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Not Even Past

IHS Podcast – Colonial Peru’s Fractional Freedoms meet Morgan’s thesis: American Freedom, American Slavery

IHS podcasts are a new podcast series initiated by the Institute for Historical Studies’ Director, Dr Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra. They are paired with weekly workshops and are designed to foster discussion between graduate students and distinguished scholars in the field. Along with graduate students and guests, each episode features Dr Cañizares-Esguerra and Ashley Garcia, a PhD Candidate in History at UT Austin. This podcast is recorded in connection with a roundtable, Singing in the Coat of the Rebels: Pardo Republics Gender Politics and the Making of Mexican Citizenship, presented by Gary Leo Dunbar, University of Texas at Austin, on 27 September. Details can be found at https://bit.ly/3lFTOx8.

Introduction

Fragments of Freedom confronts us with the most basic question of US historiography: American Slavery made American Freedom possible. Dr. McKinley shifts the ground to concepts of freedom in slavery that were more typical in societies other than colonial and national Anglo America. Using ecclesiastical archives in Lima, Peru, in the 17th century, Dr. McKinley shows that enslaved peoples negotiated the limits of domestic sexual violence and the limits of enslavers’ control over individual families. American exceptionalism notwithstanding, from Iraq to India to Peru, the religious and lay state regulated the power of the enslaver. And in the case of Peru, the Church could ritually humiliate enslavers via moral subpoenas through the pulpit. Enslavers reluctantly offered testimony to counter charges by enslaved peoples against their will because the church made their names public in sermons and on broadsides posted on the walls of parishes. The result of this muscular involvement by clerical courts in the lives of both enslavers and enslaved peoples is that domestic slavery was characterized by a full gamut of fractional freedoms. Slavery did not move teleologically toward cathartic forms of “liberation” via manumission or enslaved self-purchase. ‘Freedom” was another option within ever shifting structures of domestic subordination and negotiation ~ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Guests

Gary Dunbar is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history. His teaching and research interests include Atlantic and Pacific World histories. His dissertation examines the history of slavery, abolitionism, and citizenship in the Americas with a specific focus on Pacific Mexico. Gary holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Oregon and completed his master’s work at Central Michigan University (CMU) in the U.S. and Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) in Mexico.

Dr. Michelle McKinley is the Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law at the University of Oregon Law School and director for the Center for the Study of Women in Society.  She teaches in the areas of Public International Law and feminist studies. McKinley has extensively published work on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery. Her monograph, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. She has received fellowships for her research from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Newberry Library. Prior to joining the academy, Professor McKinley was the former Managing Director of Cultural Survival, an advocacy and research organization dedicated to indigenous peoples. She is also the founder, and former director, of the Amazonian Peoples’ Resources Initiative, a community based reproductive rights organization in Peru, where she worked for nine years as an advocate for global health and human rights.

Hosts

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Institute for Historical Studies.

Ashley Garcia is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research includes 19th century political history, American communitarianism, and American political thought. Her dissertation, “An American Socialism: The Associationist Movement and Nineteenth Century Political Culture,” explores America’s most popular utopian socialist program: the Associationist movement of the 19th-century. Ashley has also completed a Portfolio in Museum Studies as her secondary PhD field.

This is Democracy – Black Resistance to Slavery in Early America and its Legacies

This is Democracy – Black Resistance to Slavery in Early America and its Legacies: An Interview with Dr. Daina Ramey Berry

Guest: Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and Chairperson of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a Fellow of the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and the George W. Littlefield Professorship in American History, and the former Associate Dean of The Graduate School. Professor Berry is a scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery as well as Black women’s history in the United States. Professor Berry’s books include: Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia; The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation; and A Black Women’s History of the United States, with co-author Kali Nicole Gross.

Jeremi and Zachary turn to expert Dr. Daina Ramey Berry to discuss the history and legacy of slave revolts and maroon societies in the United States, and lack of education on these subjects today.

Zachary sets the scene with his poem, “One You Have Not Heard”.

About This is Democracy

The future of democracy is uncertain, but we are committed to its urgent renewal today. This podcast will draw on historical knowledge to inspire a contemporary democratic renaissance. The past offers hope for the present and the future, if only we can escape the negativity of our current moment — and each show will offer a serious way to do that! This podcast will bring together thoughtful voices from different generations to help make sense of current challenges and propose positive steps forward. Our goal is to advance democratic change, one show at a time. Dr. Jeremi Suri, a renowned scholar of democracy, will host the podcast and moderate discussions.

15 Minute History – Slavery in the West

Guest: Kevin Waite, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Durham University

Host: Alina Scott, PhD Student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin

In the antebellum years, freedom and unfreedom often overlapped, even in states that were presumed “free states.” According to a new book by Kevin Waite, this was in part because the reach of the Slave South extended beyond the traditional South into newly admitted free and slave states. States like California found their legislatures filled with former Southerners who hoped to see California and others align with their politics. “They pursued that vision through diplomacy, migration, and armed conquest. By the late 1850s, slaveholders and their allies had transformed the southwestern quarter of the nation – California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Utah – into a political client of the plantation states.” But it didn’t end there. The “continental South” as Waite calls it, had visions of extending into Central and South America as well as the Pacific. In West of Slavery, Waite “brings to light what contemporaries recognized but historians have described only in part: The struggle over slavery played out on a transcontinental stage.”  

Episode 129: Slavery in the West
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An Inconvenient Past: Slavery at the Texas Governor’s Mansion

Banner image for the post An Inconvenient Past: Slavery at the Texas Governor's Mansion

By Kyle Walker

Completed in 1856, the Texas Governor’s Mansion is the oldest executive residence west of the Mississippi River and the fourth oldest continuously occupied executive residence in the US.  Between 1856 and 1865, eight men would serve as the Governor of Texas and call this residence home. While the histories of these men and their families are well documented, little is known about the lives of the other occupants of the Mansion, the enslaved men and women who belonged to these Texas Governors.

My research at Texas State University has focused on the history of enslaved African Americans at the Texas Governor’s Mansion.  The topic of slavery at the Texas Governor’s Mansion first came to my attention in the spring of 2019. From 2013-2019 I worked for the Texas State Preservation Board in various roles but primarily as a gallery assistant at the four historic sites that the agency preserves and operates. While concluding a tour at the Mansion in April 2019, a visitor asked me where the slaves of former governors lived while at the Mansion. I was dumbfounded, not only because I did not know the answer to their question, but because I had never stopped to ask that question myself.

Left: John P. G. McKenzie, Drawing of the Governor’s Mansion, 1856. Source: Austin History Center Right: The Texas Governor’s mansion in 1866. Source: Austin History Center

Reflecting on the visitor’s question raised so many more questions for me. Had the subject of slavery at the Mansion ever been explored before? Why had the history of slavery at the Governor’s Mansion not been explored in greater detail? Why did the Preservation Board decide not to include this aspect of the mansion’s history in their tour material or at least inform their guides about how to interpret this difficult history?  Had other cultural institutions such as the Texas Historical Commission, Friends of the Governor’s Mansion, Austin History Center or George Washington Carver Center in Austin explored this subject through publications or exhibits?

The history of slavery at the Texas Governor’s Mansion is a little known and rarely discussed topic at the state’s executive residence today. The tours of the historic home that are offered by the Preservation Board or the Friends of the Governor’s Mansion (a private non-profit organization which manages the home’s collection of historic furniture and artwork), make no mention to the presence of enslaved individuals who worked at the residence between 1854-1865. Brochures and guidebooks available to visitors make no reference to the presence of slaves at the residence although a few scholarly publications, including Kenneth Hafertepe’s Abner Cook: Master Builder on the Texas Frontier (1992) and James Haley’s biography of Sam Houston (2002), do discuss slaves at the site before the end of the Civil War. No interpretive signs stand outside the home, nor are there any exhibits on display in any state, city or county museum in Austin that discuss the role of slavery in the history of the state’s executive residence.

