Negro Slavery Research Articles

WHICH SOUTHERNERS? WHICH SOUTHERN HISTORIANS? A CENTURY OF TEACHING SOUTHERN HISTORY AT YALE

5 6 Y W H I C H S O U T H E R N E R S ? W H I C H S O U T H E R N H I S T O R I A N S ? A C E N T U R Y O F T E A C H I N G S O U T H E R N H I S T O R Y A T Y A L E G L E N D A E L I Z A B E T H G I L M O R E Not long after I arrived at Yale, I met C. Vann Woodward, the man who for thirty years had been the most acclaimed historian of the South. At a departmental reception, someone unfortunately introduced me to him as ‘‘John Blum’s replacement.’’ I drew in my breath and braced myself. He rightly scowled at the suggestion that anyone could replace the eminent U.S. historian John Blum and asked, ‘‘What else do you do?’’ In a tiny little voice, I answered with a question: ‘‘Southern history?’’ Before his eyes, I had transformed myself from John Blum’s replacement into his own replacement . Woodward’s scowl deepened, and he responded, ‘‘Well, I guess someone has to do it,’’ turned on his heel, and walked away. It would be a year before I saw Vann Woodward again. Of course, he was right: ‘‘someone has to do it’’ – teach southern history, that is. Or was he? Many top universities have never had a position earmarked for a professor of the history of the South. But Yale is di√erent. In the twentieth century, the university was home to several distinguished scholars of the South, a structure that rested on two pillars: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips and Comer Vann Woodward. Phillips’s work upheld the first part of the nineteenth century and Woodward’s work upheld the latter part of the 5 7 R nineteenth century. Just as the scholarship of these two scholars brace the nineteenth century, so too did their lives span the twentieth century. U. B. Phillips published four books in twenty years at the beginning of the century: Plantation and Frontier (1909), The Life of Robert Toombs, 1877–1934 (1913), American Negro Slavery (1918), and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929). He wrote numerous articles, one of which appeared in The Yale Review in 1906. C. Vann Woodward published four books in twenty years in the middle of the century: Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938), Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951), Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1951), and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). During their lifetimes and since, Phillips and Woodward have been recognized as the leading interpreters of, respectively, the antebellum and the postbellum nineteenth-century South. But Phillips’s and Woodward’s politics – and the political import of their interpretations – sprang from the milieu of their own moments in the twentieth century. (Thanks to Garry Lacy Reeder and to Gaddis Smith for their insights on this subject.) Each man balanced on the cutting edge of the southern politics of his own time. Phillips mounted an enormous e√ort to provide an intellectual justification for the successful white southern political revolution of the 1890s that stripped African Americans of the right to vote, segregated them, and relegated them to the lowest rungs of the economic order. His generation literally rewrote southern history to justify white supremacy not simply in the past but in the present and the future; not simply in the South, but in the rest of the nation as well. Woodward’s project from the 1930s to the 1960s was to demolish the system Phillips had shored up. First, in Origins of the New South, Woodward gave the lie to the myth of white unity in a classless society, and then he gave to black and white southerners a useable past, a time between the Civil War and segregation, when their forebears had lived in a more racially just – and more integrated – world. Both men were prodigious researchers; both were powerful...

An Exploratory Analysis of <i>Time on the Cross</i> and Its Archival Implications

IntroductionRobert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's 1974 publication, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, was a reappraisal of the fiscal sustainability of institutional slavery. Predicated on the scientific method of quantitative data analysis, the work classified the U.S. slave system as a mutually beneficial exchange of services and commodities between plantation owners and slave laborers. Because of its inflammatory statements, the book quickly gained prominence in popular culture and instigated a maelstrom of public and scholarly debate. Economic historians openly questioned the authors' research methods while social analysts castigated the book's reinterpretation of slavery's cultural impact. Traditional historians were hesitantly diplomatic in their responses; professional archivists abstained from the debate entirely. The sustained absence of an archival response and the continued dearth of literature about the case are inexplicable given the book's notoriety and topical relevance to two important archival issues: the need for diverse representation in collections and the public role of the professional archivist.An example of limited historical data used as conclusive social evidence, Time on the Cross is the worst-case scenario for cultural archives that do not regularly appraise their collections or accession materials to present alternative perspectives to the master narrative. Without inclusive acquisition models, historically marginalized groups are precluded from being documented in the cultural memory. Recognizing the social power inherent in the archival record requires archivists to discard the self-appointed role of neutral observer and actively engage in public interpretations of their collections.As intermediaries between the user and the record, archivists are also uniquely positioned to advocate for the legitimate use of archival material as evidence. However, the absence of an archival response to Time on the Cross and the continued contemporary debate about the appropriate degree of abstraction from the Schellenberg practice model indicates that the scope of professional advocacy is still an unresolved issue in the archival community. Should archivists, in fact, bear some responsibility for the cultural impact of their collections?As a public narrative based on historical records, Time on the Cross has strong archival implications, especially in regards to appraisal and its relationship to collection diversity and professional responsibility. This paper explores both of these topics and, based on the case study, examine the relevant schools of thought and literature that address the archivist's role in creating culturally representative collections and the scope of archival responsibility.Time on the Cross: A Brief Case HistoryIn the collaborative effort, Time on the Cross, Fogel and Engerman attempt to bridge the cleft between cultural studies and the hard sciences by contributing an economic analysis of institutional slavery and its positive externalities. Both authors are formally trained economists and were influential in the burgeoning field of cliometrics, a specialization of economic, social, and political history that gained prominence in the 1960s. The authors introduced the pragmatic methods of scientific analysis into historical research to create impartial analytic data. Ultimately, Time on the Cross was a social science exercise that relied on an objective analytic method to investigate a subjective historical topic.1In the book, the authors stated that compared to the subsequent period of emancipation, slaves experienced more economic solubility, moral indoctrination, and positive reinforcement of traditional social values during enslavement. In addition, Fogel and Engerman asserted that the financial collapse of the southern states was inextricably linked to the advent of the Civil War; otherwise, both the South and all of its inhabitants would have continued to benefit fiscally. …

Sojourner Truth's America

This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century through the life of one of its most magnetic and influential characters: Truth. In an in-depth account of this amazing activist, Margaret Washington unravels Truth's world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation's most significant reform era. Organized chronologically into three distinct eras of Truth's life, Sojourner Truth's America examines the complex dynamics of the times in which she acted, beginning with the transnational contours of her spirituality and early life as a slave. Washington then highlights Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge, which propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write. Throughout the book, Washington explores Truth's passionate commitment to family and community, including her vision for a beloved community that extended beyond race, gender, and socioeconomic condition and embraced a common humanity. For Truth, the significant model for such communalism was a primitive, prophetic Christianity. Illustrated with dozens of images of Truth and her contemporaries, Sojourner Truth's America provides important insights into the turbulent cultural and political climate of the age while also separating the many myths from the facts concerning this legendary American figure.

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (1735-67) (review)

Reviewed by: Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (1735-67) Alessa Johns and Clarence E. Walker Megan Vaughan , Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (1735–67). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 341. $23.95. Creating the Creole Island is an important contribution to the study of slavery. The book is erudite, comparative, interdisciplinary, and it raises important questions about the creation of Creoles in slave societies. Like William St. Clair's The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Afua Cooper's The Hanging of Angelique, Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton's Slavery & South Asian History, Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker's Many Middle Passages, and Ehud R.Toledano's As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East, Vaughan's study of Mauritius examines a slave society outside of the Caribbean and North and South America. These areas have been for over forty years the center of slavery studies. This scholarship has revealed a great deal about the profitability of slavery, the work that slaves performed, master-slave relations, and slave culture. Vaughan's book will enable scholars of slavery to see how the institution developed on an island that was not as important as either Cuba or Haiti. Mauritius is an island in the Indian Ocean and was explored, colonized, and populated by many different groups of people. At various moments in its history, Mauritius was scoured by the Dutch and Portuguese, but from the early eighteenth century until 1810 the island was a French possession. Then it was conquered by Great Britain. The island's population comprised Europeans and slaves brought from Africa and India. Because Mauritius was uninhabited, its population consisted, as Vaughan says, "of no one thing or people but of many more or less foreign, more or less naturalized" (2). Noting that the term Creole is "slippery," Vaughan writes that Mauritius "without natives has always been the product of multiple influences, multiple sources, which to differing degrees merge, take root, and 'naturalize' on new . . . soil" (2). In brief, there were no Native Americans or Zulus to contend [End Page 431] with or displace on Mauritius. The eighteenth-century history of the colony was characterized by both instability and poverty. The island was also ravaged by hurricanes and swarms of rats. Initially Frenchmen did not want to come to Mauritius because economic prospects were not good. The white population of the colony was unstable and did not reproduce itself. "The latter was a function," according to Vaughan, "both of high mortality rates and the island's role as a strategic base rather than as a site of colonial production" (265). The whites also lived in fear of the slave population. From the very beginnings of settlement, the Europeans did have to confront the fact that some of the people imported as slaves ran away to the mountains and became Maroons. These former slaves harassed the settled communities for food, women, and other supplies. Marronage was never the problem on Mauritius that it came to be in either Jamaica or Brazil. Nonetheless, the French colonists were always worried about slave conspiracies. The major contribution to the field of slavery studies in Vaughan's book is its discussion of what I call the variegated slave and free black population of Mauritius. Slaves on Mauritius, who came from India and Africa, were all defined as black under the French and later the English. But whether slave or free, they created "distinct identities for themselves" (266). These differences consisted of dress, hair styles, and the retention/creation of some linguistic forms, which suggest, as other studies of creolite have, that the slaves were never completely socialized by their masters. Vaughan does not suggest that slavery was a benign institution on Mauritius. But she does indicate that there were places based on religious and ethnic distinctions that the slaves and free people created for themselves. This process was facilitated in part by the colonial administrators of the island. Students of American Negro slavery, like me, will be surprised to learn that on Mauritius free people of...

Latinos/as and White Racial Frame: The Procrustean Bed of Assimilation

When North American slavery was established in the 1600s, an interpretive perspective was developed that sought to justify the institution of African American slavery. This composite perspective, a “white racial frame,” was later extended by whites to other racial groups such as Latinos/as. This racial frame, which has become white “common sense,” includes important racial stereotypes, understandings, images, and inclinations to act. Various forms of this racial framing exist among different U.S. racial groups, but a strong white racial frame has prevailed because whites have long had the power and the resources to impose this reality. A hegemonic situation occurs when people of color consent in various ways to this white racial framing and common sense. This acceptance varies. We discuss four forms of consent to white racial framing that appear in our in‐depth interviews in a national sample of Latinos/as. Three forms reference Latinos: acceptance of elements of the racial frame, active enactment of the racial frame, and internalized violence. The fourth use of racial framing is directed by Latinos at African Americans.

Equal By Comparison: Unsettling Assumptions of Antidiscrimination Law

In Fall 2005, race riots in France drew attention to differences between the French and American legal regimes for remedying racial inequality and discrimination. The riots reacted to the persistence of employment discrimination against people of North African origin. French antidiscrimination law has been unable to solve such problems because of its focus on criminal punishment of racist speech and its uncompromising commitment to race-blindness. These features embody the intersection of two historical forces: the influence of Vichy memories on French legal conceptions of racism and discrimination, and the strong republican resistance to social distinctions. Understanding this history comparatively brings certain features of U.S. antidiscrimination law into sharper focus: U.S. law imposes civil, rather than criminal liability, and is more tolerant of race-conscious affirmative action, more resistant to regulating racist speech, and more reluctant to extend antidiscrimination law to a wide range of protected characteristics. These distinctive features of U.S. law are explained by the law's reaction to the history of slavery and segregation. The different evolutions of antidiscrimination law reveal how particular forms of racism - anti-Semitism and genocide in France, and the slavery and segregation of African Americans in the United States - gave rise to two very different antidiscrimination regimes. The French contrast challenges the assumptions of American antidiscrimination law, leading to greater precision about the uniquely American commitment to race-blindness in equal protection doctrine. The stricter French model of race-blindness highlights the instability and ambivalence of American race-blindness. Comparative historical inquiry reveals that the goal of eradicating group subordination does more work in U.S. antidiscrimination law than the goal of achieving a truly race-blind society based on individual merit.

Children in European systems of slavery: Introduction

This special edition on children in western systems of slavery1 follows last year's special edition of Slavery & Abolition on women in western systems of slavery in moving beyond the conventional t...

Forever in Struggle

Here is an invaluable and timely book about a subject central to U.S. history and still of obvious signifi cance today—slavery, the Civil War, emancipa- tion, Reconstruction, and both the immediate aftermath and longer-term consequences of those things. During the last forty years or so, scholars have produced a tremendous body of high-quality literature illuminating these and related subjects. But, as Eric Foner notes, cutting-edge scholarship . . . takes a long time to percolate into the broader culture (p. xxvii). A work of synthesis, Forever Free aims to accelerate that percolation by helping to bring the results of those scholarly labors out of university libraries and classrooms and before a larger reading public. As the book's prologue makes clear, this is a book primarily about Recon- struction. The core text is composed of seven chapters and an epilogue. Its fi rst chapter, on the origins, purpose, and nature of African-American slavery, appears here not only the South's peculiar institution caused the Civil War and Reconstruction but also because the institutions former slaves created during Reconstruction and the values and aspirations they articulated in the aftermath of emancipation had their roots in the slave experience (p. xxx). The second chapter looks at the Civil War and wartime emancipation. Five chapters then detail the history of Reconstruction—its rise, achievements, and eventual overturn. The last of those fi ve also reviews the later imposition of formal disfranchisement and legalized segregation without such a review the long-term meaning of Reconstruction's defeat for the status and conditions of the African-American population is seriously and dangerously obscured. An epilogue quickly surveys the story's sequel, from the Jim Crow era down to the present. Joshua Brown selected and captioned the pictorial images that copiously illustrate this text. Brown also authored six visual essays that demonstrate and analyze historical changes in mainstream artistic depiction of African Americans, from the antebellum era through the early decades of the twentieth

