Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel

America and the Long 19th Century Series

by Edlie Wong

Neither Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits involved those enslaved valets, nurses, and maids who accompanied slaveholders onto free soil. Once brought into a free jurisdiction, these attendants became informally free, even if they were taken back to a slave jurisdiction at least according to abolitionists and the enslaved themselves. In order to secure their freedom formally, slave attendants or others on their behalf had to bring suit in a court of law.Edlie Wong critically recuperates these cases in an effort to reexamine and redefine the legal construction of freedom, will, and consent. This study places such historically central anti-slavery figures as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and William Lloyd Garrison alongside such lesser-known slave plaintiffs as Lucy Ann Delaney, Grace, Catharine Linda, Med, and Harriet Robinson Scott.  Situated at the confluence of literary criticism, feminism, and legal history,Neither Fugitive nor Free presents the freedom suit as a "new" genre to African American and American literary studies.

Genres: History

350 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2009

Reviews

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most thoughtful and incredible history books I have read.

Reading this has given my prior knowledge a new light on the aftermath of emancipation and the struggle to get it. This book has made me feel shock and rage for those that suffered because the law and other people could not acknowledge or understand humanity. There are many things that I have learned that I did not know before and I think many more people should be enlightened on this subject.