Texas Historic Landmark medallion and National Historic Landmark plaques on the Texas Governor's Mansion
Texas Historic Landmark medallion and National Historic Landmark plaques on the Texas Governor’s Mansion. Author’s photograph.

Despite the scholarly work that has been produced about the history of the Texas Governor’s Mansion, the careers of these governors and the lives of their spouses, there exists no substantial analysis of slaves at the Governor’s Mansion. They are seldom talked about or mentioned in publications.  When they are, their status was often referred to as that of “servants.” Although more recent publications do at least acknowledge the presence of slaves, little attention has been given to the extent of slavery at the site.

My research into the history of the Mansion has confirmed that up to thirty-eight slaves may have resided at the Texas Governor’s Mansion between 1856 and 1865.  I have also shown that slave labor was employed in the construction of the state’s executive residence. The slaves of Texas Governor’s primarily resided in the servant’s quarters above the home’s detached kitchen, located off the back (west) of the home. Some Governors with larger numbers of slaves housed some of them in the stable and carriage house behind the Mansion.  A few Governors even allowed some of their slaves to reside in the unused rooms of the house and the slaves of Governor Pendleton Murrah (1863-1865) were left to care for the residence when the Governor abandoned the Mansion after the surrender of the Confederacy. 

This photo taken in 1933 shows the rear of the Governor's Mansion which is where the kitchen and slave quarters above the kitchen were located.
This photo taken in 1933 shows the rear of the Governor’s Mansion where the original detached kitchen and slave quarters above the kitchen were located.  The original detached kitchen structure was demolished in 1912 when the Mansion was expanded to include a modern kitchen,  conservatory, basement, wash room and more second floor living space.  For original photos and plans of this space, see pages 103-105 of Kenneth Hafertepe’s Abner Cook: Master Builder on the Texas Frontier (1992). Source: Library of Congress

In my research I also set out to determine if other cultural institutions in Austin had investigated the subject of slavery at the Governor’s Mansion.  As I expected, the subject was a topic that had been largely neglected by the Preservation Board, the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, the Austin History Center, the George Washington Carver Center and even the Texas Historical Commission.  This was even though exhibits and historic plaques had been produced focusing on the slave narrative of Jeff Hamilton, a slave of Sam Houston.

What explains this lack of attention? As a historic site, the Texas Governor’s Mansion is an administrative conundrum. It is administered by four state agencies; the Texas State Preservation Board, which preserves, maintains and operates the visitor services of the Mansion; the Texas Historical Commission, which oversees the historic integrity of the home; the Texas Department of Public Safety which provides security for the First Family; and the Office of the Governor. The Governor of Texas is a sitting member on the State Preservation Board, along with the Lieutenant Governor and Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, who all have a direct say in the preservation and interpretation of the state’s executive residence.  This political connection to the state’s top executives has likely caused the Preservation Board to tread lightly when interpreting difficult history such as slavery and the Confederacy at the four historic sites they operate in Austin, for fear of political backlash not just from state politicians but also their constituents.

View from the second floor gallery looking north east to the Texas State Capitol
View from the second floor gallery looking north east to the Texas State Capitol, Author’s photograph.

It is clear, however, that slavery and enslaved individuals were a significant feature of the Texas Governor’s Mansion throughout its first decade. Despite the controversial nature of the subject and the political sensitivity of the Governor’s Mansion, the continued lack of interpretation or acknowledgement of the subject is, I believe, a disservice not only to the memory of the enslaved persons that once called the Mansion home, but to the greater heritage of African Americans in Austin and the wider state of Texas.

With thanks to Dr Kenneth Hafertepe for his valuable comments.

Kyle Walker is a recent graduate of the Public History program at Texas State University.  He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology and Geography.  As an undergraduate, he participated in archaeological field schools in central Texas and Belize as well as interning with the Texas Historical Commission’s Archaeology Division.  As an intern Kyle assisted in cataloging artifacts from the seventeenth century shipwreck of the LaBelle and conducted research for Presidio La Bahia in Goliad Texas.  Before enrolling at Texas State, he worked for five years with the Texas State Preservation Board in Austin at historic sites such as the Texas State Capitol, the Capitol Visitors Center in the Old Land Office, the Texas Governor’s Mansion and the Texas State Cemetery.  As a graduate student his studies have coincided with his previous work experience, focusing on local and community history, architectural history, historic preservation, museum management, exhibit design, digital history and material culture.  In the coming year he hopes to publish his graduate research in an academic journal and is currently assisting the Longhorn Alumni Band in research for a photographic history of the Longhorn Band to be published in 2022. At present, Kyle works as an Administrative Assistant for the Department of History at UT.

The Long History and Legacy of Slavery in the Americas and Beyond

Over the past decade, Not Even Past has published a wide range of resources that focus on the history of slavery. These are intended for use in the classroom and are collected here as a resource for teachers.

Articles

White Women and the Economy of Slavery

White slave-owning women were not the only ones to insist on their profound economic investments in the institution of slavery; the enslaved people they owned and white members of southern communities did too. The testimony of formerly enslaved people and other narrative sources, legal documents, and financial records dramatically reshape current understandings of white women’s economic relationships to slavery, situating those relationships firmly at the center of nineteenth-century America’s most significant and devastating system of economic exchange. These sources reveal that white parents raised their daughters with particular expectations related to owning slaves and taught them how to be effective slave masters. These lessons played a formative role in how white women conceptualized their personal relationships to human property, imagined the powers that they would possess once they became slave owners in their own right, and shaped their techniques of slave control.

STEPHANIE E. JONES-ROGERS

Slavery in America: Back in the Headlines

People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don’t. They think the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, but they didn’t. They talk about 400 hundred years of slavery, but it wasn’t. They claim all Southerners owned slaves, but they didn’t. Some argue it was a long time ago, but it wasn’t.

DAINA RAMEY BERRY

#Blacklivesmatter Till They Don’t: Slavery’s Lasting Legacy

As scholars of slavery writing books on the historical value(s) of black life, we are concerned with the long history of how black people are commodified by the state. Although we are saddened by the unprosecuted deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and countless others, we are not surprised. We live a nation that has yet to grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlife. In 1669, the Virginia colony enacted legislation that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear of prosecution. This act, concerning “… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems all too familiar today.

DAINA RAMEY BERRY AND JENNIFER L. MORGAN

Andrew Cox Marshall: Between Slavery and Freedom in Savannah

Andrew Cox Marshall was Savannah’s most important African American in the pre-Civil War period. Born into slavery in the mid-eighteenth century, Marshall acquired his freedom and went on to become a successful businessman and an influential religious leader with far-reaching ties throughout Savannah’s diverse free and enslaved African American community; he was also well known among Savannah’s white elite. The lives of those who gained freedom before slavery ended were restricted by laws that limited their economic and social opportunities. Yet Marshall managed to navigate such constraints and achieve some level of success and autonomy.

TANIA SAMMONS

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah

Savannah is a prime location for understanding the centrality of slavery and race to the national and world economy, and the importance of the city to southern landscapes and the southern economy. Because of the great economic and social dominance of rural plantation-based slavery in the Americas, historians have long assumed that that slave labor was not suited to cities and therefore slavery in American cities was insignificant. But a re-examination of slavery in cities throughout the Atlantic World has demonstrated the importance of urban areas to the slave economy and the adaptability of slave labor and slave ownership to metropolitan regions, especially port cities such as Savannah.. Urban slavery was part of, not exceptional to, the slave-based economies of North America and the Atlantic world

DAINA RAMEY BERRY

Visualizing Emancipation(s): Mapping The End of Slavery in America

How did slavery end in America? It’s a deceptively simple question—but it holds a very complicated answer. “Visualizing Emancipation” is a new digital project from the University of Richmond that maps the messy, regionally dispersed and violent process of ending slavery in America.

