Eminent Historian Susan Eva O’Donovan Discusses Her New Book Moving Towards Freedom: The Political Education of Enslaved Americans

Noted Civil War Historian Jim Downs Moderates the Conversation

This discussion is a part of Hill Center’s Benjamin Drummond Emancipation Day Celebration*

“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

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.

Susan Eva O’Donovan is an Associate Professor of History at The University of Memphis. Her fields of interest are Nineteenth Century US, Slavery and Emancipation, and US Labor History. She is the author of numerous books and her scholarship has been recognized with numerous awards.

Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman NEH Professor of History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of numerous acclaimed books including Sick from Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War.