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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Slavery and its legacy in the USA

By Mark Sheaves

Not Even Past has published many feature articles, book and film reviews, and podcasts on slavery and its legacy in the USA.  The history of slavery is an important issue today, and the articles we publish aim to make publicly available the academic research and historical perspectives on this topic produced by graduate students and faculty at UT Austin. This body of work provides an overview of key issues important for anyone wanting to understand slavery and its legacy in the USA.

How has slavery shaped racial politics today? What was it like to be a slave? How different was the experience of slavery on plantations and in cities? Was the Emancipation Proclamation successful? How has slavery been portrayed in popular culture? Can slavery be mapped? Below you will find a thematic list of articles we have published offering some answers to these key questions.

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Race and slavery’s lasting legacy:

Jacqueline Jones discusses her book A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, an exploration of the way that the idea of race has been used and abused in American history.

Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L. Morgan offer historical perspectives on the casual killing of Eric Garner, highlighting slavery’s lasting legacy and the historical value of black life.

Concerned by misconceptions about slavery in public debate, Daina Ramey Berry dispels four common myths about slavery in America.

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Shippensburg University student Cory Layton, a junior from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, paints his face with the slogan “Black Lives Matter” at the ‘Fight for Human Rights and Social Equity’ rally at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, December 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Public Opinion, Ryan Blackwell)

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Urban Slavery:

In their article Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry explain the importance of understanding urban slavery: “Because of the great economic and social dominance of rural plantation-based slavery in the Americas, historians have long assumed that slave labor was not suited to cities and therefore slavery in American cities was insignificant. But a re-examination of slavery in cities throughout the Atlantic World has demonstrated the importance of urban areas to the slave economy and the adaptability of slave labor and slave ownership to metropolitan regions, especially port cities such as Savannah. Urban slavery was part of, not exceptional to, the slave-based economies of North America and the Atlantic world.”

Interested to learn more about urban slavery? You may also like:

Jacqueline Jones discusses her book Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War, a study of the unanticipated consequences of the Civil War for Confederate slaveholders and the dramatic efforts of the city’s black people to live life on their own terms in Savannah.

Tania Sammons’ essay on Andrew Cox Marshall, a former slave who went on to become a successful businessman and religious leader in pre-Civil War period Savannah.

 

From 15 Minute History, Daina Ramey Berry talks about Urban Slavery in the Antebellum U.S.

 

Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris offer further reading recommendations on Urban Slavery.

Going to Market- A Scene Near Savannah, Georgia. Harper’s Weekly, 1875 Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Miscellaneous Items in Hight Demand collection, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-102153

Going to Market- A Scene Near Savannah, Georgia. Harper’s Weekly, 1875 Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Miscellaneous Items in Hight Demand collection, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-102153

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Experiencing Slavery:

Slavery is often discussed in terms of numbers and dates, human rights abuses, and its lasting impact on society. To be sure, these are all important aspects to understand, but one thing that is often given relatively short shrift is what it was like to actually be a slave. What were the sensory experiences of slaves on a daily basis? How can we dig deeper into understanding the lives of slaves and understand the institution as a whole?

On 15 Minute History, Daina Ramey Berry discusses teaching the “senses of slavery,” a teaching tool that taps into the senses in order to connect to one of the most important eras in US history and bring it to the present

You may also like:

Let the Enslaved Testify: Daina Ramey Berry discusses the use of former slave narratives as a “valid” historical source.

Rosa and Jack Maddox (Briscoe Center for American History, UT Austin)

Rosa and Jack Maddox (Briscoe Center for American History, UT Austin)

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Labor and Gender:

Daina Ramey Berry discusses her book Swing the Sickle, an incisive look into the plantation lives of enslaved women and men in antebellum Georgia.

For further reading, consult this list of classic studies, new works and a few novels on labor and gender and the institutions of slavery in the United States.

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Emancipation Proclamation:

On the afternoon of January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed The Emancipation Proclamation, freeing approximately three million people held in bondage in the rebel states of the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation was a huge step towards rectifying the atrocity of institutionalized slavery in the United States, but it was only one step and it had a mixed legacy, as these essays by UT Austin historians remind us.

George Forgie discusses the political wrangling that accompanied the Emancipation Proclamation, the work it left undone, and the need – that seems so obvious today, but was so deeply contested at the time – for a law abolishing slavery altogether.

Jacqueline Jones takes us right into Savannah’s African American community on New Year’s Eve, to see and hear how Black Americans there anticipated the momentous news.

Laurie Green brings us up to 1963 to show us how civil rights activists in the 1960s saw the work of the Emancipation Proclamation as still unfinished. One hundred years after it was signed, they viewed the civil rights movement as an effort to fulfill its original intent to bring not only legal freedom, but economic justice and individual dignity to the descendants of US slaves.

Daina Ramey Berry looks at Quentin Tarantino’s sensationalist and willfully inaccurate treatment of slavery in Django Unchained and she offers us alternative sources for learning about the historical violent abuses of slave life.

Juliet E. K. Walker examines the contrast between the legal and economic consequences of the Emancipation Proclamation.

You might also like:

Jacqueline Jones on The Freedmen’s Bureau: Work After Emancipation

Henry Wiencek recommends Eric Foner’s The Fiery Trial

 

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Slavery in Popular Culture:

Historical films and books always distort the historical record for dramatic purposes. Sometimes that doesn’t matter and sometimes it does. How has the history of slavery been presented in historical films?

Jermaine Thibodeaux reviews 12 Years a Slave (2013) and talks about the difficulty of dramatizing the ‘Peculiar Institution’.

Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany Gill, and The Associate of Black Women Historians comment on The Help (2011).

Nicholas Roland offers historical perspectives on Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012).

Daina Ramey Berry and Jermaine Thibodeaux discuss Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2002) and Haile Gerima’s film Sankofa (1993)

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Mapping Slavery:

Henry Wiencek recommends two significant digitalization projects that help capture broad trends related to slavery and emancipation in the US:

Mapping the Slave Trade using Emory University’s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

Visualising Emancipation(s)‘, a new digital project from the University of Richmond that maps the messy, regionally dispersed and violent process of ending slavery in America.

Slave_Trade_1

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First photo via The Texas Tribune

Andrew Cox Marshall: Between Slavery and Freedom in Savannah

By Tania Sammons

This essay is reproduced from the book we are featuring this month, Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris. If you would like to know more about the book and especially about the sidebars that feature short essays on interesting figures and events related to the Owen-Thomas House and the history of Savannah, you can watch the video interview we posted with the editors.

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

Andrew C. Marshall.  In James M. Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church in North America, Constituted at Savannah, GA,  January 20, .D. 1788 With Biographical Sketches of the Pastors (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 76. Courtesy of Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.

Andrew C. Marshall.  In James M. Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church in North America, Constituted at Savannah, GA,  January 20, .D. 1788 With Biographical Sketches of the Pastors (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888), 76. Courtesy of Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.

Born in South Carolina around 1755 to an enslaved woman and an English overseer, Marshall wound up in Savannah as a result of two failed manumission promises and ownership by five prominent slaveholders, including John Houstoun, the governor of Georgia in 1778 and 1784, and Joseph Clay, a businessman and judge. Accounts of Marshall’s life indicate he participated in activities that supported the United States in the American Revolution and War of 1812. He purportedly received pay for his work in both wars and had the opportunity to meet General George Washington. Marshall later served as President Washington’s personal servant on his visit to Savannah in 1791. Richard Richardson purchased Marshall in 1812, and Marshall purchased his freedom at some point soon thereafter with funds lent to him by Richardson, who was a merchant, banker, slave trader, and the first owner of the Owens-Thomas House. Richardson became Marshall’s first guardian, which the law required of free blacks. Marshall’s wife, Rachel, and their three daughters—Rose, Amy, and Peggy—had previously gained their freedom through the efforts of Marshall’s uncle, Andrew Bryan, the popular and influential pastor of the First African Baptist Church, as well as Richardson and other white elites in the community. As a free man, Marshall established a home with his family in Yamacraw on Savannah’s west side. He set up a successful drayage (hauling) business that allowed him to accumulate sizeable wealth. In 1824, the tax assessment of his real estate was valued at $8,400, and his will indicates that he had acquired shares in a state bank. At the time of his death, in 1856, he owned several buildings, including a brick house that he left to his immediate family. His fine clothes and silver watch he bequeathed to his enslaved cousin Andrew, showing the strong connections binding the enslaved and the free.

Image of Rev. Andrew Bryan from History of the First African Baptist Church, From its Organization, January 20th, 1788, to July 1st, 1888. Including the Centennial Celebration, Addresses, Sermons, Etc. by E.K. Love

Image of Rev. Andrew Bryan from History of the First African Baptist Church, From its Organization, January 20th, 1788, to July 1st, 1888. Including the Centennial Celebration, Addresses, Sermons, Etc. by E.K. Love

In addition to family, home, and business, Marshall focused his attentions on building up the congregations of black Baptists in Savannah. In 1815, at about the age of sixty, Marshall took over as pastor of the First African Baptist Church. He served in that position twice for a total of more than thirty years. During his leadership, Marshall baptized nearly 3,800 people, converted 4,000, married 2,000. His widespread and diverse religious activity included traveling around the country to preach, taking a special interest in the poor and infirm, and beginning a Sunday school. He even addressed the Georgia legislature. Beginning in 1840, he directed that church funds be used for foreign missions to Liberia, the African country established by Americans for the resettlement of free blacks.

Marshall’s prominent position did not keep him from suffering the indignities visited upon other free or enslaved blacks. He did not always agree with his peers or guardians and was sometimes called out or put in his place. Around 1820 he was sentenced to be publicly whipped for making an illegal purchase of bricks from slaves. His guardian and former master, Richard Richardson, and others spoke in his behalf to ensure the whipping did not “scratch his skin or draw blood.” Nonetheless, the public spectacle was meant to make clear to Marshall and all the free and enslaved people of Savannah the limits of their power.

First African Baptist Church, Savannah (Chatham County, Georgia), 2009. Image via Wikimedia Commons

First African Baptist Church, Savannah (Chatham County, Georgia), 2009.

Within the Baptist association and his own church, Marshall suffered repercussions because of his support of the work of the controversial white minister Alexander Campbell of Virginia, a reformed clergyman who favored the emancipation of slaves. Marshall showed interest in Campbell’s movement, known as the Disciples of Christ, and invited him to speak at the First African Baptist. Marshall’s association with Campbell resulted in a split within the church, with 155 members leaving First African Baptist to establish their own church, Third African Baptist. The Sunbury Baptist Association, the regional Baptist organization run by whites, sought to have Marshall dismissed from his post by the members of his church. When that didn’t work, they removed First African Baptist from their association from 1832 to 1837. The First African Baptist Church was readmitted to the association only after Marshall recanted his support of Campbell and asked forgiveness for his errant ways. In addition, his apology helped ease tensions with the white elites in the community.

Andrew Cox Marshall lived an extraordinary life, not least for reaching the age of one hundred. He experienced slavery and freedom, witnessed and participated in key moments in American history, and spent much of his time helping his fellow men and women. He died in December 1856 after returning home from a preaching tour in Richmond, Virginia, meant in part to raise money to build a new church in Savannah.   Hundreds of people attended his funeral. A newspaper account noted “an immense throng without respect to color or condition collected in the Church, the floor, aisles, galleries and even steps and windows of which were densely packed [and] hundreds [were] unable to gain admittance.” He was buried in a family vault at Laurel Grove South Cemetery.

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Tania Sammons is senior curator for decorative arts and historic sites for Telfair Museums. Sammons oversees the reinterpretation of the museums’ two National Historic Landmark buildings, the Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Owens-Thomas House. She also produces original exhibitions and related materials on decorative and fine arts and history. Her publications include exhibition catalogues The Story of Silver in Savannah: Creating and Collecting Since the 18th Century; “The Art of Kahlil Gibran,” in The Art of Kahlil Gibran; The Owens-Thomas House; and Daffin Park: The First One Hundred Years. Recent originally curated exhibitions include Sitting in Savannah: Telfair Chairs and Sofas; Journey to the Beloved Community: Story Quilts by Beth Mount, and Beyond Utility: Pottery Created by Enslaved Hands.

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Image of Andrew Bryan courtesy of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Website: http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/love/love.html This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.

Image of First African Baptist Church, Savannah (Chatham County, Georgia) via Wikimedia Commons

More to Read on Urban Slavery

Recommended by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris

wade slaverycities berlin harris rockman

Richard Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1800-1860. (1967).
This book remains the best one-volume account of urban slavery in the antebellum South. It combines overall trends in urban slavery with detailed accounts of the populations, laws, and economic roles of individual cities. The place to start with investigations of urban slavery in the U.S. South.

Claudia Dale Goldin, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820-1860: A Quantitative History. (1976).
This comprehensive study of urban slavery argues that the demand for urban slaves increased rather than declined in the 1850s. The author challenges scholars such as Richard Wade by relying on quantitative and traditional sources such as census and probate records.

Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds. Slavery in New York.  (2005).
This edited collection accompanied the ground-breaking New-York historical society exhibition of the same name.  Leading scholars of New York, slavery and African American history provide a wealth of information on how slavery in New York from 1626 to 1827, and southern slavery after New York ended slavery in 1827, influenced the economy, politics and society of one of the nation’s leading cities.

Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs and James Sidbury, eds., The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade.  (2013).
The essays in this book examine non-U.S. cities and their centrality to the slave trade and slave economies, including locations in Africa, South America Portugal, and the Caribbean.

Seth Rockman, Scraping by: Wage Labor, Slavery and Survival in Early Baltimore. (2009).
By examining the relationship of enslaved and free laborers in the political economy of Baltimore, Rockman challenges us to understand the role of slavery as part of, not distinct from, early capitalist formations.  Compelling individual stories of laborers carry the broader arguments about the meaning of labor in one of the most important cities in the antebellum U.S.

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