Writing Slavery's History PDF

Writing Slavery's History Author(s): Dylan Penningroth Source: OAH Magazine of History , Apr., 2009, Vol. 23, No. 2, Antebellum Slavery (Apr., 2009), pp. 13-20 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40505983 RE...

Writing Slavery's History Author(s): Dylan Penningroth Source: OAH Magazine of History , Apr., 2009, Vol. 23, No. 2, Antebellum Slavery (Apr., 2009), pp. 13-20 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40505983 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40505983?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Organization of American Historians and Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to OAH Magazine of History This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:06:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Dylan Penningroth Writing Slavery's History in the 2008 presidential campaign, the Washington Post By the 1980s, African Americanists were^iiscovering a "Black Atlantic" published a story entitled "A Family Tree Rooted in American counterpart, subtly but vastly influential despite its constituents' lack Soil: Michelle Obama Learns About Her Slave Ancestors, Her- of formal political power. To take just a few examples, this scholarship self and Her Country." As the candidate had done himself, most fa- has shown that the Haitian Revolution not only drew strength from po- mously in his March 18 "race speech," the Post presented Michelle litical ideas and struggles in France, it sent refugees and potent chal- Obama's ties to a coastal South Carolina slave plantation as a "quintes- lenges to the U.S. (4). Black sailors made themselves into a nexus of sentially American" story, one that served to burnish her husband's transoceanic communication, carrying news and revolutionary ideolo- own credentials as an American. For all the attention paid to Barack gies to the back roads of the post-Revolutionary South (5). In the 1880s, Obama's multiracial, trans-national Cuban exiles raised money from New family background, there was an- Orleans' light-skinned gens de couleur other set of stories at play during the for their revolutionary - and eman- election. What set Barack Obama's cipatory - war against Spain; later, image apart from that of his wife - some of those same New Orleanians, what many voters talked about dur- seeking to prove their worth as citi- ing his House, Senate, and presi- zens through military service, ended dential campaigns - was not his up in an American occupation force white mother. It was that Michelle that was deeply suspicious of Cuban Obama's heritage was rooted in ex-slaves' claims to citizenship (6). American slavery, and his was not. In some regards, the new trans- The revelations about and reactions national approach may complicate to the Obamas' enslaved heritage tap some of the moral certainties that into a long and complex history, one have implicitly anchored scholar- that generations of scholars have ship on antebellum slavery. To sug- mapped and interpreted. This essay gest that Cinque, the hero of the 1839 lays out the major themes and lines Amistad revolt, may have become of interpretation that historians have involved with slave trading upon used over the past sixty years to ex- his return to Africa is deeply unset- amine the history of slavery in the tling to U.S. historians; historians United States (1). of west and west- central Africa have Perhaps the first major theme in grappled with the problem of Brazil- discussions about slavery in the U.S. ian "returnees" who became slave is that slavery was more than a U.S. traders by rooting such moves in institution. Its impact and origins the longer history of slavery in Af- rippled far beyond the shores of this rica (7). These are ultimately moral country, and the story of slavery is questions that lead our scholarship more than a story about an institu- and teaching both inward, to the tion. In fact, two out of every three "The Slave Deck of the Bark Wildfire," Harper's Weekly, June 2, charged i860. Al- sphere of a single planta- migrants who crossed the Atlantic before 1820 came from Africa. This though the importation of slaves had been prohibited in the U.S. tion, and outward, to the region and since the 1808, the trade continued illegally until the outbreak of the Civil War. hemisphere. One of the things I (Im- startling number, the product of age courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-4167.) tell my students is that only 3 percent some forty years of scholarship on of all the slaves who left Africa ended the volume and composition of the Atlantic slave trade, suggests how interconnected the histories of Afri- up in the U.S., but that by i860, the U.S. had 4 million slaves - the ca and the Americas were (2). That interconnected reality has spurred biggest slave population in the New World. Students are usually sur- historians to rethink older histories that tended to treat "American prised that the first figure is so low, and the ensuing discussion helps slavery" as if it began in 1619, with the delivery of "twenty Negars" to put those U.S. -centric moral issues into a larger geographic context Jamestown, Virginia. (8). The overall picture is one of transformation, of change over time, Since the early 1960s, scholars of the colonial and revolutionary era and of complex transatlantic movements that flowed in multiple direc- had been reconstructing a complex interplay of people, political ideas, tions, not just from Africa to the U.S. legal structures, and culture between Britain and its colonies, an ef- fort that has come to be called "Atlantic world history." But the sheer Historicizing Slavery numbers highlighted what one scholar called a certain "myopia" in the Another important current in the past twenty years of scholar- "Atlantic World" vision, as well as opportunities to widen that vision (3). ship has been to historicize the institution. For all their considerable Ο AH Magazine of History · April 2009 13 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:06:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms achievements, the big books published during the 1970s, the ones history of U.S. slavery could not be contained inside the familiar boundar- that landed slavery in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, ies of the antebellum period or even of the U.S. itself. tended to paint a picture rather than tell a story. In these books, the Slavery as a System antebellum South functioned as a stand-in for slavery