(Top) Illustration depicting an enslaved couple fleeing from slave patrollers, from Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself, 1849, courtesy of Documenting the American South. (Bottom) Illustration of William and Ellen Craft, published by Porter & Coates, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1872, courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

For enslaved people to remove themselves from slavery was incredibly hard, especially for women. White society expected to see some enslaved men away from their homes and plantations, but less so enslaved women. Moreover, slaveholders imposed the use of slave passes, a system of written passes given to enslaved people travelling away from plantations and farms to justify their whereabouts. Slave patrols, groups of white male patrollers with dogs, roamed the swampy Lowcountry terrain hunting for runaway enslaved people or those without a pass. For enslaved people on the Lowcountry’s sea islands, escape also required a boat to move from island to island or from their island to the mainland. For those already on the mainland, freedom was still hundreds of miles away.

The challenges of permanent escape did not deter everyone, though. A small percentage of exceptional individuals managed in antebellum times the incredibly daunting escape to Northern states or Canada, especially after escape south to Spanish Florida became more challenging after the US acquisition of this area in 1819. Sometimes with the help of support networks forged through the informal "underground railroad," assisted by "controllers" such as Harriet Tubman, enslaved people escaped either by land or by sea from major ports such as Charleston. The North Carolinian woman, Harriet Jacobs famously and unusually spent several years hiding in a loft-space, away from her children, before managing to head North and become involved in the abolitionist movement. In a different, albeit still unusual way, a married couple named Ellen and William Craft fled their enslavement in Georgia before having any children precisely because they did not want them raised enslaved. Ellen disguised herself as a white man, while her husband pretended to be her personal slave. They escaped via a steamer from Savannah to Charleston, then Wilmington. Thereafter they travelled by train and ferry until eventually arriving in Boston in 1849.

"Effects of the Fugitive-Slave-Law," drawing depicting four African American enslaved or freedmen ambushed by armed white men, Theodor Kaufmann, 1850, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

On the whole, however, men dominated when it came to escaping North, at least in part because of the differences in gender roles for enslaved women and men. Most runaways were between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five, prime child-bearing age for women who were consequently more tied to their homes and plantations. Teenage girls and women also left their homes less regularly than teenage boys and men did because of the work they performed and the care they provided for children, and so they were less familiar with the terrain outside of their immediate area. Newspaper advertisements placed by enslavers reflect that most runaways and escaped enslaved people were men and that men dominated in longer-term escape, with historians suggesting that women comprised just 19 percent of runaways between 1838 and 1860 across the South as a whole.