Enslaved Laborers Research Articles

The Plantation Carbon Complex: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change in the Early Modern British Atlantic

Abstract: In recent years, scholars working across the humanities and social sciences have suggested that agricultural land use emissions from early modern enslaved labor plantations may have played an important role in the origins of anthropogenic, or human-induced, climate change. Yet historians of slavery and the early modern Atlantic world have been slow to engage with this argument. Focusing on the major enslaved-grown export commodities of the colonial British Atlantic world, this paper employs a carbon accounting method to test whether enslaved labor plantations and enslaved-grown exports substantially increased agricultural land use emissions in the early modern British Atlantic and how they compared to British fossil fuel emissions—namely, coal burning—in the colonial period. For each of the major types of plantations modeled—tobacco, rice, and sugar—enslaved labor, regardless of crop, decisively increased the amount of carbon any single household could emit. But the wide divergence in emissions between different plantation types and export crops suggests that enslaved labor was only one essential, though not singular, factor shaping the carbon footprint of enslaved-based plantations and enslaved-grown commodities. It was instead the interaction of the multiple factors comprising what we call the plantation carbon complex —racial and gender ideologies, crop ecologies, capital requirements, African agricultural knowledge, and enslaved resistance, among other factors—that determined an individual plantation or commodity's emissions. Nonetheless, the results reveal that the combined emissions of enslaved-grown tobacco, rice, and sugar exports far surpassed not only the emissions of the major non-enslaved-grown agricultural exports of the British Atlantic colonies but also British coal emissions throughout the eighteenth century. The form of enslaved-based racial capitalism represented by colonial British plantations thus marked an important transition in the shift toward a more carbon-intensive global economy.

The Franklin Stove: Modern Materiality, Made in Pennsylvania

Abstract: From 1738 to 1784, Benjamin Franklin invented five stoves that were designed to consume fuel more efficiently, preserving resources during a climate crisis, specifically the Little Ice Age. Franklin's response to bad winter weather generated not only cast-iron technology but also a science of climate change. His long-term project shows that the material contours of early America, often treated as background, can (and should) be pulled into the foreground to reveal the emergence of modern materiality. Consumerism, resource depletion, industrialization, climate change, fossil fuel dependence, and the unjust division of wealth have been functionally connected since the eighteenth century, but when, why, and how they were linked remain important for early Americanists to decipher. Franklin's stove project reveals, for example, an early history of consumer choices in the Global North being made to seem enlightened, by conserving natural resources, even as they were retrograde, using enslaved labor and appropriated Native land. In Pennsylvania, these conditions generated the United States' first industrialized economy, born during a climate crisis and responsible, in part, for generating our current crisis, a legacy from early America that should be acknowledged—and studied—as being at least as revolutionary as the American Revolution.

He’s No Spartacus: Jesus, Slavery, and the Utopian Imagination

Abstract James Crossley and Robert Myles’s Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict is a considerable accomplishment in its situation of Jesus as a figure inseparable from the material conditions of labor exploitation. The present review discusses two topics that the book touches upon only briefly, but linger under the surface of their analysis: Jesus’ treatment of enslaved laborers and utopian social experimentation. This article juxtaposes Jesus with the roughly contemporaneous figure of Spartacus to consider about the availability of social experimentation and the location of slaves within class-based analyses of Roman antiquity.

Making dolia and dolium makers

ABSTRACT Dolia were the largest type of pottery in the ancient world, capable of holding hundreds to as much as three thousand liters. Their shape and size facilitated wine fermentation, and also made them the most expensive and difficult type of pottery to produce. This paper discusses the production of dolia to explore the specialized skills, which consisted of both free and enslaved labor, necessary for the craft. Dolia were also produced alongside brick and tile products in workshops that supplied the building industry of Rome. Craftsmen trained to make dolia acquired considerable skills and usually advanced in the workshop. As a result, a type of professional identity developed, one that both reified and defied conventions since some workers were enslaved and/or manumitted. Finally, this paper briefly discusses the enslaved potter David Drake from nineteenth-century South Carolina to consider the limits of our knowledge about skilled and enslaved craftsmen.