as a whole (9). In the 1830s, some Americans took to calling slavery "the peculiar Oddly enough, 1863 - the end of slavery - served as the major mark- institution," both because it seemed to them that slavery was disap- er of change over time in the history of slavery itself. Perhaps this pearing almost everywhere else in the Western Hemisphere and be- is understandable; after all, this was the part of slavery's history that cause American slavery was, in the words of Senator John C. Calhoun, touched the defining event in the nation's history, the Civil War, and "a positive good" for everyone concerned, including the slaves. Today, that had the strongest hold on the popular imagination (or at least historians are still thinking about slavery as an institution - a system - white people's imaginations), thanks to Margaret Mitchell's fictional and how it related to American politics, economics, and the lives of the plantation in Gone With the Wind (1939). Nowadays, historicizing slav- slaves. One longstanding debate concerns whether slavery made the ery is central. More than anyone, historian Ira Berlin put change over South different from the rest of the country, a holdout against the tide time on the agenda, reminding us that New World slavery started back of modern capitalism and market sensibilities that was sweeping the in the 1500s, and arguing persuasively that its biggest developments North in those years. Whereas northerners industrialized, it was said, happened in the 1700s. In my own survey course, I spend some time southerners stuck with agriculture. The South had few big cities; slave talking about Estevanico, a North Africa- labor was inefficient; and the masters born member of an ill-fated 1528 Spanish clung to a premodern ethos of paternal- expedition to what is now the Mexico-U.S. ism that valued honor more than profit for border region, who was still remembered its own sake. in 1930s Zufii festivals as the "Black Recent scholarship has called into Kachina" (10). Beginning with an influ- question the notion of southern regional ential 1980 article, Berlin pointed to key distinctiveness. The slave system was historical transitions in the institution of quite capable of adapting and absorbing slavery, each with profound implications a "strong dose of capitalism." To take just for slaves' lives: a shift from several more a few examples, many slaveowners made or less distinct "societies with slaves" to a field slaves work by an industrial clock "slave society" (11) that installed slaveown- with minutely-divided jobs; the South ac- ers in the seat of political power; a Revo- tually had plenty of railroads and other in- lutionary era that brought a halting end dustrial activity, largely staffed by slaves; to slavery in the North; and a "cotton revo- and the planter class's paternalist values lution" that entrenched slavery across the did not stop them from treating their continent. In this view, the classic, antebel- beloved "servants" as market commodi- lum era of North American slavery, from ties - indeed Walter Johnson argues that 1800 to i860, is merely the last of four slaveowners effectively "packaged and "generations" of slave experience (12). sold" their image of paternalist honor in Within that last era, the "cotton revolu- the slave market (13). Perhaps the ques- tion" drove its own important transforma- tion of distinctiveness is less important, tions. A growing demand for cotton's fiber in the end, than how slavery and slave launched a burgeoning internal slave trade trading shaped the nation as a whole. that seized close to a million black people As Adam Rothman shows, the many from their homes in Virginia and the Car- compromises written into the U.S. Con- olinas and forced them "down the river," Joseph Cinquez was the leader of a slave revolt aboard the stitution were just the most memorable to carve out thousands of new plantations Spanish ship Amistad en route to Cuba in June 1839. The manifestation of the many ways in which slaves seized control of the ship but were soon recaptured and slavery made "the Old South" possible. on lands freshly stolen from Native Ameri- charged with murder and piracy. This portrait was completed cans. Second, that new interest in cotton The rise of America's "slave country" out in 1839 while Cinquez (or "Cinque") awaited trial in New Ha- changed the way people worked - a crucial west underwrote the national economy's ven, Connecticut. John Quincy Adams represented the Afri- shift, since work was the main reason slav- cans, and thanks to his efforts, they were set free and allowed amazing economic performance. It also ery existed and the biggest reality in any to return to Africa. The original caption quoted Cinquez's so- put slaveholders in the driver's seat with- enslaved person's life. Third, it was an ag- ber and moving speech to his comrades on board the ship in their region while at the same time ricultural revolution that strained, tore, and after the mutiny. "Brothers, we have done that which we pur- weakening their grip on national power, ultimately remade the slave family. Fourth, posed, our hands are now clean for we have Striven to regain which helped set the stage for the Civil the precious heritage we received from our fathers.... I am War (14). the rise and spread of cotton helped change resolved it is better to die than to be a white man's slave." (Im- Moreover, as historians have taken a the master class's image of itself, from the age courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-12960.) old eighteenth-century vision of patriarchal- fresh look at the South's alleged opposite, ism to the paternalism we recognize as the they are finding that the North was much hallmark of the Old South. The seeds for such a rethinking had always more deeply involved with slavery than previously thought. Although been there. Some of the most familiar tropes in the history of slavery - the North never became a slave society, its economy relied heavily on the Dutch "man o' war" at Jamestown in 1619, for example - as well as enslaved workers, whose lives in the 1700s came to look much like Edmund S. Morgan's highly influential book on the origins of slavery in those of the plantation South. Prominent white leaders, important colonial Virginia, which appeared in the mid-1970s alongside those of Eu- businesses, and even famous colleges had ties to slavery. And when gene D. Genovese and Herbert G. Gutman, had long suggested that the northern states began passing emancipation laws in the wake of the revolution, they hedged them with so many delays and restrictions that 14 Ο AH Magazine of History · April 2009 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:06:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "The First cotton-gin," 1869. The cotton gin revolutionized the cleaning and separation of short staple cotton fiber and seeds. It also fueled an internal slave trade that moved close to a million blacks from the Upper South to the Deep South cotton plantations recently carved out of lands seized from Native Americans. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-1 03801.) some 27,000 residents of "free states" still lived in bondage as late as just by what happened here, by the master-slave relationship, but also 1810. As Leslie Harris has shown for New York City, northern whites largely by African concerns and African ideas of nationhood, religion, went to great lengths to muffle the impact of emancipation in their and politics (16). To take just one example, the famous slave rebel- section of the country by cordoning off "black people as a separate, lion at Stono, South Carolina, in 1739 was probably led by ex-soldiers dependent, and unequal group." Perhaps nothing symbolizes slavery's from the Kingdom of Kongo, who won a stunning series of skirmishes centrality to northern society - and how scholars are joining the pub- against better-armed white militias by deploying Kongolese military lic to recover that history - than the moment in 1991 when construc- tactics. Why were they in South Carolina in the first place? Not just tion crews stumbled on a long-forgotten "Negro Burial Ground" in because Englishmen wanted workers but because during the 1700s the heart of lower Manhattan (15). Scholarship on northern slavery there was a cataclysmic spiral of civil wars between rival powers in has thus come to emphasize some of the same themes as the litera- west-central Africa that sent a wave of people trained in the arts of war ture on southern slavery: the pervasiveness of white supremacy, the into the broad stream of Atlantic slaving (17). Whereas earlier works resilience of black community and culture and their importance for offered a generalized, somewhat timeless "Africa" as a baseline from resisting white oppression, and the variability of slavery over time which to trace cultural change in the Americas, these newer works and across space, even within the region. think historically about Africa and connect culture to politics, eco- nomics, and religion. Some of the most prominent of the new slave- Slavery in Cross-Cultural Context trade studies now publish their findings in digital form, and this has The outpouring of studies on the Atlantic slave trade starting in taken the field's collaborative tradition to new heights. It also opens the 1960s generated more than just aggregate numbers. It has made fascinating possibilities for teaching (18). it possible to do what U.S. slavery historians had long wished for: to But looking at the historical processes that sent people into the draw specific connections between the New World and the Old. Since slave trade means confronting the complexities of African societies, the early 1990s, we have learned that eighteenth-century slave-im- not just as "the Motherland" but as political, economic, and social sys- porting patterns were often ethnically specific. The process of cre- tems that were marked by conflict and inequality. We often forget that olization - how Africans became African Americans - was driven not most of the people who survived the Middle Passage were familiar with OAH Magazine of History · April 2009 15 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:06:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms slavery already. Indeed, the world we call "antebellum slavery" took differences of power and histories of violence (21). Such debates are shape from more than ioo years of interaction with Native American only slowly making their way into studies of antebellum U.S. slavery, and west and west-central African systems of slavery. Each of these but if and when they do, they may transform the field. broad populations had extensive and deep-rooted experiences with slavery and slaving (that is, with making slaves, as a byproduct of war, Telling the Stories of the Slaves judicial proceedings, or other mechanisms), experiences that predated Scholarship on slavery has grappled with central epistemological but were profoundly altered by European contact (19). Thinking about problems: how we know what we know about the past. The earliest these non- U.S. slave systems might complicate the way that U.S. histo- historians of slavery relied on sources generated by white people, es- rians have conceptualized agency in their analyses of slavery. Histori- pecially by slaveowning whites. Not surprisingly, they concluded that ans of Africa have come up with sophisticated ways of thinking about slavery was a benign institution, full of generous masters and happy slaving and slavery, grounding both in specific political and economic slaves. For a long time, serious scholars at the most prestigious uni- developments and changing conceptions of social ties, especially kin- versities assumed either that whatever the slaves had left behind in the ship. But in the 1960s, prominent Africanists debated whether there way of historical documentation was hopelessly biased or that there even had been slavery in Africa before Europeans brought the Atlantic were no documents to be found. In the 1970s, however, historians slave trade to those shores (20). And the theoretical models developed began to ask the obvious questions: why assume that black-authored since then - slavery as an institution of marginality, the slave as "anti- sources were more biased than things written by the men who owned kin" - have been criticized for downplaying the agency and suffering them? Such questions were part of a larger debate that swept across of the slaves. A similar debate may be emerging about slavery in the the profession during the 1960s and 1970s: which stories are told? Southwest borderlands, where scholars disagree about whether we can Who gets to tell them? It is worth remembering that, except for one distinguish "precontact" slavery from the new forms brought by Span- piece by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1910, neither of the profession's two flag- ish colonialism and where questions of human agency confront stark ship journals published an article by an African American scholar un- til 1979 (22). Moreover, the historians who assumed that only white- authored sources could be trusted - those whom Du Bois bitingly called the "gowned shape of wisdom" - were all white men (23). Since then, as a more diverse crowd has put on the academic gown, the field has embraced black-authored sources, such as fugitive slave memoirs, narratives collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and letters and newspapers of black abolitionists. Scholars have used them to rewrite the history of slavery from the perspective of both the masters and the slaves (24). As Thomas Holt put it, studies that began to appear in the 1970s and 1980s no longer relegated blacks "to non- speaking roles, the passive victims of white hostility or beneficiaries of white benevolence. They [became] actors with top billing, creating institutions, sustaining communal values, and passing on a legacy of struggle and creativity to their posterity" (25). The Problem of Agency This revolution in evidence has put the spotlight on a key ana- lytical problem: to what extent were enslaved people active agents in shaping their own lives? Historians developed the concept of slave agency as a direct challenge to those earlier schools of thought that had portrayed slaves as essentially passive. Earlier scholars had viewed slaves either as grateful recipients of their masters' benevolence or as victims of a "holocaust," utterly stripped of their humanity (26). Developments outside the academy played a key role. The civil rights movement of the 1960s pushed what was then commonly called "the Negro question" into political and popular consciousness, calling into question some of the nation's most cherished beliefs about itself and its history. Millions of Americans watched the TV miniseries Roots, a 1977 epic based on Alex Haley's bestselling book, which brought the abstractions and statistics of slaving and slavery into wrenching hu- man focus. It portrayed enslaved black people as courageous, family- oriented, and quintessentially American. Indeed, "Roots," which aired in the middle of these scholarly réévaluations, was subtitled "The Saga of an American Family." Because antebellum slavery seemed so relevant to a range of pres- ent-day concerns, scholarly debates in the 1970s and 1980s acquired an edge that was, at least for academia, unusually sharp. For exam- Bill (age 88) and Ellen Thomas (age 81), former slaves, were among the thou- ple, in 1965 a presidential commission blamed slavery for allegedly sands who had their narratives recorded by the Works Progress Administration creating a 100 -year-old "culture of poverty" and family "dysfunction" in the 1930s. They are photographed here outside their home in Hondo, Texas, among African Americans (27). Thirty years of historical research has 1937. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-1 25343.) demolished that notion, at least among responsible thinkers. We know 16 OAH Magazine of History · April 2009 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:06:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms that slavery did not stop black people from making strong families, a ingful way. The old "which came first - slavery or race?" question re- vibrant culture, or a religion (28). As with other themes in the history solves into an complex process where race, class, gender, and sexuality of slavery, what began as an effort to prove that blacks were much mutually constituted one another over time and functioned together like other Americans - just as family-oriented, just as capitalist, just (35). Some of the most prominent themes in the history of slavery look as Christian - ended up helping us reconsider the categories them- different now. Gender, for instance, inflected slave resistance: while selves. Brenda Stevenson and Ann Patton Malone have shown that men were more likely to run away than women, both sexes created a slave families were strong because they adapted, creating a variety "rival of geography," moving themselves, objects, and information "with- types, not because they fit the nuclear, two-parent model that someinofand around plantation space" (36). Throughout the antebellum pe- riod, gender defined what enslaved people did at work, as slaveowners the 1970s revisionists had looked for (29). Jon Sensbach, Sylvia Frey, Betty Wood, and Albert Raboteau have complicated our understand- sometimes imposed on the slaves their own understandings of what women and men ought to be and do (37). ing of "slave religion" by showing that there was no preordained path to Christianity, that African cosmologies shaped American ones, and Scholars disagree, however, on whether slaves resisted these gen- that converting slaves had such profound der inequalities within their own fami- political implications that Christianity lies and communities. They debate, as had to be domesticated before masters felt Claire Robertson has put it, whether it was safe enough for slavery (30). By the "the slave family was... an instrument late 1990s, slavery remained as relevant to of equality [or] of inequality" (38). There present-day concerns as it seemed in 1939 is increasing evidence of "distress and or 1977, but its lessons had changed in discord" within slave families and com- profound ways. munities, but whether it was rooted in The focus on slave agency put real peo- the violence that masters inflicted on ple at center stage. The days are long gone them or grew from largely internal dy- when a professional historian could write namics, such as the informal economy, as if only the master's voice and concerns is not yet clear (39). mattered. The agency frame is also "truer" The white supremacy that gave in the sense that it was slaves' actions that slavery its ideological anchor was itself launched rebellions, established families, based on notions of gender and "devi- passed down customs, created the "sorrow ant" sexuality - that black women sup- songs" and field hollers, and did the every- posedly didn't feel pain at childbirth, day work that sustained the South's econ- for example, or were somehow naturally omy. But the quest to "give the slaves back lewd (40). Such assumptions were about their agency" comes at a cost. Walter John- both gender and race. And they encour- son has argued that framing the history of aged particular kinds of violence against slavery around "agency" blocks off impor- slaves: not only whipping, but also rape. tant insights about "the internal politics of Slaveowners and