Black Flight from Slavery in the Americas, 1500-1865

FAIN: FEL-262222-19

Graham Russell Hodges
Colgate University (Hamilton, NY 13346-1338)

Writing leading to publication of a book about the experience of enslaved persons in the New World freeing themselves from 1500 to 1865.

This book project, Black Flight in the Americas, 1500-1865, proposes a comprehensive survey of enslaved self-emancipation and enslavers’ personal and political efforts to halt it. Using the Underground Railroad of antebellum United States as a symbol, my plan expands its history geographically across North America and Mexico and back in time to the origins of New World slavery. Using thousands of fugitive slave notices, slave narratives, and the political and legal documents of the enslavers, I create group portraits by era and location of self-emancipators and their oppressors and show how black flight affected state diplomacy. The project incorporates the violence self-emancipators employed to secure personal liberty. Including wartime escape during the American Revolution, Civil War and other conflicts creates a more nuanced, historically connected narrative across time and space. Doing so speaks to the larger question of the nature of social reform, political and economic change.