HENRY WIENCEK

Daina Ramey Berry on Slavery, Work and Sexuality

American slavery was a dynamic institution. And though slavery was mainly a system of labor, those who toiled in the fields and catered to the most private needs and desires of slaveholders were more than just workers.  Although utterly obvious, it must be reiterated that the enslaved were indeed people.  In fact, the nature and diversity of the institution of slavery ensured that bondpeople would experience enslavement quite differently. Aiming to highlight the variety of conditions that affected a bondperson’s life as a laborer, Swing the Sickle examines the workaday and interior lives of the enslaved in two plantation communities in Georgia—Glynn County in the lowcountry and Wilkes in the piedmont east of Athens.

DAINA RAMEY BERRY

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

The Price for their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved men, women, and children in the American domestic slave trade, from before they were born until after their death, in both public and private market transactions and appraisals. How was a slave’s price determined? How did planters and traders establish values for enslaved people with specific ages, specific skills, or specific health conditions? Studies of the domestic slave trade rarely discuss the economic meaning and social significance of the market values and appraisals assigned to enslaved people. When they do discuss slave prices, the focus has mostly been on prime male slaves. This study examines slave prices of women, men, and children during their entire “lifecycle,” including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and postmortem.

DAINA RAMEY BERRY

The Illegal Slave Trade in Texas, 1808-1865

At the turn of last century Eugene C. Barker, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, conducted research on the illegal slave trade in Texas. Barker sought to unveil the obscure history of slave smuggling in Texas and he set out to collect information pertaining to that subject. Interested in the nineteenth century, particularly in the period from 1808 to the 1865 when the international slave trade was officially abolished and slavery ended in the United States, Barker wrote numerous letters to elderly residents of Texas asking for their recollections on anything related to the illegal slave trade in Texas during that period.In March 1902, 80-year-old Sion R. Bostick, from San Saba County, replied to Barker with a letter containing a wealth of information.

MARIA ESTHER HAMMACK

Let the Enslaved Testify

In addition to written records of slave narratives, we can now listen to the former bondpeople talk about their experience with the peculiar institution.  The Library of Congress has a collection entitled “Voices from the Days of Slavery” which contains nearly seven hours of audio recordings of formally enslaved men and women.  These audio files are the original recordings of WPA interviews  that were used to compose the written slave narratives.  As my students  often say, it’s even more chilling to hear former slaves recount their experiences of slavery than to read their autobiographies in an edited collection. The audio files are revealing in that one can hear the questions posed and answered in their original form. Historians can compare the questions asked, place the responses in context, and learn about omitted material.  This alone allows the researcher a different lens to explore a somewhat controversial historical source.

DAINA RAMEY BERRY

BOOK REVIEWS

By any measure, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845) is an extraordinary document—as autobiography, anti-slavery polemic, literature, and primary text illuminating mid-nineteenth-century American life. Douglass was born a slave on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1818, the son of a white father and an enslaved woman. One of the most moving parts of his story revolves around his learning to read and write. Literacy opened a whole new world to him, but also embittered him, as he contemplated the injustice of slavery. In 1838 he forged his name on a pass, disguised himself as a sailor, and escaped to Massachusetts. By the 1840s he was travelling throughout the North and Great Britain, electrifying audiences with his eloquence and his compelling story of escape from bondage.I teach the Narrative in my Signature course (a seminar offered to first-year students) called “Classics in American Autobiography.” The students appreciate this text on many different levels, and eagerly engage in the discussion of a central question: How does one make a case for freedom in a time and place where many people assume slavery is a “natural” condition for a certain group of people?

REVIEW BY JACQUELINE JONES

These two historians transform the way we view the impact of the slave trade. By emphasizing the role of the African populace as well as the Portuguese in the flourishing slave trade, Mariana Candido and Roquinaldo Ferriera redistribute the economic and cultural burden of the Atlantic. Candido and Ferriera demonstrate the cultural exchange between the Portuguese and African, altering the way historians conceptualizes creolization and the formation of slave societies.

REVIEW BY SAMANTHA RUBINO

“In January of 1856, a prolonged period of frigid temperatures in northern Kentucky—the coldest in sixty years—froze the Ohio River creating a bridge to freedom for enslaved people daring enough to cross it. On Sunday, January 27, 1856, Margaret Garner and seven members of her family made the arduous eighteen-mile journey that separated their lives of enslavement in Kentucky from freedom in Ohio. After only a few hours on free soil, the Garners found themselves facing imminent capture. When the chaos subsided and the Garners were subdued, Mary, a toddler, lay dead and the Garners’ three surviving children all bore wounds of various degrees and intensity. Margaret had attacked her own children. Examining the events that shaped Garner’s decision and the subsequent legal battle that propelled her, if only briefly, into the national spotlight, Nikki M. Taylor offers a nuanced study of Margaret Garner’s life and the impact of the trauma of enslavement on the enslaved.”

REVIEW OF DRIVEN TOWARDS MADNESS BY NIKKI M. TAYLOR

“Historians have been puzzled by the rapid development of slavery in English America in the last three quarters of the seventeenth century: Scott Irish indentured laborers, Algonquian prisoners of war, and captured Africans were pressed into slavery. In a society that flaunted “English” freedoms at home, the introduction of slavery in America allegedly represented a radical departure. Moreover by the early eighteenth century the Caribbean islands and many mainland colonies witnessed the emergence of mature plantation economies and the growth of racial slavery. Michael Guasco has written a book to challenge this narrative of two seemingly different moments of transition.”

REVIEW OF SLAVES AND ENGLISHMEN (2014)

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

FILM REVIEWS

“We all know that films on historical subjects distort events for the sake of entertainment. The goal of this review is to examine this latest rendition of slavery in popular culture from a historian’s point of view to see how those distortions are used and what affect they may have on popular ideas about slavery. I am not a historian “having a hissy fit” to quote Tarantino, but I believe that using one dimensional, anachronistic characters and the preposterous plot line of an ex-slave bounty hunter, while satisfying Hollywood entertainment formulas, detract from any understanding of the actual, lived experience of bondage in US history.”

DAINA RAMEY BERRY ON DJANGO UNCHAINED

ONLINE RESOURCES REFERENCED ON NEP

PODCASTS

15 Minute History Episode 88: The Search for Family Lost in Slavery with Dr. Heather Andrea Williams

15 Minute History Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum United States with Dr. Daina Ramey Berry and Dr. Leslie Harris

15 Minute History Episode 120: Slave-Owning Women in Antebellum U.S. with Dr. Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

O’Sullivan, Timothy H, photographer. Five generations on Smith’s Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina. Beaufort South Carolina, 1862. [, Printed Later] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/98504449/.

Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery

by Clifton Sorrell III

On the eve of the Civil War, an advertisement appeared in the Texas Almanac announcing the sale of five enslaved people at the Stringer’s Hotel.

“Negroes For Sale––I will offer for sale, in the city of Austin, before the Stringer’s Hotel, on the 1st day of January next, to the highest bidder, in Confederate or State Treasury Notes, the following lot of likely Negroes, to wit. Three Negro Girls and two Boys, ages ranging from 15 to 16 years. The title to said Negroes is indisputable” —The Texas Almanac, Austin December 27th, 1862

Image of the cover of The Texas Almanac for 1862
via Portal for Texas History

This hotel was one of the many businesses in Austin using enslaved labor, a commonplace practice that extended to every part of Texas. However, urban slavery in Austin differed substantially from slavery on the vast plantations that stretched across Texas’ rural geography. Unlike rural planters, urban slaveholders were largely merchants, businessmen, tradesmen, artisans, and professionals. The urban status of these slaveholders in Austin meant that enslaved people performed a wide variety of tasks, making them highly mobile and multi-occupational. Austin property holders, proprietors, and city planners built enslaved labor not only into the city’s economy, but into its very physical space to meet local needs. This examination of the Stringer’s Hotel provides a brief window for looking into Austin’s history of slavery and perhaps the history of enslaved people in the urban context.

Close-up image of the 1885 Sanborn Maps of Austin showing the map's title and the eastern part of Austin
Sanborn Maps of Austin, 1885 (via Library of Congress)
Close-up image of the 1885 Sanborn Maps of Austin showing the blocks around the Avenue Hotel
Sanborn Maps of Austin, 1885 (via Library of Congress)

On September 3, 1850, Swante Magnus Swenson purchased a city lot in Austin. In 1854, he built the Swenson Building on Congress Avenue where the current Piedmont Hotel stands today. Inside the building, on the first floor, were a drug store, a general goods store, a hardware store, and a grocery store; a hotel, (named the Avenue Hotel but locally known as the Stringer’s Hotel) was located on the upper two levels of the building.  The Travis County Deeds Records show that sometime later, Swenson leased the hotel to a John Stringer, giving the hotel its name “the Stringer’s Hotel.” An 1885 Austin city Sanborn map of the Swenson Building shows that Swenson had a room built for “servants” in the hotel portion of the building. There is no documentation detailing whether enslaved people stayed in that room since the Sanborn map is dated twenty years after the Civil War. However, an 1889 Sanborn map shows that Swenson had the Stringer’s Hotel remodeled to remove the room for “servants,” which suggests that enslaved people originally potentially stayed there, given that “servant” and “dependency” were variant terms used for “slave” in urban spaces. The National Register of Historic Places Inventory notes that businesses on Congress Avenue did not have the financial capacity to maintain, let alone remodel, their properties right after the Civil War. This explains the twenty-year delay to remove the said “servants” room, no longer utilized by enslaved people in the 1880s. Further evidence also shows that Swenson himself had strong ties to slavery in Texas.

Black and white image of a headshot of S.M. Svensson
S.M. Svensson (via Wikipedia)

S. M Swenson was born in Sweden and came to New York as an immigrant in 1836 at the age of twenty. A few years after his arrival, Swenson worked as a mercantile trader. Through his trade dealings in the south, he befriended a slaveholder by the name of George Long, who then hired Swenson to work at his newly relocated plantation in Texas. A year later, when Long died due to poor health, Swenson married his widow, who then too died of tuberculosis three years later. By 1843, Swenson became a full-scale slaveholder in Texas through inheriting his now-deceased wife’s plantation. In 1848, he enlarged his property holdings by purchasing the adjoining plantation and expanding his cotton crop. In 1850, along with purchasing 182 acres a few miles outside of Austin, he bought the lot on Congress Avenue and constructed the Swenson Building and inside, the Stringer’s Hotel.

There are no records that detail the lives of enslaved people at the Stringer’s Hotel but other sources show that slaveholders expected slaves to fill a variety of roles in running their establishments on Congress Avenue. In his book, a Journey Through Texas, Frederick Olmstead describes his encounter with an enslaved woman who was responsible for tending to the hotel’s patrons along with upkeep and building maintenance. These slaves were also responsible for running errands and transporting goods. Many slaves also lived and traveled to and from homes and communities that formed on the outskirts of town. Traveling to and from their labor obligations or social engagements in their free time illuminates the various networks of movement created by the enslaved. Hence, given their relative independence, expectations, and responsibilities, it is not impossible to imagine enslaved people taking on leading roles in running the Stringer’s Hotel and other establishments in Austin.

Black and white photograph of the Avenue Hotel
Avenue Hotel. Photograph, University of North Texas Libraries (via The Portal to Texas History)

The analysis of the Stringer’s Hotel through Sanborn maps and other qualitative sources illuminates the roles and occupations of enslaved people in Austin’s urban space. Unlike the enslaved people confined to the private domain of plantation estates, urban slaves worked in spaces with considerable mobility, meeting the needs of their owners and to fulfill their own social lives. Perhaps mapping the movement of enslaved people in this way, could allow for further interpretations of possible realities and lived experiences of enslaved people that archival texts obscure and make difficult to see.

Sources

  • “Negroes for Sale.” The Texas Almanac. December 27, 1862, 1 edition, sec. 34.
  • “Texas General Land Office Land Grant Database”, Digital Images, Texas General Land Office, Entry for Swenson, S M, Austin City Lots, Travis Co., TX, Patent no 429, vol.1
  • “Austin 1885 Sheet 5,” Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, Map Collection, Perry-Castañeda Library, Austin, Texas.
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law. A Journey through Texas: or, A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989: 50;
  • Austin City Sanborn Map, 1885;
  • Bullock Hotel. Photograph, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, accessed December 3, 2019

Additional Readings

  • “Bullock House.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association, June 12, 2010.
  • Gail Swenson. “S. M. Swenson and the Development of the SMS Ranches,” M.A. thesis, University of Texas, (1960).
  • Gage, Larry Jay. “The City of Austin on the Eve of the Civil War.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 63, no. 3 (1960).
  • Kenneth Hafertepe. “Urban Sites of Slavery in Antebellum Texas” in Slavery in the City, Edited by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, University of Virginia Press. (2017)
  • Jason A. Gillmer. Slavery and Freedom in Texas: Stories from the Courtroom, 1821-1871. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, (2017)


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Documenting Slavery in East Texas: Transcripts from Monte Verdi
Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past
Love in the Time of Texas Slavery

Documenting Slavery in East Texas: Transcripts from Monte Verdi

By Daniel J. Thomas III

Originally from Macon, Alabama, Julien Sidney Devereux, Sr (1805-1856) moved to east Texas where he eventually purchased land in Rusk County. This plat would eventually become Monte Verdi, one of the highest producing cotton plantations in the state, where over fifty Africans were enslaved. The Devereux family papers and the maps of the Texas General Land Office, including Julian Devereux’s will (1852) and a plat map of Rusk County (1846-1861), yield rich information about the institution of slavery.

Photograph of the first page of Julien Sidney Devereux, Sr.'s will

On May 7, 1852, Julien Devereux signed his final will and testament. Thirteen of the fourteen sections of his twelve-page will dealt explicitly with the institution of slavery. Sections two through six of his will present a rigid, hierarchical system to control the distribution of enslaved persons among his family members. Devereux named the slaves who, along with the furniture and cattle, were to be willed to his wife and daughter in sections two and three, respectively. Should his daughter not marry or bear children by the age of twenty-one, he noted that all willed enslaved people were to be turned over to his wife. In section four, he bequeathed a nineteen-year-old boy, a twelve-year-old girl, and “their increase” to one of his sons. The increase allotted to his son appears to allude to the arranged breeding of enslaved people and the enslavement of their unborn children. Section five established the equal distribution of Devereux’s remaining fifty-six enslaved persons and all of their future children among his remaining sons. Section six included three stipulations controlling his widow’s actions to ensure that his enslaved persons and property remained within his direct lineage. He declared that his wife must remain on the plantation and under the supervision of his chosen executors, that she could not sell any property or slaves during her lifetime, and that she would relinquish all willed property and enslaved people should she remarry.

The peculiar affection for the enslaved also emerges in the will. In section eight, Devereux appeared to reward an enslaved man and woman for their “long and faithful service” by allowing them to nurse his children. In addition, Devereux declared that the enslaved should never be sold to pay debts because they are “family slaves.” Instead, he reserved over eleven hundred acres of land to be sold if necessary. Finally, Devereux declared that family slaves become fixed by his will thus demonstrating the way enslavement became predetermined and hereditary.

Gomert, A. & Lungkwitz, Herman. Rusk County, map, 1871
Gomert, A. & Lungkwitz, Herman. Rusk County, map, 1871; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth89173/: accessed October 12, 2019), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas General Land Office.

The accompanying county map incorporated in this analysis of Devereux’s will challenges some common assumption about institutional slavery. To shore up the distribution of public property, the Republic of Texas Congress formed the General Land Office (GLO) in 1836. This map of Rusk County was produced by the GLO and represents plats of property purchased between 1846 and 1861. The density of the map shows that few plats appear to be large; the majority of holdings appear to be quite small and crowded near others. Second, Devereux’s plantation had one of the largest enslaved populations in the state of Texas, at fifty-six. In Rusk County, plantations were not isolated, rural locales with hundreds of enslaved people, as if often assumed. This map shows an densely-settled region where the number of enslaved people would have been similar o that of the Devereux plantation at Monte Verdi.

Collectively, these documents illuminate numerous aspects about the institution of slavery in Texas on the eve of the Civil War.

Julien Sidney Devereux Family Papers, 1766-1908, 1931, 1941, Box 2N215, Will, 1852-1854 Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin. A Guide to the Julien Sidney Devereux Family Paper, 1766-1941; Volume/Box: 2n215

I  Julien Devereux . . . State of Texas, being of sound mind, do make this my last will and testament, hereby revoking all others.

  1. It is my will that after my decease my remains be interested in a suitable and christian like manner, in the burying ground adjacent to the Baptist Church in the neighborhood of the town of _______; a tomb of stone or brick to be erected over my remains with a  suitable headpiece of stone on which to be engraved the date of my birth and death.
  2. I give and bequeath unto my beloved wife Sarah Ann Devereux the following named slaves to ____: (1) Bill, a boy about twenty years old; 2) Gabby, a girl about sixteen years old, and her male child Franklin about two months old; 3) ____a woman about twenty four years old and her three sons, ____: Peter (the eldest), and George and Isaac (twins) about four years old, also her twin daughter, Kizzy and Emelisa about two years old, and such household and kitchen furniture as I may own at my death. I also give my said wife our ____ of whatever stock of cattle and hogs and ___ one fourth part of whatever stock of mules and horses I may own at my death and the one fourth part of such farming utensils as I may own at my death.
  3. I give and bequeath to my natural daughter Antoinette Devereux the following slaves, to wit: 1) Gino a man about twenty years of age; 2) Rhoda women about eighteen years of age and her two children to wit: Cynthia two years old and the female infant she now have about eight months old named ________________. I also give to Antoinette one horse, saddle and _______ one bed _____ and furniture and two cows and calves I also give said Antoinette her maintenance and education so hereafter provided. And should the said Antoinette be leaving no direct lineal heir of her body begotten then it is my will that said slaves and their increase shall revert to my child or children by my said wife Sarah Ann to be equally divided among them or their lineal heirs. And should said slaves die or any one or more of them before the said Antoinette shall arrive at the age of twenty one years, or before she may marry then it is my will that she should receive and have other slaves to be taken out of those hereafter bequeathed to my children by my wife  of equal value with such as may so die, to be set apart to her by my executors.
  4. I will and bequeath to my natural son Sidney Devereux, two slaves, to wit: Joe a boy about nineteen years old and Joanna girl about twelve years old together with their increase. And I also bequeath to the said Sidney our horse, saddle and bridle: One bed, ____ and furniture and two cows and calves. And I also give the said Sidney his maintenance and education as hereinafter provided. And should the said Sidney die leaving no child or children or the descendants of child or children then it is my will and desire that said slaves shall revert to my children by my wife Sarah Ann, or their lineal heir to be equally divided between them. And should one or both of said slaves die before the said Sidney shall arrive at the age of twenty one years then it is my will that he shall have and receive other slaves or slaves in lieu thereof in like manner as herein before provided for Antoinette Devereux.
  5. I hereby will and bequeath the residual of my property real, personal and mixed, choses in action, effects and rights of whatever description among which ___estimate fifty six slaves to my two sons Albert and Julien Devereux by my present wife, together and in common with such other child or children as she may hereafter have by me to be equally divided between my said two sons and such other child or children as may so be done. If there shall be but one of said sons living at my death and no other child born, then he is to have all the property herein bequeathed to both: if both of said sons are living at my death and no other child born, then said property to be divided between them: if there shall be at my death said two sons and one or more other child or children of my present wife living or posthumous, then it is my desire that said property shall be equally divided between all of said children. And for greater certainty I here give the names of the slaves mentioned and intended to pass to said children by this my 5th bequeath to the best of my resolution, to wit, 1 Scott 2 Jack Shaw 3 Henry 4 Luoius 5 Martin 6 Lewis 7 ___ 8 July 9 Daniel 10 Stephen 11 Levin 12 Randal 13 July? 14 Little Jack 15 Amos 16 Charles 17 ___ 18 Tom 19 Anthony 20 Walton 21 Richmond 22 Green 23 Arthur 24 Pam 25 Little Jesse 26 Nelson 27 Dennis 28 Mason 29 Harrison 30 Aaron 31 Anderson 32 Robert 33 Cola Tabby 34 Mary 35 Henry 36 Lev Mariah 37 Katy 38 Marha 39 Amey 40 Matilda 41 Eliza 42 Dea’nah 43 Makalah 44 Sarah 45 Jane 46 Phebe 47 Jinny 48 Elmina 49 Jiney 50 Louisa 51 Penial 52 Charlotte 53 Little Amey 54 Katy’s child not named and 55 & 56 (two others names not recollected, together with all the increase of said slaves. This my 5th bequeath is made charged with and subject to the following restrictions, uses and conditions to wit: That my present wife Sarah Ann remain on the plantation where we now reside, and under the supervision of my executors as hereinafter directed carry on the plantation for the maintenance of herself and her children and the two natural children Antoinette and Sidney and for the education of her own children as well as the said Antoinette and Sidney. And that she may be able to do so. It is my will that she have the use of the said plantation negroes stock, mules, farming utensils and other ___property appertaining to a plantation during her natural life or widowhood with his exception that as my children ______attain to the age of twenty one years- or if-______ the legacies and property bequeath to them by this will is to be delivered over to them respectively provided that my present residences and land to the extent of two hundred acres including the slaves shall not be sold during the lifetime of my said wife. And should my said wife-Sarah Ann again marry it is my will that there be a complete separation of her property and interests in all things of a _____ character from those of my children.
  6. I desire and bequeath to my said wife and her children all the real estate which I may own and possess at my death to be equally divided between them that is to say if I shall have one or more child or children, by her she is to have a childs part of said real estate in value equal to the part or share of said child or children to be laid off so as to include our present residences. My residences as I desire here to explain, consists of the mansion house and other buildings and four thousand acres of land more or less attached thereto in different survey_____as the William & _______and other lying in one body. The division of said land here ____plateau to be fairly and equally made by my executors.
  7. In the event I leave no child or children by my present wife, living or posthumous at my death, then I will and bequeath the property and its increase herin before devised to such child or children to my said wife and the said Antoinette and Sidney Devereux to be equally divided between them that is to say said property is to be equally divided between my said wife, the said Antoinette and the said Sidney or their lineal descendants provided I leave no child or children in being or posthumous by my said wife or the direct lineal heirs of such child or children by my said wife. Said decision to be made between my said wife and the said Antoinette and the said Sidney in three equal parts share and share alike.
  8. In consideration of the long and faithful service of the old negro slaves Scott and Gabby hereinfore bequeathed to my new sons Albert and Julian it is my will and desire that from and after they be exempt from compulsory personal labor further than to give such attention as they may be able in nursing and taking care of my children after my death; and I further will and desire that the said Scott and Gabby shall be humanely treated and will provided for by my executors.
  9. It is my will and desire that all my just debts be paid before distribution of my estate takes place. And in providing for the maintenance of my children I estimate the profile of my plantation as being ______for those purposes and pay my just debts. If, however tho fund arising from my plantation is insufficient for all the _______ properties, and it is deemed necessary by my executors to sell any portion of my estate for the payment of my debts, it is my desire that none of my slaves shall be sold. They are family slaves it is my will that they so remain after my death. I hereby designate as property to be sold for the payment of debts if necessary two tracts of land to with:  eleven hundred and seven acres the head right property of ____ Robert W Smith and Eight hundred and eighty acres known as the ____. I purchased of Doctor Elijah Doson or so much thereof as my executors may deem sufficient.
  10. Contrary to any wish desire or request of mine the legislation of the State of Texas at its last___ the second section of act entitled “an act changing the names of Antoinette _____ and Sidney May” which act was “approved January 3 1852.” said second section is in these words “That the said Antoinette Devereux and Sidney Devereux be and they are hereby declared capable in law of inheriting the property of their father Julien Devereux in the same manner as if they had been born in lawful wedlock – and that this act take effect and be in force from and after its passage”. Now, although it has long been my wish and desire that the names of the said Antoinette Scott and Sidney ___ should be changed as provided for by the first section of the above cited act, yet I never intended nor was it ever my will that they shall inherit my estate in the manner provided in the said second section . I do therefore now and forever hereafter by this my last will and testament most solemnly protest against the operation and effect of said second section of said act and desire that said second section may be appealed by act of said Legislature at the next session, the same having been passed without my knowledge consent or approbation and in direct violation of any wishes and desires. It is my will that the said Antoinette and Sidney be provided for and receive portions of my estate after my death only in such manner as is in this my last will and testament set forth and stated and in no other way.
  11. As I have before initiated, it is my will that a sufficient amount independent of the bequeath herein made be set apart and devoted to the maintenance and education of Antoinette Devereaux and Sidney Devereux, and my two sons Albert and Julien, and such other children of mine as may hereafter be born. And it is also my will that should the said Antoinette and Sidney or either of them die without lineal _____ of their body or bodies, the _______ of herein bequeathed is not in any way or under any circumstances to descend to or be inherited by any member of their mother family.
  12. My will is that my friend Doctor Peterson ___ Richardson be guardian of the person and property of my natural daughter Antoinette Devereux to superintend and direct her education and take care of her. And should my said wife deem it proper for Antoinette to be leave here I desire Doctor Richardson to take her and raise her. And it is my will and desire that my extended friend Col. William Wright Morris be the guardian of any natural son Sidney Devereux: as well of his person as his property and I desire that said Morris will consider the said Sidney wholly in his care and under his charge and permit him to ramble or wander off so as to become identified with his mothers people: That he will superintend the education and moral culture of the said Sidney and in a special manner prepare his mind for the study of the law by giving a proper direction to this education.
  13. It is my will that none of my slaves be sold. With due exception they are all family negroes, and my desire is that they so remain under the ____ plateau distribution fixed by this will: that they may be humanely treated and will be taken care of by those who may succeed me in the ownership of them.
  14. I do herby appoint my wife Sarah Ann Devereux, John Laudrew, Col. William Wright Morris, Doctor Peterson T. Richardson, and Doctor William M. ____ of Rush County and Doctor James H. ____ of Nagadoches County Texas (my trust worthy friends) my executors of this my last will and testament to execute and carry out all the terms and provisions of the _____. And it is my will that they or either one of them shall not be required to give bond and security as a condition to entering or the discharge of the duties herby imposed. It is also____my will and direction that no other action shall be had in the County Court in relation to the settlement of the estate herin disposed of then the probate and registration of this will and testament and a return of inventory of said estate. It is my desire and will that my wife Sarah ____ by the council and advice of any one or more of my other executors, as she may choose will take upon herself the supervision of my plantation for the purposes expressed in the will. That aided by my other executors she will attend to the hiring of overseers, the sale of produce, the investing of the proceeds of the plantation: That with the aid of said executor she will plan improvement of my plantation, preserve and take care of property, and above all she will attend strictly and carefully to the education of my two sons Albert and Julien and such other children as she may have by me.

I hereby appoint the said Sarah Anne Devereux guardian of the persons and property of my said sons Albert and Julian and such other child or children as she may have by me, and in case she should die then it is my will that Doctor Peterson T. Richardson will take the guardianship of said two sons and such other children as she may have as aforesaid.

The foregoing will of twelve and a half pages signed sealed and published in our presence and in the presence of each other. The foregoing twelve and a half pages contain my last will and testament executed at the town of Henderson on this 7th day of May AD 1852.

–Julien Sidney Devereux


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Bibliography
Gomert, A. & Lungkwitz, Herman. Rusk County, map, 1871; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth89173/: accessed October 12, 2019), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas General Land Office.

Julien Sidney Devereux Family Papers, 1766-1908, 1931, 1941, Box 2N215, Will, 1852-1854 Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin


You might also like:
The Enslaved and the Blind: State Officials and Enslaved People in Austin, Texas
Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past
White Women and the Economy of Slavery

Slavery World Wide: Collected Works from Not Even Past

Slavery and the slave trade transformed the world.  According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million African women, men and children were shipped across the Atlantic to North and South America as slaves.  As many as 2 million died in transit. In recent years, historians have started to investigate slavery in other contexts. While the Atlantic slave trade was vast, slavery was a truly global phenomenon appearing in diverse regions. Not Even Past offers a range of book reviews, articles, and podcasts related to slavery.  They engage issues as varied as capitalism, labor, race, gender, and love, among others.  We hope this collection can act as a resource for teachers looking to build their curriculum, and portal for all readers interested in new writing and scholarly debates

Books on Slavery

Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America by John M. Monteiro (2018)
Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor (2016)
Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World; Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferreira (2012)
Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, by Sue Peabody (2017) 
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert (2015)
Slaves and Englishmen, by Michael Guasco (2014)
Quilombo dos Palmares: Brazil’s Lost Nation of Fugitive Slaves, by Glenn Cheney (2014) – by Edward Shore
Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslin Uprising of 1835 in Bahia by João José Reis (1993) – by Michael Hatch
Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002) – by Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux

Articles on Slavery

Love in the Time of Texas Slavery – by María Esther Hammack
White Women and the Economy of Slavery – by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
The Public Archive: The Paperwork of Slavery – Galia Sims
US Survey Course: Slavery
Slavery and Race in Colonial Latin America
Slavery and its Legacy – by Mark Sheaves
#Blacklivesmatter Till They Don’t: Slavery’s Lasting Legacy – by Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan
Slavery in America: Back in the Headlines – by Daina Ramey Berry
Andrew Cox Marshall: Between Slavery and Freedom in Savannah – by Tania Sammons

Slavery and Freedom in Savannah – by Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry
The Cross-Cultural Exchange of Atlantic Slavery – by Samantha Rubino
Visualizing Emancipation(s): Mapping the End of Slavery in America – by Henry Wiencek
Daina Ramey Berry on Slavery, Work and Sexuality
Great Books on Slavery, Abolition, and Reconstruction – by Jacqueline Jones
The Littlefield Lectures: The Van and the Read: Abolitionists Roots of Radical Reconstruction (Day 1)
The Littlefield Lectures: The Van and the Rear: Abolitionists Roots of Radical Reconstruction (Day 2)
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh – by Daina Ramey Berry
The Illegal Slave Trade in Texas, 1808-1865 – by Maria Esther Hammack 
Glimpsed in the Archive and Known no More: One Indian Slave’s Tale – by Sumit Guha
Mapping the Slave Trade: The New Archive (No. 10)  – by Henry Wiencek
The Emancipation Proclamation and its Aftermath
Work Left Undone: Emancipation was not Abolition – by George Forgie
“Captive Fates: Displace American Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba, 1500-1800” – by Paul Conrad

Film Reviews

“12 Years a Slave” and the Difficulty of Dramatizing the “Peculiar Institution” – by Jermaine Thibodeaux
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) – by Daina Ramey Berry

Great Books on Enslaved Life and Labor in the US – by Daina Ramey Berry

Podcasts on Slavery

Episode 120: Slave-Owning Women in the Antebellum U.S.

Episode 114: Slavery in Indian Territory

Episode 105: Slavery and Abolition

Episode 98: Brazil’s Treatro Negro and Afro-Brazilian Identity 

Episode 88: The Search for Family Lost in Slavery

Episode 70: Slavery and Abolition in Iran

Episode 54: Urban Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.

Episode 42: The Senses of Slavery

Compiled by Jesse Ritner, updated by Adam Clulow

Love in the Time of Texas Slavery

By María Esther Hammack

An earlier version of this story was published on Forth Part of the World.

I wasn’t looking to find a story of abounding love when researching violent episodes of Texas history. Then I ran across a Texas newspaper article that shed a brief light on the lives of a Black woman and a Mexican man who had lived as husband and wife in the 1840s, twenty-five miles northeast of Victoria, Texas. She was a woman forced to live in bondage in Jackson County, near the town of Texana, in present day Edna, Texas. Her husband was a Mexican man who was likely indentured, employed, or a peon in that same vicinity.

The report, unsurprisingly, did not fully document their lives, experiences, or bonds of intimacy. It did, however, document a glimpse of two lives whose stories and relationship often go untold in the archive. This glimpse and the many questions the source delivered compelled me to further explore this couple’s relationship and harrowing flight to freedom. As a historian whose work investigates the experiences of enslaved and free Black women, men, and children who sought freedom across transnational frontiers, I wanted to learn more about this couple. I was interested in knowing more about the woman and her origins. Was she born enslaved in Texas? How long was she held in bondage near Texana? Had she tried to run to freedom before? What was her trade? How many languages did she speak? The archive has a history of silencing the Black experience and Texas has historically engaged in a disconcerting suppression of its Black past. Answers to my many questions, therefore, proved daunting tasks that led me to creative ways to study this couple’s narrative. I turned to investigate the environment and history of the geographic localities where this woman was held in order to learn more about her life, what she may have witnessed, and her tragic journey to freedom.

A 1856 map of Jackson County, Texas depicting Texana, Texas
1856 Jackson County TX Map showing Texana. Texas General Land Office.

The region where this courageous Black woman was held enslaved had been largely inhabited by Tonkawa and Lipan Apache tribal communities up until the 1830s, when they were unsettled by a group of Anglo colonizers who arrived as part of Stephen F. Austin’s Old Three Hundred colonization program. In 1832, these Anglo-settlers led the Sandy Creek assault against the native communities living in the area and destroyed remaining Tonkawa and Lipan Apache settlements. Six slave holding families, originally from Alabama, consolidated power over the area. These six families redeveloped the region’s agricultural, cattle, and trading industries through the labor of the people they held in bondage. Was this fearless Black woman brought enslaved from Alabama? Was her family forced to move to Texas alongside her? How did she come to meet the Mexican man? It is likely that she was forced to toil in both sugar and cotton crops, staples that turned high profits in Jackson County during that time. Perhaps she may have worked in any of the many groups of enslaved people who packed, prepared and carried the products of said crops to the local port on the Lavaca River. She may have played a central role in the trade that was sent out weekly on the steamboat that ran from Texana, through the pass of Matagorda Bay, to other parts of Texas, Louisiana and the Gulf South.

This daring woman was one of hundreds of enslaved individuals who turned this locality into a successful trading hub. In the early 1850s, Texana was made the seat of Jackson County, a place that became an important military and trading center that linked Texas to the rest of the US South. During that period, 34% of its population was enslaved, and only a decade later, in the 1860s, the enslaved population had risen to be half of the total population because cotton and sugar drove the land’s economic affluence. After the Civil War, when slavery ended, this prosperous area, developed by enslaved people, became a ghost town. Yet, in 1848, when this story takes place, the region was booming and welcoming of visitors and settlers, except Black and Brown. The people governing the county were certainly hostile to enslaved and free Blacks and expressly militant against settlers of Mexican descent. Interestingly, the Mexican man in this story, by 1848, had managed to live across that county for several years. Why? What was his experience upon arrival? How did he end up living in Jackson County, Texas?  Where did he come from? How did he come to meet his wife? While we may never know where this couple met, how their lives intertwined, or how their plan to run away was devised and developed, we do know that this couple ultimately fled together. It is imaginable that both desired a future where they were free. A future far removed from Texas slavery.

In the summer of 1848, and perhaps for years before, these two lovers carefully planned their escape, surely detailing every trail, bend, and river they would encounter and need to traverse on their journey to freedom. In early July of that same year, they took two horses and rode them southward, hoping to leave Texas behind and reach safe havens beyond the Mexican border.

Image of the painting A Ride for Liberty by Eastman Johnson from the Brooklyn Museum
Eastman Johnson. A Ride for Liberty. Brooklyn Museum.

They made their way towards Mexican territory, but as they reached the Lavaca river they were intercepted and pursued by a group of slave hunters, unscrupulous employees of a highly profitable profession. They were quickly surrounded. They stood no chance and received no mercy. The Romeo of this story was lynched. His body was returned to the place where authorities claimed he had “stolen” his enslaved wife. His body was then hung and displayed as a public reminder and threat to all others who hoped, braved, or even thought to run away. In this story, Juliet faced an unimaginable fate. Tortured and robbed of the freedom she almost secured for herself across a Mexican frontier, she was forcibly returned to her ruthless enslaver. The rest of her story remains hidden, silent, until it is found, and told.

The report of this couple’s story is but a fragment, a tiny visible thread in the vast unknown tapestry of the lives and experiences of thousands of women, men, and children who faced, fought, resisted and survived (or failed to survive) enslavement in Texas. It offers us a window into the vibrant, diverse and porous composite that was Texas, during a time when the institution of slavery thrived and consolidated on this side of the border, and freedom existed just a few miles south, on the other side.

Theirs was a story of bravery, of life and death: a harrowing tale of sacrifice, impassioned desire for freedom, and heartbreak different from any I have ever encountered in the archive. We know very little about their relationship. Did they have children? How did he envision freedom at their destination? Was family waiting for them in Mexican territory? Although reconstructing their background and the extent of their intimacy may not be possible, we do know that in their story love was empowering, death was swift and its perpetrators vicious. They sought freedom, yet instead they found a macabre ending committed by Texas vigilantes and sanctioned by laws that protected and promoted the institution of slavery in Texas. Theirs was a story raw, fleeting, and heartbreaking; one where freedom was worth the most violent “‘til death do us part.” Their lives and death are a love story shaped by slavery, freedom, and resistance; marked with blood and violence and no happily ever after. This record documents a rare biography of a couple’s partnership existing amongst a burning desire for freedom. It is a memoir of love in time of Texas slavery.

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Other Articles by María Esther Hammack:

The Illegal Slave Trade in Texas
Textbooks Texas, and Discontent 

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You May Also Like:

The Paperwork of Slavery
Slavery in America: Back in the Headlines
Slavery and Freedom in Savanna 

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Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America by John M. Monteiro (2018)

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody questioned enslaving Amerindians. In Blacks of the Land (originally published in 1994 as Negros da Terra) Monteiro studies Amerindian slavery in the Capitania de São Vicente, now known as São Paulo, and thus sheds light on practices and debates that took place all over the continent. What happened in São Paulo happened in Panuco, Hispaniola, Darien, Tierra Firme, Chile, Massachusetts, Georgia; in short, everywhere.

