Slavery on Trial - based on Beyond Freedom's Reach by Adam Rothman (2015)

Adam Rothman's Beyond Freedom's Reach: a Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (2015) is a circuitous telling of the era surrounding Emancipation when black Americans were particularly susceptible to becoming victims of kidnapping, as slave owners desperately tried to maintain their way of life. As the new social order took form in the South, the planter class fled to U.S. states and territories with inconsistent oversight and "slave havens" in the Caribbean. In this book, Rothman tells the story of Rose Herera, a domestic slave in Louisiana whose family straddles slavery and freedom, while being torn apart by slavery and freedom.

Telling a female slave's story 150 years after Reconstruction is a formidable feat, but Rothman had two factors working in his favor. First, he was fortunate to stumble across an incredible primary source: an 1866 report to the Secretary of State presented to the U.S. Senate on the "kidnapping of colored persons in the southern states for the purpose of selling them as slaves in Cuba.' This source is unique in its specificity and in its championing of certain universal human rights during this time. Through Rose's story, Rothman can highlight an important but relatively unknown international conspiracy to preserve the institution of slavery and its profits, while simultaneously utilizing the technique of microhistory. This historiographical method of writing focuses on the experiences of a single person or household in order to discover "new insights into how people actually lived" (6). In the end notes to the prologue, Rothman writes that the microhistory was "pioneered by social historians of early modern Europe" (End note 8, for pp. 3-7). In providing the reader swatches of Rose's life as a mother, wife, activist, woman and yes, a slave, he successfully executes her microhistory with brevity and completeness.

Using a court case as a primary source advances the impact of this book. It demonstrates the gravity of the trend of black kidnappings (and rumors of such) and the social and legal volatility of the day. Rothman often writes that the era of Emancipation was unevenly distributed across geography and circumstance. "...the forward march of freedom was erratic and could be reversed" (163). Were it not for this court case documented in Congressional hearings, her story and others like it may have succumbed to simply being rumors and not the impetus for Federal action.

Another simplification Rothman sidesteps is the reduction of Rose Herera's life to that of her status as a slave. Rather, he tells Rose's history as conditioned by the institution of slavery. The ultimate effect is that at the culmination of the narrative, "as a moral drama, nothing less than slavery itself was on trial" (137). It is to be noted that if Rose's agency was ever circumscribed by her circumstance, Rothman's microhistory is no evidence of that. As a slave, she chooses to marry a free man of color, George Herera. Together, they father 5 children. The eldest three are the precious cargo that is spirited (illegally) away by a Mrs Mary De Hart. By law, Rose was property of the De Hart family, as were her children. Although George was free, Rose and her children were not. In making slavery hereditary through the mother, Southern planter aristocrats were able to maintain profits by claiming the mother's offspring into perpetuity, rather than facing extralegal and exorbitant charges for human trafficking and import. Laws such as this provide a valuable framework for Rothman's text. As the rights of black Americans were in flux, so was the nation, and the speed and conclusion of Rose's plight is proof of that.

George Herera's agency is difficult to ascertain. By law and custom, the paternity of the Herera children was stricken from baptismal records, furthering the pro-slavery ideology that slave owners were symbolic and absolute providers for their slaves, and thus, the father figure. George could not live with Rose. George could not stop Rose from being imprisoned, nor was he able to resist Mrs De Hart's abduction of their three eldest children to Cuba. But he does push back mightily against the notion that slave families were creations of their masters. By owning the slave legally as a commodity, taking authority as a parent would, and disciplining with only one's conscience as oversight, the slave owner believed that all relationships the slave had were also manifestations of the owner. However in 1863, George pens a letter to the highest-ranking Union official in New Orleans informing the Major General that his wife is imprisoned and his children were in danger of being kidnapped by their owner (then, a Mrs Roland, Mary De Hart's aunt and the Hereras' owner, on paper). Rothman writes that George tied "his family's (my emphasis) plight to transcendent principles of right and wrong. Rose and her children may have belonged to her owner as property, but they also belonged to him, and the mother and children belonged together" (110). Rothman further notes that Herera signed the letter in his own name, indicating he was literate, the words were his own, and the agency was his own.

