Americas Big Crime: Slavery, Agency,

1
Americas Big Crime Slavery, Agency, Diversity
2
Contested Terrain Culture, slave religion,
power

• Those who molded and imbibed slavery also
  produced the single most important religious
  transformation to occur in the American colonies
  before 1776 an African spiritual holocaust that
  forever destroyed traditional African religious
  systems as systems in North America and that left
  slaves remarkably bereft of traditional
  collective religious practice before 1760.
• Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith
  Christianizing the American People (1990), 129-30.

3
Another Interpretation

• For their part, enslaved people were largely
  indifferent, or positively hostile, to the
  Christian beliefs of their owners. True, some
  slaves were converted to Christianity, but
  through the first half of the eighteenth century
  most resisted attempts to persuade them to
  abandon their traditional African religions.
• Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial America,
  1618-1776 (2005), ix.

4
What is at stake?

• Cultural Resource
• Agency/power
• So which interpretation is right?
• Both!

5
Thinking about slavery

• Not a monolithic experience
• Regional considerations
• Spectrum of agency-ability of slaves to exert
  power or influence over their own lives
• Contingency according to time and place

6
DOMINANT PARADIGM

• slaveholders severely circumscribed the lives
  of enslaved people, but they never fully defined
  them. Slavery, though imposed and maintained by
  violence, was a negotiated relationship. Ira
  Berlin, Many Thousands Gone The First Two
  Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998), 2.

7
Nature of Negotiation

• Asymmetrical power relationship
• Intrinsic instability
• Opportunities for renegotiation
• Expansion contraction of liberty

8
Three key regions on the English mainland

• North
• Chesapeake
• Carolina Low Country

9
North, Mid-Atlantic (PA, NJ, NY, New England)

• Smaller holdings
• Urban phenomenon
• Skilled labor, household labor
• Free black communities
• Isolation
• Intermarriage

10
Witchcraft in New England

• 1692
• Tituba
• Black slave from the Caribbean
• Described as mulatto/a
• Blamed for outbreak

11
Chesapeake (Virginia Maryland)

• Gang System
• African American Communities
• Natural increase
• Smaller holdings
• More interaction
• Christianization

12
Tobacco Slaves

• From indentured labor to slave labor
• 1680 turning point
• Who had it worse? White indentures or black
  slaves?

13
Carolinas (lower South)

• Task (vs. Gang) system
• Customary rights
• Absentee landlords
• Urban vs. Rural Black Culture
• Preservation of African Culture

14
But brutal system as well

• No natural increase (overwork, low fertility,
  poor diet, inadequate accommodations)
• Strict slave codes
• Barbarous punishments

15
(No Transcript)
16
Conclusions

• Slave Societies slavery is central to the
  economy.
• Societies with Slaves- slavery is not central to
  the economy.

17
Slavery as negotiated relationship

• Comparison
• Slavery as a labor system
• Diverse labor experience

18
Limits

• Overestimate the power of slaves
• Slave labor isnt comparable to free white labor
• Stretching the evidence
• Assumption
• Slave as saboteur

19
Even more

• Slave agency doesnt dismiss the extent and
  dislocation of suffering endured by Africans and
  their descendants under slavery
• Agency is a useful tool of historical analysis
  when comparing slave laborers to other slaves,
  but not white to black slave labor (at least in
  the 18th century!)

20
What isnt being considered?

• Slavery in the Caribbean?
• Slavery in Latin America?
• Slavery among Native Americans?
• Slavery in Africa?

21
Historiography

• Slavery is not interpreted the same way by
  historians
• Slavery varied from time place
• Examples of historiography

22
Samuel Elliot Morison, The Oxford History of the
American People

• Sambo, whose wrong-doings moved the
  abolitionists to wrath and tears, suffered less
  than any other class in the South affected by its
  peculiar institution. The majority of slaves
  were apparently happy. There was much to be said
  of slavery as a transitional status between
  barbarism and civilization. The Negro learned his
  masters language and to some degree accepted his
  moral and religious standards. In return, he
  contributed much besides his labor, music and
  humor for example, to American civilization
  (1965).

23
Morison on black studies

• It is the fashion for Negro intellectuals to
  describe their forebears as the most oppressed
  and exploited labor force in modern history, held
  down by fear and force, constantly striving from
  escape from slavery. The colored intellectual of
  the 1960s knows less about the plantation Negro
  of the 1840s than did many white masters of that
  era (1965).

24
James Brooks, Captives Cousins

• In the Southwest Borderlands, indigenous and
  colonial practices joined to form a slave
  system in which victims symbolized social
  wealth, performed services for their masters, and
  produced material goods under the threat of
  violence. Unlike chattel slavery elsewhere in
  North America, borderland slavery found affinity
  with kin-based systems motivated less by a demand
  for units of labor than their desire for
  prestigious social units (1996).

25
Woody Holton, Forced Founders Indians, Debtors,
Slaves the Making of the American Revolution

• From 1763-176, Indians, merchants, slaves, and
  debtors helped propel free Virginians into the
  Independence movement. In responding to
  opportunities and pressures, slaves and farmers
  challenged the authority of the provincial
  gentry. The challenges indirectly helped induce
  gentlemen to turn the protests of 1774 into the
  Independence movement of 1776 (1999).

26
Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers The
Revolutionary Generation

• The central events and achievements of the
  revolutionary era and the early republic were
  political. These events and achievements are
  historically significant because they shaped the
  subsequent history of the United States,
  including our own time. The central players in
  the drama were not marginal or peripheral
  figures, whose lives are more typical, but rather
  political leaders at the center of the national
  story who wielded power. Whats more, the shape
  and character of the political institutions were
  determined by a relatively small number of
  leaders (2000).

27
Morgan was right!!!!!!!

• American freedom for those at the top was based
  on the enslavement of those at the bottom
• Freedom cant be considered without its root in
  slavery