Escaping Bondage

Captive Africans attempted to escape their perpetrators during their marches from the interior to the coasts of Africa; they attempted to flee during the period they were kept confined in coastal structures such as fortresses, castles, and barracoons, along the African shores; and they led insurrections even once they were on board slave ships.

Consider the example of Portugal, one of the kingdoms that initiated the Atlantic slave trade to the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas in the fifteenth century, as discussed in previous chapters. Enslaved Africans and their descendants toiled in Portuguese cities and surrounding rural areas. As in all regions where slavery existed, even prior to the massive enslavement of Black Africans, enslaved people resisted, which is why Portuguese compilations of laws, the Ordenações afonsinas (1446) and Ordenações manuelinas (1521), were created to address the issue of fugitive slaves, while the Ordenações filipinas (1603) included sentences to be imposed on people who helped fugitives from slavery.⁶ In addition to these laws that coincided with the early days of the Atlantic slave trade, the National Museum of Archaeology in Lisbon recovered two eighteenth-century slave collars from the regions of Ă“bidos and Benavente that had been forgotten, or perhaps intentionally hidden, in its collections for several decades.⁷ The collars illustrate how Portuguese slave owners feared and therefore attempted to prevent their human property from escaping.

Portugal was not the only country with museum exhibits that featured early artifacts intended to identify enslaved persons who might have tried to escape. The groundbreaking temporary exhibition Slavery (Slavernij), on view at the Rijksmuseum from May 18 to August 29, 2021, included a more sophisticated version of a similar seventeenth-century brass neck restraint bearing the Nassau coat of arms and the year 1689. Whereas there was no doubt that the Portuguese collars were intended to be worn by two enslaved men, the Dutch artifact (figure 13.1) was initially mistakenly described as a dog collar. Any reference to the name of the person who wore it is absent, yet the combination of signs engraved on the collar did identify the likely owner of the human property as Anna Isabella van Beieren van Schagen, the Catholic wife of Maurits, the Count of Nassau La Lecq. Existing records indicate that the couple owned at least one servant named Paulus Maurus, whose name is certainly a reference to his African ancestry and possible slave legal status.¹⁰

Figure 13.1. Collar with the Nassau crest, 1689. Brass, h. 2.8 cm, diam. 12 cm. Inv. no. BK-NM-5144; gift of Preuyt, Terheyden. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

European neck restraints and other instruments of torture became symbols of enslaved people’s dehumanization. Secured by a lock, they were difficult to remove. Yet in this context, their main purpose was not to physically punish these bondsmen. The neck restraints were instead designed to publicly identify the two enslaved men, thus making attempted escapes in their small communities very difficult. As slavery became a consolidated institution in the Americas, slave owners and their associates created huge and heavy iron slave collars of all sizes and shapes. These artifacts and their visual representations that illustrated many nineteenth-century European travelogues (figure 13.2) are today exhibited in various museums in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Along with other restraint devices designed to punish enslaved people who attempted to run away, these instruments of torture were also intended to control, intimidate, and dissuade other bondspeople from trying to escape their bondage. Some runaway slave ads published in eighteenth-century newspapers in England and Scotland featured images of some fugitives, including enslaved men and women who fled in slave-trading ports such as Bristol and Liverpool, wearing iron, steel, copper, and silver collars exactly like those found in Portugal and the Netherlands that bore the names of their owners.¹¹

Figure 13.2. Le collier de fer, Châtiment des fugitifs (Iron collar, Punishment of fugitives), in Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au BrĂ©sil, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1834–39), vol. 2, plate 42.

In societies where slavery played a central role such as the West Indies, Brazil, and the South of the United States, slave owners, plantation managers, and overseers instilled fear among enslaved people by publicly displaying their power through employing a variety of instruments of torture.

Enslaved people who took the risk to escape either alone or in groups, for longer or shorter periods of time, did so for a variety of reasons. Broadly speaking, bondspeople were of course seeking freedom. But enslaved fugitives were also responding to more specific contexts. Some of them had been recently sold and separated from their families or old comrades, and thus attempted escape to stay close to their family members and loved ones. Others were being sexually and physically abused. Men, women, and children who escaped bondage also ran away during periods of social unrest, especially during wartime. During the nineteenth century, as various regions of the Americas abolished slavery, enslaved people escaped on foot, riding horses, on boats, and by train. They crossed rivers, forests, swamps, and sea pathways in their attempts to reach regions where slavery was outlawed. They joined other runaways in settlements in remote rural areas and the middle of cities.