"There Won't Be Any Rich People in Heaven": The Black Christ, White Hypocrisy, and the Gospel According to W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois despised white supremacy, economic exploitation, and European and American colonialism. The pillaging and partitioning of Africa angered him no end, especially since they were legitimated by the erasure of Africa and its peoples from the authorized histories of the world. M[T]here has been consistent effort, he wrote in The World and Africa in 1946, to rationalize Negro slavery by omitting Africa from world history. Fundamental this historical amnesia was the neglect of Africa's crucial role in the development of modern religions. White Europeans and Americans, Du Bois insisted, whitened their religious faiths in order justify the oppression and dehumanization of people of color. This was nowhere more apparent than in whites' conceptions of Jesus of Nazareth. Roughly two millennia ago, Du Bois observed, there was born in the Egypto-Syrian area, with its Mongoloid and Negroid elements, a social reformer called Jesus Christ. Hypocritical white Europeans and Americans, however, refused acknowledge that he was anything but white. As Du Bois maintained, Nordics who have never accepted his doctrine of submission evil, repudiation of riches, and love for mankind, have usually limned him as Caucasoid. Of course, the biblical Jesus was not white. He was a Syrian Jew, one whom Du Bois described as perhaps bearing a hooked nose and curled hair. Christ may have even inherited Ethiopian blood. Du Bois, in short, seemed think that if the association of whiteness with godliness provided a rationale for racial oppression, then recognizing the blackness of Christ, or at least his nonwhiteness, might equip African Americans with another set of tools counter exploitation and hatred.1 Du Bois's attack upon the Caucasoid Christ and his consideration of a nonwhite Jesus in The World and Africa and in a host of poems and short stories presaged a theological and religious revolution that occurred in the United States during the late 1960s. As champions of civil rights and Black Power assaulted the citadels of white supremacy during the second half of the

Rehearsal for War: Black Militias in the Atlantic World

This article challenges the notion that black militias were of little consequence in the antebellum United States. The establishment, personnel and equipment of these militia units, and their importance for local black organization, has largely escaped scholarly attention. The significance of armed companies of young black men at a time when they were not officially sanctioned by federal and state authorities has also not been explored. The article makes three arguments. First, there was a trajectory towards militarization from vigilance committees to independent companies to enrolment in union armies. Second, links between self-defence and rights of citizenship were already being struggled over at local and state levels before the more famous national expression in black union soldiers fighting for the union. Third, national narratives concerning the origins of the American civil war, African American slavery, and British Canadian history, obscure the multiple roles played by people of African descent during this period. It is only through transnational approaches towards fugitives, military formation and antislavery mobilization that we realise the role of blacks in challenging American slavery in the Atlantic world. The organization of the article is as follows. It begins with fugitives and the organization of vigilance committees of self-defense in North America. It continues with states rights of self-defence, the exclusion of black men from these rights, and the resulting organization of independent companies. The public parade of these black militias on West India Day, the most important commemoration by Americans of African descent between the early 1830’s and 1860’s, is the next section. It concludes with the continental destruction of American slavery and its consequences for the post-emancipation era. This article has several objectives. It examines important black institutions hitherto unexamined. It aims to broaden the conventional temporal and spatial dimensions of the civil war era. The third task is to reveal the limitations of nationalist narratives by seeking out connections among people of African descent as well as in the ways in which individuals and organizations provide alternative means for comparison. Finally, this article is part of a broader project examining political mobilization against slavery in the Atlantic world.

Von der Gemeinde zur "Community": Judische Einwanderer in Chicago, 1840-1900 (review)

