This rich and innovative collection explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous periods in American history – the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The essays included shed new light on individual narratives and case studies of women in war and freedom, revealing that Black women recognized they had to make their own freedom, and illustrating how that influenced their postwar political, social, and economic lives. Black women and children are examined as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy during the war, and as widows who relied on kinship and community solidarity. Expanding and deepening our understanding of the various ways Black women seized wartime opportunities and made powerful claims on citizenship, this volume highlights the complexity of their wartime and postwar experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.

Karen Cook Bell is Professor of History and the Wilson H. Elkins Endowed Professor at Bowie State University, Maryland. Her book Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America won the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society International Book Award in 2022.

Karen Cook Bell interrogates how Black women in Louisiana and Georgia used Freedmen’s Bureau courts and their knowledge of the landscape to make their own freedom. In both regions, low wages and legal battles placed formerly enslaved women at a disadvantage; however, their labor aided their families and communities. Through the “contract labor system” in Louisiana and access to abandoned lands in Georgia, these women were able to improve their conditions in the short term. While some freedpeople derived marginal economic benefits from wage labor in the immediate aftermath of the war, in Louisiana these newly emancipated women were persistent in their demands for full and fair compensation from the Bureau of Free Labor, which adjudicated a significant number of cases in their favor.

Chapter 5 examines the gendered dimensions of maroon communities in America and the wider Atlantic world. Fugitive women joined maroon societies with their husbands and other family members. Runaways were a constant source of anxiety and fear. In the Caribbean and places such as Georgia, Florida, and the Gulf Coast and along the perimeter of the Virginia and North Carolina border in an area known as the Great Dismal Swamp, they were successful in establishing maroon societies. Such societies maintained their cohesiveness for many years. Given that the woods and swamps were spaces where the enslaved could exercise more autonomy than the fields and other open spaces on the plantation, fugitive women had more freedom in these spaces. The Revolutionary War not only prompted an increase in the number of runaways, but also provided the impetus for marronage.

Chapter 1 provides an analysis of the status and position of enslaved women during the eighteenth century. The daily and seasonal work of enslaved women determined the boundaries within which women had to resist their bondage and their opportunities to do so. This chapter provides a broad understanding of enslaved women’s labor in the Southern and Northern colonies as a basis from which to further examine enslaved women’s fugitivity in subsequent chapters. This chapter demonstrates the diversity in enslaved women’s experiences during the eighteenth century and the gendered resistance strategies they pursued to contest their bondage. Despite the limitations placed on enslaved women’s resistance, they were able to contest their bondage through the liminal spaces of slavery. This contestation had significant consequences for their mobility and the actions that they pursued as slavery became entrenched during the eighteenth century.

The era of the American Revolution was as critical for African American women as it was for Black men and for White Americans who gained their independence from Great Britain. Black women’s various efforts to escape bondage have been viewed as ancillary in the letters and diaries, biographical accounts, and legal proceedings historians often used to support arguments based on analysis of enslaved men or on factors that prevented women from fleeing slavery. Black women’s freedom was intertwined with the movement for American independence, and African American women influenced the military conflict and were powerfully influenced by its outcome.

Although enslaved Black women were marginalized and faced many obstacles to freedom during the Revolutionary era, they asserted their claims to freedom through fugitivity as they invoked the same philosophical arguments of liberty that White revolutionaries made in their own fierce struggle against oppression. At stake in this discussion of fugitive women is demonstrating that Black women’s resistance in the form of truancy and escape were central components of abolitionism during the Revolutionary Era. Thousands of women of diverse circumstances escaped bondage despite their status as mothers and wives. In fact, motherhood, freedom, love and family propelled Black women to escape bondage during the Revolutionary Era; a time when the chaos of war made women’s flight possible due to the breakdown of oversight and colonial authority.