Atlantic Trade Research Articles

I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts (review)

Reviewed by: I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts Circe Sturm (bio) I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land by Alaina E. Roberts University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021 IN HER FIRST BOOK, I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land, historian Alaina E. Roberts offers a powerful and sophisticated account of Indian Territory in the Reconstruction era. Letting the land guide her lines of inquiry, Roberts makes a number of provocative arguments that upend traditional accounts of Reconstruction. By focusing on land contests in Indian Territory, she showcases the intimate connections between Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty that were articulated and enacted during this period, especially as they were expressed in debates about tribal citizenship, community belonging, and territorial authority over land. In doing so, she extends the timeframe of Reconstruction another thirty years to include the allotment era at the turn of the century, when Indian freedpeople, meaning the former Black slaves of Chickasaws, Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles, were allotted tribal lands by the Dawes Commission. She argues that this often-overlooked time and place are in fact critical to historical accounts of Reconstruction because for a short time Indian Territory was one of the last places where Black people could escape Jim Crow, find land, and exercise political rights until Oklahoma Statehood in 1907. Roberts is careful not to romanticize the nature of this land holding or to ignore the contests over political authority that were taking place in the region. In fact, throughout the book she makes a strong case that all the various groups that arrived in Indian Territory, whether by force or choice, participated in settler colonialism and that they did so consciously and strategically to improve their own standing. According to Roberts, that strategic participation is as true for the Five Civilized Tribes that were removed from their homelands in the east and forced to settle on the traditional territories of other tribal communities, such as the Caddo, Kiowa, and Comanche, as it is for their former slaves who once walked the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory alongside them. What is so provocative about this argument is that Roberts convincingly challenges the standard racial narratives that are associated with settler-colonial theory, principally the idea that settlers are typically white. Instead, she carefully demonstrates how Blacks, Indian freedpeople, and Native Americans also participated in the project of settler [End Page 148] colonialism whenever they built communities on the homelands of other Indigenous people. The story of Indian Territory centers on the promise of freedom and autonomy that comes with land tenure, a longing that was shared by all the different migrants to the area; however, as Roberts so carefully points out, these dreams were largely realized through the expropriation of Indigenous land. She is unflinching in her critiques of the anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity that are at the heart of settler-colonial processes and are so evident in her historical account. Yet Roberts still manages to write with sympathy and compassion about all of the actors in her narrative. Her capacity to do so, I think, stems in part from her own positioning and how it informs her work. As a descendant of African Americans, Chickasaws, and whites who settled in Indian Territory, Roberts weaves her own family history into the narrative, bringing to light stories that might otherwise be left untold. In fact, of all the former slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes, Chickasaw freedpeople are the ones about which we know the least. Often, they have been marginalized in the historiography because they were the one group of emancipated slaves who were never granted tribal citizenship by their former owners. Though its subject matter ranges far beyond the case of the Chickasaws, Roberts's book does an excellent job of addressing these historical lacunae. This book establishes Roberts as a powerful new voice in the field of African American and Native American history. Rarely have I encountered a first book that is so meticulously researched, methodologically innovative, theoretically sophisticated and original, while also being entirely accessible to a general reader. Readers...