Monteiro traces slavery back to a widespread Amerindian institution. In coastal Brazil, the Portuguese found a linguistically unified indigenous world, yet one deeply ethnically fragmented. Indigenous societies built sharp corporate identities through raiding and counter-raiding. The Tupi did not incorporate captured rivals into households but dispatched them in rituals of cannibal consumption. The Portuguese used these practices to justify colonization and to build a native labor force.

The Portuguese ransomed captives from the Tupi for axes, scissors, and glass beads.  Those “rescued” through trade became slaves.  The use of the word rescate (rescue and commercial transaction) for ransom implied that it was better to be a slave in a Christian household than a morsel of a demonic cannibal. Purchasing slaves through native intermediaries was not the only strategy to get cheap labor. Slavers would get licenses to wage war on communities when the latter reportedly engaged in “unnatural” practices.

“Portuguese” raids (that involved hundreds and often thousands of indigenous allies), in turn, would lead the natives to counter-raid the Portuguese who would, in turn, gain new legal justification to wage war. This complex dynamic of just war and rescate did nothing but expand the institution of indigenous slavery in the Americas manyfold. It also imbued ideologies of indigenous captivity with deep religious, theological overtones.

Everywhere the Europeans went in the Americas, slavery flourished. To the theologically mindful, however, it soon became clear that Amerindian captivity was not the preferred route to indigenous conversion but a naked attempt at exploiting indigenous labor in mines, ranches, ports, and households.  As in many other places in the Americas, the religious in Brazil began to call into question indigenous slavery. By the mid-sixteenth century in Sao Paulo, the Jesuits became adamant opponents of the Paulistas (settlers of Portuguese and indigenous decent).

The Jesuits created “aldeas” (towns) where captives were catechized. Aldeas, however, also became rotational pools of wage laborers for Paulistas, not slaves.   The debate between Paulistas and Jesuits was over whether Indian captives were pliable-for-hire-Christian laborers or commodities whose bodies could be transacted at will and whose status would be inheritable. No one questioned just war or rescate as the preferred way to get converts or slaves.

Monteiro shows that in 1570 the crown introduced legislation to regulate indigenous slavery. Settlers had to justify raids and obtain licenses. The new legislation left paperwork, as raiders had to produce formal declarations of just war to proceed. Occasionally raiders would appeal to the Inquisition to cover their raids into the interior as expeditions to go after alleged heretics. Raiders would also often present their expeditions as mining prospecting.

As parties had to justify the legality of their raids, classifications of natives came in handy.  Legal hurdles encouraged the science of ethnology. Monteiro describes how settlers and Jesuits created ever more involved taxonomies, separating agriculturalists from nomadic savages, first on the coast (Tupis vs Tapuia) and later in the interior (Guairá vs. Goiá, Guaikurú, Carijó, Caeté, Tememinó, Kayapó). Slavers clearly preferred Tupi and Guairá whose agriculturalism prepared them to be slaves on wheat growing ranches. Getting Tupi-Guaranies, however, became increasingly difficult as the Jesuits armed the Guarani with guns in their Paraguayan missions.

After 1596, the crown sided with the Jesuits who became default legal wardens of all new captives ransomed through trade or rounded up via punishing raids.  Settlers, however, continued to keep the ransomed and the raided as “pieces.” Settlers would use wills to distribute Indians as property but would be careful not to leave notarial records of sales since these records could induce legal challenges and freedom suits.  Dowries and inventories, however, still registered Amerindians in household and ranches as transferable property.

The debate between Jesuits and settlers persisted over the entire seventeenth century. In 1639, Jesuits had the Pope reissued the bull of 1537, a brief originally issued to abolish Amerindian slavery in Mexico and the Caribbean. The Jesuits also sought to reduce the power of landed elites by taking them to court and by setting up their own mills to bankrupt their rivals. Finally, in 1649, Paulistas expelled the Jesuits from the province

Pedro Alvares Cabral, after his discovery of Brazil in 1500, with native Indians (via The Jesuits and Slavery in Brazil)

This dynamic crated several different types of indigenous populations in São Paulo. The first group were those members of Jesuits towns of wage earners (aldeas) who came as captives from faraway places and often spoke many different unintelligible languages. After the 1649 Jesuit expulsion, the towns never recovered; they remained small and depopulated even after the Jesuits were allowed to come back to the province thirteen years later.

The second group were the indigenous slaves, working on settler’s ranches and in their households. Monteiro reconstructs the system of slavery in some detail. Slaves grew their own food (corn, manioc) and worked growing wheat. Wheat left the province on the back of Indians slaves too. Porters took the cargo to the port of Santos to be shipped to the sugar plantations of the northeast and Rio. Using slaves, not mules, allowed settlers not to have to invest in road infrastructure between the Paulista interior and the port.

Despite the stifling violence that characterized this society, indigenous slaves enjoyed some agency and some mobility.  Slaves ran away. They also used church tribunals to initiate freedom suits. They also sought self-manumission and recreated fictive communities through the use of godparents and cofradias (brotherhooods). By the late seventeenth century, slave agency via runaway slave communities , freedom suits, self-manumission, and creolization, along with the arrival of African slaves, partially put an end to indigenous slavery in the province. Yet far more important to the demise of indigenous slavery was the growing difficulty in getting indigenous slaves from the interior.

The third group were those natives who remained sovereign and who therefore were either the target of raids or co-participants in Paulista raids. These groups disappeared from the coast as they removed themselves into the interior or were wiped out by disease and interethnic warfare (the War of the Tamoio,1550-1570, for example).

Monteiro reconstructs in detail the political economy of Paulista raids to get slaves and thus maintain Brazil’s ability to grow grain. As Tupis abandoned the coast, Paulistas went after the Guarani-Tupi located between Sao Paulo and the city of Asuncion in Paraguay. Monteiro describes how over the course of several decades, raiders organized large expeditions with Indian allies to net hundreds of Guarani slaves from the southwestern interior, particularly the Jesuits’ missions in Paraguay.

Under the false pretense of prospecting for mines of silver and gold to create a legal cover, the largest Paulista landowners led these expeditions themselves. Men like Raposo Tavares built reputations, fortunes, and noble lineages out of his raiding exploits.  The era of large raiding expeditions, however, ended in the 1640s when the Guairá acquired guns and resisted large attacks in fortified Jesuit missions. Raids became death traps and a disaster for the businesses of leading Paulistas.

The raids, however, continued as the preferred enterprise of the poor. Raiders pressed deep into the interior of Matto Grosso and Maranhão. These raids lasted years and required involved logistics, including clearing the forest and setting up temporary settlements to grow food. These expeditions would later establish the fame of raiders as the men who first established the national territory of Brazil.

Monteiro brings the legendary raiders down to size. Paulistas built Brazil’s granary on the back of Amerindian slaves and devastating raiding expeditions that permanently changed the social ecology of the interior. Moreover, Paulistas did not create a frontier society of equals but a profoundly hierarchical one, split between ruthless lords and poor settler peasants, whose path to social mobility was the piecemeal collection of indigenous slaves in never ending, pointless raids into the interior. Monteiro also brings the Jesuits down to size.  The Jesuits opposed slavery by creating towns of wage earners but their theology did nothing but confirm the authority of “just war” and “rescue” as the twin ideological pillars of slavery. The Jesuits battled slavery without addressing slavery’s underpinning justifications. Historians, however, should remain grateful to the Jesuits because their effort to regulate slavery created a large archive of petitions, declarations, and justifications upon which Monteiro’s masterful study rests.

Twenty-five years after its original publication, Negros da Terra stills stands, a testament to the strengths of Brazilian historiography. It is still path breaking when compared with the growing Anglo American scholarship on Amerindian slavery.

Also by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra:

From There to Here: Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Puritan Conquistadors
Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment
When Montezuma Met Cortes

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