Slave States Research Articles

Review: California, A Slave State, by Jean Pfaelzer

Review: <i>California, A Slave State</i>, by Jean Pfaelzer

The Afterlife of Energy Post-carbon and Feminist Post-work Politics

In the conclusion to her book The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, political scientist Cara Daggett considers “A Post-Work Energy Politics” in which she examines the historical coupling of energy and work—meaning human, waged work—in an invitation to disassociate their values and futures. The exponential power of fossil fuels animated the pipedream that powerful, inorganic slaves could substitute unfree human labor, ideas that have driven European imperialism. Fossil fuel systems did not lead, however, to a world beyond work. Rather, today’s “patriarchal slave states” continue to manage the project of putting the world to work through the maximization of productivity, and the subordination of racialized, immigrant, and gendered bodies—who would work for lower, or for no, wages. “The project of work,” Daggett argues, “is in tension with the project of life.” 1 And the rise of “work–life balance” is a mere tactic of governance in which the enemy is fatigue, exhaustion, and burn-out. She suggests, in turn, an alliance between post-carbon and feminist post-work politics and asks: what might it mean for energy politics to refer to the politics of ensuring public vitality? In order to advance a feminist revaluation of work, Daggett draws on Kathi Weeks’s The Problem with Work to outline a project that makes two utopian demands. One demand articulates a paradoxical relationship between the pragmatism of (present) demands and the speculative seeds of possibility; a second demand outlines a utopian form for such politics: partial, fragmented kin to the genre of the manifesto. Daggett concludes with an invitation that “a radical planet politics, if it seeks to contest ecomodernist claims, needs its own politics of pleasure.” 2 In an echo to Daggett’s invitation, the authors of this Educators’ Roundtable were invited to contribute a short text that picks up on the possibilities of a post-carbon, post-work politics.

Ultra Veritatem Muliebris Vis: Women Classicists at and beyond Washington University in the Dawning of Post-Bellum America

Abstract: To contextualize the all-female American production of Plautus’ Rudens at Washington University in St. Louis in 1884 by the university’s Ladies’ Literary Society, my discussion considers the topic of Plautus’ comedy—freeborn Greeks threatened with enslavement—and the historical circumstances of its first staging in ca. 200 BCE; the historical circumstances surrounding the production, in a former slave state, less than two decades after the US Civil War; and, to illuminate the milieu in which the female students revised and performed Plautus’ text, the lives and professional contributions of five prominent American women classicists educated between 1865 and 1917.

About the distinction ancient and medieval education

On the basis of documentary sources and specialized literature, a historical and comparative study of the transformation of education in the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages in Europe was carried out. The essential content of the term “education” is analyzed as a kind of “picture of the world” of a certain person with his own understanding and perception of the environment.The political, ideological and cultural conditions that determined the specifics of the educational process, which influenced the nature of the education of the population, are traced. The destruction of the ancient Roman state and the achievement by Christianity of the status of the main religious ideology in Europe are named as the main (defining) prerequisites. It is shown that during the existence of the Roman Empire, an educated person was considered to have special knowledge, skills and abilities to replace (if necessary) one of the positions in the governing apparatus of the slave state. And in the education of a medieval person (especially at the initial stage), scientific and rational components were completely absent. Its level was directly connected with the religious and ideological worldview of the individual. The inviolability of faith in Christ (as the Son of God and the Savior of mankind) and knowledge of the essence of the most important Christian worldview values. As a result of the study, the author came to the conclusion that the most important indicators of influence that determined the specifics of a person’s education in the period of antiquity and the Middle Ages were the “content richness” of upbringing and education, the “form of organization” of the educational process, and, of course, the direction (“purpose”) social training of the younger generation during the transition to adulthood.

The Poison Pen: Slavery, Poison, and Fear in the Antebellum Press

ABSTRACT When enslaved people were accused of poisoning enslavers, it was newsworthy throughout the antebellum United States. Part of the broad appeal of such articles was their malleability; as reports of supposed poison plots or arsenic in a planter’s coffee travelled from newspapers in slave states to the pages of Northern publications, the articles morphed in form, purpose, and emotional tone. Southern readers looked to stories about thwarted poison plots to assuage their fears of a similar fate and present a brave united front. Meanwhile, Northern newspapers invited a host of other emotions from their audience, from enjoyment and schadenfreude to sympathy and anger. This article on messaging about slavery, poison, and fear in the antebellum United States builds on my monograph, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States, to focus on the emotional politics of fear. Examining how news about enslaved poisoners circulated and shapeshifted sheds light on the relationship between the antebellum press and collective emotions, and on the role of fear in defenses and critiques of slavery. While the Southern press framed stories about enslaved poisoners to address and manage members of the slaveocracy’s fears, the abolitionist press worked to invoke and amplify that terror.

Three Hypotheses About America: Helper, Lincoln, Douglass, and King

This essay advances arguments and evidence for three hypotheses about America. First, that slavery was a burden to the South, and the nation, and that it degraded what it affected. Second, that, in the main, the Fathers of this nation meant it when they recognized slavery as a moral evil. And third, that the greatest American after Abraham Lincoln in effecting legal and attitudinal change in America for the betterment of relations between the races built his strategies for reform upon the Founders’ vision, and depended on its truth to achieve his successes. To support the hypothesis that slavery was a burden, the essay recalls the arguments of a white citizen of the slave state of North Carolina, Hinton Rowan Helper. To support the hypothesis that the Founders, in the main, meant it when they condemned slavery as a moral evil, it engages the arguments of a white man of the free West, Abraham Lincoln, and those of an escaped slave, Frederick Douglass. To support the hypothesis that the understandings of the American Founding provided the fundamental guide for the way forward, it invokes the arguments and actions of a black resident of the Jim Crow South, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Two white men, two black men, four Americans to support three hypotheses about America.

Synchronization of a Class of Nonlinear Systems With and Without Uncertainty Using State Feedback and Extended Kalman Filter Based Control Scheme

Abstract The paper elaborates on various synchronization aspects for nonlinear systems belonging to a specific class, under different scenarios. The method proposed in the article refers to the Lyapunov direct method and Extended Kalman Filter technique to ensure the convergence of the slave state trajectories to the corresponding master state trajectories. Initially, an output feedback-based synchronization approach is attempted, assuming that bounds of unmeasurable states are available for controller synthesis. However, this approach has limitations in handling complete parametric uncertainty for the considered class of systems. To overcome this limitation, a state feedback-based synchronization scheme is presented, and an appropriate state feedback controller and parametric adaptation laws are designed analytically. In the case where only output states are accessible for feedback, and the system is subjected to complete parametric uncertainty, an Extended Kalman Filter based estimation scheme is used. This approach facilitates achieving synchronization despite the presence of external channel noise disturbances with a Gaussian distribution. The potency of the proposed results is successfully substantiated for the chaotic Lorenz system, which belongs to the considered class of nonlinear systems. Ultimately, numerical simulations are provided to corroborate the efficacy of proposed synchronization and estimation strategy.

Original Gītā: The Mouthpiece of Indian Territorial Slave States

This article attempts to contextualize the original part of the Bhagavad Gītā. The study observes the total 85 verses up to 2.38 of the Gītā as the original one, which deals with the question of war. The study has relevance as it informs the reader of the dominant ideology of the time when the text was produced. The article addresses on the research problems concerning the basic ideology or dharma of the original Gītā and its indication of the time when the text was set. In order to contextualize the original Gītā, the historical background and textual properties of this part will be analyzed by applying the methodological tool of the Marxist concept of historical materialism. Historical materialism analyzes any text as a literary production that reflects the social and economic base of a particular society. The study reveals that the original Gītā carries the dominant ideology or dharma as the human greed for wealth, power, and prosperity of the new territorial slave states based on private property and classes. The original Gītā, thus, is found to be set at a time when Indian slavery was on the rise overthrowing the primitive commune of Aryan Gaṇa-Saṁghas.

