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[MOVING TOWARD FREEDOM] represent[s] the remarkable discoveries that this archive of slavery can yield . . . [and] is clearly caught up in the spirit of the hunt and the joy of searching for hidden treasures that inspire the best historical researchers . . . Few historians are more familiar with the records of American slavery and the opportunities for writing its history . . . The richness of [O’Donovan’s] examples and her use of the lens of motion and travel succeed in deepening our understanding . . . [A] sweeping study.

—Drew Gilpin Faust, The New York Review of Books

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Using a remarkable plethora of voices, Susan Eva O’Donovan’s Moving Toward Freedom masterfully tracks the growth of a powerful political consciousness among enslaved Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is startling and groundbreaking work, shedding new light upon the momentous and rapid movement in the mid-nineteenth century toward emancipation and full citizenship for enslaved Americans.”

—Jonathan M. Bryant, author of Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope

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Susan Eva O’Donovan rightfully implores us to take a new view of American political history by paying the closest attention to what enslaved people were learning, doing, and seeing. Her book is a gripping account of the enslaved people who ‘moved toward freedom,’ as their local, national, and even international travels allowed them, and thus their communities, to get a thorough political education even while living under the lash.”

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University

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Moving Toward Freedom tilts our angle of vision, enabling us to see the histories of slavery and resistance in creative and inspiring new ways.”

—Marcus Rediker, author of Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea

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Moving Toward Freedom

The Political Education of Enslaved Americans

by Susan Eva O’Donovan

A magisterial, groundbreaking new study of the lives of enslaved Americans on the cusp of the Civil War that places them—and their hard-won political knowledge—rightly at the center of the fight for freedom.

The enduring image of American slavery has been of workers trapped on plantations, shuttling from squalid quarters to the fields and back again, or confined to the homes of abusive owners, constantly under surveillance and restriction. But if that were the whole picture, how would black Southerners have organized into such a formidable force the moment war erupted?

With Moving Toward Freedom, eminent historian Susan Eva O’Donovan radically widens the lens to reveal a new landscape of the slaveholding South: one in which enslaved workers were not pinned in place but mobile, deployed as laborers—and even as captains—on steamboats and ferries, or as teamsters transporting staple crops across the expanding country, or as ladies’ maids waiting on their mistresses on European vacations. While performing brutal and involuntary work, O’Donovan argues, enslaved Americans managed to accumulate the crucial experience and knowledge that they would use to bring about their own liberation.

Piecing together an extraordinary archive of letters, travel passes, receipts, and other documentation of lives in which literacy was illegal, O’Donovan allows her subjects to speak for themselves as they move through markets, jails, waterways, gold mines, and foreign lands. In so doing, O’Donovan demonstrates that slavery’s incredible profitability depended on a fundamentally unsustainable balance between commercial imperatives and slaveholders’ drive for control—one that enslaved workers eventually succeeded in using to their advantage, bringing slavery to its knees.

Photo by Amanda Lee Savage

About the author

Susan is an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis. But while she lives and works in the mid-South, her heart remains firmly rooted in the interior Pacific Northwest, land of pine and fir forests, basalt cliffs, and wild and wide open spaces. As a product of a working-class family in a working-class community made up primarily of loggers, farmers, and stock raisers, Susan has always been drawn to the role of workers in history. An endless curiosity in their everyday experiences has long informed her research, starting with a book that explored the work enslaved people performed for their owners in bondage and how those experiences shaped the gendered dimensions of freedom. Much of Susan’s scholarship has focused on the post-emancipation period. Recently, however, she has turned her attention more fully to the enslaved, a population of women and men who, in doing their owners’ bidding, fashioned themselves into a powerful political force, one that would help destroy the Confederate nation and with it, slaveholders’ dreams.