Free Black Women Research Articles

African Freedom Suits and Portuguese Vassal Status: Legal Mechanisms for Fighting Enslavement in Benguela, Angola, 1800–1830

This article focuses on the vulnerability of free blacks in Benguela, in West Central Africa, during the first decades of the nineteenth century at the height of slave exports. After the British abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, slavers moved south of the Equator leading to the pressure for more captives and the expansion of violence around Benguela. Focusing on the case of a free black woman, Dona Leonor de Carvalho Fonseca, this study discusses how she was captured, enslaved, transported to the coast, and sold. However she did not remain in captivity for a long time, since she was able to claim the principle of ‘original freedom.’ A legal mechanism created by the vassalage treaty, the principal of original freedom differentiated the local population between vassals and non vassal, Christians and non-Christians. The case of Dona Leonor illustrates how a free black could be subject to arbitrary capture, but also could claim original freedom and hence be protected from enslavement. Like her, others were able to bring freedom cases to the attention of Portuguese authorities and dispute their enslavement. These cases allow us to explore how, where, and why people were captured. It also shows the importance of vassalage treaties in defining who could or not be enslaved. By the early nineteenth century, Portuguese legislation regulated legal and illegal enslavement opening the space for captives to challenge their status. The freedom suits stress the vulnerability of the population living around the Portuguese settlements, and show how the pressures of the international slave market spread instability, even among those who were supposed to be protected by colonial law.

A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (review)

A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in Antebellum City. By Erica Armstrong Dunbar. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2008. Pp. 212. Cloth, $55.00)Reviewed by Rita ReynoldsThe history of African American women has evolved over past 25 years at a relatively slow pace when compared with African American history in general. Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in Plantation South, published in 1985 (New York), was one of first books to consider African American slave women as scholarly subjects in their own right. Jean Yellin Fagan's efforts to prove Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl was fact and not abolitionist fiction validated Jacobs's work as historical document. Jacqueline Jones's Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and Family from Slavery to Present (New York, 2009) did much to unravel dynamics of race, class, and gender for laboring black women in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In like manner Catherine Clinton reevaluated complexities of life for domestic southern slave women and for wealthy white women whose seemingly neverending needs they tended to in antebellum South.Erica Armstrong Dunbar explores how African American women in Philadelphia experienced transformation from slaves to free women of color beginning in colonial period to Civil War. Dunbar builds on solid historical scholarship on Philadelphia's free people of color by Julie Winch and Gary Nash, to name just two. But what makes this work different is its focus on what Dunbar calls regular slave and free black women of period (2).Dunbar's main argument is that, as freedom came in degrees to slave women who were last to truly experience benefits of freedom, 19th century Philadelphia served as a rehearsal for emancipation in post-Civil War era across nation (3). By using black women's friendship albums, church records, labor contracts, and personal correspondences, Dunbar is able to tell story of both wealthy literate and impoverished illiterate black women in a logical, well-documented, and convincingly argued manner.Dunbar's relatively short volume does a great deal to reconstruct gendered world in which antebellum urban black women struggled. She begins with economic and political importance of slavery in colonial Pennsylvania and argues that while Pennsylvania was considered the best poor man's country, Quakers, regardless of their religious beliefs, relied on slave labor. When Peculiar Institution came to an end during early national period Africans and African Americans moved toward a new kind of unfree labor - indentured servitude. Black women suffered greatest hardship because those born before March 1, 1780, would remain enslaved for life, and their children born after that date would remain in bondage for not more than 28 years. …

Reconstructing the Life of a Colored Woman: The Pocket Diaries of Emilie F. Davis

On January 1, 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in Confederate states under federal control, went into effect, Emlie F. Davis, a twenty-one-year-old freeborn black woman, sat in her room in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, pulled out her pocket diary, and proceeded to write about her feelings and activities. From January 1, 1863, to December 31, 1865, Davis recorded her private thoughts, hopes, concerns, and fears, as well as gossip, news, and information about local and national events in three leather-bound pocket diaries, which are currently housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Through her simple act of recording her daily experiences, Davis has left us with a much-needed lens through which to glimpse the everyday experiences of a free black woman in Philadelphia during the Civil War.

The sexual abuse of black men under American slavery.

I n 1787 a n e n s l av e d m a n i n Maryland raped a free black woman. The story comes to us from the female victim in the incident, elizabeth Amwood. One white man, William holland, had her “Pull up her Close and Lie Down he then Called a Negrow Man Slave” “and ordered him to pull Down his Britches and gitt upon the said Amwood and to bee grate with her.” A fourth individual in this horrific scene, a white man named John Pettigrew, operating with holland, pointed a pistol at the unnamed enslaved man and elizabeth Amwood. All the while, holland taunted them both, asking if it “was in” and “if it was sweet.” Afterward, William “went up into the Company and Called for Water to wash his hand, saying he had bin putting a Mare to a horse.” Scholars have suggested that rape can serve as a metaphor for enslavement—thus applying to both men and women who were enslaved. As Aliyah I. Abdur-rahman argues, “The vulnerability of all enslaved black persons to nearly every conceivable violation produced a collective ‘raped’ subjectivity.” The standard scholarly interpretation of how slavery affected black manhood is perhaps best captured by the comments of one former slave, Lewis Clarke, who declared that a slave “can’t be a man” because he

‘Uteis a si e a sociedade’1 or a brief guide to creolisation in nineteenth-century Brazil: black women, mobility, marriage and markets in Salvador da Bahia (1830–1888)

In this paper the process of creolisation will be considered through analysis of the wills and testaments of African, black and mixed-race women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. As primary sources these will and testaments provide evidence concerning material, social and cultural markers of creolisation. These markers are read as statements about belonging on the part of formerly enslaved women and their female descendants in a racially based slave society that was also formally and informally patriarchal in structure and Catholic in culture. The historical sources are used to provide a measure of the momentum of mobility engendered by manumission and passed down through the generations of freed and free black women, and reveal the limitations of mobility made possible either economically through occupation or socially through marriage. Analysed collectively, the wills and testaments of these women provide insights into the ways in which race and gender shaped the contours and confines of freedom in Salvador in particular and Brazilian slave society in general and reveal how perceptions and experiences of the limitations of integration shaped their versions of creolisation as well as their visions of freedom.

:A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in Nineteenth-Century New York

In 1866, Congress authorized the opening of a district branch of the Freedman's Bank in New York City, an institution that boasted thirty-three regional offices nationwide by the end of that decade. Within five years, deposits in the local division totaled over $140,000, representing the hard-earned savings of hundreds of the city's black working men and women. However, financial mismanagement and poor investment choices eventually led to the bank's insolvency; in a move reminiscent of contemporary debacles, payments to depositors occurred only after the oversight commission disbursed $135,000 of the bank's assets to pay salaries and attorney's fees. New Yorkers had to fight to reclaim even a portion of their savings, devastating members of the African American population already suffering from underemployment and poverty. Jane E. Dabel's book reveals this timely story about the struggles faced by black New Yorkers as they sought to make stable lives for themselves in the five decades after the Empire State's Gradual Emancipation Act put an end to slavery in 1827. Responding to the dearth of studies that focus on the experiences of free black women in the North, Dabel sets out to fill the historiographic gap, and she does so through the ambitious compilation of information from the manuscripts of the federal censuses. The resulting database helps her to offer detailed insight into certain aspects of the lives of black New Yorkers, few of whom left other types of records from which to reconstruct their stories.

Wilma King, The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era

Wilma King, <i>The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era</i>

The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era, and: Women on the Civil War Battle Front (review)

The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era, and: Women on the Civil War Battle Front (review)

The essence of liberty: free black women during the slave era

The essence of liberty: free black women during the slave era

WILMA KING. The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 290. Cloth $39.95, paper $19.95

WILMA KING. The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 290. Cloth $39.95, paper $19.95

The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women During the Slave Era by Wilma King

The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women During the Slave Era by Wilma King

Contraband Trade and the Shaping of Colonial Societies in Curaçao and Tierra Firme

In 1729, an enslaved woman named Juana Isabel Curazao fled the island of Curaçao, a small Dutch entrepôt in the southern Caribbean, and made her way across calm waters to the northern coast of the nearby Spanish American mainland (present-day Venezuela), just forty miles down-current and downwind. After ostensibly converting to Catholicism Juana Isabel obtained her freedom and acquired a small plot of land in Curiepe, a town of free blacks which the Spanish had founded in 1721 to protect the coast from the incursions of English, French, and Dutch privateers. Juana Isabel planted cacao trees, hoping to profit from Europe's growing taste for chocolate. Defying Spanish colonial law that prohibited trade with foreigners, thousands of people like Juana Isabel surreptitiously sold cacao pods to Curaçaoan traders, usually small-scale Sephardic Jewish merchants or seafarers of African descent. The traders smuggled sacks of the pods back to Curaçao, where enslaved dockworkers loaded them onto large ocean-going vessels and shipped them to Dutch processing firms across the Atlantic. A generation later, in 1765, Juana Isabel's niece and heir, a free black woman named Ana María Mohele, began a long legal battle to retain the grove, which by then had grown into a 1,000-tree plantation. Spanish colonial authorities challenged Ana Maria's ownership of the land, claiming that her aunt's manumission and property grant both were invalid. Nevertheless, they only confiscated half the property, and allowed Ana Maria to keep the rest.

Grander in her daughters: Florida's women during the Civil War

Though the women of Florida suffered Civil War traumas and privations commensurate with women throughout the Confederacy, few of their experiences have become part of the historical record. With Grander in Her Daughters: Florida's Women during the Civil War Tracy J. Revels rescues from neglect these women and the challenges they faced. Drawing largely on primary source discoveries, Revels recounts the experiences of wives and widows, Unionists and secessionists, black female slaves and their plantation mistresses, business owners and refugees. Revels finds that no matter their political allegiance, these women lived dual lives, divided in their loyalties between what they often perceived as the competing interests of their nation and their families. Isolated and largely unsettled, Florida remained a frontier into the middle of the nineteenth century. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1861 many Floridians embraced the Southern cause, and the state contributed more than its just share of manpower to the Confederacy. Revels shows that Florida's women, however, were not of one mind in their reaction to the conflict. Using diaries, letters, contemporary published sources, and an extensive series of United Daughters of the Confederacy scrapbooks, she presents the panorama of war through the eyes of such women. Revels confirms that Florida's white women largely shared in the sisterhood of the Confederacy, supporting the cause by making uniforms, serving as nurses, and raising funds. They took on greater managerial responsibilities on farms and plantations, and they endured hardships and deprivations while awaiting the soldiers' return. Not all of Florida's women were Confederates, however, and Revels brings to light the diversity of the female experience. She demonstrates that slave women grew increasingly resistant to their condition as the war dragged on. Unionist women aided the Federals, free black women found new opportunities for employment, and poor women focused much more on providing for their families than on any cause of a political nature.

Stretching the Limits of Gendered Spaces: Black and Mulatto Women in 1830s Havana

In a city mapped out by the elites to resemble nineteenth-century Paris, European and American visitors showed surprise at the scarcity of white women in Havana's public spaces. Meanwhile, black and mulatto women filled Havana's streets and plazas. They needed to in order to survive and to better themselves. What is more, their economic and social participation was indispensable to the daily functioning of the city. They constituted the majority of the city's peddlers, artisans, midwives, caretakers and preschool teachers. There were also business owners among them. And they were the wives and consorts of both black and white men. They integrated themselves in almost every aspect of daily city life by using tactics that helped them get around racial and gender discrimination. One important tactic was the use of prejudice to their advantage: they filled the economic and social gaps left by the racial prejudice and archaic gender conventions of the Cuban elites. This article will examine how, through their daily economic and social practices, women of color stretched the limits of the gendered and racialized spaces in early modern Havana. La escasez de mujeres blancas en las áreas públicas se hacía palpable para los visitantes europeos y americanos en una Habana planificada por las élites para rememorar el Paris del siglo xix. Mientras tanto, mujeres negras y mulatas llenaban las calles y las plazas de la ciudad. Lo hacían no sólo por necesidad, sino también para mejorar su situación. Por otro lado, su participación social y económica era indispensable para el buen funcionamiento de la ciudad. Constituían la mayoría de las vendedoras, artesanas, parteras, cuidaderas, y maestras de primeras letras de la ciudad. Algunas hasta eran dueñas de negocios, así como esposas y compañeras, tanto de hombres blancos como negros. Con la ayuda de ciertas tácticas, lograron evadir la discriminación racial y de género, integrándose en casi todos los aspectos de la vida diaria. Una táctica clave fue la de sacarle ventaja al prejuicio, llenando las brechas económicas y sociales que quedaban por el prejuicio racial de las élites y sus convenciones arcaicas con respecto al género. Este artículo examina cómo, a través de sus prácticas diarias, las mujeres de color rebasaron los límites de los espacios delimitados por convenciones de género y raza en La Habana del siglo xix.

Dangerous liaisons: sex and love in the segregated South

Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South. By Charles F. Robinson II. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Pp. xv, 196. Acknowledgments, introduction, tables, conclusion, epilogue, bibliography, notes, index. $29.95.) The last few years have seen the publication of several notable books on the complex topic of American interracial relationships both sexual and marital-Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law: An American History (2002), Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (2003), and Renee C. Romano, Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003). To this growing and important literature, Charles Robinson's Dangerous Liaisons makes a valuable contribution by analyzing over one hundred southern court cases (including ones from Arkansas) that span from 1662, when Virginia first passed its first anti-miscegenation law, to 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared such statutes unconstitutional. Robinson tirelessly draws on these cases to demonstrate that enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws varied not only from state to state and era to era but also within the states and within periods. Anti-miscegenation laws, both state and federal, provide vital insight into the construction of not only whiteness and blackness but also gender, class, and sexuality. Even more importantly, they shed light on the ways in which each of these social categories informed and transformed the others. Robinson asserts that anti-miscegenation laws existed to secure white men's place at the top of both a racial and sexual hierarchy. The laws typically targeted formal liaisons involving free black men and white women (pp. 1-2). The strength of Robinson's book is that he reveals the complexity in the application of anti-miscegenation laws. Robinson contends that antimiscegenation laws have always embodied both white racism and patriarchy, and that white southerners were more likely to go after interracial intimacy and marriage than sex, since intimacy and marriage implied the potential for the couple to consider each other as social equals. Interracial couples tried to evade punishment either by downplaying their relationship as being of a purely sexual nature, so as not to touch upon the issue of potential social equality, or by arguing that, in fact, they were of the same race even if this fact was not visually apparent. Robinson also argues that although African Americans opposed anti-miscegenation laws as racist they did not on the whole advocate interracial marriage but in many ways opposed it as thwarting racial pride. Unfortunately, there are only a few places in Dangerous Liaisons where Robinson mentions, let alone analyzes in detail, issues of social class. …

Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital

How much do sins visited upon one generation harm that generation's future sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters? I study this question by comparing outcomes for former slaves and their children and grandchildren to outcomes for free blacks (pre-1865), and their children and grandchildren. The outcome measures include literacy, whether a child attends school, whether a child lives in a female headed household, and two measures of adult occupation. Using a variety of different comparisons, (e.g. within versus across regions) I find that it took roughly two generations for the descendants of slaves to catch up to the descendants of free black men and women. This finding is consistent with modern estimates and interpretations of father-son correlations in income and socioeconomic status. The data used are from the 1880 and 1920 1 percent (IPUMS) samples, a 100 percent sample of the 1880 Census and a smaller data set in which I link families in the 1920 IPUMS back to the father's family in a 100% sample of the 1880 Census. These latter data sets are derived from an electronic version of the 1880 Census recently compiled and released by the Mormon Church with assistance from the Minnesota Population Center.

Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital

How much do sins visited upon one generation harm that generation's future sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters? I study this question by comparing outcomes for former slaves and their children and grandchildren to outcomes for free blacks (pre-1865) and their children and grandchildren. The outcome measures include literacy, whether a child attends school, months spent in school, years of schooling, and two measures of adult occupation. Using a variety of different comparisons (for example, within versus across regions) I find that it took roughly two generations for the descendants of slaves to catch up to the descendants of free black men and women, for those outcomes that I observe. In other words, by 1920 the remaining legacy of slavery is such that all blacks are affected equally, not just the actual descendants of slaves. There is some evidence that this convergence was facilitated by intermarriage among slave and free families. The finding of convergence is consistent with modern estimat...

“Desiring Total Tranquility” and Not Getting It: Conflict Involving Free Black Women in Spanish New Orleans

Colonial New Orleans was a community, like so many others in Latin America, in which the upper sectors desired to maintain order and “toda tranquilidad,” preferably by way of legislation and judicial compromise but through force and authoritarian measures if necessary. Challenges to this tranquility came from those groups considered marginal and thus often subordinated, oppressed, and made generally unhappy with the status quo, among them workers, women, soldiers, slaves, and free blacks (libres). Free black women— the focus of this paper—drew upon multiple experiences as members of several of these subjugated groups: as women, as nonwhites, sometimes as former slaves, and usually as workers, forced by poverty to support their families with earnings devalued because they were gained doing “women's work.” But they did not suffer silently. Condemning the patriarchal order, racist, sexist, authoritarian society in which they operated, libre women vigorously attacked it both verbally and physically, employing such elite-defined legal and illegal methods as petitions, judicial procedures, slander, insults, arson, and assault and battery.

The Inventiveness and Inventedness of Identity Formation in History and Literature

The Inventiveness and Inventedness of Identity Formation in History and Literature Nell Irvin Painter. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. xi + 369 pp. ISBN 0-393-02739-2 (cl). Elaine K. Ginsberg, ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 298 pp. ISBN 0-8223-1755-9 (pb). Shirley J. Yee For the past decade or so, feminist scholars from a number of disciplines , including history, literature, cultural studies, and poUtical theory, have examined the ways in which identity and the self are mutually constructed in historical and contemporary settings by both scholar and subject. The phenomena of representation and self-representation in history and literature become strikingly clear in Nell Irvin Painter's Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol and in Elaine K. Ginsberg's anthology of essays, Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Both point to the simultaneous inventiveness and inventedness of identity formation. Blacks who passed as whites and whites who passed as black, women who passed as men and vice versa, and the life of historical figures such as Sojourner Truth all illustrate the creativity of individuals and their ability to act as agents in the invention and reinvention of themselves whether in real life or as fictionalized characters in novels. At the same time, historians and novelists have also constructed identities for their subjects, so that individuals become known in ways that writers want them to be known and understood . Thus, I would expand Samira Kawash's statement in her essay in Passing that "the distinction between true Jiistory and fictional narrative is not in the text but in the reader" (60) to argue that what is at stake is the very notion of what constitutes "true history" and that both the reader and the writer are comphcit in the construction and perpetuation of the narrative. The life of Sojourner Truth in an excellent example of the ways in which a narrative over time has come to represent the "truth" about an individual while at the same time obscuring her Ufe. Olive Gilbert's Narrative of Sojourner Truth, published by Truth in 1850, has served as the standard primary text on her life.1 Using this text as weU as other primary written documents and visual images of Truth, Painter seeks to uncover Truth, the person, and in the process deconstruct Truth, the myth. Painter's biography must be discussed within the context of her larger work on © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 1 (Spring) 1998 Review Essay: Shirley J. Yee 175 Truth, which reveals the tension that often exists between representation at the hands of historians and self-representation.2 Painter traces Truth's life from her birth in 1797 to her death in 1883, unveiling the rich and complex life of the woman born Isabella Van Wagenen—a slave from Ulster County, New York, who on 1 June 1843 reinvented herseff as Sojourner Truth. Painter reveals little-known but critical aspects of Truth's life. She reminds readers that in many ways Truth was not unlike other rural African-American women of her time. As a slave, and later as a wage-earning free black woman, work defined her daily life. She learned to negotiate for her needs as much as she was able under the confines and uncertainties of institutional slavery. As the author points out, it was New York slavery, not southern slavery, that shaped Truth's slave experience, despite the connections abolitionists later made between Truth—the supposed symbol of slave womanhood—and slavery in the South. One of Painter's most important contributions, both to our knowledge of Sojourner Truth and to the history of the rural northeast during this period, is her extensive discussion of the religious influences in Truth's life. Painter reveals Truth as a deeply religious person whose faith provided her with spiritual strength throughout her life. She situates Truth's religious convictions within the larger context of the Second Great Awakening that swept the region during the 1820s and 1830s and her exposure first to the New York Methodists and Dutch Reformed Church and then her more active involvement with...

Voices of restless (dis)continuity: The significance of travel for free black women in the Antebellum Americas

(1997). Voices of restless (dis)continuity: The significance of travel for free black women in the Antebellum Americas. Women's Studies: Vol. 26, Women and Travel, pp. 475-495.