Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, USA, Jul 20, 2000 - History - 455 pages
From John Hope Franklin, America's foremost African American historian, comes this groundbreaking analysis of slave resistance and escape. A sweeping panorama of plantation life before the Civil War, this book reveals that slaves frequently rebelled against their masters and ran away from their plantations whenever they could. For generations, important aspects about slave life on the plantations of the American South have remained shrouded. Historians thought, for instance, that slaves were generally pliant and resigned to their roles as human chattel, and that racial violence on the plantation was an aberration. In this precedent setting book, John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, significant numbers of slaves did in fact frequently rebel against their masters and struggled to attain their freedom. By surveying a wealth of documents, such as planters' records, petitions to county courts and state legislatures, and local newspapers, this book shows how slaves resisted, when, where, and how they escaped, where they fled to, how long they remained in hiding, and how they survived away from the plantation. Of equal importance, it examines the reactions of the white slaveholding class, revealing how they marshalled considerable effort to prevent runaways, meted out severe punishments, and established patrols to hunt down escaped slaves. Reflecting a lifetime of thought by our leading authority in African American history, this book provides the key to truly understanding the relationship between slaveholders and the runaways who challenged the system--illuminating as never before the true nature of the South's "most peculiar institution".
 

Contents

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About the author (2000)

The son of an attorney who practiced before the U.S. Supreme Court, John Hope Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma on January 2, 1915. He received a B. A. from Fisk University in 1935 and a master's degree in 1936 and a Ph.D. in 1941 from Harvard University. During his career in education, he taught at a numerous institutions including Brooklyn College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Duke University. He also had teaching stints in Australia, China, and Zimbabwe. He has written numerous scholarly works including The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956); Reconstruction After the Civil War (1961); The Emancipation Proclamation (1963); and The Color Line: Legacy for the 21st Century (1993). His comprehensive history From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans (1947) is generally acknowledged to be the basic survey of African American history. He received numerous awards during his lifetime including the Medal of Freedom in 1995 and the John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanities in 2006. He worked with Thurgood Marshall's team of lawyers in their effort to end segregation in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education and participated in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was president of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and the American Studies Association. He was also a founding member of the Black Academy of Arts and served on the U.S. Commission for UNESCO and the Committee on International Exchange of Scholars. He died of congestive heart failure on March 25, 2009 at the age of 94.