Freedom Suits Research Articles

Flexibility and freedom suit me better: food delivery couriers' preferred employment status.

This research examines food delivery couriers' preferred employment status and factors explaining their opinions. Previous studies have used qualitative research methods and are unable to explain couriers' general views on employment status. In this research, a survey of 1,539 Wolt couriers was carried out in Finland with logistic regression, cross-tabulation, and content analysis as analysis methods. The results show that 56% of the couriers wanted to work as self-employed and 25% as employed. The opinion was most strongly explained by valuing work-related freedom and flexibility, which were associated with the right to refuse delivery tasks offered and to choose the amount of work, working hours and delivery vehicle. The preference for self-employment was also increased by the duration of courier work, one's own choice to work as a courier, and age. Freedom and flexibility are dependent on the sufficient availability of delivery tasks, posing challenges when the demand is low.

The Black American Revolution: The American Revolution as Experienced by African Americans

This paper focuses on how the American Revolution mobilized the enslaved and free black population in a way that constitutes a "Black American Revolution." In particular, the enslaved population engaged in multiple efforts for freedom, ranging from fighting in the Revolutionary War to writing petitions to state legislatures. First, I present how the "slavery metaphor" propagated by white Loyalists indicates the inherent differences in how the white and black populations experienced the Revolution. There is an overall discussion of the various methods the enslaved used in their attempts to gain freedom: military service, slave petitions, freedom suits, and escape. I also examine the surge of free black communities as a result of the Revolution, helped by white abolitionist allies. Additionally, the impact the Revolution had on slavery as an institution is assessed in both the North and South. Finally, the overall success of the Black American Revolution is determined.

Antona’s Suit

Abstract Antona, originally from Upper Guinea, raised a family in Mexico’s Black Pacific. Her story, memorialized in a freedom suit from 1597, suggests that framing survival as agency helps us reconstruct the experiences of people in a way that accounts for the complexity of power in their historical contexts.

Indigenous Freedom Suits, Epistemological Mobilities, and the Deep Archive

ABSTRACT This article focuses on ways of thinking productively about Indigenous freedom litigation suits, how scholars read that documentary record, whether we can give voice to the voiceless, and how ways of reading litigation records that included records from the ‘deep archive’, namely notorial and parish records, can inform epistemological seeing and knowledge mobilization. It is a cautionary tale that encourages a careful approach to slavery’s archives as sites that constitute, validate, and activate historical evidence about Indigenous slaves who litigated for their freedom.

Slavery, Freedom Suits, and Legal Praxis in the Ottoman Empire, ca. 1590–1710

AbstractBeginning with the story of the Muslim youth Mehmed bin Abdülcelil of Tunis, this article examines the plight of Ottoman subjects abducted and sold into slavery within the Ottoman Empire and their efforts to regain freedom through Ottoman courts. Freedom suits (hürriyet davaları) were common in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, so much so that contemporary legal praxis manuals (sukuk) always provided examples of how to document them, but they have never been systematically studied for this period in which slave ownership was extremely widespread and the legality of enslavement depended solely on religion and subjecthood. Drawing on a sample of seventy-nine suits from greater Istanbul and eleven sukuk manuscripts, this article considers how the trade in the illegally enslaved was concealed by the immense traffic in licit captives and how the theoretical protections of Ottoman subjecthood clashed with the practical challenges of how to prove it, exposing the gap between slavery as legal institution and slaving in practice. Whereas the vast majority of freedom suits ended in rulings in favor of the victims, most of the illegally enslaved probably never managed to have their cases heard or were turned away for lack of evidence.

The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston by Karen Woods Weierman

Reviewed by: The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston by Karen Woods Weierman Sarah E. Yerima The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston. By Karen Woods Weierman. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. xv + 164 pp. In 1836, a six-year-old enslaved girl named Med accompanied her enslaver from New Orleans to Boston. As an enslaved child in a free state, Med possessed an obscure legal status: should she be accorded the rights of legal personhood, or did she retain the status of animate property? The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided Med's fate in Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), when it ruled that enslaved people transported into Massachusetts were entitled to freedom. While many scholars have discussed the free-soil legal precedent set by Commonwealth v. Aves, few have considered Med's life before and after the case. Now, throughout this book, Karen Woods Weierman carefully examines Commonwealth v. Aves by placing Med, the child litigant, at the center of the suit's history. After the ruling, the newly freed Med was released into state custody. Separated from her family, she spent two years in a Massachusetts orphanage for poor, Black children before dying from an unnamed illness. How could Med have met such a tragic fate? Weierman contends that scholars must be attentive to the minor, dependent status of children who served as plaintiffs in freedom suits. In so doing, we gain a better understanding of the complicated, incomplete forms of emancipation that freedom suits often generated. For a formerly enslaved child, freedom "really meant being under the control of different adults" (41). By connecting the histories of slavery, childhood, and the law, Weierman makes a vital scholarly contribution and a compelling argument about the precarious nature of freedom in the antebellum North. The book is organized into five thematic chapters. In the first chapter, Weierman discusses the free-soil principle as it emerged in eighteenth-century [End Page 332] England with Somerset v. Stewart (1772) and compares Med's life to that of Phillis Wheatley. Both Med and Wheatley were brought to Boston as enslaved children. Both were embraced in abolitionist circles, emancipated and, eventually, abandoned by white benefactors. Wheatley, however, lived into adulthood and left behind a body of creative work. Weierman asks how we might "be responsibly creative" in using Wheatley's extant writings "to imagine Med's interiority" (28). In the second chapter, Weierman details the proceedings of Med's trial. Med's enslaver, Samuel Slater, argued that he maintained guardianship over Med in Massachusetts because he possessed ownership of Med's mother. Slater also argued that Med's manumission was wrongful since it would separate Med from the rest of her family. Med's lawyers countered that Slater could reunify the family by manumitting all of Med's relatives. Throughout this chapter, Weierman notes how each side professed its right to speak for Med while failing to ask Med what she held most important. Thus, Med's minor status made her own wishes and desires insignificant to enslavers and antislavery activists alike. The third chapter considers the contested meaning of Med's freedom. How free is an emancipated child who has been separated from her family and placed under the care and supervision of strangers? Weierman examines Med's fate after the ruling and explores the outcomes of other freedom suits with child litigants. Weierman argues that antislavery activists failed "to see beyond the freedom suit scenario, to understand what the outcomes meant for actual children, and to revise the script in response to complicated situations" (63). In the fourth and fifth chapters, Weierman follows Med's erasure from antislavery narratives in the wake of her death. Weierman first turns to commemorative efforts, noting how many memorials of Commonwealth v. Aves sought not to honor Med but to laud the ostensibly superior moral character of the free North and its white residents. Weierman then considers how the legal principles of Med's case shaped nineteenth-century realist novels about slavery and freedom. Characters partially inspired by Med were often portrayed as adults, as was the case in Maria Weston Chapman's...

ESTRATEGIAS DE LIBERACIÓN DE LA ESCLAVITUD EN LAS NARRACIONES DE MARY PRINCE Y JUAN FRANCISCO MANZANO

Since the beginning of transatlantic slavery, enslaved persons fought for their freedom by deploying a variety of strategies, such as running away, gradual and immediate self-purchase, freedom suits and rebellions. This article studies the strategies described in the autobiographical narratives of Mary Prince (British West Indies) and Juan Francisco Manzano (Cuba). Because the narratives encompass their life stories, they allow us to observe the process by which the authors contemplate different strategies to free themselves, as well as how they adjust their plans when faced with obstacles and setbacks. At the same time, the article examines the factors that shape Prince and Manzano’s decision making processes and how they are related to the historical, geographic, legal, and demographic contexts of each author.

At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, & Shifting Identities in Washington, D. C. by Tamika Y. Nunley

