Biography and the Black Atlantic 9780812208702

Citation preview

Biography and the Black Atlantic

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THE EARLY MODERN AMERICAS Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC–Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

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BIOGR APHY •

AND THE

•

BLACK ATLANTIC

Edited by

Lisa A. Lindsay and

John Wood Sweet

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

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Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data   Biography and the black Atlantic / edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet. — 1st ed.    p.   cm. — (Early modern Americas)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8122-4546-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)   1. Blacks—Atlantic Ocean Region—Historiography. 2. Blacks—Atlantic Ocean Region—Biography. 3. Blacks— Atlantic Ocean Region—History. 4. Blacks—Atlantic Ocean Region—Biography. 5. Slave trade—Atlantic Ocean Region— History. 6. Biography as a literary form. I. Lindsay, Lisa A. II. Sweet, John Wood, 1966–. III. Series: Early modern Americas. D13.5.A75B56 2013 909'.049601821—dc23 2013012708

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contents

Introduction: Biography and the Black Atlantic lisa a. lindsay and john wood sweet

1

PART I. PARAMETERS Chapter 1. A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn joseph c. miller19 Chapter 2. Understanding the Slave Experience in West Africa martin klein48 Chapter 3. Robinson Charley: The Ideological Underpinnings of Atlantic History sheryl kroen66

PART II. MOBILITY Chapter 4. Black Pearls: Writing Black Atlantic Women’s Biography jon sensbach93 Chapter 5. Recovered Lives as a Window into the Enslaved Family cassandra pybus108 Chapter 6. From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman: The Story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo joão josé reis131

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vi

Contents

PART III. SELF-FASHIONING Chapter 7. David Dorr’s Journey Toward Selfhood in Europe lloyd s. kramer149 Chapter 8. Methodology in the Making and Reception of Equiano vincent carretta172 Chapter 9. Remembering His Country Marks: A Nigerian American Family and Its “African” Ancestor lisa a. lindsay192

PART IV. POLITICS Chapter 10. The Atlantic Transformations of Francisco Menéndez jane landers209 Chapter 11. Echoes of the Atlantic: Benguela (Angola) and Brazilian Independence roquinaldo ferreira224 Chapter 12. Rosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution rebecca scott and jean-michel hébrard248

Afterword james t. campbell269

Notes279 List of Contributors

353

Index359 Acknowledgments369

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Introduction: Biography and the Black Atlantic lisa a. lindsay and john wood sweet

In recent years, historians and other writers have begun to produce a surge of studies of the “Black Atlantic” organized around particular life stories. This approach builds on and also suggests the limitations of scholarship over the last generation, which has focused on the myriad flow of captives, capital, and cultures around the early modern Atlantic world.1 Now, many scholars are populating this abstract and anonymous Atlantic with the historically situated experiences of individuals. A number of life histories are already in print, and more are in preparation.2 In some ways historical works like these echo themes explored by novelists like Barry Unsworth, Toni Morrison, Manu Herbstein, and Caryl Phillips.3 Collectively, these studies suggest that we are in a moment of intense concentration on the Black Atlantic as lived experience. In this volume, leading historians of Africa, the Americas, and Europe explore the potential for and implications of biography as a method for interpreting the connected histories of Atlantic societies. They do so through broad, conceptual analyses as well as case studies of individuals of African descent who lived, moved, and struggled through the early modern Atlantic world. By attaching names and faces to broad processes such as slaving, enslavement, identity formation, empire-building, migration, and emancipation, biography can illuminate the meanings of these large, impersonal forces for individuals. The Black Atlantic is both a space and an argument.4 For cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, the modern Black Atlantic was a location of both physical movement—migrations and crossings both forced and voluntary—and of continual cultural exchange, shaped from the start by racial violence.5 The cultures of the African diaspora were hybrid and creative, even as they reflected

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Introduction

displacement, loss, and trauma. Moreover, the violence and slavery at the heart of the Black Atlantic were not aberrations that set African peoples apart from modern society; rather, the Middle Passage and plantation slavery— “capitalism with its clothes off,” as Gilroy described it—were fundamental to modernity itself.6 Columbus sailed to Elmina on the Gold Coast of Africa long before the fateful voyage of 1492, and subsequent developments—from colonialism to the plantation complex, national independence movements, and decolonization—were the result of political, commercial, cultural, and ideological relationships between peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas.7 If the term “Black Atlantic” is redundant, it nonetheless embodies two lines of argument that remain worth engaging.8 First, although the importance of Africa, its peoples, and their descendants in the history of the Western world has been vigorously championed by certain scholars over the years, they have been and remain too often overlooked in the academic field of “Atlantic history.”9 Africans entered the Atlantic not as fodder for subsequent cultural transformation, but as people already familiar with instability and adaptation. Second, the complex process of racial formation that shaped identities and relations in the emerging modern world warrants continued exploration. Gilroy’s Black Atlantic analyzed the ways European racialist thinking subjected people of the African diaspora to specific forms of violence and subordination and excluded them from ideas of modernity, thus creating the conditions for creative cultural production and trenchant critique. The people whose life stories are the heart of this volume were shaped by such forces. And, as the chapters that follow suggest, their strategies of affiliation went beyond (or around) the oppositions of race. While the “Black Atlantic” represents an argument, biography represents a method. Why approach the Black Atlantic through the lens of life stories? For one thing, biography populates the Atlantic world with real individuals. Part of the power of biography as a narrative strategy is the capacity to move readers’ emotions by helping them imagine being someone else. As Joseph Miller reflects in his chapter, focusing on individuals—and trying to trace them through the historical record wherever they might lead us—has a tendency to disrupt broad generalizations and grand preconceptions, reminding us that even seemingly vast, impersonal processes such as slave trading and commercialization were experienced.10 Biography, Miller argues, reveals that, at the broadest scale and in the most intimate ways, there can be no such thing as a static history of slavery. Mediating on the classic work of sociologist Orlando Patterson, Miller agrees that at the moment of enslavement the

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Biography and the Black Atlantic

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fundamental feature of slavery is a radical and intense alienation. But Miller insists that after that point, the experience of enslavement is about efforts to reintegrate oneself into new social networks.11 More broadly, as Lloyd Kramer echoes in his chapter, this sense of alienation and the need for reintegration is arguably one of the characteristic features of the modern condition. On the other side of the master-slave relationship, Miller suggests that biography can also reveal the contexts and decisions behind slaving, thus making explicitly historical a process that is often understood as static and structural. In sum, focusing on the experience of individuals can help remind us to avoid reduction—putting aside generic models of slavery and looking instead to “contextually motivated strategies” that reveal not only alienation and marginality but also the meanings of freedom. Of course, approaching the Black Atlantic by reconstructing particular life stories is not easy. And it does not offer simple solutions to the ideological problems of the modern world or even to the methodological challenges of historians of the Atlantic. As Martin Klein points out in his chapter, anyone who tries such an approach confronts daunting challenges. First, how can historians recover the lives of enslaved people and others who left few written records? It would be easy to say that biographies of Africans and their Atlantic descendants cannot be written, either because of the presumed limitation of documentary sources or because of the genre conventions that have come to define the meaning of “biography.” From the beginnings of secular biography in the seventeenth century and continuing to the present, the genre typically involves creating a coherent narrative arc out of the lives of men and women who have achieved great prominence as politicians, military leaders, celebrities, thinkers, etc. Unlike the potential subjects of most “Black Atlantic” biographies, these are people who left behind vast archives of documentation produced by themselves and others. Typically, biographies of prominent people tend to valorize individual experience over large historical developments, while biographies of subaltern people tend to use the stories of individuals to represent the experiences of larger groups.12 As Klein observes, typically what historians are able to discover of Black Atlantic lives are not cradle-to-grave biographies but rather fragments, a surviving shard or two of a lifetime of experience. The second major challenge for biographers of the Black Atlantic is a related one: How can the unusual individuals who ended up leaving substantial recuperable traces in the historical record be understood as anything other than simply exceptional? Do their extraordinary lives make them too different from others to suggest deeper insights? Ultimately,

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Klein concludes that by employing inventive research strategies—seeking out the sources that do exist and developing creative ways of analyzing them— historians have proved not just that biographies of Atlantic denizens can be written, but that they can offer insights that are otherwise elusive. It was not only methodological difficulties that kept stories of Africans and their descendants largely out of the mainstream of Atlantic history. As Sheryl Kroen shows, the emergence of the “Atlantic” as a salient political and analytical framework in the mid-twentieth century was rooted in a long ideological effort to naturalize the history of capitalism by sidelining the histories of slavery, conquest, and colonialism—and the result was a decidedly white Atlantic. For centuries, Western histories of the Americas and of the broader Atlantic have been framed largely as stories of European expansion. But as Kroen shows, the modern vision of the Atlantic emerged in the aftermath of World War II, a moment not only of economic crisis in war-ravaged Europe but also of deep ideological crisis about the capacity of capitalism to produce good results. Partly in concert with the Marshall Plan, postwar British, French, and West German information officers worked to convince their citizens of the continued viability of capitalism and the importance of their alliance with the United States. In Britain, this effort involved resuscitating Daniel Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe and transforming him into an animated English Everyman called Robinson Charley, who was the hero of a series of short propaganda films. Of course, for this story to work, the original Robinson Crusoe had to be cleaned up a good deal. In Defoe’s 1709 novel, after all, Robinson begins his Atlantic career as a sailor on slave-trading vessels and moves up to managing a sugar plantation in Brazil before his fateful shipwreck, where his comfort is greatly enhanced by the appearance, and compliance, of the dark-skinned man Friday. Instead, in a remarkable instance of what Kroen calls “Atlantic dreaming,” the British government recast Robinson Crusoe in a way that erased slavery, colonialism, and conflict and replaced them with a benign narrative of primitive accumulation and division of labor inspired by Adam Smith. Other European governments followed suit in promoting such Atlantic dreams, offering up remarkably white, conveniently prosperous, and perpetually peaceful zones of mutually beneficial trade, and casting these historical fantasies as the foundations of so-called Western Civilization. As historian Bernard Bailyn has noted, the uncanny alliances between the Atlantic history framework and NATO membership, evident as early as the 1950s, have remained remarkably durable.13

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The effort to represent the Atlantic world as a scene of political unity and benign capitalism—as Marx pointed out and Kroen reminds us—was part of a long ideological struggle over how to tell the story of modern political economy. The Robinson Crusoe story became so conventional that Marx used its nickname, the “Robinsonade.” In contrast, the authors in this volume collectively attempt to rewrite the history of the Atlantic, to repopulate it with African captives and slave traders, with people struggling for personal freedoms in addition to political liberties, as a struggle against racism as well as for democracy. The Black Atlantic is a way of arguing against the Robinsonade. The biographical case studies in this volume are organized around three major themes: mobility, self-fashioning, and politics. Many of the biographical figures presented in all three sections, for instance, were remarkably mobile. Traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, or among different parts of the Atlantic rim, they challenge us to rethink political geography from the bottom up. Mobility also facilitated reinvention, or self-fashioning, for many of our biographical subjects. It may well be that identities are always situational and relational, but these biographies highlight both the processes and the stakes of self-creation for African-descended people amid the violence and insecurity of the Atlantic world.14 Finally, there is the question of politics. What is revealed over and over in different ways in different contexts is the centrality of black actors, slavery, and colonialism to the political history of the modern Atlantic. What we see is not just political ideologies disseminated from metropolitan centers to colonial peripheries, but appropriations and rewritings of Western political thought in various registers, from individual struggles for emancipation to colonial struggles for independence.

Mobility The scholars in this collection have worked to evoke and analyze the human dimensions of vast and complex historical dynamics by tracing individuals as they move from one place to another and from one subject position to another. Doing so challenges historians and other writers to develop more satisfying and powerful analyses of important issues—to reveal unexpected comparisons and connections, to reconsider facile abstract distinctions between slavery and freedom, and to explore common dynamics that undergird local phenomena and personal experiences dispersed in space and even time. Such juxtapositions and interconnections may not in themselves

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produce complete analyses of the broad dynamics that connected slavery, white supremacy, and colonialism to capitalism, liberalism, and the idea of the autonomous nation. Yet they can help suggest the nature of these problems, point to some ways of moving beyond nation-bound narratives, and challenge liberal ideologies of modernity that cast unfreedom as an atavistic condition and the formerly colonized world as somehow behind the formerly imperial world in time. The themes of physical movement and personal transformation are central to Jon Sensbach’s discussion of the challenge of recovering the lives of women in the Black Atlantic. Sensbach focuses on two eighteenth-century figures—Rebecca Protten and Maria “the Mooress from St. Thomas”—both of whom survived enslavement in the West Indies, became evangelists, and traveled the world as Moravian missionaries. Rebecca Protten is the central figure in Sensbach’s 2005 book, Rebecca’s Revival, which traces this remarkable woman from the Danish colony of St. Thomas to Germany and then to the Gold Coast.15 Here, his focus is the process of constructing and interpreting such a biography. The lives of enslaved women in the Atlantic world, he points out, have been elusive for historians, who generally lack sources and analytical perspectives to evaluate them. Furthermore, the well-noted characteristics of (some) Atlantic figures—like mobility—were often inaccessible to women, for whom the possibility of voluntary movement was more restricted. Rebecca Protten and Maria thus were exceptional figures because of their mobility and religious influence, as well as the paper trail they left behind. Yet Sensbach argues that their singular lives can also represent broader issues that affect the culture as a whole. “While Rebecca Protten’s experiences by no means typified those of black women in the eighteenth century,” he writes, “they represented powerful impulses presumably shared by most: the attempt by enslaved and free black women to contest the effects of the slave trade; the search for self-determination and free will; and the quest for spiritual reckoning with a capsized world.” Moreover, as Sensbach’s book recounts in more detail, Protten’s life prompts a reinterpretation of eighteenth-century Christianity by revealing a mass movement of the enslaved, who defied their masters to claim Christianity as their own religion. Like Sensbach, Cassandra Pybus shares with readers the great methodological challenges of reconstructing life histories of the enslaved, but also the creative, painstaking, and ultimately rewarding ways she has managed to do so. Building on her efforts in Epic Journeys of Freedom, Pybus has been meticulously reconstructing the lives and international itineraries of Virginians

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who fled slavery and joined the British during the American Revolution.16 Her research highlights patterns of kin relationships, naming conventions, and religious affiliations that reveal not only herculean efforts by enslaved people to sustain family and community, but remarkable success in doing so. Jane Thompson was one such person, who, as Pybus recounts, fled Tidewater Virginia with Lord Dunmore’s army and her husband, son, daughter-inlaw, and several grandchildren. Family bonds as well as shared Methodism kept the Thompsons and others like them together under the hardships of slavery and then relocation, disease, and privation. In New York and later in Nova Scotia, the Thompsons were joined by more relatives; in 1791 the entire clan together moved to the new British colony of Sierra Leone—except for Thompson’s husband, who had died, and Jane herself, now considered too old and frail for the Atlantic crossing. Though it ended in sad circumstances, Jane Thompson’s life story vividly illustrates how mobility was a strategy of pursuing freedom and protecting the bonds of family. While Sensbach and Pybus focus on physical movement, João José Reis highlights social mobility. Manoel Joaquim Ricardo (ca. 1775–1865), the subject of Reis’s chapter, endured the forced migration of the Middle Passage, but his story also highlights the possibilities of, and constraints upon, social mobility in a slave society. Likely a victim of the Sokoto jihad in what is now northern Nigeria, Ricardo arrived in Bahia in 1806 or 1807. By the 1830s, still a slave, he had become a respected merchant and even a slaveholder in his own right. He extended his trade to business partners in West Africa, where his legitimate enterprises may have been a cover for illegal slaving. After achieving freedom through his master’s will, Ricardo abandoned transAtlantic trade but became active in the internal Brazilian slave trade as well as the real estate market. In the face of intense discrimination against free Africans, Ricardo circumvented the law against African landowning, married in the Roman Catholic Church to ensure the inheritance rights of his wife and offspring, and educated his children. By the time he died in Bahia, he was one of the wealthiest men in the province, an extraordinary instance of social mobility among freedmen, most of whom left slavery to enter a world of poverty. Although Ricardo’s trajectory was clearly extraordinary, Reis argues that he can “serve as a guide to the world of nineteenth-century African libertos in Bahia.” While Ricardo’s material success points to the possibilities of assimilation and mobility, his social life continued to revolve around the African community. Ricardo “was a ladino,” Reis writes, “a man who had learned to

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Introduction

manipulate the symbols and protocol of Bahian slave society, who became skilled in the white man’s ways without abandoning his Africanness.” Reis prefers the term ladino to Atlantic creole, but both terms refer to the transformations in identity and society created by the connected cultures of the Atlantic world. The varied and specific forms such transformations took are revealed in part by biographical studies such as those in this volume.

Self-Fashioning Exploring the life histories of individuals in the early modern Atlantic world, particularly those involved in slavery and freedom struggles, challenges some of the basic tendencies of modern biography as a genre. Typically biographies emphasize individual agency, success against the odds, and stories of progress toward the resolution of personal dilemmas.17 In contrast, individuals among the African diaspora have often confronted violent loss, subordination, and tragic failure against vast abstract forces, like capitalism and colonialism, that are beyond their control. Many of the life stories collected in this volume show struggles for survival, prosperity, and community against a seemingly endless series of obstacles. While their successes are inspiring, what is remarkable about the subjects of these biographies is also the web of barriers— including dangers of enslavement, limits on freedom, and constraints on citizenship—that they and many others in the connected world of slavery and white supremacy faced. Moreover, biographies tend to assume a stable, autonomous individual and focus on that person’s inner, unique experiences. In this sense, biography has shared many of the conventions of the novel, which also emerged in the early modern period. In contrast, a generation of African social history has taught us that the qualities of situational and relational identity were particularly salient in African societies before, during, and after colonialism.18 The power of this model of subjectivity is exemplified by Lloyd Kramer’s chapter on the African American memoirist David Dorr, while those by Vincent Carretta and Lisa Lindsay reveal historical actors who were struggling for self-realization against the heritage of slavery, even as they unsettle the stable subjects of conventional biography. The central question in Kramer’s biographical chapter is how the experience of moving from one social, cultural, political context to another allows opportunities for self-reinvention as well as the affirmation of personal subjectivity. Kramer focuses on David Dorr, an enslaved African American man

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who in the early 1850s traveled as a body servant through Europe and elsewhere, returned with his owner to Louisiana, ran away to freedom in Ohio, and wrote about his experiences in A Colored Man Round the World (1858). If, as Joseph Miller emphasized, a central experience of slavery is the “challenges of disruption, renewed isolation, moving on, and starting over,” Dorr embraced these opportunities through his travels as well as in his writing about them afterward. Modern travel writing almost always involves the author’s developing sense of freedom in new, strange contexts. For Dorr, travel allowed him to reimagine what it meant to be a man and a citizen of the world, and it seemingly gave him the moral courage to break away from his owner and assert his claim to freedom. If travel outside the social and racial hierarchies of slavery was crucial for Dorr, it also make it clear how much more complex and dynamic his sense of self was than the terms freedom or equality might imply. One series of experiences that helped Dorr constitute a new sense of himself as a man of means and gentility involved having the content of his character—his refinement, his intelligence, his savoir faire—mirrored back to him by representatives of the European upper crust, people he considered in a far better position to judge such things than many Americans he might meet in person or as readers. At the same time, Dorr recounted another set of stories in which foreign women found him sexually attractive. In the end, Kramer suggests that Dorr’s writing affirms what intellectual historians might call “a ‘proto-existential’ celebration of independent selfhood.” Not just the travel, but the writing of his book, had furthered Dorr’s intellectual and psychological journey toward becoming “a new kind of man.” The same might be said, in a different vein, of Olaudah Equiano, probably the best-known ex-slave and author in the history of the Black Atlantic world. In a 1999 journal article and then in his book Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, Vincent Carretta revealed historical evidence indicating that Equiano might have been born in South Carolina rather than the Bight of Biafra, as he claimed in his autobiography.19 As Carretta recounts in his chapter, questioning the authenticity of Equiano’s description of his African homeland and the Middle Passage provoked resistance from some historians as well as Nigerian nationalists who would claim Equiano as an ancestral hero. Here, Carretta confronts his critics by considering Equiano’s purpose and strategy in writing his life story. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was published in 1789 just as abolitionists launched their assault on the slave trade in Britain’s House of Commons. The antislavery movement badly

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needed an account of the slave trade from a victim’s perspective, and that is exactly what Equiano’s published description provided. It elicited the empathy of readers and thus made a persuasive case not only for the barbarity of the Atlantic slave trade but also for the innate capabilities of Africans. All this required that Equiano be African, not African American. Carretta also points out that Equiano’s self-fashioning should be understood in the context of an eighteenth-century literary culture in which distinctions between fiction and nonfiction were often blurry; and he wryly observes that in this context, “Equiano’s literary achievements have been underestimated.” Lisa Lindsay’s chapter, too, muses on the questions of an individual’s origins, presenting different versions of his history as a reflection both of different kinds of sources and the kind of creative self-presentation that was pervasive under structures of slavery and white supremacy. In the 1850s an African American named James C. Vaughan started a new life in Yorubaland, now southwestern Nigeria. He allegedly had been instructed to go to Africa by his dying father, a Yoruba former slave in South Carolina. In Nigeria, according to family lore, Vaughan encountered people bearing what he recognized as his father’s “tribal marks,” who acknowledged him as a long-lost relative even though they could not accept his Christianity. Other evidence reveals, however, that James Vaughan’s father could not have had such facial markings, as he was born in Virginia. As was the case for Equiano, the circumstances under which Vaughan talked about his ancestral origins help explain his possible motives. His challenge as an immigrant to Yorubaland during a time of warfare and dramatic political change was to assimilate well enough to achieve physical security and social connections, but to remain outside onerous patron-client obligations. The story of his father’s alleged Yoruba connections, tempered by differences over religion, established Vaughan’s claim to belonging, even while it justified his (partial) independence. Ethnicity, in this chapter as in Carretta’s, is as much as strategy of local affiliation as a source of longstanding identification.20 In post-emancipation societies of the Americas, freedpeople engaged in fierce contests for economic self-sufficiency and personal autonomy.21 But, like Vaughan’s, many Atlantic-world biographies also center on struggles not to be autonomous.22 People of the Black Atlantic continually fought against the personal isolation that loomed within slavery. If the alienation of enslavement can be seen as an intense form of modern individualism, as Paul Gilroy suggested, then perhaps at a human level the black experience was not so different from those of others in the Atlantic world—a point consistent with

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Kramer’s portrayal of David Dorr.23 Biographies of the Black Atlantic show in stark relief the personal struggles of the modern age—for selfhood, dignity, prosperity, freedom, justice, and community.

Politics In their movements around the Atlantic, and in their personal efforts at self-fashioning, many of our Black Atlantic actors were also deeply involved in large-scale political and ideological developments. The chapters by Jane Landers, Roquinaldo Ferreira, and Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrand reveal the Atlantic world not just as a space for the unidirectional transmission of people and ideas, but as an integrated zone of exchange, meaning, debate, and struggle. The channels and networks around and across the Atlantic world were often determined not by national boundaries or even by imperial networks, but by linguistic and cultural traces of earlier orders. These patterns challenge historians to rethink “transnationalism,” a concept that often still depends on nations as the basic units, rather than as historical artifacts and residues. The biographies here suggest different links between geography and politics, showing actors operating within, across, and around imperial circuits rather than always routed back through the metropolis. They also reveal politics at different scales: within colonies, empires, and nations; at the level of ideology and discourse; and through struggles against the racism and violence situated at the core of capitalist modernity. These stories remind us that enslaved people did not simply receive metropolitan ideas, but appropriated, revised, and indeed transformed their meanings. The Atlantic was not a conduit by which the Enlightenment moved from the metropolis to the colonies, but an integrated zone of intellectual exchange and circulation. And it was one in which the enslaved were not only crucial actors but also crucial thinkers. Indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people of the African diaspora took on the political ideals of the Enlightenment, using them in their own struggles, shaping them through circulation, and arguing that they should not be merely uttered but enacted.24 The central figure in Jane Landers’s chapter was swept up in, and made his own contributions to, politics across a remarkable range of colonial spaces in the Atlantic world. Francisco Menéndez grew up in a multicultural community around the Gambia River, was brought to South Carolina by English slav­ers in the early 1700s, joined Native Americans in the Yamasee War, escaped to Spanish Florida—where he led the first free black town in what

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Introduction

is now the United States—was later captured and served as a slave in the Bahamas, and probably ended his life in Cuba. Such mobility, Landers argues, shaped people like Menéndez personally, and also shaped the geopolitics of the Atlantic world. The polyglot and literate Menéndez personified Ira Berlin’s cosmopolitan “Atlantic creole”—someone with “linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility.”25 The ways he and others put these skills to use, pressing claims for freedom while offering valuable skills and information to the powerful, helped determine political relations between the English and Spanish in southeastern North America. For a time, too, Menéndez exercised political leadership over people described by contemporaries in Spanish Florida as his “subjects.” His story, like that of Scott and Hébrard’s Rosalie described below, illustrates some of the networks of personnel, information, and authority created by the enslaved in pursuit of freedom. Such life histories point to alternative ways of mapping the Atlantic world, beyond the political boundaries created by imperialists and colonizers. Roquinaldo Ferreira’s chapter emphasizes the colonial reverberations of metropolitan political change. But it also challenges national or imperial frames of political reference by pointing to alliances of sentiment and action that bypassed the metropole completely. Ferreira focuses on a merchant and colonial official in the Angolan seaport of Benguela named Francisco Gomes, who in the early 1820s was accused of plotting a rebellion to free the colony from Portuguese rule and ally it with newly independent Brazil. Gomes was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, possibly as a slave, but in 1800, around age fifteen, he was sent into criminal exile across the ocean to the Angolan city of Benguela. Over the next two decades, he rose to considerable wealth and prominence, in large part by working through the apparatus of the colonial state. When Gomes and several other wealthy black Benguelan merchants were accused of plotting to massacre the city’s white population and the broader white-dominated Angolan colonial government they represented, Portuguese colonial authorities used the opportunity to wrest power from local elites. Moreover, the alleged revolt was deeply intertwined with the transAtlantic ramifications of Brazil’s recent revolt against the Portuguese. Like Brazil, Angola had also been influenced by the liberal revolution in Portugal itself in 1820, which had given birth to provisional juntas, led by provincial elites, in various parts of the Portuguese Empire. Colonial officials feared that Gomes and other black merchants had been plotting to break Benguela away from colonial Angola and ally it with newly independent Brazil. There is an irony here, of course: that Gomes was plotting to overturn the colonial

