Few escaped slaves had ever seen a map. In Life and Times (1881), Frederick Douglass noted that slaveholders “sought to impress their slaves with a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory, and of their own limitless power … Our notions of geography of the country were very vague and indistinct.”2 Refusing the false binary of slavery or death, the fugitive slave produced a crisis in the dominant geo-juridical order of things, becoming an emblem of resistance to the carceral networks-physical, spatial, and legal-that maintained black chattel slavery in early America.3 The slave-on-the-run posed a paradox, a problem of logic, and a series of philosophical questions: How can property escape? How can an object be responsible? How can mute matter be prosecuted and bear punishment?4 Stabilizing the fugitive identity of the runaway required a series of legal ctions and “durable abstractions” that mapped the racial body and resolved the problem of black agency with strokes of the pen.5 By 1850, the legal geographies of slavery had expanded the territory of captivity beyond state lines to inscribe servitude within the body itself. In the eyes of the law, it no longer mattered how far a slave might travel, Dred Scott or anyone else. His body was already written, spoken for, signed.6