A magisterial, groundbreaking new study of the lives of enslaved Americans on the cusp of the Civil War that places their agency—and their hard-won political knowledge—rightly at the center of the fight for freedom

The enduring image of American slavery has been of workers trapped on plantations, shuttling from squalid quarters to the fields and back again—or else 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 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 slaves’ 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 drives and the exercising of control—one that enslaved workers eventually succeeded in putting to their advantage, bringing slavery to its knees.