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Wyandot, Shawnee, And African American Resistance To Slavery In Ohio And Kansas, Diane Miller

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

From the colonial period, enslaved Africans escaped bondage. Colonial records and treaties reveal that they often sought refuge with Indian tribes. This resistance to slavery through escape and flight constituted the Underground Railroad. As European colonies developed into the United States, alliances of subaltern groups posed a threat. Colonizers and settlers aimed to divide and control these groups and arrived at the intertwined public policies of African chattel slavery and Indian removal. Tribal abolitionism and participation in the Underground Railroad was more pronounced than scholars have recognized and constituted an important challenge to the expansion of slavery.

Encounters between fugitive …