Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900

In Search of Liberty explores how African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggles for freedom as part of the larger Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture the pursuits of equality and justice by African Americans across the Atlantic World through the end of the nineteenth century, as their fights for emancipation and enfranchisement in the United States continued. This book illuminates stories of individual Black people striving to escape slavery in places like Nova Scotia, Louisiana, and Mexico and connects their eff orts to emigration movements from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as to Black abolitionist campaigns in Europe. By placing these diverse stories in conversation, editors Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have curated a larger story that is only beginning to be told. By focusing on Black internationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In Search of Liberty reveals that Black freedom struggles in the United States were rooted in transnational networks much earlier than the better-known movements of the twentieth century.

For decades, scholars have conceived of the coastal city of New Orleans as a remarkable outlier, an exception to nearly every "rule" of accepted U.S. historiography. American only by adoption, New Orleans, in most studies, serves as a frontier town of the circum-Caribbean-a vestige of North America's European colonial era along the southern coast of a foreign, northern, insular United States. Beneath that, too, many have argued, a complex algorithm of racial mixtures was at work well into the nineteenth century, a complexity of racial understanding and treatment that almost every scholar to date has claimed simply did not exist within the more "American" states further north and outside the bounds of the Caribbean's bizarre socioracial influence. The reality, as An American Color explains, is that on the surface, New Orleans did have a racial and social system that confounded the more prudent and established black-white binary at work in the social rhetoric of the British-descended states further north. But, this was not unique, especially within the United States. As Andrew N. Wegmann argues, New Orleans is representative of a place with different words for the same practices found throughout the North American continent and the Atlantic world. From New Orleans to Charleston and Richmond, the social construction of race remained constant and Atlantic in nature, predicated on a complex, socially infused, multitier system of prescribed racial value that challenged and sometimes abandoned preordained definitions of "black" and "white" for an assortment of fluid but meaningful designations in between. New Orleans is thus an entry point for the study of color in an Atlantic United States.

For more than four centuries, communities of maroons (men and women who escaped slavery) dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States. Today their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves-in Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, Belize, Suriname, Guyane, and elsewhere-remaining proud of their maroon origins and, in some cases, faithful to unique cultural traditions forged during the earliest days of Afro-American history. In 1986, expelled by the military regime of Suriname, anthropologists Richard and Sally Price turned to neighboring Guyane (French Guiana), where thousands of Maroons were taking refuge from the Suriname civil war. Over the next fifteen years, their conversations with local people convinced them of the need to replace the pervasive stereotypes about Maroons in Guyane with accurate information. In 2003, Les Marrons became a local best seller. In 2020, after a series of further visits, the Prices wrote a new edition taking into account the many rapid changes. Available for the first time in English, Maroons in Guyane reviews the history of Maroon peoples in Guyane, explains how these groups differ from one another, and analyzes their current situations in the bustling, multicultural world of this far-flung outpost of the French Republic. A gallery of the magnificent arts of the Maroons completes the volume.

Why did it take so long to end slavery in the United States, and what did it mean that the nation existed eighty-eight years as a "house divided against itself," as Abraham Lincoln put it? The decline of slavery throughout the Atlantic world was a protracted affair, says Patrick Rael, but no other nation endured anything like the United States. Here the process took from 1777, when Vermont wrote slavery out of its state constitution, to 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery nationwide. Rael immerses readers in the mix of social, geographic, economic, and political factors that shaped this unique American experience. He not only takes a far longer view of slavery's demise than do those who date it to the rise of abolitionism in 1831, he also places it in a broader Atlantic context. We see how slavery ended variously by consent or force across time and place and how views on slavery evolved differently between the centers of European power and their colonial peripheries-some of which would become power centers themselves. Rael shows how African Americans played the central role in ending slavery in the United States. Fueled by new Revolutionary ideals of self-rule and universal equality-and on their own or alongside abolitionists-both slaves and free blacks slowly turned American opinion against the slave interests in the South. Secession followed, and then began the national bloodbath that would demand slavery's complete destruction.

Covering the whole of the nineteenth century, Wanted! A Nation! reveals how Haiti remained a focus of attention for white as well as Black Americans before, during, and even after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, Claire Bourhis-Mariotti argues, the Black republic was considered by free Black Americans as a place where full citizenship was at hand. Haiti was essentially viewed and concretely experienced as a refuge during moments when free Black Americans lost hope of obtaining rights in the United States. Haiti is also at the heart of this book, as Haitian leaders supported the American emigration to Haiti (in the 1820s and early 1860s), opposed the American geostrategic and diplomatic diktats in the 1870s and 1880s, and finally offered an international platform to Frederick Douglass at the 1893 Columbian World's Fair, thus helping Black people who faced discrimination at home to fight first against slavery and the slave trade, and then for equal rights. By spanning the entire nineteenth century, Wanted! A Nation! presents a complex panorama of the emergence of African American identity and argues that Haiti should be considered as an essential prism to understand how African Americans forged their identity in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a variety of sources, Wanted! A Nation! goes far beyond the usual framework of national American history and contributes to the writing of an Atlantic and global history of the struggle for equal rights.

City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Descended from German Quakers who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the late seventeenth century, Elisha Tyson was born in 1749. As a young man he became wealthy in the milling business in northeastern Maryland before moving in the early 1780s to Baltimore, where he grew even wealthier and established a reputation as a prominent member of the city's business community. Over the course of more than three decades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tyson helped found abolition societies, supported schools for free Black children, and contributed to the creation of numerous Black institutions and benevolent societies. He filed freedom petitions on behalf of enslaved people and pushed for the passage of liberalized manumission laws in Maryland. He used some of his fortune to assist Black people who claimed they were illegally held in bondage to sue for their liberty, and he confronted slave traders who kidnapped free Black Americans with the aim of selling them into slavery. By the time he died in February 1824, Elisha Tyson had personally aided in the liberation of perhaps two thousand Black people. Yet the only biography published about this remarkable man was penned shortly after his death by John Shoemaker Tyson, Elisha Tyson's nephew. In A Pioneer in the Cause of Freedom, Joshua D. Rothman-a preeminent historian of slavery and abolition-seeks to remedy that silence. Along with an annotated version of that nineteenth-century biography, Rothman provides a thorough introduction to Elisha Tyson's religious, political, and ideological worlds as well as a set of selected documents that illuminate some of Tyson's work.

Finding Charity's Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre. Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman's reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women's future interactions with the state.

Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure's centrality to the practices and production of diaspora. Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers' narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian Vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure's manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.

In 1834 Virgil Stewart rode from western Tennessee to a territory known as the "Arkansas morass" in pursuit of John Murrell, a thief accused of stealing two slaves. Stewart's adventure led to a sensational trial and a wildly popular published account that would ultimately help trigger widespread violence during the summer of 1835, when five men accused of being professional gamblers were hanged in Vicksburg, nearly a score of others implicated with a gang of supposed slave thieves were executed in plantation districts, and even those who tried to stop the bloodshed found themselves targeted as dangerous and subversive. Using Stewart's story as his point of entry, Joshua D. Rothman details why these events, which engulfed much of central and western Mississippi, came to pass. He also explains how the events revealed the fears, insecurities, and anxieties underpinning the cotton boom that made Mississippi the most seductive and exciting frontier in the Age of Jackson. As investors, settlers, slaves, brigands, and fortune-hunters converged in what was then America's Southwest, they created a tumultuous landscape that promised boundless opportunity and spectacular wealth. Predicated on ruthless competition, unsustainable debt, brutal exploitation, and speculative financial practices that looked a lot like gambling, this landscape also produced such profound disillusionment and conflict that it contained the seeds of its own potential destruction. Rothman sheds light on the intertwining of slavery and capitalism in the period leading up to the Panic of 1837, highlighting the deeply American impulses underpinning the evolution of the slave South and the dizzying yet unstable frenzy wrought by economic flush times. It is a story with lessons for our own day. Published in association with the Library Company of Philadelphia's Program in African American History. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country's postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France's need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

In September 1857, Léon Chautard, Charles Bivors, and Hippolyte Paon arrived in Salem, Massachusetts. These refugees from the French Revolution of 1848 were "homeless, penniless, friendless, strangers in a strange land, among a people of strange speech," as one of their advocates, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, later put it. The only thing they had was a story to tell-an affecting, yet thrilling story of revolutionary upheaval, forced exile, and hairbreadth escapes over three continents. Following the June Days uprising in Paris, the three French socialists had been transported first to Algeria, then to Cayenne. After years of hard labor, they had escaped the penal colony and made their way to the United States via British Guiana. These experiences brought them into close contact with the colonial frontiers and slave societies of the Americas. In Salem, Chautard soon published an account of their trials under the title Escapes from Cayenne (1857). His pamphlet, which has long sunk into oblivion, deserves rediscovery. Escapes from Cayenne sheds light on the ideological connections between the European "spirit of 1848" and U.S. radical abolitionism and reveals the scope of cosmopolitan solidarities available to fugitives of different national and racial origins in the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Written in English by a Frenchman, and reminiscent of literary traditions such as the slave narrative and the picaresque novel, it is a tale of adventure as well as a passionate cri de cœurfor universal justice.