Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin (review)

In Aiming for Pensacola, Matthew J. Clavin contends that existing scholarship on fugitive slaves in the antebellum era has neglected liminal spaces in the antebellum South, where enslaved people could find sympathetic allies willing to aid them in escaping bondage. Clavin maintains that Pensacola served as one such place, remaining on the social, economic, and geographic margins of the South. As rigid racial hierarchies and fanatical defenses of slavery developed throughout most of the region, Clavin argues that many Pensacolans defied fugitive slave laws to shield enslaved people from authorities.

The author excels in his use of documentary evidence to establish the prevalence of antislavery sentiment in antebellum Pensacola. Clavin mines runaway slave advertisements and legal records for details about the experiences of individual refugees and their collaborators. These sources confirm Pensacola’s reputation as a refuge for fugitives by voicing planters’ and authorities’ frustrations with the town’s inhabitants. Instances where authorities manage to capture fugitives also prove revealing, as they frequently found that sympathetic whites or Creek Indians had harbored the refugees. Occasionally, collaborators helped fugitives gain passage to safer locales such as the British West Indies, where slavery had already been abolished. Clavin also makes much of Pensacola’s status as a port town, finding that many of those who aided fugitives were sailors or workers in the Pensacola Naval Yard. Drawing upon Marcus Rediker’s argument regarding the racial egalitarianism of maritime communities, the author asserts Pensacola’s port contributed to its status as a haven for fugitive slaves. Clavin’s discussion of the case of Jonathan Walker, a former sailor who attempted to deliver seven fugitives to freedom in the Bahamas, demonstrates all of these points and serves as the most outstanding portion of the book (124–41).

Clavin does not assert that the social dynamics he finds in antebellum Pensacola were unique. In fact, he compares them to the actions of abolitionists and refugees in the North and acknowledges where he is building upon the work of other scholars. For example, Clavin credits David Waldstreicher’s use of runaway slave advertisements for inspiring his own (95). Rather, the historiographical value of Clavin’s work lies in situating free people’s shielding of runaways in an antebellum southern city. By asserting that Pensacola served as a sort of frontier space between slavery and freedom, Clavin broadens the historiographical conversation on abolitionism and social conflict over slavery in the antebellum era.

At times, Clavin overstates his case in drawing comparisons between Pensacola and more conventional spaces along the Underground Railroad. The author downplays a substantial difference between the Florida port and northern locales such as Cincinnati: slavery’s legality. Some comparison is apt: in both spaces, many citizens showed disdain for local and state authorities attempting to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law by hiding or otherwise aiding refugees. However, it is difficult to imagine Jonathan Walker being branded with the mark of “S.S.” (for “Slave Stealer”) by Cincinnati authorities for his part in aiding fugitives. Liminal space or not, the social and legal climate in Pensacola offered qualitative differences that distinguished it from stations along the Underground Railroad.

Likewise, Clavin’s attempt to demonstrate Pensacola’s relative racial fluidity in the third chapter highlights a series of social interactions between white and black Pensacolans, but the evidence does not support as strong of an interpretation as he puts forward. The author sets up a bit of strawman by describing much of the rest of the antebellum South as possessing a system of “racial apartheid” (66). Not only is such a description anachronistic, it misinterprets the social character of the region. Clavin points out that enslaved workers labored alongside white wage workers at Arcadia Mill and on the Alabama, Florida & Georgia Railroad (70–72), but similar situations could be found across the antebellum South in places such as Richmond and Charleston, hardly bastions of antislavery sentiment. Even more could be...