Fugitivity and Enslaved Women's Agency in the Age of Revolution

Abstract:This article examines the flight of a mulatto woman named Margaret Grant who escaped slavery in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1770 and again in 1773. The analyses presented within focus on the meaning of freedom through a delineation of acts of self-emancipation, placing Margaret's story in the context of the wider Atlantic world. I contend that Black women asserted their claims to freedom through fugitivity as they invoked the same philosophical arguments that white revolutionaries made in their own 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. In fact, motherhood, freedom, and love of family propelled Black women to escape bondage during the Revolutionary era. By excavating the story of Margaret and other fugitive women, the integral role of Black women to the eighteenth-century abolitionist movement is manifest.