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state apparatus which had so largely shaped the course of his life and through which he had risen from criminal outcast to wealthy merchant. Indeed, one wonders to what extent this conspiracy was real and to what extent it was a fantasy, ploy, or projection of white colonial elites concerned about the success and prominence of black competitors for wealth and status. The main point, however, is the wide-ranging, trans-Atlantic sphere for political thinking and operation. Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard’s chapter presents a similarly broad political context for their biographical subject, “Rosalie of the Poulard Nation.” Scott and Hébrard trace the experience of a family that struggled for freedom, dignity, and equality on both sides of the Atlantic and in a series of different nations over the course of three generations, between the Haitian Revolution and the U.S. Civil War. The story begins with efforts to inscribe on paper the freedom of a woman called Rosalie and her children, at least some of whose father was Rosalie’s erstwhile owner. Over the next several years, in Haiti and later as a refugee in Cuba, Rosalie obtained a series of different documents attesting to her freedom. The purpose of a private emancipation agreement—even for a woman who was freed by a similar document years earlier, for a daughter who was born free, and for a family freed at one point by metropolitan French decrees and by British military law—was to shield the family from whatever questions about their past might be raised in other contexts, in other jurisdictions, in the future. Eventually, Rosalie returned to Haiti, but at least one of her daughters emigrated to New Orleans, where she married a respectable local man of color and businessman. Rosalie’s daughter and her family ultimately left Louisiana for France, where their son was educated. It was Rosalie’s European-educated grandson who returned to New Orleans and, in the aftermath of the Civil War, was elected to the state’s constitutional convention and who fought for the inclusion of language protecting a variety of civil rights, and protections of equality for women as well as men—including provisions designed to give the rights and protections of marriage to women like his grandmother. This expansive constitutional moment—promising a radically freer, new South after the upheavals of war— was short-lived, and Rosalie’s descendants moved back to Europe to pursue their business interests and live their lives. What their story shows most clearly is the deep and specific connections (often overlooked and frequently impossible to reconstruct) between the struggles for freedom and racial equality that began in the eighteenth century and continued into the twentieth, in the

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Introduction

Caribbean, in North America, in Europe—and back and forth between the continents over time. Ultimately, this account of Rosalie and her descendants leaves us with the troubled legacies of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, post-Civil War American white supremacy, and the twentieth-century horrors of systematic genocide. In the aftermath of World War II, Jim Crow in the United States was beginning to buckle under the weight of a long tradition of resistance, and much of the world, including Kwame Nkrumah’s Africa, was successfully engaged in anti-colonial independence movements. It was also just at this moment—when both white supremacy and colonialism were losing their claims to morality, legitimacy, and political potency—that the erasure of the Black Atlantic was being consolidated in Euro-American discourse, despite the continuing protests of Afro-diasporan scholars. The white-washed mythography of Robinson Charley emerged to provide a legitimate narrative of (North) Atlantic unity and to draw a veil over the brutal history of the origins of the modern, interconnected world. Ultimately, these stories remind us, as W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized long ago, how much so-called Western Civilization rested on a foundation of slavery and colonialism, a hidden history of “sweat, blood, death, and despair.”26 The challenge remains: not simply to rebut what was being said, but also to reveal what was being obscured and dismissed—that is, to refute the narrative of Robinson Charley.

* * * What, then, is the moral of these stories? Atlantic history has always been a kind of political project. In the aftermath of World War II, it was primarily an attempt to valorize Anglo-American political alliances and to rehabilitate liberal capitalism in the wake of disastrous decades of international economic depression and global warfare. But does emphasizing the diversity and humanity of the modern world merely add stories of the marginal without challenging existing myths about the nature of our modern, interconnected world? For one thing, life stories—with all their specificity and particularly—can serve as a corrective to some of the more generalizing tendencies of cultural and demographic history. While Gilroy called attention to the connections between mobility, violence, the production of race, and cultural creativity, the particular biographies explored in this volume prompt us to remember that the networks by which people, ideas, and things moved around the Atlantic

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were not amorphous or general, but concrete and specific. In practice, transAtlantic connections were not even, but “lumpy”—or perhaps choppy. Critics of the concept of globalization have pointed out the ways that transnational connections are shaped by unequal access to power, whether economic, political, or otherwise, so that what is often glossed as “global” in fact refers to specific and often bounded networks. As historian Frederick Cooper put it, “The world has long been—and still is—a space where economic and political relations are very uneven; it is filled with lumps, places where power coalesces surrounded by those where it does not, places where social relations become dense amid others that are diffuse. Structures and networks penetrate certain places and do certain things with great intensity, but their effects tail off elsewhere.”27 The same can be said for the Black Atlantic, and indeed Atlantic history more generally. Attending to individual stories and trajectories can help us see particular spatial linkages, and how they and their meanings changed over time. The transnational, hybrid cultures of the Black Atlantic took different shape in different moments and places, and among different people. It is one thing to call attention to the production of new cultures and identities, but the biographies here remind us that this was not a unitary process, and they endow it with specificity. Moreover, focusing on individual life stories demonstrates that such large-scale historical processes as migration, trade, and colonialism look different when viewed from the bottom up. For traders, captives, peasants, sailors, children, and a range of others, historical developments were experienced—that is, made and lived through by people whose relationships to these processes were different than those of political, economic, and military elites. And while the experiences recounted in these life stories very often involved survival against the odds and in many cases extraordinary achievements, a powerful recurrent theme is the pathos of alienation and the human struggle to overcome it. This is a central feature of the experience of enslavement and the modern condition. The biographies here show that such struggles and strategies are not only about cultural symbols and racial identities, but also about families, communities, and alliances ranging in scale from the intimate to the broadly political. Finally, at the most basic level, the chapters in this volume show that writing “Black Atlantic” biographies is methodologically possible. To be sure, sources are scarce and fragmentary. The narratives that emerge are often partial, fleeting, or disjointed. But their effect can nonetheless be powerful— perhaps in part because the challenge to the ideology of the autonomous

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Introduction

individual has made us more open to hybrid identities, shifting senses of self, and all the ways these life stories depart from the normative genre conventions of biography with its stable subjects, valorized individualism, and coherent personalities. Exploring what can be known about the men, women, and children who populated the Black Atlantic helps to put faces on broad historical processes and reveal them as experienced. The people who created the modern world include not just Robinson Charley and his putative peers, but also a wide range of others. Who they were, we don’t always know. Millions of their names have been lost to time. But some of them have stories.

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PA R T I PARAMETERS

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Chapter one

A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn joseph c. miller

The so-called “biographical turn” in the “Black Atlantic”—during its agonizingly long opening phase of slave trading and slavery—is a historiographical advance that I find as profound as the “quantitative turn,”1 the sweeping research of pan-disciplinary proportions a half-century ago that generated the scholarship that has now crested in the launch of the Voyages database.2 Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. This assemblage of rigorously documented detail, for all its comprehensive richness at the level of the slaving ventures designated in its entirely appropriate title, has only intensified popular and scholarly quests for the humanity that the database lacks: information on the people carried in the holds of those 35,000 (and doubtless still counting) vessels. These human beings were believed all but lost to history, with the exception of the very few survivors of its infamous “middle passage” able to tell their stories to nineteenth-century abolitionists, and nearly all of those in the quite atypical (and marginal to the trade as a whole) United States.3 Even Stephanie Smallwood’s elegant evocation of the experience of “saltwater slavery” relied more on cultural insight, in the aggregate, than on individuals’ experiences.4 Marcus Rediker’s intense analysis of slave ships, those floating microcosms of capitalism and cruelty, features moments in the lives of a few enslaved individuals, but does not pause to reconstruct the lives themselves.5 In the meanwhile, the “biographical turn,” to which the participants in this volume (other than myself) have given so much momentum, is gathering momentum. They have demonstrated again the lessons that Phil Curtin taught us in his original census of the slave trade: unimagined masses of

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evidence are lying around in plain sight for those willing to look beyond the received wisdom. Vince Carretta stunned us all simply by following the trail marked in Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative, as did Paul Lovejoy and Robin Law for Muhammad Gardo Baquaqua’s autobiography.6 In terms of research strategies, Randy Sparks reversed this conventional course from published autobiography to archive-based confirmation (or not) and expansion of detail and context by noticing neglected aspects of documentation familiar as sources for other kinds of history and elegantly contextualizing the voyages of Two Princes of Calabar from Africa to England and back.7 Beyond the relatively private framework of English institutional culture, in which most of the records note only individuals’ passing engagements with officialdom or moments of public notoriety,8 the Catholic parish records of moments of personal passages through life, notarial archives of private contracts, and the legal standing of the enslaved in monarchical courts of law have enabled several of this volume’s contributors to move well beyond the relatively troubled and problematic moments glimpsed in official records to start to reconstruct fuller lives, carrying surviving individuals from their moments of betrayal through the isolation of enslavement, and eventually finding new places for themselves, however tenuous, and however humble.9 For this recovering social historian—raised as I was in twentieth-century historiography’s detour through “social history,” “quantitative history,” and political economy, and still lingering in the structural successors of that era in contemporary “cultural history”—I welcome the epistemological implications of putting individuals and their experiences back where they belong, at the base of properly historical inquiry. If the social scientists, quantifiers, and particularly economists have left the people out of the story, it is our job—as historians—to put them in.