Since antiquity, enslaved people’s flights from bondage have been publicly advertised.¹³ During the era of Atlantic slavery, slave owners publicized these escapes through posters and fugitive ads published in local newspapers. Although the contexts of the escapes varied from one region to another, printed advertising announcing the escape of enslaved individuals carried numerous similarities across periods, languages, and regions of the Americas.

Fugitive slave ads in the United States, Brazil, and the West Indies reveal that as long as they could face long journeys filled with walking and hiding, either in plantation areas or urban settings, enslaved men and women of various ages escaped as often as they could. As slavery developed in the West Indies, English colonies created legislation responding to slave resistance. In Barbados, the Slave Act of 1661, the first code regulating slavery in English colonies in the Americas, established several provisions to control and prevent enslaved people from escaping, including requiring slave owners and overseers to provide tickets for each bondsperson who left a plantation. Jamaica adopted nearly the same decree in 1664, which was later revised in 1684, and then adopted by South Carolina in 1691.¹⁵

In the French West Indies, the Code Noir of 1685 also determined provisions against insurgent slaves. For example, Articles XV and XVI not only prohibited enslaved people from carrying weapons and gathering in groups but also prescribed physical punishments for those who broke these rules.

Most fugitives in the Americas were men, but depending on the period and region, enslaved women could represent as much as 30 percent of fugitives. Statistics from existing databases of slave ads suggest that in the French West Indies nearly 25 percent of these advertisements included enslaved women, and in Jamaica, the percentage is higher than 27 percent.¹⁷ In the United States, the proportion of enslaved women who ran away was at least 15 percent, and these numbers increased during the American War of Independence to almost 30 percent and then grew again during the Civil War.¹⁸

Although, all over the Americas, male slave owners signed most of these ads, there were also ads published by female slave owners in colonies such as Jamaica in the early eighteenth century.¹⁹ Moreover, various fugitive slave ads show that enslaved women managed to escape for several weeks without being caught. For example, a newspaper fugitive ad published at Cap Français in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1766 sought an enslaved woman named Agathe, who had run away three months prior after being sold to another owner.²⁰ Although slave owners used all available means to prevent their human property from escaping, enslaved women persisted. On May 28, 1766, another ad published in the newspaper Affiches amĂ©ricaines in Saint-Domingue announced that despite being chained together, two enslaved women owned by Mr. Laborde had been on the run for almost four weeks.²¹ Such epic escapes show that runaway bondspeople could count on other men and women to help them by breaking their chains and providing them with shelter.²²

Solidarity among enslaved women was also visible in runaway slave ads. Two years after the pair of enchained women escaped, two other enslaved women stole a dinghy and escaped from Cayes in Saint-Domingue, one of them carrying her two-month-old baby.²³ Two decades before the so-called “age of revolutions,” these flights in the French West Indies also support historian Karen Cook Bell’s argument about colonial North America and the newly independent United States that “motherhood, freedom, love, and family” did not prevent but rather “propelled women to escape bondage.”²⁴ These escapes naturally carried much greater risks, and existing sources do not always allow us to know whether slave owners were successful in recapturing these enslaved women fugitives. However, we do know that if they had been caught, they would have been severely punished. Nevertheless, punishment did not deter them from escaping again.

Enslaved men and women, owned by powerful slave owners, also escaped during the eighteenth century. Take the famous example of the enslaved woman Ona Judge, the daughter of one of Martha Washington’s “dower slaves,” who was part of the estate of her deceased first husband. Judge was a seamstress and later became the personal maid of the first lady of the United States. She took the opportunity to escape from bondage while the presidential couple was in Philadelphia in 1796. Historian Erica Dunbar brought attention to this story by showing how during the many months that followed Judge’s escape, the Washingtons persistently searched for her but were never able to bring her back to bondage.²⁵

