Rethinking Our Outlines/ Redrawing Our Maps: Representing African Agency in the Antebellum South 1783-1829 The lenses through which our common perceptions of African/Black agency in the antebellum period are viewed, synthetic textbooks and maps, rarely reveal the tremendous number of liberating acts that characterized the movements of Black people in the South from 1783 to 1829. During the American Revolution, 80,000 to 100,000 such enslaved Africans threw off their yokes and escaped their bondage. Subsequently, large numbers embarked on British ships as part of the Loyalist exodus from the United States, while others fled to the deep South, to Native lands, to the North, or held their ground right where they were, attempting, as maroons, to establish themselves and survive as free persons. While recent historical scholarship has identified many of the primary sources and themes that characterize such massive levels of proactivity, few have tried to present them as a synthetic whole. This applies to maps used to illustrate the African American history of those regions and times as well. Illustrating these movements defines the scope of this scholarly work entitled Rethinking Our Outlines/ Redrawing Our Maps: Representing African Agency in the Antebellum South 1783-1829. This work also critically looks at several contemporary maps of this period published in authoritative atlases or textbooks and subsequently creates three original maps to represent the proactive movements and relationships of Africans during this period. / African American Studies