HAS Online Roundtable: The Captive's Quest for Freedom by Richard Blackett

Historians Against Slavery has hosted an online roundtable on Richard J. M. Blackett's The Captive's Quest for Freedom.

Contributors include:
Editor Hannah-Rose Murray (University of Nottingham)
Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (Howard University)
Simon Newman (University of Glasgow)
H. Robert Baker (Georgia State University)
Martha S. Jones (John Hopkins University)
Elizabeth R. Varon (University of Virginia).
Response from: Richard Blackett (Vanderbilt University)

When I first moved north from Texas nearly twenty years ago, the first thing I noticed was that every place prided themselves on being a stop on the Underground Railroad (and the boyhood home of Abraham Lincoln, but that was particular to Indiana, where I first lived). No matter the founding of the town or the construction of a house, if it lay between the Ohio River and the Canadian border or had a cellar, closet, or crawl space, you could be sure that was a sign that runaway slaves had hidden there. After a while, I began to wonder about this, especially when the logistics and logic did not seem to hold up, much less any real documentation. Oral tradition usually ended right about 1890. Also, if every town north of slavery, and sometimes even south of the dividing line, helped as many people escape bondage as they claimed, well, the South would have hemorrhaged so much of their labor force that their economy would have collapsed.

And, good lord! Don't get me started on the damn quilts!

Of course, a combination of factors were at work here. Part was a largely white population wanting to rewrite their past, changing it from outright hostility or, at best, ambivalence toward African Americans and slavery. Part was an African American population that largely did not escape for very real reasons of family, fear of the unknown, and complete absence of opportunity or means. People often tell themselves the stories that they want to hear.

At the same time, people did run from enslavement, and their pursuit of freedom had consequences not explored in the limited world of the Underground Railroad mythology. There was, after all, a reason for the Fugitive Slave Act, and the Fugitive Slave Act played a role in the growing sectional tension and popular attitudes about slavery, which affected voting behavior.

Prof. Richard J. M. Blackett

In The Captive's Quest for Freedom, Richard J. M. Blackett looks at hundreds of these runaways and the ripple effect that they had upon national policy. As he says in his response, "on a national scale these escapes seem relatively insignificant, placing only a slight dent in the system’s ability to function. But looked at locally, what I call the politics of scale, the decision of a slave to leave mattered."

He analyzes not only the ways that the decision of a minority of people fleeing a massive institution influenced their masters to change the laws, but also those who sympathized with the fugitives (or freedom-seekers, it really is a matter of perspective) to mobilize against the law. Blackett explains it all much more eloquently:

Building outwards from the local provides an opportunity to appreciate the levels to which opponents went to contest and undermine the law. Black communities turned up at commissioners’ hearings to support the accused and intimidate commissioners. Other times they openly resisted enforcement of the law. Many times, their actions were reinforced by abolitionist organizations who offered legal aid and comfort to escapees. These “constitutional actors,” as Baker calls them, provide us with opportunities to explore the nature of pressure from without that is how those without recognized political power can influence what transpires in state and national legislatures. This issue has long been an interest of mine, and the action of the men and women who declared their undying opposition to the law, and acted on it, lies at the heart of the book.

If you would like something shorter to assign to a class, you might be interested in Blackett's Making Freedom: The Underground Railroad and the Politics of Slavery, which was developed from the Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era that he gave while writing The Captive's Quest for Freedom. 

Oh, and might I add that Richard Blackett was my advisor in graduate school? He pretty much saved my life in a miserable situation, and he has trained some clever and brilliant scholars in whose company I am honored to be included.

Historians Against Slavery was founded by James Brewer Stewart, a historian of the antislavery movement, in 2011 as "a community of scholar-activists who contribute research and historical context to today’s antislavery movements in order to inspire and inform activism and to develop collaborations that empower such efforts."