At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C.

The capital city of a nation founded on the premise of liberty, nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., was both an entrepôt of urban slavery and the target of abolitionist ferment. The growing slave trade and the enactment of Black codes placed the city’s Black women within the rigid confines of a social hierarchy ordered by race and gender. At the Threshold of Liberty reveals how these women — enslaved, fugitive, and free — imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions...