Migrants Against Slavery: Virginians and the Nation

By Philip Schwartz and Philip J. Schwarz

Book Overview

A significant number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Virginians migrated north and west with the intent of extricating themselves from a slave society. All sought some kind of freedom: whites who left the Old Dominion to escape from slavery refused to live any longer as slave owners or as participants in a society grounded in bondage; fugitive slaves attempted to liberate themselves; free African Americans searched for greater opportunity. In Migrants against Slavery Philip J. Schwarz suggests that antislavery migrant Virginians, both the famous--such as fugitive Anthony Burns and abolitionist Edward Coles--and the lesser known, deserve closer scrutiny. Their migration and its aftermath, he argues, intensified the national controversy over human bondage, playing a larger role than previous historians have realized in shaping American identity and in Americans' effort to define the meaning of freedom.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813920086
• ISBN13: 9780813920085
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher