Viola Muller says her book is an exploration of what space of refuge arose in the southern cities and how fugitive slaves navigated those spaces. She says freedom, with all its definitions and meanings, cannot fully capture the struggles of antebellum southerners of African descent.

Müller makes a lot of parallels between the undocumented in the US, and runaway slaves in urban environments. She mentions it throughout and brings it up heavily in the epilogue. She says she brings a new way of thinking about the conditions of fugitive slave workers and residents and allows us to concentrate on fugitive slaves legal and economic precariousness.

I'm always a huge geek for books that focus on Urban slavery. I enjoyed the latter chapter of these books, but I found (with my limited knowledge) that Müller didn't really add much to what's been done already. Particularly her first few chapters seem to be rehashing well known facts. Perhaps this needed more work to go from dissertation to book(?).

I enjoyed some of the arguments and methods Müller raises in the novel. She investigates how fugitive slaves navigated cities to breach the geographies of domination to find spaces of refuge. It's the phrases 'geographies of domination' and 'spaces of refuge' that intrigue me the most.

Müller claims historians need to be mindful of using runaway advertisements as quantitative sources. She says slaves in the paper were less likely to be found which is why they were publicly advertised in the first place. I do not know how well this idea translates over to other regions.

Overall I liked elements of argument.