Kate Chilton’s chapter explores the unique experience of women in the District of Columbia and argues that Black women drew on women’s strong position in the urban economy to choose work that allowed them to help support their families and demand respect and reciprocal obligations from their husbands. The strategies practiced by African American women during and after emancipation reveal the continuities between the prewar and post–Civil War periods that made urban freedom in the District of Columbia different and distinct. Despite the dislocations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction and the attempts of agents of the Union Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau to impose Republican ideals on Black women, emancipation ultimately served to reinforce prewar patterns of gendered behavior in former slave households. While Black men experienced great demand for their labor during the war, the resumption of a peacetime employment market meant that the majority of Black women would have to work in freedom.

This chapter tells the stories of three young people, living in the northeastern city of Recife, on the cusp of freedom during Brazil’s last decade of slavery. Their stories unveil the malleability of Brazilian bondage in its last gasp but also place in sharp relief the limitations and contradictions of both urban freedom and liberal modernity in a city structured by slavery. In highlighting the continuity and intersectionality inherent in urban struggles for freedom, the chapter seeks to open windows on relational dynamics that shape cities across the globe.

This chapter tells the stories of three young people, living in the northeastern city of Recife, on the cusp of freedom during Brazil’s last decade of slavery. Their stories unveil the malleability of Brazilian bondage in its last gasp but also place in sharp relief the limitations and contradictions of both urban freedom and liberal modernity in a city structured by slavery. In highlighting the continuity and intersectionality inherent in urban struggles for freedom, the chapter seeks to open windows on relational dynamics that shape cities across the globe.

The second chapter delves into slave flight to spaces of informal freedom in the urban South, the most immediate and easily reached destinations for runaways trapped in the second slavery. It considers why enslaved people chose to go to the trouble of fleeing bondage yet remain within the slaveholding states; the networks that helped them do so; the strategies they employed to hide their identities, sustain themselves, and remain at large indefinitely; and the risk they ran of recapture. The actions of these runaways went far beyond mere truancy, as is often suggested in the literature. Many fugitives to urban areas clearly attempted to live their lives there indefinitely. The chapter devotes considerable attention to the importance of family in informing freedom seekers' decisions to remain within the South, even if it meant foregoing more formal freedom in other parts of the continent. It also examines the importance of visibility in runaways' strategies of escape, exploring how they "passed for free" by looking and acting free, procuring false freedom papers and other documentation, and integrating themselves into urban free black communities so as to avoid detection.