The wet frontier of slavery: plantation slavery and freedom on Texas’ Trinity River

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Texas’ Trinity River to show how the South’s smaller rivers enabled the spread of plantation slavery in the final decades of the antebellum era. Unlike other histories of slavery that argue that the domination of slaves linked with mastery over cotton crops or a hydraulic landscape, on the Trinity the plantation landscape reflected planters’ lack of control over the river. Planters’ disinterest in mastering the environment on the wet frontier of slavery undermined their own class’s justifications for slavery, the possibilities for enslaved people’s resistance, and freedpeople’s experience of emancipation along unleveed and untamed rivers. Planters’ ability to profit without controlling the river derived from owning land in both the bottomlands and uplands while exploiting a large enslaved labour force, a reality that increased the amount of work they expected of their slaves. After emancipation freedpeople incurred their former masters’ environmental debts in the bottomlands with floods worsened from a legacy of land clearance and cultivation that overloaded the South’s smaller rivers with sediment. Forced to battle the river during slavery, freedpeople encountered an even more destructive river in freedom at the very moment their world changed from plantation to a single plot within that landscape.