Freedom

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

Continue Listening

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World By Jessica Marie Johnson (2020)

By Tiana Wilson

Many recent studies on chattel slavery in the Atlantic World have decentered the voices of the colonizers in an effort to creatively reimagine the inner lives of Black people, both enslaved and “free.” However, narrating the complex ways race, gender, and sexuality played out in a colonial setting beyond violence has proven difficult due to the brutal, inhumane conditions of enslavement. At the same time, the drastic imbalance of power raises questions about consent within sexual and intimate relationships. While most scholars of slavery have tended to shy away from such a contentious and messy topic, historian Jessica Marie Johnson presents a compelling analysis of how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and live out freedom in the eighteenth century.

She demonstrates how the legal status of free, manumission from bondage, or escape from slavery did not protect Black women from “colonial masculinities and imperial desires for black flesh” that rendered African women as “lecherous, wicked, and monstrous” (14). Slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials attempted to exploit Black women’s bodies (enslaved or legally free) for labor. In return, Johnson argues, Black women defined freedom on their own terms through the intimate and kinship ties they formed.

Focusing on Black women in New Orleans, Wicked Flesh takes readers from the coast of Senegal to French Saint-Domingue and from Spanish Cuba to the US Gulf Coast areas in order to tell the varying experiences of Black women across the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival material written in multiple languages dispersed across three continents and uses a method that historian Marisa Fuentes describes as “reading along the bias grain” to offer an ethical historical analysis of her texts. Although the majority of sources Johnson utilizes were produced by colonial officials and slaveholding men, this methodology allows Johnson to carefully and innovatively piece together archival fragments, providing readers insight into the everyday intimate lives of Black women during this era. Intimacy, as Johnson explores, encompassed the “corporeal, carnal, quotidian encounters of flesh and fluid” and was the very thing that tied Black women to white and Black men. It was through these connections that women of African descent simultaneously endured violence and resisted colonial agendas. Wicked Flesh seriously consider the ways Black women fostered hospitable and pleasurable spaces on both sides of the Atlantic.

Johnson begins her narrative in West Africa between the geographical region of the Senegal River (north) and the Gambia River (south), also known as Senegambia. Senegal’s Atlantic coast saw Portuguese-Dutch-French-Wolof trade alliances and their struggle for power, but by 1659, the French drove out the Dutch from the northern area and founded the comptoir (administrative outpost of Saint-Louis. It is in this locale, comptoir, that Johnson introduces readers to free African women like Seignora Catti, Anne Gusban, and Marie Baude, who all actively engaged in networks with European and African men.

Throughout chapters one and two, Johnson demonstrates the different ways free African women cultivated freedom in efforts to seek safety and security. This included participating in grand gestures of hospitality for French officials or marring European men, but rejecting their Catholic practices. These practices impacted three groups, free African women who has intimate ties with European and African men, captifs du case (enslaved people who belonged to comptoir residents), and Africans forced onboard of slaved ships set to travel to the Americas. Chapter three examines the latter, including Black women’s and girl’s horrific experiences on the long middle passage and how this forced migration produced a “predatory network of exchanges” that attempted to “dismantle their womanhood, girlhood, and humanity” (123).

Chapters four and five shifts to the Gulf Coast region and encourages readers to reconceptualize the price of manumission for people of African descent that extended beyond the material world. Through the lives of figures like Suzanne, the wife of a New Orleans “negro executioner,” Johnson further illustrates just how bound Black women’s freedom was to their intimate relations and kinship ties with men in power who were acting on behalf of the French colonial regime. When Suzanne’s husband, Louis Congo, initially entered in a contractual obligation with slaveowners or Company officials, he requested freedom for Suzanne too. However, French colonists rejected his demand and instead, only allowed Suzanne to live with her husband, if Louis agreed to grant the Company full use of his wife when the Company needed her. While one scholar may read this account as an example of a Black woman gaining her freedom through her husband’s occupation, Johnson critically assess Suzanne’s lack of control over her own body and movement.

Diving deeper into the intricate ways women of African descent navigated French colonial power in New Orleans, Johnson’s fifth chapter follows girls like Charlotte, the daughter of a French colonial officer, who demanded manumission for herself. It is in this section that Johnson introduces the concept of “black femme freedom” that “points to the deeply feminine, feminized, and femme practices of freedom engaged in by women and girls of African descent” (260). Scholars of Black and other women of color feminists use the term “femme” to describe a queer sexual identity that is gendered in performances of femininity. Johnson finds this term productive in the context of eighteenth-century New Orleans, because strands of resistive femininity and intimacy between women was present during this time. Black femme freedom details a type of liberation that went beyond masculine and imperial desires. It describes the importance of reading Black women’s intimate decisions to privilege themselves and each other in a world that violently privileged the position of slaveowners and husbands. An example of this Black femme freedom lies within Black women’s efforts to create spaces for pleasure, spirit, and celebration against French and later Spanish censorship of their behaviors. This included hosting night markets and wearing headwraps. The last chapter explores the shift in colonial powers and how free women of African descent used this change to claim kinship ties through registration of their wills and testaments.

Wicked Flesh is a well-researched, beautifully written text that is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections between Slavery, Gender, and Sexuality. Following in the tradition of historians like Stephanie Camp, Jennifer Morgan, and Marisa Fuentes, Johnson’s work is a superb addition to these groups of scholars who are shifting the field of Atlantic History to critically engage with definitions of freedom for enslaved and legally free women of African descent during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Graduate students including myself can (and likely will) use Johnson’s work as a model for problematizing white colonial sources, while ethically utilizing contemporary theoretical frameworks to imagine and retell the lives of those silenced by institutional archives.

Image credits

Banner image – Ndeté-Yalla, lingeer of Waalo, Gallica, bnf.fr – Réserve DT 549.2 B 67 M Atlas – planche n °5 – Notice n° : FRBNF38495418 – (Illustrations de Esquisses sénégalaises) Image from Wikimedia Commons

TIANA WILSON is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor (2016)

By Signe Peterson Fourmy

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.

The title of Taylor’s work suggests a causal relationship between slavery and the “madness” that inspired Garner to kill her daughter. In the introduction, Taylor asserts unequivocally that “slavery caused trauma.” This is a significant aspect of Taylor’s analysis as she argues that understanding Margaret Garner’s trauma is critical to understanding her reaction to the threat of capture. When federal marshals and the Garners’ enslavers surrounded the house where the Garners hid, Margaret and Robert both reacted violently—Taylor, however, reads an important distinction into their respective actions. Robert, using a pistol stolen from his enslaver, fired at the slave catchers as they forced their way into the house. Margaret also responded with deadly force, but unlike Robert, Margaret’s attention focused inside the house. Taylor cogently applies trauma theory first espoused by Sigmund Freud and later expanded by Cathy Caruth to examine this gendered distinction.

Article from the February 2, 1856 issue of the Anti-Slavery Bugle (via Ohio Memory)

Driven Toward Madness explores the intimate aspects of Margaret Garner’s life and fleeting celebrity by tracing the arc of the Garners’ flight, capture, legal controversy, and removal to Louisiana. Taylor insightfully considers the psychological effects of enslavement and sexual abuse and the meaning of infanticide in asking whether murder can be considered resistance. Reconstructing Garner’s life from interviews and articles published in contemporary newspapers, fugitive slave hearings, criminal indictments, and personal papers, Taylor employs a variety of methodological approaches that integrate black feminist theory, trauma studies, pain studies, genetics, history of emotions, and literary criticism to explore the trauma Garner experienced as an enslaved woman, and the violence that Garner endured and enacted. Taylor’s focus on the interconnected themes of motherhood, sexual vulnerability, trauma, and violence, and her attention to Garner’s mental state and perceived psychological trauma push slavery studies into new territory—the psychological impact of enslavement on the enslaved—that until recently has remained under-explored. This interpretative approach presents a challenging line to walk—one that requires the historian to stay true to the extant records yet acknowledge the unavoidable silences and absences within the archive that often obscure enslaved women’s lives. The result is a work that reconsiders enslaved motherhood and how we conceptualize resistance.

Although the specific nature of the violence Garner experienced at the hands of Archibald Gaines is absent from the written record, Taylor persuasively reconstructs a psychological profile of the enslaver. She painstakingly tracks recorded incidents of his violent temper to establish that Gaines was prone to violent outbursts. She describes the scars on Margaret’s face, as evidence of violence that was both up-close and personal; those scars offered silent testimony to the physical abuse she endured.

Margaret’s reproductive history tells of another kind of abuse. Describing Margaret as “perpetually pregnant” from the birth of her first child in 1850 to her escape in 1856, Taylor documents Margaret’s pregnancies as evidence of the sexual abuse she likely experienced. This is perhaps Taylor’s most impressive analytical work. Building on the method of reading the record Annette Gordon-Reed used in her ground-breaking study of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, Taylor establishes the probability that Gaines fathered at least two of Margaret’s children. Enslaved within different households, Margaret and Robert lived apart. They had what was commonly known as an “abroad marriage.” This meant that their time together was often infrequent and subject to their enslavers’ discretion. Additionally, Robert was often hired out, resulting in frequent and prolonged absences. Citing these absences, Taylor questions the paternity of the child in Margaret’s womb and her two youngest children, Mary and Cilla, who were often described as so fair they appeared white. To support the assertion that Gaines likely impregnated Margaret, Taylor engages in genetic analysis that includes a detailed examination of the probability that Robert (a dark-skinned man) and Margaret (a light-skinned woman) produced two extremely fair-skinned children. Taylor acknowledges the imprecise nature of this type of analysis—but her discussion of genetics, skin color, sexual abuse, court testimony, masculine honor, community complicity and silence, and sexual access point to an answer.

Driven Toward Madness is well-written and thoroughly researched. For scholars of slavery, Taylor’s examination of Margaret Garner’s life within the midwestern community of small-slaveholding households is an insightful examination of motherhood, sexual abuse, violence, and trauma created by the institution of slavery. She brings into clear focus the political implications of the jurisdictional conflict between national and state authorities concerning the Fugitive Slave Law and federal authority that contextualized Garner’s prosecution. Taylor’s work attempts to fill the substantial silences in the record that point to what is ultimately unknowable—that is, how enslavement traumatized Garner to the extent that when faced with capture, Garner picked up a knife, and then a shovel, and attacked her children rather than see them return to enslavement.

Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies, by Sue Peabody (2017)

By Isabelle Headrick

The Isle Bourbon and the Isle de France lie in the southern Indian Ocean, 1,200 miles off the southeast coast of Africa. France acquired the islands in 1638 and 1715, respectively, and developed Isle Bourbon as a provisioning stop for grain and livestock for ships traveling between Europe and India. Although these islands shared certain features with France’s Caribbean colonies, they also differed from them in the practices of racial ideologies and the economic and slavery regimes. For example, the sugar monoculture revolution did not arrive to Bourbon and Isle de France until the early nineteenth century, after the collapse of the sugar economy in St. Domingue. In this very specific context, the narrative frame of Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies hinges on a betrayal.

Madeleine’s Children tells the story of Madeleine, an enslaved woman of Indian (southeast Asian) origin who was manumitted in 1789 by her wealthy French owner, Marie Anne Routier, yet was not informed of her manumission until Routier’s death nineteen years later. Routier also left Madeleine a financial bequest large enough to pay for the freedom of her enslaved twenty-two year-old son, Furcy. However, soon after (1809), Routier’s son-in-law, Joseph Lory, tricked Madeleine out of this bequest and acquired the ownership of Furcy. Furcy sued both for his freedom and for money owed to him several times without success until achieving de facto freedom in 1829 and official free status in 1848. Peabody’s inquiries revolve around the ways that that betrayal, and the consequences for the betrayed, interacted with geography, colonial politics, the legal and bureaucratic system, and economic and family entanglements. She underscores the complicated family relationships by exposing the likelihood that the frequently abusive Eugénie Lory, Marie Anne’s daughter and Joseph’s wife, was Furcy’s half-sister through the patriarch of the family, Charles Routier. In the context of growing animosity between the creole elites and the French colonial authorities, aggravated by the Indian Ocean turn toward sugar production and consequent need for slaves, Furcy’s claim to freedom and reimbursement ignited a political crisis in Bourbon.

Through her study of ship passenger lists, censuses, bills of sale, and other autobiographies, Peabody sets herself the ambitious goal of understanding both the practices of enslavement by French Indian Ocean creole elites and the experiences of slavery and freedom from the perspective of the enslaved. This is particularly challenging given the paucity of narratives by freed-people from the world of French slavery (compared to British and American abolitionist literature). However she assembles enough information about Madeleine, Furcy, and the Routiers-Lorys to emphasize the centrality of family in either unmaking or making the enslaved or freeperson’s sense of self and place. Both Madeleine and Furcy were torn from family by their owners, and their first actions upon achieving freedom were to re-embed themselves firmly in family and economic society—Madeleine, by acting (unsuccessfully) to secure her son’s freedom, and Furcy, by setting up a confectionary business, marrying, and raising children. Likewise, the meaning of travel could shift dramatically, depending on one’s position. For the enslaved, travel usually caused catastrophic dislocation and rupture, while for the colonial elites, it reinforced their place in family and commercial global networks.

Map of the Isle Bourbon (via Wikimedia)

Readers familiar with Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard’s Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation, will appreciate the significance that Peabody attaches to legal and bureaucratic documents, not only for later historians but for people fighting to obtain or maintain their freedom. In the case of Furcy, who may have been the best-documented slave in Bourbon, Peabody had to rely on archives that were incomplete. Some particularly important documents, she surmises, may have been missing by design. She argues that slavery was a system that was maintained not only through the state’s coercive laws, but by corruption and manipulation of those laws and falsification or elimination of documents on the part of the owners. This manipulation had ramifications both contemporaneously and in future years: critical documents would turn up absent, obstructing later legal recourse for Furcy. Therefore Furcy was a victim not only of the institution of slavery but of Lory’s personal corruption and unscrupulousness—traits, Peabody argues, that typified the French Indian Ocean creole elite class. The historian’s efforts to make sense of the corrupted archive, or “the chasm between the written documents and the lived experience of slavery and freedom,” is one of the pervasive themes of Madeleine’s Children.

In the conversation with other historians, Peabody seeks to deepen understandings of freedom and slavery by enlarging the focus to include the French empire as it reached beyond the Atlantic. Her attention to the slave smuggling triggered by the abolition of transoceanic slave trading reinforces studies of contraband in the late eighteenth century. And while Madeleine, Marie Anne and Eugénie all inhabited a reality far from the revolutionary feminists in mainland France, Peabody is deeply invested in understanding the experiences of women, including highlighting the entangling practices of employing enslaved women as midwives and wet-nurses. Focusing on one family’s experiences reveals the complex and messy underbelly of an empire in the process of transformation and France’s bumpy trajectory toward the promises of the 1789 revolution.

Image credits

Recent Posts