Müller, Viola Franziska

OUR SYNOPSIS: Viola Franziska Müller argues that fugitives from slavery living in southern cities should be analyzed as undocumented migrants. She emphasizes that these people, “remained within the jurisdiction of the very slaveholding society that stipulated they were slaves; their legal status did not change. The subsequent lives that these men and women built for themselves in southern cities therefore had, likewise, no basis in law; their sheer presence in the cities was illegal.” (3) After stressing that “vast numbers of runaway slaves [sic] remained within the slaveholding South,” she pieces together how they did so in four specific cities: Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans (1). Family networks, solidarity with free African Americans, segregated neighborhoods, and Black churches all “facilitated escape and refuge.” (6) Demographic factors also substantially influenced self-liberation decisions. While she makes clear that escape opportunities were relatively rare on the entire scale of American slavery, urban settings brought anonymity, invisibility, concentrated community, and other factors that empowered flight. For the Baltimore case, she emphasizes the city having the largest free Black population in the antebellum United States. Indeed, “The lure of nearby cities with African American communities to blend into was a significant pull factor for enslaved people contemplating flight.” (59) Baltimore was a major haven that enabled self-liberators to carve out new and self-assertive lives.