Washington was not the only US founding father to chase his fugitive human property. In an ad posted in the Virginia Gazette on September 14, 1769, the founding father Thomas Jefferson announced that his bondsman Sandy had escaped. The ad described Sandy as “a Mulatto... about 35 years of age, [whose] stature is rather low, inclining to corpulence, and his complexion light.” Jefferson also highlighted Sandy’s skills: “a shoemaker by trade, in which he uses his left hand principally, can do coarse carpenters work.” Running away may not have been very difficult for Sandy because according to the ad, he was “something of a horse jockey” and took with him a white horse. But the ad also emphasized his intelligence and rebellious behavior as a man “greatly addicted to drink, and when drunk he is insolent and disorderly, in his conversation he swears much, and his behavior is artful and knavish; he also carried his shoemaker tools, and he will probably endeavour to get employment that way.”²⁶

Existing records show that Sandy was recaptured, and Jefferson sold him three years later.²⁷ But Sandy was not alone. Also owned by Jefferson, James Hubbard worked at the Mulberry nailery. He carried the same name as his father, another enslaved man owned by Jefferson. Hubbard first ran away from Monticello in 1805. Then in late 1810 or early 1811 he escaped again. But Jefferson was sly. While Hubbard was on the run, he sold him in absentia to a hired carpenter, but the sale contract stated that the slave’s price would be higher if the enslaved man were captured; therefore Jefferson made additional efforts to recapture Hubbard to get more money for his sale. One year later, the bondsman was caught and brought back to Monticello. Jefferson was vicious, making sure that the fugitive was brutally whipped, then advising the new owner to sell him out of the state. Fortunately, this sale never occurred because Hubbard was intelligent and managed to escape again a few months later.²⁸

Enslaved people also escaped temporarily to visit relatives and lovers in nearby estates.²⁹ But many others who fled from plantations, farms, and households had no intention to come back. Rachel, an enslaved woman of “twenty years of age, no perceptible mark... stout made,” ran away from her owner Francis Clark in Washington, DC, in 1804. As Rachel was “apparently far advanced in pregnancy,” her escape meant that her owners lost not only one bondswoman of reproductive age but also her enslaved offspring. Being pregnant did not prevent Rachel from running away. Moreover, her escape was obviously planned because, as the ad reveals, “she took with her several articles belonging to her mistress.”³⁰

As elsewhere, fugitive slave ads featuring enslaved women who escaped bondage in Washington, DC, show how they “altered physical appearances and dress, [took] different names,” and carried with them “stolen goods.”³¹ Like Rachel, other pregnant enslaved women escaped slavery as well. On February 11, 1828, an ad published in the North Carolina newspaper Western Carolinian offered a five-dollar reward to whoever was able to catch Easter, an enslaved woman twenty-six years of age, “very black, with thick lips... and tolerable bold in her looks,” who was pregnant.³² Many others showed great courage when persisting in escaping slavery several times. The New-Orleans Argus published an ad on March 24, 1828, offering fifteen dollars in reward for Lucinda, an enslaved woman about twenty-six years old. Described as “of midling stature, American born,” who spoke French, and who had “a pleasant appearance [and was] plausible in her manners,” the ad informs that she had been on the run already for three weeks and had “runaway frequently before, for a short period.”³³

Brazil did not have newspapers until 1808, when the Portuguese court fled Lisbon and settled in Rio de Janeiro, which then became the capital of the Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and Algarve. During the nineteenth century, the main newspapers of Salvador in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro published several fugitive slave ads on a weekly basis. Slave owners would chase their fugitive human property for years, therefore confirming that larger Brazilian cities with significant Black populations offered better opportunities to escape bondage. Female slave owners regularly published ads searching for fugitive enslaved people. For example, on July 23, 1821, Marianna Jozefa Victorina published a curious ad in the Diário do Rio de Janeiro seeking two African-born bondswomen who had the same name, Catherina. The first Catherina, identified as belonging to the Ganguela “nation,” and the second Catherina, classified as Benguela, had fled together four years earlier, on July 1, 1817.³⁴

Catholic priests also published ads searching for their human property who escaped bondage in Rio de Janeiro. On June 25, 1821, the priest Antonio Penteado, who lived in a two-story house at the corner of Ajuda Street and Manuel de Carvalho Alley, published two ads in Diário do Rio de Janeiro searching for an enslaved man of the Ganguela “nation” who had escaped a few days earlier, as well as two other enslaved men, one Brazilian born and another one of the Ganguela “nation,” who both had escaped one year earlier. It is likely that Penteado never recovered his human property, because five months later, the priest published another ad searching for the same three enslaved men, this time specifying that the two bondsmen of the Ganguela “nation” were named Antonio and Manuel.³⁵

