History Commons^™

  Jeffery R. Kerr-Ritchie’s Freedom’s Seekers offers a bold and innovative intervention into the study of emancipation as a transnational phe-nomenon and serves as an important contribution to our understanding of the remaking of the nineteenth-century Atlantic Americas.

 

Drawing on decades of research into slave and emancipation societies, Kerr-Ritchie is attentive to those who sought but were not granted freedom, and those who resisted enslavement individually as well as collectively on behalf of their communities. He explores the many roles that fugitive slaves, slave soldiers, and slave rebels played in their own societies. He likewise explicates the lives of …

This article examines Samuel Ringgold Ward's anti-slavery labours in Canada, the United Kingdom and Jamaica between 1851 and 1866. It demonstrates the ways in which Ward transformed himself into an imperial subject through the pursuit of personal and race-based liberty. This transformation is explained in four ways: Ward's physical relocation from unfree to free soil; his advocacy of legal equality for all people regardless of racial origin; his calls for emigration to the British Empire; and his commitment to the spread of pan-African evangelical Christianity. The article's central concern is to reveal the contradictions between liberty and empire.

This chapter examines cross-border fugitive slave activities in continental North America (the United States, Canada, Florida, and Mexico) during the 19th century. It begins with examples of fugitive slaves crossing borders in search of individual liberation. The second section examines diplomatic responses to these fugitive escapees, especially the signing of international treaties to prevent fugitive escape. The third part focuses on the contributions of fugitive slaves to antislavery mobilization across borders. These organizing efforts in different nations and territories took place because such efforts were either illegal or difficult to accomplish within the existing boundaries of the nation-state. The fourth …

Thirty years before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the antislavery movement won its first victory in the British Parliament. On August 1, 1834, the Abolition of Slavery Bill took effect, ending colonial slavery throughout the British Empire. Over the next three decades, "August First Day," also known as "West India Day" and "Emancipation Day," became the most important annual celebration of emancipation among people of African descent in the northern United States, the British Caribbean, Canada West, and the United Kingdom and played a critical role in popular mobilization against American slavery. In Rites of August First, J. R. KerrRitchie …

Throughout the colonial and antebellum periods, Virginia's tobacco producers exploited slave labor to ensure the profitability of their agricultural enterprises. In the wake of the Civil War, however, the abolition of slavery, combined with changed market conditions, sparked a breakdown of traditional tobacco culture. Focusing on the transformation of social relations between former slaves and former masters, Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie traces the trajectory of this breakdown from the advent of emancipation to the stirrings of African American migration at the turn of the twentieth century.

Drawing upon a rich array of sources, Kerr-Ritchie situates the struggles of newly freed people within …