The dairymaid and the prince: race,memory, and the story of Benjamin Banneker’s grandmother

The list of white Englishwomen, who formed intimate relationships with African men between 1680 and 1750 in Maryland, is impressive, more so because by 1664, Maryland laws made interracial marriages between white women and African men illegal. Court records exist documenting the punishment of women both for ‘fornicating’ with men of African descent and for having children by them, though how rigorously early colonial Maryland marriage laws were enforced remains unknown. What is known and what increasingly stringent marriage laws in Maryland suggest is that after 1664 white English women continued to choose black partners (both slave and free), regardless of serious social consequences that included social exclusion, lengthened indenture service, forced servitude of their children and of their sexual partners, and public physical punishment including whipping. By 1715, it became illegal in Maryland for black women to engage in intimate relationships with men. Mixed-race women, commonly called ‘mulatto’ in early records, found themselves with few choices in their sexual partners, since legally they were not allowed to engage in intimate relationships with either white or black men. One of these women, Molly Welsh, serves as a reminder of the unusual and unique position for women during the seventeenth century as servants, slave owners, property owners, and as partners in interracial relationships.     

Unequal partners in crime: masters,slaves and free people of color in Santo Domingo,c.1600–1650

In the early seventeenth century, important socioeconomic changes in the Spanish colony of Hispaniola brought about substantial shifts in race relations between white residents and peoples of African descent, who were enslaved and free. As the plantation system declined precipitously, white members of the Spanish elite started envisioning new roles for enslaved laborers, which included enrolling these enslaved peoples in their own intrigues against other elites. This cooperation led people in bondage to carry out violent attacks and assassination plots against other members of the white colonial society. People of African descent took advantage of these collaborations as an opportunity to advance their own interests within the community. Nevertheless, people of African descent faced fierce and often violent backlash if they acted of their own accord.     

Slave Mothers and White Fathers: Defining Family and Status in Late Colonial Cuba

This paper outlines the mechanisms used to position the offspring of slave women and white men at various points within late nineteenth-century Cuba's racial hierarchy. The reproductive choices available to these parents allowed for small, but significant, transformations to the existing patterns of race and challenged the social separation that typically under girded African slavery in the Americas. As white men mated with black and mulatta women, they were critical agents in the initial determination of their children's status–as slave, free, mulatto, or even white. This definitional flexibility fostered an unintended corruption of the very meaning of whiteness. Similarly, through mating with white men, enslaved women exercised a degree of procreative choice, despite their subjugated condition. In acknowledging the range of rape, concubinage, and marriage exercised between slave women and white men, this paper highlights the important links between reproductive practices and the social construction of race.     

‘Coercive measures’: slave rebellion,torture, and sovereignty in Cuba, 1812–1844

This article examines the use of judicial torture against free and enslaved people of color in Cuba during the first half of the nineteenth century. Utilizing the records of legal processes relating to dramatic incidences of slave rebellion, it considers the broader implications of the use of judicial torture as the colonial state responded to increasing threats to Cuban slavery and the Spanish Empire by assuming a greater role in promoting insular security. The article argues that the use of torture against enslaved deponents articulated broader transformations in the constitution and expression of Spanish sovereignty in colonial Cuba.     

‘[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.     

The enslaved wet nurse as nanny: the transition from free to slave labor in childcare in Barcelona after the Black Death (1348)

ABSTRACT

After the Black Death (1348–1400), Barcelona elites moved from hiring free wet nurses to purchasing enslaved women. This was not simply because the supply of slaves increased making enslaved wet nurses affordable. The gold standard before the plague was a married wet nurse of good reputation who lived in. Such women had families; as the labor market turned in their favor, they negotiated terms that benefited them, for example, bringing their child with them. Employers wanted wet nurses without children who could not leave their positions over those with what they deemed good characters. The slave’s inability to negotiate terms for herself or her child or to cut her period of service short made her more desirable.     

Slavery in a Texas Seaport: The Peculiar Institution in Galveston

Historians of urban slavery, free black people and the Atlantic maritime world have demonstrated that the urban milieu, maritime commerce and proximity to the sea provided free and enslaved African Americans in seaport cities with opportunities that challenged the premises and practices of bondage. Yet the relatively young and small seaport of Galveston, Texas, has received little attention from scholars. Growing in the two decades before the American Civil War from a rough village to one of the most important cotton ports on the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston maintained strict slave codes modelled on those adopted by other Southern states in response to slave rebellions and the rise of militant abolitionism in the 1830s. Nevertheless, black Galvestonians, like black seaport residents elsewhere, found greater possibilities for resisting or fleeing slavery than were available to African Americans in the interior.     

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.     

Redeeming the "Character of the Creoles": Whiteness, Gender and Creolization in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue

This article examines the political significance of white creolization in pre-revolutionary French Saint Domingue. Eighteenth-century Europeans tended to view white creoles as having physically, morally, and culturally degenerated due to the tropical climate, the monotony of plantation life, and their interaction with enslaved and free people of color. Yet elite white colonists in Saint Domingue claimed that white creoles possessed certain positive traits due to their new world birth, traits that rendered them physically stronger and potentially more virtuous than the French. Focusing on little-known publications authored by the white creole Moreau de Saint-Méry, this article highlights the deployment of gendered notions of virtue and noble savagery in debates over white creolization. Moreau's claims, when placed in the context of a conflict between local colonial magistrates and the French Colonial Ministry, challenge interpretations of white creolization as an undesirable, subversive side-effect of colonial slavery. Rather, white colonial men claimed that white colonists knew best how to ensure the obedience of the enslaved precisely because of their creolization.     

