Free Black Research Articles

The Re-enslavement of Free Black People in Texas, 1858–1864

The Re-enslavement of Free Black People in Texas, 1858–1864

A Family Affair: Black Family Networks and the 1822 Vesey Conspiracy

Abstract: In 1822, white authorities in Charleston, South Carolina, discovered a major uprising among the city's free Black and enslaved population. After more than 100 people were arrested for their roles in the putative plot, sixty-seven people were convicted and either executed or banished from the country. While the episode, known as the Denmark Vesey conspiracy after the uprising's ringleader, is well-known to historians more generally, we know much less about how it affected the lived experiences of Black Charlestonians and how it influenced Black family networks. Although we know that women and sometimes children participated in slave insurrections like Vesey's conspiracy, we do not know how rebels used kinship ties to mobilize their resistive movements or what kind of precise impact violent resistance strategies had on Black communities in early America more broadly. Yet when analyzed through Black family networks, the conspiracy reveals how people used familial connections to spread insurrection and protect themselves from enslaver violence. Notwithstanding the use of these relationships to protect against chattel slavery, the conspiracy itself became another obstacle to their fight for freedom.

To Be Visible without Being Seen in the Age of Nat Turner: A Documentary Archaeology of Free Black Responses to Dissonance in the City of Alexandria, Virginia, 1829–1833

To Be Visible without Being Seen in the Age of Nat Turner: A Documentary Archaeology of Free Black Responses to Dissonance in the City of Alexandria, Virginia, 1829–1833

Postapartheid Anti-blackness in Kopano Matlwa's Coconut

ABSTRACT: This paper reads Kopano Matlwa's debut novel, Coconut , as a critical reflection on the incomplete work of social, economic, and juridical inclusion. It outlines inconclusive episodes in the lives of two young black women: Ofilwe, a member of a rarified upper middle class, and Fikile, ensnared in grinding poverty. Drawing on Denise Ferreira Da Silva and Calvin Warren, the paper shows how Matlwa addresses the uncritical embrace of this racist and historically oppressive discourse among nominally free blacks, both among enduringly destitute slum dwellers and the emergent nouveau riche. In the novel, social death comes in the form of internalized anti-blackness as the two young black women featured in the novel doggedly pursue white identities as a means for successful existence in postapartheid South Africa.

Gender, Class, and Slavery in Plautus’ Rudens in 1884 St. Louis

Abstract: The performance of Rudens in 1884 by the Ladies’ Literary Society of Washington University allows consideration of discourses surrounding the problems of slavery and emancipation in 1884 St. Louis. Comparing Plautus’ text (and representation of Roman slavery), the English translation prepared to accompany the performance, and published reviews of the performance reveals crucial redactions and alterations. Even as reviews reveal enthusiasm for the theatrical production, judged authentic for costuming and Latin pronunciation, the changes are shown to reproduce traditional American discourses about slavery and freedom, contemporary narratives about free Blacks, and local, campus discourses about the end of Reconstruction.

Conversions of Jacob Hodges: Religion, Race, and Labor in Prison Reform Literature

Abstract: Born to a free Black family, Jack Hodges (ca. 1763–1842) was arrested for the murder of a white man in 1819 and served a term at New York's Auburn State Prison, the world-famous prototype of industrial prison discipline, where he experienced a life-altering Christian conversion. Also known as Jacob Hodges, he became one of the nineteenth century's most famous incarcerated African Americans, appearing in popular crime writing, children's books, reform society reports, and spiritual biographies. Today, however, Hodges is unacknowledged, even among scholars of race and prison studies. My interdisciplinary essay advances both historical and interpretive claims. I reconstruct Hodges's life in the crucible of evangelical Protestantism, racial assimilation, and industrial market capitalism, which worked together, I argue, to shape the ideology of the modern prison system. I also analyze the vivid fantasies about Hodges that circulated in reformist literature. Unlike the majority of captives, whose struggles left only faint traces in the archives, Hodges was neither the object of dehumanizing violence nor the subject of coldly rational surveillance; he was listened to, admired, and treated with sympathy. As a case study in evangelical reformism's sentimental, possessive style of love, the literature about Hodges poses special challenges and opportunities for abolitionist reading.

RDCWorld: performing the Black nerd in new media

Abstract With their fingers on the pulse of popular culture, RDCWorld, a digital content creation group primarily composed of young Black men, enjoys a following largely gained from their anime-inspired videos that unite a community of like-minded Black nerds in the US and speaks to the power digital media has to construct spaces based on identities that have historically been marginalized, within both Black and White-dominated spaces. Using a content analysis of their videos and textual analysis of fan comments and social media engagement, I argue that RDCWorld’s performance as Black nerds subverts traditional notions of identity, play, and space by resisting notions of the stereotypical cool Black aesthetic, integrating transnational media with Blackness to create new modes of self-representation, challenging hegemonic constructions of public play, and by normalizing spaces of free Black expression through their anime and gaming convention, DreamCon.

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.

John Witherspoon and Slavery

Like many of the American Founders, Witherspoon was influential and successful in several different pursuits. We are right to remember him as an important Christian pastor, as an American patriot, and as Princeton's first great president. The question we must ask, then, is whether this man and his accomplishments are rendered suspect, or at least made moot, because of one issue: slavery. On the one hand there is much in what Witherspoon said and did that shows him to be an opponent of slavery. While a pastor in Scotland, he baptized a runaway slave belonging to one of the leading members of his church. Later at Princeton, Witherspoon gladly taught free Blacks. His stated opinions—in writing and in lectures—were uniformly against slavery. He voiced objections to mistreating slaves and urged masters to instruct their slaves and equip them for future freedom. On the other hand, Witherspoon owned slaves. For many, that's all we need to know to denounce Witherspoon as self-serving hypocrite. Yet, we should look more closely at the historical record. Until now, Witherspoon has been condemned as an enslaver on mainly one piece of paper: an inventory prepared after his death that listed among his property two slaves. Even this line has not been quoted in its entirety or considered alongside the other contemporaneous account of his possessions. The full record needs a fuller explanation. Despite his flaws, there is little doubt that Witherspoon was, on the whole, more enlightened on the issue of slavery than many of his generation, and less personally complicit in the evils of slavery than many of our country's most celebrated founders.

Equiano's African Methodist Appetite: Feasting and Purification Rituals as Community and Resistance

Abstract: This article draws on food studies, religious history, and research on Equiano's religious orientation to argue that Equiano's Interesting Narrative describes a creolized African and Methodist asceticism in relation to food and ritual practice. His introduction to the Moravian-Methodist love feast before his conversion resonates with his earlier textual recollections of commensality and feasting practices in his eastern Nigerian homeland. Equiano's early textual descriptions of feasting rituals suggest that he was attracted to Methodism because of his experiences through the Middle Passage and his memories of feasting practices, purification rites, and sacrifices and offerings from his childhood in Igboland. Equiano's experiences of sacrifice and his portrayals of hunger and hunger strikes as a form of resistance on the slave ships mark his choice of religious and ascetic orientation. His reclamation of the ocean as a free Black sailor, an Atlantic Creole, contributes to his interest to a temperate Methodist orientation and inner-worldly asceticism.

The African-American liberation perspectives of Dale P. Andrews in conversation with other practical theologies

This study endeavors a comprehensive conversation between the African-American liberation perspectives of Dale P. Andrews and other contemporary practical theologies and liberationist perspectives. A pertinent question here arises: Will Andrews’ approach to ethnic-specific liberation properly dialogue with other practical theologies in correlation? In response, the researched argument intends to evidence that his methodology does, in fact, resonate well with notable scholars from the guild, even those from other cultural backgrounds and diverse geographical locations. In that stride, consider that Westernization and its concomitant individualism has adversely affected ethnic cultures and their collectivist natures, also resulting in power imbalances between America’s elite classes and the poor and disenfranchised. African-Americans, specifically, are often marginalized and oppressed, which goes against the biblical narrative and imperative for the church to properly “love thy neighbor” (Mark 12:31) and to seek liberation for those who are poor and destitute (Ps. 9:18; Prov. 14:31). Towards potential resolution, Andrews emphasized robust ecclesiological practices, stressing the importance of a flourishing Black American church, with the additional hope that such Spirit-inspired thriving would pour over into society as a whole. The selected theologians brought into the researched dialogue are intentional in identifying and working toward solutions regarding reconciled race relations and socio-spiritual liberation. Moreover, the increasingly multicultural church of America would do well to allow itself to be openly influenced by Majority World spiritualities, most specifically the songfulness and communal/cultural aspects of African religion.

Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw , and: Commeraw's Stoneware: The Life and Work of the First African-American Pottery Owner by A. Brandt Zipp (review)

Crafting Freedom: The Life and Legacy of Free Black Potter Thomas W. Commeraw , and: Commeraw's Stoneware: The Life and Work of the First African-American Pottery Owner by A. Brandt Zipp (review)

Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South

AbstractWhile every slave state except Louisiana limited free Black testimony in cases involving whites, and most barred it completely, several jurisdictions with slavery, including three in the Upper South—Delaware, Maryland, and D.C.—allowed at least some free Black testimony in cases involving whites at least some of the time. Historians and legal scholars have largely overlooked the phenomenon of free Black testimony in the South, outside of Louisiana. In this article, I argue that courts in the Upper South allowed some free Black testimony in cases involving whites in part because allowing (limited) Black testimony enabled courts to access the truth (slightly) more freely, thereby increasing the law's legitimacy. The exceptions to the general bar against Black testimony in cases involving whites also demonstrate the diversity of legal trends in the antebellum Upper South. In Maryland, the space for free Black testimony shrank. In D.C. and Delaware, it grew. But Southerners long contested the relationship between race and law. Competing pressures to administer a well-functioning legal system and to maintain racial hierarchy exerted force on the white elite. Southern elites, even before the great convulsion of the Civil War, sometimes divided on how best to administer a white supremacist legal regime.

Does Colonial Institutional Legacy Fully Explain Why Nations Fail? Theoretical and Empirical Confrontations Using the Case of Haiti

Economic history is mobilized by neo-institutionalists to explain the different paths to development observed in post-colonial countries. Acemoglu and Robinson have considered Haiti as an archetype of colonial institutional legacy to describe why Nations fail. Is this deterministic lecture sufficient to understand the troubled development journey of the first free Black Country? In this research, we show, with empirical and historical evidence, that institutional path-dependence theory is not the best analytical framework for the case of Haiti. Critical juncture theory appears to be more appropriate to capture what is really going on in neocolonial Haiti. We also contribute to the critical juncture theory with long-term historical evidence.

Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards (review)

Reviewed by: Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Laura F. Edwards Emily J. Arendt (bio) Keywords Clothing, Textiles, Property rights, Legal history Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Laura F. Edwards. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 433. Cloth, $34.95.) As material displays of identity, markers of class and status, or symbols of political persuasion, clothing's power to convey a variety of cultural messages has been of increasing interest to historians. Certainly, the economic significance of clothing and textiles for both trade and manufacturing in early America is widely recognized. Vastly underappreciated, however, is the place of law in those dynamics. As Laura Edwards demonstrates in her [End Page 357] newest work, both the social and economic value of textiles derived from the legal principles that attached to this form of property: "the legal principles associated with textiles involved foundational cultural values and social customs that defined the good order of society" (20). Everyone knew the value of clothing and textiles, generally knew who the owners of those items were in their communities, and recognized that court protections of those possessions were necessary to uphold public order. Clothing, cloth, linens, drapes, and even accessories like hats thus represented a unique type of property that allowed the people who produced them, traded them, and wore them to make claims to property, even if they lacked strong claims to other legal rights. For dependent persons, including married women, free Blacks, and enslaved peoples, textiles could be owned and traded, used as currency, credit, and capital. Proceeding in three parts containing thematic chapters while charting a chronological narrative, the book demonstrates how marginalized people could rely upon the legal principles that attached to textiles to both engage in the economy and access the governing institutions of the new nation, at least for a time. The legal principles attached to textiles, as shown in the book's first part, pre-dated the American Revolution and were minimally altered by the establishment of the U.S. federal system. In line with recent scholarship demonstrating the extent to which people on the margins were engaged in commercial exchange, Edwards elucidates how the legalities of textiles superseded the laws of coverture and slavery to allow people with no formal rights to enter the textile trades in the decades following the Revolution. Rebecca Coles, for instance, established a successful textile business in Virginia around the same time as the Revolution, producing fabric to be used not only by the household on the plantation, but for sale. That Coles might be considered a manufacturer defies the assumptions many of us hold regarding the power of a rights-based legal framework: How could a married woman with no legal claim to the things she produced be a successful manufacturer? The answer resides in the legal qualities of textiles, qualities lodged especially in public law where concern for the public good had long allowed claims to textiles by those whose property rights would not be recognized under private law. Non-rights holders adopted an array of creative strategies to obtain the legal recognitions that allowed them to tap into textiles' full economic potential as currency and capital to trade, pawn, lend, or save. From the tale of prisoners at Philadelphia's Walnut Street jail selling the clothing they had been gifted to obtain alcohol between 1789 and 1820, [End Page 358] to the story of Rosenah Gray, an enslaved woman who invested in fabric for resale and saving but was accused of theft in 1802, the rich examples in the book's second part demonstrate the various ways textiles functioned as financial instruments as well as consumer goods. Careful to note that racial and class privilege structured the range of opportunities available to marginalized peoples, Edwards nonetheless demonstrates the extent to which people facing structural inequalities could use the creation and circulation of textiles to their own benefit within the legal order of the republic. Ultimately, Edwards argues, a series of shifts in the decades leading up to the Civil...

Legacies of Resistance and Resilience: Antebellum Free African Americans and Contemporary Minority Social Control in the Northeast

Abstract To understand the persistence of racial disparities in the United States, inequality scholars have increasingly focused attention on historic regimes of violence and social control. In particular, a burgeoning literature examines the legacy of slavery, generally finding that where slavery was deeply entrenched, today racial inequalities and African-American deprivation are more acute. However, taking seriously the notion that history matters means considering not only the lingering effects of dehumanizing social control institutions like slavery but also the ramifications of antebellum institutions and cultures of resistance and resilience African Americans built for survival. Using quantitative methods, I examine the relationship between antebellum free African-American populations and racial inequalities in modern state-sanctioned social control. Focusing on the understudied Northeast, a region where free African-American communities flourished despite coexisting with slavery, I find that where free African Americans were more prevalent—and, thus, resistance to White’s social control efforts and resilience in the face of White hostility more robust—those same areas today display reduced levels of racial inequality in social control (i.e., lower Black–White arrest rate disparities) and reduced absolute levels of minority social control (i.e., lower African-American arrest rates). Mediation analyses reveal contemporary civil rights infrastructure, Black congregations, and Black political power operate as structural safeguards and are important components of the legacies of resistance and resilience left by free African Americans.

The Material World of Eyre Hall: Four Centuries of Chesapeake History ed. by Carl R. Lounsbury

Reviewed by: The Material World of Eyre Hall: Four Centuries of Chesapeake History ed. by Carl R. Lounsbury Shelby M. Balik The Material World of Eyre Hall: Four Centuries of Chesapeake History. Edited by Carl R. Lounsbury. (Baltimore: Maryland Center for History and Culture, 2021. Pp. 447. $89.95, ISBN 978-1-911282-91-4.) When we picture an eighteenth-century plantation, we might imagine stately architecture and elegant grounds. Or we might consider the terrors of slavery poorly concealed by a veneer of grandeur. But do we consider what preceded or followed that historical moment? How do we assess the broader currents—war, economic swings, new technologies, and social change—that transformed the place and its residents? In The Material World of Eyre Hall: Four Centuries of Chesapeake History, editor Carl R. Lounsbury and a host of authors ask these questions of a private estate on Virginia’s Eastern Shore where one family has lived since the seventeenth century (the house itself was built in 1759). The book documents the family, their property, and their possessions over nearly four centuries, telling the intertwined stories of all who have lived there—not just the descendants of Thomas and Susanna Eyre, who settled on the Eastern [End Page 339] Shore around 1650, but also the enslaved Africans whose labor made the Eyres wealthy, and their free Black descendants, many of whom continued to live and work on or near the property. Eyre Hall is among the few southern estates that have never transferred ownership; that continuity allows us to examine change over time in a controlled setting. Readers can trace the house, its occupants, its landscapes, and the objects that have filled its rooms across generations. This book interweaves several scholarly projects: a family chronicle, an oral history, a study of a built environment, and a catalog of books, artwork, ceramics, silver, furniture, and other objects. In the lengthy historical narrative, the authors use a wealth of sources, most significantly wills and probate records, as a “Rosetta Stone” to understand the family’s changing material life, and they provide contextual discussions of the family’s social, cultural, and economic milieu as well as vignettes to highlight archaeological finds (p. 25). Oral histories shed light on more recent generations, particularly the Black families who lived around the estate in the twentieth century. Studies of architecture and landscapes—both aesthetic and functional—show how work and leisure intersected. The book’s “catalogue raisonné” details objects the family used over time and offers historical context to explain how these items reflected a wider material culture (p. 17). Throughout, high-quality photographs, diagrams, architectural drawings, and maps offer essential visual aids. It is difficult to ask more of a book that packs so much into 450 large-format pages, but if any part of this history might have been better developed, it is that of Eyre Hall’s Black occupants. To be sure, the authors pay careful attention to these families; lists of enslaved people, an account of an 1852 escape, and descriptions of outbuildings where they worked illuminate their experiences. But in a work of material culture, the imbalance between the stories of Black and white families is visible. This disparity is expected, to a degree; the objects that enslaved and impoverished people (including free Blacks) used were often ephemeral and rarely kept as heirlooms. Eyre Hall might bear scant record of this history. But historians and archaeologists studying the Chesapeake have uncovered evidence of farming and domestic implements, building styles, burial customs, clothing, and spiritual objects used by generations of Black families. The Material World of Eyre Hall’s authors might have used this research to cast a wider (albeit more speculative) lens on the daily lives of Black residents, thereby making them more central to the estate’s story. This critique, however, should not diminish the book’s contributions. Using many lenses though which to examine Eyre Hall’s material history, the authors have presented a rich and complex picture of the estate. Connecting objects, people, and landscapes across time, this volume offers a new model of how scholars might understand the culture of place. Shelby M. Balik Metropolitan State University of...

An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World by Andrew N. Wegmann

Reviewed by: An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World by Andrew N. Wegmann Darryl G. Barthé An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World. By Andrew N. Wegmann. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 238. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6078-2; cloth, $114.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-6076-8.) Andrew N. Wegmann is a talented researcher who has ventured bravely into the murkiest of historical contexts with his monograph An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World. Histories of race and nation are, presently, among the most treacherous of scholarly discourses, and the author should first be commended for wading into those waters in the first place. Some of his observations are contentious, and it is certain that future scholars will take him to task for an incomplete contextualization of Gulf Coast Creolité and for Indigenous erasure. However, Wegmann has elected to have a hard conversation at a time when many prefer to avoid hard conversations, and that deserves recognition. The book itself is well written. Wegmann accomplishes a skillful navigation of the legal discourses surrounding race across two centuries and three colonial regimes. This is no small feat in itself. At its best, An American Color demonstrates the dialectical progression of racist thought and legislation in Louisiana, showing the consistencies (and/or lack thereof) from one regime to the next. Scholars have long recognized that racial lines in Louisiana were often blurrier and more negotiable before 1803 than in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, under the American regime. That fact can often give the impression that Latin Louisiana was, somehow, more enlightened or tolerant when it came to issues of race and caste. Wegmann does not fall into this trap, however, and rightly observes that every colonial regime in Louisiana—French, Spanish, and American—has been predicated on white supremacy. Yet, in his attempt to emphasize the commonality and experiential continuity between the communities of free people of color in Francophone and Creolophone New Orleans and communities of free African Americans in Anglophone colonial spaces in the United States, one cannot help but feel at times that the author overstates his case. Wegmann attempts to place “New Orleans and its foreign, bizarre, frightening ‘mulattoes and quadroons’ into the narrative of American racial identity and relations during the first half of the nineteenth century” (p. 7). This, however, is an effort that defies nineteenth-century Louisiana Creole people’s own self-identification as neither “American” nor “foreign” to the land where they lived. An American Color does not engage the subject of Louisiana Creole Afro-Indigeneity at all. By the end of his work, Wegmann announces with authority that Creoles in New Orleans were “American. It just took them a while to admit it” (p. 145). This observation, however, is not consistent with New Orleans Creoles’ own [End Page 349] views of themselves during the nineteenth century (or during the first half of the twentieth century, according to primary source accounts left by A. P. Tureaud, Marcus Christian, and Gilbert Martin, among others). In the end, readers are left to wonder at the distance between Wegmann’s perception of nineteenth- century New Orleans Creoles and nineteenth-century New Orleans Creoles’ perception of themselves. One does not have to agree with Wegmann’s conclusions—and often I do not—in order to recognize the skillfulness of his labor. Future scholars of Creole Louisiana will, no doubt, derive some benefit from his efforts. At the same time, I could not read An American Color without being reminded that in Louisiana, French is not taught as a heritage language but as a “foreign” language to people with names like “Boudreaux” and “Poché,” “Broussard” and “Barthé,” even when those people are, as I am, only a generation removed from native Francophones and Creolophones. This is Americanization contemporarily manifested, and, to be certain, Wegmann’s is an American’s history of Creole New Orleans, constructed from the outside looking in, with all that that entails. Darryl G. Barthé Dartmouth University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association...

Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country. By Fay A. Yarbrough

This is the second major book publication by Rice University history professor Fay Yarbrough. Building upon her earlier work on Cherokee gender, race, and legal history, Yarbrough here explores how Choctaws enslaved African Americans and built a legal framework that denied Black rights and contributed to Choctaw support of the Confederate States during the U.S. Civil War. Yarbrough provides insightful analysis of Choctaw government legislation and constitution writing from before Removal through the Civil War and into the Reconstruction era. This legal history aspect exposes the hardening racial dynamics of the Choctaw Nation leading up to the Civil War (especially against unrelated free Blacks and non-married, unrelated White men), gendered discourses, and efforts to support and strengthen tribal sovereignty. Intermixing of Choctaw and Cherokee sources to illustrate slave life among the Indian nations and to explain the problems with trying to remain neutral during the secession crisis causes some confusion but direct sources on the Choctaws are limited.

Three little arbitrage theorems

The authors proved three theorems about the exact solutions of a generalized or interacting Black–Scholes equation that explicitly includes arbitrage bubbles. These arbitrage bubbles can be characterized by an arbitrage number AN. The first theorem states that if AN = 0, then the solution at maturity of the interacting equation is identical to the solution of the free Black–Scholes equation with the same initial interest rate of r. The second theorem states that if AN ≠ 0, then the interacting solution can be expressed in terms of all higher derivatives of the solutions to the free Black–Scholes equation with an initial interest rate of r. The third theorem states that for a given arbitrage number, the interacting solution is a solution to the free Black–Scholes equation but with a variable interest rate of r(τ) = r + (1/τ)AN(τ), where τ = T − t.