Marx’s Critical Theory of Slavery

Abstract Marx’s critical theory of slavery is the operational subtext throughout his critique of political economy. For Marx, the movement from modern slavery to capital represents a historical transition of significance, not only (or foremost) as an empirical transition but also as a transformation of social substance. Marx reveals why, in retrospect, production based on slavery, as logical configuration, must give way to the generalising logic of wage labour. Marx’s critical theory of slavery historicises wage labour (qua category) as the dissolution and inversion of enslaved labour (qua category). Plantation slavery production in the colonised territories initiates a qualitative development that constitutes the historical condition for the emergence of a mode of sociality that we can call ‘value’. Marx’s theoretical account of modern slavery is a lever in his broader critique of capital and is fundamentally distinct from empirical, historical accounts.

Laboring Under an Illusion: Erasing Female Public Labor in Post-Abolition Zanzibar Islands, 1890–1910

Female workers were central to the coastal East African labor force during the 19th and early 20th centuries, yet their bodies have disappeared from the historical narratives of public and skilled labor. Colonial officials wrote copiously about African labor along the Swahili coast; how to find laborers, how to coerce them into working, the categories of labor, what skills laborers held, how much they should be paid, how to efficiently move them to where they were needed, among many other aspects. However, these same officials, when writing about female laborers, often eliminated mention of females from both the skilled workforce and from their status as an equal portion of free laborers in the post-abolition era. Women and girls in the nineteenth century were present in the public labor force throughout littoral communities, yet reading the records of colonial officials and historians would suggest otherwise. This epistemic erasure has warped the way historians have thought and written about labor across coastal eastern Africa. Colonial officials gendered almost all forms of public, and particularly skilled labor, as male – for both enslaved and freed workers – an erasure often mimicked in the work of historians, thus reifying colonial views of an idealized labor force that was dominated by skilled male laborers with a few low-skill female manual workers.The British belief in the “benevolence” of Arab slave-owners was a longstanding one, a belief that officials in the Zanzibar Islands used to justify their slow response to the metropole demand for the abolition of slavery. The “benignity concept” as Marek Pawelczak termed it was so pervasive in colonial reports that historians into the 21st century still use it as an argument for why slavery in the Zanzibar islands was “mild” and required “not more than twelve hours’ labour” in any given week. Hidden within the “benignity concept” is an image of enslavement as wholly domestic, and therefore implicitly feminized. What is more insidious about the benignity concept is that British officials used it in the late 1890s both to justify allowing slavery to continue and figuratively to erase female enslaved laborers as workers, rather making them “domestics” and as such part of the household. Beginning in 1895, descriptions of an enslaved female became either one of a luxuriously kept concubine who was in essence a “secondary wife” or simply of a wife and mother. Men were enslaved, women were wives, and children were no longer part of the conversation at all. Similarly, I argue here that referring to laborers as ungendered historical actors obliterates significant pieces of history and distorts our understanding of the past. The distortions in colonial record-keeping has perpetuated an epistemic erasure in contemporary literature on labor in eastern Africa, which is an act of epistemic violence.

Arming Slaves in Early Modern Maritime Asia

AbstractWhile there are large literatures on both Islamic slave soldiers and the phenomenon of “arming slaves” in the Atlantic world, military slavery in early modern Asia is still poorly understood. Using a variety of Chinese, Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese sources, this article will argue that enslaved labour was frequently directed towards violence across early modern Asia, colonial or otherwise. At the same time, the phenomenon was far from uniform in the vast expanse of land and sea between East Africa and Japan. Rather, it is better to speak of a series of analogous regimes of bondage that interacted with each other across large distances, with the line between enslaved soldiers, mercenaries, and run-of-the-mill trader-raiders being vanishingly thin at times. Finally, all this existed within the context of military infrastructure in the broadest sense of the word that included fortresses, factories, and even war elephants.