Numerous fugitive slave ads published in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro newspapers also featured Brazilian-born and African-born bondswomen who ran away bringing their young children with them. On October 29, 1821, a seventeen-year-old African-born enslaved woman named Maria, of “Congo nation,” escaped, bringing with her Candida, her four-month daughter, described as light-skinned.³⁶ On November 4, 1821, another African-born enslaved mother named Maria, of Benguela “nation,” who had recently been sold in auction by her owner’s widow, escaped from her new master, carrying her sixteen-month-old daughter.³⁷ On October 5, 1851, two decades before Brazil passed legislation freeing newborns, a Brazilian-born enslaved woman in her forties, and also named Maria, escaped, bringing along her daughter, Amelia, and all their clothes, and took from her owner clothes, several objects, money, and silver.³⁸ Likewise, in other Brazilian regions, motherhood encouraged bondswomen to flee and join runaway slave communities.³⁹

Despite receiving better food and clothing, and their alleged better position in Brazilian households, enslaved wet nurses also escaped bondage and were featured in several runaway slave ads. For example, an ad in the newspaper Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro announced that Felicia, an enslaved wet nurse identified as cabra (mixed-race Indigenous and African), tall, with big and weak eyes, had escaped on March 4, 1813. Additionally, young men and even enslaved children also escaped in significant numbers. Newspaper ads suggest that many of them were never caught. On June 3, 1821, an ad in the Diário do Rio de Janeiro announced that Domingos, of the Monjolo “nation,” whose “face is slashed with signs,” had disappeared for several weeks. In another ad of June 9, 1821, the slave owner JosĂ© Antonio de Freiras Amaral sought Francisco, a Brazilian-born enslaved youth, who had run away more than three years earlier, and another enslaved youth, sixteen years of age, identified as of the Kasange “nation,” who had escaped more than two years before.⁴⁰ Young enslaved girls also escaped bondage in Rio de Janeiro. On June 10, 1821, an ad described a twelve-year-old enslaved girl who had escaped a few days before.⁴¹ In general, enslaved people of all backgrounds, including a significant number of bondswomen and enslaved mothers, escaped bondage whenever they could in a city like Rio de Janeiro, where they could easily blend with the overwhelmingly Black population.

In the United States as well, bondswomen ran away with their children. On March 26, 1845, a New Orleans newspaper ad offered a ten-dollar reward for Eliza, a bondswoman about thirty years of age, who escaped with her four-year-old enslaved daughter Victoria.⁴² On April 27, 1847, an ad announced a fifteen-dollar reward offered for Hannah, an enslaved woman approximately thirty-five years old, who had escaped her owner John D. Pipkin in North Carolina. The ad noted that Hannah had taken her three children with her: David, a ten-year-old enslaved boy; Pleasant, a seven-year-old enslaved girl; and Joanna, an enslaved baby aged eighteen months.⁴³ Once again, the presence of several of runaway slave ads featuring enslaved mothers who escaped bondage carrying their children with them suggests that in urban areas, motherhood was not a great obstacle preventing bondswomen from seeking freedom by running away.

As slavery continued through the middle of the nineteenth century, when photography was becoming widespread, a small number of rare slave fugitive ads featured photographic portraits of enslaved people in the United States. One of these unusual ads features the brave Dolly, an enslaved woman owned by Louis Manigault in Augusta, Georgia, who fled in April 1863, during the American Civil War. To reclaim his human property, Manigault wrote an ad displaying Dolly’s photograph, cropped from a carte de visite.⁴⁴ Gaining prominence in the middle of the nineteenth century, these small photographic portraits, mounted on cards and whose format corresponded to that of a visiting card, could be reproduced multiples times. Offering a fifty-dollar reward, the ad emphasizes that Dolly’s “likeness is here seen,” adding that she was “thirty years of age, [with] light complexion—hesitates somewhat when spoken to, and is not a very healthy woman, but rather good looking, with a fine set of teeth. Never changed her owner and has been a house servant always.” Marked by a paternalistic tone that made readers believed that the owner cared about the fugitive enslaved woman, the ad also explained that “it is thought that she has been enticed off by some White Man, being herself a stranger to this City, and belonging to a Charleston [sic] family.” In other words, Manigault wanted the community to believe that Dolly’s escape was not her own decision but that she was rather negatively influenced by a white male. But the reality was different. Manigault’s private correspondence shows that Dolly’s escape was not a last-minute decision but rather that she left during “his absence to the plantation and took with her an ample wardrobe of her own clothes.”⁴⁵ Dolly was single, good looking, and probably childless, and it is likely that Manigault sexually abused her. In other words, whatever her motives were, like other enslaved women, she ran away to never come back.

