The second chapter delves into slave flight to spaces of informal freedom in the urban South, the most immediate and easily reached destinations for runaways trapped in the second slavery. It considers why enslaved people chose to go to the trouble of fleeing bondage yet remain within the slaveholding states; the networks that helped them do so; the strategies they employed to hide their identities, sustain themselves, and remain at large indefinitely; and the risk they ran of recapture. The actions of these runaways went far beyond mere truancy, as is often suggested in the literature. Many fugitives to urban areas clearly attempted to live their lives there indefinitely. The chapter devotes considerable attention to the importance of family in informing freedom seekers' decisions to remain within the South, even if it meant foregoing more formal freedom in other parts of the continent. It also examines the importance of visibility in runaways' strategies of escape, exploring how they "passed for free" by looking and acting free, procuring false freedom papers and other documentation, and integrating themselves into urban free black communities so as to avoid detection.

The fourth chapter examines slave flight to spaces of formal freedom in British Canada and Mexico from the 1830s through the 1850s. These two destinations for refugees from American slavery shared important similarities but also differed by degrees. The chapter explores why some enslaved people sought to flee the United States altogether; how they settled into new communities; and the risk of both extradition and illegal recapture by slave catchers and agents from the antebellum South. The chapter is structured thematically, beginning with a comparative examination of the journeys of freedom seekers to both international jurisdictions. The chapter then delves into the settlement experiences of refugees in Canada and Mexico, underscoring the stubborn prejudice with which especially refugees in Canada were confronted, as well as their economic opportunities. The chapter ends with an extensive discussion of the threat of extradition. Both countries refused to sign extradition treaties for fugitive slaves with the United States. In Mexico, however, the threat of reenslavement was higher due to illegal raids and incursions by southern slaveholders into Mexican territory.

This chapter surveys the historical, political, and legal problems confronting the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. It describes the antebellum debate over whether free blacks were "citizens of the United States" entitled to comity rights, the travails of abolitionists, the rampant private violence and mob rule and inadequate protection of the laws, and the abridgment of the civil rights of the newly freed people in the infamous Black Codes.

Mary Ellen Pleasant was a free black woman entrepreneur in California and a pioneer of black philanthropy. During her ninety years of life, she worked on the Underground Railroad and helped to usher in California’s Gold Rush. She is perhaps most famous for using her enormous financial resources to assist John Brown in his raid on Harpers Ferry. Her continued efforts of racial equality in the West led her to be known as “The Mother of Human Rights in California.” When Pleasant and two African American women were kicked off a street car in San Francisco, she filed suits. Her case, Pleasant v. North Beach & Mission Railroad Company, went to the California Supreme Court. After two years of litigation, the city outlawed segregation in San Francisco’s public transportation. This paper places her efforts squarely in the center of America’s greatest turning points. Time and time again we see how black women, and in particular, Mary Ellen Pleasant, cannot be separated from the endorsement of American entrepreneurship, abolitionism, and human rights.

Emma Coger, the plaintiff in Coger v. Northwestern Union Packet Company (1873), was a feisty young schoolteacher who physically resisted steamboat officers when they refused to treat her as a lady because of her color. Emma was not the first woman of African descent to sue a common carrier over race discrimination in the United States, but her suit was unusual for being planned, and for being brought in cooperation with organized men. One of the earliest civil rights lawsuits brought under the Fourteenth Amendment led the Iowa Supreme Court to outlaw race segregation on common carriers. In the 1870s, when she orchestrated her challenge to the discrimination practiced by a steamboat company, she did so with the support both African American crew members as well as with that of the Prince Hall Masons, a US organization deeply engaged in civil rights work. Her case went all the way to the Iowa Supreme Court, and it is still used cited in legal decisions today.

In 1660 Hannah Manena, the infant daughter of a woman named Priscilla, was baptized in the English colony of Bermuda. Her father, an English man, claimed ownership of her mother. Hannah later married a Bermudian man of color, Anthony McKenney, with whom she had two children before he was able to purchase her freedom when his own 22-year indenture ended in 1687. She had to leave Bermuda to maintain that hard-won freedom because an irregularly enforced 1676 law exiling all free people of color made staying too precarious. But leaving meant separation from kin including her mother and two aunts, as well as the two children who had inherited her enslaved status. Hannah and Anthony joined the fledging free community of color in New Providence in the Bahamas and were reunited with their children in 1694, after Anthony returned to Bermuda to retrieve them upon their grandfather’s death. Wills and census records from New Providence provide sketchy outlines of a free community of color who named their children after each other, left legacies to each other, baptized their children, and owned property, including human property.

New Orleans authorities accused William H. Williams of violating a Louisiana state law of 1817 against the importation of convict slaves. Williams, as it turned out, had a long history in the courtroom. Although his business practices helped him largely avoid redhibition suits, and he was never charged with slave stealing or kidnapping as were some of his slave–dealing counterparts, he did face multiple suits lodged by free blacks who claimed that they were unlawfully imprisoned in the Yellow House, Williams’ slave jail.