Reviewed by: Von der Gemeinde zur "Community": Jüdische Einwanderer in Chicago, 1840–1900 Christiane Harzig Von der Gemeinde zur "Community": Jüdische Einwanderer in Chicago, 1840–1900, by Tobias Brinkmann. Studien zur Historischen Migrations-forschung 10. Osnabrück: Rasch Verlag, 2002. 444 pp. € 29.90. Brinkmann's study of the Jewish community in Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century addresses the context of German and Jewish immigration, the relationship between class, ethnicity, and religion, aspects of association and acculturation, and the complexity of ethnicity in a modernizing America. The author announces his main research interest as the development of fundamentally new, different forms of Jewish "Gemeinschaft," that is, he wants to know when the Jewish community or communities in Chicago emerged, which structures they produced, and how they developed in light of assimilation and ethnicization processes. Since—unfortunately—he has chosen a diachronic rather than a topical approach, the second chapter summarizes the history of Jewish emigration from Germany, its motives, paths, networks. The third chapter outlines the rise of Chicago as a fast-growing American city and focuses on the Jewish element in this urban development. These two chapters mainly rely on secondary material. Chapters 4 to 6 chronicle the development of Jewish community life: the pioneer generation (1840–1855), community building in the new fatherland (1860–1870), and the community in crisis (1870–1880). Chapter 7 introduces the "other" Jews from Russia and their impact on existing community structures, and Chapter 8 addresses issues of modernization affecting the German-Jewish community from 1880 to 1900. Chapter 2: While between 1860 and 1914 almost 50 million people left Europe for North and South American, the number of ca. 100,000 Jews emigrating from German and some 10,000 from neighboring regions between 1815 and 1880 seems rather small. However, as the author argues, in relation to their share in the population they were over-represented. Bavarians, driven [End Page 214] by the search for improved social and economic conditions, more personal freedom, and fear of repression, developed a well organized network for migration to Chicago between 1840 and 1860. These people played a prominent role in the emerging Jewish community. Chapter 3: At first, it is the well established Jewish community of New York that introduces a scheme to guide the newly arrived out of the city and into newly opening terrain in the west. However, Jews soon moved from the hinterland into the emerging urban center of Chicago, taking up professions, first as the proverbial and despised peddlers, but soon building up small businesses and carving out a niche in the newly emerging textile industry. We learn of the establishment in the 1840s and 1850s of the Jewish Burial Ground Society, the first religious community (Gemeinde), a lodge of B'nai B'rith, and the United Hebrew Relief Association. The arrival of Jews from Posen (the German-occupied part of Poland) as well as the conflict between conservative/traditional and reform concepts of theology and religious practices soon made the concept of a unified, German-style, Jewish community obsolete. Charity work became the glue that pasted together the new network which was now based on voluntarism and diversity. The author also addresses the issue of antisemitic prejudices. While in the 1850s Jewish business people were still confronted with the "Shylock image" and stigmatized as unreliable, in the 1870s and 80s their business success and trustworthiness as well as their patriotic performance in the Civil War (as shown in the following chapter) was acknowledged. Chapter 5 outlines the development from the outbreak of the Civil War up to the Great Fire in 1871. In close cooperation with the "German community" the Jews mustered a contingent which became part of the German troops. The task was to defend American freedom, and parallels between the slavery of African Americans and the ancient suffering and persecution of the Jewish people were drawn. During the war very little anti-Jewish propaganda was voiced in the English press. In the remainder of the chapter the Jewish population is situated in the social and geographic landscape of the city by using a list of donors for the Jewish Hospital as assembled...

Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century

Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century. By Robert J. Steinfeld. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xi, 329. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $22.95.) In book, Robert J. Steinfeld continues his exploration of the changing legal constructions of Anglo-American labor. An earlier study, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (1991) focused first on the ascendance of indentured servitude in the American colonies, and then on the institution's normative and legal repudiation in the United States (particularly outside the South) during the early nineteenth century. The present volume pursues the evolving legal meanings of free wage labor into the twentieth century. Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century is dense and demanding - though rewarding - study. The opening section, Introduction: Free Wage Labor in the History of the West, is likely to hold the greatest interest for scholars outside the field of legal history. Here Steinfeld renews his assault on the conventional wisdom that dominant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of free wage labor were similar to our own. On the contrary, earlier generations accepted that labor contracts might compel so-called free wage laborers, through various extra-- market-force threats and pressures (e.g., incarceration, legally-sanctioned pecuniary penalties), to perform their labor agreements. From central argument (documented in the body of the book), Steinfeld proceeds in the introductory section to wide-ranging assessment of the mix of compulsions and pressures upon which employers have historically relied to exact labor. This assessment is, to my mind, persuasive. Yet it may prove controversial, since the author concludes that, because in all cases laborers are induced to choose between unpleasant alternatives, the distinction between and coerced labor is inevitably an arbitrary one. Steinfeld does offer the disclaimer that this is not an argument that wage labor was form of slavery (8). But those who believe that the physical compulsions and other circumstances impressed on human chattels were not merely particularly harsh, but were of unique order altogether, are unlikely to be appeased by the author's disclaimer. I include here, among other probable critics of Steinfeld's perspective, the adherents of Orlando Patterson's neoabolitionist thesis of natal alienation. In his determination that all forms of nineteenth-century labor were motivated by mix of incentives and that chattel servitude and wage labor existed along a very broad continuum rather than as binary opposition (8), Steinfeld acknowledges the influence of Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974). Of comparable influence is the work of the Progressive Legal Realist thinker, Robert Hale - above all Hale's ground-- breaking emphasis upon how the legal and regulatory functions of the state establish significant background conditions and otherwise contribute to differential economic power, the options available to individuals, and the ensuing market compulsions experienced by waged laborers. (See for example Force and the State: A Comparison of 'Political' and 'Economic' Compulsion, Columbia Law Review, 35 [1935], 149-61.) Steinfeld devotes most of his book to close examination of statutes and judicial rulings regulating contract labor in nineteenth-century England. Reflecting the authority of common-law Master and Servants Acts, the use of penal sanctions to discourage and punish contract breach remained compatible with English understandings of free labor into the 1870s, and employers often resorted to these to minimize workers' premature exits from agreements and to otherwise manage their labor costs and supply. Thereafter, the growing power of organized labor proved instrumental in altering the dominant view. …

Moonlight, Magnolias, and Brigadoon; or, “Almost Like Being in Love”: Mastery and Sexual Exploitation in Eugene D. Genovese's Plantation South

Like most eager graduate students on the job market, I vastly overprepared for my AHA interviews, which, thankfully, now seem like a lifetime ago. One of the questions I imagined my interviewers would ask was, what do you believe to be the most important book published in southern history (as I considered myself then as now, first and foremost, a southern historian)? Needless to say, the question was never posed; interviewers showed much greater interest in the more pedestrian tasks of determining what teaching gaps I could fill in their departments and in sizing me up as a collegial colleague. At long last, it seems, I now have an audience and a forum for that long-ignored question, as well as my response. Professors Livingston and Sinha have offered wonderful, thorough analyses and synopses of the published work of Eugene Genovese and its impact on the field of southern history. Some of what I have to say, therefore, is a mere reiteration of their points. Foremost, what I believe to be Genovese’s greatest contribution to the field is his attentiveness to analysis. As we all know, Genovese relied on many of the sources used by U. B. Phillips, whose work, American Negro Slavery, is considered the first scholarly attempt to grapple with slavery as a historical subject. Whereas the apologist and racist Phillips marshaled the sources, largely the texts written by slaveholders

Generations of captivity: a history of African-American slaves

Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the 17th century to its fiery demise nearly 300 years later. Most Americans, black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one fixed in the mid-19th century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South and subscribed to Christianity. Here, however, Berlin offers a dynamic vision, a major reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war, and ultimately emancipation. Berlin's understanding of the processes that continually transformed the lives of slaves makes Generations of Captivity useful reading for anyone interested in the evolution of antebellum America. Connecting the charter generation to the development of Atlantic society in the 17th century, the plantation generation to the reconstruction of colonial society in the 18th century, the revolutionary generation to the age of revolutions, and the migration generation to American expansionism in the 19th century, Berlin integrates the history of slavery into the larger story of American life. He demonstrates how enslaved black people, by adapting to changing circumstances, prepared for the moment when they could seize liberty and declare themselves the freedom generation. This epic story, told by a master historian, provides a rich understanding of the experience of African-American slaves, an experience that continues to mobilize American thought and passions today.

Seduction by Law: Sexual Property and Testimonial Possession in Thereafter Johnnie

In Carolivia Herron' s 1991 novel Thereafter Johnnie, none of the five main characters comprising the protagonist's family are able to grasp the meaning of the past any more than they are able to relinquish their insistence on its hold upon them in the present. As the above epigraphs suggest, the central characters of the novel are haunted by an unfinished past the generations distant past of African American slavery, certainly, but also the contemporary past in which an episode of father-daughter incest has destroyed the

"Black Thunder's" Call for a Conjure Response to "American Negro Slavery"

