More Than Maroons: Black Villages and Illinois Freedom Politics

This paper looks at the rise of a black legal culture among enslaved people in southern Illinois. For decades after legal abolition, slavery clung to life in the state’s southern rural districts. Escaping bondage in this nominally free state hinged not on passing laws but on litigating slavery’s demise in the courts. Winning these cases required African Americans to assemble a legal culture which included access to attorneys, sources of capital, relationships with witnesses, and specific erudite legal knowledge. “More than Maroons” argues that a legal culture matured when free African Americans settled into all-black towns in the state’s southern counties. Residents in these towns served as lawyers, acted as witnesses, and pooled information and resources, all of which supported illegally enslaved African Americans escape bondage. In this way residents helped dismantle slavery in the state and practiced a local politics of abolition.  Scholars have written about black towns as “maroon communities” because they were walled off and isolated from the larger hostile landscape. Yet this paper insists they did not simply react to the larger world of slavery and freedom, but actively waged campaigns against slave holders in rural courthouses. They were freedom villages. Painting them in this light offers a different portrait of black politics in the antebellum period. Coming out of rural activism residents in black freedom villages made a local, rural politics of emancipation that helped stamp out the final vestiges of human bondage in Illinois.