Conditional Freedom: Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico’s Northeast, 1803–1861(14 Studies in Global Slavery)

While the literature on slave flight in nineteenth-century North America has commonly focused on fugitive slaves escaping to the U.S. North and Canada, Conditional Freedom provides new insights on the social and political geography of freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century North America by exploring the development of southern routes of escape from slavery in the U.S. South and the experiences of self-emancipated slaves in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. In Conditional Freedom, Thomas Mareite offers a social history of U.S. refugees from slavery, and provides a political history of the clash between Mexican free soil and the spread of slavery west of the Mississippi valley during the nineteenth-century.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments List of Maps, Figures, and Tables Abbreviations Introduction  1 Free Soil and Spaces of Freedom in the Age of the Second Slavery  2 Historiographies and Insights  3 Sources and Outline Part 1: Fleeing Slavery 1 Experiencing Slavery, Imagining Freedom  1 Introduction  2 “A Spirit of Great Insubordination”: Mexico as Imagined Land of Freedom for African Americans  3 Relatives and Loved Ones  4 “Por maltrato”: The Second Slavery’s Violence and Serial Runaways  5 “Más mal que lo corriente”: Paternalism, (Broken) Compromises and Conflicts  6 The Intersection of Gender, Age and Qualifications  7 Conclusion 2 Geography, Mobility and Networks: Escaping through the US-Mexico Borderlands  1 Introduction  2 Easing Mobility: Spatial and Material Strategies  3 Abolitionists, Smugglers and Scapegoats  4 Cracking Down on Mobility: Legal and Extra-Legal Violence in the Borderlands  5 Conclusion Part 2: Crafting Freedom 3 Self-Liberated Slaves and Asylum in Northeastern Mexico, 1803–1836  1 Introduction  2 Slave Refugees in Late Colonial New Spain (1803–1821)  3 Self-Liberated Slaves in Early Independent Mexico (1821–1836)  4 Conclusion 4 “Mexico Was Free! No Slave Clanked His Chains under Its Government”: Contests over Mexico’s Free Soil, 1836–1861  1 Introduction: The Texas Revolution and the Political Landscape of Slavery and Freedom  2 The Disputed Making of Mexico’s Free Soil after 1836  3 US Refugees from Slavery and Their Contested Settlement in Mexico  4 Free Soil and Escaped Slaves in-between Conflicting States and Allegiances  5 Conclusion Conclusion: “Mexico Will Assuredly Be Overrun by the Slaves from the Southern States”: The Making of Free Soil, The Unmaking of the Second Slavery  1 The Making of Free Soil  2 The Unmaking of the Second Slavery Appendix 1: The Process of Abolition of Slavery in Early Independent Mexico following the Federalist Constitution of 1824 Appendix 2: José Joaquín Ugarte to Señor Brigadier Marqués de Casa Calvo [Sebastián Calvo de la Puerta y O’Farrill], Nacogdoches, 11 September 1804 Glossary of Spanish Terms Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Thomas Mareite, Ph.D. (2020), Leiden University, is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Duisburg–Essen. He has recently published articles on slavery, slave resistance, and emancipation in Slavery & Abolition, the Journal of Global Slavery, and Atlantic Studies.