Chapter 2 is an examination of the pre-Revolutionary period. This chapter examines the flight of a mulatto woman named Margaret Grant who escaped slavery in Baltimore, Maryland in 1770 and 1773. This chapter examines the meaning of freedom through a delineation of acts of self-emancipation and places the story of Margaret in the context of the wider Atlantic world. Ideas about freedom are in many ways fruitful to investigate when analyzing the experiences of enslaved women. Bond women expressed their thoughts about freedom in private and public discourse throughout the era of slavery. Their involvement in conspiracies and acts of resistance such as running away is evidence of their willingness to fight for freedom no matter what the outcome. Margaret’s story stands as a microcosm of the lives of other fugitive women in pre-Revolutionary America. Indeed, enslaved women such as Margaret were a dynamic force when measured against the contingencies of Revolutionary America. They gave definitive significance to the concept of fugitivity despite their fragmented histories and the historical fracturing of their identities.

In 1781 Lima, a mulato libre named Pedro Nolasco Boller filed a civil suit on behalf of his enslaved daughter María Hipólita Lozano. In their statements, both father and daughter described Lozano’s life in the Salvatierra home as exceedingly brutal. She was exposed to regular physical and sexual abuse at the hands of both husband and wife, and it was this accretion of assaults that forced her to run away. When that attempt at freedom was foiled, Lozano moved quickly to find other ways out: with the help of her extended network (which included her parents, her husband, as well as her godfather) she secured a new owner, who seemed to offer at least a modicum of refuge and a safer place to have her child; and she later turned to the courts to facilitate this transition when Fernando José Salvatierra tried to stymie it. In analyzing this case, my chapter highlights how, even when juridical freedom lay out of their reach, enslaved women nonetheless deployed myriad and evolving strategies to remake their lives.