Free Black Man Research Articles

John Witherspoon and Slavery: Ideology versus Praxis

This article reassesses the life and legacy of John Knox Witherspoon on the basis of his relationship to slavery. It argues that Witherspoon's ideological commitment to Presbyterianism came into constant tension with the realities of slavery both in his native Scotland and in the burgeoning American colony he eventually called home. Three snapshots in Witherspoon's life encapsulate this tension: his interaction with Jamie Montgomery, an enslaved man whom Witherspoon baptized in Scotland; his contributions to the scheme to train two free African Americans—John Quamine and Bristol Yamma—for their mission to Africa; and his tutoring of John Chavis, a free Black man from Virginia, at the same time he held property in slaves. Most accounts of Witherspoon's life fail to interrogate these snapshots and so fail to grasp a nuanced portrait of the imminent figure. This article parses through his unequal treatment of the African Americans he taught and the African Americans he enslaved to deliver a new reading of Witherspoon. This reading, in turn, maps onto a broader reconsideration of the founding principles of the early United States.

Epidemics of Ordinary Time

Epidemics of Ordinary Time Emily Waples (bio) 1793 It begins when a three-year-old girl, the daughter of a doctor, dies at her family's home in Philadelphia. Within a week, yellow fever infections have been reported throughout the city. "Tis a sickly time now in phila.," the diarist Elizabeth Drinker notes on August 15; "there has been an unusual number of funerals lately here." It begins when the first infected Aedes aegypti mosquito injects its virus-charged saliva into the body of its first susceptible host, stimulating the urban cycle of the disease. It begins with the circum-Atlantic slave trade, with the traffic in human bodies from Africa to North America and the Caribbean, with the Haitian Revolution and the scores of French colonizers who succumb to fever in what is then known as Saint-Domingue. It begins with violence, viral and imperial. Or, as the early republic's preeminent medical authority, Dr. Benjamin Rush, believes, it begins with some rotting coffee that has been left to fester in one of the city's wharves. The miasmatic theory of disease, postulated by Hippocrates around the fourth century BCE, understands sickness as caused by pestilential substances released into the atmosphere from the putrefaction of organic matter. This will remain the predominant explanation of disease causation until the emergence of germ theory at the end of the nineteenth century. Breath infects; air terrifies. As jaundiced and vomit-stained bodies are carted in carriages to the quarantine hospital at Bush Hill, or dropped in Potter's Field for eventual burial, the College of Physicians issues guidance on how to check the progress of the deadly epidemic. Among their eleven recommendations is a directive to "put a stop to the tolling of the bells." The near-constant death knells, the order implies, are inciting an anticipatory frenzy, marking the mortal motions of this "sickly time." Shutting down the sonic index of death's omnipresence will help. It is [End Page 214] about more than mental health: prevailing medical theory holds that the disease can be incited by fear itself. Meanwhile, some 20,000 Philadelphians—including George Washington and his government—flee the infected capital, abandoning their fellow citizens to the city's insalubrious atmospheres. It begins with chills and body aches, a slight fever, fatigue, nausea. In some cases, this is the worst of it; in some cases, it lasts only a few days. Others are not so lucky, experiencing symptoms of escalating severity: high fever, hemorrhage, hepatitis, shock, multisystem organ failure. Two symptoms in particular are unmistakable signifiers of the dreaded disease: the jaundice that gives it its name, and the telltale "black-vomit": an excretion, observers note, that looks peculiarly like coffee grounds. What they are seeing is in fact the dried blood that has accumulated in the stomachs of the sick. Rush's medical philosophy posits that all diseases, whatever their origin, ultimately wreak their havoc in the body by disordering the operation of the circulatory system. Accordingly, he champions venesection as the remedy to almost anything. He opens the veins of his countrymen until the cobblestone streets outside his shop are stained red. Emboldened by a racist scientific theory, he recruits free Black men and women to serve as nurses, declaring that their imagined immunity to the disease affords them a "noble opportunity" to demonstrate their gratitude, their worthiness for citizenship. But of course, they, too, sicken and die, joining the capital's mass graves, and Rush admits—too late—that he'd been "mistaken" on the matter of African immunity. In the end, the disease takes its leave inexplicably, or it seems. But the epidemic quite literally decimates the city. By the end of November, when the weather has cooled and the mosquitoes have died, 5,000 of the capital's 55,000 residents are dead too. But it is not the end. The fever will return, summer after summer, a curse without a cure. In the account he published the following year, Rush would reflect on the way the epidemic had altered his perception of the passage of time: it was, he noted, "uncommonly slow." This sense of deceleration lent him a novel perspective on...

Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions by Kirsten Sword

Wives Not Slaves places marital disputes at the center of the history of patriarchy in the British Atlantic and early United States. Tales of deserting wives and abusive husbands, local court battles, and public accusations—the gendered conflicts of everyday life—show how patriarchy retained its grip and resisted efforts to transform it. The book’s subtitle raises expectations of a broader study and even an interdisciplinary one. Instead, Sword focuses on patriarchal law and legal culture in the context of economic change, racial slavery, revolutionary ideology, and the press. Her detailed analysis historicizes the workings of patriarchy and women’s defiance in ways that feminist theory and other disciplinary perspectives may overlook.Sword examines local legal cases in England and the American colonies that reveal a patchwork of jurisdictions, courts, and decisions addressing domestic disputes. Despite their femme covert status, wives not only had a degree of legal redress in the seventeenth century, but courts were also inclined to take a back seat to kin and neighbors who mediated conflicts. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, published legal commentaries, especially about the precedent set by Manby v. Scott (1663), narrowed wives’ ability to claim consideration under coverture. Invoking “ancient precedents” of male privilege masked legal innovations that deepened husbands’ authority over dependent wives, children, servants, and enslaved people. Legal commentaries thus created essentialized understandings of patriarchy, even as they reshaped it for a modern world.Husbands and wives had another way to address their domestic grievances, the press. They advertised against each other to avoid the legal system, influence public opinion, and reach beyond local communities. Modeled on advertisements for runaway slaves, husbands’ ads addressed deserting wives. They accused women of shirking their duty, announced their refusal to pay their wives’ bills, and offered forgiveness to wives who returned. These ads especially reveal men’s increased vulnerability in a risky credit-based economy, a significant context for understanding patriarchal law. Women, in turn, condemned husbands’ abusive behavior and attempts to control their property. As Sword emphasizes, such was the disruptive “new media” in early America. When legal remedies were unavailing, women articulated their oppression through advertising.“If I am your Wife, I am not your Slave,” declared Eunice Davis in a 1762 advertisement (3). Such statements opened possibilities for changing the balance of gendered power. They reflect the revolutionary rhetoric of the eighteenth century, as well as the culture of sensibility, which condemned male violence and women’s powerlessness, urging marital love and companionship. Some women writers, however, offered a pointed call for greater female autonomy, joining sentimental fiction to the revolutionary ideology of independence. Although largely the purview of elite women, these sentiments sometimes appeared in the language of ordinary women’s advertised complaints. Their claims made little headway, however, except to move men toward enlightened paternalism. “Revolutionary legal culture gave husbands and masters expansive rights,” Sword explains. “The culture of sensibility pushed them to exercise them quietly” (284).Nineteenth-century feminists saw the emancipation of wives and slaves as parallel paths to modernity, but Sword shows how much the interests of white wives and enslaved people were at odds as racial slavery became entrenched in the early United States. Affluent white women claimed property rights in the enslaved as they resisted despotic husbands. Free Black men sued for their wives’ freedom, arguing that their own patriarchal authority took precedence over slaveholders’ rights. Ironically, slave states and antislavery activists both had their reasons for opposing divorce.What is most striking in Sword’s analysis, indeed dispiriting, is how much the stories of male abuse and marital conflict repeat themselves over time, even as women found new ways to give voice to their discontent. Progress narratives and Enlightenment assumptions notwithstanding, patriarchy has been a shape-shifter, adapting to legal, political, and economic challenges yet continuing to maintain masculine authority. This excellent, fine-grained study connects legal regimes to patriarchy’s quotidian preservation.

“The Walls Have Fallen”

In 2021, June 19 (Juneteenth) became a federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of enslaved people of African descent in the United States. Prior to Juneteenth gaining official status, January 1 (Emancipation Day) was the de facto national holiday on which African Americans celebrated the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery. From 1863 until the late twentieth century, African Americans throughout the nation celebrated what the black-owned journal The Elevator called “the greatest event in the history of the Colored people of America.” While several scholarly works focus on Emancipation Day celebrations throughout the United States, these studies have largely ignored how black westerners celebrated what was essentially “independence day” for African Americans. This essay examines Emancipation Day celebrations in the African American communities of San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. Emancipation Day celebrations illustrate how black Californians in the state’s largest African American communities used ritualized celebration and public dialogue to construct their new civic identities as free black men and women. Emancipation Day celebrations provided black Californians opportunities to testify to their aspirations as members of the American polity, and to their vision of themselves as upholders of liberty and beacons of freedom in post–Civil War America. Black Californians forthrightly used public commemorations of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to illustrate black community consciousness through the spirit of public festivals and civic celebrations, otherwise known as “public festive culture.” These public rituals did more than celebrate liberty: they legitimated black freedom and citizenship, honored the memory of Abraham Lincoln as God’s servant, and elaborated a political ethos powerful enough to unify African Americans as members of the American polity.

Francis Williams and the Question of Translation

Born in Jamaica in 1702, Francis Williams (d. 1770) came from one of the only free black families of means in Jamaica. He was a free black man of learning and education. This note uncovers details about his often-misunderstood background and will focus upon the one poem that has been officially attributed to Williams, ‘Ode to George Haldane’—a Latin panegyric, (mis) translated by Edward Long. The second translation studied here is by William Gardner, a translation that, while not as flagrantly disrespectful of the original verse as Long’s, still takes various liberties with Williams’s original language. Long’s translation of Williams’s poem has stood unquestioned for over three hundred years, but this note argues that Long’s translation—and Gardner’s to a lesser extent—is misinformed, based upon systematic misinterpretation, and ultimately damaging to Williams’s legacy.1 As its title suggests, ‘Ode to George Haldane’ is addressed to Haldane who had been elected to...

Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay

In this foundational work of the burgeoning scholarship on colonial Paraguay, Shawn Austin focuses on the Guaraní outside the Jesuit missions, those living in reducciones in Asunción and in areas between the missions. He is the first historian to systematically use judicial files, which show female litigants as well as Africans and their descendants, to examine how the Guaraní interacted with the Spanish and Africans in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Paraguay. Austin successfully demonstrates that encomienda, understood by the Spaniards and the Guaraní through cuñadazgo or tovajá, became the mode of colonial governance. The term tovajá initially named the exchange of women by the Guaraní for gifts given by the Spaniards, but increasingly this term shaped contexts central for expanding colonialism: for the encomienda system subjecting tributaries and also for trade. The marriage of Spanish men into the kinship of Guaraní caciques became central to securing Indigenous tributaries for the Spaniards, the core of the encomienda. Spaniards seemingly understood the implications of the term tovajá as binding them politically and economically with Guaraní leaders (p. 33). From the Spanish sources it is clear, also, that these women were not property but part of the conquistador household as inheritors. Conquistadores, and sometimes priests as well, also arranged marriages for their mestizo children in order to secure their future. The expectations of reciprocity that tovajá ties carried for the Guaraní also influenced the development of colonialism and, more broadly, the entire Paraguayan colonial society.While based on reciprocity, the tovajá system was unequally beneficial for the Spaniards, as a colonial configuration based on Guaraní cultural elements that facilitated access to labor and provisions. It was a system of reciprocity that the Spaniards institutionalized to promote colonial exploitation through encomiendas, which made Indigenous tovajás tributaries of labor.The Spaniards' ability to establish tovajá ties with Guaraní groups also allowed them to conduct raids (rancheadas) and war with other Indigenous people. Even under open violence tovajá relationships emerged. Sometimes Guaraní groups declined to participate in peaceful exchanges. In these cases, Spaniards forced their way through raids capturing women and provisions. These women were integrated into Spanish households through tovajá ties as long as the integrity of their Guaraní group persisted, and this created a sense of reciprocity under violence (p. 41). The terms of exchange placed women in the household of conquistadores and other Spanish men (which liberated Spaniards from manual labor and also provided them food), and the Spaniards retributed with iron tools like cuñas (axes). The similarity of the Guaraní word for “woman,” kuña, with the Spanish terms cuña and cuñado was noticed by the Spanish and the Guaraní as belonging to a vocabulary making sense of an economy of gift giving.Austin provides a chapter examining Indigenous resistance against the colonial regime as an antidote to misconceptions of kinship as a peaceful way of belonging to the Spanish empire in Paraguay. Somewhat naturally, this leads to studying the creation of Guaraní militias defending Spanish rule, which closes the second section of the book. The Guaraní developed a formidable militia system that influenced the larger politics of the region, for instance, during the many Spanish sieges of Portuguese Colonia del Sacramento. Austin also examines the city of Asunción, which was, in a way, the largest reducción, an Indigenous space, and the core of Spanish colonialism in Paraguay. Given the proliferation of small encomiendas in Asunción, the city became a rural-urban settlement with a high concentration of encomendero and tributary populations.The author also examines African slavery, and particularly free Black men and women in the context of cuñadazgo. A relatively large number of Africans lived in Paraguay since the conquest and as an extension of the slave trade to Buenos Aires after 1580. Free Black men's obligations to encomenderos sometimes were shaped by the ties of cuñadazgo, as seen in a Mercedarian convent's “encomienda of blacks” (p. 261). While the Mercedarians had freed these Africans and Afro-descendants from slavery, they kept them as tributaries through the ties of encomienda. In other instances, free Black men and women became tributaries of encomienda because of their marriages with Guaraní tributaries. In all these cases, free Black men and women were tied to obligations to Spaniards understood as tributaries and thus with meanings of tovajá ties. The tax on free men and women of African ancestry survived over the centuries in Paraguay due to its connections with Indigenous personal service, given that this was paid in labor. This tax was hardly applicable in other parts of the Río de la Plata, which may explain also why so many pardos from Paraguay are found in the eighteenth-century sources in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.This is a great read for understanding the reworking of Indigenous culture into the making of all aspects of a colonial society in the borderlands of Latin America.

