Manumission, Slavery and Family in the Post-revolutionary Rural Chesapeake

Manumission, Slavery and Family in the Post-revolutionary Rural Chesapeake PDF Author: John Joseph Condon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Manumission, Slavery and Family in the Post-revolutionary Rural Chesapeake

Manumission, Slavery and Family in the Post-revolutionary Rural Chesapeake PDF Author: John Joseph Condon
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description


A Question of Freedom

A Question of Freedom PDF Author: William G. Thomas
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300256272
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
The story of the longest and most complex legal challenge to slavery in American history For over seventy years and five generations, the enslaved families of Prince George’s County, Maryland, filed hundreds of suits for their freedom against a powerful circle of slaveholders, taking their cause all the way to the Supreme Court. Between 1787 and 1861, these lawsuits challenged the legitimacy of slavery in American law and put slavery on trial in the nation’s capital. Piecing together evidence once dismissed in court and buried in the archives, William Thomas tells an intricate and intensely human story of the enslaved families (the Butlers, Queens, Mahoneys, and others), their lawyers (among them a young Francis Scott Key), and the slaveholders who fought to defend slavery, beginning with the Jesuit priests who held some of the largest plantations in the nation and founded a college at Georgetown. A Question of Freedom asks us to reckon with the moral problem of slavery and its legacies in the present day.

Gleanings of Freedom

Gleanings of Freedom PDF Author: Max Grivno
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252093569
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century landowners in the hinterlands of Baltimore, Maryland, cobbled together workforces from a diverse labor population of black and white apprentices, indentured servants, slaves, and hired workers. This book examines the intertwined lives of the poor whites, slaves, and free blacks who lived and worked in this wheat-producing region along the Mason–Dixon Line. Drawing from court records, the diaries, letters, and ledgers of farmers and small planters, and other archival sources, Max Grivno reconstructs how these poorest of southerners eked out their livings and struggled to maintain their families and their freedom in the often unforgiving rural economy.

Beyond Slavery's Shadow

Beyond Slavery's Shadow PDF Author: Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469664402
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
On the eve of the Civil War, most people of color in the United States toiled in bondage. Yet nearly half a million of these individuals, including over 250,000 in the South, were free. In Beyond Slavery's Shadow, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. draws from a wide array of sources to demonstrate that from the colonial period through the Civil War, the growing influence of white supremacy and proslavery extremism created serious challenges for free persons categorized as "negroes," "mulattoes," "mustees," "Indians," or simply "free people of color" in the South. Segregation, exclusion, disfranchisement, and discriminatory punishment were ingrained in their collective experiences. Nevertheless, in the face of attempts to deny them the most basic privileges and rights, free people of color defended their families and established organizations and businesses. These people were both privileged and victimized, both celebrated and despised, in a region characterized by social inconsistency. Milteer's analysis of the way wealth, gender, and occupation intersected with ideas promoting white supremacy and discrimination reveals a wide range of social interactions and life outcomes for the South's free people of color and helps to explain societal contradictions that continue to appear in the modern United States.

Paths to Freedom

Paths to Freedom PDF Author: Rosemary Brana-Shute
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570037740
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The contributors investigate the cultural consequences of manumission as well as the changing economic conditions that limited the practice by the eighteenth century to understand better the social implications of this multifaceted aspect of the system of slavery.

Ancestors of Worthy Life

Ancestors of Worthy Life PDF Author: Teresa S. Moyer
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813072956
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Recognizing the lives of the enslaved at the historic site of Mount Clare Enslaved African Americans helped transform the United States economy, culture, and history. Yet these individuals' identities, activities, and sometimes their very existence are often all but expunged from historically preserved plantations and house museums. Reluctant to show and interpret the homes and lives of the enslaved, many sites have never shared the stories of the African Americans who once lived and worked on their land. One such site is Mount Clare near Baltimore, Maryland, where Teresa Moyer pulls no punches in her critique of racism in historic preservation. In her balanced discussion, Moyer examines the inextricably entangled lives of the enslaved, free Black people, and white landowners. Her work draws on evidence from archaeology, history, geology, and other fields to explore the ways that white privilege continues to obscure the contributions of Black people at Mount Clare. She demonstrates that a landscape's post-emancipation history can make a powerful statement about Black heritage. Ultimately she argues that the inclusion of enslaved persons in the history of these sites would honor these "ancestors of worthy life," make the social good of public history available to African Americans, and address systemic racism in America.  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

After Slavery

After Slavery PDF Author: Bruce E. Baker
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813048370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Moves beyond broad generalizations concerning black life during Reconstruction in order to address the varied experiences of freed slaves across the South. This collection examines urban unrest in New Orleans and Wilmington, North Carolina, loyalty among former slave owners and slaves in Mississippi, armed insurrection along the Georgia coast, racial violence throughout the region, and much more in order to provide a well-rounded portrait of the era.

Hirelings

Hirelings PDF Author: Jennifer Hull Dorsey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
In Hirelings, Jennifer Dorsey recreates the social and economic milieu of Maryland's Eastern Shore at a time when black slavery and black freedom existed side by side. She follows a generation of manumitted African Americans and their freeborn children and grandchildren through the process of inventing new identities, associations, and communities in the early nineteenth century. Free Africans and their descendants had lived in Maryland since the seventeenth century, but before the American Revolution they were always few in number and lacking in economic resources or political leverage. By contrast, manumitted and freeborn African Americans in the early republic refashioned the Eastern Shore's economy and society, earning their livings as wage laborers while establishing thriving African American communities. As free workers in a slave society, these African Americans contested the legitimacy of the slave system even while they remained dependent laborers. They limited white planters' authority over their time and labor by reuniting their families in autonomous households, settling into free black neighborhoods, negotiating labor contracts that suited the needs of their households, and worshipping in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some moved to the cities, but many others migrated between employers as a strategy for meeting their needs and thwarting employers’ control. They demonstrated that independent and free African American communities could thrive on their own terms. In all of these actions the free black workers of the Eastern Shore played a pivotal role in ongoing debates about the merits of a free labor system.

The Color Factor

The Color Factor PDF Author: Howard Bodenhorn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199383138
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Despite the many advances that the United States has made in racial equality over the past half century, numerous events within the past several years have proven prejudice to be alive and well in modern-day America. In one such example, Governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina dismissed one of her principal advisors in 2013 when his membership in the ultra-conservative Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) came to light. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2001 the CCC website included a message that read "God is the one who divided mankind into different races.... Mixing the races is rebelliousness against God." This episode reveals America's continuing struggle with race, racial integration, and race mixing-a problem that has plagued the United States since its earliest days as a nation. The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South demonstrates that the emergent twenty-first-century recognition of race mixing and the relative advantages of light-skinned, mixed-race people represent a re-emergence of one salient feature of race in America that dates to its founding. Economist Howard Bodenhorn presents the first full-length study of the ways in which skin color intersected with policy, society, and economy in the nineteenth-century South. With empirical and statistical rigor, the investigation confirms that individuals of mixed race experienced advantages over African Americans in multiple dimensions - in occupations, family formation and family size, wealth, health, and access to freedom, among other criteria. The Color Factor concludes that we will not really understand race until we understand how American attitudes toward race were shaped by race mixing. The text is an ideal resource for students, social scientists, and historians, and anyone hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the historical roots of modern race dynamics in America.

Freedom Has a Face

Freedom Has a Face PDF Author: Kirt Von Daacke
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813933099
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Argues that the inhabitants of Albemarle County (in rural Piedmont Virginia), white, black, and mixed-race treated each other more on the basis of a person's reputations than on the basis of state laws requiring restrictions on black freedom. Examples are drawn from law proceedings, (blacks did testify in courts despite its being against the law), marriages, residence, and other matters.