Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series
Neither Fugitive nor Free draws on the freedom suit as recorded in the
press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged
understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural
histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits involved those
enslaved valets, nurses, and maids who accompanied slaveholders onto
free soil. Once brought into a free jurisdiction, these attendants
became informally free, even if they were taken back to a slave
jurisdiction--at least according to abolitionists and the enslaved
themselves. In order to secure their freedom formally, slave attendants
or others on their behalf had to bring suit in a court of law.
Edlie Wong critically recuperates these cases in an effort to reexamine
and redefine the legal construction of freedom, will, and consent. This
study places such historically central anti-slavery figures as Frederick
Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and William Lloyd Garrison alongside such
lesser-known slave plaintiffs as Lucy Ann Delaney, Grace, Catharine
Linda, Med, and Harriet Robinson Scott. Situated at the confluence of
literary criticism, feminism, and legal history, Neither Fugitive nor
Free presents the freedom suit as a "new" genre to African American and
American literary studies.