Moving Toward Freedom

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