Neither Fugitive nor Free

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.

Edlie L. Wong is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland and author of Neither Fugitive Nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (NYU Press, 2009) and co-editor of George Lippard's The Killers.

ContentsIntroduction: Traveling Slaves and the Geopolitics of Freedom 11 Emancipation after "the Laws of Englishmen” 192 Choosing Kin in Antislavery Literature and Law 773 The Gender of Freedom before Dred Scott 1274 The Crime of Color in the Negro Seamen Acts 183Conclusion: Fictions of Free Travel 240