Journal article
Finding Asylum: Slavery, Freedom, and Legacy in Northern Pennsylvania
The Journal of African American history, Vol.109(4), pp.592-618
09/01/2024
DOI: 10.1086/732121
Abstract
This article is a microhistory of Black chattel slavery on the margins of an expanding US empire. Relying on censuses, newspapers, and county records, it investigates freedom’s limits in the “free” state of Pennsylvania through a close examination of the birth, life, death, and memory of Asylum Peters—a man born thirteen years into the age of gradual abolition who nevertheless found himself weighed down by slavery’s grasp. It also meditates on what the institution of slavery meant to Pennsylvanians at the turn of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by paying particular attention to descriptions of Peters’s legal status. No matter the evidence to the contrary, White Pennsylvanians during and after his life identified him as enslaved rather than free. As a result, although Asylum Peters was living as a free man by his twenties, the headstone marking his grave identifies him as a “colored slave.”
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Finding Asylum: Slavery, Freedom, and Legacy in Northern Pennsylvania
- Creators
- Cory James Young
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- The Journal of African American history, Vol.109(4), pp.592-618
- Publisher
- The University of Chicago Press
- DOI
- 10.1086/732121
- ISSN
- 1548-1867
- eISSN
- 2153-5086
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 09/01/2024
- Academic Unit
- History
- Record Identifier
- 9984775015002771
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