Running from Bondage

The story of Ona Judge, an enslaved woman who fled George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 1796 and remained free for the rest of her long life is widely known, particularly since the recent publication of Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught (New York, 2019). But Judge was only one of many enslaved women who attempted to escape bondage and experience a lifetime of liberty during the latter half of the eighteenth century. In this insightful study, Bell uncovers the traces and contextualizes the experiences of hundreds of women who took advantage of warfare and other disruptions to seek their freedom, contradicting the long-held belief that physical and social factors prevented female slaves from doing so.For decades, historians of slavery have assumed that enslaved women had fewer opportunities to escape than did their male counterparts, having closer ties to their children and being less likely to be assigned work that took them away from the plantation. As Bell makes clear, the participation of many enslaved women in local markets helped them to build connections with freed people and to locate themselves within a wider geographical space. Motherhood did not prevent them from running away. Many women brought their children with them when they fled, and the hope of keeping a family together, or the despair at having had a son or daughter sold and taken away, appears to have been a significant motivation to abscond. Moreover, both mothers and childless women constantly faced the threat of sexual abuse by owners or overseers, another factor likely to have led them to run away.Enslaved women, and men, had become fugitives ever since the start of slavery in Britain’s North American colonies, but Bell makes a convincing case for the American Revolution as “the first large-scale slave rebellion” in North America (6). The combination of the chaos into which the conflict plunged many of the colonies and the British Army’s offer of freedom to enslaved people who ran away from those who supported independence dramatically increased both the opportunity to flee and the ability to secure freedom for oneself and one’s loved ones permanently. These options were open to enslaved boys and men, as well as to women and girls, but the males could also join the British forces to fight against their former owners. But Bell, following Nash’s estimate that one-third of all runaways throughout the Revolution were female, makes a convincing argument regarding the meaning of fugitivity—that women were fully involved and that it was a fundamental component of the abolitionist movement.1That said, Bell occasionally makes claims for the agency of enslaved women that cannot be verified. Although North American slaves, despite the majority being illiterate, were well aware of the progress of the Haitian Revolution, we do not know the extent to which, as Bell asserts, female fugitives of the Revolutionary era were “inspired by natural rights ideology” or “believed in the independence of the individual” (104, 161). They simply may have craved liberty for themselves and, in many instances, for their loved ones.Bell’s methodology follows standard practices of social history, drawing most of her material from a published compendium of runaway-slave advertisements, which she interprets largely as transparent. She has not dug deeply into the archives to follow an individual fugitive’s story, as Dunbar did with Ona Judge, nor has she echoed Marisa J. Fuentes’ exploration of the meanings of silences in the archives of enslaved women in Dispossessed Lives (Philadelphia, 2016), or Sharon Block’s construction and analysis of a vast digital archive of runaway ads from which broader patterns can be discerned in Colonial Complexions (Philadelphia, 2018). But despite these caveats, Bell succeeds in challenging long-standing beliefs about enslaved women’s motivations and experiences. In so doing, she restores a measure of the agency that both their owners and later scholars have denied them. Gracefully written and convincingly argued, Running from Bondage deserves the attention of anyone interested in gender, slavery, or the American Revolution

Daughter · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society