She fled on horseback in the thick of war. Her six-year-old son rode with her. The white tailor at her side would pass, when anyone asked, as her husband.
Her name was Sarah. She was one of tens of thousands of enslaved people who self-emancipated during the American Revolution, and one of the many women earlier histories barely noticed.
In this Revisited episode, Karen Cook-Bell, author of Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and the Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America, recovers their stories.
We learn how Lord Dunmore's 1775 proclamation reshaped the landscape of resistance, why motherhood drove women to flee rather than keeping them in place, and what creative, subversive strategies they used to slip out of bondage and into freedom.

This is the companion conversation to Ep. 440's exploration of Jefferson's cut grievance. If Brooke Newman gave us the view from the throne, Karen Cook-Bell gives us the view from the ground. And it changes what the proclamations look like.

Karen's Website | Book |
Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/322
RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES
🎧 Episode 137: The Washingtons' Runaway Slave, Ona Judge
🎧 Episode 157: The Revolution's African American Soldiers
🎧 Episode 162: Dunmore's New World
🎧 Episode 312: The Domestic Slave Trade
🎧 Episode 424: Dunmore's Proclamation and the American Revolution in Virginia
🎧 Episode 440: Jefferson's Cut Grievances and the British Monarchy's Role in Slavery
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