Tuesday, March 31 at 5:30pm at Off Square Books
Susan Eva O’Donovan will be in conversation with Robert Colby for Moving Toward Freedom, a magisterial, groundbreaking new study of the lives of enslaved Americans on the cusp of the Civil War that places them—and their hard-won political knowledge—rightly at the center of the fight for freedom.
About the book
“Susan Eva O’Donovan rightfully implores us to take a new view of American political history by paying the closest attention to what enslaved people were learning, doing, and seeing. Her book is a gripping account of the enslaved people who ‘moved toward freedom.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
The enduring image of American slavery has been of workers trapped on plantations, shuttling from squalid quarters to the fields and back again, or confined to the homes of abusive owners, constantly under surveillance and restriction. But if that were the whole picture, how would black Southerners have organized into such a formidable force the moment war erupted?
With Moving Toward Freedom, eminent historian Susan Eva O’Donovan radically widens the lens to reveal a new landscape of the slaveholding South: one in which enslaved workers were not pinned in place but mobile, deployed as laborers—and even as captains—on steamboats and ferries, or as teamsters transporting staple crops across the expanding country, or as ladies’ maids waiting on their mistresses on European vacations. While performing brutal and involuntary work, O’Donovan argues, enslaved Americans managed to accumulate the crucial experience and knowledge that they would use to bring about their own liberation.
Piecing together an extraordinary archive of letters, travel passes, receipts, and other documentation of lives in which literacy was illegal, O’Donovan allows her subjects to speak for themselves as they move through markets, jails, waterways, gold mines, and foreign lands. In so doing, O’Donovan demonstrates that slavery’s incredible profitability depended on a fundamentally unsustainable balance between commercial imperatives and slaveholders’ drive for control—one that enslaved workers eventually succeeded in using to their advantage, bringing slavery to its knees.
About the author
Susan Eva O’Donovan is an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis. She is the author of Becoming Free in the Cotton South and coeditor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, part of the ongoing scholarship of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. She is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer and the codirector of the Memphis Massacre project, a public commemoration of Reconstruction.
About the conversation partner
A Virginia native, Robert Colby earned his BA from the University of Virginia and his MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His book, An Unholy Traffic received the John L. Nau Book Prize from the Nau Center for Civil War History at UVA, as well as the Nonfiction Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. It was also a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Institute’s Lincoln Prize, awarded annually to the best book in Civil War history. His work has previously won the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize and the Society of Civil War Historians’ Anne J. Bailey Prize and Anthony Kaye Memorial Essay Award and was a finalist for the Southern Historical Association’s C. Vann Woodward Award. Before joining the University of Mississippi’s History Department in 2022, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for American Studies at Christopher Newport University.
About the Author