The West India Regiments and the War of 1812

Abstract: The West India Regiments, men of African descent embodied into regular regiments of the British Army, played a hitherto unheralded role in the War of 1812. Knowledge of the military prowess of these regiments was widespread in the US in the early nineteenth century, and the British exploited this, mixed with a large amount of rumour and speculation as a terror tactic during the war. The West India Regiments were used as recruiters in the Chesapeake in 1814, and on active campaigns against New Orleans and Georgia in 1815. They were directly and indirectly responsible for the escape of thousands of enslaved people from slave states to British forces and even forced some US commentators to contemplate the recruitment of their own enslaved soldiers as a counterweight. While their military contribution to the war ended up being small, the psychological importance of regiments of black men within easy reach of the southern states lingered long after peace had been agreed.

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.

The Golden State’s Veiled Dichotomy

Abstract Visions of the West and specifically California as a free domain captivated many Americans leading up to, during, and after the Gold Rush. This perception was a myth that did not mesh with the reality of the blatant slavery and racism that existed there. This dichotomy remained largely veiled since then, only to resurface as recent scholarship revealed that California was not a shining beacon of virtuousness in the mid-nineteenth century. This article explores the impact of California’s overt tolerance for racism and slavery during its formative years of statehood. The legislated but unjust denial of civil rights to the state’s Black community also impacted its Chinese, Californios, and Indigenous peoples, with the latter group enduring horrific genocide. Their collective struggle for equality in a free state remained entangled in a web of statewide bigotry and White dominance that permeated all three branches of the state government. Interwoven with such inconsistencies is the scandalous development of San Quentin prison, a financial sieve that facilitated the slaveholding lessee’s largely unreported for-profit kidnapping and sale of two Black inmates (one a slave and the other a freeman) in 1855. The active racism, the cases of free and fugitive slaves being returned to their owners under the state’s own unique fugitive slave law, and the abduction of these two Black prisoners echo similar behaviors in slave states. They lay bare the myth of a free California that was, on the contrary, connected to the national slavery conundrum and was not the glowing outpost of freedom often described then in the eastern press and still believed by many, even today. Suffice it to say that the origins of the current reparations movement for California’s eligible Blacks can be traced to the mid-1850s history of California.

Black women and the cultural performance of music in mid-nineteenth century Natchez

ABSTRACT Anna and Kate Johnson’s experiences typify that of thousands of women who lived in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. In this microhistory of Anna and Kate and performativity among Black women living in a slave state, I expose the evidence of their lived experiences outside the metanarrative of music history in the United States. With the acknowledgment that middle-class Blacks adopted social customs used by whites, and confirmation through the artifacts that might confirm this practice, this essay introduces Black women and others into a more inclusive and honest narrative of social music practices in the nineteenth century.

The Creole Rebellion: The Most Successful Slave Revolt in American History by Bruce Chadwick

Reviewed by: The Creole Rebellion: The Most Successful Slave Revolt in American History by Bruce Chadwick John Harris The Creole Rebellion: The Most Successful Slave Revolt in American History. By Bruce Chadwick. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022. Pp. xvi, 231. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-8263-6347-3.) The successful rebellion of the captives aboard the slave ship Creole in 1841 has long been overshadowed by the 1839 revolt on another slaver vessel, the Amistad, which resulted in a Supreme Court decision and, many years later, inspired a 1997 film directed by Steven Spielberg. But there are encouraging [End Page 357] signs for the lesser-known Creole freedom fighters. Ivan R. Dee published the first monograph on the revolt, The Creole Mutiny: A Tale of Revolt Aboard a Slave Ship by George and Willene Hendricks, in 2003. Bruce Chadwick’s The Creole Rebellion: The Most Successful Slave Revolt in American History is the fourth book on the subject. Chadwick’s narrative advances along three paths. The first is the story of the rebellion itself. A riveting opening chapter contains a blow-by-blow account of the revolt, which erupted midway through a voyage from Richmond to New Orleans. Chadwick focuses not only on the well-informed rebel leader, Madison Washington, a formerly free man who knew about the Amistad revolt, and his allies, but also on the stunned and desperate captain, the crew, and their family members on board. Chadwick also considers the motives of the 116 out of 135 captives who, fearing for their own lives, did not join the revolt. With the Creole in their hands at the cost of just one life (the slave trader John Hewell was killed in the struggle for the vessel), the rebels wisely forced the crew to reroute to the Bahamas, where the British had already abolished slavery. In Nassau, the enslaved people on board the Creole secured their freedom, and in 1842, a London court exonerated the mutineers. Sadly, we hear little more about Washington or his compatriots thereafter. An exploration of the lifeways of those who conducted “the most successful slave revolt in American history,” however tentative, would enrich the book. The arrival of the Creole in the Bahamas sets the stage for Chadwick’s second theme: diplomatic wrangling between the governments of Great Britain and the United States. The British argued that the former captives could not be forcibly returned to the United States; since British colonies did not recognize slavery, the people on the Creole were free, whatever their legal status elsewhere. Yet the United States, led by President John Tyler, a proslavery Virginian, demanded their return. White southerners supported Tyler, and many northerners, although lukewarm about slavery, were nonetheless angry with British authorities for disrespecting American shipping and American law. Chadwick argues that Tyler, the so-called accidental president who unexpectedly succeeded the ill-fated William Henry Harrison, was politically weak when the Creole episode occurred and used the incident to try to save his presidency and ignite his reelection bid. Tyler failed on all counts: the British never returned the rebels, and Tyler, who remained unpopular in both Whig and Democratic circles, withdrew from the race. The book’s third and most innovative theme is the bitter debate about slavery within the United States that the Creole incident generated. Abolitionists, a small and divided force, were energized. The incident brought fame to figures like abolitionist congressman Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio and gave a new lease on life to the aging John Quincy Adams, who used the incident to try to break the so-called gag rule against discussions of slavery in the House of Representatives. The proslavery response was fierce. As Tyler’s presidency was ending, he helped engineer the annexation of Texas as a slave state. Chadwick does not firmly establish how much this strategy had to do with the Creole incident. As in many parts of the book, the political intrigues of Washington, D.C., take over the narrative in his final chapters, and the Creole disappears. The book’s short epilogue struggles to offer an overarching thesis, [End Page 358] but Chadwick certainly convinces readers that the Creole rebellion fostered...

When Do Elites Support Increasing Taxation? Evidence from the American South

When do elites support the expansion of the state’s ability to tax? Despite the disproportionate influence that elites are theorized to exert on politics, answers to this question remain elusive. We argue that elites will support increased taxation, including on themselves, when they believe greater fiscal capacity will yield collective goods that further their interests, they have political control, and they expect this control to persist into the future. We test our argument by measuring changes in state taxation using an annual panel of Southern slave states between 1840 and 1860. Our strategy exploits both institutional differences across these states in the de jure political control of the slave-owning elite and rising international demand for Southern cash crops. We find that states with greater slave owner control responded to increased demand for their crops by raising taxes on slaves and land, their primary assets, to fund railroad construction.

A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas by Kelly Houston Jones

Reviewed by: A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas by Kelly Houston Jones Christian Pinnen (bio) A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas. By Kelly Houston Jones. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 268. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $39.95.) Kelly Houston Jones's A Weary Land is a recent entry in the rich history of American bondage, but it inserts some important details into the national story of slavery. Through Jones's eyes, the settlement history of Arkansas in the antebellum period is reinterpreted as a time in which enslaved people were "developing a sense of place in their search for rootedness" (2). While Jones focuses her story on the landscapes of bondage, she reveals the multiplicities that were endemic to borderlands slavery. More important, she shows that "African American Arkansans defined freedom as the ability to control their movement and use of space and the ability to own land and modify it for themselves" (6). Appropriately grounding the experience of the enslaved in the land they were forced to work, she shows the reader the world of slavery truly from the ground up, which promises new analytical solutions for frequently posed questions. Jones puts the history of Arkansas through the paces of a very skilled historian with an eye to the power of slavery on a developing state and landscape. When viewed through this lens, a story emerges that demonstrates how enslaved people made calculated use of space in the attempt to resist their [End Page 107] enslavers. African Americans could not be alienated from the landscape by slave owners, no matter what white people thought or tried. In six chapters, the author paints a picture of Arkansas history that is defined by the state's roots in slavery and westward expansion. Vivid chapter titles refer to regions of—or events on—Arkansas ground and make clear the importance of Jones's connection between human bondage and geography. Chapter 1, aptly entitled "The Morass," uncovers the settlement period of Anglo-American arrivals and their enslaved African American workers. Jones succinctly argues that "slavery is not simply a part of Arkansas's history but a fundamental principle guiding Arkansas's organization as a territory and then a state—a shaping force in … becoming a place" (16). While Arkansas grew as a cotton-producing and slavelabor-absorbing region, the enslaved remained in a position where they were at once forced to do the enslavers' biddings to shape the land in order to generate profit, but also able to move with some freedom. The sparsely settled areas of Arkansas gave both the local African American population and the people of African descent in neighboring states—enslaved and free—ample opportunity to disappear. Sometimes they left for a few days; occasionally, they tried to liberate themselves permanently. Throughout the book, space and place take on important meanings for the enslaved. Jones deftly identifies the ability of the enslaved to bring their own meanings to the landscapes they remade for the profit of others. In her words, the enslaved labored "to master space in order to master self" (34), finding meaning in their forced labor that remained hidden from their enslavers and staking secret claims to land out of view of their captors. As the author explores these facets of landscape more closely, she also analyzes gender, community formation in neighborhoods and churches, commingling of enslaved and poor whites, as well as free people of color, during Arkansas's formative decades as a slave state. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are a deep dive into the story of slavery in Arkansas, focusing on the various and uneven developments in multiple regions of the state. Jones points out again and again that slavery's development in the state is rooted in the location. The Red River valley, for example, differs from the towns along the Mississippi. Depending on soil, access to transportation, and strategic location, the lives of the enslaved could look quite different. Jones shows, for example, how urban spaces could offer some comforts, such as church communities, but were unable to protect freedom seekers from discovery. One of the many stimulating discussions in the book stems from...

Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community by Vanessa M. Holden

Reviewed by: Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community by Vanessa M. Holden Kelly Kennington (bio) Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community. By Vanessa M. Holden. ( Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 184. Cloth, $110.00; paper, $22.95.) In Surviving Southampton, Vanessa M. Holden expands the usual scope of the 1831 Southampton Rebellion to include the larger community of free and enslaved women and children who produced and participated in the uprising. Her reframing of the conflict from Nat Turner's Rebellion to the Southampton Rebellion reinforces her argument that such individuals as Nat Turner did not act alone in their resistance to slavery. Violent uprisings always necessitated the participation of the Black community through a variety of resistance strategies. Enslaved and free women's resistance ranged from violence to sharing information or providing support for the rebellion. Holden's work also considers the Southampton County community as a significant context for what she calls an "intimate" rebellion. She notes how the class concerns of small and midsized farms affected the rebellion by bringing enslavers; enslaved men, women, and children; and free people of African descent into close contact in their work and social lives. Holden is to be commended for the painstaking work involved in extracting this story from a limited archive of legal testimony taken under extreme duress. Holden has organized her book into five thematic chapters that, first, lay the foundation for the rebellion and, then, closely examine the source materials available to study and understand it. She builds on scholarship that emphasizes the significance of space and geography, including such classics as Stephanie Camp's Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004) and Anthony Kaye's Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (2007), as well as more recent works, such as Ryan Quintana's Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina (2018) and Rashauna Johnson's Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (2016). In the first chapter, Holden provides the backdrop for the rebellion by detailing slavery and resistance in Southampton County, which she describes as "geographies of surveillance and control." She argues that we must look both at the enslavers' geographies of control and at geographies of "evasion and resistance" used by enslaved community members to survive their circumstances (11). The next three chapters examine the roles of [End Page 105] women, free people of African descent, and children in resistance before, during, and after the Southampton Rebellion. Historians have minimized these groups in literature on the Southampton Rebellion, and rebellions more generally, but each group practiced resistance strategies that allowed them to contribute to the Southampton Rebellion. Finally, chapter 5 dives into a close reading of witness testimonies in the immediate wake of the rebellion, including the famous record of Nat Turner's Confessions, paying unique attention to the silences. Holden thus heeds the call of Marisa J. Fuentes, in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016), and others to examine silences in the archives, though Holden adds an interesting twist to how the silences are interpreted. When witnesses take responsibility for the rebellion without implicating other community members, Holden astutely reads these omissions as intentional "silences" that "should be trusted and celebrated" (120). In other words, silences can also reveal "intent, agency, and strategy" (84). Holden's main contribution to the historiography is explaining in detail how a whole new cast of characters participated in rebellions of enslaved and free people of African descent. In Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020), Vincent Brown briefly alludes to the role of women in rebellions, and he calls for additional work on women's roles in them. Holden, however, offers a more meticulous analysis of the parts played by enslaved women, free people of African descent, and children in Southampton. She does so by using the rich trial record of the accused rebels, which includes testimony from several enslaved and free women about the men, women, and children involved in the Southampton Rebellion. Holden argues that witnesses sought...

The Primms of Fayette County: A Biracial Family in Nineteenth-Century Texas

The Primms of Fayette County: A Biracial Family in Nineteenth-Century Texas Randolph B. Campbell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Randolph B. Campbell is pictured here with his friend and colleague Richard Lowe, c. 1977, in the North Texas Daily, the student newspaper of North Texas State University (now University of North Texas). Photo courtesy of the Campbell family. [End Page 294] William Primm migrated to Texas at the age of fifty-seven in 1835 and within a year established a cotton plantation near the Colorado River to the northwest of La Grange in Fayette County. At a glance, Primm’s story does not appear to have been notably different from those of many other Texas immigrant planters at the time, but it contrasted dramatically in one way: Primm’s wife Celia was an African American woman whom he owned as a slave prior to emancipating and marrying in Ohio in 1817. They lived as a married couple in Louisiana before migrating to Texas and continued to live in the Lone Star state as man and wife until his death in May 1865. Celia died three years later in January 1868. The Primms had five mixed-race children who lived to maturity, four born before the family came to Texas and one after they reached Fayette County. Adding to their special situation as a biracial family, William Primm owned enslaved persons—twenty-one in 1850 and thirty-three in 1860, ranking his family in the Old South’s planter class.1 [End Page 295] From the time of their arrival in Texas until 1865, the Primm family lived first in a slaveholding republic and then in a slave state that both had extensive legal codes dedicated to upholding the Peculiar Institution. Laws dictated the conduct not only of slaves, but of free Blacks as well. For example, the Congress of the Republic of Texas in 1837 outlawed the marriage of any person of “European blood” with “Africans, or the descendants of Africans.” Any couple who broke that law would have their marriage nullified and be “deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor and punished as such.”2 When the Civil War ended slavery in the state in 1865, it certainly did not usher in an era of racial equality in any aspect of life. Thus, the central question raised by the story of the Primm family is how a White father, a Black mother, and their biracial children endured the complications of living as a biracial family in Texas during the years from the 1830s until the twentieth century. The answers show a notable range of individual variation. No person considered “Black” escaped the briar patch of race relations unscathed, but as the story of the Primm family shows, some found their way through with fewer injuries than others. Fayette County local histories that deal with the Primms usually describe the family as coming from colonial Virginia aristocracy. Unlike most of the Old Dominion’s leaders, however, the family’s founder in America, John De La Pryme (1725–80), was of French rather than English ancestry. A descendant of French Huguenots who moved to England in the late seventeenth century to escape religious persecution, he migrated from England’s Isle of Man to Stafford County, Virginia, in 1735. Eventually, probably to escape anti-French animus during the French and Indian War, the Prymes changed their family name to Primm.3 John Primm’s third son, also named John and usually called John Primm II, was born in 1750. John II served in a Virginia unit during the American Revolution and participated in the siege of Yorktown. Belying the claim that the Primms belonged to the Virginia “aristocracy,” John Primm II owned no slaves. In fact, soon after the Revolution, he began to migrate in a direction that took him away from the Old Dominion and any possibility of slave ownership. He moved west to Hampshire County, Virginia (now West Virginia), by 1797 and then in 1803 continued on to St. Clair County, Illinois, where he remained until his death in 1837.4 The eldest of John Primm II’s eighteen children, William Primm, was born...

Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 by Damian Alan Pargas

Pargas’ thoughtful new book is not quite what it seems. Its title notwithstanding, Freedom Seekers: Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860 is not a comprehensive new history of fugitivity from North American slavery. It does not attend to every variety of freedom seeking; military service with the British during the War of 1812 in return for postwar liberty is, for instance, noticeably absent. Nor does it assess the political significance of freedom seeking in the sectional crisis and the coming of the Civil War. Instead, Pargas has delivered something no less useful—a new and conceptually powerful spatial analysis of fugitivity. Taking a continental approach, Pargas delineates three spaces of freedom for African Americans seeking liberty from slavery: (1) spaces of informal freedom, (2) spaces of semiformal freedom, and (3) spaces of formal freedom.This differentiation is fresh yet wholly intuitive. Spaces of informal freedom were those locations within nineteenth-century slave states in which enslaved people could try to pass for free by disguising their identities and origins—urban centers like New Orleans and Baltimore, or maroon communities like those in Virginia and South Carolina. Spaces of semiformal freedom encompassed those states north of the Mason–Dixon line in which legislatures (or, occasionally, the judiciary) had begun the process of abolishing slavery. Fugitives from slavery arriving in these jurisdictions could live in de facto freedom, though the threat of capture and rendition under the terms of federal fugitive slave laws meant that that their liberty was fragile and potentially reversible. In contrast, the only reliable guarantees of formal freedom for fugitives from slavery existed beyond the borders of the antebellum United States, typically in British Canada and Mexico.Pargas’ tripartite territorial typology certainly has its limitations. The legal jeopardy of those who escaped slavery by manumission was more modest than that of those who simply took to their heels; the emancipatory experiences of these two groups should not be confused or collapsed. Likewise, in stark contrast to those who resettled in southern Ohio or southern Pennsylvania, fugitives who escaped to the most northerly regions of the free soil states—say, New England, Michigan, or Wisconsin—generally enjoyed robust protection from re-enslavement before the passage of Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Furthermore, Canada and Mexico achieved free-soil status only belatedly—Mexico in 1829 and Canada in a drawn-out process that was not complete until 1834—and quality of life for Black newcomers to these two legal sanctuaries varied enormously.Nonetheless, by imposing coherence on something that was, in his own estimation, “messy and exceedingly complicated,” Pargas provides scholars and students alike with a clear and usable set of tools to think about space, migration, and security (7). To do so, he musters an array of methods and approaches. On the one hand, Freedom Seekers is a legal and constitutional history of Black liberty in which statutes and court cases loom predictably large. On the other hand, it is also a human history attentive to motivation, opportunity, and contingency. Black actors from James Somerset to Margaret Morgan play prominent roles throughout; Pargas takes pains to remind readers that enslaved people were never passive passengers on the Underground Railroad. Quite the contrary. They were self-emancipators. They freed themselves.Freedom Seekers is never flashy. The language is generally flat; no one would ever mistake Pargas’ prose for poetry. Some of the terminology (for instance, slaves, masters, and runaways) is also unhelpful and outdated. Yet the analytical payload delivered between these covers is remarkable. Pargas’ book not only builds upon his 2018 edited volume about the same subject but also effectively synthesizes the profusion of recent work about practical abolition by Baumgartner, Harrold, Walker, Blackett, Churchill, and many others.1

Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 ed. by William S. Belko, and: A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200. Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond

Reviewed by: Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 ed. by William S. Belko, and: A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200. Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond Stuart Leibiger Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821. Edited by William S. Belko. Studies in Constitutional Democracy. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. x, 225. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-2228-2.) A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200. Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse. Edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond. Studies in Constitutional Democracy. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. xxvi, 414. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-2231-2.) Two new books in the University of Missouri Press series Studies in Constitutional Democracy mark the recent bicentennial of the Missouri Compromise. Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821, edited by William S. Belko, executive director of the Missouri Humanities Council, closely examines congressional debates over the settlement. A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse, edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley, a professor of history at the University of Missouri, and John Craig Hammond, an associate professor of history at Penn State University–New Kensington, explores the Missouri crisis in a context broader than the narrow congressional milieu in which it is usually studied. Between 1819 and 1821, a controversy over Missouri's admission to the Union deadlocked Congress. Antislavery restrictionists in the House of Representatives passed the Tallmadge Amendment, prohibiting Missouri's admission as a slave state, but proslavery antirestrictionists blocked the measure in the Senate. After a one-year deadlock, Congress admitted Missouri as a slave state. The settlement also provided that the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′ would be forever free of slavery. Later in 1820, controversy resurfaced when a clause in Missouri's state constitution banned free people of color from entering the state. A congressional resolution stating that the clause in question could not be used to violate the privileges and immunities clause of the federal Constitution resolved this second dispute, despite Missouri's continued refusal to admit free Black people. Each chapter of Contesting the Constitution perceptively analyzes how a specific clause in the U.S. Constitution was interpreted by restrictionists and antirestrictionists in the congressional debates over Missouri's bid for statehood. Christopher Childers's essay discusses how Missouri's ban on free Black people entering the state sparked a disagreement over the meaning of the privileges and immunities clause. Restrictionists argued that by denying free citizens of color access to the state, Missouri's constitution violated the clause in Article IV, Section 2, that states that "citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states" (Belko, p. 31). Antirestrictionists countered that Missouri's constitution did not violate the federal Constitution because Black people were not in fact U.S. citizens. A chapter by John Eastman (who supported Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election) examines the debate over the guarantee clause. Restrictionists insisted that Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution, which guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government," required Congress to deny Missouri's admission to the Union as a [End Page 763] slave state, because slavery clearly violated the principles of republicanism (Belko, p. 51). Antirestrictionists answered that the treaty between the United States and France creating the Louisiana Territory ensured that new states carved out of that territory must enter the Union on the same terms as the original states, including the option to have slavery. Chapter 8, one of three chapters by William S. Belko, illustrates how restrictionists refuted this claim by maintaining that the president and the Senate could not use a treaty to usurp the power of Congress to regulate the territories and admit new states. As John R. Van Atta's essay demonstrates, southern states vigorously denied that Congress possessed the power to prohibit slavery in new states (as opposed to in...

“Liberty or Death!”

“Liberty or Death!”