Unearthing the Roots: White Privilege and Trauma in A. S. King’s Dig

Unearthing the Roots:White Privilege and Trauma in A. S. King’s Dig Beth Boyens (bio) The cover of A. S. King’s 2020 Michael L. Printz award-winning novel Dig features this tagline: “White isn’t just a color.” With that assertion, readers are invited into a young adult novel that explores the toxicity of white privilege in the lives of its five teenage and two elderly protagonists. King’s novel is unabashedly about being white in contemporary U.S. society; as such, it enters an ongoing (and, some might say, too-late emerging) conversation about white privilege and systemic racism. It seems no accident that this novel came upon the scene in 2019 as the political climate bubbled with rancor and division. The novel is also an eerie precursor to the demonstrations, protests, and Twitter storm following the murder of George Floyd and leading up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol—all while the young people of our nation looked on. Just two years earlier, Angie Thomas’s exploration of race, police brutality, and white privilege, The Hate U Give (2017), received a Printz Honor Award, behind Nina LeCour’s depiction of teenage depression in We Are Okay (2017). I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest that these issues are related. The soul wound of our nation, the racism on which our country achieved its wealth and success, bleeds into the hearts and minds of this current generation—and they are feeling its effects. The link between racism/racial tension/political unrest and our young people’s mental health is apparent. Dig seeks to unearth the wounds at the root of the current milieu; in doing so, King identifies white privilege as its own sort of trauma. In his 1845 autobiography, former slave Frederick Douglass asserts that the institution of slavery was nearly as morally harmful to white owners as it was to black slaves. He describes his early interactions with a new mistress who had never before “had a slave under her control previously to myself” as amicable—even kind (1903). But since “power corrupts, [End Page 259] and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Douglass identifies the corruption particular to a racist system: Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear. She had bread for the hungry, clothes for the naked, and comfort for every mourner that came within her reach. Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities. Under its influence, the tender heart became stone, and the lamblike disposition gave way to one of tigerlike fierceness. (1905) The institution of slavery—and its parent, racism—wounds everyone, Douglass argues. The trauma is deep and long lasting. The reviews of Dig highlight its depiction of this trauma. The Kirkus Review describes the novel’s Hemmings family as having been “poisoned by virulent racism” (“Dig”), and Deborah Stevenson’s review in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books calls the novel “the most haunting exploration in youth literature to date of the advantage and poison that is white privilege, and the resentment of young people at the toxicity of what they inherit” (301). Indeed, the novel is about the roots and rootedness of racism and white privilege. Featuring three generations of the Hemmings family, the oldest of which lives in upper-class wealth acquired from a family potato farming business, Dig suggests (and not especially subtly) that the family’s racist roots tunnel deep into their history and collective psyche. Marla and Gottfried Hemmings, the family’s matriarch and patriarch, are at turns explicitly and implicitly racist. Marla, for example, reflects on what her father would “say about people who ate fried chicken” (187) and worries that she is “going to die because Gottfried had to have his soul food . . . I’m going to die in the farmers’ market surrounded by immigrants and Amish people. This is not where I want to die” (188). Gottfried’s racism is expressed in his inattention to the...

백인 여성 크레올의 이중적 위치와 문제적 동일시: 진 리스의 어둠 속의 항해

This paper focuses on the double status of the white female Creole and the unanchored consciousness of Anna Morgan in Voyage in the Dark, as an outsider born in a colony, in that neither be fitted into the mother country. Her Creole identity makes her subordinate, as both the subject and object of male consumption and a spectacle of the metropolis, and she inevitably becomes dependent on those consumers. This relationship is conveniently aligned with that of white owners and black slaves, although this problematic analogy is constantly denied by Anna herself, who recognizes her privileged white position in Dominica by looking backwardly. From this line of thought, this paper sheds light on the postcolonial characteristics of Rhys’s work through Anna''s adrift and fragmented consciousness and identity as an eternal refugee who never belongs to either side. This foreshadows the advent of the second generation of postcolonial writers, yet Rhys takes a distinctive position among them, envisioning complicated perspectives on imperialist colonialism intertwined with gender dynamics as a white female Creole. (Sookmyung Women’s University)

A central place foraging seabird flies at right angles to the wind to jointly optimize locomotor and olfactory search efficiency.

To increase the probability of detecting odour plumes, and so increase prey capture success, when winds are stable central place foraging seabirds should fly crosswind to maximize the round-trip distance covered. At present, however, there is no empirical evidence of this theoretical prediction. Here, using an extensive GPS tracking dataset, we investigate, for the first time, the foraging movements of Bulwer's petrels (Bulweria bulwerii) in the persistent North Atlantic trade winds. To test the hypotheses that, in stable winds, petrels use crosswind to maximize both the distance covered and the probability of detecting olfactory cues, we combine state-space models, generalized additive models and Gaussian plume models. Bulwer's petrels had the highest degree of selectivity for crosswinds documented to date, often leading to systematic zig-zag flights. Crosswinds maximized both the distance travelled and the probability of detecting odour plumes integrated across the round-trip (rather than at any given point along the route, which would result in energetically costly return flight). This evidence suggests that petrels plan round-trip flights at departure, integrating expected costs of homeward journeys. Our findings, which are probably true for other seabirds in similar settings, further highlight the critical role of wind in seabird foraging ecology.