traders literally and the slave community," by "smuggling... figuratively made themselves out of a liberal notion of selfhood, with its em- slaves. They built not only their fortunes phasis on independence and choice" (31). but also their self-image out of the slaves Others have wondered whether an empha- they owned or sold - an image of physi- sis on slave agency risks downplaying the cal, legal, and above all sexual mastery constraints of the system or even "white- over slaves. There was more going on washing" the horrors of slavery (32). Still than met the eye when white men poked "Slave Woman and Child," date unknown. The drawing shows others have critiqued the resistance model and probed naked slaves on the nation's a female slave on a Caribbean island holding her infant child. for narrowing our vision to exclude things auction blocks (41). The distress on her face is noticeable perhaps reflecting the that do not fit - such as inequality and immense human cost of slavery. (Image courtesy of Library of Thinking about gender also helps us conflict among slaves - and for making Congress, LGUSZ62-15385.) understand connections and compari- whites the basic reference point for nearly sons with Africa. Because the Atlantic every aspect of black history (33). slave trade took so many more men than women across the ocean, many New World slave communities were Gender and Slavery literally full of men during the 1700s, with profound implications for people's lives and for the demographics of their societies. The num- Like African American history itself, the study of enslaved women bers were skewed not just because South Carolina planters wanted started as a project of recovery and ended up transforming the field. Gender has become a core analytical category for studying slavery. men, but also due to African demand for enslaved women. African This was not always true. Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman demand, in turn, was conditioned on diverse and shifting cultural (1985) cogently pointed out that many of the conclusions then reign- conceptions of gender roles (42). Slavery and related forms of social ing in the field were based on an implicit assumption that "the slave" dependency in some parts of Africa became increasingly "feminized." was male. She had a tough time getting her manuscript published On both sides of the ocean, an enslaved woman was valuable to mas- (34). Since then, historians have increasingly argued that the origins, for both her productive and reproductive capacities: not only for ters development, and demise of American slavery have to be understood the physical work she could do - so much cotton planted and picked, so many pots washed - but also for the children she could bear, all in relation not just to race and class, but also gender. Importantly, they have emphasized the interconnectedness of these categories, rejecting of whom would, legally, belong to her master (43). In the Atlantic the notion that one could "trump" or "cause" the others in any mean- crossing, slave women outnumbered free women 4:1; for children the OAH Magazine of History · April 2009 17 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:06:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ratio was even higher (44). Ideas about gender likewise permeated Conclusion the legal system that underpinned colonial and antebellum slavery, Our understanding of antebellum slavery is different in many ways beginning with the rule that slaves inherited their status (and mas- now than it was sixty or even thirty years ago. As an avalanche of tight- ter) from their mothers, rather than the "normal" Anglo-American ly-focused works on particular topics poured out in the 1980s, some rule of patriliny (45). observers worried that there might never be another "big-picture" book like those that reshaped the field in the 1970s. But those works paved Slavery and the Law the way for new syntheses, such as Berlin's, even as they helped us Scholars are increasingly paying attention to the links between rethink what counts as the "big picture" in the first place. Our assump- slavery and law. As David Brion Davis, Paul Finkelman, A. Leon Hig- tions about what a valid source looks like have changed. So have our ginbotham, and others remind us, slavery profoundly shaped our na- assumptions about who "the slave" was. The subject's geographic and tion's founding charter, the Constitution. It did so not only in the infa- chronological boundaries have widened and become more complicated mous "three-fifths" clause but also in clauses on taxes, foreign trade, as we have discerned antebellum slavery's connections to other parts and "domestic insurrections" (46). The exigencies of dealing with of the world, come to grips with its long colonial history, and explored slavery and slaves continued to influence the development of Ameri- how it shaped what came after. Many of our insights were signaled long can law over the next eighty years. The result was hundreds of statutes ago but ignored because they came from black scholars. In 1935, for ex- and cases at every level - federal, state, and local. The law, in turn, ample, it was Du Bois who advised us to write our histories "as though helped define and nurture slavery. In short, whatever else slavery was, Negroes were ordinary human beings" (50). The fact that historians it was a legal institution. today go out of their way to cite Du Bois reminds us that the "we" of our Since England had no relevant legal tradition for slavery, slave law scholarly community has also changed and will probably continue to had to be created, defined, and maintained by an ever-changing hedge change. It is foolish to predict the future, especially for someone whose of statutes and cases. Judges in the North and South wrestled to recon- specialty is the past. But the quality and pace of scholarship on slavery cile the moral implications of their decisions with what they felt were in the United States show no signs of letting up. □ the dictates of legal precedent and their vision of a well-ordered so- ciety. Thomas Ruffin's opinion in State v. Mann (1829), for example, Endnotes laid out a harsh universal logic for slavery: "the power of the master 1. Shailagh Murray, "A Family Tree Rooted in American Soil: Michelle must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect." Yet Obama Learns About Her Slave Ancestors, Herself and Her Country," Washington Post, Oct. 2, 2008; Barack Obama, "A More Perfect there was no single, stable "law