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• 1 2021-10-28T17:55:10+00:00 Absconding-Easy to Run but Hard to Leave 25 plain 2022-02-06T21:57:43+00:00

                      

  "Freedom without beloved kinsman was a meaningless deliverance."

  The effects of absconding were immediate. They at once challenged the slaveholders' control and the standards of the slave society, and they cost the slaveholders not only in terms of labor power and psychological unease but also resulted in the missing, worry, fear, and joy of the slave community and the enslaved people's family and loved ones. Moreover, "Slave runaways by their actions compounded the burden of bondage felt by other slaves while heightening a sense of the possibility of escape."
  
  a characteristic of Freedom is accountability. We see enslaved people put on freedom through accountability. Parents generally felt accountable to their children and felt responsible for the care; this response ability was an outgrowth of the. The enslaved person who contemplated escaping was forced to consider the most responsible action or gauge the priority of freedom. Meaning they had to weigh what they were accountable for and measure the freedoms they believed required their attention.

  Note: laws that forbade enslaved people from writing and writing, in some cases hunting, owning property, and the like, were not simply preventing them from knowledge or accumulating money but rather possession [either as owner or stewart] requires accountability. A person forced to be unaccountable is a slave or prisoner. To possess [anything] is to make someone accountable; to make someone accountable is to admit a degree of freedom and expect acts of responsibility. To obstruct a person response-ability is to prevents a person from being accountable to one's possession [tangible or intangible], and this is a characteristic of  slavery or incarceration.

  The power in escaping is realized in the form of laws, punishments, national reactions [fugitive slave law], and resources used or employed to prevent and capture freedom seekers. 

  Despite the laws, patrols, sheriffs, bounty hunters were created to support slaveholders' prevention of absconding. As a result, hundreds of thousands of attempts were made to flee slavery temporarily or permanently during the historical period of slavery.

  In running, we gain a glimpse into how enslaved people negotiated reality by weighing the repercussions or negative consequences with what they valued most and/or what they desired to avoid. 

  The following is a short list of reasons for freedom-seeking:

  1. Fear of being sold in the south or sold at a great distance away from family, home, and all that they were familiar with. 
  
  2. Hired out at a great distance or lacking opportunities to visit family.
  
  3. Escape punishment or cruelty by slaveholding households. One historian noted, "The threat of punishment was cited most often as the reason blacks ran away."

  4. In the most basic sense, the desire to be free is accessible in various ways. Freedom often meant, free to choose or select one's course in life or reap true rewards and punishments of one's decision or indecision.

  5. Discontent in the form of "frustration born of self-worth and knowledge of the inherent limits of slavery."

  6. Desire to see family or provide for their family.

  7. General dislike of labor and a disdain for slavery and willing to act on strong dislike by running away.

  8. Annoyance with the slaveholders.

  9. One had lost their welcome in the slave community or escaped intra-community punishment.