Free Black Research Articles

Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott by Lea VanderVelde (review)

Reviewed by: Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott by Lea VanderVelde Loren Schweninger (bio) Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott. By Lea VanderVelde. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 305. Cloth, $29.95.) Historians have long been aware of freedom suits in the southern states, mostly as interesting anecdotes or footnotes when discussing other issues concerning race and slavery. There are a number of articles and a few books focusing specifically on the subject of how slaves went to court, filed a suit, and obtained a verdict. The literature mainly involves cases in the Upper [End Page 596] South and Louisiana. Among the best of these studies is Judith Schafer’s analysis of New Orleans suits during the period 1846–62.1 Although various aspects of freedom suits are discussed in this literature, many books and articles focus on the color of plaintiffs. Few historians would disagree with the assertion of Eva Sheppard Wolf, who writes that “the decisions of courts and juries [in freedom suits] rested on the appearance of the plaintiffs more than on their genealogies, establishing legally that race was based on how a person looked even more than who his ancestors were.”2 In the study under review, the evidence is strong that this was not the case, at least in Saint Louis. The author has combed through hundreds of freedom suits dating from the early nineteenth century to the Dred Scott decision in 1857 and chosen a dozen cases, discussing the reasons the suits were brought, the trial proceedings, outcomes, and what happened to those freed in later years. She cites several possible grounds for such legal action, including the enslavement of free blacks, Native Americans, children of free mothers, and slaves who resided with their owners or with their owners’ permission in free territory (by far the largest group). The lives portrayed are vivid, detailed, moving, deeply researched, and interesting. They are presented in a style of engaging prose and tell much about the slave families. Some of the research is extraordinary, as the author traces the families over time and discusses their owners and their owners’ families. She even visited a number of courthouses in Kentucky and Illinois to fill in the gaps in the Saint Louis court records. In addition, she discovered a rare manuscript court record concerning the first slave (Peter) to sue for freedom in the Northwest Territory in 1794. At the same time, in one exceptional section, she compares and contrasts the court record for Lucy Delaney with a memoir Delaney wrote a half century later, revealing how memories faded with the passage of time and how Delaney’s later recollections “depart from the legal records” (144), especially with respect to her portrait of her mother. The book is also groundbreaking with regard to the continuation of slavery in various sections of Illinois into the 1830s and 1840s. The new material includes some information about the lawyers who participated in the freedom suits, the process in the common law court, and the economic, social, and cultural attitudes of whites and blacks. In short, there is much to be admired in this book. At the same time, the study does not contextualize its findings in either the literature of freedom suits or the broader literature on American slavery. One of the author’s themes appears to be how the migration west was not one in pursuit of liberty and freedom (she mentions the 1893 Turner thesis) but rather the expansion of slavery. This has been long accepted by scholars. In another section she suggests that the great migration of [End Page 597] the antebellum era was to the West. One could just as easily argue, especially in light of the domestic slave trade, that it was to the South or the Southwest. The author employs the metaphor of the redemption song from Bob Marley’s powerful 1979 classic urging blacks to emancipate themselves from mental slavery, with lines taken from a speech given by Marcus Garvey The word “redemption” is not appropriate for slaves seeking their freedom, as they were not redeeming their freedom (except for the small number of free blacks) but seeking to...

Family bonds: free blacks and re-enslavement law in antebellum Virginia

Family bonds: free blacks and re-enslavement law in antebellum Virginia

Lincoln’s Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months That Gave America the Emancipation Proclamation and Changed the Course of the Civil War by Todd Brewster (review)

Reviewed by: Lincoln’s Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months That Gave America the Emancipation Proclamation and Changed the Course of the Civil War by Todd Brewster Robert O. Faith Lincoln’s Gamble: The Tumultuous Six Months That Gave America the Emancipation Proclamation and Changed the Course of the Civil War. Todd Brewster. New York: Scribner, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4516-9386-7, 352 pp., cloth, $27.00. A year punctuated by frequent Union military failures, formulation of a policy of emancipation, and widespread public disaffection, 1862 proved to be one of the most trying years of the American Civil War for Abraham Lincoln. In Lincoln’s Gamble, Todd Brewster explores the transformative period between July 1862 and January 1863, the month in which President Lincoln issued his final Emancipation Proclamation. It is during this time, Brewster argues, that one might find the “real Lincoln”—one who came to embrace emancipation while the focus of the Civil War shifted from reunion toward the destruction of slavery (8). Written in engaging prose and mindful of the many complexities and ambiguities of Union war policy and Lincoln’s thinking on race and slavery, Brewster’s narrative offers an immersive look into the processes by which Lincoln ultimately changed the nature of Union war policy to include emancipation along with reunion. Beginning with the funeral of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s son on July 13, 1862, when Lincoln first revealed his plans for emancipation to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Secretary of State William H. Seward, Brewster’s narrative marches forward chronologically, with each chapter focusing on major events or themes between July 1862 and January 1863. Largely based on standard primary sources regarding Lincoln and emancipation, the book also contains a helpful appendix that includes the texts of all three drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation, as well as Lincoln’s famous letter to Albert G. Hodges of April 4, 1864, justifying military emancipation. Throughout the book, Brewster carefully traces the development of emancipation policy in Lincoln’s mind, revealing the extent to which Lincoln’s thinking on emancipation evolved between the September 22 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and its final version, one hundred days later, on January 1, 1863. Brewster maintains that Lincoln’s initial position on slavery during the war was largely hands-off, as he encouraged military officials to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, for instance. Moreover, Lincoln’s fear of the social consequences of immediate abolition—reflected in part by his enduring embrace of colonizing free blacks outside of the United States—“made him uncomfortable with any plan that did not take gradualism as its philosophy and popular consensus as its partner” (46). As political and military events unfolded throughout 1862, though, Lincoln came to embrace a policy of military emancipation, however limited in scope. Still, for all of its moral grandeur and mythical status to modern Americans, the myriad political and military uncertainties surrounding the Union war effort ensured that the fate of emancipated slaves remained far from clear on January 1, 1863. Indeed, as Brewster aptly writes, for Lincoln the final Emancipation Proclamation was “a roll of the dice” (243). [End Page 454] While Brewster ultimately emphasizes Lincoln’s evolving policy of emancipation, he also devotes some attention to other major developments in the Union during the latter half of 1862. Here, one will find a general discussion of military events through the end of the year, as well as the growing dissent of a northern public that knew little of military victory and much of war-weariness and sacrifice. Although important for establishing the political and military context of the Union war effort in 1862, these subjects are treated better elsewhere. Yet even on such crucially interdependent topics as slavery, emancipation, and colonization, Brewster’s book does not engage the larger historiographical literature and debates, which may disappoint specialists in these areas. Instead, Brewster devotes considerable space to detailed biographical sketches of Lincoln’s political influences, cabinet members, military subordinates, and family members that, at times, are an unnecessary digression from his larger narrative. The same may be said for particular topics that are given disproportionate treatment here, such as his discussion of...

The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru by José R. Jouve Martín (review)

Reviewed by: The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru by José R. Jouve Martín Karen B. Graubart José R. Jouve Martín. The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014. xxvii + 209 pp. Ill. $39.95 (978-0-7735-4341-6). This lively monograph examines the changing medical profession in late colonial Lima through its most unlikely practitioners, the black and mulatto surgeons and doctors who dominated and transformed the field. Unlike most Afro-descent people in colonial Lima, these men left a documentary corpus, both scholarly and personal. This study of three of these black doctors investigates the intersection of medicine with political and institutional changes in late colonial Lima. The first chapter attributes the rise of black healers to colonial demography: nearly half of Lima’s population was of African descent. Men of Spanish descent chose higher status jobs, leaving the roles of phlebotomist, romance surgeon, midwife, and nurse to free blacks. Only Latin surgeons required university training and an examination before licensing by the Protomedicato (the official tribunal overseeing the medical profession); these posts often went unfilled. By 1701 castas were also attending medical classes; despite professors’ complaints, the king allowed anyone without “infamy” (illegitimacy or heresy) to apply. In 1752, another monarch reversed this position by extending “infamy” to indigenous or African heritage. Only a few castas succeeded in gaining licenses by petitioning the monarch or obtaining training outside the empire. [End Page 608] Chapter 2 describes how two of these Afro-Peruvian surgeons intersected with Lima’s enlightenment journal, the Mercurio peruano (1791–95). Invited to write for it by Hipólito Unanue, the great creole scientific reformer, José Manuel Valdés and José Pastor Larrinaga wrote on new surgical procedures and theories, and railed against the arcane remedies of the city’s unlicensed curers. In pseudonymous pieces, they intervened in debates over gender, reproduction, and monstrosity, and even the patriotic history of Peru, linked in creole fashion to Inca (but not African) heritage. Chapter 3 examines the different career paths of these two as well as José Manuel Dávalos, whose degree from Montpellier led to a career as an accredited doctor and a university chair in Lima. Early nineteenth-century Lima faced not only filth and epidemic disease, but also political rifts as the viceroyalties moved toward independence. Dávalos played a large role in the 1806 smallpox vaccination campaign, and he and Valdés occupied chairs in Unanue’s new Colegio de Medicina y Cirugía de San Fernando, which would become a center for new medical practice and radical politics. Larrinaga, on the other hand, sought to separate the mostly black surgeons from the Protomedicato and mostly white doctors that supervised them. He accomplished this in 1801, proposing a surgical school for the certification of surgeons in direct competition with Unanue’s San Fernando. Most of the black doctors’ writings concerned contemporary medical and public health questions. Yet they were also drawn into debates over slavery, race, and citizenship as the viceroyalties participated in the political tumult of the Cortes de Cádiz as Napoleon invaded Spain. The existence of Afro-Peruvian intellectuals led to an 1812 Corte decision that castas could practice any profession for which they were qualified, though voting rights were left ambiguous. The reforms were suspended when the monarchy returned in 1814. But with independence in 1821, black doctors received government posts, including Valdés’s triumphant appointment as protomédico general. Chapter 4 looks at Valdés’s career as protomédico (1835–43), wherein he pushed for a Peruvian medical practice, based upon the specificities of the Andean climate, and confronted folk healers and foreign physicians. His campaign against a French purgative cure met with public success and resulted in an important epidemiological treatise, but the arrest and failed trial of a popular curandera degraded the Protomedicato’s support. The office found itself mired in national and international politics as it promoted a Peruvian medicine. The conclusion examines Valdés’s biography of Martín de Porres as the sixteenth...