In American classrooms in first half of twentieth century, students using popular history textbook Growth of American Republic were taught that slaves suffered less than any other class in South from its 'peculiar institution.' ... There was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization. The negro learned his master's language, and accepted in some degree his moral and religious standards (Morrison and Commager 415). This idea of slavery stems directly from U. B. Phillips's massive history American Negro Slavery (1918), which dominated historiography of slavery well into 1950s. In Phillips's words, the plantations were best schools yet invented for mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which bulk of American negroes represented, and Phillips emphasizes that process of transition from barbarism to civilization was essentially slow (343). White plantation owners, in this metaphor, instill order and attempt to teach methods of rationality to superstitious and ignorant slaves. It is not surprising then to find that Arna Bontemps, when researching slave narratives before writing his historical novel of slavery, Black Thunder (1936), rejected Nat Turner's rebellion as basis for his novel because he was uneasy about the business of Nat's 'visions' and 'dreams' (Introduction xii). Instead, he chose Gabriel Prosser and his attempt to capture Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, because Prosser had not depended on trance-like mumbo-jumbo, and he emphasizes that Prosser had not been possessed, not even overly optimistic (xiii). Bontemps appears to have valued Prosser's logical planning and organization, his strategy, and his dignity. It would be easy to read this as revealing Bontemps's desire to counter dominant image of slaves as superstitious and ignorant, except for fact that Bontemps depicts in his novel slaves who fear and bad hands, who visit conjurers for protection, and who see ghost of slave Bundy, who was beaten to death by his master. It is true that Gabriel himself dismisses other slaves' superstitions, and this has led Eric Sundquist to note that, although conjure has undeniable power in slave world recreated in Black Thunder, it is set in contrast to decidedly foundation provided for Gabriel's bid to be free (97); Sundquist argues that conjure remains ambivalent in this novel, since it both causes a disabling fear of 'stars,' 'signs,' and 'bad hands' that dooms rebellion, and ultimately becomes a mechanism for power and revenge within community (121-22). While I find Sundquist's insightful and comprehensive in relation to slaves themselves, my own draws on Houston Baker's theory of conjure as narrative and William Covino's theory of magic rhetoric to explore how this conflict between rationality and conjure within novel's plot is mirrored at level of novel's discourse, inviting reader to participate actively in choosing conjure over type of rationality that Phillips's text presents. Many of slaves in Black Thunder are caught in an epistemological dilemma between trusting rational word that comes to them from masters and books, and trusting a conjure epistemology that they themselves often dismiss as superstition. Ben, slave who confesses and thus reveals Gabriel's plot to overthrow Richmond, is haunted by ghost of Bundy, a slave beaten to death by his master, and yet rejects ghost's call for retribution. Gabriel himself, at more than one crucial juncture, faces choice between reading world according to an empiricist mode and reading events in natural world as signs or symbols that would reveal a conjure knowledge based on assumption of an animate and interconnected world. By revealing Ben and Gabriel as tragic misreaders, and by providing reader with opportunities to interpret text through a conjure epistemology, Bontemps argues not only for a revised history of slavery that acknowledges slaves as sources, but also for a way of knowing both past and contemporary reality that does not rely on objectivist discourse. …

"Building Bridges Back to the Past": An Interview with Fred D'Aguiar

This interview was conducted after Fred D'Aguiar traveled to Ghana (West Africa) where he had been invited by the British Council to lecture at Ghana University--where I was working on a research project on women's slave narratives--and to participate at the conference "The Writer and the Slave Trade," held at Cape Coast University (26-30 November 1997). After a visit to Elmina Castle and Cape Coast Castle--which hurt too much--we could not but talk about D'Aguiar's The Longest Memory (1994), and Feeding the Ghosts (1997), two powerful and poetical works in which the author both revisits, and rewrites previous stories on a monstrous and barbaric episode: African-American slavery.

Native-American Slavery and Territoriality in the Colonial Upper Great Lakes Region

Studies of slavery in the Great Lakes region have general^ focused on African, rather than on Native-American slavery, and compared northern and southern institutions, touching only briefly on the importance of Indian slavery in the development of bound labor around the Great Lakes. Because of the strong interest in African-American history, in North America slavery has been viewed quite literally as a <cblack-and-white issue. This emphasis on African-American slavery obscures the crucial role that Native-American slavery and Native-American/white relations played in the labor systems of the Great Lakes region. Indian slavery, more familiar in South America, has been regarded as an offshoot of captivity in North America. Certainly, the enslavement of native peoples grew out of precontact captivity practices that were exacerbated by the introduction of European chattel slavery in the region. Indeed, demand for slaves and the value that the French placed on captives inspired some native groups, including the Foxes, Sioux, Ojibwas, and Iowas, to make war on their neighbors with the intent of gaining the material and economic benefits resulting from the slave trade.1 Russell M. Magnaghi has shown the vibrancy and resiliency of Indian slavery within the Great Lakes region, both in terms of the trade in slaves east to the St. Lawrence River Valley via Fort Michilimackinac and in their use as domestics or as laborers in the fur trade. It was only through the abolition of slavery in Upper Canada and the qualified enforcement of the Northwest Ordinance that Indian slavery eventually vanished from the upper Midwest. Yet most studies of Great Lakes slavery focus on French and British concepts of bound labor drawn from plantation slavery in the Atlantic world.

Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860

Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780-1860. By Joanne Pope Melish. (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, c. 1998. Pp. xx, 296. $35.00, ISBN 0-8014-3413-0.) In this ambitious and often compelling study, Joanne Pope Melish seeks to explore in detail, and then to reconfigure, our sense of the meaning of emancipation in New England between 1780 and the Civil War. Working with a wide field of sources--from the mundane private transactions recorded in court records to the splashy come-ons of theatrical broadsides--she portrays the consequences of the end of slavery there as far more pernicious than we have been satisfied to think. Melish aims to show that the New England emancipation of African Americans was not so much the end of slavery as the creation of a deep racialist vision and, concurrently, an elaborate fiction about New England that would fuel sectional debate to 1860. Melish argues in particular that the meaning of gradual emancipation is best seen in terms of two interrelated narratives, one that came to dominate accounts of slavery's end in the North, and another notable for its near total absence. The latter missing story is the story of how deeply embedded African American slavery was in the society and economy of early New England. As legal slavery faded from the social scene in New England in the mid-1820s, southern slavery emerged into a critical glare as never before. This coincidence drove the history of New England slavery out of the national debate, thus also effacing much of the history of New England African Americans, to the point where they themselves did not grasp the importance of their past. The other story, the one told instead, was of a perennially free New England, cradle of American liberty, and fortress against the increasingly evil South. Some of the ground Melish covers is familiar, such as the racial discrimination in political and economic life that constricted African Americans' citizenship. But most of her concerns in this broadly conceived book--the biological construction of African American bodies by white physicians, for example, and the striking images of racial role-reversal in drama, art, and literature--are freshly seen and compellingly interpreted in ways that broaden our understanding of how deep and yet problematic was the bond between racialist ideology and the twin images of free New England and slave South. …

Women Advocates Before the Supreme Court

Women Advocates Before the Supreme Court CLARE CUSHMAN Legend has it that when Dolley Madison and a group ofthe First Lady’s friends arrived one day at the Supreme Court in the middle of an oral argument, the great advocate Daniel Webster stopped his oration, bowed to the ladies, and started again from the beginning. Although such excessive gallantry was not standard practice in the early nineteenth century, it was customary for wives of Washington dignitaries to dress up in the latest fashions and come to the Supreme Court to observe oral arguments. The passive, decorative role women then played in the life of the Court contrasts sharply with the professional one they play today. This gradual transformation did not begin until 1880, ninety-one years after the Court’s inception, when a woman was finally permitted to leave the spectator ranks and join the show. That was the year that Belva A. Lockwood became the first female attorney to argue a case before the Supreme Court.1 The previous year she had forced the Court, through congressional intervention, to license women to practice before it.2 It had not been an easy task.3 Lockwood’s admission opened the doors for successive women attorneys to file petitions and briefs at the Supreme Court, to join its bar and to move the admission of other attorneys, and to argue cases before the Bench. Before examining the contributions of the women advocates who followed in Lock­ wood’s footsteps, however, it is appropriate to consider claims that two earlier women, Lucy Terry Prince and Myra Clark Gaines— neither of whom were lawyers—personally pleaded their own land dispute cases before the Supreme Court. No official documents have been discovered to support these claims. Lucy Terry Prince (c. 1725-1821) Lucy Terry Prince, an African-American, is usually hailed in reference books as the first 68 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY i I No official record has been found documenting the alleged oral argument of Lucy Terry Prince, a freed slave, before Justice Samuel Chase in 1796. This oil portrait of Prince, one of the first published African-American poets, is purely imaginary; no likeness of her exists. WOMEN ADVOCATES BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT 69 woman to address the Supreme Court of the United States. The popularizer of this legend is Massachusetts historian George Sheldon, who described the event in his 1893 article “Negro Slavery in Old Deerfield,” which was published in New England Magazine and widely circulated. He wrote that Prince was permitted to argue her Vermont land claim suit in 1796 before the “Supreme Court of the United States . . . presided over by [Justice] Samuel Chase of Maryland.” Apparently, Chase was so impressed by Prince’s elo­ quence that he complimented her on making “a better argument than he had heard from any lawyer at the Vermont bar.”4 Her performance would have been all the more extraordinary considering her back­ ground. She was taken from Africa as a child in 1730 and eventually sold to a Deerfield, MA, innkeeper named Ebenezer Wells. She purchased her freedom in 1756 after her mar­ riage to Abijah Prince, a free black. In 1762, a wealthy Deerfield landowner deeded Abijah Prince 100 acres of land in the newly opened territory of Guilford, VT. The Princes and their six children took up residence there in the 1780s. Hungry for land, they had also ob­ tained a grant of 300 acres of wilderness tract in nearby Sunderland. The predatory behavior of a wealthy Sunderland neighbor, Colonel Eli Bronson, was the basis for the legendary suit. He set up a claim to the Princes’ property and, accord­ ing to nineteenth-century Sunderland histo­ rian Giles B. Bacon, “by repeated law suits obtained about one-half of the home lot, and had not the town interposed [the Princes] would have lost the whole.”5 A prominent cit­ izen, Bronson allegedly hired Royall Tyler, a future chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, and Stephen R. Bradley, a future Ver­ mont senator, as his counsel. The Princes were said to have engaged Isaac Tichenor, a future governor of the state, to defend their claim.6 In his article, Sheldon...