Finally we can look examine the negotiation and power struggle between Mary De Hart and Rose Herera. Compared to the intensely and frequently violent abuse that took place between the domestic slaves and their mistresses in the book we read last week, Rothman's female leads are confronting Emancipation in a different place under very different circumstance. The prolonged discipline that Rose receives in light of her agency is at the hands of local jailer, after her arrest for allegedly assaulting her owner, Mrs Roland. That she was jailed and not beaten - or worse - is one deviation from Glymph's text. In 1865, Rose denied Mrs Roland's charges in provost court (102), which may have been deemed "sassy" or "insolent" as in Glymph's history, but to deny an owner in court is evidence of the asymmetry of Emancipation across time and space. Another interesting diversion from last week novel is that black people can - for the first time - testify against white people. This uniform application of rights brings into focus the "many civil wars" of New Orleans that were being waged in the "twilight of slavery." In an even more intriguing development of Emancipation, Rose presses charges against De Hart after she's spirited the children to Cuba and returned to Louisiana. Now a freed woman, she requests her lawyer to arrange for her former mistress' arrest and detainment on charges of kidnapping. In what can only be described as an amazingly short amount of time and courageous amount of agency, Rose is able to find recourse for her children against her former owner in the throes of the legal system.

The characterizations that Rothman tackles challenge the supposed perimeters of citizenship, freedom, race, class, gender and right. Their individual stories help shed light on the gray areas they waded through in the legal and social landscapes of the emancipated South.


~ dls

Agency Under Fire : Out of the House of Bondage by Thavolia Glymph (2008)

Most appropriate for Women's History Month, this week's reading for my graduate history seminar takes a rare perspective of women's labor history in the American South. The violence of slavery is usually envisioned at the hands of men, outdoors; say, an overseer whipping a field hand. But this text examines the hegemony among women inside the plantation household, a space both public and private, intimate and impersonal, before and after Emancipation.

In Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, Thavolia Glymph uses the dichotomies of the plantation household as the environment most likely to have housed interactions between enslaved women and their mistresses. Domination and abuse of enslaved women would have largely occurred in the plantation household, which in itself represented "a field of power relations and political practices" between and within races and genders (2). The creation and use of the plantation household is quite useful in that before Emancipation, white women were the de facto managers of the home, during the Civil War they were witness to a major transfiguration of the home, and after Emancipation they were the unwilling participants to a historic shift in women's work in the home. White women were at all once owners and then employers. Black women were surviving silently and then living loud and vocal, propelling both races of women out of the plantation household into a (more) free society.

"Free labor" in this book is similar to how I interpreted it while reading Coolies and Cane a few weeks ago.  After Emancipation, living as a black woman in a free wage society largely meant obtaining the right to move freely in the world at-large and the world of work. She slowly obtained the option to choose the right to work, and with that, the right to be fired. As the threat and reality of perpetual corporal punishment at the hands of owners faded into the past, she began to use her voice, one that had silently accompanied generations of active resistance to slavery. With Emancipation she had obtained the voice to quit, and in at least one case documented in the text, the right to take legal action for wrongs committed by an employer (191). Her newly acquired job mobility in domestic service widened her sphere of influence to other homes transfigured by the Civil War. She and her sisters in the South could hire out their skills as washerwomen, cooks, and seamstresses, among a variety of other vocations that had previously made up the plantation-era division of labor they had been forced into. Another use of black women's voices and choices were the increased information networks - gossiping - that provided a means of avoiding violent or unfair homes. Using her voice to leave unsafe work sites and convey intimate details about behaviors and employment practices radically changed how white women interacted with their environments and their employ, while allowing black women another channel through which to express distrust, anger, hurt and frustration with racism.

Glymph's plantation household can first be considered a private residence, as we think of our homes today; intimate and personal. In the proslavery ideologies of the time, slaves were part of the "family" and thus a part of the private nature of the household. Glymph does not shy away from the hygienic and very often, sexual demands white owners made their slaves meet for their personal comforts. But in practice, a slave was an economic resource used to provide goods and services that were desired by owners, usually, a biological, white family. The ownership of a slave meant there existed a public component to the plantation household that governed the rights of owners over their property. It was this explicitly public ownership that black women resisted, first with their actions and later with both their actions and voices. Glymph admits that the "historiography of American slavery tends to be squeamish about the inherent violence of the arrangements slavery required (57)." Black women of the time could not afford to be squeamish about the violence they faced, and quite often opposed the abusive and violent tactics of their mistresses.

Earlier in the term, we read a paper by Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor of African/African-American history, entitled "On Agency" (2003). In it, Johnson asserts that agency is more than simply human volition or will. If it can be reduced to such, then it voids the personal efforts of the slave to actively engage in and defy her oppressive state while in the midst of it. Slaveholder expectations of black women reduced their agency to "acting out" rather than being a deliberate response to systematic racism. "Rendered childlike and irresponsible, slave women could also not be serious contenders for the status of rebels (94)." Such gendered notions on warfare held by white men and women alike meant they frequently misinterpreted incidents of rebelliousness. Glymph writes further on that page that whites depended on a "prevailing pattern of who would be charged with concerted rebelliousness," and black women, by and large, were not suspect. This evidence of early racial profiling prevented white planter class Southerners from anticipating the new levels of interaction in the plantation household with black women after the War.

Decorum and custom demanded that white women respond to the voice of black women. The image and respect of the Southern mistress stemmed from an (ironically) patronizing submissiveness to the ingrained patriarchy that characterized the home during the 19th-century. Glymph describes the "good" mistress paradigm as the white woman who has "dedicated her life to the never-ending task of managing her household and caring for her family and slaves in sickness and in health. Her comeliness was due in no small measure to her ability to satisfy all who depended on her, to manage a household rent by inequalities of race and gender with seeming equanimity (19)." The prototypical Southern Lady was expected to be fragile and protected by her man, the master of his domain and slaves. This typical view of Southern women deserves Glymph's perspective. Her book is not only about black women, but white women and the patriarchal weight they were subjected to along with the slaves, especially those who were female. By joining their struggles as women then pitting them against the other as blacks gained their voice in labor negotiations, Glymph gives a 360-degree view of power relations among women during this time. Both the lens of race and that of gender are necessary to complete this picture. Glymph tends to leave the details on the patriarchy to the reader, however, choosing to elaborate on how women of different races found their work lives forever changed. This is a benefit as there is considerably less scholarship on women exercising agency during the 19th-century, so the book finds fertile ground in the audience of women's history and American history readers.

This book is unique in its presentation of the economic principle-agent problems of women in the Emancipation era. In another twist of irony, seeing as how I am a single, educated, Southern economist, "economy' was a virtue of Southern women even then, save that in the past, it exemplified a woman who ran her plantation household with the utmost domestic efficiency, meting out directives and punishments as needed to suit her desires. As a black woman, I am far from that manifestation of economy in any era. However, it begs the question of the agency of those "women of economy" who came before me. Was it their choice as white women to be executives of the Reconstructive homestead, especially as legions of newly freed black women actively chose to pursue an education at newly founded institutions such as Spelman College (my alma mater), and the demands of satisfactions of their own private family life? As black women exercised their voice and choice for work, white women had no choice but to find and preserve some agency of their own to maintain their image of the genteel, mannered, micro-managing matriarch. This meant negotiating with former slaves, finding new solutions to run the household smoothly, and in many cases, going into the work force themselves to find their own voice. Glymph's story is not a story about white women or black women, but a story about women who work, worked together, and worked towards a new future.


dls

Pleading the 14th Amendment: More Than Freedom by Stephen Kantrowitz (2012)

Spanning the years 1829-1889, black Americans' fight for freedom, and subsequently, citizenship, was in constant transition, and would continue to be well into the present-day. Although nominal citizenship was bestowed by the Federal Government via the 14th Amendment in 1868, the social, economic and political privileges that accompanied white citizenship were not that of "colored citizenship" during this era.

In his book More than freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889, author Stephen Kantrowitz writes that after the Civil War, the community of blacks in Boston, Massachusetts were instrumental in the "remaking of the postemancipation South" and pressed for "broader and more capacious laws of equal citizenship" while "insisting that whites who continued to exclude them by law or custom stood in opposition to the victorious Union and the egalitarian 'spirit of the age,'" (Kantrowitz 4). By stating that citizenship was validated both by law and by custom, Kantrowitz opens the door to the spectrum of equality in 19th-century America across race, class and gender. Whereas white male citizens had private property rights and suffrage, black males - and at a much slower rate, black women - were granted these rights in name only at first, and over time, made strides towards full engagement and respect in the milieu. Kantrowitz does adequately well in taking the time to discuss what black women activists were doing alongside the men, but several well-known female freedom fighters were left out, leaving to the imagination the concept of "citizenry' for a women. This book defines citizenship as being both the legal and social attainment of equal standing with any other (male) American.

Symbolically, blacks were squared off against the 'Slave Power' that had (for lack of a better word) enslaved white America since the 1700s. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was the litmus test of citizenship in that non-citizens were slaves and only citizens could vote to repeal the law. Nonetheless, Kantrowitz displays black resistance during these year as well as during and after the Civil War. Between 1829 and 1860, blacks claimed their own citizen status by establishing their own institutions and meeting places such as churches, conventions, schools and lodges that housed the Prince Hall Freemasons, an organization that the author stresses in its significance. The Freemasons embraced principles of universal citizenship and white British members initiated the first black members in 1775 after they were previously rejected by colonial Freemasonries. In Boston, black nomenclature for self-identification presented the race as "African" first in the 1700s and later as "people of color" (1830s), "Negro," "colored Americans," "Africamericans," and occasionally as the "nominally free" (35). Consider also the fact that the Boston Public School System was desegregated in 1855 and a strong sense of black patriotism with frequent references to Crispus Attucks' martyrdom during the American Revolution. In fact, the source of inspiration for the struggle most present to Black Bostonians was the American Revolution and not the Haitian Revolution. Kantrowitz chooses to focus on the former, but in light of emancipation in contemporary societies, it would have enhanced the book even more to see how blacks were borrowing from or contributing to the global trend of freedom during this era. Black Boston was literate and engaged and perhaps historical documentation might connect them to the movement beyond their borders (domestic and international) in a meaningful and relevant way.

During the War years, blacks immersed themselves in military service to the objections of the law and white society. When blacks were not permitted to join the military (although they had served in previous wars) or the city militias, they created their own drill companies. With the passing of the Militia Act of 1862, blacks gained (nominal) citizenship and the employment opportunities afforded them by the military, although equal  pay with white laborers would be inferior for generations to come. After Emancipation, the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments freed the slaves, granted citizenship and voting rights, but the portion of Kantrowitz' book that deals with these years is appropriately titled "The Disappointments of Citizenship." The disappointment is that the fight for equality was only beginning and was perhaps, more heated and protectionist than before Emancipation. In that light, abolition was a "necessary but insufficient" stepping stone of citizenship, and Kantowitz is careful to delineate the abolitionist battles that ceased in 1864 from the activist battles that are perpetual.

Is this book a history of the path to citizenship for blacks in America? Or of the path to citizenship for black Bostonians? To a large extent, it is the latter, as Boston's geography, status as the crucible of American independence, and early establishment made it a petri dish for revolution and revolutionary ideas. In that sense, it's a community history of local characters with a shared goal. But to what extent did the revolutionary ideas of Black Boston resonates and reflect those of Blacks elsewhere? Did all blacks desire inclusion over segregation? There was likely division among Blacks in other states and territories over this point as as there was in Boston when the setting for change was the classroom. So in that sense, Kantrowitz' periodization and characterization of Black Boston can be extended more generally to the masses of enslaved and free Blacks of the time across the nation.

When Economics met History

As previously noted, I am enrolled in a graduate history seminar covering the U.S. in the 19th century. Since I'm an economist, I'm sometimes able to tackle topics specific to my passion, economic history, but I'm not always so  lucky. Since the start of the year, I have been using this blog space to review and respond to several books I've read in the class. This will continue over the next six weeks, and as the class comes to a close, I will be be blogging about my term paper over the black markets that slaves created as the nation marched ever closer to Emancipation. From an economic perspective, the risk profiles of blacks were changing and thus many chose to use the uncertainty to their own economic advantage.

THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO READ MY BLOG and please continue to peruse and comment as you always have! All posts pertaining to the History 588 seminar and related readings are tagged 'PhD.'


Economics continues to be personal and practical, even in graduate school!



dls