The Equal Struggle for Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America by Corinne T. Field (review)

The Equal Struggle for Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America. By Corinne T. Field. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. 243. Paper, $32.95.)Reviewed by Lori D. GinzbergI imagine that most of us who teach about the early republic have invented tricks to help students get both the foreignness of that era and its profound connection to our own. Slavery seems to them, even in the face of ongoing racism and racist violence, the most alien past. Evangelical religion, and its connection to movements for progressive social and moral change, seems quaint. And the notion that woman suffrage was ever seen outrageous-impossible. I evoke a reaction to the early demand for woman suffrage by inviting responses to a demand that children be given the vote. This gets students worked up (in one happy moment, a student stamped her foot at me), and they launch some version of every argument ever made against women voting. Finally, they conclude, children are not adults, and that settles it.Apparently, however, does not. While historians are familiar with the idea of childhood a historically shaped stage of life, we, like my students, tend to consider adulthood self-evident. I thought about this quite a bit I read Corinne T. Field's intriguing and beautifully written account of how leading nineteenth-century advocates of women's and black rights-notably Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frances Watkins Harper-drew on recently institutionalized notions of adulthood to argue for white women's, black women's, and black men's capacity to be voters. Of course, the idea that only property-owning white men acquired the rights of full citizenship was not in itself new. But those rights, and especially the right to vote, became separated from property ownership, chronological age assumed growing importance, and politicians struggled to define a legal moment when people could exercise particular rights. Adulthood itself, Field shows, was a contested political and legal, not biological, category, one that managed, through supposedly neutral measures, to rationalize the continued subordination of some groups to others. White men's political dependence, like their dependence on their mothers, would be outgrown; the legal, economic, and personal dependence of black men and all women would not. Thus a new rhetoric of majority, increasingly specified for most (but far from all) purposes age twenty-one, served both to grant rights to white men-and to infantilize, and deprive of those rights, everyone else.At first glance this seemed a progressive step. Age, John Locke insisted, not inherited rank, made a man free. From the seemingly neutral assertion that subjection was 'temporary,' age came to assume new importance in legal and political writings, and became an additional justification for the natural subjection of men over their households and their dependents (15). For both white women and for enslaved and free African Americans, forms of dependence limited their ability to become full-fledged adults; the earliest feminist thinkers argued, was women's independence prior to marriage that was temporary. Ironically, as age twenty-one became more important, Field argues, it also became more gender-specific, marking out a universal transition to personal and political liberty for [white] boys but having little relevance for girls (40).As age came to define white men's maturity and capacity, was also, perhaps inevitably, appropriated by those excluded from its promises- people who had reached the age of twenty-one, but were not granted the capacity for independence that came with it. …

Black Litigiousness and White Accountability: Free Blacks and the Rhetoric of Reputation in the Antebellum Natchez District

Black Litigiousness and White AccountabilityFree Blacks and the Rhetoric of Reputation in the Antebellum Natchez District Kimberly Welch (bio) In September 1822, Fanny, a free woman of color and former slave, appeared before the district court in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. She was suing Francois Gueho, an “evil-minded and disgraceful” white man, for libelous attacks on her reputation. Gueho, Fanny claimed, had “wickedly, willfully and maliciously slandered” her and “endangered her freedom by insisting that she is a slave.” In 1805, her owner had initiated “an act of emancipation” before Alexander Leblanc, the parish court judge, and Fanny had been living as a free person for some time, as those who knew her could attest. Indeed, Archibald Haralson, a successful Princeton-educated attorney from nearby West Feliciana Parish, assisted Fanny in her lawsuit against Gueho and corroborated her claims. She behaved respectably, acted “diligently,” “faithfully served” her former owner, and obeyed all “lawful commands.” Nonetheless, Gueho’s “acts of violence, threats and menaces” had jeopardized her reputation in the community, Fanny told the court, and caused others to question her free status. Gueho, she relayed, “intended to reduce her to slavery.” He was a powerful and influential man, the “president of the Parish of Pointe Coupee.” Without the court’s intervention and protection, he could “greatly injure her.” Fanny expected the court to hold him legally responsible for his assaults on her reputation. To that end, she requested he be summoned to court for a public accounting of his offenses against her. In addition, she asked the court to formally “adjudge” her a free woman and award her $5,000 for damages done to her reputation, plus “general relief.”1 We do not know what the court decided in Fanny’s case. Her petition and the sheriff’s return requiring Gueho to appear before the court are the only surviving documents. But we can conclude that not only did Fanny—a woman and a former slave—challenge a white man in a venue typically denied her, she also aired her complaint publicly and with Haralson’s endorsement. The court validated it by ordering Gueho to respond to Fanny’s charges, and the community watched. Moreover, Fanny’s lawsuit [End Page 372] indicates that she had achieved a certain degree of legal sophistication not usually attributed to an overwhelmingly illiterate people denied many legal rights. Fanny understood that she simply could not appear in court and expect to succeed without some help. She drew on a network of allies to aid her in her lawsuit, indicating that she had developed ties to local whites (including her lawyer) and activated those relationships when necessary. Finally, and, for the purposes of this essay, most importantly, Fanny took great care to cultivate her reputation in her community, and legal action against a white man was a crucial mechanism for defending her good name and protecting herself and her status as a free woman. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to various features of African Americans’ legal culture and engagements with the law.2 Much of the current historical scholarship investigating the relationship between subordinated people and the law in the nineteenth century examines the legal system from the bottom up. Rather than focusing on statutes and appellate court records as the conclusive expression of the law, scholars such as Laura Edwards, Ariela Gross, Hendrik Hartog, and Dylan Penningroth (to name but a few) have turned to the trial courts to emphasize how ordinary people (including free and enslaved African Americans, poor whites, women, the elderly, and children) participated in and shaped (directly and indirectly) legal processes in their communities.3 Indeed, in her path-breaking examination of law and governance in the post-Revolutionary Carolinas, Edwards argues that because local authorities worked to “keep the peace” and emphasized social order and community regulation over individual rights, everyone, including domestic dependents such as wives, slaves, and children, “participated in the identification of offenses, the resolution of conflicts, and the definition of the law.”4 Another trend in the scholarship on African Americans’ interactions with the legal system focuses on slaves’ lawsuits for freedom.5 Scholars such as Kelly Kennington use freedom...

Slavery and War in the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861–1870 by Vitor Izecksohn (review)

Reviewed by: Slavery and War in the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861–1870 by Vitor Izecksohn Tim Roberts (bio) Slavery and War in the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861–1870. By Vitor Izecksohn. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. 251. Cloth, $45.00.) This book by Vitor Izecksohn, a historian at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, makes a new contribution to scholarship seeking to locate the Civil War in a comparative perspective. While previous scholars, beginning with David Potter, have examined the American conflict with reference to contemporaneous nationalizing or industrializing wars in Europe and Eurasia, Izecksohn focuses on the Western Hemisphere. He argues that Brazil’s experience in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70)—although the war was an international conflict involving four countries, broke out over foreign issues (mainly, Paraguay’s aggressive policies in Uruguay, the home of many Brazilian expatriates), and was fought largely outside Brazilian borders—resembled the Union’s experience in the Civil War in terms of government centralization, uncompromising military objectives, and recruitment of black soldiers. But he concludes that the two recruitment crises had different consequences. U.S. policy “contributed powerfully to emancipation and reform in the defeated South,” whereas measures of Emperor Dom Pedro II backfired, gradually eroding monarchical legitimacy and representative parliamentary government (2). In chapters that alternate between the North and South American conflicts, Izecksohn shows how the exigencies of national emergency pressured both governments to risk freeing and arming slaves. Although far more novel in the United States, this decision was risky for both regimes. They both insisted on unconditional surrender yet exercised authority in societies similar in their ephemeral war patriotism and hostility to large national (and poorly organized) armies. Readers of this journal familiar with President Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 decision to recruit free blacks and [End Page 463] former slaves will be interested to learn how in Brazil manumitted slaves substituted for impressed white men from the outset of the War of the Triple Alliance, and by 1867 the Brazilian government was freeing its own slaves and buying slaves from private owners for military service. Enlistment of slaves thus became “a fundamental strategy for the defense of the Imperial state” (160). Of some 91,000 Brazilian wartime troops, about 4,000 were slaves (out of a slave population of 1.7 million, 14 percent of the total population of Brazil), recruited roughly proportionally from throughout the nation: about two-thirds came from the southeast region, including state-owned farms and factories in and around the capital Rio de Janeiro. Although the Brazilian slave population, unlike that in the United States, was in decline at the time its war of national reconstruction erupted, free Brazilians fiercely debated slave enlistments, using the recent American emancipation as precedent. Izecksohn’s discussion of the weak indigenous Brazilian abolitionist movement illustrates Seymour Drescher’s observations of Latin America generally.1 While an abolitionist adviser of Pedro II lobbied for his country, like the United States, to follow the classical examples of Greece and Rome and humbly call upon “their captives in time of trouble,” a critic of slave recruitment pointed out that American slavery’s regional, not national, location meant abolition had posed little immediate threat to the Union’s society or economy (154). Izecksohn emphasizes that this debate’s result in only a smattering of manumitted soldiers, and the postwar persistence of racism against black veterans and civilians alike, reflects how the War of the Triple Alliance created few long-term changes in Brazil’s social structure. Loopholes in the country’s Free Womb Law of 1871 enabled slavery to last until 1888, and a year later the Brazilian Empire was overthrown by a military coup d’état. This conclusion is ironic, given that Izecksohn indicates his original interest in this topic arose to show “the ways in which American exceptionalism could be contested” (x). By emphasizing the differences between the two wars’ outcomes—essentially, citizenship for black Americans and continued disenfranchisement for black Brazilians—Izecksohn, as did Eric Foner a generation ago in a comparison of the political...

Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South by Susanna Michele Lee (review)

Reviewed by: Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South by Susanna Michele Lee Daniel Ritchie Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South. Susanna Michele Lee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-107-01532-6, 256pp., cloth, $95.00. Susanna Michele Lee’s book focuses on the work of the Southern Claims Commission (1871–80), which awarded compensation for property losses during the Civil War to southerners who could prove they had been loyal citizens. It helpfully elucidates how loyal citizenship was conceptualized and disputed in the aftermath of the conflict. The author has provided us with an engaging, clearly written, and well-researched account of the commissioners’ work. Lee argues that the commissioners initially defined loyal citizens as white men who had opposed secession at the ballot box and on the battlefield. Southern claimants were expected to prove they not only possessed Union sympathies (ideological citizenship) but had also vigorously contributed to the Union cause (active citizenship). The supposition that loyal citizens were to be defined as white men was undermined by both the complex relationship of former slaves, free blacks, and women to the state and the efforts of these groups to prove that they had been loyal citizens during the war to the commissioners. During its ten-year lifespan, the Southern Claims Commission acted as a bulwark against the Democrats’ idea that postwar loyalty should be the basis for access to the rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States. Lee’s first chapter situates the work of the Southern Claims Commission within a wider context of congressional debates over citizenship and loyalty, while the second examines the efforts of white men to demonstrate their loyalty. What is perhaps most striking about the chapters on white men is how strict the Southern Claims Commission was in its definition of loyalty. The three commissioners (Asa Owen Aldis, Orange Ferris, and James B. Howell), all Republicans appointed by President Grant, believed that residence in a seceded state was prima facie evidence of disloyalty. They assumed that a real unionist could not have remained in these localities without being subjected to severe harassment. Unsurprisingly, many white southern claimants did not meet the commissioners’ standards of loyalty. The author suggests that [End Page 323] the Southern Claims Commission’s elevation of wartime actions over ideology, moreover, promoted an understanding of citizenship that ensured that the passive unionists in the South could be marginalized as cowards who had shirked their obligations to the nation. It is significant that the Southern Claims Commission did not ask claimants about their position on slavery unless they mentioned it. The commissioners did not view slaveholding as evidence of treachery, but they did see criticizing emancipation as incongruous with loyalty to the Union. This position posed a significant problem for those unionist slaveholders who claimed allegiance to the Union on the basis that it was a proslavery compact. In the case of southern women who were pro-emancipation and who had opposed the Confederate war effort, the Southern Claims Commission was forced to recognize that white men did not possess a monopoly on loyal citizenship. The common law tradition of coverture, the notion that women possessed no relationship to the state unmediated by a father or husband, had made it difficult for women to claim to be loyal citizens. Coverture, however, allowed some white southern women to claim the political sympathies of their husbands while preserving their essential feminine domesticity. In harmony with these principles, white women sometimes presented their opposition to male enlistment on behalf of the Confederacy as an action appropriate to their sphere of influence. There were some obvious cases of inequity in the commissioners’ treatment of women, which the author usefully highlights. For instance, on the one hand, cooking for or nursing Union soldiers was dismissed as merely circumstantial evidence of loyalty. On the other hand, the Southern Claims Commission regarded even cooking and sewing as indicative of assistance for the Confederacy. The chapters on non-white southerners are useful, if only for reminding us of the need to avoid the tendency of conflating southerners with whites. The Southern Claims Commission had initially not...

“Forget Me Not”: Free Black Women and Sentimentality: Color Plate 3.

Everything about friendship albums of the early nineteenth century indicates that they were exclusively for white consumers. Unique artifacts, manufacturers produced blank volumes with decorative covers—variously known as scrapbooks, friendship albums, or giftbooks—for inscription and display. Emerging around 1825, these mass-produced items (ranging in price from about two to five dollars) were “placed beside the Bible and the hymnal on the center table in the parlor” (Adelson 646) to represent the gentility of the lady of the house. Album manufacturers created these token gifts of friendship for “socially conscious middle-class women,” white women who placed their albums where they might be appreciated in “places of honor on hundreds of parlor tables” (Wolf 3). Albums represent the commodification of print. Manufacturers produced these items to mimic handcraft, but with technological developments such as the steam-powered printing press, lithography, the availability of paper in rolls, and cloth binding, newer items could imitate the old integrity while appearing on the market faster than ever before. The move from stamped bindings pressed by hand with a woodcut to embossed covers, which used a steel or brass plate to engrave in one maneuver, made most friendship albums very fashionable and too expensive for most folk markets. In its signification of literacy and middle-class appetite, the friendship album as genre excluded antebellum African Americans. Yet black women of the early nineteenth century also owned and maintained friendship albums. Items that belonged to black writers feature ornate Moroccan leather covers with intricate designs of ovals and lyres pressed into the leather. Roughly eleven-by-nine in dimension, some with more than seventy leaves of paper, these items were large, and guest contributors filled them with many mementoes. Black women’s albums bear special inclusions such as gold leaf embossing and quality paper that indicate their excellence among similar items. Free African Americans likely gifted scrapbooks to loved ones during special occasions or holiday seasons. Their friendship albums were for exhibition because owning an album of value represented one’s popular enjoyments and relative wealth among a small cadre of free black people in the early nineteenth century. Fine items such as African American friendship albums portrayed opulence

Ben Franklin's ghost: world peace, American slavery, and the global politics of information before the Universal Postal Union

AbstractAttributing revolutionary potential to new international communications technology, notably the internet, is not new. On a global scale, similar ideas emerged in the mid nineteenth century in relation to government-subsidized mail steamers. These visions remained utopian, then as now, although some nations went further than others in attempting to implement ‘world peace’ and ‘social improvement’ through communications. Before widespread electrical transmissions, Americans created the blueprint for such utopian visions through mail steamers. Americans had long considered their postal system socially transformative; the development of mail steamers turned that social vision outwards to the globe. This article examines two movements of the 1850s that sought change through global communications: using mail steamers to resettle American free blacks in Africa and reducing international postage rates to such a low rate that increased communications would prevent war. These two nearly simultaneous histories suggest that the evolving concept of the nation-state deserves further investigation as an element at the conjuncture of global communications and social reform.

Gateway to freedom: the hidden history of the Underground Railroad

More than any other scholar, Eric Foner has influenced our understanding of America's history. Now, making brilliant use of extraordinary evidence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian once again reconfigures the national saga of American slavery and freedom. A deeply entrenched institution, slavery lived on legally and commercially even in the northern states that had abolished it after the American Revolution. Slaves could be found in the streets of New York well after traveling with owners doing business with the city's major banks, merchants, and manufacturers. New York was also home to the North's largest free black community, making it a magnet for fugitive slaves seeking refuge. Slave catchers and gangs of kidnappers roamed the city, seizing free blacks, often children, and sending them south to slavery. To protect fugitives and fight kidnappings, the city's free blacks worked with white abolitionists to organize the New York Vigilance Committee in 1835. In the 1840s vigilance committees proliferated throughout the North and began collaborating to dispatch fugitive slaves from the upper South, Washington, and Baltimore, through Philadelphia and New York, to Albany, Syracuse, and Canada. These networks of antislavery resistance, centered on New York City, became known as the underground railroad. Forced to operate in secrecy by hostile laws, courts, and politicians, the city's underground-railroad agents helped more than 3,000 fugitive slaves reach freedom between 1830 and 1860. Until now, their stories have remained largely unknown, their significance little understood. Building on fresh evidence-including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York-Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. The story is inspiring-full of memorable characters making their first appearance on the historical stage-and significant-the controversy over fugitive slaves inflamed the sectional crisis of the 1850s. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by practical abolition, person by person, family by family.

Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche (review)

Reviewed by: Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche Yael A. Sternhell (bio) Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance. By Cheryl Janifer LaRoche. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. Pp. 256. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $25.00.) Cheryl Janifer LaRoche’s aim in Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance is to unearth an alternative history of the Underground Railroad, centered on the clandestine and largely ignored work of African American communities in the southern regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. “The small rural settlements and their churches,” she argues, “were not necessarily organized as traditionally conceived Underground Railroad ‘stations’—deliberate spaces, planned or appropriated, often with the aid of White abolitionists, to hide and then facilitate a steady flow of freedom seekers to specific destinations.” Instead, “these first stops out of slavery frequently consisted of internal, church-based paths to freedom and salvation” (3). LaRoche focuses on four such locales, as well as on the complex web of families, churches, and communities operating in regions historians have often assumed to have been too dangerous for the antislavery movement. Thus the term “geography of resistance” encompasses both physical geography and human geography as well as the links between the two. In both of these areas LaRoche has much to offer. Excavating the forgotten histories of these tiny black settlements reveals new sites of Underground Railroad activity, like Poke Patch, Ohio, situated only twenty miles from the Ohio River and in the midst of the state’s iron furnace region. The settlement attracted two hundred runaways, who moved between the furnaces dotting the land as they made their way north. While the homes of white abolitionists have traditionally dominated the public memory of the movement, LaRoche shows that iron forges, as well as caves and waterways, were instrumental in facilitating the first leg of runaways’ journeys. She also demonstrates the crucial place of church organization and church leadership in weaving the webs of resistance. Along with family networks and voluntary associations, these inextricably entwined, all-black organizations created the infrastructure that enabled the successful smuggling of slaves. Covert activity took place in church conventions, Masonic lodges, family gatherings, and through the movement of itinerant pastors. The Underground Railroad thus appears in this book as the work of a tightly [End Page 311] knit and highly mobilized black community operating in the southernmost recesses of the North. Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad also makes several sound methodological points, which will speak to historians across a wide range of fields. In order to excavate the histories of these forgotten hamlets, LaRoche has relied heavily on archaeology and on the close study of the physical landscape. In Miller Grove, Illinois, she found “foundations and wells, garden flowers and yucca plants” testifying to the settlement’s past existence (43). Cemeteries also figure prominently in her research: “Where towns or churches no longer exist, tombstones and grave markers remain as the last vestiges of a once vital Black settlement. . . . Inscriptions on gravestones provide genealogies for interrelated families living on the early Black frontier. Cemeteries mark free Black communities and connect them to the Underground Railroad” (102). In addition, LaRoche has integrated her findings into older maps of the movement, showing the close proximity between white centers of abolition and free black settlements, and between African Methodist Episcopal church circuits and known Underground Railroad routes. While the visual evidence is integrated into a traditional monograph, her use of maps as a form of evidence will be useful to scholars interested in the growing trend of mapping space and movement in digital forms. The author has also made extensive use of oral histories, opting to believe what she heard from descendants and locals even when written evidence could not be found. She makes a forceful argument for this methodological decision: “I am cautious about disregarding lore and longstanding legends without research supporting refutation. Often we are less rigorous in denial of fact than we are in corroboration and acceptance. . . . I advocate preserving stories despite apparently implausible, anachronistic, or temporally and geographically inaccurate data. These same errors can and do...

A desolate place for a defiant people: the archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and enslaved laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp

In the 250 years before the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was a brutal landscape--2,000 square miles of undeveloped and unforgiving wetlands, peat bogs, impenetrable foliage, and dangerous creatures. It was also a protective refuge for marginalized communities, including Native Americans, African-American maroons, free African Americans, and outcast Europeans. Here they created their own way of life, free of the exploitation and alienation they had escaped. In the first thorough examination of this vital site, Daniel Sayers examines the area's archaeological record, exposing and unraveling the complex social and economic systems developed by these defiant communities that thrived on the periphery. He develops an analytical framework based on the complex interplay between alienation, diasporic exile, uneven geographical development, and modes of production to argue that colonialism and slavery inevitably created sustained critiques of American capitalism. Published in cooperation with the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Free Blacks of Virginia: A Personal Narrative, A Legal Construct

The Free Blacks of Virginia are a mostly unknown group in United States history. The common narrative is that all Africans were brought to this country as slaves with no rights, and systematically received legal privileges after the Civil War in the 1860s and the Civil Rights struggle in the 1960s. The reality differs from this assumption. The first Africans who landed on the shores of Virginia in 1619 began their lives as indentured servants similar to many European immigrants. After finishing their term of service, these Africans were accorded liberties such as the right to vote, own property, and import both European and African servants. The mid to late 1600s brought the legal transformation of Africans from servants for a term to servants for life, or slaves with no rights. The author employs her own family’s history in Virginia to illustrate how the initial cluster of Free Blacks grew through manumissions and births at the same time as their legal rights were systematically and dramatically restricted.

The Cult of Quality: White Eugenics and Black Responses in the United States, 1900-1934

This paper focuses on the theory of eugenics and how it was adopted and subverted by black intellectual figures when institutionalized sterilizations were based upon class. The cornerstone of the eugenics theory was based in biological determinism and assumptions of genetic heritability. For black leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois in particular, the early plight for racial legitimacy rested on eugenics and, while morally questionable, strengthening the black community was an attempt to counteract white assumptions. Thus,‘black eugenics’ should not immediately be condemned as an outright failure but should be regarded as an earnest attempt for civil rights. As such, it should not be forgotten and should be recognized as part of the broader framework for African American liberation.

The passenger cases and the commerce clause: immigrants, blacks, and states' rights in antebellum America

In 1849 Chief Justice Taney's Court delivered a 5-4 decision on the legal status of immigrants and free blacks under the federal commerce power. The closely divided decision, further emphasized by the fact there were eight opinions, played a part in the increasingly contested politics over growing immigration, and the controversies about fugitive slaves and the western expansion of slavery that resulted in the Compromise of 1850. In the decades after the Civil War federal regulation of immigration almost entirely displaced the role of the states. Yet, over a century later, Justice Scalia in Arizona v. US appealed to the era when states exercised greater control over who they allowed to cross their borders; a dissent which has returned the Passenger Cases to the contemporary relevance. The Passenger Cases provide a counter-history that allowed the Court to affirm federal supremacy and state-federal cooperation in Arizona I (2011) and II (2012). In The Passenger Cases and the Commerce Clause Tony Allan Freyer focuses on the antebellum Supreme Court's role prescribing state-federal regulation of immigrants, the movement of free blacks within the United States and on the origins, state court decisions, federal precedents, appellate arguments, and opinion-making that culminated in the Court's decision of the Passenger Cases. The Court's split decision provided political legitimacy for the 1850 Compromise: enactment of a stronger fugitive slave law, admission of slavery in western territories based on popular vote of residents (popular sovereignty), and the abolition of the slave trade in Washington D.C. The divided opinions in the Passenger Cases also influenced the immigrant and slavery crises which disrupted the balance between free and slave-labor states, culminating in the Civil War. The states did indeed enact laws enabling exclusion of undesirable white immigrants and free blacks. The 5-4 division of the Court anticipated the better known, but even more divisive, views of the Justices in the Dred Scott case (1857). And in considering the post-Reconstruction evolution of new standards by which to judge immigration issues, the Passenger Cases revealed the continuing controversy over how to treat those who wish to come to our country, even as federal law came to dominate the regulation of immigration. These issues continued to complicate immigration law as much today as they did more than a century and a half ago. The persistence of these problems suggested that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind continued to demand a coherent, humane, and more consistent immigration policy.

The ragged road to abolition: slavery and freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865

Contrary to popular perception, slavery persisted in the North well into the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in New Jersey, the last northern state to pass an abolition statute, in 1804. Because of the nature of the law, which freed children born to enslaved mothers only after they had served their mother's master for more than two decades, slavery continued in New Jersey through the Civil War. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally destroyed its last vestiges. The Ragged Road to Abolition chronicles the experiences of slaves and free blacks, as well as abolitionists and slaveholders, during slavery's slow northern death. Abolition in New Jersey during the American Revolution was a contested battle, in which constant economic devastation and fears of freed blacks overrunning the state government limited their ability to gain freedom. New Jersey's gradual abolition law kept at least a quarter of the state's population in some degree of bondage until the 1830s. The sustained presence of slavery limited African American community formation and forced Jersey blacks to structure their households around multiple gradations of freedom while allowing New Jersey slaveholders to participate in the interstate slave trade until the 1850s. Slavery's persistence dulled white understanding of the meaning of freedom and helped whites to associate black with slave, enabling the further marginalization of New Jersey's growing free population. By demonstrating how deeply slavery influenced the political, economic, and social life of blacks and whites in New Jersey, this illuminating study shatters the perceived easy dichotomies between North and South or free states and slave states at the onset of the Civil War.

Merchants of Independence: International Trade on the Santa Fe Trail, 1827–1860 by William P. O’Brien (review)

Reviewed by: Merchants of Independence: International Trade on the Santa Fe Trail, 1827–1860 by William P. O’Brien Christopher Menking Merchants of Independence: International Trade on the Santa Fe Trail, 1827–1860. By William P. O’Brien. (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2014. Pp. 219. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) William O’Brien’s book looks at what would become the southwestern United States through the experiences of the town of Independence, Missouri, and the Santa Fe Trail. He uses the economic experience of the town as a microcosm for international trade between the United States and Mexico during this period. This new interpretation of the significance of the Santa Fe Trail allows O’Brien to draw a larger significance from what much of the historiography has considered a regional story. His central argument is that an inquiry into the economic and social experiences of Independence’s role in the Santa Fe Trail can reveal much about this history of the Southwest and the nature of international trade during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Santa Fe Trail serves more as a persistent theme than the focus of O’Brien’s book. He uses the trail and the growth of Independence to show that the nature of international trade meant embracing social and racial differences for the purpose of economic gain. In this version of the narrative, O’Brien argues that the pursuit of profit necessitated the cooperation of groups that normally would be at odds with each other. This argument dominates his book. His discussion includes whites from across the United States, free blacks, Mexicans, and American Indians all working towards their own economic benefit. Without this cooperation, O’Brien argues, the Santa Fe Trail would not have been such a significant part of the international trade with Mexico. O’Brien extrapolates from [End Page 430] the example of racial cooperation in Independence that international trade at this time could only be facilitated by those willing to set aside nationalistic and ethnic differences. This experience on the frontier of the United States that O’Brien argues is so telling of international trade is reminiscent of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. O’Brien makes a similar argument: the regional experience of Independence and the merchants of the Santa Fe Trail is significant despite such a small part of the population directly experiencing the trade. While O’Brien never makes as comprehensive a claim as Turner, he establishes a basis for using this particular experience as a benchmark for understanding international trade in the early nineteenth century. O’Brien’s book convincingly ties the experience of international trade in the Southwest to both the national and international experience. Although this is ostensibly a local history of a Missouri town, it also tells the story of the United States in the early 1800s. This frontier town served as a crossroads for the international trade and a microcosm of the changes shaping the United States. This book contributes to the historiographies of not only the Southwest and of economic history but also the United States at large. O’Brien did a remarkable job with such a small volume. Christopher Menking University of North Texas Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance

Journal Article Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance Get access Cheryl Janifer LaRoche. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. xx, 232 pp. Cloth, $85.00. Paper, $25.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Pages 1264–1265, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav066 Published: 01 March 2015

Without Representation, No Taxation: Free Blacks, Taxes, and Tax Exemptions Between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars

This Essay is the first general survey of the taxation of free Blacks in free and slave states between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. A few states treated all equally for tax purposes, but most states enacted taxation systems that subjected free Blacks to different requirements. Both free and slave states viewed free Blacks as an undesirable population, and this Essay posits that—within the relevant political constraints—states used taxes and tax exemptions to dissuade free Black immigration and limit the opportunities for free Blacks within their borders. This topic is salient for at least two reasons. First, the Essay sheds light on laws and events that the literature—and the American educational system—has largely ignored. It directly contradicts the commonly held belief that free Blacks largely enjoyed the same set of rights and privileges as their White counterparts until Jim Crow and the Black Codes set in after the Civil War. Second, by juxtaposing then-widely prevailing views with historical tax laws, this Essay underscores the inherent relationship between tax policy and social policy. Taxes have never been just about bolstering the public fisc. Although this Essay will hopefully never have direct applicability to contemporary events, it can provide insight into current and future tax policies and the extent to which history, prejudice, and economic concerns inform policymakers’ decisions.