Contested mobility: free African Americans and the law in the U.S. South, 1790-1830s

Abstract

This dissertation examines how laws regulating mobility shaped the experiences of freedom for free African Americans in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Contested Mobility shows that mobility laws had a far more profound impact on free Black lives in the Upper South and beyond than existing scholarship has acknowledged. By criminalizing undocumented movement and residency, these laws exposed free African Americans to the constant risk of being rendered “illegal” despite their free status. This designation made them vulnerable to policing, imprisonment, coerced labor, and the disruption of family ties, much like modern-day undocumented migrants. Confronted with a freedom that was precarious and subject to constant negotiation, free African Americans worked within, pushed against, or found ways around southern registration, exclusion, and expulsion statutes. Covering the period from the 1790s to the 1830s, this study reveals how the threat of exposure, social and economic standing, and personal connections largely determined who could find protection through legal strategies such as petitioning and turn the law into an instrument of empowerment, and who instead had to navigate it through evasive tactics under the threat of discovery or felt pressured to leave the state.