• 1 Bowie State University is a public historically black institution in Maryland. It is actually the o (...)

1Karen Cook Bell is an Associate Professor at Bowie State University1. She has published in fields related to black history and culture. Her first book Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth Century Georgia (University of South Carolina Press) was in 2018, just three years before Running Away from Bondage.

• 2 http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/gos/source.html (March 13, 2023).

2Bell’s book relies on well-known primary sources, runaway slave advertisements published in newspapers in the British North American colonies, later the United States, which are available in various collections and databases. Her main source is the four-volume compilation by Lathan Algerna Windley published in 1983 Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730's to 1790 which covers the southern states from Maryland to Georgia. Bell embraces this collection uncritically whereas more recent databases insist the compilation has serious flaws2. Because slavery also prevailed in the North of the British North American colonies and slowly disappeared there only in the revolutionary and postrevolutionary period, she also uses published collections of Northern slave advertisements. However, surprisingly, she does not refer to current existing digital databases. She does not mention “The Geography of Slavery” database housed by the University of Virginia, or other existing databases such as the “Freedom on the Move” database housed by Cornell University Press. Nor does she mention the bilingual database “Le marronnage dans le monde atlantique : Sources et trajectoires de vie” sponsored by a number of Canadian universities and institutions and housed by the University of Sherbrooke.

• 3 See Le Glaunec’s detailed presentation of sources, methodology, and the historiography of runaway s (...)

3Not only does Bell ignore recent digital databases but she does not particularly engage into a critical examination of runaway slave advertisements as sources, mainly taking them for granted (see her brief examination of the strengths and limitations of slave advertisements p. 15). One book sorely missing from her bibliography is Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec’s Esclaves mais Résistants. Dans le monde des annonces pour esclaves en fuite Louisiane, Jamaïque, Caroline du Sud (1801-1805), which does examine the “genre” of runaway slave advertisements, both from the perspective of social and literary history. Le Glaunec, like other historians such as David Waldstreicher or Shane White, does not consider that “runaway slave advertisements” are merely constitute objective historical documents as is the case in Bell’s book3. As part of his dissertation in the early 2000s, Le Glaunec compiled a database of over 4,000 runaway advertisements which made it possible for him to reveal collective patterns and individual specificities in the lives of the enslaved ranging from spoken languages, clothing to gender etc., all of this based on quantitative research in the database. Bell’s research seems to have been far less systematic, which is normal given the much vaster period she embraces (the whole of the 18th century in fact).

• 4 Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause. A History of Abolition, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2016, p (...)

6Bell’s overall thesis is that women have been neglected in past studies of runaway slaves, while they represented up to 40% of the fugitive slaves. She wants to demonstrate that fugitive women fought for freedom through flight in the age of “revolutionary America”. Her goal is “to present an American Revolution that is inclusive of Black women” (p. 19), a sentence that would have required some further elaboration. Does she mean “to present a history of the American Revolution that fully takes into account the experience of fugitive black women “ (my formulation) ? Obviously she does, but the book has greater ambitions. Not only does Bell want to read the history of the American Revolution through the eyes of these women, but her point is also that black fugitive women, like fugitive men, played a major part in the disruptions of the slave system in North America during the American Revolution: these disruptions she rightly includes into an overall pattern of antislavery activity which she calls “abolition” following the thesis of historian Manisha Sinha in her 2016 book subtitled A History of Abolition (see Bell p.160). To Sinha, “black resistance to slavery was the essential precondition to the rise of abolition” − though Sinha’s book itself mainly centers around the antislavery activism of whites and free blacks in the North of the United States4.

• 5 On Horne’s book, see J. William Harris’s comments on the volume as questionable history, Slavery & (...)

7Does Bell’s book contribute to a larger understanding of the American Revolution as a complex social movement, now a fairly classic interpretation, or does Running Away from Bondage follow in the footsteps of a more recent historiographical trend describing the American Revolution as an attempt to maintain slavery, and the slaves’ flight as the only real revolutionary event? The latter trend has been illustrated by Gerald Horne’s 2014 book The Counterrevolution of Slavery and the collection of essays put together by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2019 entitled “The 1619 Project”5. While both these publications proved controversial with historians of the American Revolution, they also clash with the recent historiography of antislavery during the American Revolution such as Douglas Egerton’s 2011 book Death or Liberty. African-Americans and Revolutionary America. This particular set of publications, including Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause, A History of Abolition, insists on how easier slave emancipations were made in the revolutionary context.

• 6 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 1961, with a New Foreword by Thad W. Tate a (...)

8Bell sends mixed signals as regards her interpretation of the American Revolution. On the one hand, she describes the “half-decade prior to the American Revolution” (1770-1775 according to her) as “an epic struggle between slavery and freedom” with major antislavery pamphlets being written in that period (p. 45). She writes: “Expressions of antislavery sentiment and petitions to the legislature » were « ubiquitous in the colonies” (p. 46), thus recognizing the progressive − though brief − debate on slavery which took place in the United States during what she calls the “American Revolution” (also see p. 77 and 126). On the other, she openly sides with historian Gerald Horne’s controversial thesis on the nature of the American Revolution p. 78-79, saying: “African American Patriots [those who served in the Continental Army] contributed to what Gerald Horne refers to as the counter-revolution of slavery: the idea that the revolution was in large part a revolt against a ‘nascent abolitionist movement’ in Britain”. This sentence raises many questions. First the reference to Horne’s book contradicts what she writes earlier about the “antislavery sentiment” being widespread in the colonies: as I suggested earlier, in his book Horne claims that fears of insurrection (not antislavery sentiment) motivated Americans’ desire for independence. Second the sentence itself does not make sense as the fact that African Americans joined the Continental [American] Army in reality shows that the Revolution was seen by a sizable proportion of free blacks and slaves as a progressive cause that could lead to a racially inclusive new nation, not as a war against abolition6.

• 7 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992.

11In this chapter, the British are portrayed as using “racial manipulation” (p. 91), not “abolition”, in their dealings with the fugitive slaves running to their lines, which is quite correct but does not correspond to Horne’s thesis. Yet this point is contradicted when Bell writes a few pages later (p. 104) that “Fugitive women […] correctly perceived that their best chances for freedom resided with a British victory and a disruption of the existing social order”. It may have been an understandable perception but was it a “correct” perception? If the British had won, would they have abolished slavery and confirmed the disruption of the social order? Bell herself reminds readers that the British protected slaves as Tory property in the South instead of freeing them and did not conduct an abolitionist campaign. In addition, an examination of the British context reveals that abolition became a popular cause in Britain only after the War of Independence, and − historians contend −, because of the loss of America7. In any case slavery itself was not abolished in Britain until 1833: what mattered for British activists between 1783 and 1807 was the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Chapter 4 deals with “Obstacles to Freedom in Post-Revolutionary America” and reads as a history of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the War of Independence regarding slavery (the constitutional debates protecting slavery, but also the efforts made by enslaved women to “self-purchase” themselves and gain freedom through flight, then having to carve an economic space for themselves in the new urban environment of the early American republic). Chapter 5, “Marronage and Black Women’s Fugitivity”, is an interesting angle from which to study slave flight in North American history.