The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817–1863

Abstract

In the decades before the Civil War, free African American communities in Maryland and Pennsylvania lived on a literal borderland between slavery and freedom. In Maryland, black men and women lived in the midst of bondage, facing policies attempting to reenslave or drive them from the state. In Pennsylvania, tenuous holds on freedom were undermined daily by attempts to capture fugitives from bondage.

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