Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

That the past is never past is nowhere more apparent than in recent debates over efforts to celebrate “Confederate History Month.” Happily, critics responded to the omission of slavery and the suffering it wrought from the latest official commemorations, still and perhaps forevermore marinated in the intoxicating rhetorical liquor of the “Lost Cause.” And so the sobering scholarship of archival scholars such as Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal records, family papers, genealogical studies, and often on the recorded words of enslaved people themselves is an urgently needed remedy.

Love of Freedom is grounded in two observations: that slavery was certainly not exclusively southern—that New England, too, had a terrible legacy of enslaving African people, although the circumstances of slavery in this region were distinctive in many respects. The second starting point is that while the people kidnapped and enslaved in New England were disproportionately male, African women’s experience of slavery and of the complicated legacies of African and colonial American patriarchy were similarly distinctive and should be studied independently.

Foremost, Love of Freedom is a thick description of the legal and social status of slavery in the northeastern American colonies and, as such, will serve as an important resource for anyone doing research in the field. The authors point out that the first kidnapped African people were taken to Boston only six years after its founding. Only five years later, in 1641, the Massachussetts Bay colony had the dubious distinction of becoming the first British colony to codify slavery legally. By 1700, the authors estimate a black population of one thousand, half living in Massachusetts. Fortunately for historians, the legal status of enslaved people, particularly women, seems to have been a source of continual legal challenge. The result is that we have a surprisingly rich record of direct testimony from enslaved women.

Directly from the voices of women such as Hagar Blackmore we get an account of being kidnapped away from her family in Angola, transported to Barbardos, and sold to a wealthy merchant in Cambridge. From this woman we learn of the vulnerability of enslaved women to rape, and we get some sense of what it meant to be a survivor. The authors point out that the principle of coverture, a convention of English common law in which women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands, further guaranteed the absence of any sort of reasonable legal protection for enslaved women—or even for free married black women.

As a part of laying to rest the myth of slavery in the north as a benign institution, the book illustrates one manifestation of the idea of coverture. A wife’s killing her husband was, because of established notions of hierarchy, worse than ordinary murder and was, in fact, given a special designation: “petit treason,” for which burning to death was the punishment. Killing a husband—or a master, in the case of enslaved people, was almost—if not quite—on the scale of regicide and was punished accordingly. The book lays out the grim details of human suffering: the archaeological evidence showing widespread malnutrition among black children in the region; the spinal deformations evident among women forced to do laundry, ironing, and household heavy lifting; the forced breeding.

Among the most important archival sources is the record of “freedom suits,” women “seeking possession of their liberty” through manumission or some sort of legal process. Through the testimony extant in these cases, the reader gets a powerful sense of exactly what freedom meant to these women—and what slavery meant. As the authors conclude from these records, “Being stolen from kin and homeland was the central wrong African men and women cited time and again.” And to rectify this crime entailed the re-possession of the self by its rightful owner.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 28th 2010

Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820

admin — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Susan E. Klepp

University of North Carolina Press

Susan E. Klepp’s Revolutionary Conceptions tracks the changes in family size ideals and the associated changes in family planning and women’s roles in early America. It is unsurprising that Klepp’s work highlights the limitations to women’s agency in family planning. Revolutionary Conceptions makes clear that women played an increasing role in determining the number of children they would have, and how this was tied to a greater presence of women outside of the domestic sphere.

Klepp reproduces letters from women who talk about their desire to have fewer children, which are usually followed by a revelation that woman, ultimately, gave birth to (by modern, typical North American views, anyway) a large number of children. Female slaves, were, alternately, wanted for their reproductive capacity and then sold for having had “too many” children when large families were no longer en vogue. Klepp also highlights some areas in which women had (limited) control. Women were brought to court to testify as experts in cases such as rape and infanticide; however, it was men who made the ultimate decisions in these cases. Klepp notes, “[I]n the colonies, month-to-month fertility decisions were left to women.”

Throughout the text, the author notes the difficulties in acquiring information about her topic. Early censuses, for example, routinely under-counted infants, particularly girls, which makes Klepp’s task of tracking changes in birth rates difficult. Klepp’s task is even more challenging due to the paucity of birth records for slaves. Further, when Klepp examines family planning, she quotes from letters and other texts in which women talk about limiting the number of children they would have, but the methods these women used were not shared.

In one interesting section, Klepp discusses herbs and concoctions used as emmenagogues (used to induce menstruation), abortifacients, and contraceptives, but notes, “Women usually made only oblique references to their use of these medicines and practices.” Despite this, Klepp is able to produce a highly detailed study of the issue.

I appreciate the comprehensiveness of Klepp’s approach. Not only does she support her study with statistics (represented in text as well as several graphs and tables), but she also includes artwork. Her chapter examining images of women describes and provides examples of portraits of women and their children, as well as husbands, from 1682 to approximately 1830. Klepp traces changes in women’s poses and the symbolism of the accessories that accompany them.

The main flaw I found in this chapter was in the accompanying examples. It is a shame that not all images that Klepp discusses are included in the book, and the black and white reproduction of the images that do appear has obscured many of the significant details Klepp describes; however, these issues do not detract from Klepp’s analysis.

Despite the vagaries, lost information, and reticence to have recorded information in the first place, Klepp has produced a highly detailed, fact-based, and—perhaps most importantly—interesting study of the declining number of children that early colonial American women bore, and what this meant for their agency both within and outside of the household.

Written by: Erin Schowalter, February 27th 2010