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The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame DeCuir’s Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era by Jack M. Beermann

who supported independence dramatically increased both the opportunity to flee and the ability to secure freedom for oneself and one’s loved ones permanently. These options were open to enslaved boys and men, as well as to women and girls, but the males could also join the British forces to fight against their former owners. But Bell, following Nash’s estimate that one-third of all runaways throughout the Revolution were female, makes a convincing argument regarding the meaning of fugitivity—that women were fully involved and that it was a fundamental component of the abolitionist movement. That said, Bell occasionally makes claims for the agency of enslaved women that cannot be verified. Although North American slaves, despite the majority being illiterate, were well aware of the progress of the Haitian Revolution, we do not know the extent to which, as Bell asserts, female fugitives of the Revolutionary era were “inspired by natural rights ideology” or “believed in the independence of the individual” (104, 161). They simply may have craved liberty for themselves and, in many instances, for their loved ones. Bell’s methodology follows standard practices of social history, drawing most of her material from a published compendium of runawayslave advertisements, which she interprets largely as transparent. She has not dug deeply into the archives to follow an individual fugitive’s story, as Dunbar did with Ona Judge, nor has she echoed Marisa J. Fuentes’ exploration of the meanings of silences in the archives of enslaved women in Dispossessed Lives (Philadelphia, 2016), or Sharon Block’s construction and analysis of a vast digital archive of runaway ads from which broader patterns can be discerned in Colonial Complexions (Philadelphia, 2018). But despite these caveats, Bell succeeds in challenging long-standing beliefs about enslaved women’s motivations and experiences. In so doing, she restores a measure of the agency that both their owners and later scholars have denied them. Gracefully written and convincingly argued, Running from Bondage deserves the attention of anyone interested in gender, slavery, or the American Revolution.