Plotting for Freedom: An Enslaved Couple’s Intimate Letters in the Age of Atlantic Slavery

Revealing an enslaved couple's intimate correspondence across three continents, this book redefines how freedom was imagined, planned and pursued-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, two of which address the conditions of her enslavement and her desire for freedom, are the earliest known epistles by an enslaved