Atlantic Odyssey Research Articles

History Below Deck: An Interview with Marcus Rediker

History Below Deck:An Interview with Marcus Rediker Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) and Marcus Rediker The factory, whether in the Midlands of England making cloth or the Midwest of the U.S. making steel, seems the quintessential institution of the rise of capitalism, and those toiling in it the archetypical worker. Marcus Rediker calls attention to a less visible realm of labor, the sea, telling about those who worked on ships, particularly sailors and pirates, during the age of sail on the Atlantic. Rediker first staked out this history in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (1987), and expanded it in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, co-authored with Peter Linebaugh (2000). Alongside those, he also collaborated on Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 1 (1990), which shifted the focus from founding fathers in conventional histories to the movements of working people who shaped history. Rediker's investigation of the age of sail led to his pathbreaking account of the vehicle that made slavery possible, The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), which describes the various people who staffed, invested in, and were human cargo on those seagoing "factories of capitalism," as he puts it. Complementing that book, in The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (2012), he unpacks one of the few successful resistances of those enslaved. Throughout, Rediker has foregrounded such moments of resistance. His Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (2004) and Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (2014) focus especially on pirates, and The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (2017), shines light on an unlikely eighteenth-century pacifist hero. In addition, Rediker has co-edited two books on the Atlantic during the age of sail, and written a film, Ghosts Of Amistad: In The Footsteps Of The Rebels, with Tony Buba (2014). [End Page 547] Born in 1951, Rediker attended Vanderbilt University and Virginia Commonwealth University (BA, 1976), doing his graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania (PhD, 1982). He has taught at Georgetown and the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History. This interview, conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, took place in Pittsburgh, PA, on June 6 and 12, 2019. Jeffrey J. Williams: How would you encapsulate the kind of history that you do? Marcus Rediker: I do "history from below." It focuses on the people who have been left out of the narratives of the past, especially those based on the nation-state. It's not just a matter of having sympathy for their lives but about how ordinary working people have made history and how their collective actions have frequently shaped history. A lot of the history I write has been hidden. I try to recapture lost voices and get close to the experience of unknown, frequently anonymous people. The great difficulty of doing this kind of history is that the people I study didn't usually create any documents of their own, so this work requires reading many different kinds of documents that were usually produced by the ruling classes and their allies, and reading them against the grain. Sometimes you're reading the archive of repression, but I'm especially interested in the active agency of unknown people in shaping both the archive and history. JJW: Your first book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, gives an account of sailors and sets out your project. It's a history of the working class, but it's not about a factory as we usually think of them. One of your points is that we conceive of the sea as an empty space, but the sea was the prime conduit of capitalism as it developed in that era, and sailors were its chief workers. How were you drawn to study sailors instead of other workers? MR: Actually, when I went to graduate school in 1976, I intended to be a...

The Atlantic Odyssey of Richard Tookerman: Gentleman of South Carolina, Pirate of Jamaica, and Litigant before the King's Bench

This article is a microhistory of Richard Tookerman, an alleged pirate who appeared in South Carolina, Jamaica, England, and other locations in the greater Atlantic world. Accused of trading with pirates and of assisting the pirate Stede Bonnet's escape from a South Carolina jail, Tookerman eventually resurfaced in Jamaica, where in 1721 he was apprehended by Admiral Edward Vernon. Sent to London to stand trial for crimes that included piracy and Jacobite activity, Tookerman went free by virtue of a writ of habeas corpus, which emboldened him to countersue Vernon for false imprisonment and negotiate a favorable cash settlement. The investigation of Tookerman's life reveals new dimensions of piracy by tracking individuals in local administrative records from several colonies in an attempt to connect piracy at sea with the land-based communities that supported it. Tookerman was a minister's son and self-styled "gentleman of South Carolina," and his rather ordinary life challenges the idea that pirates were a uniquely deviant kind of human being, thereby complicating the very idea of what it meant to be a "pirate." Tookerman's ability to evade the law in several maritime communities indicates a lingering sympathy for pirates, even as the British colonial governments tried to eradicate them.

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard

Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling by Benjamin N. Lawrance

Reviewed by: Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling by Benjamin N. Lawrance Craig Hollander (bio) Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. By Benjamin N. Lawrance. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Pp. 376. Cloth, $85.00.) Many scholars are already familiar with the saga of the Africans from La Amistad. But don’t let such familiarity with the episode keep you from reading Benjamin N. Lawrance’s new book, Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling. Focusing on African child slaves, the book provides a fresh perspective on both the Amistad affair and the illegal African slave trade to Cuba during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. With good reason, Lawrance takes issue with those who characterize the period as an “age of abolition.” On the contrary, he argues that it constituted “the beginning of an age of child enslavement” (7). In 1997, the superstar director Steven Spielberg released the film Amistad, which portrayed the ordeal of 53 African slaves who staged a successful insurrection onboard a Cuban slave ship called La Amistad in 1839. Although the Africans sought to sail the ship to Africa, they wound up near Long Island. They were detained in Connecticut and then subjected to a drawn-out legal battle for their liberty. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Africans, enabling 35 of them to journey back to Africa in 1842. Not surprisingly, Spielberg’s spotlight on the Amistad affair drew both popular and scholarly attention. David Brion Davis began his book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006) with a description of the famous revolt and the various legal issues surrounding it. And it was only a couple years ago that Marcus Rediker published The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York, 2013). Lawrance recounts in Amistad’s Orphans the same narrative as previous works concerning the Amistad affair. And, at times, he tries to relitigate the case on behalf of the Africans (perhaps if only to demonstrate his exhaustive research into African dialects). For the most part, though, Lawrance’s book is only about the Amistad affair insofar as it produced sources about six children from Sierra Leone: Covey, Antonio, Ka’le, Te’me, Kag’ne, and Margru. Lawrance employs the extant information about these children—“Amistad’s orphans,” as he refers to them [End Page 846] collectively—to explore “the African child slave experience and [reevaluate] the centrality of child mobility to the massive illegal trafficking enterprise undergirding the nineteenth-century trans-Atlantic slave trade” (5). “With the requisite contextual information,” he assures, “the lives of Amistad’s orphans can, and do, speak to the broader experience of tens of thousands of others enslaved during the nineteenth century” (46). In Amistad’s Orphans, Lawrance asserts that the experience of African child slaves in the illegal slave trade has been “misunderstood” (5). He is being too generous. Few scholars have ever sought in earnest to understand whether African child slaves experienced the traffic differently than their adult counterparts. Yet children comprised a significant portion of the African slave trade (roughly one-fifth of the total number of captives). Moreover, the percentage of children in the traffic increased over time. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century—when the African slave trade to Cuba was purportedly illegal—children constituted more than a third of the total number of captives. Several scholars have suggested that this demographic shift must have resulted from a change on the supply (African) side. After all, wouldn’t most slave traders prefer to purchase adult males, rather than women and children? Not so, says Lawrance. “Slave children,” he contends, were “highly prized, specifically targeted, and exceptionally valuable investments” (29). The question, then, is why would traffickers want them? According to Lawrance, slave traders sought to purchase African children because they viewed child slaves as more “coercible” than adults— meaning that they were easier to enslave, more controllable, and less likely to rebel. It also stands to reason that such “coercibility” became more desirable during the illegal...

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard (review)

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. By Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard.

Dreadful Acts of Liberty

A review of Marcus Rediker’s The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, a detailed account of the successful insurrection aboard a slave ship in 1839, the subsequent trials, and the eventual repatriation to Sierra Leone of the insurrectionists in 1842.

By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey by Erskine Clarke (review)

By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey by Erskine Clarke (review)

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey by Erskine Clarke (review)

By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey by Erskine Clarke (review)

By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey

Journal Article By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey Get access Erskine Clarke. (New York: Basic, 2013. xxii, 450 pp. $29.99.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 2, September 2014, Pages 538–540, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau435 Published: 01 September 2014

Book review: Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation, written by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard

Book review: Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation, written by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Marcus Rediker (review)

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom By Marcus Rediker. (New York: Viking, 2012. Pp. 288. Cloth, $27.95.)Reviewed by Graham Russell Gao HodgesStephen Spielberg's 1997 film account of the Amistad Revolt of 1839 begins with gripping scenes of enslaved people digging out with bare fingers the nails holding imprisoning irons. After those visceral images the movie settles into a familiar courtroom drama, leaving the flesh and blood world of the rising slaves behind. The film depended heavily on Howard Jones's Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York, 1987). Jones emphasized the effect of the revolt on abolitionism and American politics and focused on the legal battle over the rebels' status. Now Marcus Rediker applies his ample talents to tell the story of the Amistad Africans themselves within Atlantic culture. Rediker, winner of many prizes for his works on eighteenth-century pirates and on slave ships, is one of the best prose stylists and researchers among contemporary historians, and those skills are on full display in the present book.The Amistad Revolt is well known to historians, though never before have all of the methods of a skilled social historian been put to use. Howard Jones's fine monograph is closest thematically to Rediker's approach. One should also, given Rediker's heavy emphasis on the contemporary creation of historical memory in popular culture, consider Iyunolu Folanyan Osagie's 2000 book on Amistad in historical memory. As Rediker is especially keen to place Amistad as a formative intervention in abolitionism, Jones's argument that the revolt made abolitionism ever more entwined in American politics is most apposite. Moving beyond this argument, Rediker focuses on the rebels themselves and contends that the revolt made abolitionists more accepting of violent means for ending slavery.Rediker begins his saga with a careful account of the African origins of the Amistad rebels. By locating their nationalities, he indicates the importance of the Poro, a secret masculine society devoted to settling local disputes and creating global unity (32). Throughout, Rediker combines direct factual recollection with context about domestic servitude, wars, slave factories, the slave trade, and the Middle Passage to the slave pens of Havana, where traffic in human bondage still persisted decades after the British closed Atlantic slave commerce. In so doing, Rediker firmly aligns with and pushes forward W. E. B. Du Bois's observation in The Souls of Black Folk that rebellion flowed in the blood of AfricanAmerican slaves. Rediker thereby contradicts a long train of scholarship starting with Gerald Mullin's Flight and Rebellion in 1973, through Ira Berlin's 1999 opus, Many Thousands Gone, and implicitly argued as well in 2012, in Stephen Kantrowicz's More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889-that skilled, acculturated enslaved people were more likely to run away and rebel than forcibly imported bond people brought directly from Africa.Following a fine section on the rebels' experiences in Cuban slave society, Rediker details their rising against their sea masters on the Amistad and the ensuing, wandering sail to Long Island in the United States. …

By the rivers of water: a nineteenth-century Atlantic odyssey

In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a strange seventeen year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline, visited cities and villages, and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths. Along the way they encountered not only many diverse landscapes, peoples, and cultures, but also many individuals on their own odysseys--including Paul Sansay, a former slave from Savannah; Mworeh Mah, a brilliant Grebo leader, and his beautiful daughter, Mary Clealand, at Cape Palmas; and King Glass and the wise and humorous Toko in Gabon. Leighton and Jane Wilson had freed their inherited slaves, and were to become the most influential American missionaries in West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. While Jane established schools, Leighton fought the international slave trade and the imperialism of colonization. He translated portions of the Bible into Grebo and Mpongwe and thereby helped to lay the foundation for the emergence of an indigenous African Christianity. The Wilsons returned to New York because of ill health, but their odyssey was not over. Living in the booming American metropolis, the Wilsons welcomed into their handsome home visitors from around the world as they worked for the rapidly expanding Protestant mission movement. As the Civil War approached, however, they heard the siren voice of their Southern homeland calling from deep within their memories. They sought to resist its seductions, but the call became more insistent and, finally, irresistible. In spite of their years of fighting slavery, they gave themselves to a history and a people committed to maintaining slavery and its deep oppression--both an act of deep love for a place and people, and the desertion of a moral vision. A sweeping transatlantic story of good intentions and bitter consequences, By the Rivers of Water reveals two distant worlds linked by deep faiths.

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation by Rebecca J. Scott, Jean M. Hébrard

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation by Rebecca J. Scott, Jean M. Hébrard

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Marcus Rediker

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom by Marcus Rediker

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation

Microhistory and Movement: African American Mobility in the Nineteenth Century

Microhistory and MovementAfrican American Mobility in the Nineteenth Century Nicole Etcheson (bio) Janette Thomas Greenwood, First Fruits of Freedom: The Migration of Former Slaves and Their Search for Equality in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1862–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Earl F. Mulderink III, New Bedford’s Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Sydney Nathans, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012). Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012). Eva Sheppard Wolf, Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). Edlie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009). African American history may be one of the last fields to receive a micro-historical treatment. Nineteenth-century African American history has been favored with sweeping accounts of the black experience, ranging from John Blassingame’s classic The Slave Community to Ira Berlin’s more recent Many Thousands Gone. Studies on more focused topics such as slavery in the Chesapeake or free blacks in the North have certainly contributed to knowledge of the black experience, but scarce records, especially the lack of firsthand accounts for many aspects of black life, make microhistory’s tight focus on the “proudly small” difficult to achieve.1 [End Page 392] Microhistories are intensely concentrated examinations of topics that often appear narrow and insignificant until the microhistorian reveals how the subject illuminates greater issues. The microhistory falls between the grand synthesis or theoretical analysis that slights individual human actors and the antiquarian social history that ignores the larger meaning of the countless details it relates. Microhistories can test the conclusions of the grand synthetic histories as well as reveal the patterns of life in a particular place and time.2 Microhistory’s close relatives include biography and the community study. While biography relates the individual life, savoring its uniqueness, microhistory challenges conventional historical narratives by revealing how a life, often a very ordinary one, defied societal patterns or lived up to them in unexpected ways. Microhistory observes historical change up close and notes how historical forces operated on individuals.3 Similarly, examining a place can reveal the contours of the larger society by elaborating the different types of communities—rural or urban, agricultural or commercial, northern or southern—that people construct. There have been classic studies of colonial towns and nineteenth-century rural communities.4 Many microhistories of places have been what J. Matthew Gallman has called “city biographies,” but people inhabit places, and studies of those places connect their inhabitants to larger trends. John Mack Faragher used Robert Pulliam, “the pioneer of Sugar Creek,” as the iconic figure illustrating the nature of frontier Illinois.5 Studies of northern African American communities, such as James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton’s study of Boston, have generally focused on cities. Melvin Patrick Ely used county court papers to reconstruct the life of free blacks in the rural Virginia community of Israel Hill.6 The works under review include both genres of microhistory: studies of individual African Americans and accounts of the post-Civil War black diaspora that created new communities of freedmen in the North. If there is a theme that unites them, it is that of movement. White mobility is taken for granted, perhaps because whites chose to migrate, while slavery made black mobility far more constrained, but Africans and their descendants migrated in ship holds crammed with bodies or coffles of slaves, chained at the neck, walking toward the newly opened cotton lands of the interior South. The authors discussed here use microhistorical techniques to examine struggles over black mobility. Edlie L. Wong presents a nuanced history of sojourning cases in which a slave’s travels opened up the possibility of freedom. A scholar of African American literature, Wong draws from critical legal studies and race theory. She is...

The Amistad rebellion: an Atlantic odyssey of slavery and freedom

The Amistad rebellion: an Atlantic odyssey of slavery and freedom

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom

Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard (review)

Reviewed by: Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation by Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard Martha Hodes (bio) Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. By Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 259. Cloth, $35.00.) Toward the end of this book's tantalizing prologue, the authors describe their work as "micro-history set in motion" (4). Tracing several generations of a single family across multiple locations, the authors acknowledge that the Atlantic world is hardly a microcosmic setting, yet they insist that "the deepest analysis may emerge from close attention to the particular" (5). This type of detail-oriented analysis is exactly what Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard undertake and accomplish in Freedom Papers. In order to tell a story that encompasses West Africa, Haiti, Cuba, the United States, France, Belgium, Mexico, and England, they have unearthed a stunning array of sources resulting from exhaustive research in governmental, ecclesiastical, financial, legal, military, and educational records (among other sources), crafting a narrative from documents as small and particular as a signature on a bill of sale or the letterhead of a piece of stationery. The story begins with an Atlantic crossing in the late eighteenth century, introducing us to Rosalie, a Senegambian woman enslaved in Saint-Domingue, "recorded on paper not as an individual but as a commodity" (15). Passing through the Haitian Revolution, exile in Cuba, and insecure freedom, we arrive in New Orleans with one of Rosalie's daughters, who eventually marries a man named Jacques Tinchant; both bride and groom were of mixed European and African descent, and Freedom Papers soon becomes the story of the six Tinchant sons and their assorted forays into a transnational cigar business. It is in these business endeavors that Scott and Hébrard uncover "a complex exercise in rhetorical composition and self-presentation" (167); the brothers "pushed and pulled against the boundaries of nationality," the authors write, "experimenting with a sequence of alternate affiliations"—drawing upon a "Creole image" of "sunshine, palm trees, and a bronzed complexion" (163), for example, or choosing to project "a generalized French-ness" (166). Among the most intriguing of the family stories are those of Joseph and Édouard Tinchant, both of whom worked tirelessly for the rights of African Americans and served in the Sixth Louisiana, the black regiment that defended New Orleans during the Civil War. Yet Joseph soon refashioned himself as a Mexican citizen, selling his cigars as Don José Tinchant y Gonzales, and later became a Belgian citizen. As for Édouard, he safeguarded his French citizenship papers and allowed himself, after the war, to be designated as white by the census taker in Mobile, Alabama. [End Page 132] Like the best microhistories, this one makes no claim to the typicality of its protagonists. Indeed, what is atypical here (although not quite stated as such) are the papers signaled in the book's title, which point to an implicit argument: the simultaneous power and fragility of documenting freedom, nationality, and citizenship. Interwoven into the family story is a parallel narrative of the literal documents: the "single sheet separated from the record book" (38), the significance of deciphered marginalia, the letter "written in English, typed in purple ink and signed with a flourish" (167). Here and there, we read a sentence like, "Then he stopped, inserted a period, and began again using a different preposition" (55). I loved the visibility of this analysis and interpretation. Not surprisingly, these sorts of meticulous readings require Scott and Hébrard to adopt a vocabulary of caution, ranging from "almost certainly" and "could well have" to "perhaps" to "we cannot know for certain"; I loved these careful phrasings, too, reflecting back the malleable language of the sources themselves, most especially with regard to designations of status, racial classification, and nationality, whether self-proclaimed or imposed by others. If the book's methodology is pleasingly visible, the overarching argument is more muted. In the end, the authors extol the family's strength and courage in overcoming unfreedom and racism in their many and varied manifestations. "Across three generations," they write, "as...