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Agency and Resistance: African and Indigenous Women’s Navigation of Economic, Legal, and Religious Structures in Colonial Spanish America

This essay was written as part of Dr Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s course, Colonial Latin America. Hope Payton explores how Indigenous and African women—both free and enslaved—navigated the legal, economic, and religious institutions of colonial Latin American cities. Drawing on wills from Potosí and La Plata and a freedom suit from Lima, it examines how these women accumulated property, engaged with paperwork culture, and leveraged church tribunals to assert their rights. In doing so, the essay sheds light on the appeal of Catholicism in the Spanish Indies, particularly its role as a mediator of protection, legitimacy, and social mobility for marginalized communities.

The conventional narrative of Spanish colonization in the Americas typically portrays Indigenous and African peoples as passive recipients of European conquest and conversion. This perspective, however, overlooks the agency of these groups in shaping colonial society. In cities like Potosí—major economic centers of the Spanish Empire—free and enslaved indigenous and African people found opportunities to accumulate wealth, property, and legal knowledge. Contrary to the assumption that indigenous people were always relocated to cities by force or compulsion, many indigenous groups strategically used urbanization to consolidate power and to maintain authority within their own ethnic groups; securing leadership, controlling labor, and engaging in the colonial economy while preserving traditional structures—demonstrating their agency in shaping their own futures.

Despite their rigid social hierarchies, cities in the Spanish Empire allowed for certain flexibility that indigenous and African people, especially women, could exploit. Economic opportunities, particularly in large industrial cities like Potosí, created avenues for wealth accumulation, while the Catholic Church’s legal structures provided mechanisms for securing assets and negotiating social standing. Through participation in the marketplace, property ownership, and engagement with notarial culture, women actively shaped their own economic futures.

A reproduction on 12 linen canvases in the Edward Luther Stevenson Collection of the Geocarta Nautica Universale ("Worldwide Maritime Chart") or 1523 Turin Map believed to have been made by Giovanni/Juan Vespucci from the Spanish royal standard map (Padron Real). — A reproduction on 12 linen canvases in the Edward Luther Stevenson Collection of the **Geocarta Nautica Universale** (“Worldwide Maritime Chart”) or **1523 Turin Map** believed to have been made by Giovanni/Juan Vespucci from the Spanish royal standard map (Padron Real).
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

At the same time, the Church’s bottom-up structure, reinforced by extensive bureaucratic systems and opportunities for petitioning, allowed marginalized groups to access legal protections and assert their rights. Church tribunals provided an alternative to colonial civil courts, allowing commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous peoples to challenge injustices and seek legal remedies. This accessibility contributed to Catholicism’s widespread appeal and deep entrenchment in colonial society. Indigenous and African women in colonial Spanish America exercised agency by leveraging urban economies, church legal structures, and Catholic institutions to accumulate wealth, secure property rights, access legal recourse, and shape both their personal and communal identities within the Catholic Church and the Spanish colonial system.

Cities in colonial Spanish America, particularly those like Potosí and La Plata, provided indigenous and African women with unique opportunities to accumulate wealth, property, and legal knowledge. Unlike rural areas, where economic mobility was more restricted, urban environments fostered commercial activity, offering women access to markets, trade networks, and financial transactions that could increase their economic standing. Cities also housed notarial offices and church institutions, which played a crucial role in recording contracts, wills, and property transactions. Through engagement with these legal and bureaucratic systems, women learned to navigate paperwork, ensuring that their assets were protected and transferred to future generations.

Cities as Sites of Agency

The will of Luisa de Villalobos, a free Black woman who migrated from Nombre de Dios in Panama to Lima and later Potosí, exemplifies how cities enabled women to accumulate wealth through diverse commercial ventures in cities. Villalobos, who drafted the will in 1577, trafficked and had investments in fine European clothing, perfumes, and silver. Villalobos left a considerable amount of her wealth to two other Black women, Francisca Godines and Maria Fula, declaring “that to Francisca Godines or her closest heirs [you] pay the value of nine glass bottles of orange blossom water and thirteen flasks of the said water” and “that one yellow skirt with velvet trim, another trimmed with velvet, one doublet of fine wool and one wool cloth in which it is wrapped belongs to Costanca, morena, of the falconer of the Villa Real.”^[1] By drafting a will in 1577, Villalobos ensured the legal recognition of her property and debts while also making strategic donations or sales to other free Black or enslaved Black women that enabled them to accumulate wealth and property as well.

Potosí, Bolivia.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Cities in colonial Spanish America were also home to cofradías, religious brotherhoods, that provided monetary support to enslaved individuals so they could purchase their freedom. These organizations were supported by the church and its administrators, such as the Jesuits. Villalobos supported cofradías by leaving a portion of her wealth to a Jesuit priest, Father Medina. In her will, she states that she has “in the possession of María Fula” a large number of expensive European textiles and that it is her “will that with all of this Father Medina does what he likes.” This donation to the Jesuit priest likely supported cofradías in Potosí, thereby reinforcing the economic and legal networks that benefited marginalized groups in urban centers.

Similarly, the will and codicil of doña Isabel del Benino, a free indigenous woman, drafted in 1601, show how urban economies enabled indigenous women to accumulate wealth. She owned a rural estate near Potosí and conducted agricultural business with clerics in Potosí, such as “Father Joseph de Llanos, priest and vicar of this valley” whom she stated in her will owed her “a remainder of thirty pesos from some goats that I sold him.”^[2] Through her business with the clerics, she was able to accumulate wealth. In her will, she also leaves her remaining estate to her daughter, “my hija natural, doña María del Benino, whom I leave for my universal heir in all the remainder of my estate.” This statement in Benino’s will demonstrates yet another way cities and their legal framework allowed women to accumulate wealth and property, through knowledge of paperwork and the property rights granted to women in cities. Despite some racial and gendered restrictions, urban centers provided economic and legal opportunities that allowed African and Indigenous women to secure wealth and navigate the colonial system to their advantage.

The Church as a Legal Resource

The accessibility of church tribunals to commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous people played a crucial role in the widespread appeal of Catholicism in colonial Spanish America. Unlike civil courts, which often favored colonial elites and upheld rigid social hierarchies, ecclesiastical courts provided marginalized individuals with an alternative avenue for seeking justice. The Church’s willingness to hear petitions from society’s most vulnerable reinforced its image as the moral authority that protected the faithful and the followers, fostering loyalty and devotion among indigenous and African populations. By framing grievances in religious terms, petitioners could align themselves with the Church’s broader mission of upholding Christian values, further legitimizing Catholicism’s role in daily life.

Balck women laboring, Guiana, mid-19th century — Female workers in Guiana, mid-19th century.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The lawsuit filed by Natividad, an enslaved woman in Lima, against her master Doctor don Juan de la Reinaga in 1792, focused on his sexual abuse against her, exemplifies how church tribunals provided enslaved individuals with a means of contesting their mistreatment. In her petition, Natividad requested her freedom, telling the judge, who is a member of the Church, “Your superior understanding will mean that you will have understood that this case compels me to act by in the very least soliciting that you grant me the freedom that corresponds to me.”^[3] In a civil court, Natividad would have likely only petitioned to be sold to another master, as was dictated by the Spanish legal code of the time. However, due to her master’s position as a priest and member of the Church, she hoped that his immoral acts that violated the behavior expected of his position would cause the court to act in a more severe manner. At the beginning of her petition she states that “clearly my master forgot the obligations of his position, about Christianity and about authority when, on different occasions, he proposed his dishonest relations.”

Later, she once again appeals to the judge’s religious position, stating “I could very well lodge my appeal before the Señores of the Real Audiencia where the law of God has directed that slaves demand freedom whenever they seek the sanctuary and refuge that the law grants. But I wish that the secular courts should hear about the recklessness, indifferent, and tyrannies so foreign to leniency and self-restraint that an ecclesiastical priest professes. Thus, I renounce the indulgence of royal law and bring my case before the just commission of Your Most Illustrious Lord, who is very competent to reform the immoderate powers of a priest and decree what is in the interest of the pious cause of liberty that I claim.” In her language, Natividad clearly appealed to the religious nature of the court and the responsibility that they had for the behavior of a priest of their order.

*Plan for the ports at Nombre de Dios, Panama, circa the 17th century.*
*Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

Cases like Natividad’s reveal how enslaved and indigenous individuals viewed the Church not only as a site of religious devotion but more importantly as a powerful political institution where they could seek justice and social mobility. The fact that enslaved women, despite their legal and social subjugation, turned to the Church for recourse demonstrates the faith placed in its institutions, reinforcing its central role in colonial society as well as its popularity.

The wills of commoners, enslaved individuals, and indigenous people in colonial Spanish America reflect the profound influence of the Catholic Church. These documents not only served as legal instruments for dispensing wealth and property but also demonstrated investment in Catholic beliefs, rituals, and institutions. The consistent inclusion of religious donations, burial requests, and provisions for masses highlights how individuals—especially indigenous and African women—sought to secure their afterlife through the Church while reinforcing its central role in colonial society. Wills served as a final testament to religious devotion, illustrating how Catholicism shaped personal identity, social obligations, and cultural traditions across different racial and socioeconomic groups.

The will of Ana Copana, an indigenous woman born outside the city of La Plata who later became a property owner in the Andean highlands, exemplifies this deep religious commitment. Drafted in 1598, her will contains explicit instructions for her burial. She “order(s) that my [her] body be buried in the church of our Lord Saint Sebastian in the chapel of Our Lady of Copacabana and the customary alms be paid for the burial.”^[4] Her will also contains explicit instructions for the number of masses to be said for her soul. She orders that “a requiem mass be sung over my body…eight masses be said for my soul in the parish of Saint Sebastian…another six masses be said for my soul and my executors pay the customary alms…another six masses for my soul, by selling a little bit of corn that I leave in a pirua.” Her burial choice at a chapel of significance that is quite far from her deathbed and emphasis on masses reflect how indigenous individuals actively engaged with Catholic practices, reinforcing the Church’s importance in both life and death.

Catedral de La Plata.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, the 1658 will of doña Ana de Barba y Talora, a divorced mestiza woman from Potosí, further illustrates the Church’s pervasive role in shaping individual legacies. In her will she orders “that my [her] body be buried in the principal church of this city” and “that one hundred low masses be said for my soul by the clergy that my executors wish and the customary alms be paid from my property.”^[5] These requests indicate her desire for spiritual intercession. Beyond her own salvation, she left many religious paintings, statues, and cloths, such as “a statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception” and “a canvas of Saint Gertrudis without frame” to her daughter and niece. The number of items left to her family emphasize the importance of Catholicism in her everyday life and her desire that her family maintain the faith. Ana de Barba y Talora also paid for the continuation of her blind daughter’s care and musical education, charging her daughter’s new guardians with “continuing to teach music as he has begun with my daughter so that she is sufficiently skilled to procure her a place in a convent. There she can serve the choir, and be kept for this ministry.” This request emphasizes how convent life was seen as both a religious vocation and a form of security for women. Both of these women’s wills reflect the popularity and influence of Catholicism and the Catholic Church among commoners and the indigenous people of colonial Spanish America.

The experiences of indigenous and African women in colonial Spanish America challenge the notion of passive subjugation, revealing instead their agency in navigating economic, legal, and religious structures to their advantage. Cities like Potosí provided avenues for wealth accumulation, property ownership, and legal literacy, while the Catholic Church functioned as both a spiritual and political institution that reinforced social mobility. Through wills, lawsuits, and participation in religious organizations such as cofradías, these women asserted control over their assets, secured their family’s future, and engaged in Catholic traditions that reinforced the Church’s authority in their communities. The Church’s accessibility, particularly through its tribunals, further solidified its popularity, as marginalized individuals viewed it as an avenue for justice and social mobility. The examination of the legal and economic strategies of indigenous and African women highlights how they actively shaped colonial society, proving that even within a complex legal system and enslavement, they found ways to exercise power.

Hope Payton is a junior at the University of Texas pursuing a BA in history with minors in Spanish and UTeach Liberal Arts. While completing her undergraduate degree, she has been involved in the creation of an online exhibit examining modernity in nineteenth century Latin America with the Benson Latin American Collection. She looks forward to student teaching social studies at the high school level her senior year

^[1] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 34.

^[2] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 41.

^[3] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 208.

^[4] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 36.

^[5] Nora E. Jaffary and Jane E. Mangan, eds. Women in Colonial Latin America, 1526 to 1806: Texts and Contexts (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2018), 45.

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An Overlooked Success: How the Failed Annexation of Santo Domingo led to the Successful Prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan

The 19th century in American history is marked by rapid territorial expansion, from the Louisiana Purchase to the Mexican-American War. By 1850, the continental U.S. had taken a familiar shape. The Civil War interrupted this expansion as the nation grappled with the future of slavery and the role of the federal government. However, at the close of the war, during Reconstruction (1865-1877), territorial expansion resumed with the purchase of Alaska and the failed annexation of Santo Domingo, modern-day Dominican Republic. Yet, this attempt at expansion stands out from other additions to U.S. territory. The Annexation was not merely a land grab but a Reconstruction project, recognized as such by both its supporters and its detractors. It yielded no territorial gains, but surprisingly, it was this political fight over Santo Domingo that helped achieve one of Reconstruction’s great successes: the Prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan—America’s first organized terrorist threat.

On the first of July 1870, The Baltimore Sun reported that “The treaty for the annexation of the island of San Domingo to the United States was rejected by the Senate this afternoon by a vote of 28 to 28, being ten less than the required two-thirds to secure its ratification.”[1] The tie vote also saw thirteen abstentions, effectively killing what had become a pet project of President Ulysses S. Grant, though the initiative did not start with him. In 1867, Grant’s predecessor, President Johnson, intervened with the government of the recently independent Santo Domingo to aid in its defense against raids from Haiti. In his fourth annual message to Congress in 1868, Johnson detailed the support provided to Santo Domingo and expressed the desirability of acquiring land suitable for a naval base. He also proposed the idea of annexing both republics on the island of Hispaniola: Santo Domingo and Haiti.[2] However, Congress seemed uninterested in this suggestion, mainly because it had already allocated 7.2 million dollars to purchase Alaska in the spring of 1867, under the Johnson Administration.[3]

A High Price to Pay

During the Civil War, Russia was the only major European power to support the Union. Secretary of State William Seward[4] framed the purchase of Alaska as a gesture of goodwill towards the Czar, who was contending with his own conflict in Crimea.[5] Moreover, Congress appeared reluctant to purchase more land, particularly after the establishment of the Joint Special Committee on Retrenchment in 1866, aimed at cutting government spending.[6] The Civil War had cost nearly $5.2 billion, leaving a remaining debt of $3 billion (unadjusted for inflation). To put it into perspective, the annual budget of the government at the start of the war was $63.1 million. This financial reality made it clear in Washington that cost-cutting measures were necessary.[7] Additionally, President Johnson began losing allies in Congress that had helped him with the Alaska deal since he had tried to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in violation of the Tenure of Office Act, resulting in Johnson’s impeachment in February of 1868.[8] While Congress would not find Johnson guilty nor remove him from office, the American people effectively did so by electing Ulysses S. Grant in November 1868.

Picture of Annexation demonstration in San Domingo City--the Seybo regiment in the citadel, bearing the U.S. colors — *Annexation demonstration in San Domingo City–the Seybo regiment in the citadel, bearing the U.S. colors.* Source: Library of Congress

In his relatively short first inaugural address, President Grant spoke of bolstering law enforcement in the South as new terror threats arose, touched on a foreign policy of mutual respect, promised to see the 15^th Amendment ratified, and pledged to pursue respectful policies regarding the Native Americans. As important as these subjects were, Grant spent most of his inaugural address talking about debt[9]: “A great debt has been contracted in securing to us and our posterity the Union. The payment of this, principal and interest, as well as the return to a specie basis as soon as it can be accomplished without material detriment to the debtor class or to the country at large, must be provided for.” [10] In over two paragraphs, he laid down a clear mandate to cut spending and pay off the debt.

Indeed, Grant would succeed in this reconstruction project by 1870, having reduced the public debt to $3.1 billion.[11] For Grant and many other radical Republicans, paying off the debt was a part of Reconstruction. However, this prioritization of debt reduction would undermine Congressional support for other Reconstruction projects like the Freedman’s Bureau and the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo. Opposition to the purchase was often linked to its financial cost, as well as broader tensions surrounding the abolition of slavery and the challenges of Reconstruction. While prejudice against the Dominican people was a factor for some, the resistance seemed more rooted in larger national debates of the era than in targeted animosity toward Santo Domingo. Democrat Representative Fernando Wood would say in debating against the treaty, “I am opposed to the San Domingo annexation, not only because of a large sum of money at this time, but also it is another step in the demoralization of the American People”[12]. In this case, “demoralization” refers to the effects of Grant’s Reconstruction.

Map of Provincia de santo Domingo 1861 - for An Overlooked Success — *Provincia de Santo Domingo 1861.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

In a letter to President Baez from President Grant on July 13, 1869. This tells us Buenaventura Baez reached out to Grant sometime between January and July 1869. Whatever Baez’s emissary said to Grant piqued his curiosity enough to greet him as a “Great and Good Friend. In the letter, Grant tells Baez that he would be sending Brevet Brigadier General Orville E. Babcock[13] as a special agent to assess the viability of annexing Santo Domingo.[14] Babcock went on to make two trips to the island and serve as the President’s chief emissary in the annexation negotiations. Once there, Babcock quickly realized the extent of Santo Domingo’s disputes with its neighbor, Haiti, with whom it shared the island of Hispaniola. Although Haiti was the smaller country on the island, it had a larger population compared with the sparsely populated Santo Domingo.[15] After gaining independence from Spain in 1821, Haiti invaded Santo Domingo within weeks, leading to a period of occupation. Despite its disadvantage in manpower, Santo Domingo prevailed in the face of a Haitian occupation until 1844.[16] Following its independence, Haitian raids along the borders became a regular occurrence. During this period of rising Dominican nationalism, caudillos (military strongmen or dictators) like Buenaventura Baez seized the moment to gain power, often for personal enrichment. Baez increased military spending to ward off Hattian raids, but this led to a mounting national debt, which reached $1.3 million by 1859[17]. As a result, Baez began seeking protectorate assistance from foreign powers, including the United States.[18]. In his diaries from his second trip to the Island, Babcock notes, “He (Baez) seemed in good spirit, much in favor of annex.”[19] Indeed, there seemed to be widespread support within Santo Domingo.

The Role of Fredrick Douglass

When Babcock returned to Grant, having confirmed that Baez was interested in Santo Domingo being annexed, Grant began using his influence to promote the idea. When word had reached Charles Sumner, he asserted that the people of Santo Doming were opposed to such an arrangement. In response, Grant enlisted Fredrick Douglass to travel to the island in 1871 and determine whether the citizens would support such a move. Douglass had long advocated for normalizing relations with black republics such as Haiti and Santo Domingo.[20] In 1873 he was happy to report that “they want to join their country to the United States and to become citizens of the United States.”[21] While Douglass’ report was based on anecdotal evidence from his conversations with the island’s inhabitants, there had also been a referendum ordered by President Baez with an admittedly low turnout. Still, of the 15,169 votes cast, only 11 were cast against annexation.[22] Despite this turnout, people like Douglas and Grant pointed to this result to demonstrate a political will on the part of the Dominican people to join the US.

Portrait of Frederick Douglass — *Retouched portrait of Frederick Douglass taken in the 1840s.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

Frederick Douglass was not simply advocating for territorial expansion. He viewed the annexation of the island as an opportunity to challenge prevailing prejudices and demonstrate the potential for all people, regardless of race. In his lecture on the annexation of Santo Domingo, Douglas compared the Spanish and French attempts to reenslave the black and mulatto inhabitants to the actions of the Klan in the South, who, after being paroled at Appomattox now formed a terrorist group to strengthen white supremacy. In his own words: “The fact is significant and has a lesson for those men in our county who are still endeavoring by violence and midnight crimes to worry the American negro back into slavery. The negro is no less a man here than in Santo Domingo.”[23] Thus, for Douglass, the annexation of Santo Domingo was closely associated with Reconstruction and civil rights, providing African Americans in the South with an example of resistance to white supremacy. Grant, like Douglas, linked the proposed annexation to the widespread terror of the Ku Klux Klan across the South.

Annexation as Part of Reconstruction

Grant’s first term was marked by intractable domestic issues, from the fight for the Fifteenth Amendment to the war he waged against the Ku Klux Klan in the South. Thus, he turned to foreign policy for what he thought would be an easy victory via the annexation of Santo Domingo. When he argued for annexation, he cited all the usual reasons for the acquisition, such as fertile soil and tropical produce, and strategic interests, such as having a naval base in the Caribbean to bolster the Monroe Doctrine, all common arguments made by the initiative’s supporters in Congress. But Grant went even further. In a memorandum issued to the State Department describing the benefits of the proposed annexation, Grant writes:

Caste has no foothold in San Domingo. It is capable of supporting the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate. The present difficulty in bringing all parts of the United States to a happy unity and love of country grows out of the color prejudice. The prejudice is a senseless one, but it exists. The colored man cannot be spared until his place is supplied, but with a refuge like San Domingo, his worth here would soon be discovered, and he would soon receive such recognition as to induce him to stay.[24]

Frederick Douglass (seated, left) with The Commissioners to Santo Domingo for An Overlooked Success — *Frederick Douglass (seated, left) with The Commissioners to Santo Domingo, Brooklyn Navy Yard, January 1871.* Source: Getty’s Open Content Program.

The quote above shows that the annexation of Santo Domingo was wrapped up in Grant’s vision for Reconstruction. This excerpt shows that Grant wanted to keep Black communities in the US while also providing them with a refuge from Ku Klux violence. By the time of this writing, the emigration movement had gained considerable traction, even among the freedmen’s community. With the advent of Klan terror in the South, many Black communities sought refuge in places like Haiti and Liberia. Elias Hill, a notable leader of a Black church from South Carolina—where Klan activity had been incredibly violent—led the whole of his congregation in a move to Liberia.[25] However, offering a place to flee wasn’t the only way Grant linked Santo Domingo to Reconstruction. He also saw the annexation of Santo Domingo as a way of ending slavery in other parts of the hemisphere. In a speech after the treaty was rejected, Grant urged Congress to reconsider, arguing that an American government on the island would prompt enslaved people in the Caribbean to flee to Santo Domingo as a refuge. He further asserted that “Porto Rico and Cuba will have to abolish slavery as a measure of self-preservation to retain their laborers.”[26]

Grant wasn’t the only one that connected Santo Domingo to the Reconstruction, those opposed the annexation also made this link. In 1870, many of the arguments used by Democrats against the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment were echoed in their opposition to annexing Santo Domingo. Representative Fernando Wood, for instance, recycled his arguments against the Fifteenth Amendment in a Congressional debate stating, “As wicked as is the attempt to compel the fusion of two such opposite races existing among ourselves, it would be far more suicidal and criminal to add the people of San Domingo also.”[27] Importantly, when Wood referred to the “fusion of two opposite races,” he was speaking of the impact of the amendment on the communities of freed blacks born in the United States, as it granted them citizenship. Indeed, the democrats’ opposition to the proposed annexation reflected their broader resistance to naturalizing freed Blacks.

Picture of Ulysses S. Grant on horseback - for An Overlooked Success — *Ulysses S Grant on horseback.* Source: Wikimedia Commons

Predictably, Democrats opposed the annexation of a Latin American republic with a significant Black and mixed-race population. Still, those sentiments were shared by less radical Republicans like Senator Justin S. Morrill, who allied with Charles Sumner in his opposition to the treaty. In an 1871 speech, Morill spoke of the formerly enslaved Americans who had recently been made citizens by the 15^th Amendment, saying, “It is useless to disguise the fact that the people of a portion of our present territory have not become assimilated with the American people and American Institutions, and the time when they will do so must be computed, not in years, but by generations.”[28] Even critics of the acquisition recognized the connection between the proposed annexation and Reconstruction. Sentiments like those expressed by Morrill and Sumner led to fissures in the Republican party, leaving President Grant feeling betrayed.

A Misunderstanding with Mr. Sumner

Ultimately, it was Charles Sumner’s refusal, as Chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which prevented the treaty from being passed. While he had supported the annexation of Alaska just a few years earlier, he refused to admit Santo Domingo. Sumner, along with Thadeus Stevens, had led the radical wing of the Republican party, but the two began to diverge when it came to handling Reconstruction. The more radical Stevens thought the South should be treated as conquered territory, while Sumner sought a conditioned reconciliation with the South.[29] Due to his leadership among the Radicals and his well-established support for Reconstruction, Grant expected Sumner’s support. Before moves had been made in Congress, Grant shared an early draft of the treaty with Sumner, to which Sumner promised his “friendly consideration.” Grant, still relatively new to politics, interpreted this as support for the acquisition.[30] This misunderstanding undermined Grant’s efforts to secure the treaty and led to him to push for a vote in the Senate without the necessary support from his party.

Sumner had his reasons for not supporting the treaty, some of which, as noted above, were rooted on pseudoscientific ideas of geographic racial determination.[31] But Sumner also sympathized with the Dominican nationalist arguments and distrusted Baez, whom he viewed as a despot trying to sell off his country. “A convention was appointed, not elected, which proceeded to nominate Baez for the term of four years, not as President, but as Dictator. Declining the latter title, the triumphant conspirator accepted that of Garn Ciudadano or Grand Citizen with unlimited powers…Naturally, such a man would sell his own country.” [32] Siding with the Dominican Nationalists, Sumner thought that support for the treaty represented a betrayal of its inhabitants by Baez, who he characterized as a villain.

Painting of General Gregorio Luperón — *General Gregorio Luperón – Monumento a los Héroes de la Restauración.*
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A correspondent of Sumner’s, General Gregorio Luperón, a leader in the Dominican Nationalist movement, wrote to Grant in late 1869 expressing his anger with the U.S. Navy in the sinking of the Telegraph, a ship used to transport Dominican Nationalists from Haiti to Cuba. President Johnson sank the ship as part of his established protectorate, but now he directed his anger squarely at Grant. The General wrote, “Spain, in spite of its traditional quixotism, rejected the cowardly Baez’s undignified petition, and to our understanding, the Spanish Government’s course of action was more honorable than yours…Your Excellency had the weakness to order, to authorize the destruction of Telegraph, accepting the immoral decree of Baez’s mercenary Senate.”[33] Issuing the protectorate and the actions of the U.S. Navy were primary reasons for Sumner’s opposition, and would cite incidents like the sinking of the Telegraph in his arguments against the annexation: “It is difficult to see how we can condemn with proper, whole-hearted reprobation, our own domestic Ku Klux with its fearful outrages while the President puts himself at the head of a powerful and costly proceeding operating abroad in defiance of International Law and the Constitution of the United States.”[34] For Sumner, Grant’s actions, which he viewed as violations of the Constitution and an “usurpation of war powers,” undermined the moral authority Grant had built through his prosecutions of the Klan.

The Santo Domingo Purge

In the fight for the annexation treaty, many in Grant’s cabinet saw that Santo Domingo was a losing battle long before Grant. Grant pressed on, ordering his department heads to spend political capital to have the treaty passed. Despite these efforts, support for the treaty was never strong. After many in his cabinet had sided with Charles Sumner, whose support was crucial, Grant began to rail against his disloyal cabinet. According to a diary entry by Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, Grant claimed that “the Secretary of the Interior is opposed to it; the Attorney-General says nothing in its favor, but sneers at it; and the Secretary of Treasury does not open his mouth.”[35] Indeed, Grant’s break with Sumner and less radical Republicans led to a purge within his cabinet, and he began dismissing all those members of his administration who served Sumner. While this may initially appear vindictive, there was some positive outcomes. Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar, a long-time friend of Charles Sumner who had opposed the treaty, Was initially recommended for the position of AG by Sumner. On July 15, 1870, Hoar received a letter requesting his resignation.[36] A month earlier, Grant submitted a new name for Attorney General, a man named Amos T. Akerman.[37]

But Akerman’s work as head of the new Department of Justice has largely been a footnote to history. Akerman, a former Confederate officer who has become a staunch Republican, had been personally threatened by the Klan for his shift in allegiance. He would go on to aggressively prosecute the Klan, effectively dismantling the organization for nearly four decades.[38] His appointment seems providential, considering the Act to Establish the Department of Justice does not mention civil rights.[39] Furthermore, it was the Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment and not a judiciary committee that passed it. This represented a move toward civil service reform and a cost-saving measure.[40] Indeed, Akerman ran up against repeated funding shortages throughout the Klan trials. However, Akerman oversaw the prosecutions heavily and even directly called on Grant to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in several counties in South Carolina. While coincidental, the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo led directly to one of the most successful reconstruction projects, the prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan.[41] What appeared to be a typical territorial land grab was, in fact, closely connected to the broader goals of the Reconstruction.

Conclusion

In the end, the proposed annexation of Santo Domingo failed, defeated by a strange alliance between well-meaning radical Republicans and racist Democrats, killing Grant pet project and limiting his vision for Reconstruction. Yet, the political fight over Santo Domingo played a pivotal role in staffing the newly founded Department of Justice with a leader who possessed the will to Prosecute the Ku Klux Klan. Unlike other territorial expansions, this attempt was directly linked to the question of Reconstruction, and not only by President Grant and his supporters, but also by those opposed to the treaty. Regardless of the failure to secure the annexation, it is clear that the debate surrounding this Reconstruction initiative contributed to one of the era’s greatest successes.

Acknowledgements:
This article originates in Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s capstone undergraduate seminar.

Miguel Angel Canto Jr. is a first-generation college student and hopeful law school applicant, expected to graduate this May with a Bachelor’s in History and Philosophy. He is working on his undergraduate honors thesis on the establishment of the U.S. Department of Justice. His research interests include the legal history, history of ideas, history of republics and American history, particularly Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.

[1] “The San Domingo Treaty Rejected,” The Baltimore Sun, July 1, 1870, https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-baltimore-sun-the-san-domingo-treaty/158127723/.

[2] “December 8, 1868: Fourth Annual Message to Congress | Miller Center,” October 20, 2016, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-8-1868-fourth-annual-message-congress.

[3] United States and Russia, eds., Treaty Concerning the Cession of the Russian Possessions in North America by His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias to the United States of America (Washington, 1867), https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.treatyconcerning00unit/.

[4] Secretary of State for President Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.

[5] “The Alaska Purchase, Articles and Essays, Meeting of Frontiers, Digital Collections,” web page, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, accessed December 1, 2024, https://www.loc.gov/collections/meeting-of-frontiers/articles-and-essays/alaska/the-alaska-purchase/.

[6] The 39th Congress, “Concurrent Resolution Providing for a Joint Select Committee on Retrenchment” (Congressional Globe, 1866).

[7] “History of the Debt,” TreasuryDirect, accessed August 28, 2024, https://www.treasurydirect.gov/government/historical-debt-outstanding/.

[8] “The Impeachment Trial of President Andrew Johnson | Century Presentations | Articles and Essays | A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1875 | Digital Collections | Library of Congress,” web page, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, accessed October 19, 2024, https://www.loc.gov/collections/century-of-lawmaking/articles-and-essays/century-presentations/impeachment/.

[9] Grant Ulysses, “First Inaugural Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant,” Text, Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O.: for sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., 1989, March 4, 1869), https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/grant1.asp.

[10] First Inaugural Addresses, Grant, 1869.

[11] “Public Debt of the United States. 1870, 1880, 1890 and 1902. [Washington, D. C. 1903].,” online text, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, accessed December 4, 2024, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.2080020a/?st=gallery.

[12] United States Congress, “The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session Forty-First Congress; Together with an Appendix, Embracing the Laws Passed at That Session, (1870): 3034-3038.,” Book, UNT Digital Library (John C. Rives, 1870), United States, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30886/m1/209/.

[13] Babcock had served as one of Grant’s aides-de-camp during the Civil War.

[14] “Letter to President Buenaventura Baez of the Dominican Republic | The American Presidency Project,” accessed November 6, 2024, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/letter-president-buenaventura-baez-the-dominican-republic.

[15] John B. Crume, President Grant and His Santo Domingo Project: A Study of Ill Judgement (Florida Atlantic University, 1972) p. 11.

[16] “History of the Dominican Republic, Government, Facts, President, & Flag, Britannica,” October 28, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Dominican-Republic.

[17] Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo, “Report of the Commission of Inquiry to Santo Domingo” 1 (1871): I–II, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.cow/reciqsadm0001&i=1, p. 178.

[18] Luis Martínez-Fernández, “Caudillos, Annexationism, and the Rivalry between Empires in the Dominican Republic, 1844–1874,” Diplomatic History 17, no. 4 (1993): 571–97, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24912228.

[19] Orville E. Babcock, “Orville E. Babcock Diary: The Second Journey to Santo Domingo November 8th to December 2nd, 1869” (Mississippi State University, 1869).

[20] Merline Pitre, “Frederick Douglass and the Annexation of Santo Domingo,” The Journal of Negro History 62, no. 4 (October 1977): 390–400, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/stable/2717114.

[21] Frederick Douglass, “Frederick Douglass Papers: Speech, Article, and Book File, 1846-1894; Speeches and Articles by Douglass, 1846-1894; Undated; ‘Santo Domingo,’ Manuscripts, Typescripts, and Fragments; 1 of 5” (1873), mss11879, box 28; reel 18, Manuscript Division, https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss11879.28013/.

[22] Harold T. Pinkett, “Efforts to Annex Santo Domingo to the United States, 1866-1871,” The Journal of Negro History 26, no. 1 (January 1941): 12–45, https://doi.org/10.2307/2715048.

[23] Douglass, “Frederick Douglass Papers.”

[24] Ulysses S. Grant, “Memorandum,” The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, November 1,1869-October 31, 1870, edit. John Simon, vol. 20 (Mississippi State University, 1995), https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/usg-volumes/20, p. 74.

[25] Scott Farris, Freedom on Trial: The First Post-Civil War Battle over Civil Rights and Voter Suppression (Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2020,) p. 59.

[26] Ulysses S. Grant, “Making the Case for US Annexation,” in The Dominican Republic Reader : History, Culture, Politics, ed. Eric P. Roorda and et al. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, n.d.), 158–60, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/detail.action?docID=1689436.

[27] United States Congress, “The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session Forty-First Congress; Together with an Appendix, Embracing the Laws Passed at That Session, (1870): 3034-3038.,” Book, UNT Digital Library (John C. Rives, 1870), United States, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30886/m1/209/, p. 1187.

[28] Justin S. Morrill, “Opposition to US Annexation,” in The Dominican Republic Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Eric P. Roorda, et al. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/detail.action?docID=1689436.

[29] Fergus M. Bordewich, Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction, First United States edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023,) p. 14-15.

[30] Chernow, Grant, p. 691-692.

[31] Hidalgo, “Charles Sumner and the Annexation of the Dominican Republic.”

[32] Charles Sumner, “Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the St. Domingo Resolutions; Delivered in the Senate of the United States,” March 27, 1871, HathiTrust, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112102553197&seq=3&q1=santo+domingo.

[33] Gregorio Luperón, “Dominican Nationalism versus Annexation,” in The Dominican Republic Reader : History, Culture, Politics, ed. Eric P. Roorda and et al. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 171–72, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utxa/reader.action?docID=1689436&ppg=188.

[34] Sumner, “Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the St. Domingo Resolutions; Delivered in the Senate of the United States.”

[35] Chernow, Grant, p. 698.

[36] Ulysses S. Grant, From Grant to Hoar, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, November 1,1869-October 31, 1870, ed. John Simon, vol. 20 (Mississippi State University, 1995), https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/usg-volumes/20, p. 170.

[37] Ulysses S. Grant, Appointment of Amos T. Akerman The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, November 1,1869-October 31, 1870, ed. John Simon, vol. 20 (Mississippi State University, 1995), https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/usg-volumes/20.

[38] Farris, Freedom on Trial, p. 78.

[39]An Act to Establish the Department of Justice.” P.L. 41-97 Stat.162, 1870 U.S.C. 41st Congress. Justice.gov, 2013. https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/jmd/legacy/2013/10/23/act-pl41-97.pdf.

[40]Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Creation of the Department of Justice: Professionalization Without Civil Rights or Civil Service,” Stanford Law Review 66, no. 1 (2014): 121–72, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24246730.

[41] Farris, p. 283.

Abolitionist and Civil War Chronicler: The Unique Perspective of the Thomas Jackson Letters

Thomas Jackson’s story has been largely untold, but the record he left behind demands historical analysis. His erudite letters have much to contribute to our understanding of the abolitionist movement, the evolution of attitudes to race, and everyday experiences of the U.S. Civil War. Jackson’s status as a British immigrant also provides us with an added analytical layer in which to view American abolition, race, and the Civil War in a transnational context.[1] In this article, I introduce the Thomas Jackson Collection and what we can learn from it.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Thomas Jackson, whose life came to be absorbed by the spirited abolitionist movement of his day, became a successful rope-making trader not long after his relocation to America, circa 1829. His father, John Jackson, who “suffered persecution of a year’s imprisonment and three times in the pillory for what he spoke and published in the cause of the revolted colonies,” served as a consistent moral compass for his son.

Born into England’s working class, Thomas Jackson admired the newly christened American Republic.[2] Although he knew, by his own account, next to nothing about slavery in America before he emigrated there, Jackson found his spiritual calling in political activism—abolitionism, in particular.

Jackson’s path to American politics was far from linear. Born on December 7 1805, Thomas grew up in the rural town of Ilkeston, roughly fifty miles northeast of Birmingham. There he was raised, along with six siblings, by working-class parents and likely received no more than a basic education. Despite his modest upbringing, by the time he passed away in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1878, he came to be known more for his impassioned abolitionist work than for the trade he was born into.

Jackson empathized with the anti-slavery cause after witnessing the stunning inhumanity of an American slave market. Because of this, he supported the Union when the war broke out, hoping that the terrible violence would at least serve a worthy purpose: bringing an end to slavery. In October 1862, with the war grinding on perhaps longer than anticipated, Thomas wrote that “the traitors [i.e. the confederate states] have now [received] fair warning; that if they do not lay down their arms by Jan. 1. 1863. slavery will be abolished in all rebellious states and districts…I most devoutly pray that they may continue obstinate…That is now the only hope for freedom every were [sic] in the United States.”[3]

Image of the original Thomas Jackson letter to the editor. All scans are reproduced with permission from the owner. — *Images of the original letter to the editor. All scans are reproduced with permission from the owner.*

Image of the original Thomas Jackson letter letter to the editor. All scans are reproduced with permission from the owner.

Judging by his letters alone, it’s clear that Thomas Jackson embraced abolitionism as a core part of his identity. By extension, he considered himself a purist when it came to honoring the “free principles and republican government” for which the United States ostensibly stood.[4]

Because values like individual liberty and freedom of expression transcended national borders, it mattered little to him that he was born in England and, therefore, lived in the United States as an immigrant.

The collection

These strongly-held ideals shine through in almost every letter and newspaper editorial that make up the bulk of the Thomas Jackson Collection. His reports on slavery and the Civil War have been painstakingly transcribed, organized, and curated to offer historians a rare glimpse into a unique abolitionist who was entangled in both American and British politics. While the original letters are now safely housed in the Library of Congress’ Manuscript Division, their digitized copies are fully accessible online thanks to the efforts made by Jackson’s descendant, John Paling, and his team, to organize and digitize the collection.[5]

The Civil War and the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement have of course been studied in depth. Many of these studies take a top-down perspective. Thomas Jackson’s collection of letters provides a valuable and much-needed grassroots perspective. It is rare to find source material written from Jackson’s vantage point, that is letters penned by someone from a working-class background who also understood the value of recording and commenting on the magnitude of his historical moment: America’s mid-nineteenth-century political crisis.

Jackson arrived in the United States in 1829. Still in his twenties, he held an idealized view of the country that would soon be complicated by his encounter with the brutalities of slavery and violent division. Like other immigrants, he primarily sought fresh opportunities that had been closed off to him in his home country. In this case, his father’s political imprisonment drove the family to bankruptcy.[6] As such, Thomas and his brother Edward suffered from meager resources once setting foot on the American continent. Despite the initial challenges, he and his brother managed to secure their footing in Reading, Pennsylvania, by using the local Schuylkill Canal to establish a rope-making business.

“…we are doing a large business. Generally employ about 20 men and eight boys…Annexed is an engraving of our wheel houses, Hackle lofts, and engine house & a part of the walk & the office. We have a very nice place here now and fast improving.”[7]

Lithography of two enslaved people that reads: Am I not a man and a brother? Am I not a woman and a sister? — *From the cover of the 1866 annual report of the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Despite facing near penury, Thomas Jackson’s entrepreneurial spirit eventually allowed him to rise to a prosperous position, giving him resources very different from those he was born to. His relative financial success enabled him to become a kind of working-class autodidact. His lucid letters, which are notable for the quality of the prose and the artistic flourish of his penmanship, suggest a level of learning that was mainly confined to the privileged elite of the day.

Although he became a successful businessman in America, the country failed to fully live up to his expectations. The young republic, a self-proclaimed land of opportunity and equality, was also home to what he considered a blight on the American experience: the continuation of slavery.

In a letter to his cousin, Caleb Slater, back in England, which was subsequently published in a local newspaper, Jackson claimed to have first witnessed a slave market in 1833. Given the “glowing ideas of free America” his father had instilled in him as a boy, he “never dreamed that such a thing was possible as liberty and slavery existing together under a free government, and just laws.” He was adamant: I “Never thought such a thing could be; do not now think it can be; know now it cannot be.”[8]

Stereograph showing a man with a rifle sitting outside a commercial building used as a slave market, bearing a sign "Auction & Negro Sales" on Whitehall Street. — *The Slave Market. Atlanta, Georgia. Source: Library of Congress*

From this introduction, Thomas went on to describe the slave auction scene underway in Richmond, Virginia, where a “most interesting young woman…as white as [his] own English wife” stood at the auction block before a “queer-looking crowd [of] dirty mouthed, rum-drinking tobacco chewers…liable to become the property, and entirely subject to the power and the lust of the grossest brute among them, if he bid high enough!”[9]

Jackson was enraged by the harsh realities of a slave republic. He used his unique perspective to approach the abolitionist movement with a distinct strategy. He leveraged his connections in England to provide British citizens firsthand reports of slavery in America, as he did with the letter above. In doing so, he hoped his visceral and emotional first-person stories about slavery’s horrors would influence British public opinion. Eventually, he hoped the British government would be discouraged from supporting the American cotton trade, which was intertwined with slavery. When the Civil War came, he doubled down on these efforts, as he became aware that Britain’s “freedom-hating” aristocracy, with the government’s tacit support, secretly aided the “villainous rebels” as a means of keeping the cotton industry alive.[10]

Examining Jackson’s rhetoric and the political positions they reveal enable us to answer questions about the nature of nineteenth-century abolitionism. Were the aims of British abolitionists living in the United States more radical than those of their compatriots living back in England?[11] If so, were the political differences more a matter of class or of vantage point? In other words, did it require witnessing slavery firsthand for an abolitionist to draw a harder line on the issue, or were other factors, such as social standing, more important in delineating the moderates from the radicals?

*Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation / The Strobridge Lith. Co., Cincinnati. Source: Library of Congress*

If we were to view Jackson’s political discourse alongside the writings of the British metropole’s largely elite circle of abolitionists, it’s easy to discern a more fiery, visceral retelling of slavery’s horrors—and of the urgent need to abolish it immediately and by any means necessary.[12] Early in the war, before the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, Jackson witnessed the country “in all directions…being desolated by fire and sword and shell” and declared that “slavery must perish, with all its abettors.”[13] Perhaps traveling to Harrisburg and seeing firsthand the rebels and Union soldiers make preparations for further carnage enabled him to imagine not a gradual but rather an immediate—and, if necessary, violent—end to the institution of slavery, a “doom it so richly deserves.”[14]

Thomas Jackson’s letters reveal an unwavering commitment to abolition; they also show striking ways in which race underpinned life both in the US and in Britain. There is little doubt as to the value of this source material for scholars studying race, particularly in early America, for Jackson’s writings betray his struggles to come to terms with race and racism in his adopted country.

As an abolitionist, Jackson clearly intended to convince readers of the fundamental humanity of Black slaves and the need to guarantee equality to vulnerable non-white groups.[15] But Jackson was also a product of his time and he displayed attitudes rooted in this.

Depiction of the Anti-Slavery Meeting on the Boston Common held in 1851. People are gathered under a tree, there is text on the meeting on the lower end of the picture. — *Anti-Slavery Meeting on the [Boston] Common. Source: New York Public Library*

As shown in his account of the slave market above, Jackson obsessed over the surprising “whiteness” of many enslaved people he encountered. He was scandalized to see men and women with complexions similar to his own being held in bondage. Returning to his account of the slave market, we find a long digression into the racial characteristics of both the slaves and their would-be owners:

I suppose I saw 15 or 20 sold, of all shades of colour [sic.] from black to three-quarters white. Then they brought out a good-looking, well-dressed, modest, and most interesting young woman, about 23 or 24 years old, and, to all appearance to me, as white as my own English wife. She had a little daughter about three years old by her side, and a beautiful babe of about a year old in her arms, both, for all I could see, as white as my own children at home…the offspring of slave mothers have been whitening, until the very small taint of negro blood is not perceivable in many.[16]

Jackson went on to describe the men placing bids as “dirty-mouthed” and “seemingly not half as white as their victims,” preparing to subject an example of “feminine loveliness” to their “power and [their] lust.”[17]

To him, the white complexion of many of these Black slaves seemed to underline the patent absurdity and cruelty of slavery, especially when placed against the “brute” status of the southern whites he encountered.

There’s little doubt, too, that Jackson knew evoking whiteness would be effective in garnering sympathy from white readers. In a later letter describing the lecture tours organized by abolitionists, in which runaway slaves featured prominently, he doubled down on this rhetoric. Many of the former slaves, he writes, were “so white that no one would ever suspect that they had a drop of African blood in their veins.”[18] In this way, whiteness became a term loaded with value for Jackson even as he denounced the racism that underpinned slavery.

The work of Mary Niall Mitchell and Martha Cutter, among others, points out that American abolitionists readily employed the language of whiteness as a tool to sway public opinion on the issue.[19] Although he was born in Britain, Thomas Jackson, used a similar rhetorical strategy. He may have arrived at this independently or adopted it from wider writings.

It is worth considering the implications behind an English immigrant’s echoing of American attitudes about race. Given that Jackson largely aimed his writing to English readers, his apparent confidence that an English readership would be equally moved by American racial rhetoric is significant. Indeed, this challenges assumptions about the uniqueness of American racial thought.

None of this is to say that Thomas Jackson ignored enslaved people who could not “pass” for whites. Nor did he mean to suggest that slaves with darker skins were somehow less deserving of sympathy or equality. Further down in his letter concerning former slaves, he mentions he employed darker-skinned freedmen, one of whom was a “smart fellow,” another a “deep thinker,” and another who demonstrated “intellect…of a high order.”[20] Yet when quoting them directly, he transformed his interlocutors into characters out of a minstrel show, capturing their voices with terms like “day” instead of “they” and “den” instead of “then.”[21] In short, his commitment to abolitionism was sometimes contradicted by his racialized language.

Most people don’t know Thomas Jackson but he left behind a remarkable historical record. This provides an opportunity for further reflection on a critical moment in the nation’s history. As such, this collection deserves a broad readership.

[1] For representative scholarship, see Mason, Matthew. “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century.” The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2002): 665–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3491468.

[2] “Article_1859-03-01 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. July 28, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/articles/article_1859-03-01/.

[3] “TJ_Letter_1862-08-12 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/.

[4] “Article_1844-10-26 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. July 28, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/articles/article_1844-10-26/.

[6] “Article_1825-12-24 Bankruptcy – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/other-documents/np_1825-12-24-from-london-gazette/.

[7] Thomas Jackson in letter to cousin Caleb Slater, June 3, 1856. “TJ_Letter_1856-06-03 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1856-06-03/.

[8] “A Native of Ilkeston in an American Slave Market.” Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/. Published in Eastwood, England area newspaper September 11, 1862.

[9] Ibid.

[10] “TJ_Letter_1864-09-01 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1864-09-00/.

[11] For British abolitionism, see Huzzey, Richard. “The Slave Trade and Victorian ‘Humanity.’” Victorian Review 40, no. 1 (2014): 43–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24497035.

[12] For comparative analysis of British and American abolitionism, see Mason, Matthew. “The Battle of the Slaveholding Liberators: Great Britain, the United States, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century.” The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2002): 665–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/3491468, and Mason, Matthew. “Keeping up Appearances: The International Politics of Slave Trade Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.” The William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 809–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40467542.

[13] “———.” 2023d. Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/.

[14]“TJ_Letter_1863-08-20 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1863-08-20/. In addition to political commentary, this letter provides detailed description of Confederate movements at this time which would also prove useful to military historians of the Civil War.

[15] Since Thomas Jackson expressed disapproval of universal voting rights, we should interpret his understanding of equality to be of a limited nature, i.e., the guarantee of “natural rights” for all. For his criticisms on full democracy, see for instance: “TJ_Letter_1862-10-12 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2023. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 22, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-10-12/.

[16] “———.” 2023e. Thomas Jackson Letters. August 25, 2023. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1862-08-12/.

[17] Ibid.

[18] “TJ_Letter_1864-04-18 – Thomas Jackson Letters.” 2024. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 27, 2024. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1864-04-18/.

[19] Cutter, Martha J. “‘As White as Most White Women’: Racial Passing in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves and the Origins of a Multivalent Term.” American Studies 54, no. 4 (2016): 73–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44982355. Mitchell, Mary Niall. “‘Rosebloom and Pure White,’ or so It Seemed.” American Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2002): 369–410. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30042226.

[20] “———.” 2024b. Thomas Jackson Letters. March 27, 2024. https://thomasjacksonletters.com/letters/letter_1864-04-18/.

[21] Ibid.

From Africa to Austin: Bondy Washington

Census records are invaluable historical documents, but they are frustratingly limited, especially when you try to use them to tell the stories of formerly enslaved people. One example is Bondy Washington, a woman likely trafficked from Africa into slavery who became a long-term Austin resident.

For the past three years, I have been working with Dr. Edmund T. Gordon to create demographic maps of Austin, Texas from 1880-1950. These maps were created with massive amounts of census data—over 372,000 people’s information was transcribed from thousands of scanned pages across seven decades. When we completed this large database, I calculated some other large aggregate figures, beginning with the 1880 census.

In 1880, 49.99 percent of Austin residents were born in Texas. In today’s terms, that would mean almost half a million people, but back in the late nineteenth century, this figure was less than six thousand or 5,481, to be precise. Digging deeper into the census figures, I found an intriguing data point—one. In 1880, one person in Austin was born in Africa. Her name was Bondy Washington, and she was a Black woman.

At first, I thought that this could be a transcription error. I checked the original document and saw that the person recording her information had in fact written “Africa” as her birthplace.

Bondy Washington in the 1880 Census

I also found Bondy in the 1900 Census. Again, Bondy’s birthplace is recorded as Africa.

Bondy Washington in the 1900 Census

Bondy wasn’t in my database again after 1900, but I became fascinated with her story and decided to dig deeper. The earliest record that I can confidently match to her dates from 1870. In this census, Bondy’s birthplace is recorded as “Congo R., Africa.” She is listed as living with a man named Frank, who, in other censuses, is recorded as her husband. Several city directories from 1880 to 1900 mention Frank, all associating him with the same address—821 E 11^th Street, in a neighborhood then known as Robertson’s Hill. It is safe to assume that Bondy also lived there and that her exclusion was probably related to her gender. City directories from 1903 and 1906 associate Bondy with the same address. Frank, who was left out of these documents, possibly passed away between 1900 and 1903.

Picture of original - Bondy Washington in the 1870s Census — *Bondy Washington in the 1870 Census*

I later found Travis County death certificate for a Black woman named “Bondig Washington.” Despite the error, I believe that this is likely the same person. While people provide their own information in the census and directories, someone else must record their death certificate. In this case, the (white) county clerk filled it out and recorded Bondy’s birthplace as Texas. In her death, her place of birth was erased.

Picture of original document - Bondy Washington's Death Certificate — *Bondy Washington’s Death Certificate*

Already, Bondy has a remarkable story: a Black woman born in Africa around 1850 was brought to Austin, TX and lived in the same place for more than thirty years. But what else can we know about her? Who was she before 1870, and who was she before emancipation?

Picture of original document - Bondy Washington's sale — The final record I found that mentions Bondy is a notice of sheriff’s sale in the Statesman. The house that she had lived in, at least since 1880, was being sold for $3.77. Sheriff’s Sale of Bondy Washington’s Property

It’s impossible to say what her life was like, but Bondy was likely trafficked to the United States from Congo as a child. She had enough memory of this to claim her birthplace as Africa on records she filled out personally.

Bondy’s African origins are especially puzzling when considered in the context of the legality of the slave trade. When the United States Constitution was written, its authors agreed to allow the trafficking of African slaves into the county until at least 1808. In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed into law a bill banning the practice starting the next year. Because Texas was not a part of the United States, and was rather a part of Mexican territory, it was not beholden to this rule. The Mexican government banned the importation of slaves into Texas in 1824. When Texas became a Republic, its constitution also banned the practice.

Image of Canoe for Transporting Slaves, Sierra Leone — *Section of Canoe for Transporting Slaves, Sierra Leone, 1840’s.*
Source: *Slave Voyages*

So, if Bondy was brought to Texas to be enslaved, she was brought illegally. Historians have written about the illegal slave trade in Texas in the republican period and thereafter. They have documented that the illegal slave trade continued through the 1850s, sometimes on ships purporting to import camels into the United States.

American politicians generated a scheme to allow for clandestine trafficking of Africans to the United States. They petitioned the United States War Department to allow the importation of camels for use in domestic combat. This gave large cargo ships travelling to West Africa a cover story—their large holds were for military camels, not slaves. The last speculated instance of this practice was in 1856.

Illegal trafficking continued during Bondy’s early years, and it is likely that this is how she came to the United States. We can’t know, though, how she was brought there—on a camel ship or otherwise. Rare is the slave ship that records the names of its passengers. Certainly, an illegal slave ship trafficking people to the United States in the 1850s didn’t leave such traces. Even if they did, who knows the name Bondy was given by her mother? Who knows if she changed it once she landed in Texas or had it changed for her?

Ship records weren’t the only ones that excluded people’s names. The 1860 slave census records the number of people an individual enslaved, but it completely omits their names. As such, it would be impossible to identify Bondy in the slave registers. However, there is one potential lead. Someone in the Austin area with the surname “Washington” enslaved, among many others, two people of the same ages that Bondy and Frank would have been in 1860. Since some people took the surnames of their enslavers upon emancipation, it is possible that these two people were Bondy and Frank.

Two images of selection of the 1860 Slave Census, showing two people of Frank and Bondy’s ages, owned by a man in Travis County named T. P. Washington. — *A selection of the 1860 Slave Census, showing two people of Frank and Bondy’s ages, owned by a man in Travis County named T. P. Washington.*

Because those collecting their information recorded them as property and not people, we don’t know the names of those two people, and we don’t know who they are.

A depiction of the house at 821 E 11th St (on the corner) in 1887 from the Augustus Koch map. — *A depiction of the house at 821 E 11^th St (on the corner) in 1887 from the Augustus Koch map.*

We do know some things. Bondy was from Africa, and she lived in Austin. Bondy and Frank probably built that house themselves, and they lived there for decades. They lived in a neighborhood that is today so utterly transformed by modernity, segregation, and gentrification.

A Google Streetview photo of the location of historic 821 E 11th St, Austin, Texas—just across the street from Franklin BBQ and the African American Cultural and Heritage Facility. — *A Google Streetview photo of the location of historic 821 E 11^th St, Austin, Texas—just across the street from Franklin BBQ and the African American Cultural and Heritage Facility.*

Bondy had no children, so no personal genealogical inquiries would have made her story known. Our project has the potential to find other people in Austin with unique stories. By looking at big data, we can find individuals with differences. However, there are still limitations to what we can know because of what was recorded in the past.

Amy Shreeve Bridges is a J.D. Candidate at Yale Law School and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. While pursuing her undergraduate degree in history, she completed digital humanities and urban geography research that focused on mapping the racial geography of historic Austin. Her research interests include historical GIS, segregation, and urban housing policies.

References

“912 E 11^th Street,” Google Streetview, March 2024, https://www.google.com/maps/@30.2698205,-97.7309772,3a,75y,209.52h,104.14t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1syJa1RPhIgQNCmJL-o4CPKg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DyJa1RPhIgQNCmJL-o4CPKg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.share%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26yaw%3D209.52129397598353%26pitch%3D-14.140192174838944%26thumbfov%3D90!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205410&entry=ttu.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 168. Morrison & Foumy. 1881.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 239. Morrison & Foumy. 1887.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 258. Morrison & Foumy. 1891.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 288. Morrison & Foumy. 1893.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 297. Morrison & Foumy. 1895.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 273. Morrison & Foumy. 1903.

Austin, Texas, City Directory, pg 285. Morrison & Foumy. 1906.

“Sherrif’s Sale,” Austin Statesman, March 16, 1909. https://www.newspapers.com/image/366290646

Barker, Eugene C. “The African Slave Trade in Texas.” The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 6, no. 2 (1902): 145–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27784929.

Koch, Augustus. Austin, State Capital of Texas. 1887. Lithograph, 28 x 41 in. Austin History Center, Austin Public Library.

“Racial Mapping Austin,” Central Texas Retold, accessed June 19, 2024, https://ctxretold.org/black-communities/mapping-the-city/.

“Report of Death,” Travis County Death Certificates via FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9Y1H-SYKH?view=index), image 1490 of 3319.

U.S. Census Bureau. The Ninth Federal Census (1870); Census Place: Austin, Travis, Texas; Roll: M593_1606; Page: 297A.

U.S. Census Bureau. The Tenth Federal Census (1880); Census Place: Austin, Travis, Texas; Roll: 1329; Page: 262d; Enumeration District: 136.

U.S. Census Bureau. The Twelfth Federal Census (1900); Census Place: Austin Ward 8, Travis, Texas; Roll: 1673; Page: 3; Enumeration District: 0096

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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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.

Our New History Ph.D.s

For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History. So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class of new UT Austin History PhDs and tell you a little about them and their work.

Each of these students completed at least two years of course work. They read hundreds of books and wrote dozens of papers to prepare for their comprehensive examinations. After that, they developed original research projects to answer questions no one had asked before. Then they did a year or so of research in libraries and archives, before sitting down to write their dissertations. They did all this while working, teaching, caring for their families, having at least a little fun, and, in some cases, writing for Not Even Past!

Here they are, with their dissertation titles (and abstracts, if we have them). CONGRATULATIONS DOCTORS!

Sandy Chang, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, University of Florida
“Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migrants in British Malaya, 1870s-1930s”

Across the South Seas explores the migration of Chinese women who embarked on border-crossing journeys, arriving in British Malaya as wives, domestic servants, and prostitutes. Between the 1870s and 1930s, hundreds of thousands of women traveled to the Peninsula at a time when modern migration control first emerged as a system of racial exclusion, curtailing Asian mobility into white settler colonies and nation-states. In colonial Malaya, however, Chinese women encountered a different set of racial, gender, and sexual politics at the border and beyond. Based on facilitation rather than exclusion, colonial immigration policies selectively encouraged Chinese female settlement across the Peninsula. Weaving together histories of colonial sexual economy, Chinese migration, and the globalization of border control, this study foregrounds the role of itinerant women during Asia’s mobility revolution. It argues that Chinese women’s intimate labor ultimately served as a crucial linchpin that sustained the Chinese overseas community in colonial Southeast Asia.

Sandy Chang on Not Even Past:
Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes
A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

Itay Eisinger
“The Dystopian Turn In Hebrew Literature”

From its inception in Europe during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement promoted, leveraged and drove forward a utopian plan for a Jewish national revival, in the biblical Land of Israel, and in essence framed these plans as a pseudo divine right of the Jewish people. Numerous intellectual, cultural and literary historians therefore have focused on the role of utopian thinking in the shaping of Zionist ideology and Hebrew literature. By way of contrast, this dissertation focuses on the transformation, or evolution, of dystopian poetics within the realm of modern Hebrew literature. … Recent scholarship argues that while early “totalitarian” dystopias tended to focus on the dangers of the all-powerful state, tyranny, and global isolation as the main sources of collective danger to a prosperous and peaceful future, more recently published dystopias – both in the West and in Israel – have moved their focus to other topics and hazards, such as catastrophic ecological or climate disasters, patriarchy, sexism and misogyny, and the rise of surveillance and the integration of the intelligence community into the all-powerful well-oiled capitalist machine. While I do not disavow such arguments completely, I argue that most Israeli dystopias are still driven primarily by the traditional depiction of an authoritarian-fascist regime run amok – in alignment with the Huxley-Orwell model – while at the same time, explore creatively a vision of Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s prediction in 1967 that the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinians would inevitably force Israel to become a “police state.” … I examine the common themes found in these novels, including the dystopian depiction of an instrumentalization of the Shoah and manipulative abuse of the memory of the Holocaust in order to promote political agendas, allusions to the nakba, the over-militarism and nationalism of the state, the effects of the Occupation on Israeli society, and Israel’s neoliberal revolution…. By examining these novels from this perspective, and creating a dialogue between these works and different critical scholars, this dissertation aims to contribute to the study of Israel by rethinking its history – through the prism of dystopia.

Itay Eisinger on Not Even Past:
Rabin’s Assassination Twenty Years Later

Carl Forsberg, 2019-2020 Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, 2020-2021 Postdoctoral Fellow with Yale’s International Security Studies Program and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy.
“A Diplomatic Counterrevolution: The Transformation Of The US-Middle East Alliance System In The 1970s”

This dissertation charts the agency of Arab, Iranian, and US elites in transforming the structure of Middle Eastern regional politics and constructing a coalition that persists to the present. In the decade after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the regimes of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, King Faisal in Saudi Arabia, and Shah Mohamad Reza Pahlavi in Iran set out to overturn the legacy of Nasserism and Arab socialism. Animated by a common fear that their internal opposition gained strength from a nexus of Soviet subversion and the transnational left, these regimes collaboratively forged a new regional order built around the primacy of state interests and the security of authoritarian rule. They instrumentally manipulated a range of US-led peace processes, including Arab-Israeli negotiations, US-Soviet détente, and conciliation between Iran and its Arab neighbors to advance their diplomatic counter-revolution. US administrations at times resisted these efforts because they read the region through the polarities of the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the 1973 War, however, the opportunity to marginalize Soviet influence in the region proved too enticing for US officials to ignore. My project deploys multi-lingual research conducted in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, the UK, and the US. To overcome the lack of open state archives in Arab countries, the dissertation examines US, British, Iranian, and Israeli records of discussions with Arab leaders, as well as memoirs, periodicals, and speeches in Farsi and Arabic, to triangulate the strategies and covert negotiations of Arab regimes.

Celeste Ward Gventer, Post-doc, The Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
“Defense Reorganization For Unity: The Unified Combatant Command System, The 1958 Defense Reorganization Act And The Sixty-Year Drive For Unity In Grand Strategy And Military Doctrine”

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles at the White House in 1956

This dissertation seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: why, in 1958 and as part of the Defense Reorganization Act (DRA) passed that year, did U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower remove the chiefs of the military services from the chain of operational command and instead empower the so-called “unified combatant commands” to lead American military forces in war? The answer, this dissertation will argue, is that Eisenhower had found himself competing with his military service chiefs for his entire first administration and the first half of his second over national (grand) strategy and military doctrine. Taking those service chiefs out of the chain of operational command would, in effect, diminish the role of those officers. Eisenhower had found that simply getting rid of refractory officers was insufficient to quiet their rebellion: only by suppressing their role permanently in the bureaucracy did he hope to unify American strategy- and policy-making. This interpretation is at odds with the few accounts of the 1958 DRA that do exist, which tend to take Eisenhower’s stated purposes—to enhance “unity of command”—at face value. The circumstances that led Eisenhower to take this step were decades, if not longer, in the making. … The situation resulted from the inherent pluralism in American military policy making … it was also a product of the decades that preceded Eisenhower’s administration during which the American military was consistently forced to “fill in the blanks” of national strategy. What drove matters to a head in the 1950s was the steady growth of American power after the 1898 Spanish-American War and, especially, after the Second World War. It is necessary to also appreciate several legacies Eisenhower confronted and that colored his own views: the history of American military thinking about command and about civilian control; the creation of military staffs and the process of reform and professionalization inside the military services during the twentieth century; and the development of independent service doctrines. … This work will trace these conceptual threads over the sixty-year rise of the United States to a global power, culminating in Eisenhower’s standoff with his service chiefs in the 1950s.

Lauren Henley, Assistant Professor, University of Richmond
“Constructing Clementine: Murder, Terror, and the (Un)Making of Community in the Rural South, 1900-1930”

Deirdre Lannon, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Texas State University
“Ruth Mary Reynolds And The Fight For Puerto Rico’s Independence”

Ruth Mary Reynolds (Women in Peace)

This dissertation is a biography of Ruth Mary Reynolds, a pacifist from the Black Hills of South Dakota who after moving to New York City became involved in the movement for Puerto Rico’s independence…. She bucked the social norms of her conservative hometown to join the Harlem Ashram…. Her work within the Ashram connected her to the web of leftist coalition activism launched by the Popular Front era of the 1930s and 1940s, and to A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement for black equality. She became involved with organized pacifism, most notably through her membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and her close friendship with its U.S. leader, Dutch-born theologian A.J. Muste. In 1944, Ruth decided to make the issue of Puerto Rico’s independence her own. She helped form a short-lived organization, the American League for Puerto Rico’s Independence, which was supported by Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck among others. She became close friends with Pedro Albizu Campos and his family, as well as other Puerto Rican independence activists. She traveled to Puerto Rico, and in 1950 found herself swept into the violence that erupted between the government and Albizu Campos’s followers. Her experiences in New York and Puerto Rico offer a unique lens into the ways in which the Puerto Rican independence movement functioned, and how it was quashed through governmental repressions. Her friendship with Pedro Albizu Campos, the fiery independentista who remains a figurehead of Puerto Rican identity and pride, helps to humanize the man behind the mission. Ruth never abandoned her friend, or their shared cause. She fought for Albizu Campos to be freed, bucking the climate of repression during McCarthyism. This dissertation traces her efforts until 1965, when Albizu Campos died. She remained an active part of the Puerto Rican independence movement until her own death in 1989.

Holly McCarthy
“The Iraq Petroleum Company In Revolutionary Times”

Signe Fourmy, Visiting Research Affiliate, Institute for Historical Studies and Education Consultant, Humanities Texas.
“They Chose Death Over Slavery: Enslaved Women and Infanticide in the Antebellum South”

“They Chose Death Over Slavery,” … examines enslaved women’s acts of infanticide as maternal resistance. Enslaved women occupied a unique position within the slaveholding household. As re/productive laborers, enslavers profited from work women performed in the fields and house, but also from the children they birthed and raised. I argue that enslaved women’s acts of maternal violence bear particular meaning as a rejection of enslavers’ authority over their reproduction and a reflection of the trauma of enslavement. This dissertation identifies and analyzes incidents of infanticide, in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri. Using a comparative approach to consider geographic location and household size—factors that shaped the lived experiences of the enslaved—I ask what, if any, patterns existed? What social, economic, and political considerations influenced pivotal legal determinations—including decisions to prosecute, punish, or pardon these women? Expanding on the work of Laura Edwards and Paul Finkelman, I argue that public prosecution and legal outcomes balanced community socio-legal interests in enforcing the law while simultaneously protecting slaveowners profiting from their (re)productive labor. The existing scholarship on slavery, resistance, and reproduction shows that enslaved women were prosecuted for infanticide, yet the only book-length studies of enslaved women and infanticide center on one sensationalized case involving Margaret Garner. Infanticide was more prevalent than the secondary literature suggests. Building upon the work of historians Darlene Clark Hine and Jennifer L. Morgan, I explore how enslaved women re-appropriated their reproductive capacity as a means of resistance. In conversation with Nikki M. Taylor, Sasha Turner, and Marisa Fuentes, I ask what this particular type of violence reveals about the interiority of enslaved women’s lives. Additionally, I explore what these acts of maternal violence reveal about enslaved motherhood—or more specifically an enslaved woman’s decision not to mother her child.

Signe Fourmy on Not Even Past:
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor

Sean Killen
“South Asians and the Creation of International Legal Order, c. 1850-c. 1920: Global Political Thought and Imperial Legal Politics”

This dissertation argues that South Asians used international legal discourse both for ideological disputation and to mount political challenges to the domination and subjugation that accompanied British imperial rule between roughly 1850 and 1920. South Asians instigated political and legal disputes in India and Britain, throughout the empire, and overseas, and gained promises and partial concessions to Indian opinions and demands that limited British options in imperial and international relations. In so doing, they compelled the British state to alter the ideology, the policies, and the practices of the state, in India and in its relations with other states both within and outside the empire. Britain’s power, ultimately, meant that South Asians’ argumentation and actions shaped the contours of global order after the First World War….Traditional histories of international law argue that international law originated in Europe and regulated European states’ relations until colonized states were granted international legal recognition at the time of decolonization. Recent revisionist scholarship argues that the existence and experience of empire and colonial rule shaped the development of international law and global order throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation approaches empire in a way that emphasizes the global exchange of ideas and the active connections between colonizers and the colonized. Elite, English-speaking South Asians acted as cultural translators or intermediaries. They engaged in debates as public intellectuals, and they carved out spaces for themselves in the social and political communities that created public opinion. Consequently, South Asians’ ideas about relations among different peoples and between states, and South Asians’ mobilization of these ideas throughout the empire and overseas to make political claims about the obligations of the imperial state and the rights of imperial subjects shaped ideas about global order and the structure of international legal relations.

Jimena Perry, Teaching Instructor, East Carolina University
“Trying to Remember: Museums, Exhibitions, and Memories of Violence in Colombia, 2000-2014”

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia.

Since the turn of the century, not only museum professionals but grassroots community leaders have undertaken the challenge of memorializing the Colombian armed conflict of the 1980s to the early 2000s. In an attempt to confront the horrors of the massacres, forced displacement, bombings, and disappearances, museums and exhibitions have become one of the tools used to represent and remember the brutalities endured. To demonstrate how historical memories are informed by cultural diversity, my dissertation examines how Colombians remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the countryʼs internal war. The chapters of this work delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and represent at the National Museum of the country. The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their particular way of remembering, which emphasizes their peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. Bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, my work contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. In addition, my case studies exemplify why it is necessary to hear the multiple voices of conflict survivors, especially in a country with a long history of violence like Colombia. Drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, I study how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society. My work also analyzes museums and displays as arbiters of social memory. It asks how representations of violence serve in processes of transitional justice and promotion of human rights for societies that have been racked by decades of violence.

Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:
When Answers Are Not Enough: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
More Than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History
Too Much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellin, Colombia
Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory, 2000-2014
My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig
History Museums: The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogatá, Colombia
History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

Christina Villareal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, The University of Texas at El Paso
“Resisting Colonial Subjugation: The Search for Refuge in the Texas-Louisiana Borderlands, 1714-1803”

This dissertation is a history of the Spanish borderlands from the perspectives of subjugated people in the Gulf Coast. Based on colonial, military, and civil manuscript sources from archives in the United States, Mexico, Spain, and France, it traces the physical movement of Native Americans, soldiers, and African and indigenous slaves who fled conscription, reduction to Catholic missions, or enslavement in the Texas-Louisiana borderlands of the eighteenth century. It reconstructs geographies of resistance to understand how challenges to colonial oppression shaped imperial territory and created alternative spaces for asylum. While the overarching focus of the dissertation is political space-making at the ground-level, the pivotal change occasioned by the Treaty of Paris (1763) serves as the central arc of the dissertation. The treaty, in which Spain acquired Louisiana from France, signified a major imperial transformation of the Gulf Coast. Initiated “from above,” this geopolitical transition expanded the Spanish borderlands over former French territory and altered the locations where Native Americans, soldiers, and enslaved people could find or avoid colonial oppression.

Christina Villareal on Not Even Past
The War on Drugs: How the US and Mexico Jointly Created the Mexican Drug War by Carmen Boullusa and Mike Wallace

Andrew Weiss
“The Virgin and The Pri: Guadalupanismo And Political Governance In Mexico, 1945-1979”

This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between Catholicism and political governance in Mexico from 1945 until 1979 through the lens of Guadalupanismo. Guadalupanismo (devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe) is a unifying nationalistic force in Mexico. After 1940, Church and state collaborated to promote the Virgin of Guadalupe as a nationalist emblem following decades of divisive state-led religious persecution. Mexico, however, remained officially anticlerical sociopolitical territory. I analyze flashpoints of Guadalupan nationalism to reveal the history of Mexican Church-state relations and Catholic religiosity. These episodes are: the 1945 fiftieth anniversary of the 1895 coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe; U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 visit to the Basilica of Guadalupe; the construction of the New Basilica in the 1970s (inaugurated in 1976); and Pope John Paul II’s trip to Mexico and the Basilica in 1979. Each of these occasions elicited great popular enthusiasm and participation in public ritual. And each brought politicians in contact with the third rail in Mexican politics: religion. The essential value of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as I show, is that as both a Catholic and a nationalistic icon, she represented an ideal symbolic terrain for the renegotiation and calibration of Church-state relations under PRI rule. I follow these Guadalupan episodes to track the history of Guadalupanismo and interpret the changing Church-state relationship at different junctures in the course of the single-party priísta regime. These junctures (1945, 1962, 1976, and 1979) are relevant because they are representative of classical and degenerative phases of priísmo (the ideology of the ruling party [PRI] that governed Mexico from 1929 until 2000) and cover the episcopates of three major figures who ran the Archdiocese of Mexico for over sixty years. The Church-state covenant was renegotiated over time as seen by the Guadalupan episodes I analyze.

Andrew Weiss on Not Even Past
Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey

Pictured above (Clockwise from top center): Sandy Chang, Andrew Weiss, Deirdre Lannon, Jimena Perry, Celeste Ward Gventer, Christina Villareal, Itay Eisinger.
Not pictured: Signe Fourmy, Lauren Henley, Sean Killen, Holly McCarthy, Carl Forsberg,

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

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.

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; (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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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The Enslaved and the Blind: State Officials and Enslaved People in Austin, Texas

By Daniel Josiah Thomas III

Black and white image of the Neill-Cochran House — (Used with permission of the Neill-Cochran House)

On November 6, 1855, Washington Hill commissioned Abner H. Cook to build a southern plantation house in Austin, Texas. The Texas Historical Commission reported that “the property worth $900 in August 1855 was worth $8,000 when Hill paid his taxes for 1856.” When the two-story limestone home was completed, Hill had greatly overextended his financial resources. In an attempt to retain the property, Hill sought tenants to help with his costs. Fortunately for him, the Texas Legislature would approve funding for a program that would help. In 1856, the same year Hill’s home was completed, the legislature voted to found an Asylum for the Blind. Austin’s asylum would provide initial financial relief to Hill, but it also led to the use of enslaved people on his property.

1921 Sanborn Map of Austin featuring former compound of Texas School for the Blind (via Library of Congress)

From 1856 to 1919, the Texas State Asylum for the Blind took copious and painstakingly detailed notes of all business-related meetings. One of the earliest entries recorded the asylum entering into a contract with Washington Hill for the purpose of using his property. An entry made on October 26, 1856 states:

Washington L. Hill proposes to lease his residence in the city of Austin for the use of the school for the term of two years commencing on the 20 Nov[em]b[e]r next for the term of nine hundred dollars per year payable quantity in advance — which proposition was accepted by the Board and R. L Townes was appointed to enter into contract with L. Hill.^[1] (See below)

Image of a page of Texas State Asylum for the Blind's meeting notes — (Photo by Author)

The legal stipulation that he receive the entire year’s payment from the asylum in advance speaks to the urgency of Hill’s financial situation. Nonetheless, having extended control of his property to the School for the Blind allowed for the school to do what was necessary to conduct business.

Meeting files for 1860 illuminate how agents of the Texas State Legislature and their enslaved persons were vital to the school’s successful operation. Several entries that took place during a meeting on January 16, 1860 reveal both the enslaver’s name and the role their enslaved persons were to have at the School for the Blind. The meeting file states:

“The following proceedings were had. Ordered, that the Superintendent be authorized to employ Negro woman of W L Chalmers as cook $18.00 per month, subject to be discharged upon notice by trustee: Also, the negro woman of Ed Clark, at $15 per month, subject to his discharge upon notice of Trustees: Also, to retain in the employ of the institute the Negro man of Col Neal at $20 per month and clothing. . . . The salary for the negro girl belonging to Doch Maynire was filed at $10 dollars per month instead of $12 dollars as first agreed upon. . . . The meeting then adjourned.^[2] (See below)

The two women, one girl, and one man mentioned at this meeting reveal the presence of four enslaved people laboring at Austin’s School for the Blind in 1860. In all these instances, the school paid each enslaver a monthly rate to use their enslaved persons for the benefit of the school’s operation. While one enslaved woman was reported to have served as a cook, the role of the others was not mentioned. The identity of two of the men responsible for the renting of these enslaved people, however, is revealed by Texas’ ninth Governor, Francis Richard Lubbock in his memoirs. W. L. Chalmers and Edward Clark were key members of the Texas State Legislature. Lubbock identified Chalmers as an “assistant clerk” of the Seventh Legislature, in 1857 and “chief clerk” of the Ninth Legislature in 1861.^[3] Edward Clark was the “Secretary of State” to Governor Elisha M. Pease from 1853-1857.^[4] Clark would serve as the Lieutenant Governor of Texas from 1859-1861 and the Confederate Texas Governor in 1861. Thus, the property currently known as the Neill-Cochran house was once a place where both enslaved people and the highest-ranking state officials, converged to ensure the well-ordered functioning of the Texas School for the Blind.

Photograph of Historical Marker at the Neill-Cochran House Museum — Historical Marker at Neill-Cochran House Museum (via Flickr)

Sources for this article:
^[1] An Inventory of School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Meeting Files 1856-1919, 1979-2015, Volume 1989/073-28, Texas State Asylum for the Blind/Blind Institute/Texas School for the Blind, 1856-1919, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, TX.
^[2] Ibid, 24-25
^[3] Frances Lubbock, Six Decades in Texas: Or Memoirs of Frances Richard Lubbock, Governor of Texas in War Time 1861-1863, Austin: B. C. Jones & co., printers, 1900), 223, 329.
^[4] Ibid., 195.

An Inventory of School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Meeting Files 1856-1919, 1979-2015, Volume 1989/073-28, Texas State Asylum for the Blind/Blind Institute/Texas School for the Blind, 1856-1919, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin, TX.

Evelyn M. Carrington. The Neill-Cochran Museum House, 1855-1976: A Century of Living from Texas History. Waco, TX: Texian Press for the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Texas, 1977.

Kenneth Hafertepe. Survey and Multiple Property Nomination of Abner Cook Structures in Austin. 1989.

Francis Richard Lubbock. Six Decades in Texas; or, Memoirs of Francis Richard Lubbock, Governor of Texas in War Time, 1861-63. Edited by Cadwell Walton Raines. Austin: B. C. Jones & Co.,1900.

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