runaway slaves
Freedom-seeking escapees
Runaway slaves were enslaved people who escaped or attempted to escape bondage.
The term appears throughout American historical documents, newspapers, and literature from the colonial period through the Civil War: The sheriff posted notices for runaway slaves.
Enslaved people who fled successfully were called fugitives; the Fugitive Slave Acts required their return even from free states.
- maroonsStrands in isolation
- freedom seekersThose escaping captivity
- abolitionistsThose opposing human bondage
- QuakersPacifist Protestant denomination
- JamaicaCaribbean island nation
Nat Turner · Harriet Tubman · bloodhounds · disguises · survival tactics · Frederick Douglass · safe houses · hidden passages · Mason-Dixon Line · free states · oral histories · Haitian Revolution · Underground Railroad · antebellum South · conductors · fugitive slaves · bondage · chains
- Abolitionismabolitionists, abolitionist movement, anti-slavery, antislavery, abolitionism
- slaverychattel slavery, enslaved, enslavement, bondage, chattel
- Abolitionabolitionists, Frederick Douglass, abolitionist movement, Underground Railroad, Emancipation Proclamation
- colonial slaverychattel slavery, African slaves, plantation system, bondage, servitude
- Guiana slaverySuriname, French Guiana, Demerara, maroons, plantation economy
- Afro-LatinosAfro-Brazilian, Afro-Colombians, Afro-Cubans, Afro-Peruvian, Afro-Brazilians
runaway slavesemancipated slaves
Formerly enslaved, now liberated
freedmen · freemen · free blacks · citizens
runaway slavesslaveholders
Owners of enslaved people
slave owners · slave catchers · overseers · plantation owners · masters