"Slavery, Race, and Freedom on the Spanish Anglo Borderlands"

Abstract

"Slavery, Race, and Freedom on the Spanish Anglo Borderlands" Christian PinneniD On a cool, crisp fall day, the free black man James appeared in front of the Spanish governor of Natchez during court day in 1781. The settlement was an outpost built on—and below—bluffs that oversaw the mighty waters of the Mississippi river dissected by muddy roads following a haphazard pattern. It was home to many other African men and women, the overwhelming majority of whom were slaves. James, however, had recently been freed and now sought to prove to everyone in town that indeed he deserved to be treated as a free man. To do so, James had to demand from the governor that two white men pay the debt owed to him. There are many things we do not know of the encounter. How did James address the governor? After all, the man was an official of the Spanish empire that had only recently brought the English settlers of Natchez into its fold during the American Revolution, and the language of the court was Spanish, not the English James likely spoke. How did the Spanish governor receive James? Did he accept his case as any other, or did he hesitate in light of the racial identity of the other petitioners and claimants that day, assuredly all white? Did the governor understand the importance of the case for the next decade and a half of Spanish stewardship in Natchez, or did he simply follow the letter of the law? Whatever the case, James, a former slave, received justice. The two white men, Clement Dyson and John Staybraker, were ordered to pay their debt.1 With this decision, the governor of Natchez had brought the full leverage of Spanish law to an Anglo-American white population and their black slaves, and this would have tremendous consequences for the following decade. James's actions might not appear revolutionary in the Age of Revolutions that had recently swept up the remote district in its wake, but in many ways they can be read as such. James, a black man who had no rights under the previous government, had asserted his rights under Spanish law as he approached the Spanish governor with his case. For the first time in the eight-decade-old European history of the District—which had previously been held by France (until 1763) and then Great Britain—whiteness no longer appeared as the exclusive marker of citizenship or defining aspect of freedom and liberty in the burgeoning plantation society. This step of agency, self-preservation, and justice undertaken by James, presents an important marker in the historical record of Natchez. By extension, James' [End Page 551] and other people of color's stories that claimed these rights need to be unearthed to complete our picture of race relations at the margins of the American Republic to aid our understanding of slavery and race in the emerging United States. The Natchez District, the outpost of three empires in the eighteenth-century Gulf South, was not a topic in any of the essays chosen for Richmond Brown's Coastal Encounters, the most useful collection of essays on the borderlands in the colonial South to date. In the words of Brown, Natchez, and the entire region, is "a significant but heretofore relatively neglected subject."2 Unfortunately, not much has changed over the last decade. This article draws on the intellectual approaches to southern borderlands in Brown's attempt to chip away at the blank spots of the region's history and to emphasize the importance that borderland studies play in understanding early American history in general, and the history of race and slavery in particular. Outside of the traditional focal points for race and slavery studies of colonies like Virginia and South Carolina, historians are able to test the conclusions drawn by scholars of the aforementioned areas. Usually, the borderlands complicate the genesis story of slavery in the United States, and thereby adds to our understanding of the role that black men and women played in the development of the American Republic. Most recently, Kathleen DuVal, in her acclaimed Independence Lost, argues that the Gulf Coast "sheds new light...