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.     

The nameless and the forgotten: maternal grief,sacred protection,and the archive of slavery

ABSTRACT

Death, particularly of enslaved infants and children, cast a long shadow over the experiences of enslaved mothers. Almost half of all enslaved infants died within the first two weeks of birth and another quarter died by age two. Although profit–loss calculations tabulate the frequent deaths of enslaved youngsters, these accounts reveal very little about cultural conventions on maternal grief or how enslaved mothers responded to their children’s deaths. In addition to using the rhetorical to draw attention to the loss women experienced and archival silences on maternal grief, this article challenges the claims that enslaved Africans welcomed and celebrated death because it freed loved ones from bondage and reunited captive Africans with their ancestors. Attention to expressions of grief and evolving grieving practices reveal the transformation of enslaved people’s culture and the invisible suffering of the enslaved, which are sometimes overshadowed by narratives of resistance and the resilience of African culture and black mothers.     

American Toussaints: Symbol,Subversion, and the Black Atlantic Tradition in the American Civil War

During the American Civil War, Toussaint Louverture was for African Americans the touchstone of a transatlantic identity, which joined their violent struggle for freedom and equality to a black revolutionary tradition that was deeply rooted in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. White abolitionists reinforced the construction of this identification, for when they saw armed and uniformed black men, they likewise imagined American Toussaints, committed, disciplined, and talented slave soldiers who were eager to both die and kill for freedom. The men and women who seized upon the revolutionary symbols of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution at this critical moment in the history of the American republic advanced a subversive ideology that undermined the white supremacist ideas that buttressed both the institution of slavery as well as the republic itself.     

In pursuit of autonomous womanhood: nineteenth-century black motherhood in the U.S. North

ABSTRACT

African Americans who resided in the antebellum North were subjected to forms of disenfranchisement that informed their political activism. These experiences were especially pronounced for black women whose identities existed at the intersections of race and gender, and black children who in some cases remained enslaved and indentured beyond their parents. The development of discourse on Northern black motherhood, produced in nineteenth-century black print culture and black women’s activism, countered indeterminate conditions of Northern freedom by promoting the empowering potential of black maternal authority.     

Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order

Slave-breeding is a topic that has long divided American historians. Since the late nineteenth century, historians have sought out empirical evidence to prove or disprove the idea that some slave owners deliberately bred slaves for sale or to augment their own labour force. As a result, the historiographical treatment of slave-breeding has become bogged down in what Herbert Gutman called ‘the numbers game’. This essay re-examines the question of slave-breeding and challenges us to consider the broader historical meaning of such sensational accusations. It does this by focusing on the rhetoric of black and white abolitionists in the United States between 1830 and 1861. The author argues that slave-breeding discourse provided abolitionists with a narrative focal point with which to attract public attention to their concerns about the westward extension of slavery, the physical and emotional toll slavery wrought on enslaved women, and the trauma associated with the break-up of slave families.     

Finding dignity in a landscape of fear: enslaved women and girls at the University of Virginia

From its inception, the University of Virginia was a destination for enslaved men, women, and children who were forced to leave their families to build and sustain the needs of this newly founded institution. This article explores the unique experiences of the enslaved women and girls who labored at the University of Virginia, and highlights the distinct intersectionality of their oppression in terms of their race, class, and gender. Their stories showcase the particular challenges that arose while enslaved at a university filled with young privileged white men, bringing attention to the historic and continual struggles of black women throughout history.     

Laura Smalligan's Jonkonnu,a Jamaican Slave Dance: Contesting the African in African-American

Using insights from her field of West African art and ethnography, Laura Smalligan (in an earlier journal article concerning the Jamaican slave dance, Jonkonnu) opens up and renews challenging perspectives regarding the indispensable African content of New World slavery. Smalligan argues that the Connu slave pageant stemmed from a particular time, place and outlook (of slaves from the Bight of Biafra, modern Nigeria). Discussion here pivots on two comparisons: of dance, often accompanied by trance states (from West Africa to Anglophone plantation societies in the Caribbean and mainland North America); and, of the way contemporary scholars now – often smitten in this generation by the postmodern ‘literary turn’ – view, prematurely, slave ethnicity as heuristically vague and unmanageable, as opposed to local slave society people, black and white, then who in their ordinary talk and activities depicted certain slaves ethnically (and linguistically). These broad comparisons should deepen and advance understandings to that dimension of the African diaspora to the Americas known (fashionably) as ‘ethnogenesis’, that is, the process of becoming African-American.     

Surgery,Slavery and the Circulation of Knowledge in the French Caribbean

Over the course of the eighteenth century, the reputation of surgery in France dramatically improved. Similarly, surgery thrived in the French Atlantic. Surgical expertise was a necessity in colonies that served as naval bases. Moreover, the violent brutality engendered by colonial slaveholding meant that surgeons dominated health care in France's Atlantic empire. As a result of these factors, Europeans as well as white Creoles practised surgery. Degreed practitioners offered their services in cities, while plantation surgeons and managers held the knives on the plantations. Enslaved men and women practised surgery too. Some tended their fellow slaves in the plantation hospitals and cabins, while others performed surgical procedures in urban areas. Due to the practical need for surgery in colonial and slaveholding environments and the lively exchange of surgical information, the surgical craft flourished in the French Caribbean and was practised by both free and enslaved persons.     

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.     

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.