slavery Archives - Page 2 of 7

Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution by Ada Ferrer (2014)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba was profoundly shaped by its proximity to and multi-layered relationship with Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was called before the 1803 Haitian Revolution. In the decades leading up to Saint-Domingue’s 1791 slave revolt, Cuban planters looked with envy on the booming sugar economy of their neighbor to the southeast and sought to emulate its success. After the revolution in Haiti, Cuba was able to take advantage of the implosion of Saint-Domingue’s sugar industry. Sugar production machinery and human expertise vanished from Saint-Domingue and reappeared in Cuba. Within twenty years of the first Haitian slave revolt, Cuba had surged ahead to become the largest sugar producer in the Caribbean. Necessary to that, of course, was human capital in the form of enslaved Africans or Afro-Caribbeans, some of whom may have been captives from Haiti. Between 1791 and 1821, slaves were imported into Cuba at a rate four times greater than in the previous thirty-year period. As a result, Cuban elites were forced to confront the growing probability, and then actual occurrence, of slave revolts.

Ferrer shapes her narrative around the “mirror,” or reversal, of historical processes: the collapse of one colony’s sugar economy and the rapid growth of another’s; the liberation gained by slaves on one island and the expansion of slavery and entrenchment of enslavement structures on the other; revolution and independence in one place and colonialist counterrevolution in the other; fears of re-enslavement on the part of former slaves and fears of revolt on the part of the elites. She argues that for Cuba, the Haitian Revolution in 1791 served as a temporal “hinge” between the “first and second slaveries.” The second slavery distinguished itself from the first in its larger scale and in its existence alongside a growing “specter” of abolitionist political movements and the reality of enslaved people successfully claiming and obtaining their own freedom.

Nineteenth-Century Photograph of Enslaved People Drying Bagasse in Cuba via University of Miami Digital Collections

The first half of Freedom’s Mirror takes the reader up to Haitian independence and victory over Napoleon’s forces in 1804. These chapters trace the evolution of Cuba’s “sugar revolution,” Cuban attempts to deter the import of negros franceses – Saint-Domingue slaves who might foment rebellion — and a short-lived alliance between the Spanish army based in the city of Santo Domingo (including soldiers from Cuba) and the Haitian rebels. The second half of the book showcases the conflicts resulting from the rise of coffee plantations in lands occupied by communities of runaway slaves, the 1808 turmoil in Cuba caused by Napoleon’s installation of his brother on the Spanish throne, featuring discussions of independence and slavery abolition, and the 1812 Aponte Rebellion.

Map of Haiti via Digital Public Library of America

Freedom’s Mirror, however, is not just a story about the causal relationship between the Haitian Revolution and Cuba’s transformation, and Ferrer does not confine her investigation to economic or political factors. What interests Ferrer are the “quotidian links – material and symbolic – between the radical antislavery movement that emerged in Saint-Domingue at the same time that slavery was expanding in colonial Cuba” (11). In particular, she tracks the circulation of knowledge, rumor, conversation, religious symbolism, anxieties and hopes that mapped onto infrastructures of commerce, slave-trading, government activity, and military action.

Toussaint L’Ouverture via New York Public Library

In 1801, for example, Toussaint Louverture’s forces occupied Santo Domingo and issued public proclamations. These were carried by ship crews and disseminated in Cuba, as were first-hand accounts of Spanish refugees from that occupation who had fled to Cuba. This, according to Ferrer, is the mechanism by which Cubans came to know of the events of the rebellion and the “spectacular ascent” of Toussaint Louverture (153). Eleven years later, images of the coronation of the Haitian King Christophe appeared in the prison holding suspects from Aponte’s revolutionary movement in Cuba. In the tradition of Lynn Hunt’s treatment of the “invention” of human rights, Ferrer uses her sources—city council minutes, port registers, trading licenses, letters, confessions of revolutionaries on the eve of their executions, and printed images of Haitian leaders—to document that this circulation of information and rumor transformed the interior experiences and decision-making of historical actors and ordinary people in both Cuba and Haiti.

Freedom’s Mirror situates Cuba in a regional history, primarily the interactions between Cuba and Haiti. Ferrer is fundamentally attuned to the circulation of knowledge, symbolism, and ideas. In bringing those into the light, she shows us that economic, political, and military realities never cease to shape, and be shaped by, subjective perceptions and individual actions.

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)

By Tiana Wilson

After reading this book in three different graduate seminar courses, I can confidently argue that Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is one of the most important texts of our time, and a must read for anyone interested in overcoming the limitations of archival research. For many scholars of marginalized groups in the U.S., there remains a challenge in finding materials on our subjects because most of their records are not institutionalized. However, Fuentes offers a useful analytical method for extracting information from sources bent on erasing their existence.

Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives. She cautions scholars to avoid traditional readings of archival evidence, which are produced by and for the dominant narratives of slavery. Instead, she calls for a reading “along the bias grain,” of historical records and against the politics of the historiography on a given topic. In other words, she pushes historians to stretch fragmented archival evidence in order to reflect a more nuanced, complex understanding of enslaved people’ lives. In doing so, her work investigates the sometimes hidden intentions and power dynamics that frame people’s decision-making. Rather than placing our subjects within the categories of victims or victors, Fuentes encourages scholars to examine the “complex personhood” of everyday actions.

Dispossessed Lives provides a portrait of eighteenth-century urban slavery in Bridgetown, Barbados from the perspective of multiple black women. This includes black women’s experiences in public executions and violent punishments, their involvement in the sex economy, and their efforts to escape slavery. Fuentes makes two interventions into the scholarship on slavery in the Atlantic world. First, she challenges the narrative that plantation slavery was more violent than other forms of bondage, and argues that urban slavery was just as brutal. Second, with a focus on the centrality of gender, Fuentes’ study reveals how black women experienced constructions of their sexuality and gender in relation to white women. The main questions guiding this work were: how did black women negotiate physical and sexual violence, colonial power, and female slaveowners in the eighteenth century, and how was freedom defined and what did freedom look like in a slave society?

Map of Barbados, 1767 (via Library of Congress)

Addressing the above questions, Fuentes describes and interrogates archival silences, and then works with these seemingly useless sources to reimagine black women’s experiences, filling in historical gaps in studies of early American slavery. For example, in her strongest chapter, Fuentes works with runaway slave advertisements to narrate the experiences of an enslaved runaway named Jane, as she navigates the colonial-built environments of urban areas that were constructed to terrorize fugitive bodies. Fuentes combines other sources to depict the architectural layout of the city that Jane would have encountered in her journey, such as the Cage (a place that held runaway slaves) and the execution gallows. In doing so, she demonstrates how colonial powers designed urban areas to confine and control black people’s movement.

In another chapter, Fuentes explores how black women’s sexuality was constructed in relation to white women’s identity. In this section, Fuentes discusses the sexual entanglement of a white woman, Agatha, and two white men. The mistress sent an enslaved boy, dressed as a woman to murder one of her sexual partners during the nighttime. Utilizing the trial records of the boy, Fuentes demonstrates what the boy’s attire reveals about black women’s mobility at night. While elite white women were not allowed in public, unaccompanied, Fuentes argues that black women’s ability to cross urban spaces in the night suggests that society viewed black women as sexual agents and therefore as unwomanly. Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how white authorities positioned black womanhood in opposition to white femininity.

Fuentes further problematizes white and black people’s relationship in early America, allowing readers to fully grasp the nuanced meaning of freedom for black people. For instance, in her assessment of Rachael, a woman of color slaveowner, Fuentes challenges the dominant reading of Rachael’s agency in her active role in the commodification of black bodies. Fuentes does not refute Rachael’s agency itself but contends that Rachael was also subjugated to different forms of inequality due to the racial and gendered hierarchies within a colonial context. By questioning Rachael’s actions, Fuentes illuminates black women’s limited opportunities in the slavery era. Readers benefit from Fuentes’ take on freedom because she accounts for enslaved and freed people’s contradictory beliefs and actions.

Fuentes is a beautiful writer, and she responsibly narrates the different types of violence black women faced historically and still face (if we are not careful) through archiving practices and writing today. She intentionally acknowledges her own subjectivity in the work, and readers would appreciate this honesty from a scholar who is passionately concerned with the ethics of history and not reproducing the same historical violence. Dispossessed Lives is a must-read for all historians (professional or amateur), and I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the possibilities for studying subaltern voices and the nuances of historical subjects and events.

Love in the Time of Texas Slavery

By María Esther Hammack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Articles by María Esther Hammack:

The Illegal Slave Trade in Texas
Textbooks Texas, and Discontent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World; Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferreira (2012)

Luanda and Benguela became the busiest, most profitable slaving ports in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century precisely because these two ports set up tribunals to hear tens of thousands of enslaved petitioners demand freedom. Paperwork in local tribunals set hundreds of thousands free, even at the risk of bankrupting powerful merchants. As petitioners litigated their freedom, the colonial state grew in legitimacy and bottom up support. Through petitioning and litigation, the peoples of Luanda and Benguela became active “Portuguese” vassals with rights. Those under the protection of the sovereign state became more than mere commodities while those outside became increasingly more vulnerable. Pervasively and paradoxically, the very consolidation of state legitimacy contributed to the expansion of the slave trade. After years of working in ecclesiastical, municipal, and state archives in Luanda, Rio, and Lisbon, Ferreria offers a major reconceptualization of colonialism and slavery itself. A better title for his book would have been: Petitioning Slaves and the Creation of the South Atlantic Slave Trade.

Angola was no more than these two relatively small ports of few thousand dwellers (moradores), each with strange connections to their hinterlands. Luanda and Benguela were overwhelmingly black and mulatto cities that engaged in formal ceremonies of protection and “transfer” of sovereignty with neighboring natural lords, sobas. The sobas offered labor, porters, and military aid to urban merchants (pumbeiros and sertanejos) and sheriffs (captães mores), the representatives of the Portuguese state, in exchange for a monopoly on the local redistribution of foreign commodities and support against their rivals. Sobas provisioned the trading caravans to the interior (sertões) with porters. The sobas also offered military aid to the cities when neighboring and distant sovereigns, including the Dutch, French, and British, threatened the ports.

This system of Portuguese sovereignty however was rather limited. To the north and south of Luanda and Benguela lay independent polities that for nearly three hundred years remained impervious to all threats of violence and negotiations. The degree of coastal isolation of these two ports was striking. Given the nature of maritime currents, Benguela and Luanda communicated much more easily with merchants in Rio (Brazil) than with one another. For nearly three centuries there were no roads connecting Luanda and Benguela. Like in the north and south, the eastern, interior frontiers of both cities ended where the independent Imbangala kingdoms began. The frontier was dotted with “forts,” or presidios, that were primarily trading centers: Indian cottons, Brazilian cachaça, and gunpowder for slaves. Within these narrow horizontal coastal-eastern corridors, the ports held loose control over the local natural lords, sobas, sworn to vassalage.

Ferreira describes how the expansion of trade within Luanda and Benguela’s subject territories led to the enslaving of vassals. As commodities arrived and credit expanded, so too did pawnship. Debtors would offer family members and subordinates as slaves to merchants. Sobas would also punish civil and criminal cases, particularly witchcraft, with slavery. This system benefitted merchants who did not have to rely on interior trading fairs to obtain chattel from independent kingdoms. Yet, at the same time, the Portuguese crown empowered local judges to set up tribunals to secure the rights of all vassals. Ferreria describes the workings and evolution of the Tribunal de mucanos in detail, offering a mind bending account of bottom up participation through paperwork.

Recently arrived slaves in Brazil, circa 1830 (via Wikipedia)

Mucanos were petitioners who orally pleaded in front of sobas and capitães mores for freedom when wronged. Slowly, oral petitions became written, local custom codified, local decentralized decisions centralized, and corrupted local judges overseen by outside referees. Ferreria describes how the tribunal de mucanos, originally under the control of mercantile interests and self-interested local lords, evolved into a tribunal controlled by bishops (junta das missões). The juntas would have priests as translators-cum-official legal intermediaries (inquiridor das libertades), scribes (escrivão), registries (livro branco), and archives. Priests would become accountants, collecting the royal quinto (20% tax) after having properly ascertained who was rightfully enslaved. In practice, the job of the junta became one of distinguishing between outsiders from the sertòes, who could be enslaved, from the internal vassals who could not. More importantly, after baptizing the properly enslaved, priests would use the body of slaves to document the act of royal authorization and baptism by fire branding chattel. Slaves leaving Angola would carry two other fire marks as notarial documents: the originating and the receiving merchants’. Ferreria also shows that local decisions taken by the local rural tribunals would evolve into a hierarchical system of urban appellate courts, moving petitions from magistrates (ouvidor) to the governor (ouvidor geral) to Lisbon. There were slaves who sent petitions to Lisbon to appeal. Some even appeared in Lisbon in person.

Ferreria shows that in the second half of the eighteenth century the debate over the right to enslave vassals evolved, particularly as the governor Miguel Antonio Mello argued that the same rules to judge the wrongful enslavement of soba vassals should also apply to processes within the sovereign kingdoms of the sertões. All slaves, regardless of their origin, should have the right to appeal. Mello’s good intentions were not to last beyond his time in office. Mello, nevertheless, waived all fees to mucanos in judicial procedures.

In Luanda and Benguela, race was meaningless except as marker of social status, which was signified through clothing. Many petty merchants were slaves-for-hire, retailers (quissongos), moving cachaça, guns, and Indian cottons into the trading fairs (feiras) in the interior sertões while bringing back caravans of slaves. Many settlers (moradores) of the ports were ladinos, that is urban slaves who enjoyed extraordinary freedoms, including often the right to move to Brazil as servants, petitioners, and traders. Merchants and captains were largely exiles and criminals, degredados, from Brazil. Black settlers and ladinos were considered “white,” but so too were the vassals of allied sobas who through trade acquired European shoes: Negros calçados would petition to be exempted from tribute as porters and be treated as “white.” Female slaves who amassed considerable fortunes as market women (quitanderas) also became free “white” settlers. This was a world of both strict social hierarchies and dizzying social mobility.

One of Ferrerira’s most intriguing contributions is to demonstrate the peculiar relation of Brazil and Angola, one that almost entirely excluded the Portuguese. If Angola was a colony, it was Rio’s and Minas Gerais’s. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the expansion of gold mining in Minas led to the growth of Brazilian involvement in Luanda and Benguela. Merchant-pombeiros and sheriffs-capitães mores were often exile-degredados from Brazil. Luanda and Benguela settlers sent their kids to be educated in Rio. Many acquired trades in Brazil and came back as carpenters and tailors. When Brazil declared independence in 1822, the Portuguese remained fearful for several decades of repeated conspiracies to unite Angola to the new Brazilian empire. The case of Angola demonstrates that early modern monarchies were indeed polycentric. The center of gravity often lay in America, not Europe.

This extraordinary, eye-opening book not only illuminates the distinct nature of South Atlantic systems of slavery, connecting Rio to Luanda and Benguela, a system that accounted for at least one third of all the slaves brought to the Americas. It also throws light on the role of slave petitioning in securing legitimacy and political resilience There were extraordinary parallels between the Tribunal de mucanos in Angola and the Republica de indios in Spanish America. In both cases, the state invested heavily in protecting nonwhite vassals from mercantile predation. In doing so, the system grew in legitimacy and longevity. The true paradox of modernity might not be that white freedom was possible because there was black slavery, as Edmund Morgan argued in American Slavery, American Freedom. The true paradox might well be that slavery grew and multiplied precisely because there were tens of thousands of slaves who petitioned and obtained their freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

White Women and the Economy of Slavery

In 1849, sixty-five “ladies of Fayette County” Tennessee wanted their State legislature to know that a central dimension of patriarchy was failing. In a collective petition, they highlighted the ways that this failure was unfolding and how it impacted the lives of Tennessee women, particularly those who were married or who were soon to be wed. At the center of their petition were “thoughtless husbands” who fell far short of patriarchal ideals. These men, through “dissipation or improvident management,” created circumstances that compelled their new wives to endure lives plagued by “destitution,” “hardship, and suffering.”

The signatories went on to draw astonishing contrasts between the patriarchs of old and those of a new age and the ways that these different generations of men treated the women in their lives. The young women they purported to represent entered marriages with “competent estates descended to them from the estates of their deceased fathers,” noblemen who accumulated their wealth and property through years of labor, diligence, and frugality. They waxed nostalgic about those hardworking men of their father’s generation who hoped to pass the fruits of their extensive and admirable efforts onto their children. Yet, within no more than two years of marriage, they alleged, their husbands had wasted it all. Playing to the legislature’s fatherly sentiments, the Fayette County ladies told its members that the men whom they entrusted their daughters to were inept, thieving failures who stole their fortunes and financial legacies and left their most vulnerable children in “want and suffering.”

The legal doctrine of coverture and the constraints it imposed upon married women were central to the failures of which they spoke. Coverture provided that when a woman married, her assets or wages became her husband’s. If she acquired any property after she married, those assets would belong to her husband as well. In other words, the legal doctrine of coverture robbed married women of their independent legal and economic identities.

These sixty-five Fayette County women challenged the tenets of coverture and asked the legislature to consider whether the elements of this legal doctrine were “based on the principle of equity and justice.” They queried whether it was “right and justice to subject the patrimony of married Ladies to the payment of the debts of the husbands which often exist before marriage.” Their line of questioning made it clear that, in their eyes, it was not. They called upon the legislature to “devise and enact some Law for the State” whereby “the personal estates of females [would] be placed upon a similar basis as their Real estate, and so protected and secured that it cannot be sold, and taken from them without their consent.”

There was a specific reason why they deemed this “placement” necessary: slavery and the region’s dependency upon it. Slave-owning parents typically gave their daughters more slaves than land, and as a result, slaves were profoundly important to women’s personal stability. These women asked the legislature to protect the kind of property that was worth the most to them because, in light of “peculiar Southern institutions, manners, and customs, it [wa]s in most cases a much greater privation and inconvenience to the married ladies to be deprived of their slaves than of their land.”

Negro Life at the South – Oil on canvas, by Eastman Johnson.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The petition put forth by these sixty-five “ladies” was exceptional because of its collective nature, but the arguments and circumstances they laid bare in this document echoed those that married slave-owning women voiced in their homes and communities as well as in the individual bills of complaint they filed in nineteenth-century chancery courts throughout the South. In the not-so-private conversations at home and in their petitions, married slave-owning women throughout the South repeatedly made it clear that their husbands were robbing them of their slaves, squandering their assets, and violating what these women believed to be their property rights in enslaved people.

They explained how they came to own the slaves in question—i.e. whether they were inherited, given as gifts, or purchased—as well as the kind of control they exercised over them. They provided documents such as bills of sale, wills, and deeds to support their claims. With striking candor, they informed family, friends, and judges alike that their husbands came to their marriages impoverished and slave-less. It was women, they argued, who owned the slaves in their households, not their husbands. And when it was necessary, they produced witnesses whose testimony substantiated their assertions. One by one, at home and in court, married slave-owning women throughout the South did what the sixty-five women from Fayette County, Tennessee did collectively; they called upon family, friends, and judges throughout the region to help to secure their ownership of slaves and shield their property from their husbands’ ineptitude and misuse.

Daguerreotype, New Orleans, 1850s.
Source: The Burns Archive via Wikimedia Commons.

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

These lifelong processes of indoctrination make it clear why some white women did not feel compelled to relinquish control over their slaves to their spouses once they married, why they sought to manage and “master” their slaves, why they felt completely comfortable buying and selling enslaved people, and why they sued their husbands in court over their slaves, too. The ownership of slaves was gendered: white women slave owners played roles in the trans-regional domestic slave trade and nineteenth-century slave markets. They responded to the Civil War and adapted to its economic aftermath in ways that were often different from their husbands, fathers, and brothers.

The Petition of Ladies of Fayette County, Tennessee, November 9, 1849, is Document Number: 19-1849-1, Legislative Petitions, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee, Accession #: 11484907 Race and Slavery Petitions Project, Series 2, County Court Petitions.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers was a Harrington Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin from 2018 to 2019. She is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.

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Books for Further Reading

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) is the most recent and comprehensive study of southern slave markets to date. Johnson examines the interplay between white sellers, buyers, and enslaved people within the context of the slave market and the interstate slave trade.

Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2007) complements Johnson’s study by exploring the ways in which the slave market permeated every town, city, and rural landscape. By doing so, Deyle makes visible how the indifferent calculations of white southerners and the trauma that these calculations brought about in the lives of enslaved people occurred far beyond the slave market and often via private sales between members of southern communities.

Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2016) lays bare the human impact and toll of the slave trade and how the forced migration and labor of enslaved people in the West and Lower South, and the violence white southerners perpetrated against them in order to get them to do that work, proved fundamental to American capitalism.

Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017) studies the actual human cost of slavery via the prices affixed and values assigned to enslaved people from conception to after death. Ramey Berry’s study also reveals that enslaved people developed their own systems of value that forthrightly challenged those imposed upon them.

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The Public Archive: The Paperwork of Slavery

Millions of tweets and millions of state documents. Intimate oral histories and international radio addresses. Ancient pottery and yesterday’s memes. Historians have access to this immense store of online material for doing research, but what else can we do with it? In Spring 2018, graduate students in the Public and Digital History Seminar at UT Austin experimented with ways to make interesting archival materials available and useful to the public; to anyone with access to a computer. Over the Summer, Not Even Past will feature each of these individual projects.

Slave passes were an early form of racialized surveillance, small pieces of paper with the power to decide where black men and women could travel, who they could meet, and whether they might be subject to violence. Digitized by Galia Sims, The documents in “Guards and Pickets: Paperwork of Slavery” provide a glimpse into the paperwork created to control the movement and relationships of the enslaved, like passes, jail fees, marriage certificates, patrol invoices.

More on Sims’ project and The Public Archive here.

The Littlefield Lectures 2018: The Van and the Rear: Abolitionist Roots of Radical Reconstruction (Day 2)

On February 26-27 2018, The History Department at the University of Texas at Austin was pleased to welcome Dr. Manisha Sinha, Professor and James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, as the featured speaker for The Littlefield Lecture Series. Dr. Sinha’s first lecture, titled “Abolition and the Making of Southern Reaction,” is featured here.

Watch Professor Sinha’s second lecture on Not Even Past, titled “The Van and the Rear: Abolitionist Roots of Radical Reconstruction:”

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