All over the Americas, at least in rural areas, slave owners hired slave catchers to hunt enslaved fugitives. Riding horses and followed by dogs, these men could chase fugitives for several weeks.⁴⁶ In 1793, the Congress of the newly independent United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act, a federal law that introduced the fugitive clause in the Constitution, which authorized local governments to capture, arrest, and return enslaved fugitives. Acknowledging that fugitives received outside support, the legislation also instated a $500 fine against anyone who assisted escaped slaves. As historian Manisha Sinha has written, in addition to addressing the capture and return of fugitives from beyond the borders of Southern states, the act also “facilitated the kidnapping of free Blacks into slavery.”⁴⁷ But despite the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, bondspeople, free Black communities, and abolitionists resisted and continued to challenge the law in multiple ways, especially by assisting in the escape and protection of enslaved fugitives.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, as discussed in chapter 12, US Northern states introduced free womb legislation that gradually abolished slavery. Hence, men, women, and children continued to escape and seek refuge in states that had enacted legislation to progressively eradicate slavery.⁴⁸ Supported by Black and white allies, enslaved people created a fugitive corridor through which they sought to reach freedom havens in the Northern states of the United States and also in Canada, where slavery had been formally abolished in 1834. Among the most distinguished fugitives who fled to the North was orator, writer, abolitionist, and statesman Frederick Douglass. Helped by a freeborn Black woman named Anna Murray, he managed to flee from Baltimore on September 3, 1838, and “succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any kind.”⁴⁹ More than a decade later, Harriet Tubman successfully escaped from Maryland and reached Philadelphia.⁵⁰ In subsequent years, Tubman helped not only her brothers to escape but also many other enslaved people.

Along with Tubman, this network of freedom seekers, known as the Underground Railroad, has been memorialized in the United States through the protection of historical sites along its route, museum exhibitions, novels, children’s books, plays, motion pictures, and television series.⁵¹ But despite the emphasis on this northward fugitive corridor, enslaved people also escaped across borders southward, earlier before the rise of the Underground Railroad.⁵² Starting in the late sixteenth century, bondspeople fled the Carolinas and Georgia to find refuge in Spanish Florida, where Spanish colonizers sought to counter English influence. Despite British occupation between 1763 and 1783, this influx of enslaved fugitives continued until the region’s acquisition by the United States in 1821.⁵³ During the nineteenth century, bondspeople from the United States also escaped to Mexico, especially after Vicente Guerrero abolished slavery in 1829.⁵⁴ As the domestic slave trade flourished with the second slavery, a group of slaves on board the brig Creole that left Richmond to New Orleans transporting 137 enslaved persons led a revolt in 1841. After taking control of the vessel, the insurgents were successful in redirecting the Creole to the Bahamas in the British West Indies, where slavery was then abolished, and where they were eventually freed.⁵⁵

Meanwhile, as cotton production increased, slavery persisted and expanded in the US South. During this period, both the federal and state governments led initiatives to apprehend enslaved fugitives. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a clear division was established between Southern slave states and Northern states where slavery had been abolished and to where enslaved people seeking to emancipate themselves attempted to escape. As the number of enslaved fugitives increased, slave states were concerned about the financial losses incurred from these escapes.⁵⁶ In 1850, a new Fugitive Slave Act expanded the provisions of the 1793 legislation, making it easier for slave owners to claim, recapture, and recover their escaped human property from beyond state borders.⁵⁷ As the Civil War started in the United States in 1861, similarly to what happened decades earlier during the American War of Independence, enslaved people collectively escaped from plantations to join the ranks of the Union Army.⁵⁸ In Brazil, a few months before the final abolition of slavery (as we will see in chapter 16), bondspeople also organized collective escapes. In Jeffrey Needell’s words, the flights were massive “to the point of threatening the harvests in western São Paulo, Brazil’s economic frontier.”⁵⁹