In Forging Freedom: Black Women & the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers amasses a wealth of deeply researched and rigorously interrogated material, bringing to contemporary scholarship an important analysis of black women's individual visions of freedom in a slaveholding city. Perusing sources such as court records, family papers, legislative documents, probate data, parish registers, census materials, tax lists, city directories, organizational records, police ledgers, death certificates, legal case files, and manumission books (7), Myers explores the strategies and avenues that legally free, “virtually free,” and enslaved black women engaged in order to bring themselves and their offspring towards a more secure and fuller freedom.

The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, “Glimpsing Freedom,” Myers gives a guided tour through the vibrant, thriving, and racially diverse landscape of Charleston's seaport city. She frames a portrait of Charleston as a “City of Contrasts”: an array of elite whites, free black artisans, poverty-stricken blacks, working-class whites, and enslaved labourers living in close contact in racially integrated neighborhoods, yet all residing within a strong legal and social system committed to upholding white and male authority (25). Charleston's shifting demographic, notably with the influx of free black refugees fleeing the insurrection in Haiti, are shown to effectuate a resurgence of white anxiety towards blacks. With the additional Denmark Vesey conspiracy, Charleston saw a succession of more rigid laws enacted to restrict the movement of any person of colour.

Part II, “Building Freedom,” takes a closer look into the ways free, virtually free, and enslaved black women visualized the meaning of freedom, and the methods they adopted to resist the new restrictive Act of 1820. Designed to control the number of free blacks living in the city, the Act of 1820 effectively outlawed owner-initiated manumission while blocking free blacks from migrating into the city (61). If a free black Charlestonian left the city, therefore, they were barred from returning. A major turn in Charleston's seemingly lax legislative attitude to free blacks (the city profited from “head taxes” that were paid by free blacks), for the free and enslaved black women that remained in Charleston, the avenues towards freedom had to be continuously renegotiated. “Freedom” in antebellum Charleston, as Myers repeatedly demonstrates, was as much a legal status as it was a performance of respectability. Understanding that their social mobility was limited by the raced and gendered construction of antebellum southern society, black women increasingly sought to strengthen their tenuous freedoms through compromises with the very forces that restricted their movement. For example, enlisting southern values of landownership and property, we find that free and “virtually free” black women sought ownership of real estate; filed affidavits; initiated lawsuits; created trust agreements with white men; and even bought, owned, and sold enslaved labourers to create a better social and financial standing for themselves and their children. Enslaved women navigated their circumstances oftentimes forging a semi-familial structure out of a coercive union with their white male owner. Trading sexual intimacy to safeguard some form of elite white male “protection” was undoubtedly risky for both free and enslaved black women. Yet, for many, the offspring that came from these unions would go on to enjoy the benefits of an education and some financial bequests from their fathers. Negotiating their freedom from the tenuous link between white men and their (if fully acknowledged) offspring, enslaved black women were able to elevate themselves to a quasi-free status, essentially finding “a way out of no way” (39).

Part III, “Experiencing Freedom,” provides a detailed portrait of two case studies: the stories of Cecille Cogdell and Sarah Sanders, and Margaret Bettingall and her daughters. In this final section, Myers corroborates her argument that black women's access to their visions of freedom was contingent upon factors of time, place, and social space. Thus we find two unique cases in which chance as much as strategy played a key role in determining the virtue of individual black women. Meticulously handled, the story of Cecille Cognell and Sarah Sanders gives much-needed attention to incidences in which white women sought autonomy independent of white men, as black women sought autonomy through white male assistance. Clearly this dynamic attests to the broader raced and gendered construction of southern society. The Cognell/Sanders story also illuminates the intricacy of a black female–white male relationship through the potential lens of another factor that is not sufficiently discussed in other parts of the book: love and/or genuine affection. The Bettingall story, on the other hand, portrays an affluent free black woman of feme sole status entering a legal battle against elite whites to protect her property, and thus secure a better future for her descendants.