fugitive slaves
Freedom-seeking escapees
Fugitive slaves were enslaved people who escaped from bondage in the American South, typically fleeing to free states in the North or to Canada before the Civil War.
The term appears prominently in historical and legal contexts, particularly regarding the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, which required that escaped slaves be returned to their enslavers even if captured in free territory.
The Underground Railroad helped fugitive slaves reach safety.
- freedom seekersThose escaping captivity
- safe passageProtected transit through danger
- Underground RailroadCovert abolitionist escape network
- abolitionismMovement to end oppression
- manumissionFormal freeing of enslaved
Harriet Tubman · safe houses · chattel slavery · Dred Scott decision · spirituals · conductor · emancipation · slave codes · extradition laws · disguises · escape route · hiding place · hidden in plain sight · antebellum South · freedom · bondage · chains · shackles
- Abolitionismabolitionists, abolitionist movement, anti-slavery, antislavery, abolitionism
- Abolitionabolitionists, Frederick Douglass, abolitionist movement, Underground Railroad, Emancipation Proclamation
- Antebellum Americaantebellum era, Compromise of 1850, sectionalism, states' rights, Kansas-Nebraska Act
- Spartacus RevoltSpartacus, slave revolt, gladiators, rebel army, slave army
- American HistoryAmerican Revolution, Revolutionary War, colonial era, founding fathers, Declaration of Independence
- slaverychattel slavery, enslaved, slave, enslavement, slave traders
fugitive slavesslaveholders
Owners of enslaved people
slave owners · enslavers · plantation owners · slave catchers · overseers
fugitive slavesfreedmen
People released from slavery
free blacks · emancipated slaves · freemen · citizens · abolitionists