Slave Crucibles: Interstate Migrants and Social Assimilation in the Antebellum South

Between 1800 and 1860 almost a million American slaves were forcibly removed from the Upper South and sent to the Lower South. An outpouring of historical research has greatly contributed to our understanding of the political, economic, demographic and business aspects of interregional slave migration in the antebellum period. As yet, however, relatively few studies have examined the assimilation process of interstate slave migrants. Cast into new slave communities, newcomers were often treated – and felt – like outsiders by their fellow bondspeople, and were forced to utilise various strategies to effect their integration. How did migrants experience the transition to new slave communities? How did they forge new relationships, and what were the bases of these relationships? What institutions and strategies aided in their integration process? And to what extent do their experiences reveal a broad ‘slave identity’ in the antebellum period? This study explores these questions for interstate newcomers in the antebellum South.     

A Theory of Capitalist Slavery

The relationship between slavery and capitalism has become a renewed topic of debate, yet scholars have not been able to agree on a definition of capitalism. In this article I first clear up some misconceptions and situate the debate in the Marxian tradition from which it arose. I argue that while non‐Marxian accounts of capitalism fail to explain the key social transformations that have accompanied the rise of capitalism globally, Marxian accounts have failed to comprehend similar transformations that occurred on American slave plantations in the 19th century. I then present a general model of capitalism, building on earlier work by Brenner and Wood, that both incorporates and explains the distinctive dynamics of capitalist slavery in the antebellum South.     

Routine of seasons: Labour regimes and social ritual in an antebellum plantation community

Using the narrative of Ellen and William Craft's escape from slavery, together with a database of 2260 runaway slave advertisements published in antebellum South Carolina newspapers, this article examines the ways in which runaways exploited whites' notions of race and freedom to pass as free. Acculturated women and men engaged in intricate performances in which they exploited colour, dress, language, and employment skills to transcend lines of race and class, in order to assume free identities. Recognising that freedom could be performed, if not legally attained, the majority of runaways did not strike out for free territory. Instead, many remained in the South where they created free identities that enabled them to secure employment, enjoy mobility, and maintain kinship ties, if only temporarily.     

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.     

‘How a Slave was Made a Man’: Negotiating Black Violence and Masculinity in Antebellum Slave Narratives

In the manner in which they portrayed black masculinity, fugitive slave autobiographies published in the 1840s represented a sharp break from abolitionist narratives produced during the previous decade. Unlike anti-slavery authors writing in the 1830s, slave narrators of the 1840s deliberately renounced any connection between black manhood and a willingness to commit horrific acts of retributive violence against whites. At the same time, fugitive slave authors insisted on the admirable manliness of the African American men they depicted, including themselves as the protagonists of their stories. The return that radical abolitionist authors made to a glorification of black violence in the 1850s marks the publication of slave narratives in the 1840s as an exceptional moment in the history of antislavery literature. The popular success of these narratives, contrasted with the unpopularity of the more violent antislavery texts of the 1830s and the 1850s, also reveals the fears of black violence that white Americans harboured throughout the antebellum period and fugitive slave authors' consciousness of those fears.     

Historical writing on migration into the commonwealth Caribbean: A bibliographical review of the period c.1838‐c.1938

For almost a century after slave emancipation in the Commonwealth Caribbean a steady stream of immigrants entered the colonies, from such diverse places as India, Africa, Europe, China, North America, Syria and Lebanon. Historical scholarship on these migrants has concentrated heavily on the Indians, while almost completely neglecting the Syrian/Lebanese. Moreover, the main emphasis has been on the economic roles of the migrants within the dominant plantation sector. Recently, however, increasing attention has been focused on the non‐plantation sectors, while interesting and scholarly work is also emerging on the socio‐cultural aspects of immigrant society. Much research still needs to be done on migrants into the smaller Caribbean islands. Although small in number by comparison with those migrating to Guyana and Trinidad, a knowledge of their roles in and adaptation to their host societies will help us to understand more fully the impact of post‐emancipation migration on the Commonwealth Caribbean.     

Sexuality and the Second Slavery: Figuring Sexuality in Racialized Labor Formations

From the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, sexuality was a key factor in the reorganization of New World slavery through the period described as the Second Slavery. With the early nineteenth century bans on the transatlantic slave trade initiated by the United States and the British Empire, there was a corresponding transition from prior plantation economies focused on US Upper South tobacco and Caribbean sugar islands toward more differentiated forms of labor based on hiring out in domestic services, manufacture, and the expansion into new frontiers of accumulation in the New South of the Mississippi Delta, Cuba, and Brazil. This qualitative change and expansion of New World slavery carried gendered understandings based on the sexuality and reproductive capabilities of enslaved people. Using Tomich's conception of the Second Slavery, I incorporate an analysis that demonstrates how conceptions of sexuality were integral to racializing and gendering processes of subordination that reveal the heterogeneity of the historical and economic moment.     