Reviewed by: At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, & Shifting Identities in Washington, D. C. by Tamika Y. Nunley Terri L. Snyder (bio) Washington DC, Slavery, Black women, African Americans, Fugitive slaves, Freedom At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, & Shifting Identities in Washington, D. C. By Tamika Y. Nunley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 254. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95; ebook $22.99.) Tamika Y. Nunley's powerful new study, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C., is the first comprehensive history of Black women in the nation's capital. The book analyzes the struggles of enslaved, fugitive, free, and refugee women to pursue strategies for liberation from the turn of the nineteenth century through the tumultuous years of the Civil War. As women strived for a never-certain liberty, they articulated their own epistemologies of freedom and a radical vision of equality and citizenship. Each chapter of At the Threshold of Liberty examines one of the institutions that Black women and girls encountered in their struggles for liberty in the District of Columbia—slavery, fugitivity, courts, schools, streets, and the government. This might suggest a topical approach, but chronology is fundamental to Nunley's history. The book begins in 1800, when the majority of African Americans in the District were enslaved, and traces the rise of Washington as an entrepôt of the domestic slave trade. It concludes in the 1860s, when the nation's capital had been radically altered by the expansion of its free Black population, abolitionism, emancipation, sectional strife, and the confluence of its Black community, Black refugees, and Union soldiers during the Civil War. Nunley analyzes the lives of Black women in the broader context of the contradictions of early Washington as the capital of a slaveholding republic. D.C. was a thorny nexus of possibilities for Black women to navigate, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free. Black women labored in the District, engaged in fugitivity, challenged their enslavement in courts, forged community networks and support groups, and fashioned their own economies. D.C.'s Black Codes and courts sought to control the Black population. Strict documentation of free status was required, and the criminal justice system targeted African Americans who assembled for leisure, socializing, and politics. Meanwhile the courts eliminated hearsay as evidence for freedom suits, and proslavery and antislavery mobs clashed repeatedly over high-profile fugitives, escape attempts, and the formation of schools for Black girls. Thus, whether enslaved or free, [End Page 300] Black women and girls in the District were subjected to multiple forms of surveillance, threats of violence, and legal reprisals. Nunley relies on a range of sources, including runaway advertisements and newspaper accounts, abolitionist records, court cases, African American memoirs and letters, and she demonstrates how Black Washingtonians, and Black women in particular, built institutions that laid the groundwork for African American liberation. Three conceptual innovations structure At the Threshold of Liberty: navigation, self-definition, and improvisation. For Nunley, the idea of resistance is too reductive to effectively capture the subjectivities of Black women in early D.C. Instead, she examines how women navigated the conditions of slavery, fugitivity, freedom, and refuge to assert, if not reinvent, themselves. The experiences of cooks, runaways, petitioners for freedom, schoolgirls, prostitutes, schoolteachers, and war refugees can be brought together through this framework in which asserting a name, running away, or pursing an education can all be seen as aspirational ends toward self-definition as liberty. Whatever their aspirations, however, women and girls faced barriers that required them to be improvisational in pursuit of the lives that they sought to create. In addition to its scope, context, and conceptualization, At the Threshold of Liberty has other exceptional features. Some shards of evidence are stubbornly opaque. In other instances, Nunley uses them to great advantage, such as her treatment of the account of Jane Johnson drawn from William Still's The Underground Railroad (1872). Legally knowledgeable of the possibility that jurisdictional change could lead to freedom, Johnson, aided by Black abolitionists in Philadelphia, sought freedom from her enslaver. Johnson lost her court battle in D.C., surrounded by the...

At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C by Tamika Y. Nunley

Reviewed by: At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C by Tamika Y. Nunley Joseph P. Reidy (bio) At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. By Tamika Y. Nunley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 254. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95.) Tamika Nunley’s At the Threshold of Liberty examines African American women’s struggles to achieve freedom and equality in the District of Columbia during the nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, slavery framed these efforts; then, in very short order, everything changed. Nunley offers a character-rich account of ordinary women who persistently sought to escape oppressive circumstances. She views their actions as evidence of “self-making,” in which “enslaved women plotted, dreamed, imagined, and created ideas about themselves, as well as the people they knew, and the places in which they lived” (2). Present in the capital city from the beginning, enslaved women persistently sought to rise above the status of property and assert their [End Page 269] personhood, and in the process they made the district “a contested site of liberty” (39). Women’s overt demonstrations of self-making often challenged slavery directly. As early as 1815, the enslaved woman Ann Williams leaped from a second-floor window to avoid removal to Georgia. Three decades later, the sisters Mary and Emily Edmonson joined seventy-five other enslaved people in an ill-fated attempt to escape the city in the schooner Pearl, a case that won international notoriety. Freedom-seeking women also took to the courts, and Nunley’s account of their exploits reinforces the findings of such recent studies as Kelly Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (2017) and William Thomas III’s A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War (2020). When successful, such actions dramatically changed the lives of plaintiffs and their families. The failures could have far-reaching implications, as the case of the sisters Priscilla and Mina Queen demonstrated. Claiming that the free status of their ancestor Mary Queen entitled them to freedom, they retained the services of Francis Scott Key, a veteran of such pleadings, including those of other descendants of Mary. The matter reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where, in 1813, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled inadmissible the “hearsay evidence” upon which the Queens asserted the free status of their progenitor (74). In one fell swoop, Marshall crushed the sisters’ dreams and those of countless other enslaved persons similarly situated. Between 1830 and 1850, as the district’s total Black population steadily grew from roughly nine thousand to almost fourteen thousand, the free portion soared from under five thousand to more than ten thousand. The free Black community’s growth resulted less from procreation than from self-purchase; once having scrimped and saved to achieve liberty, recipients guarded the prize carefully by creating tight networks of personal relationships and social institutions to protect their status. Nunley notes the importance of education in this effort, led by the pioneering work of Ann Marie Becraft, Sophia Browning, and Alethia Browning Tanner in the early decades of the nineteenth century. These women instilled in the daughters of families “with aspirations for social mobility” the necessary qualities of character, deportment, and responsibility (104). Students’ letters to the pioneering white educator Myrtilla Miner, whose Normal School for Colored Girls opened in 1851, reveal their commitments to “thrift, frugality, and hard work” and to “reform and uplift” in the public sphere (113). This quest for self-making, Nunley argues, encompassed enslaved as well as free Black women, as the example of Elizabeth Keckly illustrates. Having learned custom needlework while enslaved, she eventually [End Page 270] purchased her freedom and settled in Washington, where she became a sought-after dressmaker whose elite clientele included Varina Davis and Mary Todd Lincoln. The Civil War ushered in dramatic and lasting change. Virtually overnight, Washington became an armed camp, and the metaphorical “threshold of liberty” became an actual one. Nunley explores this transformation from two vantage points...

A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas III

Reviewed by: A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas III Alice L. Baumgartner A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War. By William G. Thomas III. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. [x], 418. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-300-26150-9; cloth, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-300-23412-1.) From the 1780s to the Civil War, enslaved people in Prince George's County, Maryland, filed over a thousand legal actions for their freedom. With careful research and beautiful prose, William G. Thomas III makes the powerful argument that freedom suits laid bare the uncertain legal foundations of slavery and, in the process, represented "a public counterpart of the Underground Railroad" (p. 9). In 1770, William and Mary Butler sued for their freedom on the grounds that their grandmother Eleanor Butler, or "Irish Nell," was a "free white woman" and indentured servant (p. 24). Although Eleanor had married an enslaved man in 1681, which, under a 1664 act, consigned her to bondage "for the duration of her husband's life," the Maryland General Assembly overturned this law shortly after Eleanor's marriage (p. 24). In their suit for freedom, William and Mary Butler argued that Eleanor's children were free because they were born after the repeal of the 1664 act. The provincial court decided in the Butlers' favor, but the court of appeals reversed the lower court's ruling, asserting that the 1664 act applied because Eleanor and Charles Butler were married under its terms. Undeterred, the next generation of Butlers filed lawsuit after lawsuit—and in the wake of the American Revolution, the Butlers started to win. Soon other enslaved people started to claim their freedom on the grounds that their ancestors were free. In 1791, Edward Queen sued for his freedom because his grandmother, Mary Queen, was a "free woman of color" from New Spain sold as an indentured servant (p. 168). Also in 1791, Charles [End Page 408] Mahoney filed a petition that he was descended from a free woman named Ann Joice. In response, the Maryland assembly made it more difficult for enslaved people to bring suits. In 1793, the legislature granted jurisdiction over petitions for freedom to lower district courts, which were often more favorable to slaveholders. Three years later, in 1796, the assembly required that attorneys representing enslaved people pay the court costs if their freedom suits were dismissed. The courts also handed down decisions that were unfavorable to enslaved people. In 1810, when Mina Queen claimed her freedom because she descended from Mary Queen, the District of Columbia Circuit Court ruled parts of a crucial deposition "hearsay" and, consequently, inadmissible (p. 171). The tightening of evidentiary standards made it more difficult for enslaved people to secure their freedom on the basis of ancestry. To make matters worse, the Jesuits sold 272 enslaved people to Louisiana in 1838, depriving those who remained in Maryland of crucial witnesses in freedom suits. As evidentiary standards tightened, and as enslaved people were sold from the Eastern Seaboard to the south-central United States, the opportunities for freedom on the basis of ancestry dwindled. But enslaved people continued to file petitions on other legal grounds. The most successful cases were of emancipated enslaved people who had been illegally imported into the District of Columbia. In 1828, Thomas Butler successfully sued for his freedom because he and his family had been sold in the district, violating Maryland's laws against the slave trade. Four years later, Ann Williams won her freedom on the same grounds. Enslaved people from Prince George's County secured their freedom not by escaping to Canada but by filing petitions with the courts. Thomas convincingly argues that these freedom suits were an important, if overlooked, route on the Underground Railroad. The "conductors" on this route were lawyers of mixed allegiances, like Joseph Bradley, himself a slaveholder, and Allen Bowie Duckett, Thomas's own ancestor. The heroes of this route were not the lawyers but the petitioners themselves, who, by ingenuity, perseverance, and legal acumen...

The Trafficking of Elisha Webb: Black Freedom Claims in British North America

This article examines the story of Elisha Webb, an African-descended woman who was born free (ca. 1716) on Virginia's Eastern Shore. In 1737, she was illegally sold into slavery and trafficked to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Webb's efforts to regain her free status, which she successfully obtained in 1742, illustrate the politics of African American legal claims to freedom in early North America. Although individuals such as Webb accomplished vital work in gaining their liberty, too often we have understood their claims to freedom as politically inchoate. By blending microhistory, legal history, and biography, the article reconceptualizes prerevolutionary freedom suits as part of the long trajectory of Black antislavery politics. Cases such as Webb's reframe prerevolutionary freedom suits as arising from a vernacular tradition that provided one point of origin for abolition. Webb's freedom suit makes visible three key areas of this vernacular tradition—the collective, portable, and instrumental legal knowledge in Black communities; the role of networks within Black communities and across Black and white neighborhoods; and the distinctive position of Black women in antislavery work.

James Indian, “Answers”: An Indigenous Freedom Suit in Massachusetts Bay

Abstract Around 1670 an enslaved plaintiff called James Indian sued for his freedom in Massachusetts Bay. As his case languished, he found colonists willing to help him. The result of their collaboration, “James Indians answers to his Mr Carrs reasons of appeale,” offered a powerful critique of New England slavery law.

Editorial

Editorial

A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War by William G. Thomas III

Reviewed by: A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil Warby William G. Thomas III Ted Maris-Wolf (bio) Slavery, Antislavery, Abolition, Legal history A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War. By William G. Thomas III. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 418. Cloth, $35.00.) [End Page 156]Rarely have white historians of slavery sought relationships with descendants of those enslaved by their very own ancestors, let alone authored a scholarly monograph detailing the horrors of slaveholding and violence in their family history. William Thomas has done both. The resulting study, A Question of Freedom: The Families Who Challenged Slavery from the Nation's Founding to the Civil War, is an ambitious and meticulously researched examination of slavery and law between the Revolution and the Civil War, as well as an unconventional and provocative call for historians to lead the way in fostering truth and racial reconciliation in today's society. Thomas challenges readers (especially those of us descended from enslavers) to reflect on our own relationships to the private and public pasts we inherit, study, and narrate. Are we open to hearing and acting on the calls of those enslaved by our own family members? Reckoning with revelations uncovered during the course of his research, Thomas asks, "How would I respond to the call of these ancestors? How would you?" (121). Thomas's unorthodox use of first-, second-, and third-person voice likely will inspire more scholars to follow his example (and that of others before him, including Saidiya Hartman, Edward Ball, and Thomas Norman DeWolf) in crafting more intimate historical explorations of the lives of the enslaved. Perhaps A Question of Freedomwill even precipitate the long-awaited moment when we historians of slavery acknowledge greater kinship with our cousins in anthropology by explicitly positioning ourselves (and our personal histories) to the subjects and people we study—something anthropologists have been doing for decades. It is just as likely, however, that Thomas's approach will alienate some who see his first-person interludes of "self-revelation" and attempts at racial reconciliation as distracting, overly personal, or even insulting, especially if they find these passages obscure the individuals at the center of the study—enslaved Black men and women who took the extraordinary step of petitioning for their freedom and challenging the very basis of legal slavery in Maryland, Washington, DC, and elsewhere (2). After all, must we be privy to the private ruminations and emotional journeys of the historian to appreciate brilliant scholarship? Thomas's bold narrative approach is reason enough to assign A Question of Freedomin any graduate seminar, but his remarkable archival detective work and resulting contributions make this one of the most [End Page 157]important recent works in legal history and, more broadly, the history of American slavery. Thomas recounts in painstaking detail the efforts of five generations of enslaved families of Prince George's County, Maryland, to secure their freedom and that of others by directing white lawyers to file hundreds of freedom suits on their behalf in various courts—county, state, even the U.S. Supreme Court. Through their personal involvement in the conception of these suits, the Queens, Mahoneys, Bells, and other enslaved families "accumulated a substantial reservoir of legal experience and knowledge" that not only secured freedom for many of their own petitioners between 1787 and 1861 but also rattled the foundations of the institution of slavery in Maryland and beyond (149). One of Thomas's most important contributions is advancing our understanding of an increasingly robust Black legal culture between the Revolution and the Civil War and the role of enslaved petitioners and their freedom suits in fostering this tradition. Thomas recounts the complicated situations of dozens of petitioners who creatively, persistently, and often repeatedly challenged the property claims of their enslavers through law. In several early suits in Maryland, enslaved families evoked the Somersetv. Stewartruling of 1772 to argue that because an ancestor of theirs had set foot in England, they and all descendants were free, according to English common law...

Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

Witnesses to Freedom: Paula's Enslavement, Her Family's Freedom Suit, and the Making of a Counterarchive in the South Atlantic World

Abstract In 1753, a pregnant woman named Paula was kidnapped in Angola, enslaved, and taken to Brazil. Four decades later, in 1794, Paula's children and grandchildren, 15 in total, filed a lawsuit for their family's freedom in Rio de Janeiro claiming that Paula was a free woman in Angola before her enslavement. This article reconstructs Paula and her descendants' multigenerational legal battle and reveals that their struggle for freedom was, in large part, a struggle against archives. I examine a unique aspect of the freedom suit: witness testimony from Paula's former kin and community in Angola, collected across the Atlantic Ocean four decades after Paula's enslavement. I argue that the memory and testimony of Paula's kin and community in Angola formed a powerful counterarchive that not only narrated her freedom in Angola but also challenged the Brazilian colonial archive's reliance on paper evidence of freedom.

Slavery as a State of War: New York Abolitionists, the Laws of War, and the Right of Self-Emancipation

Slavery as a State of WarNew York Abolitionists, the Laws of War, and the Right of Self-Emancipation Deborah A. Rosen (bio) New York State played a leading role in the antebellum abolitionist movement and made particularly notable contributions to legal thought and rhetoric. This article examines an important element of New Yorkers' legal rhetoric in support of abolition: their use of ideas grounded in the laws of war. The study analyzes how New York abolitionists used the rules governing warfare between 1830 and 1860 both to attack the legality of slavery and to justify slaves' enduring right to rebel and escape. They asserted not only that enslavement was unlawful under the laws of war but also that slavery illegitimately created a continuous state of war that justified self-emancipation by individuals. Although scholars have not studied war-related abolitionist rhetoric in any depth, excellent existing scholarship provides a strong context for this article by examining two pertinent historiographical subjects: the role of New Yorkers in the abolitionist movement and the justifications asserted for forceful, violent resistance to slavery. Book-length studies of African Americans in New York State by Milton C. Sernett, Leslie M. Alexander, and Leslie M. Harris, along with Manisha Sinha's essay on Black abolitionism in New York and other works focusing on specific aspects of the state's abolitionist movement, provide solid historical context. It is evident that New York State's role in the fight against slavery was enhanced by its relatively high number of free African American residents, its strategic geographic position between the South and Canada, and its highly developed literary and associational culture. There were two main centers of activism in the state, the populous cities of New York City and Brooklyn on the southern tip and the frontier region of central and western New York. During the antebellum period, New York and Brooklyn were vibrant centers of African American life and activism. A number of leading abolitionists lived in the two cities, and they enjoyed considerable support from the thousands of Black residents as well as from many white city dwellers. This southeastern region of the state served as the headquarters of several eminent abolitionist organizations, [End Page 307] hosted important antislavery conventions, and was the place of publication for influential antislavery and African American periodicals. Likewise, in western and central New York, cities such as Rochester, Syracuse, and Utica were home to antislavery activists, societies, conventions, and newspapers. Notably, this region was also a fount and center of political abolitionism: the Liberty Party was founded here, as was its successor fifteen years later, the Radical Abolitionist Party. Abolitionists in the two regions interacted with each other at conventions, read each other's publications, and heard each other give sermons and speeches. The two regions were also linked through the networks of the Underground Railroad, especially through the New York State Vigilance Committee, which connected New York City with local vigilance committees in central and western New York.1 In addition to New York's importance to the abolitionist movement, the state was also home to a sizeable percentage of the nation's lawyers. According to the 1850 Census, there were 4,263 lawyers in New York State, which constituted 18 percent of all American lawyers.2 The ample supply of lawyers made it possible for New Yorkers to bring freedom suits [End Page 308] that contested clients' alleged enslaved status in court and also initiate litigation asserting individual African American clients' rights to nonsegregated schools, equal treatment in public transportation, and due process in court proceedings. Moreover, the significant presence of lawyers also allowed New Yorkers to make a broader case for nationwide emancipation and racial equality based on fundamental legal principles. The conjunction in New York State of a vigorous and politically oriented abolitionist movement, a heavy concentration of lawyers, and an inclination to support resistance to slavery helps explain New York abolitionists' distinctive approach. With regard to its emphases, strategies, and rhetoric, New York was notably different from New England. In particular, political abolitionists—a number of whom were also antislavery constitutionalists—were especially active in New York. Historian Manisha Sinha notes that "in New York...

Shared Atlantic legal culture: the case of a freedom suit in Benguela

ABSTRACT Through an examination of arguments used in an 1866 freedom suit initiated in Benguela, this article highlights the existence of a shared legal culture in the Lusophone Atlantic. Through in-depth analysis of this case, I show how common institutions of the ius commune acquired specific meanings in the pro-slavery jurisdictions of Benguela and Brazil. I specifically focus on how legal categories of property law shaped the judicial language of freedom in the Lusophone Atlantic. While drawing on other nineteenth-century freedom suits, legal doctrines, and secondary literature, this analysis of a Benguela suit sheds light upon the existence of a shared Atlantic legal culture and upon a re-signification of legal categories in colonial contexts.

Appealing for Liberty: Freedom Suits in the South. By Loren Schweninger

With this important new book, Loren Schweninger, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, offers a fresh perspective on slavery and freedom in the U.S. South. At the core of the book is careful, and deeply contextualized analysis of over two thousand freedom suits, covering over four thousand enslaved plaintiffs, from across the nation. The author has meticulously combed through archives in fourteen states to amass what is one of the most important collections of primary sources concerning slavery in the southern United States. Schweninger does highlight some aggregate trends in the data, most notably that suits for freedom were more common in the upper South than in the lower South, and that the rate of suing for freedom remained roughly constant between U.S. Independence and the Civil War. Yet this book is not primarily one that looks at generalizations. Instead, this source base supports an analysis that looks at the social life of enslaved people with unprecedented detail and connects those experiences with bondage to the wider landscape of the law of slavery and freedom in the United States, a “social and legal history fused” (6).

Meticulous Imprecision: Calculating Age in Colonial Spanish American Law

Abstract It is easy to presume that age’s legal value rests in the autonomy and rights that accrue to the liberal (male, propertied) citizen who has reached the age of majority. But this is not universally so. In Spain’s American colonies, legal age talk involved multiplying privileges rather than exclusionary subtraction. Few indigenous peoples, enslaved people of African descent, or members of the free casta poor tallied the years they had lived in a manner that meets modern standards of precision. Instead, the ages that Spanish American officials set down on paper in criminal trials, censuses, and freedom suits derived from complicated cultural equations, including reconciling local ethno-numeracies with European counting systems. For all its seeming imprecision, age was of critical importance to colonial Spanish Americans, since rather than guaranteeing access to rights, age was a language that colonial subjects used to turn legal incapacities into beneficial protections.