“Purchaser of My Body and Soul”: Fugitivity and Freedom in the Antebellum United States

As in our contemporary moment, slavery’s living legacies, or afterlives, imperiled Black freedom in the antebellum era. The institution shaped the lives of all African Americans in the United States—enslaved, free, and those in between. This paper will concentrate on those marked by the in-between. It examines the continued presence of slavery’s law and power in the lives of those who escaped the South through an examination of cases of retroactive self-purchase. It studies the stories of fugitives who deemed it necessary to buy their freedom to protect the liberty they had already made for themselves and explores the connections between Black fugitivity, legal thought, and freedom as process under slavery’s extraterritorial law.