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.     

Measures of Assimilation in the Marriage Market: Mexican Americans 1970–1990

In 1965 the United States rewrote its immigration laws, and immigration increased sharply as a result. The immigrants and the children of immigrants from the post‐1965 period are slowly becoming more influential in U.S. life; the largest of these groups are the Mexican immigrants and the Mexican Americans. The rapid growth of Hispanic and Asian populations in the United States has led to a renewed interest in the question of assimilation; that is, will the new groups assimilate, and if so how long will it take? Will they become part of White America? Will some groups assimilate into the Black‐dominated urban underclass (a process Portes called segmented assimilation)? Will some groups remain permanently separate and socially isolated? In this article, I examine the behavior of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in the U.S. marriage market, using census data from 1970, 1980, and 1990. The findings are that Mexican Americans are assimilating with non‐Hispanic Whites over time, and the evidence tends to reject the segmented assimilation hypothesis. The interplay between intermarriage and endogamy is studied with log linear models; some variations by geography and U.S. nativity are noted.     

Transatlantic Encounters and the Origins of James Henley Thornwell's Proslavery Ideology

The European travel experiences of antebellum Southern intellectual James Henley Thornwell and his subsequent publications in the USA shed light on the history of transatlantic ideological exchange. This case study indicates that British antislavery concepts failed to sway Thornwell; instead, his writings reveal that European travel sometimes strengthened Americans’ proslavery beliefs rather than fostering antislavery views. Condemning abolitionists as illogical fanatics and blaming capitalism for the wretched situation of London's laborers, he returned home a staunch defender of the slave system and paternalism. A leading intellectual, Thornwell profoundly influenced the South, including secessionists, through his powerful proslavery argument.     

Negative Assimilation: How Immigrants Experience Economic Mobility in Japan

This paper examines the economic mobility of foreign migrants in Japan. In a country that is largely regarded as homogeneous and closed to outsiders, how and to what extent do immigrants achieve economic success? A survey conducted by the authors revealed that the conventional assimilationist perspective does not fully explain immigrants’ economic success in Japan. Migrants from the West experience what Chiswick and Miller ( 2011 ) refer to as “negative assimilation.” That is, their earnings decline over time in Japan. While negative assimilation was not clearly observed among immigrants from neighboring Asian countries, wages among them did not increase with the length of their stay in Japan. For both groups, the skills they brought from abroad were found to be largely accountable for their economic success, while locally specific human capital, such as education acquired in the host society, did not contribute to their earnings.     

Quantitative sources for studying urban industrial slavery in the antebellum US South

The composition of antebellum Southern urban industrial labour forces is an area requiring careful quantitative analysis. Southern elites worried about slaves in urban industry (especially hired slaves) because they experienced wage‐labour freedoms and so had greater opportunites to resist slavery. The distribution of late antebellum Richmond tobacco factory workers between hired slaves and owned slaves is studied by examining property tax records and census of manufacturing records. Tax records are shown to understate by 11–12 per cent the number of slaves used in factories. This error is due to tax evasion, assessment inefficiency, and seasonal variations between census and tax record collection dates. Furthermore, tax records cannot be used to distinguish between owned and hired slaves in factories, as previous researchers allege. Only the 1860 census of manufacturers explicitly divides the slave force between hired and owned slaves. This record shows that 58 per cent of Richmond tobacco workers were hired slaves, lending credence to the fears of southern elites that urban industry would erode the master‐slave relation they preferred.     

‘No More Sarah Hicks’: A Reconfiguration of Antebellum Time and Space for an Elite White Woman

This article considers the life of Sarah Hicks, a young middle class woman born and raised in the cultural milieu of antebellum New York, who, in 1853, married Benjamin F. Williams, a physician and slaveholder from Greene County North Carolina. The article traces her literal journey across the Mason–Dixon line where she encountered southern ways of life that were, in the first instance, bewildering to her. Gender forms the primary focus of the article as Sarah moved from a northern gender ideal of true womanhood to that of the plantation mistress. Her search for a sense of belonging as a southerner suggests a period of transition in her life as she reconfigured what it meant to a woman, wife, and mother in the antebellum world of the slaveholding South.     

‘A southern college slipped from its geographical moorings’: slavery at Princeton

While slave-owning students at Princeton rarely constituted a majority of students, they were often a large plurality of the students in the antebellum period. Because of Princeton's historic role in educating southerners, it has sometimes been referred to as the most southern of the Ivy League schools. So many students from the United States South enrolled at Princeton during the first several decades of the college that one observer wrote that one might take Princeton for a ‘Southern college slipped from its geographical moorings.’ This article explores the extent to which and whether Princeton behaved like a southern institution in its speech and actions concerning slavery and emancipation.     

‘[S]he could … spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: white mothers and enslaved wet nurses’ invisible labor in American slave markets

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the market that white mothers created for enslaved wet nurses, the intimate labor that they performed in southern households, and the ways that this market intersected with slave marketplaces in the antebellum era. It argues that white mothers’ desires and demands for enslaved wet nurses transformed bondwomen’s ability to suckle into a largely invisible, yet skilled form of labor, and created a niche sector of the slave market. In these ways, white mothers were crucial to the commodification of enslaved women’s reproductive bodies, their breast milk, and the nutritive and maternal care they provided to white children.     

Nigerians in China: A Second State of Immobility

China’s rapid economic development has been accompanied by new forms of immigration. Investors and professionals from developed countries are increasingly joined by a diverse group of immigrants from around the world. While there is a large body of academic literature on Chinese emigration, China’s new role as a country of immigration has received less scholarly attention. This paper addresses the dynamics of South–South migration to China through a study of Nigerians in Guangzhou, a major international trading hub. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews and participant observation among African traders and migrants in Guangzhou. The paper contends that Nigerian immigration to China epitomizes global migration trends towards a diversification of migration flows, commercialization of the migration process and increased policing of foreigners within national borders. China was rarely the preferred destination of this study’s Nigerian informants but, rather, a palatable alternative, as their aspirations to enter Europe and North America were curtailed by restrictive immigration regimes. They escaped a situation of involuntary immobility in Nigeria through short‐term visas obtained with the help of migration brokers. However, opportunities for visa renewals are scant under the current Chinese immigration policy. Undocumented migrants find their mobility severely inhibited: They must carefully assess how, when and with whom they move about in order to avoid police interception. This is a business impediment, as well as a source of personal distress for migrants who engage in trade and the provision of trade‐related services. The situation can be described as a “second state of immobility”: the migrants have succeeded in the difficult project of emigration, but find themselves spatially entrapped in new ways in their destination country.     

Migrant Assimilation in Europe: A Transnational Family Affair1

The paper advances our empirical and theoretical understanding of migrant assimilation. It does so by focusing on a very particular group of individuals who appear more likely than other migrant types to “go native.” We call these individuals “mixed nationality relationship migrants” (i.e., migrants who have committed to a life outside their home country because of the presence of a foreign partner). The paper argues that the transnational family milieus that emerge from this form of international migration are critical to the assimilation process. Empirical material from 11 in‐depth interviews with female migrants in Britain (Sheffield) and France (Paris) supports our argument. We also suggest that such “extreme” assimilation is more likely within a regional migratory system – like the EU – where the “identity frontiers” crossed in the formation of a transnational family are relatively shallow.     

The old-new distinction and naturalization: 1900

The author analyzes differences in naturalization baetween "old" groups of migrants coming primarily from Northern and Western Europe and "new" migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The primary focus is on naturalization as a measure of assimilation into the United States. Reasons for differences between the two groups are discussed     

Returns from the South: Effects of return migration of Ghanaian migrants from China on livelihoods and wealth inequalities in Ghana

The sedentary bias that characterizes discourses on migrations from and within the Global South has failed to inform a consistent exploration of international migration from and among global southern countries as normal, desirable and impactful to migrants and their social networks at different spatial levels. Migration-development nexus analyses are predominantly framed around Global South-Global North migration episodes whereby cash and social remittances from the North to the South are expected to trigger development in poorer global southern origin countries. This approach neglects the possibility of similar outcomes accruing from south-south migrations. Drawing on qualitative research methods among Ghanaian migrants to China, our paper addresses the question how does south-south migration affect livelihoods and wealth inequality? We argue that blunt global categorizations such as “Global South” and “Global North” only serve to obfuscate what is a rather heterogenous bunch of countries, with divergent opportunities for migrants. We recommend that greater focus should be on the contextual factors at the origin and destination, the quality of return preparedness and the human capital of the migrants rather than an arbitrary clustering around a binary Global South-Global North trajectory as though they are internally homogenous. We conclude that there is heterogeneity in the effects of south-south migration on household livelihoods and wealth inequalities.     

‘A Full Knowledge of the Subject of Slavery’: The Amistad,Expert Testimony,and the Origins of Atlantic Studies

This article explores the role of testimony, expertise, and the academy in the production of knowledge about slavery in the context of the trials of the Africans aboard the slave ship La Amistad, 1839–1841. Testimony provided by enlisted self-professed experts formed the intellectual architecture to the legal argument as it advanced to the Supreme Court. When considered separately from the trials, and distinctly as a question of the production of knowledge, the role of expert testimony provides crucial insight into the function of the university in antebellum anti-slavery thought and action, the marginalization of the lived African slave experience, and the emergence of Atlantic studies in the contemporary present. Examining the relationship between the university and the marshalling of expertise – broadly understood as linguistic, political and cultural knowledge of slavery and the slave trade – suggests that the early use of expert testimony had an important albeit neglected role in the birth of Atlantic studies.