An Epistemological Perspective on History The essential shift in perspective is from structures and abstractions—for example, “volumes and directions”—to people and their experiences. My friends reading this reflection on the state of our field of slavery studies will know my now long-running crusade to historicize our endeavors.10 This historical framing is the context in which I welcome biography, because it has the potential to detect and then try to understand the many and diverse experiences of being enslaved. My plea to the biographers assembled in this endeavor is to exploit that potential for revealing the humanity of the enslaved

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and their experiences of enslavement, rather than merely appropriating isolated elements from the rich and often, perhaps always, surprising details of real people’s real lives in support of the existing highly structural approach to them only as “slaves,” and to their lives only as “slavery.” They were much more than that, and they made much more of their experiences, however constrained, than merely suffering or resisting. No one here lingers in the iconic “slavery” portrayed in modern popular culture—in the United States, essentially African American men working in the cotton fields of the antebellum South; in England or France, African men toiling in canebrakes under a scorching Caribbean sun; or for others, perhaps girls and women secluded and seduced in exotic harems somewhere in a sexualized oriental palace. But the considerable body of scholars who think about the subject professionally may find similarly challenged their essentially sociological assumptions about “slavery as an institution.” In this category of reductionist abstractions I include “slave societies” or “societies with slaves,” “slave modes of production,” forms of “unfree labor,” “slave/creole cultures,” or even “the idea (or ideology) of slavery.”11 I do not denigrate the significant understandings sociological modeling has given us, as we historians cannot think without these theories, but I am inviting readers to consider the deep-seated assumptions that underlie how we can think most comprehendingly, and hence most productively, beyond the conventions, popular and academic, of existing understandings of slaving. In the parlance of the professional literature on “slavery,” I want to problematize the utility—even question the elemental accuracy—of the familiar, all-but-ubiquitous phrasing of “slavery” studied as an abstract “institution.” Effecting this transition from a sociological to a historical mode requires several logical steps, perhaps demanding ones, considering the intensity of politicized neo-abolitionist structuralism that surrounds the subject. First, one must suspend the usual virtual exclusivity of focus on the intense and tense relationship between paradigmatic masters as dominating and paradigmatic slaves as dominated, the contrast that all but defines “slavery as an institution.”12 Instead, I want also to acknowledge, robustly, the historical contexts in which both parties, masters and slaves, were trying to manipulate not only one another but also others around them. The sympathetic reader must then follow the implication that contextualizing this paradigmatic master-slave dyad forces us to abandon the very notion of “slavery as an institution”; that is, we must think beyond the static abstraction, independent of time or place, that we imagine by observing and abstracting “it” as such. Rather, we must think

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experientially by imagining ourselves in the positions of the historical creators, sensing the meanings of their actions to them, recognizing intentions of theirs beyond their fraught relationship with one another. The moral resonance of “slavery” in our own cultures makes this step a particularly difficult one; our interests in the subject lie essentially in condemning the relationship comprehensively and hence abstractly. But we might also wonder what led slav­ers to create and endure so problematic a situation; they must have had other purposes relevant to the changing historical contexts in which they lived. Thinking historically also requires one to abandon the recent intensely structural inclinations of the historical discipline generally. The notion of “slavery as an institution” has created few waves among historians, whose discipline was defined at the end of the nineteenth century primarily through an unproblematized focus on the “origins” of “nation-states.” But we now understand these entities to be figments of the modern imagination, that is, not natural entities but rather ideological strategies.13 A historical approach to the past, through the motivations of the slavers and the experiences of the enslaved, and the changes they wrought together, affirms—indeed exploits—the humanistic aspects of what people have done. By focusing on motivated and contextualized strategies of the slavers and the enslaved, one arrives at the logical axis of historical narrative, the kind of “story” one may tell: processes (of incremental, inadvertent change) that slavers initiate and the enslaved manipulate. “Slavery” is our retrospective observation of the outcome of the myriad actions on which historians properly concentrate. “Slavery” explains nothing; it is what historians ought to try to explain. Because studying “slavery as an institution” rests on such deep commitment to these structural, abstract conventions, it may be helpful to readers to query them systematically, one by one, en route to suspending them in favor of a historicized alterative. I begin by considering aspects of the existing literature that illustrate the contrasts between what I term its “sociological” (in a nontechnical sense) tone and the “historical” dynamic I hope to elaborate. Orlando Patterson’s paradigmatic synthesis of the logic of the field, his avowedly sociological Slavery and Social Death, epitomizes the decontextualization of what I call the “master-slave dyad.”14 For a quarter of a century this masterwork has justly been accorded pride of place, and it will not soon be superseded as a vivid evocation of the lived Hegelian “problem” of personal domination. Patterson takes on slaving on a sweepingly global scale, though not historically. “Slavery,” as he abstracts it, singular among human relationships in its extremity of claimed domination, is utterly ubiquitous in recorded

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human societies. In Patterson’s hands, slavery has dynamic elements, to be sure, though not of a historical sort that would embed particular masters and their slaves in specific times and specific places. His data come from a comprehensive range of very specific ethnographic sources, but his essentially statistical analysis of them extracts the masters and the slaves from the specific situations in which they lived. He isolates the pair axiomatically, indeed by definition in his resonant metaphor of “social death.” Masters monopolize the lives of their slaves, to the absolute exclusion of all others around them, thus condemning the enslaved to the historical living hell of decontextualization.15 Slavery and Social Death then essentially goes on to elaborate the psychology of such obsession within the isolated intimacy of his sequestered master-slave dyad more than it provides a sociology in the sense of positioning masters—or their slaves—in the larger social (or temporal) matrices in which they lived. Patterson’s “social death” excludes historical context by definition. Patterson’s treatment of masters and slaves as individuals, rather than as relational beings embedded in social—or, as I would phrase the point, historical—contexts, is also thoroughly modern in its implicit assumption of “society” itself. The autonomous, self-centered individual stands—calculatingly— at the core of all the modern behavioral social sciences. And well she might have to concentrate, cognitively, rationally, because she has no one to turn to for survival but herself. It is not by accident that modernity defines the individual as rational (or misled by hegemonic ideologies) and pathologizes emotion. He or she then acts in ways that may be combined with the similarly individually calculated actions of others into aggregates susceptible to description in terms of their statistical tendencies. The implicit dehumanization, or at least anonymity, of sentient historical beings through application of statistical techniques to slavery and, most prominently, to the demographics of the Atlantic slave trade have excited emotional objections from both scholars and members of the public intent on understanding the identities and experiences of the enslaved that these abstractions of the modern social sciences obscure.16 The intensity of these reactions, of course, reflects the political sensitivity of the subject itself, a metonymic essence of the modern metaphysically isolated individual. In contrast, since historians are epistemologically humanists, a historical approach starts by framing the contexts that Patterson backgrounds to sense the strategic considerations that motivated the people who managed to acquire slaves at all. Patterson merely presents the historian with the enslaved already on hand and in hand, unproblematically subject to a master’s

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compulsion to dominate.17 Most other works on slavery have, in varying but considerable degrees, treated this assumption of abstracted dyadic domination as the dominating aspect of “slavery.” One significant reason Patterson’s book immediately attained the seminal status that it deserves is that in it he brilliantly distills to an explicit essence the axiom that hovers implicitly in nearly all other works in the field. This axiomatic denial of social existence to both the slavers and the individuals enslaved predicts the remainder of Patterson’s argument. Implicitly lonely masters end up depending on their slaves so intensely that they have to acknowledge them personally as the vibrantly alive individuals who they in fact always were. Indeed, their very recruitment and retention for their masters’ service must have called on them to be exactly that. The dynamic counterpart of “social death” is intense personal vitality. So intense and intimate a relationship is necessarily filled with dialectical contradictions that make relations between slaves and masters anything but stable. Thus, for Patterson, “slavery” itself is process, a growing engagement from the perspectives of both the enslavers and the enslaved. Beyond the rich intended irony of rescuing the seemingly dominated slave and placing the nominal master in the position of parasitical dependent of the enslaved, this Hegelian dynamic of twisted psychological interdependency also reflects existential anxieties inherent in the book’s axiomatic reliance on the individualism of modernity (and its discontents). But Patterson’s slavery is also—and contradictorily—processual in a sense of according growing social contextualization to the enslaved. They move from the “social deaths” of their moments of violent capture, through arrivals at remote locations in utter subordination to their masters’ wills, to contesting the domination (all but tautologically) inherent in such engagements (but primarily, even only, on individual terms), and eventually—for some, at least—on through “manumission” to the social “resurrection” of conditional, negotiated, but recognized public standing.18 The psychodynamics of obsession that the book elaborates thus in fact characterize only an effective “middle passage,” the phase of contestation, in this journey from isolation to assimilation. A contradiction may also lurk in Patterson’s due attention to rituals of exclusion by naming, dress, and other social markers apparently necessary to isolate the enslaved; the enslaved person is thus not socially inert but only liminal and thus anxiously evident to all. A parallel phrasing of a title appropriate for the master-slave dyad contextualized more historically might be “slavery and social dread,” or “slavery and social denial.”

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Patterson’s accent on assimilation generates several of the many great insights of his sociology, as they show the true, that is, historical, peculiarity of the permanent, inherited civic exclusions of slavery as institutionalized in the United States. Slaves, as vital human beings working to gain the recognition initially denied them in the wider societies where they find themselves, challenge their masters’ claimed monopolization of their attentions, mostly by burrowing from within their enslavement. They use strategies of “resistance” of the oblique and opportune sorts long featured in the general literature on slavery as a relationship of domination.19 However, the totality of the domination that lies at the base of Patterson’s definition of “slavery,” the analytical isolation of the master-slave dyad, by definition converts any sign of life from the enslaved into “resistance.” Conceptually, they have no other option. But these are generic passages of abstracted slaves, anywhere, anytime. The principal exception to this generic sociological process was denial of this final step toward “freedom” (as David Brion Davis had noted, obliquely attributing the blockage to racialization) in certain colonies in the New World, and preeminently, of course, in the United States. Patterson’s process thus operates ubiquitously through the myriad specific realizations that he documents, but in analytical significance it recedes to incidental background, mere “cultural” variants on the prioritized regularity, indeed ubiquity, of “social death.” The principal particularity—truncation of an otherwise uniform process (one hesitates to think also “progress”) toward manumission in parts of the Americas—is not a positively explained event with a historicized, that is, contextualized, logic of its own, but remains a dichotomous absence, left as an unexplained exception to the general model. The primary ahistorical analytical alternative to Patterson’s sociological synthesis of the historically varying local results of slaving has been to “compare” the varied outcomes as “cases” of a generic phenomenon, with their differing features analyzed as “variables” around a constant, no less abstract essence. In the early decades of modern studies of slavery, the apparent “mildness” of the practice in Brazil (in racial terms, of dubious direct relationship to slaving as such) offered a tempting contrast to the presumed (also racialized) “harshness” of slavery in the United States. This and other quasi-social-scientific historical comparisons explicitly assume, in the spirit of true experimental science and parallel to Patterson’s implicit backgrounding of context, that “other things are equal,” ceteris paribus. But “things” involving human perceptions—on which history properly concentrates—never are the same, and “things” in the past cannot be ascertained to have been so

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in any rigorously scientific sense. Moreover, the “things” scientific method attempts to hold constant are limited, even unique, in their numbers, whereas the aspects of historical context relevant to motivating human actions are, by definition, infinite and ephemeral. As a result, historians attempting to “compare” “slavery” in different places have in effect acknowledged contexts but structured them as decorative background, analytically inert, effectively dismissed as insignificant. In the comparative method, time itself is among these analytical residuals. Comparisons are inherently static, and so comparison entirely misses the inherently dynamic qualities of slaving. They assume away the historical processes slavers appropriated to engage in slaving and the further changes they may be assumed to have intended to effect by slaving, not to mention the radical disruptions experienced by the enslaved. As historical strategists, slavers operate effectively primarily in contexts of rapid change, and the enslaved survive only by drawing on their deepest reserves of adaptability, agility, and opportunism. Slaving, as motivated human action, was itself fundamentally historical also because it was a particularly efficacious strategy of making a difference in people’s lives, thus generating historical processes. Slavers introduced powerful human resources from outside the spheres in which they acted historically and protected them from local rivals. Their control of the people they thus introduced provoked virtually endless chains of reactions to their slaving among competitors, on scales ranging from the interpersonal microdynamics between individual masters and the people they acquired to local and regional competition between slavers seeking power through slaving and opponents less committed—if not actively opposed—to their strategy, or between the legitimate wives of patrimonial householders and the slave girls brought in for domestic services but available also to attend to their masters in more intimate ways. This historicized approach to slaving—or, in the formal language of the discipline, viewing human initiatives through the lens of a rigorously historical epistemology—explains the association of “slavery” with “human progress” David Brion Davis acutely noted years ago,20 but not merely a paradox or unexplained irony, as he left the association. Rather, slaving as a strategy to further changes in the interests of the slavers was an eminently intelligible, intended historical process. Slavers succeeded in moments of momentous change and also used their unrestrained control of their slaves to apply their energies to radically novel ends of their own. Slaving is thus inherently historical. Sociological structures and institutional comparisons

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of the outcomes of these processes as “slavery,” and particularly its singularly institutionalized variant in the modern United States, obscure this fundamental dynamic.

Problematizing History But why is doing something that sounds so obvious as “historicizing” the concept of slavery so problematic for historians? No one has ever denied that things change, slaving included. Davis launched the modern field of slavery studies almost fifty years ago by focusing on change on encompassing scales, beyond his operative focus on the profound change in the hearts of the eighteenth-century pietists and humanists who recognized slavery as a moral “problem” of proportions so enormous that eradicating it required mobilization of all the overwhelming civic, and eventually military force of emerging modern governments.21 Nonetheless, for the ethical and political reasons I have sketched, nearly all academic literature on the subject, implicitly or explicitly, anywhere in the world, has continued to treat slavery as an implicitly static “institution”—that is, sociologically. In an epistemological sense, “history” involves a good deal more than just mining the past for human behavior to describe, or even to analyze through an ad hoc assortment of analytical lenses. Historical sociology also engages in this latter process, often revealingly enough with regard to illustrating regularities in human behavior. Sociological approaches may even acknowledge change, but they do not integrate its dynamics analytically. In contrast to historical thinking, which contextualizes in order to suggest the meanings and intentions behind human actions, sociology decontextualizes by selecting specifics to illustrate the generalizations and theories on which it focuses, creating the “models” on which it properly—and productively—concentrates. Putting the point less abstractly, and thus more historically, changing contexts, not the seemingly universal constant of inhumane domination,22 explain how people in positions definably marginal to the contexts in which they lived recurrently resorted to slaving to convert their marginality toward centrality. Historians thus would not say that slaving abstractly “persisted,” even though people in positions of marginality, logically necessary components of any coherent (and thus conceptually centered) historical community, have therefore (also logically) necessarily turned up ubiquitously since the very beginnings of human time. Historians may thus focus on the specific circumstances in which peripheral parties,23 again and again, in different places

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and different times, found slaving an accessibly advantageous strategy and so reinvented it out of their own moments, and so always in novel ways and to particular strategic ends. These historical contexts of change both motivated and enabled these specifiably marginal interests to use slaving to appropriate the changes already underway around them for purposes of their own, which also always differed, depending on where in their particular historical contexts the slavers stood. The historian would not start from the intellectual, or philosophical, or ideological “problem” of an “institution,” frozen in timeless analytical space, but rather with the historical, that is, dialectical/processual, specifics of what Davis noted—but reluctantly backgrounded—as “economic functions and interpersonal relationships . . . for which we lack satisfactory data.” Historians then account for such recurring patterns by reasoning from the particulars of human experiences rather than contemplating the abstract logic of the patterns the particulars may also form.24 Biography bypasses generic “slavery” and inherently contextualizes specific experiences of slaving in, both as results of and as contributors to, the varying compound historical processes of which they were parts. “Context” for historians prominently— even primarily—includes change, in the form of multiple ongoing processes. The strategies of slaving that recurred on global scales (and recur still today, in spite of nominal “abolition”) are understandable not only as a single, universal abstraction but also in their multiple local realizations, as practices meaningful to particular protagonists and meant to accomplish specific changes. Biography adds the particular, flexibly changing strategies of the enslaved, the most marginalized of the marginal, as they move through—and ongoing movement is a critical emphasis—the experiences of their enslavement. By explicitly problematizing slaving as a “historical strategy,” in processual historical contexts, rather than implicitly as a sociological institution, I accent “change” of a very particular historical sort. Instead of “slavery” as a sort of relational constant, whatever the dialectical dynamism its isolation may have energized, “slaving” is understood historically by situating the slavers and the enslaved in the specific contexts in which the innumerable master-slave dyads in the world’s history in fact lived. I intend “context” in the most comprehensive sense possible, including momentary (and individual) adaptations of received cultural heritages; societal frameworks as dynamic outcomes of historical actions rather than as constraining “structures”; imagined political, military, or economic opportunities; and emphatically also including the sheer ephemerality of the series of “presents” in which we all always live.

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This phrasing of the dynamic aspects of slaving is thus intended to draw on what strike me as (the) three distinguishing components of history’s epistemology. Our purpose in thinking historically is to explain, in plausible and relevant ways25—that is, to offer understandings relevant to ourselves that we may plausibly (not possibly, and ideally also probably) attribute to the people in the past whom we study. We seek “truth” less than we seek to communicate meaning; whatever “truth” we achieve is consensus, probably fleeting, and significantly rhetorical. It may thus be said that historians distinctively explain by focusing on (1) humans (people rather than abstractions, institutions, or structures of any kind—mental or social or economic or otherwise). Thus for historians, abstractions do not act. Christianity, or civilization, or modernity does not “spread”; rather people may adopt and adapt elements of these logical constructions for their own immediate purposes; civilizations do not “endure,” but rather people may preserve them, and necessarily change them in the course of making the efforts necessary to maintain elements in them against the inevitably erosive flow of time; ideas cannot “influence,” but people may manipulate them ideologically to attempt to influence others. In the context of understanding slaving, “slavery as an institution” is an abstraction and thus not a premise viable for historians, though historians may trace how certain interests in the very particular context of—say—British North America eventually institutionalized the unintended consequences of the intense slaving in the Atlantic, created by the people whose biographies we contemplate26 (2) humans acting (in whatever baffled ways they can manage) out of incomplete, impressionistic, and significantly inaccurate awarenesses of momentary and particular circumstances from which they derive meanings, and hence motivations for whatever they do. That is, historians reconstruct contexts as richly as they can, to discern as many as possible of the always multiple, not always (or perhaps seldom) coherent, aspects of actors’ contexts to which they may plausibly have reacted in the ways that historians can identify. For historians “cause” is thus an entirely false problematic. It is necessarily

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attributed to structural sociological abstractions, in a futile search for coherence in the eye of the analyst/beholder. “Causation” may be possible to discern in defined scientific reactions, or physical processes, but among historians the word almost always attributes agency to an abstraction, in response to some phrasing parallel to “what [abstraction] caused the Second World War, or the Great Depression,” or even “slavery.” In a historical mode, it cannot be said that “race caused slavery” in the Americas, or vice versa. This sort of statement is mechanistic, regular, and deterministic; human actions are subtle, complex, unique, and contingent. It should be no wonder that historians never agree on the answers to questions of cause, posed as these historical red herrings. Even if masters abused enslaved persons to the point of provoking flight or retaliation, the historian cannot assume a causal link between provocation and rebellion, both abstractions. Rather, a historical assessment of such incidents would consider as much of the context of the fugitive’s circumstances, at the moment of flight, as can be evaluated. Thus, again, historians assess contexts as fully as possible to identify all the potentially significant aspects motivating what people may be observed to have done. To repeat: historians do not “prove” anything but rather explain, in the sense of rendering others’ actions plausible, even convincing, to readers or audiences also positioned in swirling flows of time. The place of abstract “causation” in a historical epistemology, as distinct from ascertainable or plausibly inferable motivations, is rhetorical, at best: (3) humans act more with the intention of forestalling changes than of effecting them, that is, reacting to protect themselves against consequences stemming from the motivated initiatives of others. Such externalities as climate are often prominent elements of contexts, but they are historically significant only as filtered through human reactions to their noticeable aspects, through the meanings people may attribute to them, in the historical contexts in which they find themselves, momentarily.27 The further implication of change, construed historically in terms of the multiple human actors producing it by interacting, is that it is an ongoing dialectical process. People are inherently social beings, or—in the context of this discussion of the epistemology of history—by definition they act in historical contexts. Every human action may be said—reducing the

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contrast with scientific reasoning, including “causation,” to a familiar axiom of mechanics—to produce unanticipated and asymmetrical human reactions. How otherwise would Patterson depict the forlornness of the enslaved so effectively through his isolating metaphor of “social death”? Consummate powerlessness is the inability to provoke anyone; “social death,” as I emphasized in a preceding context, is historically inert. Historically, slaves are actors, and every historical action is itself also a reaction to and part of infinite sequences of reactions. These processual sequences are the aspects of contexts that the historian strings together in plausible narratives. Since each action arises from a preceding one, in an established context of multiple meanings, the processes that historians track are incremental, even minimally so. The historian sees change as an extension of the philosophical Occam’s Razor. This law of logic, in effect, urges elegance in explanation; what explains most elegantly requires the fewest assumptions; in mathematics, it is a “least moves” sequence. In terms of historical action, it means that the most accessible move is the one that alters contexts (including existing positionality) least, adapting to changed contexts by attempting to modify only a selected few aspects, or even an obsessively singular aspect, of contexts that are infinitely complex. Historical actions are therefore minimalist, at least in principle. A “least moves” approach succeeds most often also because change is not cheap. Historians therefore must also account for actors’ access to means available and adequate to effect it. Stating the point in yet another way, humans relish changes of dramatic, transformational proportions; clear-cut contrasts make great stories. But they are not historical. They are magical, essentially illusions achieved by the sleight of hand of focusing attention on orderly contrasts abstracted from the messy realities of experience. Realistically, that is, historically, actors maneuver opportunistically within the realm of the apparently possible. People also inherently seek security, and the security of the known motivates them to seek change in forms that preserve as much as possible of the past; alternatively, they misinterpret unavoidable novelty as familiar. People are conservative; they create change inadvertently, in spite of their best intentions. The historian’s definition of “change,” beginning with contextualized human initiative, is therefore incremental, and it generates infinitely complex, subtle, even contradictory chains of human relations and reactions that the historian uses to explain outcomes by arraying them as processes plausible in the present. In the conventional field of studying slavery, the logical contrast

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between a “slave society” and a “society with slavery” is not historical;28 it does not detail the incremental processes that might lead from the one to the other. It is not invalid in itself, but neither is it historical. A former colleague presents these three components of history’s epistemology alliteratively (and hence masterfully and memorably) in terms of the particularities of “people, places, and processes.”29 To his alliterative play on “p” I would add an accent on taking analytical account of, or problematizing, the partiality of the vast array of individuals’ understandings of their surroundings. We all create illusions of our surroundings to reduce the anxieties that anyone must feel who wallows along in the ongoing uncertainties of time itself. I mean “partiality” in both senses of the word: “incomplete,” as well as “involving feeling or commitment, including self-interest.” To continue the play on “p,” history is therefore also fundamentally perspectival. It is as plural, as a narrative may involve participants in the past, as well as subsequent historians in the present contemplating them. The historian thus thinks in registers that include human emotions, while avoiding abstractions presumed to be calculated, logical, and efficacious, and hence operative only at selected levels of rationality. Since history takes account of what, to the actors, was unaccountable, beyond the limited aspects of the contexts in which people found themselves that they actually experienced, its epistemology is richly ironic, filled with unpredicted outcomes, consequences of actions not intended by the initiators of the changes to which they ended up having contributed, indirectly, through the reactions of others that they provoked. The alternative to historians’ reliance on ambivalence and ambiguity, the sociological abstractions of the literature on slavery, leaves people as merely passive, at best participating as accepting without reasons of their own, or accepting for reasons attributed to them by some all-knowing analytical observer in the present, hopefully not including historians. These attributed characteriological ways of explaining may employ ethnic or racial discourses, may be presented as matters of faith, or humanized (and secularized) as psychological, but none of these entirely valid ways of rendering people in terms of abstract logics approximates history’s existential epistemology. “Slavery” presented “as an institution” is a fait accompli, accomplished, a “done deal,” generic, and static. Conceived in this conventional abstracted form, it axiomatically becomes the intractable “problem” that scholars have accepted it as being, however they lament the dilemma that they have themselves thus created by structuring it as such. Without thinking about “slaving” historically, as contextually

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motivated strategies, we have logically accepted the moral abomination that we condemn; we have left “slavery” as an evil lurking eternally in the hearts of men (and women).30 It is in this sense that “slavery is good to think with.”31 But the historian instead follows ordinarily ambitious and unsettling “slaving strategies,” in all their dynamic particularities—though decidedly not in their peculiarity as a human experience. “Evil,” however, is precisely what I will argue slaving, and the slaveries eventually built on it, became—but only in a historical sense that specifies the modern context that imbued it with the strong and negative meanings that motivated eighteenth-century abolitionists. History is elementally perspectival. A historian cannot attempt a comprehensive explanation—which would be omniscient, god-like—as would a moral philosopher, or a politician (at least for rhetorical purposes). Rather, “evil” refers to human perspectives on actions and on the processual changes following from others’ reactions to them. It demonizes to displace responsibility from the initiators of the process by blaming the reactors; in a playground brawl, the kid who hits back is always the one who ends up being noticed and sent to the principal. In the case of slaving, “evil” refers to a quite specific destructive intent—not primarily to destroy the enslaved, who are needed, but rather of the status quo, the contexts that motivate the slavers to slave. Their slaving, in turn, is threatening from the perspective of the rivals at whose expense the slavers advance themselves by slaving. Slaves were the slavers’ means of gaining, from the margins, on more established rivals otherwise capable of inhibiting moves of the sort that slaving enabled.

