This book sheds new light on domestic forced migration by examining the experiences of American-born slave migrants from a comparative perspective. It analyzes how different migrant groups anticipated, reacted to, and experienced forced removal, as well as how they adapted to their new homes.

Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery tells of an extraordinary life in and out of slavery in the United States and Canada. Born Elijah Turner in the Virginia Tidewater, circa 1810, the author eventually procured freedom papers from a man he resembled and took the man’s name, Henry Goings. His life story takes us on an epic journey, traveling from his Virginia birthplace through the cotton kingdom of the Lower South, and upon his escape from slavery, through Tennessee and Kentucky, then on to the Great Lakes region of the North and to Canada. His Rambles show that slaves were found not only in fields but also on the nation’s roads and rivers, perpetually in motion in massive coffles or as solitary runaways. A freedom narrative as well as a slave narrative, this compact yet detailed book illustrates many important developments in antebellum America, such as the large-scale forced migration of enslaved people from long-established slave societies in the eastern United States to new settlements on the cotton frontier, the political-economic processes that framed that migration, and the accompanying human anguish. Goings’s life and reflections serve as important primary documents of African American life and of American national expansion, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This edition features an informative and insightful introduction by Calvin Schermerhorn.

This dissertation examines the movement of enslaved people in the antebellum United States from the Upper South to the cotton frontier of the Deep South and the impact that forced relocation had on family formation over time. This move took an entire generation of slaves and artificially placed them together, often with little thought of their desires or needs. Slaves, typically young and strong of back wherein to manage the extreme labor demands of cotton cultivation, often did not have the benefit of older family members with which to learn and gain generational knowledge in the early years of the establishment of the cotton frontier. They strove to build new lives of their own design, lives that met their needs of physical, social, and emotional survival. This building and rebuilding of families, often numerous times, resulted in a multiplicity of familial structures, structures which endured growing pains and conflicts and acted as a first line of defense against the ravages of slavery. After emancipation, this building and reclaiming of family became a hallmark of freedpeoples lives. In mining multiple first-person slave accounts, newspapers, legal records, plantation diaries, and personal letters, this dissertation asserts that the enslaved and later freed families of the Deep South did not always conform to rigid social boundaries and norms. They fought through extraordinary trauma and circumstances, separations and sales, to restore families and often to build something entirely new, a family built of their own intention. What emerges is a story of family fluidity, one with far-reaching implications, even into current political and social debates on what the family is in the U.S..

"Beginning with the slave trade, Johnson and Campbell trace the migration--forced and free--of blacks through the antebellum period into the 1970s. They examine the major causes of the migrations and the personal motivations of the migrants. Drawing widely from historic, economic, sociological, and demographic sources, Johnson and Campbell have presented a comprehensive and concise review of black migration in America"--from back cover.

The Quarters and the Fields offers a unique approach to the examination of slavery. Rather than focusing on slave work and family life on cotton plantations, Damian Pargas compares the practice of slavery among the other major agricultural cultures in the nineteenth-century South: tobacco, mixed grain, rice, and sugar cane. He reveals how the demands of different types of masters and crops influenced work patterns and habits, which in turn shaped slaves' family life. By presenting a broader view of the complex forces that shaped enslaved people's family lives, not only from outside but also from within, this book takes an inclusive approach to the slave agency debate. A comparative study that examines the importance of time and place for slave families, The Quarters and the Fields provides a means for understanding them as they truly were: dynamic social units that were formed and existed under different circumstances across time and space.

Examines the experiences of runaway slaves in North America, conceptually dividing the continent into three distinct 'spaces of freedom'.