Pargas’ thoughtful new book is not quite what it seems. Its title notwithstanding, Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 is not a comprehensive new history of fugitivity from North American slavery. It does not attend to every variety of freedom seeking; military service with the British during the War of 1812 in return for postwar liberty is, for instance, noticeably absent. Nor does it assess the political significance of freedom seeking in the sectional crisis and the coming of the Civil War. Instead, Pargas has delivered something no less useful—a new and conceptually powerful spatial analysis of fugitivity. Taking a continental approach, Pargas delineates three spaces of freedom for African Americans seeking liberty from slavery: (1) spaces of informal freedom, (2) spaces of semiformal freedom, and (3) spaces of formal freedom.
This differentiation is fresh yet wholly intuitive. Spaces of informal freedom were those locations within nineteenth-century slave...