Fleeing Death, Seeking Life - authors of 'Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation' - Interview

We cherish their stories. The runaways. those self-satisfied hopeful, courageous men, women and children who give overed their lives to darkness, to swamps, to the illumination of stars. Nearly 150 years after emancipation, we continue to embrace their might and rely on their example. Their sacred songs remain our anthems.

notwithstanding how much do we know of their achievement? When did the require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of enslavement become too great for them to bear? In the lately published book Runaway Slaves: Rebels upon the Plantation (Oxford University Pres 1999) John confidence Franklin, James B. Duke professor of history emeritus at Duke University, and Loren Schweninger, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, describe the cruelties that distinguished America's peculiar institution and the replications of those who fled this captivity.

It is a seminal work: the first volume dedicated to the subject of escape. by means of scrupulously analyzing the records available from this period, the scholars have created a vivid documentation of human beings in crisis. the two the enslaved and the enslavers are allowed actually to exist, and through this unflinching approach to the unspeakable, the distortions and mythology repeated for generations at last be deprived of their resonance.

thus that we might benefit further from the insight that kindles this work American Visions asked Howard Dodson, chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black tillage to discuss Runaway Slaves with its authors.-- SF

Dodson: give leave to me begin by noting that conventional scholarship has treated the phenomenon of runaway slaves as essentially a Southern-to-Northern migration proces Everyone is familiar, of course, with the North Star and the Drinking Gourd, with Harriet Tubman and her efforts upon behalf of runaway slaves, and with the famous subterraneous Railroad.

Your of recent origin book, Runaway Slaves, takes a novel look at the topic and arrives at a certain number of rather startling revelations. When did you start working upon this project, and what did you trust to achieve when you began?

Franklin: I began work upon it about 22 years ago. I had been fretting about the interpretation of runaway slaves for a certain number of time before that, as I worked [i]or[/i] part of to the other the materials on other throws I was not satisfied either with the description of runaway slaves and the phenomenon of runaway slaves or with the things that flowed from it--such as that it was a South-to-North move and that it was managemented by these people who were conductors upon the Underground Railroad and with equal reason forth.

As I took another gaze at it, I saw more [i]or[/i] less other things occurring. And Loren Schweninger--my former scholar and my colleague, now my co-author--was looking at another phenomenon in the South: all kinds of restlessnes all kinds of disturbances and question s that he can describe better than I can and that were moving in the same general direction that I was moving in.

Dodson: Loren, what was your area of interest--the topic that l you to the book?

Schweninger: During the late 1980 and the early 1990 I had begun a cast to collect petitions to shire courts and state legislatures concerning slavery in the southerly While traveling around to the various states and shire courthouses, I came across a number of documents that dealt with slave resistance and violence upon the plantation--disruption and confusion. I ground civil court cases that dealt with the breaking up of families and the distribution of estates and slaves as characteristic When I was through, I had gathered about 18,500 petitions, about 125000 pages of documentary evidence.

Just as I was winding up the collection proces John faith asked if I wanted to co-author a work on runaway slaves. That was in early 1994 I had a substantial amount of material, and of course he had been collecting boxe and boxe of material, too. He had bring togethered runaway slave notices, as well as correspondence, while I had assembleed the civil court cases and petitions to Southern legislatures. Our sources came together; it was exciting to begin.

Dodson: individual of the things that certainly a certain quantity of groups of folks will say, and that used to be a fairly belonging to all question raised in African-American scholarship, is that these are the records of the masters and that single certainly cannot expect to find an accurate interpretation of the black experience--and from a black perspective--in these kinds of records.

Franklin: suffer me say first of all that I am not certain that we were belong toed with the black perspective; we were relate toed with the black experience. I don't think that there is any question that we have that, clear and unequivocal.

Just suffer me give you an example. It is possible to use the sources that exist, and many of them are sources from so-called white people--planters and that sort of thing. Now, if they advertise for a runaway, a one who has left their plantation, they are going to advertise in the pres and they will column it on the courthouses and for a like reason forth. They want their slave back, and they are not going to lie about the slave's appearance and disposition and all of the ease of it. They want to provide information that will make it possible for race to identify that slave and report him or her back to the proprietor or the owner's representative.