The historical context of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery speeches between 1844 and 1855 indicates that he gave them reluctantly after yielding to entreaties and that they are confused, contradictory, and without direction. Stunningly, between 1851 and 1854, years of monumental events in the time of abolitionism, there is no evidence that Emerson ever uttered a single word about slavery publicly. Although hating slavery with a passion, he disliked abolitionists almost as much and shied away from taking a public stand until 1856.

The historical context of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s antislavery speeches between 1844 and 1855 indicates that he gave them reluctantly after yielding to entreaties and that they are confused, contradictory, and without direction. Stunningly, between 1851 and 1854, years of monumental events in the time of abolitionism, there is no evidence that Emerson ever uttered a single word about slavery publicly. Although hating slavery with a passion, he disliked abolitionists almost as much and shied away from taking a public stand until 1856.

The first chapter examines the changing landscape of slavery and freedom that developed in North America in the revolutionary era. It explores how and why opportunities for enslaved people to permanently escape bondage expanded significantly between the colonial era and the early nineteenth century. The chapter begins with a discussion of how slave flight was characterized during the colonial period, underscoring the informal nature of sancturary spaces and the lack of any spaces of "formal freedom" throughout the continent, as slavery was legally sanctioned everywhere. It then delves into the major transitions that occurred in the Age of Revolutions, with the abolition of slavery in the Northern United States, British Canada, and Mexico; as well as the wave of manumissions in the southern states that greatly bolstered urban free black communities. By the mid-1830s, enslaved people who found themselves trapped in the second slavery of the American South saw potential "spaces of freedom" in every direction: informal freedom within urban areas in the South itself; semi-formal (contested) freedom in the Northern United States; and formal freedom beyond the borders of the United States.

The third chapter explores slave flight to spaces of semi-formal freedom in the antebellum North. It analyzes why freedom seekers sought to risk their lives to escape the South rather than flee to nearby spaces of informal freedom; how they did so; their settlement processes; and how they fared in the legal quagmire of rendition and reenslavement. It begins with an examination of enslaved people's perilous northbound journeys, emphasizing the particular reasons some freedom seekers sought free soil and some semblance of legal freedom from slavery. It then delves into refugees' experiences settling in and sustaining themselves in the northern states, with an emphasis on their integration into northern free black communities. The chapter concludes with an extensive discussion of the ambiguous legal status of fugitive slaves in the Northern United States and how conflicts over legal rights and the conditions for rendition developed over time, often stimulating mass civil disobedience to federal fugitive slave laws and de facto protection from reenslavement.

Throughout the antebellum period, the beliefs in force and direct action splintered the abolitionist movement. Black leadership believed moral suasion failed to protect black people and produce liberation. For some time, Douglass’s endorsement of Garrison’s ideology was out of step with black leaders that wanted the ability to defend their humanity. This essay illustrates how Douglass’s thinking evolved regarding the utility of moral suasion and the direction of the movement overall. Through the force of events, Douglass’s stance in the abolitionist movement shifted from nonresistance to political violence. In time, he conceded and then advocated for emancipation by violent means. Douglass’s stance and celebrity shaped the movement. He helped usher the movement from a group of religious outsiders to a political force who welcomed a war of abolition.

This chapter focuses on the constitutional debates of the early 1850s, when many antislavery writers narrated both the progress of moral insight, which they viewed as embodied in the rise of antislavery sentiment, and the Slave Power’s advances, which they tracked in the Fugitive Slave Act, fugitive slave cases, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In attempts to reconcile their perceptions of both general moral progress and peculiar moral decline, these writers characterized proslavery advances as anachronistic deviations from founding-era expectations and slavery’s unexpected spread as antithetical to the egalitarian spirit of their age. All of this indicated just how different the revolutionary past was from the present, signaling to their contemporaries that it was time to realize the permanent truths that had been enunciated in the transient founding past. In short, antislavery writers promoted a historical consciousness attentive to historical distance: sometimes they narrated the growth of moral opposition to slavery since the founding, and sometimes they narrated the Slave Power’s rise since that time, but in both cases, they pointed to the reality of change over time.