Fall Of Slavery Research Articles

Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas*

Abstract The lash and shackles remain two primary symbols of material degradation fixed in the historical memory of slavery in the Americas. Yet as recounted by states, abolitionists, travellers, and most importantly slaves themselves, perhaps the most terrifying and effective tool for disciplining black bodies and dominating their space was the dog. This article draws upon archival research and the published materials of former slaves, novelists, slave owners, abolitionists, Atlantic travelers, and police reports to link the systems of slave hunting in Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, and the US South throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slave hounds were skillfully honed biopower predicated upon scenting, hearing, sighting, outrunning, outlasting, signaling, attacking, and sometimes terminating, black runaways. These animals permeated slave societies throughout the Americas and bolstered European ambitions for colonial expansion, indigenous extirpation, economic extraction, and social domination in slave societies. as dogs were bred to track and hunt enslaved runaways, slave communities utilized resources from the natural environment to obfuscate the animal's heightened senses, which produced successful escapes on multiple occasions. This insistence of slaves' humanity, and the intensity of dog attacks against black resistance in the Caribbean and US South, both served as proof of slavery's inhumanity to abolitionists. Examining racialized canine attacks also contextualizes representations of anti-blackness and interspecies ideas of race. An Atlantic network of breeding, training and sales facilitated the use of slave hounds in each major American slave society to subdue human property, actualize legal categories of subjugation, and build efficient economic and state regimes. This integral process is often overlooked in histories of slavery, the African Diaspora, and colonialism. By violently enforcing slavery’s regimes of racism and profit, exposing the humanity of the enslaved and depravity of enslavers, and enraging transnational abolitionists, hounds were central to the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas.

JAMAICAN LEGISLATION AND THE TRANSATLANTIC CONSTITUTION, 1664–1839

AbstractBetween its first meeting in January 1664 and the final session held under unfree labour in December 1838, the volume of legislation passed by the house of assembly in Jamaica increased exponentially. As in Britain and Ireland, this reflected the growing administrative capacity and political power of the legislature and also the enormous demand for laws and law-making among local interest groups. The rise and fall of slavery and the slave society in the island was therefore underpinned in a large part by the power of its colonial legislature, which also operated within the broader transatlantic constitution structured by imperial politics and law. There was very little though to distinguish the house of assembly from others in British North America, at least in legislative terms, and even after the traumatic imperial disjuncture of 1783 the reformed transatlantic constitution continued to provide a supportive environment for the expansion of legislation within the island of Jamaica.

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

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

Bringing Back the States: A Congressional Perspective on the Fall of Slavery in America

In the aftermath of America's Civil War, national lawmakers who chronicled the fall of slavery described the North as a terrain of states whose representatives assembled in Congress, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–77) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–70). Beginning in the early 1900s, scholars who helped establish the field of American constitutional history redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–1877) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–1870), a first generation of scholars writing during the Progressive Era redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in William A. Dunning's Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898), John W. Burgess's The Civil War and the Constitution (1901–1906), and James G. Randall's Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (1926). Although a second generation of scholars uncovered traces of the lawmakers' perspective of states, new efforts in the wake of the civil rights movement to understand the internal workings of political parties and the contributions of ordinary Americans kept the study of national lawmakers and their states on the margins of inquiry, as evidenced in leading revisionist histories of Reconstruction, including Harold Hyman's A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973), Michael Les Benedict's A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974a), and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution (1988). Today, the terrain of Northern states remains in the backdrop, as illustrated in recent studies featuring the wartime national government, including James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012) and Mark E. Neely, Jr.'s Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (2011), as well as studies of the mechanisms of constitutional change during Reconstruction, including relevant sections of Bruce Ackerman's We the People II: Transformations (1998) and Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography (2005). This review essay argues that incorporating the states back into this century‐old framework will open new lines of inquiry and provide a more complete account of federalism's role in the fall of slavery. In particular, a return to the archives suggests that in the uncertain context of mid‐nineteenth‐century America, slavery's leading opponents in Congress saw the Constitution's federal logic not simply as an obstacle, but as a crucial tool with which to mobilize collective action and accommodate wartime opposition at a time when no one could say for sure what would remain of the United States.

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

<i>Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World</i> (review)

<i>Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World</i> (review)

Book reviews

David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Trevor Burnard)Louis Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment (R. Darrell Meadows)Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Stephen D. Behrendt)Ruben Gowricharn, Caribbean Transnationalism: Migration, Pluralization, and Social Cohesion (D. Aliss a Trotz)Vilna Francine Bashi, Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World (Riva Berleant)Dwaine E. Plaza & Frances Henry (eds.), Returning to the Source: The Final Stage of the Caribbean Migration Circuit (Karen Fog Olwig)Howard J. Wiarda, The Dutch Diaspora: The Netherlands and Its Settlements in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (Han Jordaan) J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat, Sleeping Rough in Port-au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children &Violence in Haiti (Catherine Benoît)Ginetta E.B. Candelario, Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (María Isabel Quiñones)Paul Christopher Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa (Sarah England)Jessica Adams, Michael P. Bibler & Cécile Accilien (eds.), Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South (Jean Muteba Rahier)Tina K. Ramnarine, Beautiful Cosmos: Performance and Belonging in the Caribbean Diaspora (Frank J. Korom)Patricia Joan Saunders, Alien-Nation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Sue N. Greene)Mildred Mortimer, Writings from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean (Jacqueline Couti)Colin Woodard, The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down (Sabrina Guerra Moscoso)Peter L. Drewett & Mary Hill Harris, Above Sweet Waters: Cultural and Natural Change at Port St. Charles, Barbados, c. 1750 BC – AD 1850 (Frederick H. Smith)Reinaldo Funes Monzote, From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492 (Bonham C. Richardson)Jean Besson & Janet Momsen (eds.), Caribbean Land and Development Revisited (Michaeline A. Crichlow)César J. Ayala & Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898 (Juan José Baldrich)Mindie Lazarus-Black, Everyday Harm: Domestic Violence, Court Rites, and Cultures of Reconciliation (Brackette F. Williams)Learie B. Luke, Identity and Secession in the Caribbean: Tobago versus Trinidad, 1889-1980 (Rita Pemberton)Michael E. Veal, Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae (Shannon Dudley)Garth L. Green & Philip W. Scher (eds.), Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival (Kim Johnson)Jocelyne Guilbault, Governing Sound: The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics (Donald R. Hill)Shannon Dudley, Music from Behind the Bridge: Steelband Spirit and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago (Stephen Stuempfle)Kevin K. Birth, Bacchanalian Sentiments: Musical Experiences and Political Counterpoints in Trinidad (Philip W. Scher)

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (review)

Reviewed by: Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis E. Arnold Modlin Jr. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. David Brion Davis. Oxford University Press, New York, 2006. 464pp., 21 halftones, 8 maps, notes, and index. $30.00 cloth. (ISBN 0-19-514073-7). New World Slavery is a broad but still somehow under-covered theme in the scholarly literature. Works on slavery tend to be either very general or very focused. How does one consider such an expansive subject, both geographically and historically, in one volume without leaving out important themes? David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, and Directory Emeritus of the Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, delivers a solid attempt to cover all the major themes in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Davis helps the reader appreciate the major concepts of slavery in the New World without leading the reader to think that slavery was a monolithic experience. Inhuman Bondage is not an encyclopedia on New World Slavery. Davis’s purpose is to place American slavery within the context of the Atlantic slave system and to help us develop a better understanding of American slavery—and I think Davis accomplishes his mission. Chapter 1 examines many of the key themes such as racism, international and national law, justice, and politics by considering the case of the Cuban slave ship, La Amistad. In 1839, Cinqué an illegally captured and enslaved African led a revolt on the slave ship La Amistad, killed a number of crew members and forced one of the surviving slave owners to plot a course for Africa. Instead of doing that, the ship’s newly forced pilot steered the ship toward the U.S., ending up in New York; the boat and all on board were taken to Connecticut starting a legal battle that would pit former President John Quincy Adams against the administration of President Van Buren. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the theoretical context of modern, post Age of Exploration, slavery. Modern, New World slavery differed from earlier forms of human bondage in that it was economically and industrially based, while many forms of pre-modern slavery were centered on war plunder or debt. Davis argues that slavery is different from servitude by pointing out that enslaved people throughout history have been dehumanized, stripped of citizenship, and treated as property. Here the discussion turns to examples of pre-modern slavery among the Sumerians, the Neo-Babylonians, and the Tupinamba of pre-conquest Brazil. He also lays out many of the foundational concepts and ideologies leading to the uniqueness of American slavery including slavery among the Israelites, the often-quoted Biblical scriptures, including the cursing of Canaan, and the Greek and Roman philosophical views often used to justify slavery. Many wealthy, early-American slaveholders, particularly in the antebellum South, viewed slavery not only as moral, but also critical to democracy. Some southern slave owners saw themselves as modern parallels of ancient Roman senators of the Republic, evidently as a result of their Classical education. In Chapter 4, the author [End Page 378] further reflects on how racially based African enslavement became incorporated into the exploitation of the New World. In Chapters 5 and 6, Davis helps us appreciate the regional differences of slavery within Brazil and the United States, and between the Caribbean islands controlled by various European countries. I found the comparisons of slavery within Brazil and the U.S. particularly interesting. More so than their counterparts in the Caribbean, slave owners in Brazil and the southern U.S. emphasized their “paternalistic patronage” while developing harsh industrialized forms of agricultural production. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the issues raised by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Each of these convulsions had an impact on the lives of slaves and slave owners throughout the New World. Within the territory that would become the U.S., slaveholders worried about whether to arm slaves to assist in fighting the British. In both North America and the Caribbean, the British increasingly used black soldiers to fend off...

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World – By David Brion Davis

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World – By David Brion Davis

Inhuman bondage: the rise and fall of slavery in the New World

Inhuman bondage: the rise and fall of slavery in the New World

The Decline and Fall of Slavery in Nineteenth Century Brazil

It is in my case a particular honour to address the Royal Historical Society. As president of the Society for four years in the 1960s, Professor R. A. Humphreys, the first holder of the Chair of Latin American History in the University of London which I have been privileged to hold since 1986 (and, incidentally, my teacher both as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate student), gave a series of distinguished presidential addresses on aspects of British and United States policy towards Latin America, and Anglo-American rivalries in Latin America, during the nineteenth century. But it seems that I am the first historian of Latin America to present a paper to the Society on a specifically Latin American theme.

Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (review)

BOOK REVIEWS179 Sfovery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryfond during the Nineteenth Century. By Barbara Jeanne Fields. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. Pp. xv, 268. $27.50.) Sfovery and Freedom on the Middle Ground analyzes Maryland's transition from the last stages ofa crumbling slave society to the first stages ofa modern capitalistic one. Professor Fields's portrait of die former fits historiographically upon the larger canvases painted by Eugene Genovese and Ira Berlin; her portrait of the latter extends into a Border state the contemporary American Marxist analysis ofpostslave societies. On theone hand, Professor Fields offers strong, subtle interpretations and discusses at several points the ways in which her views relate to those ofother scholars. That is one ofthe most intellectually engaging aspects ofher style. On the other hand, the footnotes in this book verge on being gratuitously combative , and I can only hope that the many historians whom she dismisses will consider her ideas in a more generous spirit than she displays toward dieirs, for she has some excellent material to offer. Fields lays to rest the assumption that Maryland slavery, because it had to accommodate itself to the polity of a Border state and because it coexisted with a uniquely high percentage of free blacks, was somehow more benign in character than slavery farther south. Instead, Maryland slaveholders were nervous and defensive, clinging to power in an unrepresentative legislature, and prepared to impose their own version ofpolice order upon Baltimore. Fields also musters finearguments to illuminate the paradox that small slaveholdings (the mostcommon holding in Maryland in 1860 was a single slave) may have proved more disruptive to the lives of individual black people than large slaveholdings. The chapters on the Civil War in Maryland and the fall ofslavery there are firmly rooted in the records of the Union army and Freedmen's Bureau, where Fields has done extensive research. Many ofher insights hit home. General Benjamin Butler, for example, hardly a hero in traditional accounts of Maryland during the Civil War, emerges as a realist who understood power. He gave his superiors "the luxury ofbenefitting by his action while clucking dieir tongues in disapproval." Her discussion ofdie ways in which army recruiting among blacks broke down the distinctions among previously free men, previously enslaved men, and fugitives from elsewhere is deftly done. Less persuasive is her cautious treatment ofthe mercurial rise and precipitous fall of the Radical coalition that passed the 1864 constitution, then evaporated in 1867. That phenomenon, which fits awkwardly into the story as Fields conceptualizes it, is not adequately addressed. The strongest portions ofthis monograph trace the social consequences ofthe postwar growth of industrial capitalism and the trend toward truck forming in many ofthe areas where slaves had once raised staples. Fields's analyses ofwhat happened to blacks in the course ofthese two processes is outstanding, and her painstaking survey ofblack farmers in three counties 180CIVIL WAR HISTORY in the 1880 census yield impressive evidence. She interprets the labor crises of 1877 as a sort ofpublic announcement that a new social order had emerged and all sides in Maryland recognized it. James C. Mohr University of Maryland My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civü War Era . By Jean-Charles Houzeau. Edited, with an introduction by David C. Rankin. Translated by Gerard F. Denault. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Pp. xvi, 168. $20.00.) The publication of this account of events in New Orleans from 1863 through 1868 by a participant in those events, Jean-Charles Houzeau, accompanied by an extensive introduction on the life of Houzeau, is a valuable addition to the scholarship of Reconstruction in Louisiana. Houzeau was a Belgian journalist and astronomer of aristocratic family, who came to the United States in 1857. His Enlightenment beliefs in progress and the importance of the environment over heredity appear in his writings and influence his actions throughout his life. Residing in Texas when the Civil War began, he made his way to Union-occupied New Orleans in 1862. He soon was writing articles for L'Union and then the Tribune, newspapers published by free persons of color in New Orleans. In November...