“Borderers” and Fugitives

The first words of Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach describe Abraham Lincoln’s hand trembling as he writes lines on a paper: the Emancipation Proclamation. Rothman then quickly pans a thousand miles away, to where enslaved woman Rose Herera sits in a “clammy” New Orleans jail with her infant son (p. 2). Ultimately, Herera would use the words written by Lincoln and other powerful men in the nation’s capital to successfully claim her rights and her children. As Rothman and the other authors reviewed here emphasize, Lincoln and Herera had a symbiotic relationship: without the lines written by Lincoln and those like him, Herera would have lacked the means to rebuild her life. Without the bold actions taken by Herera, these words would have been sterile.

The books under review explore the relationship between formal and lived power by focusing on one particular sort of line written by the powerful: a border line. All four books tell the stories of those who reimagined, profited from, demanded adherence to, or refused to respect these lines. Recent works on the history of the U.S./Mexican and other borders have emphasized that borders were always less solid and certain than they appeared. As Rachel St. John wrote: “Rather than a clear line that defined the limits of national territory and state power, the border was a space where categories blurred and power was compromised.”¹ Together, these books demonstrate the contingent and constructed nature of political authority by focusing on the bodies that sometimes crossed, sometimes defended, the borders laid down by distant elites.

Mathew Clavin’s work on fugitive slaves around Pensacola reminds us that slavery’s borders were indeterminate from the start. Pensacola, for most of its history through the Civil War, was a society with slaves, yet here “slaveowners’ hegemony was incomplete” (p. 120). Pensacola was within slavery’s borders, yet a steady stream of slaves, from its settlement to the Civil War, found that they could escape slavery without crossing the Mason-Dixon Line simply by “aiming for Pensacola.” Florida was the final destination for some fugitives. There they found allies, work opportunities, and the capacity to disappear from the eyes of their masters. Many others used it as a portal to the broader Atlantic World.

Sovereignty over Pensacola changed so many times that it was difficult for any state to establish meaningful control. Runaway slaves, like other marginal people, found refuge in the liminal and ineffectively governed colony, which had a perpetual labor shortage that offered opportunities for fugitives. Under Spanish rule, Pensacola was a magnet for fugitive slaves; when the British took over in 1763, this “epidemic” of runaways continued. Nearby Creek and Seminole communities assisted and harbored slaves who had fled U.S. masters; these black allies in turn played important roles in their efforts to resist white expansion. The British in the War of 1812 made the liberation of slaves part of their strategy: when they left, almost all black residents then in Pensacola left the city; some, together with their British and Native American allies, built a well-armed and -provisioned fort, called Negro Fort, which the United States ultimately could suppress only with a military campaign (pp. 55–57).

Even after the United States formally acquired Florida in 1821, antebellum Pensacola, located on slavery’s “southern frontier,” remained culturally as much a part of the Atlantic World as it was of the United States. Pragmatically, the federal government lacked the resources to enforce norms...