." He began his journey away from Milledgeville, Georgia, buoyed by his familiarity with the state's geography. From his hiding place in the forest adjacent to his owner's plantation, a man he described as savage, Brown resolved to go west. "I had come to know the road to Cass-ville, because we slaves used to have to take bacon to the Altoonah gold mines to sell to the miners. Cass-ville must be quite two hundred miles from Milledgeville, and I knew every step of the road." That knowledge carried Brown a part but not all of the way to freedom, and by the time he set float down the Tennessee River on a hand-built raft, he had exhausted his knowledge of Southern terrain. The raft nearly collided with a steamboat on reaching the Ohio River, and he decided to abandon it on the riverbank. Talking his way onto the steamboat Neptune by convincing the captain that he was traveling to meet his owner, Brown used his time aboard to replenish his dwindling store of information, "endeavor[ing]," he said, "to ascertain" from other passengers how he might get from New Orleans to England. Brown soon realized that his fellow passengers had taken advantage of his "ignorance and simplicity" to deliberately mislead him. In a cruel jest, the men had told Brown that England was no more than a step or two away from the Crescent City. When the Neptune stopped along the New Orleans shore, the sight of legions of enslaved laborers sweating over piles of cargo needing to be moved made Brown's heart sink, and he began to "suspect that all was not right." Hurrying away from the Neptune, Brown "made for a place where [he] saw a number of cotton-waggons, tended by the drivers, who were all, or nearly all, of my own colour," determined to ask them "a few questions." The answers were awful to a man who wanted nothing more than to get away. "I was in the very heart of slavery, and further off from England than when I was in Georgia."

Still, piecing together what he got from the black teamsters as well as the black watermen who also congregated in large numbers at New Orleans, Brown gathered "a good deal [more] information" about the "opportunities thus afforded me" and how he might obtain his ultimate goal. That time was not long in coming. Less than a year after leaving his master's plantation, this man, who had been born into slavery, subjected as a child to the domestic slave trade, beaten, abused, locked up, and lied to, followed the Mississippi River to its origins and crossed into Canada, bound, as he said, for "the North Star." From there, Brown inched his way east. Picking up whatever jobs he could to pay his passage, he eventually slipped back to the US side of the border, departing Boston for Liverpool in the summer of 1850. "After a surprising run of fifteen days," Brown at last reached his long-dreamed-of destination, safely landing where his dear departed friend, John Glasgow, had "left his wife and children so many years before."

Black teamsters and their counterparts, the black watermen, spent their days coursing over the region's rivers and roads in their wagons and boats, hauling everything from crates of apples and casks of wine to sides of beef, boots, shoes, and astonishing quantities of the South's great staples. They moved back and forth across the Southern interior, stitching hinterland to ocean shore, cities to plantations, mountains to plains, and south to north. And as they floated, paddled, or drove their wagons, enslaved teamsters and boatmen kept their eyes and minds wide open. Although what they came to see, know, and believe was a function of their individual routes as well as the mode of propulsion (steamboats and wagons proceeded by different routes and paces), no boatman or teamster was left unaffected by their experiences moving slavery's goods. Getting the crops to market and getting the goods home changed American history by changing America's enslaved.


Watermen were not the first to whom Brown turned when he needed advice, but they would have been a good choice. The rivers, bays, and bayous of the American Southeast teemed with river traffic. In the decades before the introduction of Robert Fulton’s steam engine, the traffic was composed of rafts, keelboats, canoes, and other vessels powered by water, wind, or human hand. That changed in the second decade of the nineteenth century when Fulton, Henry Shreve, and others launched the nation’s first steamboats. Eagerly sought after by planters who yearned for more efficient and cheaper ways of moving their crops to market and bringing finished goods home, steamboats, with their ability to run against as well as with river currents, fast became a regional favorite. By the 1820s, hundreds of varying tonnages could be found huffing their way along inland waterways, and as many as 2,169 had been built for use in the Southern interior by 1860. To stay afloat, these boats needed not just steam but crews too, and from the beginning, enslaved people figured among them. While exact numbers remain evasive, circumstantial evidence suggests that by the mid-nineteenth century enslaved people represented somewhere between 12 and 50 or more percent of the South’s inland crews. Mostly leased out by their owners to the shipping companies and captains who needed their labor, black watermen and -women were regular fixtures on the region’s vessels. They crewed the tenders that guided oceangoing vessels in and out of the South’s harbors, commanded the canoe-like pirogues favored by low-country planters in Georgia and South Carolina, poled rafts and other shallow-drafted vessels across the limestone ledges that otherwise made many inland waterways unnavigable, and manned the keelboats that continued well into the nineteenth century to carry produce from Kentucky and Missouri to the merchants of New Orleans. Even Solomon Northup, a free black Northerner whose story of having been kidnapped into slavery continues to captivate American audiences, spent time aboard the Deep South’s boats, earning himself the sobriquet “the Fulton of Indian Creek” for his work ferrying sawed lumber from his owner’s mill to its market. Such was enslaved people’s ubiquity on the South’s inland waterways that when the Colonel Crossman exploded near New Madrid, Missouri, in the mid-1850s, the Scottish poet and geologist Charles Mackay was not at all surprised that the bulk of the crew had been “all negro slaves.” Though no fan of the practice (he blamed the black crew for the accident), Mackay also knew that in the late-antebellum South, there were no easy alternatives for what he judged a “deplorable” practice.

Although the vast majority of these enslaved crews were concentrated on the lowest rungs of shipboard society, enough of them rose so high in rank as to stand out in a society otherwise known for its obstinate color line and widespread racial oppression. Chief among these were the enslaved men who became pilots. Holding down a job second in importance only to that of the captain, men like Robert Smalls-who in May 1862 leveraged his years of experience piloting the Planter in and around Charleston harbor into freedom for himself, his family, and friends-were wholly responsible for guiding their vessels safely through an always changing waterscape made hazardous by half-hidden logs, sandbars, shoals, and navigable channels that never seemed to stay in one place. Decreed "by far the most difficult post aboard a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593657047
• ISBN 13: 9780593657041
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar