Free Black Research Articles

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom by James A. Delle

Reviewed by: The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom by James A. Delle Christopher Blakley (bio) The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom james a. delle University Press of Florida, 2019 224 pp. African slavery shaped the society, economy, and culture of northeastern North America beginning as early as 1626, when Dutch settlers forcibly relocated Atlantic Africans to New Netherland. Twelve years later William Pierce sailed the Desire from the Caribbean to Boston, where he hoped to sell a cargo of captive Africans, possibly including Dorcas "ye blackmore," in exchange for enslaved Indigenous people seized by settlers during the Pequot War. James A. Delle's study of the archaeology of northern slavery and freedom explores the materiality of enslavement, fugitivity, and emancipation in the Northeast and New England from the early seventeenth century to the antebellum era and Reconstruction. He argues at the outset that "American slavery was not born in the tobacco fields of Virginia or the rice plantations of the Carolina Low Country but in the villages of Puritan New England and on the streets of Dutch New Amsterdam, the settlement that would eventually become New York City" (31). Drawing on previous scholarship—including archaeological field excavations led by colleagues and his own research conducted with field school teams on multiple sites in the Northeast—Delle makes use of an abundance of archival and archaeological materials to consider the lives of enslaved, self-emancipated, and free people of color over the longue durée. The book fuses analysis with historical documents to a range of material cultural evidence from architecture to ceramics, metal and glass artifacts, cultural landscapes, tools, musical instruments, conjure bundles, and children's toys to reconstruct the everyday lives of diverse communities. A central thesis of the book is that enslaved people experienced and survived violence from slaveholders in the North in much the same way as others did in the South, and Delle's efforts to challenge commonplace notions among the public of kind and benevolent northern slaveholders is worthwhile. The book is divided into eight chapters organized into five sections that examine the themes of the history of northern slavery, the materiality of enslavement in the North, the forms of resistance the enslaved practiced in opposition to their enslavers or slave-catching gangs, the kinds of freedoms [End Page 575] that formerly enslaved people pursued, and the commemoration of northern slavery. Delle begins by providing an overview of northern slavery and archaeological investigations, first with the form of critical community archaeology developed at the African Burial Ground in New York. This excavation conducted in Lower Manhattan raised the methodological question of how to "decolonize the field" of historical archaeology, and it is surprising that beyond this brief mention Delle does not explicitly return to this question throughout his book. Other sites of either enslaved or free African Americans discussed include Lucy Foster's Garden in Andover, Massachusetts; two communities of free people—Skunk Hollow, New Jersey, and Parting Ways, Massachusetts; and provisioning plantations in Rhode Island, principally at Newport, a center of Atlantic slaving throughout the eighteenth century. Following his survey of archaeological projects, Delle turns to reviewing the historiography of slavery in the Northeast and New England, and he discusses the scholarship of Wendy Warren and Christy Clark-Pujara. A third chapter takes up a number of archaeological sites in the North, including another African burial ground in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the provisioning manors of Long Island, and plantations in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In addition to domestic objects like clay pipes and ceramics, Delle draws attention to artifacts associated with conjure and medicine, such as cowrie shells, glass beads, bundles of iron objects, and a stone pestle. Moving to a single case study, Delle presents his research of one plantation, Rose Hill, in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Descendants of the well-known Carter family of Virginia purchased the estate in 1802 and relocated the enslaved families they possessed to the Genesee Country to produce and sell wheat flour for the Baltimore flour trade as food for provisioning captives on Caribbean plantations. Delle and colleagues investigated the remnant buildings at Rose Hill and its environs, including a home that...

United States Reconstruction across the Americas ed. by William A. Link

Reviewed by: United States Reconstruction across the Americas ed. by William A. Link Joseph A. Fry United States Reconstruction across the Americas. Edited by William A. Link. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. ISBN 978-0-8130-5641-8-6. 136 pp., cloth, $34.95. William A. Link, the editor of this initial volume in the Frontiers of American South series provides a lucid and informative introduction. He contends that a proper understanding of US Reconstruction requires an “analysis” that reaches “beyond national bounders” (3). Essays by Rafael Marquese, Don H. Doyle, and Edward B. Rugemer impressively realize this objective. Marquese focuses on the growth and demise of slavery and the labor systems that replaced it in the United States and Brazil. This national juxtaposition is not new, but he argues persuasively that, rather than being distinctly independent and different, developments in the two most important slave economies in the Western Hemisphere were interconnected and influenced one another. Marquese establishes the US–Brazil nexus in several informative ways. Prior to the American Civil War, this connection economically and politically reinforced Brazilian slavery. The consistently proslavery US government provided a reassuring ally for Brazilian slaveholders, and by the 1850s, the United States had become the principal market for coffee, Brazil’s primary slave-produced crop. Following the American war and the abolition of slavery in both the United States and Cuba, [End Page 64] Brazil’s isolated position in the Western Hemisphere contributed to its gradual ending of slavery by 1888. As this process unfolded, owners of Brazil’s coffee plantations continued to observe US developments, where sharecropping by both freed slaves and poor whites maintained and expanded cotton production. In contrast to the relatively decentralized form of management under sharecropping, Brazilian coffee planters developed the colonato system, a free-labor alternative that sustained “centralization of managerial decisions” while employing former slaves and Italian immigrant workers (34). Buttressing his theme of US–Brazil connections, Marquese notes that the burgeoning postwar US market was the primary consumer of both American cotton and Brazilian coffee and that the vast expansion of US grain production displaced the Italian agricultural workers who immigrated to Brazil. While Marquese emphasizes Brazilian observation of US developments, Rugemer focuses on US responses to the October 1865 rebellion of free blacks against government rule in Morant Bay, Jamaica. The rebellion derived from blacks’ systematic depravation following abolition in 1833. The rebels killed 22 people and sacked twenty plantations. British authorities responded by killing 85 and executing another 354. Rugemer lucidly explains the historical context for these explosive racial tensions by demonstrating how Jamaican blacks had received no land, no legal protections, and no political rights when freed in 1833. As the US war ended, black Jamaicans were overwhelmingly poor, illiterate, and unable to vote. Word of this rebellion reached the United States as policymakers debated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the First Reconstruction Act of 1867. Did events in Jamaica portend developments in the American South? Responding to this question, US newspaper editors and public figures utilized the rebellion to buttress their positions. Those who sought to establish and safeguard the rights of black people cited the need to avoid the depravation suffered by freed slaves in Jamaica. Others were more concerned about the threat of black-on-white violence and emphasized the need to restrict black people’s rights and freedom. Both sides cited Morant Bay as a disaster to avoid, and this “intersection” of postemancipation events “in the Atlantic world” convincingly illustrates Rugemer’s contention that it is necessary to look beyond domestic influences and considerations when recounting US Reconstruction (107). Unlike Marquese and Rugemer, who focus on slavery and its aftermath, Doyle employs US foreign relations in the late 1860s as the vehicle for analyzing Reconstruction in global terms. He contends that US foreign policy was primarily defensive, sought to safeguard republicanism in the Western Hemisphere, and was strikingly successful, given the “massive withdrawal of European empires from the Americas” (49). From this perspective, Emperor Napoleon III’s failed attempt to impose a [End Page 65] French-sponsored monarchy in Mexico was the most serious European threat to US ideological and security interests and the...

James W. Garrett and Black-owned Property in Territorial Oregon, 1853–1858

In this Research Note, author Kenneth Hawkins updates his article, “‘A PROPER ATTITUDE OF RESISTANCE’,” published in the Winder 2020 issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly, with an additional archival record belonging to James W. Garrett, a free Black person living in Territorial Oregon.

Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War by Brian Taylor

Reviewed by: Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War by Brian Taylor Le’Trice Donaldson Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War. By Brian Taylor. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 236. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5977-0; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5976-3.) “Why... should black men fight for the United States?”—William H. Newby, a free Black man who migrated to California during the gold rush, posed this question at the Second Annual State Convention of Colored Citizens in 1856 (p. 15). Newby went on to emphatically state that “he would welcome a foreign army if ‘that army provided liberty to [him] and [his] people in bondage’” (p. 15). In Fighting for Citizenship: Black Northerners and the Debate over Military Service in the Civil War, public historian Brian Taylor pivots the narrative away from the foregone conclusion, traditionally argued by historians, that northern African American participation and support for the Union in the Civil War were guaranteed. For Black northerners at the start of the American Civil War, memories of the past few decades stood fresh in their minds. The Militia Act of 1792, which prohibited Black men from serving in militias, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision all culminated in a reluctant and skeptical population of Black northern men and women, unenthused over another “white man’s war” (chap. 2). Taylor’s study demonstrates how “black Americans strategized about how to use military service in the Civil War to fundamentally transform the nation and served with an eye toward using their service to confirm black citizenship” (p. 14). The “politics of service,” as labeled by the author, became the driving force behind the ongoing and strategic public and private debates in Black northern communities (p. 6). During the 1862 advancement of the Confederacy through Kentucky, the Black community of Cincinnati publicly discussed its resentment at being dragooned into fortifying the city’s defenses. One unnamed Black resident stated, “I confess...I am not patriot enough to fight or dig trenches for ‘the Union as it was,’ ‘the Constitution as it is,’ and the negroes as they are” (p. 47). The reluctance expressed by this individual stood in stark contrast to Frederick [End Page 731] Douglass’s “Men of Color to Arms!” poster so often quoted by scholars to illustrate Black northern support of Black military service. Building on the scholarship of Chandra Manning’s Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York, 2007) and Martha Jones’s Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York, 2018), in the first two chapters Taylor methodically dissects the polarizing and troublesome dialogues occurring in Black newspapers, churches, and community events throughout 1861 and 1862. Taylor has thoroughly researched and examined the newspapers, speeches, and writings of Black northern leaders and contemporary historians to craft this original scholarship. He provides a window for the reader to grasp the desperate and frustrating position of a betrayed people strategically forcing and changing the course of a nation to live up to its noble proclamations of freedom, liberty, and justice for all. Brian Taylor’s Fighting for Citizenship brilliantly encapsulates the nuances of how Black northerners turned the service and sacrifices of Black soldiers into gains and growth for the entire Black community. The author astutely observes “the troubling reality that black men had to kill and die in large numbers to win citizenship” (p. 13). The strength of Taylor’s study lies in his balanced analysis of this overlooked debate over Black military service during the Civil War. The fluidity of Taylor’s writing and the importance of the subject matter make this book useful to a wide range of scholars seeking a fresh analysis of the African American experience during the Civil War. Le’Trice Donaldson Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Theorizing Dual Progression: Some Questions for Dan Shen

Theorizing Dual Progression: Some Questions for Dan Shen

Pirates, Bloodhounds, and White Heirs: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Fictions of Haiti

Pirates, Bloodhounds, and White Heirs: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Fictions of Haiti Mark Kelley “It should no longer be possible to write a history of the early American republic without mentioning Haiti, or St. Domingue,” Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and Michael Drexler note in their 2016 collection, The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States (1). Haiti’s revolution (1789–1804) fundamentally challenged the white-supremacist legacy of its US revolutionary counterpart (1775–83). What began in Haiti as a large-scale revolt against French colonial rule concluded with the hemisphere’s first free Black republic.1 In turn, US writers confronted the potential disruption of white hegemony in their own nation and across the hemisphere.2 Just as a Haiti-less US history is impossible, the same could be said of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s literary career. At present, Sedgwick is only sparingly considered part of the subsequent “transatlantic print culture of the Haitian revolution” that Marlene L. Daut recounts in her 2015 field-shaping book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (3).3 Melissa Homestead has introduced the crucial idea that Sedgwick “insistently represented cultural and economic ties between the USA and the Caribbean,” but she stops short of further exploration and, I will show, casts those “ties” in overly neutral terms (“Shape” 192).4 The “ties” Sedgwick highlights include US wealth stolen from Haiti, diasporic culture imported from Haiti, antislavery sentiment powered by Haiti, and, most complicatedly, proslavery sympathies justified as a response to Haiti. Like us, Sedgwick knew that it was impossible to write her history without Haiti. In practice, she presents Haiti as too vital to repress yet too revolutionary to praise. Haiti subsidizes and unsettles Sedgwick’s vision of Jacksonian America. The full scope of Haiti’s revolutionary history, diasporic culture, indissoluble sovereignty, independent economy, and rejection of white hegemony is not to be found in Sedgwick’s fiction. From her perspective, this free Black republic [End Page 1] was primarily a source of American wealth, a shaper of its culture, and a threat to its prevailing white hegemony. Thus, she writes in the discourse of “manifest domesticity,” in Amy Kaplan’s term, wherein America is constituted via real and imagined domination over Haiti.5 This dynamic is strongest in a trio of works published in succession: the canonical Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827), the children’s story “Dogs” (1828), and the pirate novel-of-manners Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times (1830). As I show, the underdeveloped pirate plot in Hope Leslie—in which a Tortuga-bound Chaddock and his piratical crew threaten to kidnap Hope—charges the historical novel’s climax with an unspoken fear: colonial violence could have begotten (or may yet beget) novel systems of enslavement or revolution centered in Haiti. Sedgwick’s removal of the pirate, I conclude, allows her to reject this multivalent Haiti in favor of colonial wealth’s transfer to white New Englanders. In “Dogs,” such heirs confess colonial powers’ denial of Haitian rights. Here, a New England family’s discussion of dogs’ moral training suddenly leads to a précis of bloodhounds’ violence against revolutionary Haitians; in the process, Sedgwick warns that dogged plantation violence or racial revolution may soon pierce US bodies. The solution, she implies, is to promote a more benevolent white hegemony. Sedgwick perfects this process in her subsequent novel. Set in 1820s New York, Clarence portrays a dog-wielding pirate’s threat to ostensibly blameless heiresses of fortunes derived from colonial Saint Domingue and Jamaica. Repeating the pattern established in Hope Leslie and “Dogs,” these white heroines’ rejection of immoral piracy coincides with their acceptance of colonial wealth. In total, Sedgwick implies that white Jacksonian heirs must insulate themselves from post-revolutionary violence while retaining pre-revolutionary spoils. As these readings begin to show, two figures embody Sedgwick’s ambivalent yet self-serving approach to Haiti: pirates and bloodhounds. As numerous scholars confirm, pirates are compelling devices for those seeking to portray national power, its limits, or its alternatives.6 The “bucaniers of Tortuga” in Hope Leslie (334), the Haitian bloodhounds in “Dogs,” and...

A Theatre of a History: Major Themes in Early African-American Theater and their Relations with the History

Although it is not the first literary type that comes to mind related to African-American literature, the drama has become an important form of black self-expression. The black theater, modernized with time and adapted to the popular formats of the era, has achieved rapid development in the after-slavery period. The Harlem Renaissance was especially a booming era in this respect. This genre sometimes appears as a reinterpretation of the classics like Shakespeare's works with a black point of view, but most often it appears as exclusive works, belonging to, and produced for black people. Black Nationalism, mentioned in this case, is a theme frequently used in theatrical works. Besides, subjects such as slavery, which blacks have suffered from for many years; their search for rights due to the unfair practices they have endured; the utopia of a new beginning as free blacks in another country; and the lives of historical personalities that have marked the blacks' struggle for freedom, are also among the themes that the black theater has used most frequently. In this study, the relationship between the history and the theater of blacks in America will be analyzed by exemplifying and discussing major themes used in the early African-American Theatre.

Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. By Tera W. Hunter

<i>Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century</i>. By Tera W. Hunter

Vestiges of Black Internationalism

The siege led by the Continental Army to reclaim Savannah from British forces in the fall of 1779 is remembered as one of the most disastrous battles of the American Revolutionary War. However, greater carnage was circumvented by a legion of (largely) free Black Chasseurs Volontaires recruited from the colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). Their role proved strategically vital, and a monument erected in Savannah’s Franklin Square today pays homage to their contributions to the American project of independence. Indeed, the beguiling mythos of independence suffuses their historic legacy. Yet although their story is remembered in African American histories from the nineteenth century to the present, they are systematically occluded, marginalized, and overlooked by the colonialist archive. This article interrogates the violence of archival erasure and demands interdisciplinary, multimodal, and collaborative modes of recreating and rehabilitating lost African Atlantic histories.

Colonizationism versus Abolitionism in the Antebellum North: The Anti-Slavery Society of Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary (1836) versus the Hanover College Officers, Board of Trustees, and Faculty

In March 1836, nine Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary students, almost certainly including Benjamin Franklin Templeton, a former slave enrolled in the seminary, formed an antislavery society. The society’s Preamble and Constitution set forth abolitionist ideals demanding an immediate emancipation of Southern slaves with rights of citizenship and “without expatriation.” Thus they encountered the ire of Hanover’s Presbyterian trustees—colonizationists who believed instead that free blacks and educated slaves, gradually and voluntarily emancipated by their owners, should leave the United States and relocate to Liberia, where they would experience greater opportunity, equality, and justice than was possible here in the United States and simultaneously exercise a civilizing and Christianizing influence on indigenous West Africans. By separating the races on two different continents with an ocean between them, America’s race problem would be solved. The efforts of the colonizationists failed, in part because of a lack of sufficient resources to transport and resettle three million African Americans. Then, too, few Southern slaveholders were willing to emancipate their slaves and finance those former slaves’ voyages, and most free blacks refused to leave the country of their birth. In Liberia, left largely to their own resources, colonists encountered disease, the enmity of local tribes, the threat of slavers, and difficulties in farming that left these former slaves struggling for existence, even if free blacks who engaged in mercantile trade there fared well. In the United States, the trustees’ conviction that American society was racist beyond reform, together with their refusal to confront the system of slavery in the South in hope of preserving the Union and their refusal to allow even discussion of the subject of slavery on the Hanover campus, left their central question unanswered: Would it ever be possible for people of color and whites to reside together in the United States peaceably and equitably? The trustees’ decision exerted another long-term impact as well. Although today the campus is integrated, Hanover College would not admit an African American student until 1948.

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Our Town, by David Hyatt Crowe

Revolution and Roses: The Voice and Aesthetic of Sarah Mapps Douglass

ABSTRACT Philadelphian Sarah Mapps Douglass has been recognized as a powerful figure in the nineteenth-century fight for African American rights and liberation, yet she is often forgotten for her activist work in the arts. Utilizing both feminist tactics and upper-class traditions, Douglass became a revolutionary figure for Black women’s cultural practice and social justice reform.

Debret, Gilberto Freyre, Cecília Meireles: representaciones del comercio callejero en Brasil y sus influencias orientales y africanas

Street trade has existed in Brazil since the colonial period, practiced by free blacks and slaves. The objective of this study is to show aspects of this trade in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Recife, from the imperial period to the Estado Novo de Vargas government, marking Eastern influences, especially Islamic, introduced by Portuguese slaves and colonizers, until the arrival of New European immigrants in the first decades of the 20th century. It is based on the analysis of extracts and images of works by three authors: Jean-Baptiste Debret, in Viagem Pitoresca e Histórico ao Brasil (1835-1839); Gilberto Freyre, in Casa-grande &amp; Senzala (1933), Sobrados e Mucambos (1936) and Guia prático, histórico e sentimental do Recife (1934); Cecilia Meireles (1941), in the chronicle “Through the Rio Streets”, published in Travel in Brazil magazine, illustrated with photographs by Jean Manzon, which records the insertion of the European immigrant in the street trade of Rio de Janeiro. It is also intended to show the intersection between this trade and the conceptions of traveler and tourist.

O olhar do viajante e do turista em representações do comércio de rua no Brasil por Debret, Gilberto Freyre e Cecília Meireles

Street trade has existed in Brazil since the colonial period, practised by free blacks and slaves. The aim of this study is to show the changes in this trade in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Recife, from the Imperial period to the Estado Novo of the Vargas government, marking Eastern influences, especially Islamic, introduced by slaves and Portuguese slaves and colonisers, until the arrival of New European immigrants in the first decades of the 20th century. The study is based on the analysis of extracts and images of works by three authors: Jean-Baptiste Debret, in Viagem pitoresca e historica ao Brasil (1835-1839); Gilberto Freyre, in Casa-grande & Senzala (1933), Sobrados e mucambos (1936) and Guia pratico, historico e sentimental do Recife (1934); Cecilia Meireles (1941), in the chronicle Pelas ruas do Rio, published in Travel in Brazil magazine, illustrated with photographs by Jean Manzon. It is also intended to show the intersection between this trade and the conceptions of traveller and tourist.

Haiti and the Black Intellectual Tradition, 1829–1934

In September 1829, David Walker published the first edition of his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that became a stirring call to arms for both slaves and free blacks alike. Walker's audience was blacks in the United States and his aim was to foster black unity and education, combat racial stereotypes, and make the case for the abolition of slavery. Like most abolitionists, black and white, Walker hoped that the end of slavery could come about through peaceful means. Unlike most other abolitionists, however, Walker openly called for slaves to violently resist their bondage, stating, “it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” While advocates of pacifism and nonviolence often based their positions on their Christian faith, it was Walker's Christianity which lent support to his calls for revolutionary violence. “Does the Lord condescend to hear their cries and see their tears in consequence of oppression?” he asked. “Will he let the oppressors rest comfortably and happy always? Will he not cause the very children of the oppressors to rise up against them, and oftimes to put them to death?” Walker firmly believed that God would have his vengeance on blacks’ oppressors and that the vehicles for that vengeance might very well be the slaves themselves.

Special Report: America’s First Asylum for African Americans Marks 150th Anniversary

<i>Special Report:</i> America’s First Asylum for African Americans Marks 150th Anniversary

Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire

Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire

Structural Racism in American Psychiatry and APA: Part 1

Structural Racism in American Psychiatry and APA: Part 1

Free Speech v. Free Blacks: Racist policing and calls to harm

ABSTRACT In 2018, mobile phone videos went viral of white people calling police to report Black people for engaging in innocuous conduct. Dubbed “white caller crime” by some commentators, mainstream and social media afforded serious and satiric attention to racist harassment via police calls. In this article, I analyze these police calls as a form of racist expression that operates as a call to harm. I begin by recounting three calls that went viral in consecutive months in 2018. I then theorize how the calls play out white supremacist and colonial logics of race and place, and I explore how viral publicity provides a viable strategy of resistance to racist expression. I close by contending that publicity, and the responses it has inspired, holds more promise for contesting racist police calls than a predictable turn to law and punishment under a hate speech framework.

Kidnapping Reconsidered: Courts' Merger Tests Do Not Remedy the Inequities Which Developed from Kidnapping's Sensationalized and Racialized History

Kidnapping has a troubled history in the law. It was instituted, perpetuated, and expanded almost exclusively after publicized and sensationalized cases where the children of wealthy whites were taken. In the same periods, courts and legislatures largely ignored the cries of minorities, particularly slaves or free blacks, that they too had been kidnapped. In the public hysteria over the relatively few kidnappings of white children, legislatures expanded the offense’s definition to the point that it lost all meaning and became unconstitutionally vague. To remedy this problem, courts created kidnapping merger tests. But these tests have had little consistency or coherency, and troublingly, they have done little to solve the issues of discriminatory enforcement that have plagued kidnapping since its inception. Legislatures should reconsider kidnapping and narrow its definition in order to prevent the arbitrary use of police or prosecutorial discretion. If legislatures refuse to act, then courts should strike down kidnapping statutes as vague and as violations of double jeopardy and equal protection, as well as a cruel and unusual punishment.