Toward a Black Ecomusicology, 1853? Listening to Enslavement with Solomon Northup

In his 1853 autobiographical narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, violinist Solomon Northup recounts his own experience of being abducted and sold into slavery for twelve years. Born as a free Black man with significant musical experience prior to enslavement, Northup offers considerable detail about his sonic (and musical) experiences, frequently situating them in a broader environmental context of slave plantations, land- and riverscapes of the American South, and their remediations in print/musical notation. In asserting a salient connection between environment, race, and sound, Northup's memoir points to possible limitations in conceptualizations of the environment that have predominated in recent ecomusicology but have tended to efface the issues of race. I sketch here a prehistory of ecomusicology that grapples directly with the sonic legacies of transatlantic slavery, underscoring how landscape might be understood not as a space of solitude or contemplation, but rather of economic exploitation and violence. Like other areas in musicology, ecomusicology has been hindered by its reliance on a “white racial frame” that tends to presume certain kinds of subjectivity and possible relationships with the environment. When considered from this perspective, Northup's account offers an important, if harrowing, reminder of the complex entanglements of environment, race, sound, economy, and violence.

La Confederación Argentina y sus subalternos: Integración estatal, política y derechos en el Buenos Aires posindependiente (1820–1860)

This book connects subaltern studies, Indigenous history, the history of the African diaspora, and gender studies by comprehensively examining the relationship of the government of the province of Buenos Aires led by Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829–52) with various subaltern groups. Ricardo Salvatore asserts that Rosas retained power and consistent popular support by controlling the territory through war, disseminating propaganda (via print culture and public celebrations) that increased loyalism to the Federalist cause and demonized the Unitarian resistance, and, finally, preserving order in the countryside. This peace was important because agricultural exports provided funds essential for Buenos Aires province, and the larger Argentine Confederation, to battle the Unitarians and foreign enemies.Salvatore shows the increasing influence and burdensomeness of this war-driven state in the lives of individuals who experienced intermittent civil and international war. Poor countrymen, Indigenous groups, and Afro-porteño men were essential to deploying the Buenos Aires militias across the Argentine Confederation. Rosas mobilized a system of values common to different social groups; countrymen paisanos, Indigenous groups, the urban Black population, and large sectors of women supported Rosas and Federalism.The book opens with a historiographical examination of subaltern studies and Latin American history and culture. Each chapter examines how sources were produced in order to determine how Rosas's government differently recorded these subaltern groups depending on political interests. A key agent producing these records was the new countryside bureaucracy, jueces de paz, who maintained social order even under the continuous threat of war. The book refreshingly examines women's role in popular politics given the increasingly political role of women in estancias and in securing food from authorities during wartime. Federalist Rosismo put women in a new position in public space, though in limited and episodic ways. Salvatore also challenges the definitions of subalternity by considering Unitarian rural proprietors as subalterns, even though they were generally wealthy and well educated, because the state persecuted them and put them in a position of subalternity. He shows this in his analysis of rural constitutionalism and Hilario Lagos's 1852–53 rebellion. Sources and their examination are richer for countrymen and Indigenous groups—for instance, the nuanced analysis of how the soldier-peasant was both oppositional to the state and loyal to the politics of Federalism—but less substantial for Afro-descendants (whose support the regime considered complete) or women (who were not seen as political agents).While this is the most comprehensive examination so far of the Black population's political engagement with the Rosas government, some aspects are controversial. Salvatore reads the pro-Rosas newspapers' depictions of Black loyalty to deconstruct the voice intended to represent the Black population. This reviewer finds problematic the assertion that the bozal poetry appearing in 1830s Buenos Aires popular newspapers represented the Afro-descendants' aspirations and ways of feelings (p. 284). Rosas did not pass new legislation against slavery but continued with the 1813 legislation ending the slave trade and instituting the new legal status of libertos. Indeed, Rosas extended libertos' service through militarization, and thus they were coerced to serve. Rosas's measures of 1833 and 1839 against the slave trade were meaningless, as there was no ongoing large-scale slave trade to Buenos Aires in the 1830s. Salvatore correctly identifies that continuous Black militarization loosened slavery's bonds in the 1830s, but this was gendered, with coercion and slavery under other names (e.g., patronato) applied to women and children. As Rosas did very little regarding freedom, perhaps we should look more carefully at the politics of equality—for instance, at the right to vote for free Black men and access to education.Some typical postabolition measures occurred in Buenos Aires while slavery still existed. For instance, in the early years of Rosas's rule, the province's proprietors requested a “census of servants,” a register of enslaved men and women who hired themselves out. This police intervention in domestic labor relationships is telling of a certain “rebellion of servants” taking place amid political turbulence (1828–30) and the lack of social deference that increased elites' anxieties (p. 87).The book successfully identifies the theme of the “threatened republic” as the unifying feature of Rosismo Federalism, which solidified relationships between Rosismo and different subaltern groups with their own interests and led to the system's survival (p. 290). Salvatore argues that Argentina under Rosas was a fragmented and unfinished republic, based on these somewhat corporate alliances between widely different groups.

A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship

A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship

Tough, Rugged, and Evolving Masculinity: Harry Compton, an Enslaved and Free Black Man in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey

This article explores the little known yet intriguing life of Harry Compton (c. 1743–c. 1814), who first comes to our attention in the 1883 narrative of the life of his famed granddaughter, Silvia Dubois. An enslaved person turned independent businessman, Compton constructed a complex and evolving concept of masculinity in the face of oppression, encouraging us to understand black masculinity in slavery and freedom as a life-long pursuit of self-empowerment and personal reinvention. His story, which occurred mostly in rural New Jersey, adds nuance to scholars’ understanding of early black masculinity as a public performance that showcased one’s power and authority, or self-worth, while also providing an important example of black masculinity as a developing process. In telling Compton’s story, the article advances a number of narrative threads pertaining to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New Jersey, including slavery, gender, culture and economy, and the law. An analysis of Compton allows the reader to learn a great deal about the world in which he lived and, ultimately, overcame through his dynamic masculinity performed in various public settings.

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

From Property to Education: Public Schooling, Race, and the Transformation of Suffrage in the Early National North

This essay argues that education became an important cultural arbiter of voting rights in the early national North. It first shows how, in constitutional conventions, reformers marshaled the existence of expanded access to public education to justify eliminating property qualifications for the suffrage for white men. Many of these same conventions also disfranchised free Black men. Though racism and partisan politics motivated these decisions, convention delegates often justified them on grounds of education. They claimed that Black men were not educated enough to entrust with the vote. At the same time, many white communities curtailed Black access to education. Constitutional convention proceedings influenced Black activist to increase their emphasis on education—which dated back to the revolutionary era—to claim, reclaim, and maintain voting rights. By the Civil War, the results of this discourse were apparent: In Northern states, where education was legally segregated and unequal, most Black men could not vote. Where Black children had relatively equal education, Black men had the suffrage. Literacy and education tests were still rare. But the Northern discourse that connected schooling and suffrage had transformed education into a basis for voting rights, much like property had been before it.

UMA DE SUAS MAIS BEM FECUNDAS ESPERANÇAS: A TRAJETÓRIA DE MANOEL PEDRO CARDOSO VIEIRA

Manoel Pedro Cardoso Vieira (1848-1880) was a free black man and a member of the 19th century elites with a career and training in the field of law, he was also a teacher, journalist, poet and politician. As general deputy for the province of Paraíba do Norte, he gave speeches in 1879 regarding latent themes in 19th century society such as drought in the North and Chinese immigration. After his death, his name experienced everyday forgetfulness, but he won the honors of memorization through the chair of immortal as patron of chair number 10 at the Paraibana Academy of Letters and the naming of a street in the capital of Paraiba in his honor. Studies about black subjects who managed to become members of the elites in the midst of slavery contribute to complex the analyzes regarding the black experience in the history of Brazil, giving prominence to those subjects that surpassed the norm.

William Johnson's Hypothesis: A Free Black Man and the Problem of Legal Knowledge in the Antebellum United States South

This essay uses the diary of free black barber and Natchez, Mississippi, businessman William T. Johnson as a means to explore the extent to which one black man in the antebellum U.S. South knew the law; how he came to know it; and what role he saw it play in his life and community. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to black Americans' engagement with the legal system in the pre-Civil War U.S. South and have undermined the notion that black people were legal outsiders. In particular, they have shown that African Americans in the slave South were legal actors in their own right and were legally savvy. Yet what does it mean when scholars say that free blacks and slaves knew how to use the law? This essay uses Johnson's diary to demystify the phrase “to know the law” and shows that we speak of “knowing the law,” we speak of a remarkably complex and uneven phenomenon, one best mapped on a case-to-case basis. Understanding what it meant “to know the law” sometimes requires examining an individual's personal theory or hypothesis of what law does for them.

Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life by Albert Louis Zambone

Reviewed by: Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life by Albert Louis Zambone Vaughn Scribner Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life. By Albert Louis Zambone. (Yardley, Pa.: Westholme Publishing, 2018. Pp. xx, 376. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-59416-315-9.) In Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, Albert Louis Zambone takes a fast-moving, narrative-driven approach to Daniel Morgan, an often overlooked [End Page 893] Revolutionary Virginian “of humble origins who wished to be recognized as a gentleman” (p. xv). In Zambone’s telling, Morgan’s life “amounts to an outline for how to get ahead in colonial America” (p. xvi). Morgan’s life was indeed an “outline” for white men’s success in an America defined by unfreedoms and inequality: he killed and displaced Native Americans for his extensive land-holdings in the Ohio Valley region; exploited the labor and firepower of African Americans in his bid for military prowess and genteel status; and continuously negotiated mercurial lines of hierarchy, gender, and honor during his scrabble to the top of Virginia’s powerful gentry. Curiously, however, Zambone pays little attention to the diversity of the American experience, and he does not engage with the equally diverse historiographical discussions surrounding Revolutionary America’s various peoples. African Americans receive sparse consideration in the story of a man who prospered in a region that relied on enslaved people for its economic success. Zambone mentions Morgan’s “agricultural wealth” as well as the sixteen enslaved black people in Morgan’s will, but the author misses several opportunities to dive into the contradictions between slavery and freedom with which Morgan—a man so dedicated to defending “honor as well as liberty itself”—must have grappled (pp. 14, 235). For instance, the thousands of African Americans who served with Morgan in the American Revolution go unmentioned, while Morgan’s decision to take two free black men as his permanent slaves after the victory at Cowpens, South Carolina, is noted without further analysis. Native Americans, furthermore, serve as elusive, violent characters. In the description of Morgan’s experiences in the French and Indian War, Natives are only present insomuch as they might cause the Virginia ranger “to be killed, wounded, or scalped” (p. 31). They disappear during the American Revolution, only to reemerge as the final obstacle to America’s “settlement of the Ohio valley . . . [and] all of Washington’s hopes for the future” of the region (p. 281). Never mind that Native warriors like Little Turtle and Blue Jacket had spent the last fifty years warding off British, French, and now American invaders—when the Ohio Valley tribes defended their land from General Arthur St. Clair’s forces in 1791, “[t]he fighting was savage” as one thousand Americans were caught in a “killing zone” just after they “had stacked their guns and lined up to get their morning meal” (p. 280). Zambone explains how the Native Americans executed all who were left behind (including an old friend of poor Morgan), capping off the description of St. Clair’s defeat with President George Washington’s rage-filled exclamations of his army being “‘hacked, butchered, tomahawked, by a surprise’” (p. 281). Nevertheless, Zambone provides a riveting account of Daniel Morgan’s raucous exploits. Chapters that delve into the minutiae of battles will delight fans of military history (his chapter on Morgan’s defeat at the siege of Quebec is quite well written). Yet, in tackling “the history of Morgan’s place and his era, particularly as it influenced him and others around him,” Zambone’s work leaves unanswered questions, especially regarding nonwhite actors, women (Morgan’s wife and daughters receive only brief mention), and deeper historiographical developments (p. xix). Morgan—apt to self-aggrandize with false claims such as “Old Morgan was never beaten!”—would have probably [End Page 894] preferred to ignore more unflattering investigations (p. 107). But this was necessarily Morgan: a man whom George Washington described in 1792 as “No head. Health gone. Speculator” (p. 282). Vaughn Scribner University of Central Arkansas Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South by Kimberly M. Welch

Reviewed by: Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South by Kimberly M. Welch W. Caleb McDaniel (bio) Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South. By Kimberly M. Welch. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 306. Cloth, $39.95.) Kimberly M. Welch ends Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South with the story of how it began, with digging through rotting documents stored loosely in boxes or garbage bags and dusted with the droppings of various pests. The book is based on Welch’s study of over one thousand civil lawsuits filed by black litigants between 1800 and 1860 in the Natchez district, defined here as Adams and Concordia Counties in Mississippi and Iberville and Point Coupee Parishes in Louisiana. To find those lawsuits, she traveled not only to established archives, but also to [End Page 464] courthouses and storage sheds where she found crumbling nineteenth-century legal records stashed and still folded in three, largely forgotten even by the clerks who possessed them. What Welch found in those previously unexplored records is a story that, she argues, historians have also forgotten: in the antebellum South, black litigants frequently entered courtrooms to pursue damages, to recover money they had loaned to white defendants, to enforce contracts, to petition for divorce or family recognition, to report kidnappings, and to sue for freedom. Many black litigants succeeded by appealing both to their local reputations and to their rights as property holders. Welch uses these findings to argue that relations between white and black residents in the Natchez district were more complex than a simple case of total domination, on the one hand, and total subordination, on the other. She challenges Eugene Genovese’s view of antebellum southern courts as “instruments of white hegemony” (13) and joins more recent legal historians, including Ariela Gross and Laura Edwards, in arguing that the courts were never fully controlled by any one group. For Welch, law ultimately “reflects the messiness and the contradictions of local communities and lived experience” (13). To be sure, while hundreds of black litigants succeeded in Natchez district courts, those same courts protected slaveholders’ property rights and ordered auctions at which people were sold. But courts sometimes became an “arena of possibility” in which black litigants could claim rights, enforce those claims even against white defendants, and somewhat improve their living conditions (166). In these “fleeting, hard-won moments of recognition,” black litigants turned inconsistencies and tensions within the southern legal system to their momentary advantage (59). Instead of focusing on what white southerners would allow, Welch focuses on what black litigants actually said and did to advocate for their interests. This book belongs to a growing body of scholarship on black litigiousness in the American South, both before and after the Civil War. Like Anne Twitty’s Before Dred Scott: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787–1857 (2016) and Kelly Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (2017), which examines approximately three hundred freedom suits in antebellum St. Louis, Welch’s work demonstrates the importance of looking at local courts for evidence of how the law worked in slave states. (Welch’s database includes roughly 128 freedom suits, about half of which were successful, but the bulk of the suits she surveyed involved free black litigants.) In Natchez, as in St. Louis, law was a part of daily life, and knowledge about the law was widespread [End Page 465] among black southerners, free and enslaved. Welch even found at least two cases of free black men appearing as attorneys of record before courts, despite being unable to sign their own names. “While many people of African descent in the slave South could not and did not go to court,” she writes, “the legal activity of people of color—their claims-making and self-advocacy—had a long and robust history . . . that did not begin with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and the extension of formal rights” (192). Indeed, together with Martha Jones’s Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018) on free black litigiousness in antebellum Baltimore...

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones

Reviewed by: Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones Richard D. Brown (bio) Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America. By Martha S. Jones. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii, 248. Paper, $27.99.) Birthright Citizens is an important, path-breaking study that brings readers deep into the subject explored in Henry Louis Gates Jr., et al., The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship (New York, 2012). Martha S. Jones's eight concise, gracefully written chapters reveal the complexities of citizenship among free blacks, from the 1790s through adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Although Baltimore and Maryland supply her primary focus, the reach of her study includes the entire United States. Jones takes William Yates's little-known Rights of Colored Men to Suffrage, Citizenship, and Trial by Jury (Philadelphia, 1838) as her point of departure. Yates, a white New York abolitionist, supplied evidence supporting the citizenship of free people of color. Jones, however, reaches beneath "high court opinions and legislative edicts" to probe real life experience so as to reveal "the ideas of former slaves and their descendants" (9). Consequently, Jones demonstrates the ways free blacks asserted and exercised rights commonly ascribed to citizens. The city and state practices Jones investigates possess more than local significance. After all, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the majority Dred Scott opinion, played a prominent role in Baltimore as well as national affairs. If the right to vote was the measure, Jones explains that free blacks were citizens in 1800. However, Maryland legislators erased that right in 1801, denying black suffrage by law. Nationwide, this policy would be imitated and challenged in the first half of the nineteenth century. This dynamic of contestation—the assertion and restriction of rights—is a powerful theme of Birthright Citizens. Jones shows readers a multitude of anomalous cases, as growing numbers of free black men asserted rights to property and freedom of movement. The debate over Missouri's admission to the union brought black citizenship to the forefront of national debate in 1820–21 because Missouri leaders proposed barring free blacks from entering the state—a common slave-state policy. Jones explains how free blacks in Maryland responded. Prompted by white Marylanders' movement to colonize them, people of color in Baltimore focused on citizenship. Since the U.S. [End Page 575] Attorney General, Baltimore's William Wirt, argued publicly in 1821 that the Constitution automatically made every state citizen a U.S. citizen, free blacks turned to him. Yet when they pressed him to defend their citizenship, Jones reports, Wirt declined. Moreover, Octavius Taney, brother of the future Chief Justice, advocated removal of all free blacks from not only Maryland but the entire United States. Maryland's legislature sought to push free people of color out of state. Yet efforts to deny black citizenship encountered obstacles. Black sailors in the U.S. Navy possessed rights and testified against whites in courts martial. In Baltimore courts, blacks defended their property and could even win an assault case against a white. By engaging in legal procedures and seeking court recognition, free people of color asserted themselves as rights holders. Moreover, as they built and incorporated churches, their claims to citizenship achieved a kind of reality. Jones explains, however, that often the exercise of black rights was contingent on white sponsorship. A Baltimore person of color capable of enlisting a prominent white patron could claim—and enforce—rights that no black outsider could. To leave and re-enter Maryland persons of color required certificates, and Jones's examination of the records shows that a white gentleman's endorsement was necessary. Though free blacks asserted their birthright citizenship, in Maryland that citizenship was no better than second class. Jones's careful exploration of "Courthouse Claims" (in Chapter 7) shows how the non-racial aspects of Baltimore's legal procedures commonly recognized the rights of free blacks. Though Maryland law forbade the practice, blacks testified against whites. Insolvency statutes made no racial distinctions, though officials might note them. The Orphan's Court adjudicated the contracts of apprentices and admitted the testimony of black children...

Patenting an Invention as a Free Black Man in the Nineteenth Century

With recent patent law decisions today still citing from Justice Taney’s patent opinions from the nineteenth century, it is imperative that the historical context with which these opinions were written is understood. This Comment will address each aspect to patent inventorship laid out above. First, this Comment will discuss the evolution of property and patent rights as it was later used against the abolition movement of the nineteenth century. Second, this Comment will describe: the importance of the inventions of free black men, and the knowledge and strength that Henry E. Baker’s significant record keeping provided for the black community. Finally, this article will highlight the importance of understanding the complex historical context with which the patent laws of the United States developed because the Supreme Court continues to cite patent jurisprudence from the antebellum period without context of the intimate oppression to inventors’ property and patent rights.

‘Creating insurrections in the heart of our country:’ fear of the British West India Regiments in the Southern US Press, 1839–1860

ABSTRACTIn the decades leading to the Civil War, the United States and Great Britain faced a number of diplomatic crises, during which southern politicians often became alarmed at the prospect of British soldiers invading the southern coastline. The perceived threat was part of a wider southern paranoia over Britain’s role in what was seen as a conspiracy to demolish the southern American system of slavery for Britain’s ultimate economic gain. The alarm over an imagined British invasion was exacerbated by the fact that the anticipated invaders were free black men, the West India Regiments, stationed in the British West Indies. The tone of this paranoia was shaped by the memory of black participation in the War of 1812 and the fear that slaves would flee to British lines in any future conflict. An analysis of the discourse about these men in the southern press tells us much about the fears of southern slaveholders with regard to the trustworthiness of their own slaves and the ever-present threat of slave rebellion. Ultimately, the fears expressed about a disciplined black army led by an abolitionist imperial power reveal the true nature of southern anxiety over the stability of the South’s own form of white supremacy.

"Slavery, Race, and Freedom on the Spanish Anglo Borderlands"

"Slavery, Race, and Freedom on the Spanish Anglo Borderlands" Christian PinneniD On a cool, crisp fall day, the free black man James appeared in front of the Spanish governor of Natchez during court day in 1781. The settlement was an outpost built on—and below—bluffs that oversaw the mighty waters of the Mississippi river dissected by muddy roads following a haphazard pattern. It was home to many other African men and women, the overwhelming majority of whom were slaves. James, however, had recently been freed and now sought to prove to everyone in town that indeed he deserved to be treated as a free man. To do so, James had to demand from the governor that two white men pay the debt owed to him. There are many things we do not know of the encounter. How did James address the governor? After all, the man was an official of the Spanish empire that had only recently brought the English settlers of Natchez into its fold during the American Revolution, and the language of the court was Spanish, not the English James likely spoke. How did the Spanish governor receive James? Did he accept his case as any other, or did he hesitate in light of the racial identity of the other petitioners and claimants that day, assuredly all white? Did the governor understand the importance of the case for the next decade and a half of Spanish stewardship in Natchez, or did he simply follow the letter of the law? Whatever the case, James, a former slave, received justice. The two white men, Clement Dyson and John Staybraker, were ordered to pay their debt.1 With this decision, the governor of Natchez had brought the full leverage of Spanish law to an Anglo-American white population and their black slaves, and this would have tremendous consequences for the following decade. James's actions might not appear revolutionary in the Age of Revolutions that had recently swept up the remote district in its wake, but in many ways they can be read as such. James, a black man who had no rights under the previous government, had asserted his rights under Spanish law as he approached the Spanish governor with his case. For the first time in the eight-decade-old European history of the District—which had previously been held by France (until 1763) and then Great Britain—whiteness no longer appeared as the exclusive marker of citizenship or defining aspect of freedom and liberty in the burgeoning plantation society. This step of agency, self-preservation, and justice undertaken by James, presents an important marker in the historical record of Natchez. By extension, James' [End Page 551] and other people of color's stories that claimed these rights need to be unearthed to complete our picture of race relations at the margins of the American Republic to aid our understanding of slavery and race in the emerging United States. The Natchez District, the outpost of three empires in the eighteenth-century Gulf South, was not a topic in any of the essays chosen for Richmond Brown's Coastal Encounters, the most useful collection of essays on the borderlands in the colonial South to date. In the words of Brown, Natchez, and the entire region, is "a significant but heretofore relatively neglected subject."2 Unfortunately, not much has changed over the last decade. This article draws on the intellectual approaches to southern borderlands in Brown's attempt to chip away at the blank spots of the region's history and to emphasize the importance that borderland studies play in understanding early American history in general, and the history of race and slavery in particular. Outside of the traditional focal points for race and slavery studies of colonies like Virginia and South Carolina, historians are able to test the conclusions drawn by scholars of the aforementioned areas. Usually, the borderlands complicate the genesis story of slavery in the United States, and thereby adds to our understanding of the role that black men and women played in the development of the American Republic. Most recently, Kathleen DuVal, in her acclaimed Independence Lost, argues that the Gulf Coast "sheds new light...