Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (America and the Long 19th Century, 8)

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series 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. Studies Lawsuits To Gain Freedom For Slaves On The Grounds Of Their Having Traveled To Free Territory, Starting With Somerset V. Stewart (england, 1772), Commonwealth V. Aves (massachussetts, 1836), Dred Scott V. Sanford, And Cases Brought Questioning The Legitimacy Of Negro Seamen Acts In The Antebellum Coastal South. These Lawsuits And Accounts Of Them Are Compared To Fugitive Slave Narratives To Shed Light On Both. The Differing Impact Of Freedom Obtained From Such Suits For Men And Women (women Could Claim That Their Children Were Free, Once They Were Judged Free) Is Examined. This study 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