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Fugitivism

Escaping Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1820-1860

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Fugitivism

By: S. Charles Bolton
Narrated by: Andrew L. Barnes
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About this listen

During the antebellum years, over 750,000 enslaved people were taken to the Lower Mississippi Valley, where two-thirds of them were sold in the slave markets of New Orleans, Natchez, and Memphis. Those who ended up in Louisiana found themselves in an environment of swamplands, sugar plantations, French-speaking creoles, and the exotic metropolis of New Orleans.

Like enslaved people all over the South, those in the Lower Mississippi Valley left home at night for clandestine parties or religious meetings, sometimes “laying out” nearby for a few days or weeks. Some of them fled to New Orleans and other southern cities where they could find refuge in the subculture of slaves and free blacks living there, and a few attempted to live permanently free in the swamps and forests of the surrounding area.

Fugitivism explains how escapees made use of steamboat transportation, how urban runaways differed from their rural counterparts, how enslaved people were victimized by slave stealers, how conflicts between black fugitives and the white people who tried to capture them encouraged a culture of violence in the South, and how runaway slaves from the Lower Mississippi Valley influenced the abolitionist movement in the North.

The book is published by The University of Arkansas Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2019 The University of Arkansas Press (P)2021 Redwood Audiobooks
Americas United States Mississippi City Transportation New Orleans Runaway

Critic Reviews

"A magisterial meditation on escape from the Lower Mississippi Valley." (Environmental History)

"Enriches scholarly knowledge and understanding of enslaved fugitives...makes an original contribution to the historiography." (The Journal of Southern History)

"Deeply researched and elegantly written account...should be consulted by any teacher or researcher interested in the numerous varieties of fugitivism." (Journal of American History)

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