While the literature on slave flight in nineteenth-century North America has commonly focused on fugitive slaves escaping to the northern states and Canada through the “Underground Railroad”,... Show moreWhile the literature on slave flight in nineteenth-century North America has commonly focused on fugitive slaves escaping to the northern states and Canada through the “Underground Railroad”, Conditional Freedom aims to provide new insights into the evolving social and political geography of freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century North America, particularly by exploring the development of southern routes of escape from slavery in the US South and the experiences of self-emancipated slaves in the US-Mexican borderlands. First, Conditional Freedom provides a social history of enslaved freedom-seekers. Second, it also provides a political history of the contest between Mexican free soil and the spread of slavery west of the Mississippi river valley between 1803 and 1861. Its main question is: what was the nature of slave flight in the Mexican borderlands, and how and why did Mexico develop into a site of “conditional freedom” for slave refugees from the American South? In order to reconstruct the entangled stories of slave refugees and free soil in the US-Mexico borderlands, this study draws mostly upon municipal, county and state archives, military and judicial records, diplomatic and personal correspondence, newspaper articles, “runaway slave” advertisements, petitions, memoirs and travel accounts. Show less
