The developments of the time provided more slaves with new opportunities to escape slavery by fleeing to free black communities. Yet for most enslaved people living in the US South it was a period of intensification and expansion of human bondage. For many African-American slaves, it was an age of emancipation. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, free black communities within the slaveholding southern states emerged or were bolstered as a result of an increase in manumissions. Contrary to common assumptions that self-emancipation by flight was only possible to regions outside the southern states, this article argues that many slaves actively took and preserved their freedom by hiding amongst free African American populations in urban areas.
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