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When radical abolitionists imagined alternatives to the US nation-state in the anxious decade preceding the Civil War, their rhetoric was sometimes com-plemented by visions of an alternate territory, one not yet tainted by national or racial interest. North American abolitionists who did not consistently support flight to Canada or" repatriation" to Africa projected regions of inter-racial justice that began within the United States but sometimes exceeded its national borders and in fact resisted incorporation by any extant nation. The geographies of resistance proposed by John Brown, in his charter for an abolitionist state, and by Martin Delany in the serial novel Blake; or the Huts of America, appear to contemporary eyes as" transnational" spaces mapped by the requirements of asymmetric war: impassable swamps, rugged mountains, caves-all marginal lands-are the defining features of what we might call …