Neither Fugitive Nor Free

Neither Fugitive nor Freedraws on the freedom suit as recorded in the press and court documents to offer a critically and historically engaged understanding of the freedom celebrated in the literary and cultural histories of transatlantic abolitionism. Freedom suits involved those enslaved valets, nurses, and maids who accompanied slaveholders onto free soil. Once brought into a free jurisdiction, these attendants became informally free, even if they were taken back to a slave jurisdictionat least according to abolitionists and the enslaved themselves. In order to secure their freedom formally, slave attendants or others on their behalf had to bring suit in a court of law.Edlie Wong critically recuperates these cases in an effort to reexamine and redefine the legal construction of freedom, will, and consent. This study places such historically central anti-slavery figures as Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, and William Lloyd Garrison alongside such lesser-known slave plaintiffs as Lucy Ann Delaney, Grace, Catherine Linda, Med, and Harriet Robinson Scott. Situated at the confluence of literary criticism, feminism, and legal history,Neither Fugitive nor Freepresents the freedom suit as a "new" genre to African American and American literary studies.

Edlie L. Wong is an associate professor of English at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, where she teaches nineteenth-century African American and American literature.