Partisan Politics in the 21st Century South: The Fading Impact of Antebellum Slavery

Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen (2018) argue that antebellum slavery is directly related to racial conservatism and support for the Republican Party in the modern South. Yet during the last two decades, the South has begun a subtle but still very significant partisan shift to the left. Areas where population growth has stagnated (or actually declined) have tended to become more Republican; Democratic support has been bolstered by higher population growth. Significantly, local population growth and historic slave populations are largely unrelated. I examine the extent to which antebellum slavery influences county-level southern White partisanship and racial resentment during the second decade of the 21st century. Over the course of this time period, the impact of antebellum slavery evaporates. Not coincidentally, county-level population growth is strongly associated with increased Democratic identification and more progressive racial attitudes at or near the end of this time frame.

The Whiteness of the White

The Whiteness of the White

Phylogeography of Sub-Saharan Mitochondrial Lineages Outside Africa Highlights the Roles of the Holocene Climate Changes and the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Despite the importance of ancient DNA for understanding human prehistoric dispersals, poor survival means that data remain sparse for many areas in the tropics, including in Africa. In such instances, analysis of contemporary genomes remains invaluable. One promising approach is founder analysis, which identifies and dates migration events in non-recombining systems. However, it has yet to be fully exploited as its application remains controversial. Here, we test the approach by evaluating the age of sub-Saharan mitogenome lineages sampled outside Africa. The analysis confirms that such lineages in the Americas date to recent centuries—the time of the Atlantic slave trade—thereby validating the approach. By contrast, in North Africa, Southwestern Asia and Europe, roughly half of the dispersal signal dates to the early Holocene, during the “greening” of the Sahara. We elaborate these results by showing that the main source regions for the two main dispersal episodes are distinct. For the recent dispersal, the major source was West Africa, but with two exceptions: South America, where the fraction from Southern Africa was greater, and Southwest Asia, where Eastern Africa was the primary source. These observations show the potential of founder analysis as both a supplement and complement to ancient DNA studies.

HOW THE SUPREME COURT DISTORTED TEXT, IGNORED HISTORY, AND GASLIGHTED THE BOLD PROMISE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866 A Comcast Case Study

HOW THE SUPREME COURT DISTORTED TEXT, IGNORED HISTORY, AND GASLIGHTED THE BOLD PROMISE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866 A <i>Comcast</i> Case Study

World Christianity and Indigenous Experience: A Global History, 1500–2000, by David Lindenfeld.

<i>World Christianity and Indigenous Experience: A Global History, 1500–2000</i>, by David Lindenfeld.

Climate variability along the margin of the southern African monsoon region at the end of the African Humid Period

Evidence for climate variability in the southern African monsoon region (SAMR) is limited by a spatially and temporally discontinuous palaeoclimatic dataset. We describe a 6680 year long, largely sub-decadal resolution δ15N record from a rock hyrax midden from southeastern Africa. The results provide a detailed reconstruction of regional hydroclimates since the beginning of the mid-Holocene. A long-term – albeit subtle – increase in humidity consistent with precessional forcing is observed, but the record is dominated by a strong ∼1750-yr cycle, a signal that is shared with other SAMR records. Considered in their regional context, these data suggest that changes coincident with the termination of the African Humid Period at ∼5500 cal BP do not express the abrupt transition observed in some records from the northern African tropics. Rather they indicate gradual changes, as observed at peri-equatorial sites. Notably, however, eastern and western subregions of the SAMR experience a rapid phase shift beginning ∼5500 cal BP, with initially in-phase hydroclimate anomalies transitioning to the establishment of a strong east-west dipole. This likely reflects a coeval strengthening of the Southeast Atlantic trade winds and decreased atmospheric pressure in southeast Africa, factors associated with increasing (decreasing) austral (boreal) summer insolation. The results highlight the distinct nature of southern African responses across this key period of African climate history.

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Across Time, Space, and Matter

Across Time, Space, and Matter

A Process Model of Organizational Repair Efforts: The Case of U.S. Universities and Antebellum Slavery

A Process Model of Organizational Repair Efforts: The Case of U.S. Universities and Antebellum Slavery

Moman's Secret Agenda

Moman's Secret Agenda

Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783 by Lee B. Wilson

Reviewed by: Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783by Lee B. Wilson Matthew Mason Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783. By Lee B. Wilson. Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society. ( New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 274. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-108-49525-7.) This erudite volume adds to the scholarly understanding of American slaveholders' deep engagements with the most modern features of the Atlantic [End Page 541]world, as well as of the multiple mechanisms they wielded in pursuit of mastery over their human property. In it, Lee B. Wilson offers deeply documented insights, preeminently on legal history and the history of slavery. At the core of Wilson's argument is the contention that South Carolina's colonial-era slaveholders, far from being "beyond the pale of English imperial legal history," constructed the legal machinery that controlled and dehumanized enslaved Africans directly from English law (p. 5). To demonstrate this point she analyzes sources that include but range far beyond statute law, illustrating how white South Carolinians—much like their counterparts in early modern England—employed a wide variety of "routine 'private' practices and civil litigation" to make "slavery work on a daily basis" (p. 11). In the process, legally savvy white Carolinians found the best mechanisms within the intricacies of the British empire's legal patchwork to create a legal culture that "worked quietly and invidiously to commodify enslaved people" both within and beyond Carolina's borders (p. 11). This analysis makes this volume a real contribution to the literature, revealing that the British Atlantic was "a world in which 'law' was an action rather than an object" and in which "litigants transformed legal procedure into a site of innovation" (p. 9). Its contribution goes beyond geographically widening our lens on that world, for it shows that such innovation could be used to oppress as much as to liberate. Among the invidious consequences of these multiple methods of categorizing African slaves as chattel property, Wilson asserts, was the broad psychological acceptance among these white people of the notion that Black people were subhuman. Readers of this journal familiar with long-running historiographical debates about the degree of guilt American slaveholders felt will closely note her running claim that it was close to zero. It was more than an ideological consequence of the chattel principle; it was also a function of how mainstream their laws were within the British Atlantic. The many scholars who have posited "that slaves were a novel form of property and that adapting colonial laws to suit slave societies was a fraught process are incorrect," she proclaims (p. 38). Instead, her research "reveals how seamless this process was as a practical and theoretical matter" (p. 38). But her own discussion nods to some of the evidence those historians have used to show metropolitan resistance to the emerging slave laws of the seventeenth-century colonies. One way to thread the needle between her thesis and that of those she aims to refute is to observe how much of her evidence of the "seamless" chattelization of Africans is from the eighteenth century, by which time it appears that chattel slavery was on firmer legal ground throughout the British empire than in the seventeenth century. Wilson's is a downright Dickensian tale of the fearsome power of the pen and legal papers to blight the lives of their victims, deployed here in Charleston or in maritime courts as much as in London. But in this sphere she also seems to overstate her argument. In the book's least restrained moments, we read that "knowledge of English law was the sine qua non of mastery over slaves" (p. 2). Less dogmatically and thus more persuasively, Wilson at other times characterizes the use of these legal tools as "an essential part of the 'technology of colonization'" that perpetuated slavery and the slave trade (p. 88). Setting aside the moments of overreach, with Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave [End Page 542] Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America...

Forum: Holly Brewer's “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire”—Introduction

Historians have long since agreed that slavery was central to the social, economic, and political life of the English-speaking North American colonies, and then early United States. Yet the origins of North American slavery have remained far less clear. Holly Brewer's article, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire,” which appeared in a recent issue ofLaw and History Review, attempted to clarify one key question within this puzzle. Did judges and legislatures in the colonies create their own institution of slavery? Or did they borrow from English precedent? For Brewer, the answer is clear: seventeenth and eighteenth century English judges, merchants, and others, in tandem with “crown policy,” built the institution of slavery that would be “a foundation for a common law of slavery in all English colonies and for the slave trade.” Slavery, in other words, was legal in England before theSomersetdecision. It would thus be legal in the British Empire.1

Pigmentocracy and the performance of whiteness in contemporary photography: Yvonne Venegas’s San Pedro Garza and Dana Lixenberg’s united states

ABSTRACT I am writing about how whiteness works in the United States and Mexico, by looking at portraits by one photographer in Mexico, Yvonne Venegas and one photographer in the United States, Dana Lixenberg. I understand whiteness as something that goes beyond a skin tonality and that does something in the world. I analyze symbols and poses in portraiture to interpret how whiteness is performed and, also, how (through cultural, social and economic schemes of whiteness, by the photographer) the subject is called back into whiteness. I found that whiteness is performed similarly in both cultural contexts I examined, and although mestizaje in Mexico and slavery in the United States defined race relations in distinctive ways, whiteness must be studied as something that goes beyond a pigment and more in alignment with social and economic class perceptions. I propose study of pigmentocracy as an interlocking skin-color/class system in which skin tones are perceived based on social and cultural prejudices and linked to particular socioeconomic levels. In this system, perceptions of class and skin color work as self-reproducing and interdependent power apparatuses and dispositifs.

RETHINKING THE LIBERIAN PREDICAMENT IN ANTI-BLACK TERMS

Liberia’s protracted civil conflict was sustained for a period of fourteen years (1989–2003), killing approximately 250,000 Liberians and displacing half of the population. Liberia’s war, like other contemporary African conflicts, has been persistently represented as an example of wanton violence, political tribalism, chaos, or an amalgamation of such elements. Founded in 1822, the Colony of Liberia was annexed by the American Colonization Society to expatriate and colonize “free” negros and their descendants on the coast of West Africa. “Re-colonization,” as it was recognized by the ruling US Southern class, was rendered a compromise between the absolute abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and perpetual black servitude. Yet, repatriation was treacherously crafted by abolitionists and their pro-slavery contemporaries, alike, as a fugitive project, an opportunity for “free” blacks to experiment with emancipation and take refuge from the sociopolitical and economic conditions which amounted to what was effectively slavery by another name. The rhetorical propagation of the West African settlement as a pre-racial site – of sorts – in which stolen peoples could escape the violence of American racialism has made articulable contemporary theorizations of the Liberian civil war as a paradigmatic example of the negro’s irresponsible experimentations with freedom. The following paper offers a re-contemplation of Liberian historiographical accounts, one that attends to the racialized global orders against which this national crisis has developed and limns the impossibility of freedom in the afterlife of slavery, where anti-black terror is not only temporally unbounded but transgeographical.

The Paradox of Invisibility

Teaching architectural history with a commitment to social justice presents an epistemological challenge for two key reasons. First, the spatialization of social justice is irredeemably political, raising the question as to how to discuss politics in the classroom. Second, how does an educator articulate an ethical framework within which to situate histories of injustice and exclusion in the realm of knowledge production? By analyzing diverse public reactions to the controversial Emancipation Memorial (also known as the Freedman’s Memorial) in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC during the social justice movements of 2020, this paper examines the politics of social justice through an exploration of the notion of “invisibility,” a paradoxical condition that, as African American novelist Ralph Ellison suggests, can imply both a fantasy of empowerment and a tragedy of powerlessness. The Freedman’s Memorial was erected in 1876 to commemorate United States President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which many American textbooks credit with “freeing the slaves.” Set on a high pedestal, the monument depicts Lincoln as a towering savior and the unshackled man kneeling in front of him. Though sculptor Thomas Ball modeled the kneeling man after the formerly enslaved man Archer Alexander, the monument denies Alexander’s personal history and his traumatic escape to freedom. It is Lincoln’s heroism, and not that of formerly enslaved people like Alexander, that is disseminated through an entrenched web of hegemonic cultural consent. How does an educator discuss Alexander’s invisibility in the context of this memorial to deepen the understanding of racial ideologies undergirding the institution of slavery in America? The paper argues that microhistory can serve as a powerful historiographic antidote to the dehumanizing effects of invisibility.

