Slavery in Motion

When we think of American slavery, we tend to think of plantations, with Black people bound to those lands. But as Susan O’Donovan illustrates in the groundbreaking new book Moving Toward Freedom, the enslaved were often in motion, compelled to work in a variety of jobs, ranging across the nation and beyond. That movement has political implications since it shaped how Black Americans envisioned and achieved freedom.

O’Donovan is an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis. Her previous book, Becoming Free in the Cotton South, won the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians. She answered questions via email from Chapter 16:

Chapter 16: Many books about American slavery focus on a single location. How did you come to write about enslaved people on the move?

Susan O’Donovan: There are drawbacks to studying people in a place. As I came to realize while working at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, where I studied former slaves across the length and breadth of the former Confederacy, the longstanding practice of studying people in a place carries a lot of risks. While diving deep into one community or plantation or even a state can yield a wealth of insight into the past, it also works like blinders, preventing us from seeing what’s happening beyond that place and how that larger world affects and is affected by those we’re studying.

By yanking off those rhetorical blinders, a wholly new view of American slavery comes into focus, one that directly challenges current practices of imagining antebellum plantations as carceral places and the enslaved as their inmates. It also reveals a very different political history, one that is no longer the private purview of the free.

Chapter 16: Moving Toward Freedom is so rich with details and examples. Beyond the familiar published slave narratives, how were you able to illuminate the personal experiences of so many enslaved people?

O’Donovan: Excavating the lives of any subaltern people, particularly those unable to leave much of a paper trail of their own, calls for a little creativity. But knowing that enslaved people were property, as well as key players in what quickly became a global economy, opened up a number of fruitful avenues of inquiry. Sources such as court records, fugitive slave advertisements, planters’ journals, hotel receipts, letter wrappers, and the labor registers kept by railroad and canal contractors not only allow us to better measure the scope and scale of this master-commanded mobility, they invite us to think more deeply about how all this movement changed the enslaved and with it, the institution of slavery.

Chapter 16: When discussing white slaveholders, you keep circling back to a paradox: “The harder they tried to buoy their power and prestige, the more their grip slipped on those they needed to control the most.” How did the mobility of slavery feed this paradox?

O’Donovan: As I note above, the current interpretive trend is to view antebellum plantations as precursors of the modern prison system. It is a view that slaveholders themselves would have loved, had it been true. But it wasn’t, and that’s one of the central arguments of my book and the heart of paradox that you mention.

Slaveholders might justify, as economic and domestic necessities, turning enslaved men loose on their roads or sending domestics north to care for white people’s babies. But these decisions came at considerable political risk. Any hope of maintaining a prison-like surveillance of enslaved workers collapsed when those workers were ordered away from their owners’ homes. Traveling as they did on their owner’s command, they were protected by custom and law. State laws also protected that kind of economic mobility. By the 1850s, when an accelerating cotton economy put even greater numbers of enslaved workers in motion, some planters began to second-guess these decisions, seeing their workers in a new and more subversive light.

But by then, it was too late. The paradox that slaveholders had lived with for decades proved to be the shoal on which slavery died. The death of the Confederacy made it clear that they couldn’t have it all: control over people and the commerce that made them rich.

Chapter 16: By the dawn of the Civil War, how did Black Americans define their freedom? How were those definitions shaped by the movements that you describe in the book?

O’Donovan: For starters, there was no such thing as a Black freedom. Indeed, one of the fascinating lessons I took away from my research was how pluralistic their political ideologies were. That complexity makes sense. Our ideas are informed by our experiences, and no two enslaved people had identical experiences. Those who traveled to California with their owners returned home with a different portfolio of possibilities than those who were made to tag along on tours of Europe. 

Their hopes for the future and their understandings of what freedom ought to mean were shaped, as well, by their experiences in bondage itself. That added further complexity to an enslaved political ideology. As I wrote about in my first book, those many ideas of freedom surfaced after emancipation. There were former slaves who clamored for a redistribution of land; there were those who believed firmly in the rights of property; there were those who believed women did not belong in the public sphere; and there were those who believed the opposite. What I hope my new book does is invite historians to reconsider the politics of Black freedom and do more to root the many different strands and ideas in the slave past.

Chapter 16: In the current political climate, the study of African American history has come under fire. Why research into the world of Black slaves? What can it hope to achieve?  

O’Donovan: A lot. Despite current efforts to suppress and deny the Black past, African American history is American history. Those of us who live in or near South Memphis, for instance, are reminded daily of enslaved people’s role in making the nation. It was enslaved workers hired away from their owners who graded the track and laid the first rails for what was initially known as the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. Enslaved people generated the wealth that made the United States a global power as early as the early 19th century. We cannot even explain the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments without reference to the practice of human bondage. To not take enslaved peoples’ experiences into account is to misunderstand American history.