Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South by Emily West (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South by Emily West David E. Goldberg Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South. Emily West. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. ISBN 978-0-81313692-9, 256pp., cloth, $50.00. Of the many horrors and indignities the slaveholding South inflicted on its victims, no other act was as disruptive and traumatic as the separation of family. It was not surprising, then, that former slaves used their first days as free citizens to reunite with family members and loved ones. Yet while historians have examined these post–Civil War family reunions, they have paid only cursory attention to similar reunions during times of slavery. In her new book, Emily West examines the cases of free black men and women who petitioned southern courts to return them to slavery. She argues that these cases, although rare, provide revealing insight into marital relations, economic conditions, and proslavery legislation that muddied the line between freedom and bondage for free blacks in the antebellum South. In evaluating the residency petitions of free black southerners, West takes seriously Walter Johnson’s challenge to think beyond agency. For many free blacks in the antebellum South, decisions involving freedom and slavery were often untenable. A myriad of political, economic, and social restraints restricted citizenship [End Page 202] rights, none more so than the denial of kinship ties. For these individuals, freedom was synonymous with belonging, survival, and emotional attachments rather than autonomy. Free black southerners petitioned courts to be reunited with loved ones still enslaved, as well as to gain assurances that families would not be later resold. In evaluating the motivations of free black residency and reenslavement petitions, West is careful to differentiate between the motives of men and women. For men, petitions to reenter slavery were often individual choices that rarely affected others. Free black women, however, reentered slavery knowing that children born to enslaved women would themselves be slaves and potentially sold away without legal recourse. Despite the various choices that motivated free black men and women, West also reiterates that these decisions were rarely their own. Proslavery legislation that worked to undercut citizenship claims and economic opportunities, along with the sexual acts of masters and whites often influenced the decisions of free blacks to petition southern courts. Eighteen-year-old Sarah Cheathem and twenty-nine-year-old Mary Walker each petitioned to be owned by specific white males, legal requests West explains as owing to longstanding intimate “acquaintances” between the women and their would-be masters. The trial transcripts of these women and the many other petitioners compliment recent work by Ariela Gross and Laura Edwards, who highlight the ways slaves and free blacks took to the courts to address grievances and negotiate citizenship. While such actions allowed many slaves to be acquitted of violent offenses inflicted against masters and other whites—as Gross demonstrates—the trial records examined in Family or Freedom show the similar ways in which the cultural hegemony of paternalism assisted the petitioners’ residency complaints. Those who requested residency or enslavement did so by appealing to the desired benevolence of slaveholders and playing to expected racial stereotypes, which provide telling reminders about the differences between “activity” and “resistance” in the slaveholding South. Given the scarce source base and the anonymity of the many petitioner records, West has succeeded in pinpointing and evaluating the motivations that led many to give up their “freedom.” More importantly, she has avoided the temptation to take creative liberties with the silences that accompany many of the litigants’ complaints. At the same time, historians in the future might do well to consider more fully the political and cultural world of the amanuensis in the antebellum South—those anonymous “ghost writers” who negotiated the ambiguous boundaries that separated slave from free and white from black in the years before the Civil War. David E. Goldberg West Virginia University Copyright © 2014 The Kent State University Press