Plotting for Freedom

An Enslaved Couple’s Intimate Letters in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

Revealing an enslaved couple’s intimate correspondence across the Atlantic world, this haunting book traces how they imagined, planned and pursued freedom—for themselves and their children.

Revealing an enslaved couple’s intimate correspondence across the Atlantic world, this haunting book traces how they imagined, planned and pursued freedom—for themselves and their children.

In the late sixteenth century, well before any whisperings of abolition, husband and wife Antón Segarra and Felipa de la Cruz plotted with each other from opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean to raise enough funds to purchase their family’s freedom. Their quest for liberty spanned West Africa, Spain and Mexico—from afar, they penned letters to share their news, their hopes and their strategies.

Drawing on over a decade of archival research, award-winning historian Chloe L. Ireton pieces together the couple’s world, including the identity of Felipa’s enslavers; the location of the palace where she lived in captivity; and the fate of her beloved husband. Felipa’s surviving letters, which address the conditions of her enslavement and her desire for freedom, are the earliest known epistles by an enslaved Black woman in the Atlantic world.

This powerful story explores how a family gathered and exchanged knowledge to fight for their freedom in the first decades of Atlantic slavery. Spanning oceans and mountains, cities and ports, palaces and ships, it paints a deeply moving picture of the human consequences of European imperialism—and of the courage and resilience of two individuals yearning to be free.

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