of slavery." For one thing, laws relat- Union," transcript available at. we have seen, neither England nor the U.S. Constitution provided a 2. For a recent overview 01 that long-term scholarly enterprise, see David comprehensive blueprint. In turn, the localism of slave law, as Laura Eltis, "The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Edwards, Ariela Gross, and others suggest, meant that slaves helped in Reassessment," William and Mary Quarterly 58 (fan. 2001): 17-46; for various (and usually indirect) ways to give shape to those laws. It seems important earlier contributions, see Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: strange to argue that southern courts might sometimes put slaves on Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, vj}o-i8$o (Madison: trial for their alleged crimes, much less pay attention in those trials to University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Paul Lovejoy, "The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis," Journal of African History 23 (Oct. 1982): procedural rules; or that slaves, who had no legal rights or voice, could 473-5OI- insert their words into legal proceedings (47). The fact that we are ask- 3. Kristin Mann, "Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and ing such questions underlines how the new legal history of slavery is of Atlantic History and Culture," Slavery and Abolition 22 ( April 2001): 13-14. changing the way we think not only about slavery, but also about "the 4. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo law" and how it worked. Revolution (1938; New York: Vintage, 1989); James Sidbury, Ploughshares Then, too, in their constant struggle with masters over the con- into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810 ditions of their lives, slaves slowly managed to carve out an array of (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). privileges: precious hours of rest on Sundays, a quarter-acre garden 5. W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Julius S. Scott, "The patch to grow vegetables and raise chickens and pigs on, even peri- Common Wind: Currents of Afro- American Communication in the Era of odic trips to buy things the master's fatback and cornmeal rations did the Haitian Revolution," Ph.D. diss., Duke, 1986. not provide. Although they were always precarious and never recog- 6. The story is brilliantly told in Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana nized as "rights," these customs existed at the ragged edges of the and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). law (48). And in the 1860s, they became a critical battleground in the And its two leading figures were Antonio Maceo, a free man of color, and new struggle to define what would come after slavery. When northern Máximo Gómez, a white man. officials arrived during the Civil War, they were surprised to discover 7. Howard Jones, "Cinque of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth," that freedpeople did not need lessons in property ownership any more Journal of American History 87 (Dec. 2000): 923-39; Paul Finkelman, "On Cinque and the Historians," Journal of American History 87 (Dec. 2000): than they needed lessons in making a living or in making healthy 940-46; Lisa A. Lindsay, "To Return to the Bosom of their Fatherland': families. As Julie Saville and Eric Foner point out, freedpeople fought Brazilian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Lagos," Slavery and Abolition against not only white southerners, but also the northerners' gospel 15 (April 1994): 28-29. of "free labor," which threatened to strip away all the hard-won gains 8. There is a related conversation to be had about comparative demography. of the "informal economy" along with the hope of landownership and Brazil, Haiti, and Jamaica were demographic catastrophes. Such a replace them with nothing more than a bare wage (49). There was conversation, however, must go beyond questions of whether or not nothing self-evident about the meaning of freedom. And the history masters were "harsh" and plant such questions in the context of work, of Reconstruction - with its titanic struggles over politics and citizen- crops, and disease. 9. These landmark books included Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The ship, access to land, education, and the dignities of everyday life - was, World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1972); John W. Blassingame, in a sense, a three-way battle over meaning. What had the ending of The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: slavery changed - or would it change - about America? 18 O AH Magazine of History · April 2009 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:06:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Oxford University Press, 1979); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in 2002); Dylan C. Penningroth, "The Claims of Slaves and Ex- Slaves to Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976). Family and Property: A Transatlantic Comparison," American Historical 10. As early as 1940, at least one black historian was aware of the Estevanico Review 112 (Oct. 2007): 1039-69. story and how poorly it fit with prevailing assumptions about American 20. See Walter Rodney, "African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression history and what constituted "valid" sources of evidence. "Estevanico made on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave-Trade," one great mistake - he left no Relation." Rayford W. Logan, "Estevanico, Journal of African History 7 (Nov. 1966): 431-443; J. D. Fage, "Slavery and Negro Discoverer of the Southwest: A Critical Reexamination," Phylon 1 the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History," Journal of African (4th Qtr., 1940): 305-14, 314. History 10 (July 1969): 393-404. 11. A formulation borrowed from Moses I. Finley, "Slavery," in Encyclopedia 21. For two landmark critiques of the major theoretical models for slavery in of the Social Sciences (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968), 307-13. Africa - including the influence of antebellum American slavery studies - 12. Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on see Jonathon Glassman, "The Bondsman's New Clothes: The Contradictory British Mainland North America," American Historical Review 85 (Feb. Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast," Journal of African 1980): 44-78; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African- History 32 (January 1991): 277-88; and Frederick Cooper, "Review Article: American Slaves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). The Problem of Slavery in African Studies," Journal of African History 13. The "strong dose" quotation comes from Eugene Genovese, the leading 20 (1979): 103-25. Compare those critiques to Brooks, Captives ßf Cousins, proponent of the southern distinctiveness idea, and is quoted in Mark M. which draws on one of those Africanist models; and to Ned Blackhawk's Smith, Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American review of Captives and Cousins, in American Indian Culture and Research South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 92, a book that Journal 28 (Winter 2004): 85-90. succinctly summarizes these debates about regionalism. Walter Johnson, 22. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard Profession, 1915-1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). The University Press, 1999), in. article was W. E. B. Du Bois, "Reconstruction and Its Benefits," American 14. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Historical Review 15 (July 1910): 781-99. Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 23. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; New 15. Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 81-85, 104; Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow York: The Free Press, 1998), 728. of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-186} (Chicago: 24.Muchofthismaterialisnowavailableonline.Forfugitiveslavenarratives,see. For WPA narratives, see and for a selection of photographs and audio recordings of Northern Free Blacks, ijoo-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, those narratives, see. 1997). Uncovering these ties has prompted public acknowledgments and 25. Thomas C. Holt, "African- American History," in The New American spirited debate at Brown and Yale universities, both of which have their History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 312. own histories with slavery. But whereas Brown's can be found in financial 26. Compare Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional ties with the Atlantic slave trade, Yale's takes more material form: it is and Intellectual Life (1959; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). there that an undergraduate college is named after the proslavery South 27. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, The Negro Family: The Carolinian, John C. Calhoun, and where a stained-glass window depicts Case for National Action, Washington, DC: Office of Policy Planning and slaves picking cotton. Interest in these debates is not confined to academic Research, U.S. Dept. of Labor, March 1965. Indeed, Roots , which aired in circles. In 2005-2006, the New-York Historical Society drew record- the middle of these scholarly réévaluations, was subtitled "The Saga of an breaking crowds to an exhibit on slavery that had been spearheaded by American Family." James Horton, Berlin, and Harris. The still-active website can be found at 28. To name just a few works, see Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in. Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976); Lawrence 16. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Albert University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery Raboteau, Slave Religion: The 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 29. Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure 17. John K. Thornton, "African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion," American in Nineteenth- Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Historical Review 96 (Oct. 1991): 1101-13. For a similar line of analysis Press, 1992); Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and linking slave revolts to political developments in Africa, see João José Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, 30. Jon F. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World trans. Arthur Brakel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, in North Carolina, 1765-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 1993); David Richardson, "Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Press, 1998); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African Atlantic Slave Trade," William and Mary Quarterly 58 (Jan. 2001): 69-92. American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 And on transfers of agricultural technology and knowledge, see Judith A. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Just how African Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas these religious and cultural forms were is still a matter of debate. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). For discussion of how one 31. Walter Johnson, "On Agency," Journal of Social History 37 (Fall 2003): 113-24. can bring these insights into the classroom, see James H. Sweet, "Teaching 32. Wilma A. Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and the Modern African Diaspora: A Case Study of the Atlantic Slave Trade," Emancipation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 4; William Radical History Review 77 (Spring 2000): 106-22. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New 18. David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Susan Eva O'Donovan, Becoming eds. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), Cambridge University Press, 1999); and the multisponsor version online 3-6; Peter A. Codanis, "The Captivity of a Generation," William and Mary at. Other useful digital Quarterly 61 (July 2004): 544-55. collections include Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's important databases on 33. Penningroth, "The Claims of Slaves and Ex- Slaves to Family and Property"; slaves and freed slaves living in the Louisiana region from 1718 to 1820, Holt, "African American History," 329-30; O'Donovan, Becoming Free at. See also The Atlantic Slave Trade in the Cotton South, 45, 292. The school of legal scholarship known as and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record, a collection of images critical race theory lodged a similar critique of scholarship on twentieth- assembled by Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr., accessible at century law. See Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins:. Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color," 19. James F. Brooks, Captives e[ Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, ed. the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Kimberlé Crenshaw et al (New York: New Press, 1995), 357-83. O AH Magazine of History »April 2009 19 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:06:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 34· Deborah Gray White recounts this sobering and instructive story in 1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 209-48. Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (Chapel Hill: 48. Although sometimes these "informal economies" and "customs" even University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 85-100. found their way into judges' opinions. See Rice v. Cade, et al, 1836 La, 35. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Lexis 198. Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of 49. Rebecca J. Scott, "Reclaiming Gregoria's Mule: The Meanings of Freedom North Carolina, 1996); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American in the Arimao and Caunao Valleys, Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1880-1899," Past and Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," in Feminism e[ History Present 170 (2001): 181-216; Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 183-208. Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (New York: Cambridge 36. Stephanie M. H. Camp, "The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women University Press, 1994); Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861," Journal of Southern and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1983). History 68 (Aug. 2002): 535. 50. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, 10th ed. (New 37. Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South York: Atheneum, 1985), 1. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 83-118. 38. Compare Claire Robertson, "Africa into the Americas? Slavery and Women, Dylan Penningroth is associate professor of history at Northwestern Uni- the Family, and the Gender Division of Labor," in More than Chattel: Black versity and an affiliate in the department of African American Studies, Women and Slavery in the Americas, David Barry Gasper and Darlene Clark and holds a joint appointment as a research professor at the American Bar Hine, eds. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 3-42. Foundation. His research focuses on African American history and U.S. 39. Nell Irvin Painter, "Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded social and legal history. He is the author of The Claims of Kinfolk: Afri- Cost Accounting," in U.S. History as Women's History, eds., Linda Kerber can American Property and Community in the Nineteenth- Century et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1995), 125-46; Brenda South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), which won Stevenson, "Distress and Discord in Virginia Slave Families, 1830-1860," the Ο AH Avery O. Craven Award. He also won the 200 g O AH EB SCO - in In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, host America: History and Life award for his article "The Claims of Slaves 1830-1900, ed. Carol Bleser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 103- and Ex- Slaves to Family and Property: A Transatlantic Comparison," 24; Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property American Historical Review 112 (Oct. 2007): 1039-69. He is currently working and Community in the Nineteenth- Century South (Chapel Hill: University of on two projects: a study of the cultural, social, and legal legacy of slavery in North Carolina Press, 2003). colonial Ghana and a study of African Americans' engagement with local 40. Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation courts in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States. South (New York: W. W. Norton Publishing, 1985), 27-61; Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 12-49. 41. Edward E. Baptist, "'Cuffy,' 'Fancy Maids,' and One-Eyed men': Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States," American Historical Review 106 (Dec. 2001), 1619-50; and Johnson, Soul by Soul, esp. 115. 42. G. Ugo Nwokeji, "African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic," William and Mary Quarterly 58 (Jan. 2001): 47-68; Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: EMM ISHaMIffi^^Slä^ Cambridge University Press, 1983), 62-65. 43. Gareth Austin, Labour, Land, and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807-1956 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2005), 119, 175-79; Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold, trans. Alide Dasnois (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 260-61, 276; Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, "Women's Importance in African Slave Systems," in Robertson and Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 3-25; White, Ar'n't I a Woman? 49-59, 66-67; Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 179. The crops and much else were different between Africa and the U.S., but the link between production and reproduction was similar. 44. Mann, "Shifting Paradigms," 14. The OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program connects 45. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, esp. 132-35. In you with more than 300 outstanding U.S. historians, matrilineal Akan (West African) law, the pattern was mirrored: slaves took perfect for public programs, campus convocations, their family affiliation (if not also their status) from their fathers, whereas free people belonged to their mothers' families. lecture series, teacher workshops, History Month 46. Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of observances, and conference keynotes. Jefferson (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 3-36; A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 6. The lectureship website at 47. Ariela Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum contains a complete list of participating speakers as Southern Courtroom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Laura F. well as information on scheduled lectures. Visit today! Edwards, The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009); A. E. Keir Nash, "Fairness and Formalism in the Trials of Blacks in the State Supreme Courts of the Old South," Virginia Law Review 56 (1970): 64-100; Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619- 20 OAH Magazine of History · April 2009 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:06:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms