Enslaved Population Research Articles

The travail of Delaware slave families in the early republic

ABSTRACTLargely ignored in histories of the American slave trade, Delaware provides a unique case study of a state that attempted to carve out its identity as the notions of a free North and a slaveholding South emerged in early America. Delaware’s small slaveholdings and relatively small geographic area created unique challenges for its enslaved population. Aided by Quaker and Methodist abolitionists, slaves fought against kidnappers, slave sales, and distance to build and maintain families. Using heretofore unexamined tax records, the travail of enslaved families in Delaware at the close of the eighteenth century is analyzed in great detail.

The amelioration of British West Indian slavery: anthropometric evidence

AbstractAn older view among historians, predominant until about 1970, held that British West Indian slave maintenance standards were significantly improved or ‘ameliorated’ from the later eighteenth century. Subsequent research has disputed this consensus, although uncertainty remains on key details of slave diet, labour, and demography. As an alternative welfare measure, this study examines the reported heights of detained runaway slaves and ex‐slaves held between 1788 and 1838 at workhouses on Jamaica, the most important British West Indian colony. Analytical challenges arise through the limited age data. Also, a disproportionate share of the detainees had an urban background. However, these problems can be overcome with help from local estate records and from eastern Caribbean anthropometric evidence. The mean stature of Jamaica‐born adult detainees clearly rose during the period, and they gained a widening height advantage relative to their Africa‐born counterparts. This offers a useful indicator of trends for the enslaved population at large. The workhouse material confirms ‘old school’ judgements that substantive amelioration occurred, as a course of deliberate slaveholder policy.

Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras by Kristen Epps

Reviewed by: Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras by Kristen Epps Kristen Anderson Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras. Kristen Epps. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8203-5050-9. 288 pp., cloth, $59.95. In Slavery on the Periphery, Kristen Epps examines the institution of slavery in a place where it has often been overlooked—the western frontier between Kansas and [End Page 98] Missouri. Slavery as an abstract idea was obviously very important to the region—as the struggle over whether Kansas would be a slave state made abundantly clear—but few studies have examined the experiences of the enslaved people who actually lived in this region. While their number was not large, Epps makes the case that enslaved people played a significant role in the settlement of the region. In her effort to recapture the day-to-day lives of enslaved people in the Kansas–Missouri border region, Epps turns to the techniques of microhistory. This is a difficult task, given that the region's enslaved population was not large and left few records behind. Epps has engaged in substantial detective work, uncovering sources that let her reconstruct the world these enslaved people inhabited. This includes discussion of the kinds of work enslaved people did, their family relationships, their resistance to slavery, and their efforts to build community. She uses a wide variety of sources, including not only letters, diaries, and other reminiscences of settlers in the region but probate records, freedom suits, military records, tax lists, wills, newspaper advertisements, and Civil War pension files. From this investigation, Epps constructs an image of a thriving slave system on the western frontier. The lives enslaved people lived in the Kansas–Missouri borderland were in many ways similar to those in other parts of the Upper South but were also shaped by the presence of the frontier. In particular, slaves on the frontier had an unusually high rate of mobility. Slavery in the Kansas–Missouri borderland area was a very small-scale system, with the result that slave hiring, diverse employment, and abroad marriages were common. The higher mobility that resulted from this situation became part of the power struggle between master and slave: slaveholders benefited from their slaves' mobility when hiring them out or sending them to perform tasks but also had to limit and control that mobility to sustain the institution of slavery. Similarly, enslaved people could benefit from increased mobility and use it to claim some independence for themselves or even escape, but they also suffered because of it when their families were torn apart by sale or hiring out. Epps thus argues that slavery cannot be seen as just a theoretical concept in the settlement of Kansas. Slavery had been an actual presence in that territory since the 1820s—through Native American slaveholdings and at trading posts and military bases—and there was no reason to think it would not continue to grow. As a result, the conflicts of Bleeding Kansas were fought over the actual introduction of slavery into the West, not just its theoretical presence. Epps argues that the significance of the Missouri–Kansas border for the enslaved changed dramatically over time. From the 1820s through the 1850s, it was a largely theoretical border, with slavery existing on both sides of it in a very similar form. The 1850s' sectional crisis changed this dramatically; Kansas slaves were presented with an unusual situation in that antislavery and proslavery settlements were scattered throughout the territory, with the [End Page 99] result that slaves could very easily wind up living near an antislavery community. Epps examines the demise of slavery on the Kansas side of the line, and then in Missouri during the Civil War. In both cases, she examines how enslaved people seized their freedom, often at great risk. In particular, living in the border region presented opportunities for Missouri slaves to escape once Kansas became a free state, and Epps examines the Underground Railroad routes that led many Missouri slaves to freedom. She also discusses the other ways Missouri slaves gained their freedom...

"The High and Conspicuous Ground": The Logic of Immediate Emancipation and the Politics of the Decision of 1834

On 1 August 1834, slavery came to its permanent and quite uneventful end in the colony of Antigua. Antigua's planter-dominated Assembly was compelled by a series of self-miscalculations to grant immediate freedom to the colony's enslaved population rather than adopt the proposed the Apprenticeship scheme. The uniqueness of Antigua's decision lay in the fact of Antigua being the only "sugar colony" to take the action. The Antigua Assembly's decision was a landmark decision, a fact not lost on many contemporary observers including other regional assemblies and politicians, pro-slavery and abolitionists within the empire. Despite the importance of the decision to understanding regional history, academic historical examination and discussion on the decision has relegated it to a mere footnote in most histories, including histories of the territory. This article seeks to re-establish the importance of the Assembly's decision to understanding planter and slave-owner attitudes about slavery and freedom, as well as what self-interests affected each slave-owning group's attitude toward British mandated slave emancipation. The article begins with an examination of the historiography of the decision, offering an insight into the two main perspectives—economic determinism and humanitarianism. The main theme of the paper is the role and nature of economic determinism in compelling the final decision. The article also establishes, in line with Douglas Hall in his Five of the Leewards, that the decision was not a unanimous one, having passed by the single vote of the Assembly's speaker. The objective is to establish that the decision of the Assembly was not based on choice and consensus, and that the economic considerations were inextricably tied to political and legislative considerations, which the planters voting for the decision appeared to view as equally important. Finally, the author seeks to place the history of the decision in its proper posture, not as a footnote or peripheral event but one which establishes that the history of the region is complex and nuanced and based in large part in colliding personal self-interests, notwithstanding the groups into which historians and some contemporaries placed these actors. The decision of the Antigua Assembly to grant freedom to its then enslaved population requires greater interrogation, debate and understanding on par with the historical discussion that have surrounded the British Parliament's 1833 decision.

The Sweetness of Life: Southern Planters at Home by Eugene D. Genovese

Reviewed by: The Sweetness of Life: Southern Planters at Homeby Eugene D. Genovese William J. Harris Sr The Sweetness of Life: Southern Planters at Home. By Eugene D. Genovese. Edited by Douglas Ambrose. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xxxii, 275. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-316-50289-1; cloth, $99.99, ISBN 978-1-107-13805-6.) The Sweetness of Life: Southern Planters at Homecontinues Eugene D. Genovese's efforts to more fully understand the complexities of southern planters, a task he finds essential to understanding the slave South and the system of slavery. As Genovese states in the introduction, he has "come neither to praise nor bury the slaveholders, but to limn some of the features of their lives, which may help us understand them better" (p. 2). Genovese's use of material accumulated through decades of research allows him to create a layered view of the slaveholding class. A skilled writer, Genovese weaves entertaining and insightful tales throughout the book, capturing the activities and preferences of individuals as well as the broader sentiments of the planter class. Through discussion of leisure activities such as dining practices, horse riding, fishing and hunting, piano playing, and gambling, Genovese presents a wide-ranging portrait of seldom discussed aspects of the American South. Genovese passed away prior to completion of the book. As a result, Douglas Ambrose provides an in-depth prologue outlining the context of The Sweetness of Lifealong with the broader experiences of Genovese's career. Ambrose contends that each chapter stands on its own, thus creating a book that lacks the "tight, overarching argument" one has come to expect in Genovese's work [End Page 990](p. x). However, certain recurring themes can be found. Genovese effectively demonstrates the ways that southern leisure activities reified class distinctions and order in the region. For instance, through a discussion of horses and carriages, it becomes clear that southern elites held particular preferences regarding style and quality. Carriage ownership reinforced the planters' status within the community, while the ability to provide transportation during weddings and other social events to those unable to purchase their own reinforced the sentiment that these men were worthy of their elevated status in the community. Similarly, when Genovese discusses a variety of subjects ranging from gun ownership to hunting and horse riding, or illicit activities such as gambling and drinking or rampant sexual activities, ideas of manliness and masculinity flow throughout the book, in terms of both how planters viewed or defined themselves and how they were regarded by others. Ideally, The Sweetness of Lifewould not only illuminate our understanding of the planter class but also demonstrate how planters' choices and activities were interwoven with the enslaved population of the South. According to Ambrose, "What emerges most clearly from The Sweetness of Lifeis not the profundity of an argument about the master-slave relation, but, instead, the presumption of slave presence in nearly all aspects of the slaveholders' lives" (p. xix). However, emphasizing the presence of enslaved men and women fails to adequately address not only how they functioned as actors in the formation of southern leisure but also how their actions shaped the thoughts and activities of the planter class. Kernels of this sort can be seen when Genovese briefly mentions the dangers associated with enslaved people's access to horses, drugs, and guns. The systemic realities of slavery challenged the application of leisurely activities. Importantly, sharp divisions existed in the understanding and expression of leisure among planters and enslaved people. Expanding on points only briefly broached in this book (such as the conflicted holiday season for enslaved people who found themselves both engaged in celebration and fearful of potential separations based on sale or being hired out in the new year) would allow for better understanding of the true nature of slavery in the South. The Sweetness of Lifeis an important book that should provide several avenues for further discussion and debate for years to come. William J. Harris Sr Presbyterian College Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth

Reviewed by: Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth Tara Inniss (bio) Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 290 pp. 6.125 x 9.25, 12 halftones, notes, bibl., index. US$90.00, hardcover. ISBN: 9781469632865. Also Paperback and eBook. The circulation of medical knowledge, particularly during the colonial period, is a vast field of potential study for the Caribbean historian of medicine. Given the number of publications in various languages across the region over the period, it is regrettable that more of the region’s scholarship has not been dedicated to knowledge formation and exchange among physicians in the region and beyond. Rana Hogarth’s comparative study of the racialization of medicine and the African body provides careful insight into the medical construction of race in Jamaica and South Carolina during the period of slavery. Organized into three parts, Hogarth demonstrates how physicians, and planters, in Jamaica and South Carolina were engaged in an iterative process to construct not only medical definitions of race, but also to racialize the African body, particularly the enslaved body, and ailments “peculiar” to black bodies in the tropics. Another useful comparison is her evolution of public institutions, such as hospitals and workhouses, for the surveillance and control of sick black bodies in both Jamaica and the Antebellum South—or what she terms as the “Greater Caribbean”. In Part I, Making Difference: Race and Yellow Fever, Hogarth traces some widely accepted views on the perceived race-based immunity of enslaved Africans to yellow fever. Even in the midst of dissenting views on the widely accepted notion that enslaved Africans were immune to the lethal effects of mosquito-borne yellow fever epidemics that swept the Greater Caribbean, leaving thousands dead, there was a consensus on the inalienable issue of racial difference between how disease afflicted the black versus the white body. Part II, In Sickness and Slavery: Black Pathologies, Hogarth examines [End Page 221] the perplexing racialized discourse around the disease Cachexia Africana (also known as dirt-eating, mal d’estomac, geophagy and pica). This was a well-known illness affecting enslaved African populations in the Caribbean, and described by enslavers/physicians. There have been many explanations for the descriptions and interventions that physicians have made about the disease. But Hogarth goes beyond these to establish that the very construction of the disease was one based on racial difference, helping to consolidate the medical authority of white men over other practitioners, including Obeah men and women, even though African practitioners were constantly contesting that authority. Part of the knowledge exchange among Jamaican and Antebellum Southern practitioners was over the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. There was a deepening sense that Africans were engaging in resistance to white authority over their own health and bodies. Therefore, there was less of an effort to “treat” the illness, and more to control and discipline the black body. One of Hogarth’s most convincing discussions of the racialization of enslaved health is in Part III, Disciplining Blackness: Hospitals. Hogarth frames the evolution of public institutions for the treatment of black bodies within a continuing discourse of surveillance and control in slavery, even as the care and treatment of enslaved workers shifted from private estate-based plantation medicine to state/public intervention. This discussion is particularly useful in providing more insight into the systemic place of race in medical institutions. Hogarth layers racialization of the black body from observation to pathologization to its ultimate surveillance and control, so at no point is the enslaved “patient” “object” “subject” ever free from the gaze of the white male physician conducting his research. Her examination of race-making in medicine in the Greater Caribbean provides fertile ground for further explorations of medical knowledge exchange both within and beyond the region. It is interesting that she pulls the Antebellum South into the ambit of influence of Caribbean-based physicians publishing on common diseases affecting enslaved populations. Contrary to our twenty-first-century notions of globalized medicine that often depict the balance of power in medical research weighed in favour...

The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery by Micki McElya

Reviewed by: The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery by Micki McElya Kami Fletcher Micki McElya. The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016. 416 pp. $29.95. Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery traces the founding of Arlington National Cemetery by examining the geographical landscape—most notably the enslaved population that served as its first occupants—and the politicized military climate that shaped burial policy, defined national mourning, and determined who was to be buried, honored, and nationally remembered. While 1864 is the official date given for the founding of the cemetery, McElya, like any good researcher of cemeteries, takes her start date from the earliest land ownership and land use on which the cemetery still stands. Constructed in 1778 under the ownership of his father, John Parke Custis, George Washington Parker Custis (also adopted grandson of first president George Washington) first established a plantation that housed Custis’s immediate family along with enslaved men, women, and children as a “shrine to George Washington . . . broadcast[ing] his family’s lasting significance to the nation and its leaders in the capital.” To this, McElya is quick to point out that it was the enslaved women of the plantation who kept and preserved the land on which Arlington National Cemetery currently sits, and have “molded the land there, buried their dead . . . their sweat blood and tears had already sanctified that ground long before 1864.” From the beginning to the end, the author challenges the origin of Arlington, but, more important, challenges the narrative put forth of who should be nationally honored and memorialized. McElya’s research illustrates how the national cemetery reflects a narrowed and purposefully limiting view of American identity. It is an identity that negates the condition of African Americans and puts forth a more reconciliatory national character of black and white. What the author is resisting is the notion that death became the great equalizer for those who lost their lives serving this country. Their headstones might be the same, but if one peers closely enough, the military dead are bordered off and segregated in interment and memory. Once the Civil War ensued and the United States Colored Troops (USCT) fell as casualties of war, they were given segregated burial in the commonly called “Lower Cemetery.” [End Page 66] “Buried at the far northeastern edge of the plantation,” McElya paints the spatial and racial segregation of these fallen heroes, as “[the USCT] joined other black people who died in [the] Washington-area and perhaps a few from Freedman’s Village [reconstructed living and working quarters for black persons in Union custody at Arlington], thus initiating the racial segregation of the national cemetery that persisted well into the twentieth century.” The “Lower Cemetery”—initially labeled “Contraband Cemetery” because during the war years, when enslaved persons under Union possession were branded contraband—was equipped with a black sexton and continued the racially bordered burial practices of slavery. All black people regardless of military status, service to one’s country, or heroic act were interred in this segregated site. McElya brings this point home by saying that not only were 600 Confederate soldiers buried within Arlington’s principal cemetery but also that the Lower Cemetery was utterly disregarded during Decoration Day (the ceremonial decorating of military gravestones). By simultaneously using slavery and the politics of war, the author uses death and burial to show how the contours of race greatly affected the origin and existence of Arlington National Cemetery. Midway through the book, McElya questions for whom Arlington is a national cemetery and carries this theme to the end. For example, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, established in 1921 with the elaborate ceremonial burial of an unknown American World War I soldier, is turned into a teaching moment about national exclusivity. African Americans were segregated in military service and discriminated against during these war years. Yet the celebration of the unknown World War I hero is positioned as memorial for national belonging for our hero. McElya puts it within this context, forcing readers to understand the whiteness that undergirds the patriotism. McElya even brings up...

Birth and initiation on the Peers Plantation: the problem of creolization in seventeenth-century Barbados

ABSTRACTA central debate within slavery studies centers on the question of whether enslaved Africans ‘retained’ their cultures or became ‘creolized’ in the Americas. Focusing on two enslaved women and the six children they bore by their master in late seventeenth-century Barbados, this paper suggests how creolization operated in the early modern English Caribbean. The women and children were baptized and provided for in their master’s will. Yet they were also part of the plantation’s 180 strong West African enslaved population. Contextualizing all of the influences that shaped their experiences on Barbados, this paper examines naming, baptism, and birthing rituals to provide an account of the women’s lives that does not privilege either European or West African cultural practices. It argues that creolization was not a marker of identity, nor a unidirectional process of Europeanization, but rather a multivalent and multidirectional negotiation of cultural exchanges.

From violence to alliance: Maroons and white settlers in Jamaica, 1739–1795

ABSTRACTDuring the First Maroon War, violent battles between Maroons and British colonists were frequent and violent. How then, after the peace treaties, did former enemies negotiate their new positions as allies? How did colonists accept this new status quo while balancing it with racial beliefs of the era? This article examines Maroon and colonist efforts to progress in a physically difficult and socially charged environment while living side-by-side with a large enslaved population. Ultimately, some influential planters, as opposed to poorer settlers, came to recognise the mutual benefits this uneasy peace provided. That is not to say these colonists were not fearful of the Maroons but that they recognised the usefulness of the Maroon communities.

Land of hope and dreams: slavery and abolition in the Dutch Leeward islands, 1825–1865

ABSTRACTThe asymmetry of laws concerning the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves in the Atlantic world in the early-to-mid nineteenth century led to a range of responses on the part of inhabitants of the Dutch Leeward islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Martin. These ranged from activism, adaptation, accommodation to, as this article highlights, maritime marronage on the part of the enslaved population of these islands. The Dutch Leeward islands have been understudied in the historiography of abolition and emancipation but, as this article will argue, they should be included into the larger story of how abolition was experienced on the local, regional, Atlantic, and international stages.

Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South by Damian Alan Pargas

Reviewed by: Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum Southby Damian Alan Pargas Charles Vincent Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South. By Damian Alan Pargas. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 281. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-107-65896-7; cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-1-107-03121-0.) Damian Alan Pargas has produced a valuable volume on the many aspects of the forced migration of enslaved people in the antebellum South. Forced migration took three forms: trade from older southern states of the Atlantic seaboard to other areas, local movement and moving about in rural areas, and being hired out to the city. In this well-crafted volume, Pargas poses vital questions and provides documented answers. How did American slaves experience forced migration? How did they get along with other slaves? How did they negotiate their removal and rebuild their lives while contending with the “consequences of forced migrations for identity formation” (p. 3)? With a map of the domestic slave trade, pictures, and impressive documentation, this volume uses a comparative perspective “juxtaposing and contrasting the experiences of long-distance, local, and urban slave migrants” (p. 3). One argument Pargas makes is that no southern slave owner was truly committed to paternalism but rather acted out of “financial self-interest” (p. 258). In chapter 1 the author observes that “between 1820 and 1860, at least 875,000 slaves were forcibly removed from the Upper South,” causing the enslaved population in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama to increase by 68 percent and leading to a cotton boom after the invention of the cotton gin and a sugar revolution in Louisiana (p. 19). New Orleans became the South’s largest slave market. Owners sold or hired out slaves for reasons as varied as personal dislike, to cover up illicit affairs, to rid themselves of recalcitrant slaves, and to alleviate their own economic [End Page 926]indebtedness. Some of those sold had to endure the inhumanity of inspections and probing at the auction blocks, slave pens, and jails and being taken overland and by sea routes to various locations. Chapter 2 discusses how they reacted to the prospect of relocation, resisted or negotiated the terms of their relocation, and the organizational aspects of forced migration. Slaves preferred local over interstate moves, because they feared family separation and the reputation of the Deep South. The enslaved employed resistance techniques including religious appeals, physical violence, and self-mutilation. Chapter 3 describes the inhumane events that accompanied many forced migrants—slave pens, inferior food, bedbugs, lice, fleas, and sexual exploitation. A few who were hired or sold to urban areas found life a little more bearable. Chapter 4 discusses some of the struggles of learning new work routines and environments. Many forced migrants from the upper South had not seen cotton, and having to learn to pick and cultivate cotton caused slave owners to prefer younger migrants. Cotton was the great equalizer in terms of gender. While harvesting cotton or sugar was more difficult than tobacco, Pargas observes that the belief that upper South slaves were better off than lower South slaves is not true. Chapter 5 asserts that planters’ claims to paternalism and benevolence were inconsistent with the system of slavery and its ideological justification. The conditions of the slaves—housing, food, and clothes—were poor, and corporal punishment was frequent. Chapter 6 and the conclusion are insightful. Posing questions of how slaves experienced transitions and forged new relations, strategies, and identities, Pargas highlights many examples of collective resistance, including marriages among migrants and helping others escape. Worship services created bonds. Illicit visits to loved ones, “courting, marriage, and family formation” were likewise “ways to integrate into slave communities” (p. 240). Helping slaves with tasks, workplace cooperation, and lodging with newcomers also helped make some adjustment bearable. Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum Southhas added greatly to a vital topic. Well documented, this volume should be high on a list of mandatory reading for classes on slavery in the antebellum South, sociology, and southern history in general. Charles Vincent Southern University and A&M College Copyright...

The Price You Pay

Planters and colonial officials throughout the Caribbean feared the consequences of emancipation in the nineteenth century, especially after the British abolished slavery in 1834. Concerns were particularly strong among the planters and colonial officials of the Dutch Leeward islands of St. Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius, as their geographical location left them vulnerable to the decisions of neighboring imperial powers. As early as 1825, when British law prohibited the extradition of foreign runaway slaves from their colonies, freedom was just a short boat ride away for the enslaved population of the Dutch islands, leading to worries that their islands would quickly become depopulated of their laborers. These fears were ultimately unfounded, however. As this article shows, the majority of slaves of the Dutch Leeward islands chose to either stay home or, after sojourning in another place, decided to return to their homes.

Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts by Emily Blanck

Reviewed by: Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts by Emily Blanck James J. Gigantino II (bio) KEY WORDS Slavery, Privateers, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Freed slaves Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts. By Emily Blanck. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014. Pp. 217. Cloth, $49.95.) Emily Blanck uses a little known interstate dispute to discuss some sweeping issues in the legal history of slavery and the larger historiography of the nation’s founding. Tyrannicide tells the tale of a group of thirty-four slaves captured by British privateers from their South Carolina plantations during the American Revolution who, by varieties of happenstance and chance, ended up captured by the American privateer Tyrannicide and escorted to Boston in 1779. Their story is the backdrop for Blanck’s analysis of the fissures that developed between North and South concerning the institution of slavery during the revolutionary period. Blanck organizes her work very much as a tale of two states, showing the divergent paths that South Carolina and Massachusetts had embarked on from the colonial period forward. By the onset of the Revolution, both remained slaveholding states, yet the economic purpose and overall understanding of the institution’s in each state was quite different in opinion and especially law. The author’s exploration of the colonial [End Page 405] legal past identifies some strong differences between both locales as they emerged as states in 1776, with Massachusetts being quite comfortable identifying slaves as persons under the law and therefore entitled to certain fundamental rights. South Carolina, on the other hand, repeatedly affirmed slaves as property and therefore unable to access those rights, most importantly habeas corpus, which Massachusetts slaves had successfully used in the late colonial period to argue for freedom. Beyond the differences in their colonial past, Blanck illustrates how the revolutionary experience dictated separate reactions to the continuation of slavery. South Carolinians, surrounded by an enslaved population hungry to seize the freedom offered by the British, created laws that further regulated the institution, while Massachusetts residents, who had far fewer slaves for the British to coopt, became more interested in abandoning it. Blanck argues that they would have done just that if the institution’s destruction would not have shattered the fragile unity that held the various states together in the midst of war. The divergence of the states on the role of slavery comes into full view when those thirty-four South Carolina slaves arrived in Massachusetts. Though more than half quickly returned to South Carolina, fourteen lived in Boston and its environs for the next four years as their owners could not afford to easily reclaim them. Those fourteen individuals not only soaked up the revolutionary rhetoric and ideas promulgated by the city’s free black community but also possessed a front-row seat for a series of court battles from 1780 to 1783 that started Massachusetts toward the path of becoming a free state. By 1783, when the owners tried to reclaim their slaves, they faced an uphill legal battle that tested the new union between the states in respecting each other’s property. At its core then, Tyrannicide explores the tension between the post-revolutionary governments of South Carolina and Massachusetts over the fate of these fourteen slaves. Officials from both states traded numerous letters that reveal just how different the two states’ legal systems were on the issue of slavery during this critical period. In a process fraught with legal misunderstandings on both sides, the fourteen individuals gained de facto freedom as their South Carolina owners and the state’s representatives declined to continue advocating the case against their northern neighbors. Blanck shows how this episode tested the limits of colonial unity and created the first fissures that would eventually come to bear on the constitutional debate over the fugitive slave clause. The Tyrannicide affair acted as a rehearsal for those issues and powerfully [End Page 406] shows that contention between slave and free states pre-dated the Constitution and remained a divisive concern from the nation’s very beginning. Although Blanck sets up a clear dichotomy between crumbling Massachusetts slavery and...

When the Slave Esperança Garcia Wrote a Letter by Sonia Rosa (review)

Reviewed by: When the Slave Esperança Garcia Wrote a Letter by Sonia Rosa Elizabeth Bush Rosa, Sonia When the Slave Esperança Garcia Wrote a Letter; tr. from the Portuguese by Jane Springer; illus. by Luciana Justiniani Hees. Groundwood/House of Anansi, 2015 40p ISBN 978-1-55498-729-0 $18.95 Ad Gr. 2-5 “Esperança Garcia is famous in the Brazilian state of Piauí, and I would like her to be celebrated all over Brazil and the rest of the world.” Author Rosa makes a good case for this wider recognition through her portrayal of the eighteenth-century slave who [End Page 219] learned to read and write from the Franciscan missionaries who owned her family, and was later sold apart from her husband and older children to the cruel Captain Antonio Vieira de Couto. Garcia took the probably unprecedented step of writing a letter of complaint to the regional governor asking for relief, and when a copy of the letter was discovered in a Piauí archive in 1979, it became a testimony to the tribulations and resistance of the indigenous enslaved population. Rosa notes that there is no record of a reply from the governor, and this bitter uncertainty is built into the reimagining of Esperança’s story: “Esperança Garcia could think of nothing else. The answer could arrive at any moment.” The universal sadness of the slave’s story, together with Hees’ arresting folkloric artwork that renders Esperança as a stalwart, dignified profile with a wide eye on the future, will draw in the audience. However, since the letter itself is the crux of this tale, much more explanation—or even informed conjecture—is needed. How did a slave come by writing paper and pen? How did she get the letter itself to the governor? Why was a copy of the letter found in Piauí while the original is archived in Lisbon? While these omissions are disappointing (particularly in view of the fact that no source notes are offered), this title can nonetheless provide younger children with a broader view of the history of slavery beyond the United States. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Palenques y Cimarronaje: procesos de resistencia al sistema colonial esclavista en el Caribe Sabanero (Siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII)

This article discusses the marronage logics (Cimarronaje) and the constitution of Palenque villages, as an expression of black slaves’ resistance against the colonial neogranadian system. The analysis is temporarily focused on the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, and spatially in the current Caribbean region of Colombia, specifically the areas known as Bolivar Sabanero and the Mompox Depression. Throughout the conjunction of these temporal and geographic variables, the author can track how black slaves ran away from their masters using marronage (cimarronaje) dynamics, as a pursuit for social and territorial autonomy. This autonomy was materialized through the construction of Palenque villages in specific areas of the Colombian Caribbean, where they found what the colonial system did not provide to the enslaved population of the time. In this sense, this paper presents some theoretical positions corresponding to the study of Afro-descendants during the colonial times in the focused region. The analysis could contribute to strengthening the figure of Palenque village’s as territorial entities and a geographic space that allowed the Maroons to access levels of social autonomy through a particular use and appropriation of their native territory.

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender and Population Politics after Slavery. By Juanita de Barros (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014) 279 pp. $32.95

<i>Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender and Population Politics after Slavery.</i> By Juanita de Barros (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014) 279 pp. $32.95

“In the Free”: The Work of Emancipation in the Anglo-Caribbean Historical Novel

The concluding words of Erna Brodber'sThe Rainmaker's Mistake, a novel prompted in part by the two-hundredth anniversary of the 1807 Act to Abolish the Slave Trade in Britain's Caribbean Colonies, affirm its engagement with history and historiography, emphasizing the need for Caribbean writers of the twenty-first century to search the past – uncover its traumas, its mysteries, and its treasures – in order to make sense of the present and project a future “in the free.” Brodber's work, of course, is part of a much larger and longer conversation among Caribbean novelists about what it means “to search and to reproduce and to cultivate,” literally and metaphorically. To explore the implications of this conversation, my essay focusses on this various and vexed cultural work as performed in three key Caribbean novels: E. L. Joseph'sWarner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole, published in 1838, the year that “full freedom” was granted by the British Parliament to the enslaved population of the British West Indies after a four-year apprenticeship period; Paule Marshall's 1969The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, produced during a period of independence for many Anglo-Caribbean nations, including her parents' native Barbados in 1968; and, finally, Brodber's 2007 “Afrofuturistic” novelThe Rainmaker's Mistake.

The Economic Consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade. By Barbara Solow (New York, Lexington Books, 2014) 150 pp. $75.00

Solow provides important insights for understanding the economics of slavery in the Americas. This posthumous volume brings together some of her seminal publications based on her research throughout the past twenty-five years. It well deserves to be collected in a convenient volume for scholars who study slavery in the Americas. The central theme is the significance of the institution of slavery in modern economic development. Always written with a brilliance and flare, Solow’s work ably outlines the basic features of slavery as a system and economic structure. Although her analysis is heavily weighted toward British and North American history, her explanation of slavery’s underpinnings in economic terms applies to any society in any time period.The book includes seven chapters about the economic consequences of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The first examines the development of capitalism and the role of slavery from the beginnings of sugar production in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa to its introduction into the Americas. It provides a perceptive appreciation of Williams’ hypothesis about the close association between capitalism and slavery.1 In the second chapter, she explores the role of forced colonization through slavery as a mechanism for development in places with an abundance of land, as in many parts of tropical America after the decimation of the indigenous population through disease and colonial conquest.Her third chapter, which is published for the first time in this book, engages the debate between Williams and his critics, especially Drescher.2 She convincingly argues that Williams provided significant insights into the transition from slavery to abolition that have been supported by recent research. Her chapter about why Christopher Columbus failed, considers the development of the Americas without slavery. This counterfactual approach allows Solow to explore the entrepreneurial experimentation of various European colonial powers in the development of the sugar complex in the Americas and the tangential extensions of slavery into other spheres of economy and society. In her chapter about Caribbean slavery and the growth of the British economy, she examines the Williams thesis in greater detail, particularly in relation to the criticisms of Engerman and Thomas, employing an econometric analysis that uses a Cobb-Douglas production model to establish levels of profits related to the sugar industry.3 She demonstrates in her final chapter that the British experience in the Caribbean benefited from the transition to a plantation economy. In her penultimate essay, also published in this volume for the first time, she explores the theories of Karl Marx and American economic growth based on slavery.Conspicuously absent from this book is the impact of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on Africa, its states, its societies, and the economy. Solow’s insights cry out for a discussion of the transformations that occurred in Africa as a result of the modernization and industrialization of Western Europe and the Americas. How did technology and economies of scale affect Africa, and what was their role in the origins of the enslaved population? Although this question apparently never occurred to her, it is relevant for the historiography of the Atlantic world.Solow is not the only scholar who has ignored Africa in this respect; the general silence raises important conceptual issues. Was Africa even part of the Atlantic world, other than as an ocean filled with people to enslave? Was Africa such a vacuum of meaning and history that its economies are not worth exploring? A volume dedicated to the issues that Solow has addressed in her scholarly career might at least have provided an introduction to global issues that go beyond an Atlantic that stops short of the African coast. In addition to the two new chapters in this collection, Solow would have done well to include a third one dealing with the African side of the equation. Other scholars will have to pick up where she left off.

Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba. By William C. Van Norman, Jr. (Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2013) 232 pp. $59.95 cloth $29.95 paper.

The last twenty years has witnessed a noted shift in the thematic interests and conclusions about the first half of nineteenth-century Cuban history. Previously, the dominant topic of historical investigation was the rise of the sugar economy, analyzed from the insights of dependency theory. Sugar became the single most important catalyst in explaining the causes behind Cuba’s war for independence, even helping to explain the historical roots of Fidel Castro’s 1959 Revolution. Beginning in the 1990s, however, when Cuba lost the Soviet Union as an ally and benefactor, its economy atrophied, and sugar production came to a grinding halt. The economic and political chaos of the 1990s led historians to look at topics far removed from sugar and its hegemonic role in shaping Cuban history. Van Norman’s excellent study is the latest addition to this budding historiography. Diligently working his way through imperial archives in Spain, national archives in Havana, and regional archives in Cuba, Van Norman examines the neglected role of coffee in Cuba during the nineteenth century. In particular, he analyzes how coffee produced a type of slavery vastly different from that on sugar plantations.Van Norman organizes his book into three parts that address three broad topics. Part I examines the structure and demographics of Cuban coffee plantations. Van Norman convincingly shows not only that “the crop mattered”—coffee plantations were not run like the agro-industrial work camps found on sugar plantations—but also that coffee’s economy of scale fostered the emergence of a rapid rate of creolization among the slave population. After analyzing the structural dynamics of coffee plantations, he then turns to the heart of his book, which explores labor, religion, family, housing, geographical space, and slaves marketing and selling their own goods. Readers of this journal will find the chapters about religious practices and the spacial layout of the coffee plantation to be the most interdisciplinary. Drawing inspiration from anthropological and religious studies, Van Norman describes the enslaved population’s attempt to re-create an African cosmology that also spoke to their immediate Cuban surroundings. Moreover, he employs scholarship about cultural geography and archival sources to show how slaves subverted their masters’ intent to convert them into crude instruments of labor by establishing their own family and kin relations.Another of Van Norman’s major contributions is the way in which he re-orients the study of resistance and slave revolts to show what was particular to coffee plantations. Over time, the rapid rate of creolization, the development of more stable family and community relations, and the opportunity to harvest and market agricultural production resulted in a “moral economy” that came to govern slave life on coffee plantations. When these rhythms and expectations were upset, rebellion often followed. For example, Van Norman cites the cholera epidemic as a cause of the 1833 slave revolt on the plantation Salvador. The slaves perceived cholera as an indication of malevolent forces at the command of whites that they had to eradicate. Hence, the uprising was not just about opposition to enslavement; it was also a religious movement to restore balance to the world that had been upset by evil spirits.More than seventy years ago, Ortiz, Cuba’s foremost anthropologist of the twentieth century, deftly counterpointed sugar and tobacco as the two dominant crops that shaped Cuban history.1 By counterpointing coffee to sugar, however, Van Norman’s book brings further complexity to the study of nineteenth-century Cuban history. Thus will it appeal to a broad range of scholars who study Latin America, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and the African diaspora.

Sacred Ways of Meaning and Knowing: A Comparative Reading of Caribbean Literature

Sacred Ways of Meaning and Knowing:A Comparative Reading of Caribbean Literature Matthew Pettway (bio) CARIBBEAN LITERATURE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial. By Raphael Dalleo. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2011. OSHUN’S DAUGHTERS: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas. By Vanessa K. Valdés. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2014. This essay is a comparative reading of Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial (2011) by Raphael Dalleo and Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014) by Vanessa Valdés. Raphael Dalleo’s book is a pan-Caribbean literary history examining the role of the public intellectual from the plantation colony to the emergence of postcolonial regimes. Though also concerned with Caribbean literature, Valdés’s woman-centered approach engages Afro-diasporan religion not as an intellectual project but an intimately sacred means of knowing and healing in the lives of black female characters across the Western Hemisphere. Her emphasis on Caribbean, [End Page 115] U.S., and Brazilian women writers, female protagonists, and female-identified African divine entities, situates her scholarship in the vein of renowned critic Miriam DeCosta-Willis and qualifies her book as an interruption of an otherwise androcentric paradigm. By way of juxtapositional analysis, I explore the multiple contributions of Valdés and Dalleo’s books in order to compare disparate methodologies and to make critical suggestions for future research. Owing to my interests, my critique is centered on Hispanophone Caribbean authors, the recovery of Afro-Caribbean colonial literature, Spanish-speaking Caribbean writers, and a critical approach to African diasporic religion as epistemological practice. I argue that future literary histories should further integrate black colonial literati into Dalleo’s notion of a nineteenth century Caribbean counterpublic, thus expanding an otherwise constricted notion of discursive practice. In that respect, there is much research to be done. Moreover, I believe the silence Dalleo assigns to Afro-diasporic religion inadvertently negates the epistemological significance of such traditions. In this essay, I recommend constructive approaches for the revision of the literary record and my reading of Vanessa Valdés’ work submits certain methodological considerations. Instead of speaking in terms of zeitgeist, Dalleo names three periods in Caribbean literary history: plantation slavery, modern colonialism, and post-coloniality. Dalleo reworks Pierre Bourdieu’s framework of “literature as a field” in order to examine “the mediating autonomy of cultural producers” (6). Though his primary concern is the writing of a pan-Caribbean literary history, Dalleo engages cultural studies as an instrument for contextualizing literature in terms of social structures and institutional power. The author explores how colonialism persists in the Caribbean not in a static way but as the reemergence of domination to contain resistance movements. Dalleo’s critical scope is impressive, embracing the Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone Caribbean from the nineteenth century through the twentieth and into the present. Dalleo says that Caribbean writers were unable to forge a Caribbean public sphere grounded in local practices until the second half of the nineteenth century when it slowly began to take form (15–16, 44). Plantation Societies and the Rise of a Caribbean Counterpublic Rafael Dalleo argues that the nineteenth-century Caribbean was not a public sphere as theorized by Jürgen Habermas, but rather constituted a counterpublic where abolitionist literature—largely published in Europe—represented enslaved populations. Habermas envisions a “utopian version of the public sphere” as an emporium of ideas that democratizes discourse by allowing for exchange across class divides (40). But, Dalleo says that newspapers in Caribbean slave societies were the rhetorical vehicle of a small slave-holding elite that feared widespread literacy would give enslaved men and women access to radical abolitionist ideas. The Caribbean press was established in the eighteenth century with two objectives: [End Page 116] keeping records of the monetary value assigned to human captives and as a means of regulating the movement of enslaved persons (25, 30). Dalleo evokes Ángel Rama’s notion of the lettered republic in order to highlight the hierarchical nature of public discourse in Caribbean colonies based on monoculture and captive labor (27). The Uruguayan theorist argued that the Catholic Church and the...