Enslaved Mothers Research Articles

‘Her Work of Love’: Forced Separations, Maternal Grief, and Enslaved Mothers’ Emotional Practices in the Antebellum US South

ABSTRACT This article considers enslaved mothers’ emotional responses to the separation of their children. While slavery studies scholars have discussed the individual impact sales had on enslaved people, and historians of emotion have explored white communities’ understandings of both white maternal love and enslaved emotion, few studies have explored how events such as sale shaped enslaved women's own emotional understandings, practices, experiences and expressions. Guided by enslaved women's own testimony, this article argues that enslaved women created their own, gendered, emotional worlds in response to their experiences of sale – their own conceptions of love and grief, ways of expressing their emotion, and collective emotional practices in the aftermath of separation. Not only individual responses to emotional pain, their collective emotional practices must also be viewed as acts of refusal to submit to slave trading practices, white emotional standards and racialized emotional ideologies. Through loving and grieving actively, enslaved women maintained their maternal bonds in the face of both practical and ideological attempts to decimate them.

Postcolonial Black Motherhood: Dismantling Controlling Images in Jesmyn Ward's Bois Sauvage Novels

Abstract Centering on Jesmyn Ward's two recent novels, this article begins with the literary through line from Toni Morrison's early novels to Ward's constructions of Black mothers in the twenty-first century of a fictional rural Mississippi. As Morrison before her, Ward archives Black women's lived experiences to reconfigure not only an American literary imagination but also the past itself to explore Black women's oppressions from the slave era to our contemporary moment. Ward's novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing express the social constructions that have burdened Black women, especially mothers, since the slave era. Through the social framework of controlling images as defined by Patricia Hill Collins, this article dissects U.S. social hierarchies that discriminate against Black mothers’ intersectional identities while theorizing how Black women feminist writers have strived toward self-definition and liberation. Implicit in the construction of these dominant social hierarchies is the postcolonial condition of Black mothers and women who have contested the colonial project of slavery, the imperial project of expansionism, and the postcolonial project of mass incarceration and lynchings. Most importantly, Ward illustrates how these controlling images and social constructions of racialized motherhood have concealed the structural oppressions experienced by Black women every day. Thus, I argue these two novels dismantle the controlling images surrounding Black mothers while examining how motherwork and othermothering constitute radical interventions that disrupt our racist, sexist culture and society. By reappropriating their past and self-defining their present, the Black mothers in Ward's novels uncover structural oppressions and reveal the critical connections between enslaved mothers and contemporary Black mothers.

The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Una historia de la emancipación negra: Esclavitud y abolición en la Argentina

The abolition of Latin American slavery has long been recognized as a complex and contentious process stretching over several decades. Historians who study that process face the challenge of incorporating into their stories multiple actors: state officials, lawyers, journalists, activists, and, not least, enslaved people actively seeking freedom. That approach has generated a rich historiography, ranging from early work by Emília Viotti da Costa, Robert Conrad, Rebecca Scott, and others up through recent books by scholars such as Jeffrey Needell, Angela Alonso, and Yesenia Barragan. Based on deep and meticulous research and clearly and effectively written, Magdalena Candioti's Una historia de la emancipación negra is a worthy addition to that literature.Candioti begins her story with the profoundly destabilizing impacts of national independence on the institution of slavery. Revolutionary rhetoric that compared Spanish rule to enslavement and that promised to strike off the chains of colonial rule inevitably raised the question of whether that promise included the chains of slavery. Since many, and probably most, independence leaders were themselves slave owners, this question struck uncomfortably close to home. The contradiction between national freedom and continuing enslavement produced first the abolition of the African slave trade in 1812 and then the Free Womb Law (Ley de Libertad de Vientres) the following year. The law decreed that children of enslaved mothers would continue to serve their mothers' enslavers until reaching the age of majority (16 for females, 20 for males), at which point they would achieve full freedom.One ambiguity of the new law was whether children of enslaved mothers were born free (and were therefore ingenuos) or whether they were born enslaved and then immediately freed (and were therefore libertos). The Reglamento de Libertos, approved a month after the initial law, settled that question and laid out the regulations governing this new class of persons. In 1840, a court in Tucumán found that “los derechos y obligaciones que tiene el patrono [enslaver of the child's mother] respecto del liberto son los mismos que tiene un amo respecto de un esclavo; . . . ambos tienen el derecho de servirse y sacar del liberto y esclavo una justa utilidad” (p. 88; emphasis in original). Patronos were also free to sell their libertos (after the age of two) to other owners, and Candioti finds many instances of slave parents going to the police to request assistance in getting their children back, “con suerte dispar” (p. 86).Meanwhile, those Africans and Afro-Argentines who had been enslaved at the time of the Free Womb Law's passage remained enslaved. They continued to pursue freedom in the same ways that they had pursued it under colonial rule, through negotiating with their enslavers and accumulating the savings with which to buy their freedom. Candioti finds that the same system of coartación (enslaver and enslaved person agreeing in advance on a fixed purchase price) that existed in Cuba, Peru, and other countries operated in Argentina as well, and that, as in other countries, women were clearly favored over men in grants of manumission (pp. 111–12).Independence further undermined slavery by opening another route to freedom, through military service. Several thousand slaves were conscripted into rebel armies and then into provincial forces during the civil wars that followed independence. Slaves could also volunteer for service, and many did so. Conscription was no guarantee of freedom, however, since many draftees died or returned from service broken in health.With no new slaves being born or imported from Africa, by the 1840s slavery's days in Argentina were clearly numbered. Reviewing the debates in the constitutional assembly of 1852–53, Candioti finds that Article 15, which abolished slavery, was approved with zero discussion, no voices speaking either for or against the measure. The constitution made no provision for compensation to former enslavers, but several provinces did institute programs that compensated owners for their liberated property.Throughout her book, Candioti stresses the tensions and disconnects between legal principles and daily lived reality, and the constant process of negotiation among enslaved persons, libertos, enslavers, and state officials. She has dug deep into administrative, judicial, and church archives and into nineteenth-century newspapers, and has made excellent use of the outpouring of research in recent years on Black and subaltern history in Argentina. Finally, rather than confining herself to Buenos Aires, she surveys conditions and practices throughout Argentina while simultaneously calling for further research on those provinces. All these aspects make the book a signal achievement and the obligatory reference for how slavery came to an end in Argentina.

Yesenia Barragan. Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of scholars from North American institutions have sought to expand historical understanding of the process of abolition in Spanish America. Yesenia Barragan’s book analyzing the case of the Colombian Black Pacific is a major contribution to this scholarship. It draws on the rich tradition of Colombian history and the Colombian Pacific, offering a comprehensive analysis that emphasizes the gradualness of Black emancipation and the significance of the regulation of the status of the “Free Womb Children”—free sons and daughters born to enslaved mothers after the passage fo the Free Womb Law— as a form of “racial governance” (p. 6) of the new generations of Black inhabitants of the Valle del Cauca. The book is made up of six chapters divided in three interlinked parts, covering the “social universe of the Colombian Black Pacific,” (p. 37), the laws and technologies of gradual emancipation, and the final abolition and its afterlives. The first chapter is centered on the description of the material and social world of the lowlands: its geography, rivers, mining economy, and legends. Using secondary sources, travel accounts and records from the national and local archives, chapter two describes the lives of slaves and emancipated blacks the cities of Quibdó and Nóvita. The third chapter describes the antecedents to the Free Womb Law of 1821, especially the Antioquian law of 1814. In dialog with Edgardo Pérez Morales’s thesis (now book, Unraveling Abolition: Legal Culture and Slave Emancipation in Colombia [2022]), it analyzes political antislavery arguments, their impact in Nóvita, and the opposition they roused there. In chapter four, Barragan explores the popular circulation of the law, marks the importance of baptismal records as proofs of freedom, and unveils conflicts around the control of Free Wombs’ children’s lives. In chapter five, Barragan reconstructs three routes to freedom: self-purchase, testamentary manumissions, and public manumissions. The author analyzes the political use of the latter in conversation with Jason McGraw’s “Spectacles of Freedom: Public Manumissions, Political Rhetoric, and Citizen Mobilisation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colombia” (Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 2 [2011], 269–88) and details how those manumissions had different impulse in different contexts. Chapter six reconstructs the final abolition process, attempts to delay it, and the politics of compensation. The epilogue connects this process to the present day and emphasizes how the vernacular freedom woven daily by the lowland inhabitants challenged Colombian white supremacy.

The Kentucky Origins of Three Michigan Rescues

The Kentucky Origins of Three Michigan Rescues Hillary Delaney (bio) In the 1840s, the wealth of enslavers decreased markedly as Underground Railroad activity in the borderlands of Kentucky surged. The banks of the Ohio River, which separated Kentucky’s northernmost counties from the free states of Indiana and Ohio, became ground zero as slave hunters and patrollers attempted to thwart freedom seekers. Despite these efforts, the enslaved population continued to decrease with each successful escape.1 In 1847, Kentuckians made forays into Michigan to capture those who had fled northward; Michigan’s citizens intervened on behalf of freedom seekers in dramatic fashion. The exciting details and resulting legal decisions were widely covered in the press and had significant impacts on the rights of all involved entities.2 This helped to build a narrative of those at the center of the disputes, most often beginning with the escape and what followed. To give agency to these individuals and to gain a fuller understanding of their lives and what led to these incidents, it is important to learn of their lives in Kentucky. Ferreting out details of the lives of enslaved people requires a familiarity with the communities in which they were held. It is also crucial to understand the slaveholding families—their complicated relationships with those they held in bondage, and their connections to other enslavers and organizations. An approach employing genealogical research methods, an understanding of local records, and a grasp of the social and physical aspects of the community can often provide a much fuller story. [End Page 9] Adam Crosswhite At the center of one of the dramatic 1847 episodes was a man named Adam Crosswhite. Crosswhite and his family made their way from Kentucky to freedom in Marshall, Michigan, in 1843. A few years later, they found themselves facing re-enslavement when agents of their slave holder, Francis Giltner, came to Michigan to claim them.3 The dramatic details of their rescue and the political fallout it prompted have been committed to history, but most early accounts have little detail of Crosswhite’s life prior to his escape.4 Adam Crosswhite was born to an enslaved mother around 1799 in either Bourbon or Clark County, Kentucky. His father is presumed to have been his original enslaver, Isaac Crosthwait.5 Isaac Crosthwait was about seventy-five years old when Adam was born, a detail that invites scrutiny.6 Crosthwait’s age does not completely invalidate his paternity, but other possibilities can be explored. Enslaved women held by Crosthwait were accessible to his nearby male family members and cannot be ruled out. Multiracial children born to enslaved mothers could receive both the favor of a White father and the ire of the White mistress. Their status could also complicate relationships with others in the community of the enslaved.7 These complexities must be considered while researching Adam Crosswhite’s life as an enslaved person. Isaac Crosthwait’s Last Will and Testament was filed on January 28, 1811, in Clark County, Kentucky. At the time of his death, Crosthwait enslaved nine people—only two of whom were identified by name in the will. Ben was set apart for Crosthwait’s daughter, Nancy, as payment for work her husband had done for his father-in-law. Adam was allotted to Crosthwait’s unmarried daughter, Frances, who was to reside in the family’s home inherited by her older brother, William. Both transfers were to occur after the death of Isaac’s wife, Elizabeth. The remaining seven enslaved people were referred to only as “the rest.” This acknowledgement of Adam by name and his bequest within the family as a “gift” are unique within the whole of Crosthwait’s enslaved people.8 [End Page 10] Isaac’s son, William, was named the administrator of his mother’s estate upon her 1816 death.9 An auction notice was soon placed in the newspaper announcing the sale, which included “a number of likely young negroes.”10 The appraisal of Elizabeth’s assets included five enslaved people: Adam, George, Jane, Ann, and a second Adam. The only thing distinguishing the two men named “Adam” was their $550 and $600 appraisal amounts.11 At auction, all...

Slave Episteme in Biocapitalism

This article explores the connection between the extraction and dispossession of human reproductive labor power and its products in the contexts of Atlantic slavery and contemporary biocapitalism. It argues that the conceptualization and practice of slave reproduction that sustained slave racial capitalism is forwarded into the biocapitalist present through “the slave episteme.” This becomes evident when reproduction in biocapitalism is viewed through the lens of the long history of slave “breeding” in the Atlantic world. While the “blackness” that enslavers attributed to enslaved mothers and their progeny objectified and dehumanized both and rationalized their treatment as fungible and alienable commodities, in contempory biocapitalism the racial formation that subtends reproductive extraction and dispossession has been complexly recalibrated to do related ideological and material work. The article concludes with a discussion of the sublation of “blackness” in contemporary market exchanges in which reproductive labor and its products are bought and sold.

Stephen Foster and the Slavery Question

Stephen Foster and the Slavery Question

Review: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, by Tiya Miles

Review: <i>All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake</i>, by Tiya Miles

Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century by Libra R. Hilde

Reviewed by: Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century by Libra R. Hilde John Patrick Riley (bio) Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century. By Libra R. Hilde. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 400. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $37.50.) Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty explores the myriad obstacles that faced enslaved Black family men in the U.S. South, with the main goal of countering "the enduring stereotypes of black men's irresponsibility within the family" (3). Libra Hilde draws on primarily Black sources, notably the Federal Writers' Project interviews and autobiographies. She is particularly interested in finding the importance that Black families placed on the fatherly role; despite slavery's denial of Black masculinity, [End Page 568] the constraints on material provisioning, and rejection of parental authority, Black "men, and their children, invested fathers and fatherhood with consequence" (11). In demonstrating this, Hilde succeeds wonderfully. She aptly reveals the tremendous importance and high expectations enslaved children placed on their fathers, even when living separately on other plantations. Hilde's work builds on recent trends in the history of the enslaved family by moving away from the matrifocality so central in post-Moynihan historiography, toward one where Black men belong at the center of the family unit, even if distance and the constraints of slavery kept them on the physical periphery. Crucially, it does this without returning to the nuclear household thesis of Genovese or diminishing the important role played by enslaved mothers. Hilde's analysis expands on Edward Baptiste's characterization of enslaved men in the role of caretaker. Providing for one's children, both spiritually and materially, represented resistance as well as emotional investment. The heart of Hilde's monograph is her first four chapters, which focus on the obstacles slave society placed before Black fathers and how enslaved men overcame them. The distance inherent in cross-plantation marriages, white interference in family discipline, and difficulty providing food or clothing all combined to test Black fatherhood. But as Hilde correctly points out, these men were not passive in response. Interviews with formerly enslaved people revealed that they held fondness for caretakers—for men who provided a sense of stability and enmeshed themselves in larger fictive kin networks. Pride in a father's accomplishments was common, whether celebrating prowess at fishing or hunting, the skill of his trade, or even his ability to evade patrollers and move unnoticed between plantations. Through a host of actions both subtle and obvious, Black men left an indelible impression on their children and grandchildren. Hilde divides direct fatherly support into three categories: material, ideological, and cultural provisioning. Providing children with extra food or homemade clothes, or using earned money to purchase candy and treats, fit the antebellum role of father as provider. Hilde expands her argument by demonstrating the ways fathers prepared children for the harsh realities of enslaved life through important lessons and oral traditions, a role typically reserved for mothers in much of the literature on slave families. Hilde fails to explore the ways in which enslaved men sought to train their children, especially sons, in a skilled trade or to covertly help them acquire literacy skills. A trade such as blacksmithing or the ability to read and write would do much to improve a child's quality of life, enabling opportunities to earn additional money and afterward provide for their own children. [End Page 569] While Hilde does emphasize the importance that freedmen placed on education for children postwar, she misses an opportunity to demonstrate continuity with fatherhood behaviors during slavery. Hilde breaks important ground with her fifth chapter, which moves away from Black men as fathers to examining attitudes and recollections toward white fathers and children of mixed race. Black fathers' treatment of children born of liaisons with and sexual assault of enslaved women ran the gamut from preferential treatment to extra punishment or cold indifference. With its emphasis on white parentage, it is at once an important yet odd chapter in a volume so focused on showcasing Black fatherhood. Similarly, chapter 6 delves into enslaved mothers' expectations of white...

Ordinary Litigants: Women and Men, Slavery and the Enlightenment in Latin America

Ordinary Litigants:Women and Men, Slavery and the Enlightenment in Latin America Camilla Townsend (bio) Michelle A. McKinley. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. x+ 294 pp.; ISBN 978-1-1071-6898-5 (cl); 978-1-3166-2010-6 (pb); 978-1-3167-3191-8 (epub). Bianca Premo. The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xiii+ 384 pp.; ISBN 978-0-1906-3872-6 (cl); 978-0-1906-3873-3 (pb); 978-0-1906-3874-0 (epub). Two colonial Latin Americanists have recently made landmark contributions to the study of the history of law. Michelle McKinley's Fractional Freedoms and Bianca Premo's Enlightenment on Trial both study the uses to which disempowered people put the court system, focusing on gender and race as intertwined categories of analysis. Their studies yield particularly rich results even for scholars outside the realm of legal history. McKinley frankly acknowledges that in the past generation there has been "a veritable boom in studies examining slaves' entanglement with the law" (7). Like many who study Latin America, she has found herself responding to the historian Frank Tannenbaum's thesis in Slave and Citizen (1947) that the enslaved in that region found themselves in dramatically different circumstances than those in North America because of their access to the court system (thanks to the Siete Partidas) and the existence of an alternate set of authority figures (the Catholic Church).1 She does not quarrel with his insight, but her focus is on the slaves themselves: "A study that takes as its subject slaves' use of courts implicitly differs from a study of the laws of slavery, although both approaches ultimately are shaped by the issue of agency and structure" (28). She wishes to underscore that if we move beyond the bounds of fully slave societies like Brazil and the southern United States, we find enslaved people with a much higher likelihood of having experienced intimate ties with slaveholders, and not just in a sexual sense. It thus becomes imperative that gender take a lead role in our analysis (10–11). Furthermore, she argues that "contingent liberty (or fractional freedom) was the reality that all—whether enslaved, freed, or free—accepted and to which they accommodated their lives" (11). [End Page 165] McKinley's book is so thorough that it can and undoubtedly will serve as a veritable encyclopedia on the ways in which slaves pursued "fractional freedom"—a somewhat increased liberty for themselves or their loved ones—in a mid-colonial society with slaves. Chapter one demonstrates how actively the enslaved were involved in shaping their own legal cases, no matter how much help they received from a procurador (attorney). It also documents the practice of the censura (public censure), about which very little has been previously known. At the request even of a slave, the church would send out announcements to be made from every pulpit in the region, calling for people to step forward as witnesses; "Does anyone here know if it is true that don Alonso freed the baby Inés at her birth?" Chapter two explores the tensions between the sacrament of marriage (the authority of the church) and enslavement (the authority of the state), demonstrating in fascinating detail how effectively the enslaved used these tensions—for instance, when an enslaved Peruvian man married in haste in Lima to avoid being sent by his master out to Arica (97). Chapter three, on affective intimacy, moves beyond the expected stories of masters forcing enslaved women into relationships. Here, McKinley looks at ways in which some people were able to hide their enslaved status in order to contract marriage with a free person, to the benefit of the children. Chapter four considers the question of relations between enslaved mothers and their children who were freed by their fathers at baptism. It demonstrates how vulnerable such freedom was and how necessary it was for the enslaved mothers to keep the fathers in the public eye, first in order to gain freedom for the children and then to protect them from re-enslavement. Chapter...

Mistresses, motherhood, and maternal exploitation in the Antebellum South

ABSTRACTThis article explores the interventions of slaveholding women or ‘mistresses’ into enslaved women’s mothering. While motherhood is often interpreted as a site of women’s bonding as a ‘shared’ experience, this article explores the ways in which mistresses (re)constructed racialised hierarchies that stratified motherhood along the lines of race and class. This undergirded their delegation of mother-work, or rather, the forced re-direction of enslaved women’s mother-work to mistresses’ own families. Mistresses’ sense of social superiority and their interests in slave labour were expressed through their interventions into enslaved women’s motherhood. These interventions took many forms; from seeking to influence the timing and paternity of enslaved women’s childbearing, to routine interventions into parental decisions, to the removal of enslaved children from their families for domestic servitude. Centralising the roles of white women in enslaved women’s ‘maternal exploitation’, this article adds an additional and largely overlooked dimension in understanding the extent of enslaved mothers’ and children’s exploitation under slavery in the Antebellum South.

Fertility control, shared nurturing, and dual exploitation: the lives of enslaved mothers in the antebellum United States

ABSTRACTSlaveholders believed women could both labour and care for their children simultaneously, and they routinely exploited enslaved mothers as both workers and as reproducers. Using Stephanie Camp’s conceptualization of enslaved women’s bodies as sites of resistance, this article argues that despite slavery’s arduousness motherhood provided a place of refuge for enslaved women to enjoy their children and the camaraderie of their peers. However, women sometimes lamented bringing enslaved children into the world and strove not to do so, especially when pregnancy resulted from sexual assault. Slavery’s unique burdens meant many women participated in shared and more communal forms of mothering than their white counterparts.

Mothering slaves, labor, and the persistence of slavery in Northeast Brazil: a non-plantation view from the hinterlands of Ceará, 1813–1884

ABSTRACTThis article examines the female slave experience and its links with reproduction for women of African descent living in the interior of the Brazilian Northeastern province of Ceará during the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that the institution of slavery in rural Ceará took advantage of both the productive and reproductive labor of enslaved women. Far from being employed only as household servants, female slaves also labored in the various economic activities, including cash-crop and subsistence agriculture, of the small-scale slaveholding units that characterized the hinterlands. Moreover, enslaved women performed the childbearing and childrearing labor that was largely responsible for the persistence of the slave population at the provincial level. This article also shows that slaveholding in rural Ceará, as in other creole societies of the Americas, disrupted the ties between enslaved mothers and their children and dismissed the mother–child relationship that was central to reproduce slavery in the first place.

Conceived in violence: enslaved mothers and children born of rape in nineteenth-century Louisiana

ABSTRACTThrough the examination of testimony from formerly enslaved people who had been fathered by white men under slavery, this paper considers how enslaved women negotiated motherhood when their child had been conceived through rape. Evidence reveals that the relationship between enslaved mothers and their children remained strong, despite sexual violence and interference into childrearing by slaveholding families. Informants had close knowledge of the non-consensual nature of their conception, and their willingness to discuss sexual violence reflects the lack of stigma attached to rape victims in the slave community, and hints at the way that enslaved communities coped with sexual violence on an institutional level.

The nameless and the forgotten: maternal grief, sacred protection, and the archive of slavery

ABSTRACTDeath, particularly of enslaved infants and children, cast a long shadow over the experiences of enslaved mothers. Almost half of all enslaved infants died within the first two weeks of birth and another quarter died by age two. Although profit–loss calculations tabulate the frequent deaths of enslaved youngsters, these accounts reveal very little about cultural conventions on maternal grief or how enslaved mothers responded to their children’s deaths. In addition to using the rhetorical to draw attention to the loss women experienced and archival silences on maternal grief, this article challenges the claims that enslaved Africans welcomed and celebrated death because it freed loved ones from bondage and reunited captive Africans with their ancestors. Attention to expressions of grief and evolving grieving practices reveal the transformation of enslaved people’s culture and the invisible suffering of the enslaved, which are sometimes overshadowed by narratives of resistance and the resilience of African culture and black mothers.

US slavery, civil war, and the emancipation of enslaved mothers

ABSTRACTIn the United States, slavery’s destruction was a war-long process, shaped not only by Union military victories, legislation, and presidential proclamations, but also by contradictory, inconsistent and sometimes lethal policies enacted by the Union military and federal government toward refugees from slavery. The haphazard nature of those policies and their often deadly consequences were never more evident than in the experience of enslaved women, mothers, and the children under their care, who approached Union lines in pursuit of freedom, but encountered a gauntlet of conflicting and unevenly enforced military edicts and a humanitarian crisis still only superficially understood by many Civil War historians.

Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland by Jessica Millward

Reviewed by: Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland by Jessica Millward Wilma King (bio) Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland Jessica Millward Athens: University of Georgia Press 2015 152 pp. At first glance the title, Finding Charity’s Folk, suggests that the monograph will focus on reuniting the loved ones of an enslaved woman, Charity, born in Maryland circa 1759. However, the deeply researched study is more generally about the historical location and position of black women, or “folk,” whose legal savvy and assistance from others helped them navigate from slavery to freedom before the Civil War. Jessica Millward channels the narrative through a prism pointed at Charity Folks, who along with her five children and their children made the transition from slavery to freedom while she acquired real and personal property in Annapolis that did much to secure their freedom and legacy. Finding Charity’s Folk is a slim four-chapter volume of less than seventy-five pages of text, excluding the acknowledgments, prologue, and epilogue. Rather than a biography, it is a social history resulting from more than a decade of research involving the examination of over one thousand manuscripts archived in the United States, England, and Africa. When describing her own work, Millward writes: This study focuses chiefly on two aspects of how enslaved people defined freedom. The first is grounded in the historically specific circumstances of enslaved women, exploring their experiences and suggesting ways that using the archive of Charity’s life can move our discussion of the lives of enslaved women and their long struggles for freedom in new directions. The second involved an investigation of the meanings of mobility and its impact on the autonomy of enslaved and ex-slave women’s lives. (2) More specifically, chapter 1, “Reproduction and Motherhood,” presents a two-pronged approach. First, it examines how bondwomen stretched the boundaries of slavery and exercised what autonomy was available to them as mothers. Second, it “investigates how enslaved women’s sexual experiences shaped their choices, their sense of identity, and the ways they reared [End Page 236] their children” (12). “This chapter,” the author continues, “is particularly attuned to resistance and agency as it relates to enslaved mothers” (14). “The Act to Ascertain and Declare the Condition of Such Issue as May Herein Be Born of Negro or Mulatto Female Slaves,” promulgated by Maryland lawmakers in 1809, serves as the backdrop for chapter 2, “Beyond Charity,” which focuses on the legal acquisition and protection of freedom by women other than Charity Folks. Using Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “afterlife of slavery,” Millward attempts to answer questions about the lives of freed women who remained surrounded and sometimes haunted by slavery. Chapter 3, “Commodities and Kin,” is primarily about black Marylanders buying loved ones to unite families, but redirects its attention to Charity Folks to determine the representative nature of her experiences and those of her family. Also, the chapter promises to answer whether Folks’s experiences were typical or atypical. Finally, the fourth chapter, “Moving Slavery, Shaping Freedom,” provides an examination of free black households, including Charity Folks’s, and how the women in their own abodes protected their offspring legally. A sustaining argument throughout Finding Charity’s Folk maintains that enslavement and emancipation were “tied to the womb,” thus creating an intricate knot between women and their offspring. Also bound up with this mass of humanity was the quest for freedom, family, and property. Charity Folks achieved these goals (1). She, unlike some African Americans in Maryland who entered lengthy and costly litigation or contentious fights with owners or heirs for their own freedom or that of their children, became free without an apparent legal struggle. Although the author writes, “Charity Folks ultimately negotiated freedom for her children in the sort of unrecorded transactions that were far more common than formal legal manumissions,” that is not clear (26). However, it is clear that in 1797, John Ridout bequeathed Charity, a “faithful servant,” to his wife, Mary Ogle Ridout, and “outlined his intention to free any of Charity’s children in bondage” (42). Two months following his death, the widowed Mary...

The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 by James J. Gigantino II

Reviewed by: The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 by James J. Gigantino II David Gellman (bio) The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 james j. gigantino ii Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015 359pp. The old periodization of slavery and abolition in the North is breaking down. So too, if historian James J. Gigantino II has his way, is the old historical geography of slavery. Scholars used to consign slavery’s end north of the Mason-Dixon Line to the Revolutionary era and only pick up the story of antislavery activism years later, in the three decades preceding the Civil War. Gigantino’s extensively researched study adds compelling evidence to the notion that neither African American experience nor the mechanics of abolition fell into neatly divided eras. Too much painful history and too many complicated developments occurred between the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the Civil War to sustain established chronologies. Gigantino’s claim that his careful study of New [End Page 477] Jersey requires scholars to scramble their mental map of American slavery stands on shakier ground. The “ragged road to abolition” in the Garden State shares key features with similarly ragged roads in other northern states and has much to teach about the cruelly conditional nature of black freedom in the new nation. But this state study also highlights the ways in which New Jersey was an outlier in important respects. The timing and tempo of abolition in New Jersey magnified all the shortcomings of emancipation in the North in general and the slave-dependent portions of the mid-Atlantic in particular. New Jersey initiated gradual abolition in 1804, later than all other states that traveled down this particular legal path. Rather than try to catch up to other states, lawmakers in New Jersey committed to the slowest possible form of gradualism. The law declared children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1804, to be free, but with females obligated to serve their mothers’ master until age twenty-one, males until age twenty-five. Since children born to females bound under this arrangement would remain in their masters’ control until at least age twenty-one, this stipulation significantly extended the life of the institution. Indeed, one of Gigantino’s main arguments is that this approach did not end slavery, but rather created a new form of slavery. Whites still bought, sold, and inherited term-bound people held in servitude. Unscrupulous whites exploited and dodged the law to their further advantage, for example by ignoring the requirement to register the birth of black children. Without recorded births, the date of actual freedom for individuals remained in doubt. Gradualism also facilitated the sale of African Americans into southern slavery, even though such sales violated New Jersey law. Rather than schedule an end date for slavery as neighboring New York did in an 1817 law, New Jersey reaffirmed gradualism in 1820. Only in 1836 did New Jersey courts cease to regard blacks prima facie as slaves. The 1846 law that finally abolished slavery came with features that sustained time-bound servitude under the guise of apprenticeship for years to come. This legal framework had severe consequences for African Americans. Community and institution building, processes that historians of slavery in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England have detailed as part and parcel of the gradual emancipation process, occurred much less robustly in New Jersey. The varying legal status of family members made independent family formation much more difficult. What Gigantino terms slavery’s “flexibility” in the state—masters extracting not only agricultural labor [End Page 478] but also work in factories and roads, hiring out and transferring titles— exacted a heavy price. And yet despite the author’s insistence that gradual abolition did not usher in a new era, he notes that masters and slaves engaged in negotiations to limit their terms and to arrange self-purchase. Resistance took on new meaning. News of jailbreaking, poisoning, and slaves attacking masters unnerved whites. The author asserts, “No longer could masters exert the same type of control over their chattel that they had used before gradual...

The ragged road to abolition: slavery and freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865

Contrary to popular perception, slavery persisted in the North well into the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in New Jersey, the last northern state to pass an abolition statute, in 1804. Because of the nature of the law, which freed children born to enslaved mothers only after they had served their mother's master for more than two decades, slavery continued in New Jersey through the Civil War. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally destroyed its last vestiges. The Ragged Road to Abolition chronicles the experiences of slaves and free blacks, as well as abolitionists and slaveholders, during slavery's slow northern death. Abolition in New Jersey during the American Revolution was a contested battle, in which constant economic devastation and fears of freed blacks overrunning the state government limited their ability to gain freedom. New Jersey's gradual abolition law kept at least a quarter of the state's population in some degree of bondage until the 1830s. The sustained presence of slavery limited African American community formation and forced Jersey blacks to structure their households around multiple gradations of freedom while allowing New Jersey slaveholders to participate in the interstate slave trade until the 1850s. Slavery's persistence dulled white understanding of the meaning of freedom and helped whites to associate black with slave, enabling the further marginalization of New Jersey's growing free population. By demonstrating how deeply slavery influenced the political, economic, and social life of blacks and whites in New Jersey, this illuminating study shatters the perceived easy dichotomies between North and South or free states and slave states at the onset of the Civil War.