antebellum

Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:33:00 +0000

In this superb book, Edlie Wong analyzes the territorialization of freedom and slavery in the antebellum Atlantic. While reading it, I frequently recalled Martin Luther King, Jr.’s warning that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Yet Wong’s work also suggests the converse is true: the existence of free blacks threatened institutionalized slavery on practical and moral grounds, while the continuation of legal slavery in any jurisdiction challenged core notions of freedom, including freedom of movement and travel. This conflict played out in courtrooms and the court of public opinion as slaves sued for legal emancipation—a strategy fraught with its own contradictions.

Wong considers not only American struggles, but also how freedom on European soil and slavery in the West Indies influenced and was influenced by American slavery. Slave narratives, novels, popular press, and legal documents are the material from which Wong makes a dialectical critique of pro- and anti-slavery thought as it crystallized around legal cases. As befits her topic, she organizes the book locally rather than chronologically.

Chapter one deals with nationalistic British abolitionism, which championed freedom while confining it within British borders. Chapter two moves across the Atlantic to northern American free states, which offered southern slaves traveling there a choice: sever social ties and gain individual freedom, or return to home and slavery. Chapter three focuses on the Dred Scott decision and examines legal emancipation in the southwest U.S. Chapter five and the concluding chapter again take a transatlantic standpoint. The former examines the criminalization and de facto enslavement of free blacks—both American and foreign-born—who traveled into southern slave states as sailors. The latter briefly treats the question of American citizenship after emancipation and travel abroad.

Throughout, Wong sharply analyzes the rhetoric of pro- and anti-slavery literature. Whites on both sides generally acceded to the “chattel principle” that slaves are an extension of their masters' wills. Thus, unlike fugitive slaves, American slaves brought by their masters onto free soil might sue for their freedom precisely because the masters had made the decision, effectively consenting to their emancipation. Paradoxically, the movement onto free soil instilled slaves—now to be considered free agents—with their own wills, and any who returned with their masters to slave territory were argued to have chosen re-enslavement. Slaveholders, thus, saw their slaves as will-less objects, at the same time considering their enslaved status was the slaves' own choice. On the other side, White abolitionists constructed a rescue narrative in which they heroically spoke for slavery's helpless victims. Slaves whose active resistance challenged this gallantry were censored in the liberal media, or left out altogether.

Not surprisingly, Wong finds this paternalist viewpoint particularly strong where Black children and women are concerned. In the case of six-year-old Med, both lawyers claimed to speak for the girl, one presuming her desire to remain in free Massachusetts while the other argued her best interest was returning to Louisiana and her enslaved mother. Slaveholders vilified abolitionists for tearing apart families whose members were not all emancipated, while abolitionist literature suppressed the difficult decision of emancipated or escaping slaves to leave still-enslaved kin.

Wong seeks to restore the Black actors missing from these accounts. Some slaves turned the legal principle partus sequitur matrem (“the offspring follow the mother”) to establish emancipation for themselves and their children. Harriet Scott, for instance, wife of Dred, simultaneously sued for her own freedom and in so doing also established the legal emancipation of her two daughters. Thus matrilinear arguments could subvert paternalistic slave laws.

A foreknowledge of antebellum history and law would be helpful to the reader, but isn’t prerequisite. Including a timeline might have been useful, but that hardly detracts from the intelligence of the argument and the important recovery of overlooked source material. Though Wong refrains from drawing explicit connections to modern racial profiling, incarceration, migration, and an evermore tightly entwined global economy, the parallels lie on the page for any modern reader to draw.

Written by: Charlotte Malerich, October 26th 2009

Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth Century America

admin — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:49:00 +0000

By Maria Carla Sanchez

University of Iowa Press

Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America explores the complex relationship between American social activism and literature in the nineteenth century. At times symbiotic, at times turbulent, this relationship was formed both by the power of literature and by the hopes and dreams of American social reformers for their country. In perhaps the most compelling argument of the book, Maria Carla Sanchez describes the many ways in which period writers both used fiction as a tool of reform, and used reform as an excuse to write fiction. Sanchez argues that the beliefs and views of these antebellum reformers indelibly shaped literature, literary criticism, and the literary canon.

Sanchez skillfully depicts the “reform culture” of the antebellum period, at the apex of the temperance and abolition movements. In addition to the popular moral initiatives, groups of nineteenth century reformers tackled many niche issues such as prison reform, vegetarianism, and Indian rights. Sanchez posits that though Christian preachers and other religious figures played an unmistakably important role in the movements, the antebellum period truly came to be the first time in American history when social reform was carried out by groups of people with diverse philosophical, class, race, creed, and educational backgrounds. Sanchez also makes special note of the fact that women used the social reform movements as a vehicle to “resist the confines of domesticity.” Their activism thrust them into the public sphere and allowed them to participate in a discourse to which they had been previously unwelcome. An important part of the way they participated, of course, was through the written word.

Reform culture in antebellum America was both fearful of and excited by the power of fiction, and Sanchez deftly demonstrates the complicated maneuverings that period authors went through to ensure the respectability of their work. This was especially true for women writers, who had to prove both that the writing they did was truthful and morally upstanding, but also that it had an “uplifting or edifying” purpose. Reading or writing for pure pleasure was not something that could be admitted to. Sanchez contend convincingly that the reform culture of the antebellum period gave women the chance both to enter the public sphere as readers and writers, and as champions of causes they believed in.

Written by: Jennifer Wedemeier, June 20th 2009

A New Type of Womanhood: Discursive Politics and Social Change in Antebellum America

admin — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:31:00 +0000

By Natasha Kirsten Kraus

Duke University Press

Kraus has done an amazing job of researching and organizing this work, which compiles so much information about American antebellum women’s rights. As I read it, I was continuously blown away by the tightness of the presentation. The author acknowledges missing records and the reality that the reader is in the present, 150 years removed from this history.

Written for university level consumption, this text explores activism at a time when the south and north were heading towards civil war. Concurrent with the fight to abolish slavery, women were utilizing public speaking, writing, and petitions to end their status as mere property and assert contractual control over their own property. The long road that spans from handing over all of their possessions, including their bodies, to their husbands to gaining equal rights is a never ending one. Women like Susan B. Anthony used the argument that women needed the same rights as men in order to benefit men and their male children.

In 1860, under the Earnings Act, married women were finally given some control over their own earnings; however, their husbands had to provide consent for those decisions. This early wave of activism happened because of what Kraus refers to as an "aporia"—an impasse in the complex web of economic, legal, and domestic interactions, among others.

Activism happens when there are ruptures in society. Kraus provides an overview of the transition from a feudal land-based economy to an industrial capitalist economy and reminds us that change is akin to difficult growth spurts. As we step into globalization, we observe the same employment fluctuations that happened during and after the Civil War.

Sadly, women are still not viewed or treated as equally important and valued as men today. Reading example after example of misogyny in the antebellum legal machine, I was angered by how far we still have to go. Discovering that in 2006 most states still provided loopholes for husbands who raped their wives helped to explain why I still cannot walk down the streets in my city without being harassed by men who refuse to take “no” for an answer. It also reveals the context of judges who hand down lenient sentences to men who beat their wives; society needs to view all people as individuals, not property.

The book ends on the conclusion that, however slowly, activists are tearing down old belief systems that oppress people. It is hopeful that in the future, democracy for all individuals in society will hopefully be achieved.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, February 17th 2009