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Migrants against Slavery:
Virginians and the Nation

by Philip J. Schwarz

288 pages • 6 x 9 • Cloth $42.50

ISBN 0-8139-2008-6

Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies

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.

Reviews

"This is a quite original approach to the study of slavery in antebellum Virginia . . . . By telling a series of short biographies, an interesting argument is presented, and it is an excellent supplement to some rather traditional approaches."

--Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester

The Author

Philip J. Schwarz, Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, is the author of Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 and Slave Laws in Virginia.

Related Links

Migrants against Slavery: Virginians and the Nation
by Philip J. Schwarz
Available April 2001
288 pages • 6 x 9 • Cloth $42.50
ISBN 0-8139-2008-6

http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/schwarz.html

Revised 10/1/07