The difference multiplicity makes: The American Civil War as passive revolution

Abstract This article examines and further develops the relationship between the theory of uneven and combined development (UCD), recently taken up by International Relations (IR) scholars to furnish a social theory of ‘the international’, and the Gramscian concept of ‘passive revolution’, which refers to a molecular process of top-down revolution and state formation that preserves ruling-class power by transforming its social base. To this end, the paper: (1) advances a productive distinction between ‘societal’ and ‘(geo)political’ multiplicity, increasing the transdisciplinary potential of UCD and challenging dominant state-centric approaches to IR; (2) demonstrates that UCD is central to creating the conditions for passive revolution; and, (3) argues that UCD illuminates the distinct spatial dimensions of passive revolution, for which the succession of ‘classes’ in time requires the expansion of capitalist social relations in space. To illustrate these claims, the article demonstrates how the American Civil War is best understood as an inter-societal conflict, exacerbated by the coexistence of two social formations within a single state, leading to war. It then shows how, upon victory, the North’s abolition of enslaved labour and the subsequent attempt to re-subsume the South within a single sovereign polity constituted a radical instance of passive revolution.

A Racial Theory of Labour: Racial Capitalism from Colonial Slavery to Postcolonial Migration

Abstract A reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery in the consolidation of the global regime of capital accumulation provides a vital source of Marxian critique for our postcolonial present. The Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African men and women into human commodities. The reduction of human beings into human commodities, or ‘human capital’ – indeed, into labour and nothing but labour – which was the very essence of modern slavery, served as a necessary prerequisite for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called ‘labour in the abstract’, and requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour as such under capitalism. The production of labour in the abstract, or labour ‘in general’, depended nonetheless upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, particularly the branding of race. The term ‘Black’, which was devised to literally and figuratively brand the flesh of enslaved people, was also contrived to signify their particular sociopolitical condition of brutal degradation as the ultimate limit for the subjugation of labour. Blackness names that limit. Thus, Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism. Marx’s scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure. If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour’s subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognise the tendency for all labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection. Consequently, the labour theory of value – which has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour – must be complemented with what we might posit to be a racial theory of labour. Such an ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of capitalism is no mere scholastic exercise in the historiography of ‘primitive accumulation’, however, but rather must be re-purposed toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour. Extrapolating key insights from Marx’s corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, this essay is ultimately concerned with the ways that slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/postcolonial sociopolitical order.

Armed Citizens on the Border: How Guns Fuel Anti-Immigration Politics in America

Abstract To make a nation on stolen land using enslaved labor, the early American state relied on gun and immigration policy to create a well-armed white settler population. This legacy continues to animate modern conservativism, which is staked on supporting gun-friendly and anti-immigrant policies. Despite this history and ongoing political reality, however, the sociology of migration has largely ignored the relationship between firearms and immigration politics. To explore this relationship, the current study draws on 20 months of ethnographic data from the U.S.-Mexico border. I show how contemporary American gun culture bolsters anti-immigrant organizations through two mechanisms. First, gun shows and shooting ranges are important sites of recruitment among anti-immigrant groups. Second, the thrill of handling firearms mitigates the monotony of everyday anti-immigrant activism, while also easing the disenchantment that participants may otherwise feel about the effectiveness of their actions in bringing about long-term change. The article concludes by urging scholars of American politics to be mindful of the legacies of settler-colonialism and to take seriously the reinforcing effects of guns on nativist politics.

‘She Refused to Be Left Behind’: The Sinews of Modern Day Trafficking in the Late Illegal US-Brazil Slave Trade, ca. 1860s–1880s

ABSTRACT This article explores how the illegal slave trade between the United States and Brazil evolved in the 1860s–1880s into novel forms of captive mobility that closely resemble modern day human trafficking. It does so by examining the experiences of two Black families who were trafficked by an American ‘Confederado’ colonist. Through a close reading of a diverse array of sources, including government records, newspaper correspondence, passenger lists, and rich oral histories, it pushes back against the enslaver narrative in which these families are portrayed as willing travel companions. Instead, it narrates a counter-history that exposes how their enslaver used subterfuge, diversion and coercion to traffic them in plain sight and retain their enslaved labour against the tide of emancipation.

Not Subjects of the Market, but Subject to the Market: Capitalist Slavery as Expropriation

This essay draws political theory into dialogue with recent work in economic history and the history of capitalism to develop an account of the unique injustice produced by capitalist slavery in the antebellum United States. Prevailing approaches to thinking about slavery in political theory tend to disembed it from its broader socioeconomic context, which has led theorists to overlook some of the distinctive horrors associated with capitalist slavery in particular. In response, I develop a theory of capitalist slavery as expropriation, conceived as violent domination harnessed to the imperatives of capital accumulation. Capitalist slavery-as-expropriation encompasses two analytically distinct moments: the moment of confiscation, in which human lives and capacities are enclosed via commodification, and the moment of conscription, in which enslaved labor is mobilized via routine violence. Though enslaved people were not market subjects, this framework reveals the extent to which they were nevertheless subject to the market.

Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery

The powerful mythos of George Washington as a virtuous and honorable man who, in his youth, chopped down a cherry tree only to confess his transgression immediately, continues to shape popular public perception of the American Cincinnatus. Modern historians have worked to deconstruct this hagiographic image of Washington, and Bruce Ragsdale further contributes to these efforts with Washington at the Plow. Ragsdale not only focuses on the founding father's identity as a farmer and an enslaver, but he also examines how Washington navigated a complicated tension between his public reputation and his private interests in a changing Atlantic World.The main thrust of Ragsdale's work focuses on Washington's life as a Virginia planter during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods. Despite his many absences from Mount Vernon and his other properties during his tenure as leader of the Continental Army and, later, as president, Washington maintained a vested interest in capitalizing on the agricultural output of his estates. Indeed, his near obsession with British farmers and the New Husbandry movement greatly informed the various experiments Washington implemented on his plantations to increase both the efficiency of enslaved labor and crop production in the late eighteenth century. For example, on his Virginia plantations Washington adopted British models of crop rotation that skillfully adjusted for the different ecological factors of the Eastern Seaboard. He also made changes to the layout of Mount Vernon's landscape, including the construction of new buildings, after being inspired by the improvement projects made to Britain's large estates. However, as Ragsdale demonstrates, Washington's personal desire to capitalize on the economic independence of his farms often conflicted with the founding father's efforts to uphold his popular reputation.Throughout his work, Ragsdale demonstrates the many ways in which Washington maintained a public persona that often contradicted the lived reality of those whom the Cincinnatus enslaved. For example, Washington's letters claim that he opposed the separation of enslaved families and that he abhorred the practice of selling enslaved persons; however, Ragsdale reveals that Washington often engaged in these practices. He accepted enslaved peoples as payment for loans or purchased enslaved peoples with specific skills, such as the enslaved bricklayer named Neptune, to use in new farming experiments on his plantations (146). Ragsdale also emphasizes how Washington's participation in the amelioration movement—brought on by the rise of gradual abolition at the turn of the century—only served to obscure the violence inherent in the institution of American chattel slavery, although not explicitly. As Washington encouraged overseers and white laborers to increase the surveillance of enslaved peoples on his many estates, he kept a detailed record of their movements and demanded increasingly high rates of productivity and efficiency that disrupted enslaved communities. Other works, such as Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told (2015), clearly highlight how technological advances in both agriculture and commerce only intensified the violence and brutality of enslavement. Although examples of violence against the enslaved men and women on Washington's estates are only briefly addressed, including the physical trauma and abuse that resulted from Washington's increasingly complicated agricultural demands, Ragsdale is careful to acknowledge Washington's willful exclusion of violent punishments in the archival record as well as the manipulation of any language used to describe these occurrences.Although one of Washington's main goals was to serve as an example of the farming and husbandry enterprises the new nation needed to operate as a sovereign economic and political institution in an increasingly globalized world, by the end of his presidency, he failed to make any considerable changes. Other than his participation in the Philadelphia Agricultural Society or the organized visitations to Mount Vernon, the many farming or management changes Washington made to his estates had little impact on the broader population of either Virginia or Pennsylvania farmers. Even so, students and scholars interested in the transmission and transformation of agricultural knowledge and farming practices in the Atlantic World will find Ragsdale's work helpful, especially the many examples of Washington's successes and failures as a farmer. Scholars of slavery may also find useful information concerning the organization of Washington's enslaved labor and the examples of Washington implementing British plantation models from the Caribbean for increasing productivity at Mount Vernon. More importantly, however, Bruce Ragsdale's focus on how Washington navigated the changing national debates on slavery following the American Revolution in both his public and personal life highlights the complicated role Washington himself played in the creation of his own legend.

Profiting from Slavery and Emancipation: Compensation, Capital, and Collateral in Nineteenth-Century Senegal

The relationship between capitalism and slavery has been contentious because, in the Atlantic economy, enslaved people functioned as commodities, as labor, and as assets. The transition away from the Atlantic slave-trading system across the nineteenth century affected the stakeholders in these economic functions differently. Compensated emancipation in Senegal provides an opportunity for thinking about the possibilities and limitations of compensation in facilitating capital's continuity. This article traces how individuals who had invested in enslaved labor managed the transition of emancipation and reinvested their compensation claims. It explores how the process of compensation addressed the problem of commercial debt in ways that allowed for a continuity of many of Senegal's urban business elite and their family firms through the end of the nineteenth century.

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

State of the Field: A New Historiography for the Old South? Slavery and Capitalism, White Elites and Enslaved Blacks

State of the Field: A New Historiography for the Old South?Slavery and Capitalism, White Elites and Enslaved Blacks Lacy Ford (bio) For roughly a decade, historians’ understanding of the antebellum American South has been increasingly influenced by a new burst of scholarship collectively labelled “The New History of Capitalism.” Scholars leading the argument for the New History of Capitalism (NHC) contend with considerable, but sometimes reckless, vigor that the slaveholding South stood on the driving edge of the larger capitalist and imperialist project of the nineteenth century. There is much in these works to recommend an emphasis on capitalism and imperialism as creators of the Old South, certainly as it existed in the late antebellum era, and the region played a large role in the evolution of those two projects. But the core, or rather the heart, of the NHC’s argument places cotton and slavery together as the dominant driving force behind the expansion of both capitalism and imperialism in the nineteenth century world. Yet there are also scholarly cautions that must be acknowledged and even damaging misconceptions and erroneous assumptions that promise to limit the NHC’s influence on the historiography of the Old South over the long term. This new corpus of scholarship characterizes southern slaveholders as acquisitive, expansionist, and possessing a broad ambition for power reaching well beyond their control of enslaved Black people. Collectively, the new NHC literature attempts to radically transform our understanding of the slaveholders’ role in furthering capitalist and imperial designs, not only in the American South but also in other parts of the world. In the NHC’s view, as the South’s slaveholding elite committed itself to pursuing territorial expansion and extending slavery, its aspirations moved beyond mastery and profit toward the building of an empire for cotton and the creation of a truly global economy sustained to a large degree by cotton production in the American South.1 This essay examines the NHC corpus, acknowledging its value, especially as a debating point, but also probes its weaknesses as revealed by existing and contemporary scholarship. [End Page 442] An earlier work, Adam Rothman’s Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005), anticipated the coming turn in antebellum southern historiography by emphasizing the slaveholders’ seemingly unquenchable desire for territorial expansion and the acquisition of more and more enslaved Black people, but this book did not present deep South slaveholders as creators of the international capitalist enterprise. According to Rothman, Southern slaveholders and aspiring slaveholders rushed into the old Southwest (Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana), seeking more land and more enslaved labor (whether via the illegal international slave trade, the legal domestic trade, or in-migration from the upper South and older cotton states). Rothman embraced the notion that the slaveholders of the lower South had embarked upon an imperialist endeavor to establish an ever-growing empire for cotton centered in the lower South.2 Yet at the same time, as one reviewer noted, Rothman was “sensitive to the hundreds and even thousands of individual decisions involved in making the old Southwest a slave country.”3 Those decisions included choices by white people about whether to buy or sell slaves, and decisions by the enslaved over whether or not to run away from a new master in an attempt to preserve a family—and many other decisions large and small made by both slaveholders and the enslaved. Ultimately this sea of decisions led the region’s slaveholders to establish the lower South as a critical plantation periphery supplying needed raw material for the core of the world’s emerging capitalist economy. But the region remained largely on the margins of the industrial revolution that it sustained, Rothman argued, while its planter elite nonetheless developed and retained close connections with the core. The expansionist slaveholders built a new cotton empire in the old Southwest, but it was far less clear that these slaveholders had embarked upon a capitalist project for cotton to drive the world economy. On balance, Rothman’s book endorsed the notion that slaveholders led an expansionist, even imperialist, regime in terms of controlling cotton lands, but it did not endorse the idea that Southern slaveholders...

Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans ed. by Laura Kilcer VanHuss

Reviewed by: Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans ed. by Laura Kilcer VanHuss Perry Carter Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans. Laura Kilcer VanHuss, Editor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2021. x and 243 pp., ills, notes, index. $45.00 cloth (9780807174791). Before beginning this review, I need to state for the sake of transparency that while I do not personally know Laura Kilcer VanHuss, two of the people she cites in her introduction, David Butler and Stephen Hanna, are colleagues of mine. For five years we worked on a project that examined tourism at River Road plantation museums, one of which was Oak Alley Plantation, where Kilcer VanHuss works as a curator. This edited volume can be summarized as a deconstruction and a re-narration of the southern plantation myth. Put plainly; it is not Gone with the Wind. It is its antithesis. The nine essays center around yet counterpose themselves to Marie Adrien Persac’s map/painting Norman’s Chart of the Lower Mississippi, an 1858 hand-painted map showing plantations bordering the Mississippi River from Natchez, Mississippi, to New Orleans, Louisiana. Replicas as posters can be purchased at most plantation museum gift shops in the New Orleans region. Norman’s Chart is a conveyor of the plantation myth. A myth of a genteel landed aristocracy of 19th-century entrepreneurs and their families living a life of luxury on their estates. But, the enslaved are missing from this narrative. Those who, through their coerced labors, made their enslavers’ life of luxury possible. In this volume, part of how the plantation myth is deconstructed is by de-conflating the master’s house (his mansion, the Big House) and the plantation. The master’s home is the front face of an agro-industrial complex powered by enslaved labor, the actual plantation. At most plantation museums today, all that remains of the plantation is the master’s home. The true creators of the plantation are effaced. These essays examine various aspects of the plantation. The chapter by Laura Ewen Blokker scrutinizes the architecture and built environment of the plantation. She notes that Louisiana in 1860 was the state with the highest concentration of enslaved persons — 48.4 percent. Accordingly, a large portion of Louisiana’s built landscape was occupied by plantations. Suzanne Turner, in her chapter, interrogates plantation landscapes. Here she notes that instead of “moonlight and magnolias,” that “a series of landscape-altering interventions transformed what was essentially forest and wetlands into a managed agricultural entity, one that required tremendous financial investment, primarily in the form of enslaved labor” (50). [End Page 360] The chapter by Charles Chamberlain traces the political power of the planter elite and the role it played in the aftermath of the 1811 German Coast Slave rebellion, which up to that time was the largest slave rebellion in the United States. Creole planters such as Noël Destréhan and Jacques Villeré used their increased status from the trial (if it can be called that) of the rebels to run for political office. In a unique chapter, Christopher Willoughby describes 19th-century medicine/race science on the plantation. He shows how the pseudo theory of environmental determinism was used to justify the enslavement of Black people. He also shows how the toils of the plantation broke and debilitated Black bodies. Willoughby has some great sentences in his essay like this one on the spread of cholera: “While physicians during this period often saw cholera as the product of the local environment or personal sin, the disease was undoubtedly imported in the bowels of agents of commerce” (114). William Horne writes about the plantation as a base of Black power during the reconstruction period in Louisiana. Former enslaved people’s networks of kith and kin forged through subjugation created a formidable political activist movement during reconstruction. They were so successful that white supremacists in the state had to resort to violence to suppress them. This violent suppression was pinnacled in the Colfax massacre of 1873, where 60 to 100 Blacks were murdered. The massacre effectively ended Black political participation in Louisiana for 90 years. The power of visual imagery is the...

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity