Author: Christopher H. Bouton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498579469
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
Using slave trials from antebellum Virginia, Christopher H. Bouton offers the first in-depth examination of physical confrontations between slaves and whites. These extraordinary acts of violence brought the ordinary concerns of enslaved Virginians into focus. Enslaved men violently asserted their masculinity, sought to protect themselves and their loved ones from punishment, and carved out their own place within southern honor culture. Enslaved women resisted sexual exploitation and their mistresses. By attacking southern efforts to control their sexuality and labor, bondswomen sought better lives for themselves and undermined white supremacy. Physical confrontations revealed the anxieties that lay at the heart of white antebellum Virginians and threatened the very foundations of the slave regime itself. While physical confrontations could not overthrow the institution of slavery, they helped the enslaved set limits on their owners’ exploitation. They also afforded the enslaved the space necessary to create lives as free from their owners’ influence as possible. When masters and mistresses continually intruded into the lives of their slaves, they risked provoking a violent backlash. Setting Slavery’s Limits explores how slaves of all ages and backgrounds resisted their oppressors and risked everything to fight back.
Author: Christopher H. Bouton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498579452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
"This study examines how slaves in antebellum Virginia, through physical confrontations with whites, fought to reassert some measure of control over their day-to-day lives. The author analyzes how while this violence came at a high cost, it also ensured the preservation of their humanity and set limits on their enslavement"--
Author: Robert H. Churchill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108489125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
A new interpretation of the Underground Railroad that places violence at the center of the story.
Author: John Craig Hammond
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813946042
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Most treatments of slavery, politics, and expansion in the early American republic focus narrowly on congressional debates and the inaction of elite "founding fathers" such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, John Craig Hammond looks beyond elite leadership and examines how the demands of western settlers, the potential of western disunion, and local, popular politics determined the fate of slavery and freedom in the West between 1790 and 1820. By shifting focus away from high politics in Philadelphia and Washington, Hammond demonstrates that local political contests and geopolitical realities were more responsible for determining slavery’s fate in the West than were the clashing proslavery and antislavery proclivities of Founding Fathers and politicians in the East. When efforts to prohibit slavery revived in 1819 with the Missouri Controversy it was not because of a sudden awakening to the problem on the part of northern Republicans, but because the threat of western secession no longer seemed credible. Including detailed studies of popular political contests in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri that shed light on the western and popular character of conflicts over slavery, Hammond also provides a thorough analysis of the Missouri Controversy, revealing how the problem of slavery expansion shifted from a local and western problem to a sectional and national dilemma that would ultimately lead to disunion and civil war.
Author: James Oakes
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies. The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of antislavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes’s brilliant history of Lincoln’s antislavery strategies reveals a striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The linchpin of antislavery for Lincoln was the Constitution of the United States. Lincoln adopted the antislavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery, and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state action to achieve the final abolition of American slavery. With this understanding, Lincoln and his antislavery allies used every tool available to undermine the institution. Wherever the Constitution empowered direct federal action—in the western territories, in the District of Columbia, over the slave trade—they intervened. As a congressman in 1849 Lincoln sponsored a bill to abolish slavery in Washington, DC. He reentered politics in 1854 to oppose what he considered the unconstitutional opening of the territories to slavery by the Kansas–Nebraska Act. He attempted to persuade states to abolish slavery by supporting gradual abolition with compensation for slaveholders and the colonization of free Blacks abroad. President Lincoln took full advantage of the antislavery options opened by the Civil War. Enslaved people who escaped to Union lines were declared free. The Emancipation Proclamation, a military order of the president, undermined slavery across the South. It led to abolition by six slave states, which then joined the coalition to affect what Lincoln called the "King’s cure": state ratification of the constitutional amendment that in 1865 finally abolished slavery.
Author: Herbert G. Gutman
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0394724518
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 770
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Book Description
An exhaustively researched history of black families in America from the days of slavery until just after the Civil War.
Author: Matthew Salafia
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208668
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
In 1787, the Northwest Ordinance made the Ohio River the dividing line between slavery and freedom in the West, yet in 1861, when the Civil War tore the nation apart, the region failed to split at this seam. In Slavery's Borderland, historian Matthew Salafia shows how the river was both a physical boundary and a unifying economic and cultural force that muddied the distinction between southern and northern forms of labor and politics. Countering the tendency to emphasize differences between slave and free states, Salafia argues that these systems of labor were not so much separated by a river as much as they evolved along a continuum shaped by life along a river. In this borderland region, where both free and enslaved residents regularly crossed the physical divide between Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, slavery and free labor shared as many similarities as differences. As the conflict between North and South intensified, regional commonality transcended political differences. Enslaved and free African Americans came to reject the legitimacy of the river border even as they were unable to escape its influence. In contrast, the majority of white residents on both sides remained firmly committed to maintaining the river border because they believed it best protected their freedom. Thus, when war broke out, Kentucky did not secede with the Confederacy; rather, the river became the seam that held the region together. By focusing on the Ohio River as an artery of commerce and movement, Salafia draws the northern and southern banks of the river into the same narrative and sheds light on constructions of labor, economy, and race on the eve of the Civil War.
Author: James David Nichols
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496205790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
"The Limits of Liberty chronicles the formation of the U.S.-Mexico border from a unique vantage of how "mobile peoples" assisted in constructing the international boundary from both sides"--
Author: Eve M. Troutt Powell
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804783756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, an active slave trade sustained social and economic networks across the Ottoman Empire and throughout Egypt, Sudan, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Unlike the Atlantic trade, slavery in this region crossed and mixed racial and ethnic lines. Fair-skinned Circassian men and women were as vulnerable to enslavement in the Nile Valley as were teenagers from Sudan or Ethiopia. Tell This in My Memory opens up a new window in the study of slavery in the modern Middle East, taking up personal narratives of slaves and slave owners to shed light on the anxieties and intimacies of personal experience. The framework of racial identity constructed through these stories proves instrumental in explaining how countries later confronted—or not—the legacy of the slave trade. Today, these vocabularies of slavery live on for contemporary refugees whose forced migrations often replicate the journeys and stigmas faced by slaves in the nineteenth century.
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.