Isaac Leeser and Slavery: A Match Made in Richmond

Isaac Leeser and Slavery:A Match Made in Richmond1 David Weinfeld (bio) In October 1850, The Occident and American Jewish Advocate published an article titled "Judaism and its Principles." The piece was written by Isaac Leeser (1806–68), founder and editor of the newspaper and former hazan of Philadelphia's Congregation Mikveh Israel. The article reflected the breadth and depth of Leeser's Jewish knowledge. Leeser was a prolific writer, translator, publisher of Jewish works, and, despite being a staunch traditionalist, innovator in his efforts to reach and teach American Jews. In the article, Leeser contrasted the certainty of revelation with the unreliability of reason. "What one man calls reasonable another may … style absurd; or what is perfectly consonant with the notions generally prevailing this year that is the current spirit of the age, may fall within the next twelve months beneath the axe of some sharpwitted critic."2 As an example of ethical uncertainty Leeser suggested "the institution of slavery." He noted that many Southern slave owners had once pronounced slavery "the greatest curse under which they labored," while most Northerners approached the institution "with a great degree of indifference." As Northern "abhorrence of slaveholding has increased," however, Southern ideas have undergone a "corresponding mutation" such that even women "advocate the state of bondage as the happiest for the African race." Slavery was viewed as a "patriarchal" institution, "promotive of mutual blessing to the master and servant." Leeser pointed to the curious phrase, "the blessings of slavery," to demonstrate the difficulty in making moral sense of the problem. He concluded with a paean to ethical relativism: "Both Southerners and Northerners are equally sincere in their views that the one loves as ardently as the other detests the presence of negro bondmen."3 By equating pro- and anti-slavery [End Page 231] positions, Leeser seemed to avoid taking sides on this contentious issue, claiming that both were legitimate opinions. In fact, however, Leeser's sympathies lay with Southern slave masters. He believed slavery to be a positive, uplifting institution for African Americans, whom he deemed inferior to whites. Such views were common in the United States, especially in the South but even to some extent in the North, among Jews and non-Jews alike. What made Leeser unique was his implicit view, reflected in his published writing, that racialized chattel slavery was particularly beneficial to American Jews, as it proved that Jews belonged to the white racial category. Some historians have positioned Leeser as publicly nonpartisan on the subjects of slavery and the war, a stance reinforced by his insistence that Jewish clergy and journalists avoid political content when they wrote for his newspaper. Bertram Korn asserts Leeser's "genuine and sincere neutrality" during the Civil War. Lance J. Sussman's excellent biography similarly refers to Leeser's "silence about the war and slavery." According to Sussman, his "position on slavery was no secret," although he "declined to speak or write at length about the topic."4 Further, Sussman notes that, like New York rabbi Morris Raphall, Leeser believed that the Bible sanctioned slavery, although he "disagreed with Raphall's assertion that 'the negro race [was consigned] to bondage through Noah's cursing Canaan."' For Sussman, this disagreement means that, "at least in theory," Leeser "rejected racism as the basis for slavery," which he viewed "solely as an economic and legal institution."5 But Leeser's writings in The Occident in fact demonstrate a different position. First, neutrality on the war meant de facto support for the status quo—namely, the persistence of slavery in the United States. Second and more important, the tone of Leeser's writings on slavery and abolitionism convey support for the former and antipathy toward the latter.6 A study of Leeser's written work, with a focus on the terms "Negro" and "slavery," shows that Leeser's sympathy for slavery was [End Page 232] rooted in his belief in the inferiority of African Americans and their fundamental weak-mindedness, servility, and barbarity. This article argues that Leeser's pro-slavery stance was more rooted in anti-Black racism than previous historians have suggested. It points to some likely sources of Leeser's embrace...