An Angry God in the Hands of Sinners: Enslaved Africans and the Uses of Protestant Christianity in Pre-Revolutionary Boston

This article contends that slaves were able to successfully appropriate Christian institutions to decode the Euro-American world they arrived in and resist the dehumanization associated with African slavery in the Americas. Looking beyond religiosity, eschewing the teleological obsession with freedom that obfuscates our understanding of slavery, and using Boston—an Atlantic port city full of churches and slaves—as a case study, we are able to see how enslaved Africans were able to use what they learned in Boston's churches, including the ability to read and write and a powerful Christian vocabulary, in order to meet the master class and other whites on their own terms and challenge the boundaries of slavery.     

‘To return to the bosom of their fatherland’: Brazilian immigrants in nineteenth‐century Lagos

This article explores the southern prison system during the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth-century USA, to reveal struggles over landscape and geography. It suggests connections between diverse institutions such as plantation jails, county and city jails, workhouses, state penitentiaries and slave pens that have not been conceptualized as part of a carceral system supporting slavery. Slaveholders' various means of using these institutions are outlined as are their perceptions of these prisons. The article concludes by discussing the perspective of enslaved peoples, arguing that prisons were the site of considerable resistance as slave geographies were unable to be completely confined by the expanding carceral system.     

The concept of piracy in nineteenth-century American abolitionist rhetoric

American abolitionists used the concept of piracy as a rhetorical and tactical device to attack the institution of slavery during the antebellum period. Activists branded slaveholders as ‘pirates’ in order to delegitimize the validity of slave owners' title in stolen people and recognize enslaved peoples' rightful self-ownership. The pirate label further conveyed that slaveholders' violence against slaves was illegal and that enslaved people could lawfully use lethal force to resist those who held them captive, assaulted them, or kidnapped them. Thus, abolitionists characterized slave owners as pirates not only to stigmatize slaveholding but also to shape legal perspectives on slavery by reversing presumptions about property rights and about slavery-related violence.     

Black Purgatory: Enslaved Women's Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Rio Grande do Sul,Brazil

This article explores the cases of two Brazilian-born enslaved women who were convicted of infanticide and murder in the city of Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) in the 1820s. Maria was convicted of slitting the throats of her two children with her master's razor. Mônica was convicted of killing her master, André Dias, with five axe blows. Although the crimes these two women perpetrated differed in some ways, their sentences were similar. They were not sentenced to death, the typical fate of enslaved individuals who committed murder. Instead, they were publicly flogged then sent into degredo (penal exile) in Benguela, two Portuguese colonies in West Central Africa. These cases suggest that in the context of slavery in Rio Grande do Sul, the limited possibilities of negotiation between masters and slaves resulted in enslaved women committing violent acts of individual resistance, which, although apparently desperate acts, were also the result of a larger strategy. The article shows that in both prosperous and poor households in the domestic environment, enslaved women experienced various forms of daily violence. It also sheds light on how early in Rio Grande do Sul's history, public defenders started condemning physical violence by slave owners against enslaved women, and how the judicial system recognized the legitimacy of their arguments by sentencing the women to penal exile rather than the death penalty. For the two unmarried enslaved women who were constant victims of abuse, and who very probably did not have any close relatives, being exiled to Benguela was perhaps a blessing in disguise.     

Neither Slavery nor Abolitionism: James M. Pendleton and the Problem of Christian Conservative Antislavery in 1840s Kentucky

The case of James M. Pendleton (1811–1891) adds clarity to understandings of the relationship between slavery and Christianity in the nineteenth-century USA. A white Baptist minister in his native Kentucky throughout most of the antebellum period, Pendleton actively opposed slavery because he believed it an affront to biblical teaching and an economically fruitless way to order a society. At the same time, however, Pendleton also opposed abolitionist measures that called for immediate emancipation of slaves, both because he felt immediatism threatened social stability and because abolitionism appeared to flaunt what he saw as Christian orthodoxy. Pendleton's example shows why slavery was such a complicated issue for Southerners, as well as why abolitionism held so little sway among Southern evangelicals – even among those that wanted slavery ended.     

Conceived in violence: enslaved mothers and children born of rape in nineteenth-century Louisiana

ABSTRACT

Through the examination of testimony from formerly enslaved people who had been fathered by white men under slavery, this paper considers how enslaved women negotiated motherhood when their child had been conceived through rape. Evidence reveals that the relationship between enslaved mothers and their children remained strong, despite sexual violence and interference into childrearing by slaveholding families. Informants had close knowledge of the non-consensual nature of their conception, and their willingness to discuss sexual violence reflects the lack of stigma attached to rape victims in the slave community, and hints at the way that enslaved communities coped with sexual violence on an institutional level.     

Maternal struggles and the politics of childlessness under pronatalist Caribbean slavery

ABSTRACT

This article considers the relationship of enslaved and apprenticed women in the Anglophone Caribbean to the embodied experience of childbearing, motherhood, and childlessness. It places this analysis in the context of a discussion of the development and implementation of pronatalist policies in the Anglophone Caribbean during the late period of slavery. It examines the experience of pronatalist policies by enslaved women, using as a case study a microhistory from Jamaica during the apprenticeship period (1834–1848). Although the existence of pronatalist policies gave some women (mothers with large numbers of children) a position from which to claim reduced workloads and other ‘rights’, they made the situation of childless women more difficult. In historians' attention to the struggles of mothers, we have sometimes paid insufficient attention to the perspective of childless and bereaved women.     

A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said

Throughout the eighteenth century, advertisements offering enslaved infants and children for free appeared in New England newspapers; historians have not previously discussed this apparently anomalous northern practice of giving away children. Scholars of slavery are increasingly accentuating the implications of human property embodying profit, but this article uses these advertisements to consider what it meant to embody financial loss, and how the ‘giving away’ of enslaved children complicates the current historical framing of American slavery as a capitalist enterprise. That not all enslaved people embodied a positive value only accentuates the calculations at the heart of American chattel slavery.     

Till Death Do Us Part: Testamentary Manumission in Seventeenth-Century Lima,Peru

This article joins a long-standing conversation among slavery scholars regarding the tensions that emerged from the legal status of slaves as property and as persons. This feature of quasi-personhood and property was perhaps most pronounced in the testamentary devise of freedom granted by slave owners. Posthumous bequests of freedom simultaneously recognised the property rights of the deceased in human beings, while validating the affective ties of loyalty and devotion spawned by the master–slave relationship. The article traces the efforts of Margarita de Torres, an enslaved woman, who waged a nine-year lawsuit for her freedom against the executrices of her owner's estate. In so doing, the article analyses Margarita's motivations for embarking on a protracted and costly lawsuit, given the odds in favour of, and against, slaves seeking to enforce testamentary promises of manumission in seventeenth-century Lima. More broadly, the article explores the affective relationships between owners and slaves, the conditions that accompanied testamentary freedom and the complexities that arose with the legal treatment of enslaved offspring of free fathers.     

Threat of a Bondman: Political Self-Fashioning and Christian Empowerment in the Memoir of Quamino Buccau,A Pious Methodist

This article analyses the permeable boundaries between slavery and freedom which developed in the context of illicit inter-imperial trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Caribbean, focusing on ties between the Dutch island of Curaçao and the neighbouring northern coast of Spanish South America. As smuggling opened opportunities for enslaved people to cross political borders, it spurred authorities to develop flexible legal frameworks to meet the challenge of conducting free trade in colonial slave societies. The evidence indicates that, even in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, slavery sometimes existed along a legal continuum, rather than as an immutable, absolute category.     

Intersectionality and the Role of White Women: An Analysis of Divorce Petitions from Slavery

Research on sexual violence and rape during slavery often focuses on the dynamic between white men and black women. However, white women played an important intermediate role in the sexual violence of enslaved black women. Analyzing divorce petitions submitted during slavery, the unique role of white women and their responses to sexual violence carried out by their husbands offer additional depth to the discussion of rape of enslaved black women. Furthermore, this analysis adds to intersectionality theory with the concept of a web of intersectional incentives, tactics, and consequences that encourage the maintenance of oppression.     

Cohabitation registers and the study of slave families in Virginia

Virginia's cohabitation registers were compiled after the Civil War to legalize the unions that had formed between enslaved couples and to legitimize the children of those couples. They provide valuable demographic information about more than 13,000 couples and their children – well over 50,000 individuals – drawn from 23 counties across the state. The registers can be very useful to historians of slavery and slave families, but when using them it is essential to understand why and how they were created, what exactly they include, and what they omit.     

Imaging Separation in Tom Feelings' The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo and Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

Graphic artist Tom Feelings and novelist Toni Morrison face similar challenges in representing the Atlantic slave trade. Feelings' The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo tells a wordless narrative in pictures. Morrison's Beloved portrays in contemporary narrative form, the devastating effects of forced transnational migration. Both artists confront conventional silences surrounding this aspect of slavery by presenting displaced Africans on their way to the Americas. Their texts both define Black literature of the late twentieth century, and trouble the status quo as experiments in aesthetic expression. Their works demonstrate the way a legacy of trauma is written into the fabric of US culture. I put forth a comparative methodology of representations of the Middle Passage in word and image, by examining the self-definition of a genre and the collapse of conventional medial distinctions between graphic, linguistic and musical expression. Feelings employs overt symbolism and more subtle modes of signifying in his treatment of individuals in crisis, forced into new subject positions when enslaved. Likewise, Morrison critiques identity formation while in bondage by stylising her language for particular effects. Parallel structures in word and image signify resistance to convention as African American literature makes its way into the broader realm of world literature.     

The enduring function of caste: colonial and modern Haiti,Jamaica, and Brazil The economy of race,the social organization of caste,and the formulation of racial societies

Abstract

Modern day social hierarchies in Jamaica, Brazil and, to a degree, Haiti find their roots in the colonial context, where planters stratified laborers in order to maximize control. During slavery planters found artificial ways of influencing African identity, dividing enslaved Africans by their occupations and by skin color. These distinctions created divisions among workers and color proved a singularly powerful and enduring symbol of social and economic mobility. The American propensity for creating racial classifications for Africans and further divisions for 'mixed-race' offspring traditionally served economic interests. Their perpetuation into the present may signal the continued utility of dividing Africans into subgroups as a means of maintaining control of racial politics in the Americas.     

Custom and law: The status of enslaved Africans in seventeenth-century Barbados

The island of Barbados provides an ideal case study to explore the beginnings of slavery and definitions of slave status in England's early American colonies. Africans and Europeans confronted each other earlier and on a larger scale in Barbados than in any other English colony. By tracing the development of slavery from the colony's settlement in 1627 this article argues that the legitimization or legalization of African slavery and the status of slaves were established in custom long before any slave laws were passed. Focus is on slave status as a point of analysis, implicitly defined by three major features: chattel property, lifetime (or permanent) servitude, and inheritance of slave condition from an enslaved mother. In examining the evidence for these features, the article contends they were part of the culture of the Euro-Atlantic world and English worldview by the time the island was settled. None of the features was ever defined in any law; rather, they were implicit in any Barbados law that mentioned slaves.     

The urban background of Enslaved Muslims in the Americas

Enslaved Muslims constituted a relatively small proportion of the enslaved population in the Americas, and that population was largely male. This article explores an unappreciated dimension of the background of these enslaved Muslims, the fact that most came from towns and had traveled widely, between towns; that is enslaved Muslims tended to come from urban settings, no matter where they ended up in the Americas. This urban background has implications in terms of the experiences and expectations of the enslaved. The urban context was associated with commerce, craft specialization, literacy, and political and social consciousness of slavery and its meaning within west Africa. The study examines available biographical information on enslaved Muslims from the Western Sudan, usually referred to as Mandingo or some variant in the Americas, and those from the Central Sudan, including Hausa, Yoruba, Nupe and people from Borno. The urban setting of Muslim areas of West Africa is then compared with other towns and cities in the Atlantic world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in terms of size of towns and multicultural backgrounds of urban populations, further demonstrating that the urban background of many enslaved Africans and the extent to which the enslaved population was moved between towns has not been appreciated.     

Cape Verde at the End of Atlantic Slavery

This article situates the Cape Verde islands in the last half-century of Atlantic slavery. It concentrates on the final decades of bondage in Cape Verde, abolished selectively in 1857 and in totality in 1878, set within a longer period that began with international conventions prohibiting slave trafficking north of the equator and ended with the imperfect end of Atlantic slavery in the 1880s. Several dynamic forces, I argue, gave the Cape Verde archipelago an outsized role in Atlantic slavery's uneven decline and destruction. Some of these forces – the enforcement of anti-trafficking conventions, British abolitionist activity, the eclipsing of enslaved by free-labour in transatlantic labour flows – should be categorised as local echoes of a larger Atlantic narrative. Yet, in Cape Verde, we also find a dynamic admixture of phenomena – ecological crisis, epidemic disease, the advent of South Atlantic steamship service, experimentations in free soil, and imperial renewal – that projected the archipelago into and onto a wider nineteenth-century world made by enslavement and its destruction.     

Rethinking runaways in the British Atlantic World: Britain,the Caribbean,West Africa and North America

This essay utilises four exceptional case studies to explore the various causes, experiences and results of escape from slavery in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British Atlantic World. These are: Johnny Beckles in Barbados, Jamie Montgomery in Scotland, Castle Slaves at Cape Coast Castle on the West African Gold Coast; and Harriet and Beverly Hemings in Virginia. This essay illuminates the diverse forms of enslavement and escape, showing that while some sought escape from slavery and even their race, others sought sanctuary within slave society and even on plantations, while others used escape as a means of pressuring for changes in their lives and work as enslaved people.     

How Cuba burned with the ghosts of British slavery: race,abolition and the Escalera

In the antebellum period, a system of slave trials operated in Virginia that was entirely at odds with the common law practices that governed the trial of most defendants, free and enslaved, throughout the southern states. This article examines the operation and implications of this system in Richmond, Virginia, between 1830 and 1861 and argues that the absence of due process protections for slaves enabled the legal system to better serve the interests of the slaveholding class than in common law jurisdictions. This was particularly significant in Richmond, as urban-industrial conditions made slaveholders extremely dependent on the law to combat slave crime. By the 1850s, however, the conflict between Virginia's slave trial system and Anglo-American common law culture, as well as between slaveholder and nonslaveholder interests, had resulted in adjustments to the system that signalled the start of its decline.     

US slavery,civil war,and the emancipation of enslaved mothers

ABSTRACT

In the United States, slavery’s destruction was a war-long process, shaped not only by Union military victories, legislation, and presidential proclamations, but also by contradictory, inconsistent and sometimes lethal policies enacted by the Union military and federal government toward refugees from slavery. The haphazard nature of those policies and their often deadly consequences were never more evident than in the experience of enslaved women, mothers, and the children under their care, who approached Union lines in pursuit of freedom, but encountered a gauntlet of conflicting and unevenly enforced military edicts and a humanitarian crisis still only superficially understood by many Civil War historians.