Historicizing Biography in the Black Atlantic Applying this historical definition of slaving to biographies of the enslaved implies a similarly contextualized definition of enslavement as isolated vulnerability, or helpless isolation. This accent on the slave’s positionality contrasts in nearly every one of its five or six decontextualizing components with Patterson’s famous sociological definition of slavery as “the permanent, violent [personal] domination of natally alienated and generally [that is, socially] dishonored persons.”32 It emphasizes the contexts in which both masters and slaves acted, rather than centering on the paradoxical relationship between masters and slaves, entirely abstracted from those around them. In Patterson’s definition, the intense, even obsessive, relationship between master and slave states all but tautologically the obverse of the condition of “social death.” In

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contrast, a historical approach draws attention to the slavers’ relations with the social, or economic, or political, or military rivals of their particular, changing moments. Competition, not domination, motivates and enables masters’ strategies of improving their (relative) positions by slaving. The implied instrumentality of the enslaved in turn helps explain the cruelties associated with the strategy of slaving. Moreover, Patterson’s definition of slaves as “dominated” rests not on the experiences of the enslaved but rather on a reductive—because decontextualized —vision of the masters’ intention to dominate. It, in effect, elevates to definitional status what Patterson himself demonstrates to be no more than a master’s conceit. Defining enslavement historically, that is, experientially and including the perspectives of the enslaved, starts with their backgrounds, assesses individual personalities, considers the experiences of capture and removal, and hence seeks their motivations and assesses their means to act in the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they find themselves, beyond the passivity of suffering and domination. This is, of course, not a bad agenda for biography. An example at an elemental level: enslaved women and children had experiences, opportunities, and objectives significantly different from those of enslaved men.33 Placing enslaved people in historical contexts more complex than single-dimensionally “dominated,” from before their captures and removals through their calculated manipulations of their masters’ authority, positions them as autonomously motivated historical actors. Giving them contextualized hopes for comfort or other personal satisfactions and fulfillments than the abstract “freedom”(through manumission) that constitutes the primary analytically significant escape for Patterson’s slaves, makes them historical people with realistic choices—“agents” as some current discourses abstract the people hidden behind the “mask” of slavery in much of the literature. Arguably, isolation is a—if not the—prominent motivating aspect of enslavement as experienced. For the enslaved, isolation is the existential obverse of the component of Patterson’s abstracted “natally alienated,” as it is also their experience of what Patterson phrases—again abstractly—as “social death.” In fact, Patterson’s definition—“the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons”—does not describe the argument of the book, which emphasizes not “permanent . . . domination” but rather the slave’s process through arrival, engagement with masters, and—usually— eventual manumission, not to say ironic ultimate psychological mastery of

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the master. Phrased more accurately, the definition would read “the psychological domination of, and dependence on, permanently natally alienated and socially dishonored persons,” and it would suggest the corollary that “violence” is necessary only because in every realistic historical context the enslaved have options, and take advantage of them, whether they find them on plantations, in mines, harems, villages in Africa, or in complex ancient Asian and African households of the sort that Patterson refers to as “palaces.” The isolation of the enslaved upon arrival is also their principal weakness, the circumstance, or aspect of their historicized contexts, that leaves them vulnerable to abuse or exploitation. But isolation is ephemeral. All human beings are social; they depend fundamentally on one another. The enslaved arrive alone, with no one to whom they can turn for protection, or affection. They lack cultural knowledge or even the language to communicate. This vulnerability is psychological as well as physical, more demoralizing and more emotionally debilitating than the stereotyped occasional lashings of the whip or the drudgery of (collective) labors in a cotton field. The principal historical strategy of the enslaved, living in processual time, is therefore to overcome their initial isolation, to make human contacts with whomever they find accessible, to build committed relationships of whatever sorts, and to defend whatever connections they manage to make with whatever means may be available, including imaginative ones.34 Because they are permanently “natally alienated,” historical persons isolated by enslavement primarily seek new ways to belong in their new situations.35 There is no turning back, and so they move on, as Patterson’s emphasis on assimilation implies. Their personal strategies may center on obsessive and manipulative relationships with the masters, including playing on the psychodynamics of Patterson’s master-slave dyad, but over time the enslaved extend these connections in other opportune directions, flying well under the radar of abstract social/civic acknowledgment Patterson emphasizes. Human fulfillment thrives on multiple relationships, each appropriate to one or more of the unpredictably varying moments in everyone’s lives. The slaves’ informal networks, invisible in structural terms, are the contributions of the enslaved to Patterson’s abstract social process of assimilation. By contextualizing, the historian of slaving and being enslaved—rather than “slavery as an institution”—contemplates the opportunistic strategies of the enslaved as well as the opportunism of the slavers. However Patterson’s slaves may preserve some sense of personal dignity, and however they may play off the contradictions within the (presumed,

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axiomatic, accepted, given) relationship of domination to find places of their own in society, they are unpromising agents of historical change. Historical actions affect the actors’ contexts, from which Patterson’s “slaves” are definitionally isolated. Within this logic, slaves are positioned to make a historical difference only in rebellion, that is, no longer as dominated “slaves” but rather by asserting themselves outside the intentions of their would-be masters. In fact, by devotedly and brilliantly celebrating the agency of the enslaved in psychological terms, Patterson’s book—as a whole—disproves his own defining quality of “domination”; this definition is thus the perspective of the masters, not of the enslaved, and more an ideological assertion than historical actuality. Sandra Greene has recently emphasized the compelling sense of abandonment, with accompanying shame, with which survivors of enslavement in the late nineteenth-century Gold Coast lived.36 Abandonment is, of course, the personal experience of the isolation that I emphasize as the (abstractly) defining aspect of enslavement. It underlies the stress that I place on the primary strategy of the enslaved as seeking places to belong, stable relationships on which they can depend, and as many of these, of characters as varied as possible, as they can manage.37 It is through seeing the enslaved as historical actors, motivated by the most compelling aspects of the contexts (of isolation) in which they found themselves, that we understand enslavement. Evidence of this feeling lingered, generations after the experience itself, among the descendants of the enslaved in the United States. Sterling Stuckey and Michael Gomez have highlighted “folktales”—expressive forms of encoding, memorably, as Africanists appreciate, the collective wisdom of generations of historical experiences—in early twentieth-century African American communities of the “Old Buzzard.” The Old Buzzard was the metaphor in which descendants of the people captured and sent off from Africa recalled the enslavement of their ancestors. European slavers did not appear in these memories. In full Lévi-Straussian form, animals in these tales exhibit the realities of experience, the lessons of life, beyond the specific historical contexts —“slavery” or economic maximization or political strategies—that we might now attempt to impose on them. The Old Buzzard deludes innocent victims by waving an irresistibly attractive piece of red cloth to lure them into his clutches.38 He is not a trickster, who is small and weak and has to rely on wit to survive among the lions and hippos of the world, but rather a bird who appears benign but turns out to have been lethally treacherous. He is the key figure in a story of betrayal. The experience of betrayal parallels that of

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abandonment in the sense that it leaves feelings of utter isolation and helplessness. It expresses the experience—and thus my historical definition—not of “slavery” but rather of enslavement. The buzzard is, of course, a necrophage.39 The story of the Old Buzzard thus also highlights death as another prominent component of the experiences of the Black Atlantic in the era of the slave trade that biographers may well consider taking into account in filling out the lives they seek to reconstruct, beyond our modern reductive modeling of the story as “slavery.” My own, now-aging, construction of the slave trade in the southern Atlantic as a Way of Death40 only scratched the surface of a theme—mortality—that others have subsequently begun to develop toward its full potential as an anxiety pervading the Atlantic experience for all concerned, African or enslaved or neither. I began that book with the imagery of death—color-coded red41— that pervaded the few expressions of Africans’ experiences of the trade in the southern Atlantic, but then I moved on to the more abstract structures of merchant capitalism that the book tried to identify and integrate. Phil Curtin’s Census had highlighted mortality as a demographic variable, both along the Middle Passage and in his use of census data on survivors and their descendants in the Americas to estimate the volumes and directions of the trade that became the hallmarks of the field, and in many quarters remain so. I had few new numbers to contribute to this heavily quantitative field, at the time, but it turned out that the slavers themselves had identified mortality among the enslaved as a significant cost of doing business—what they called the “slave risk” (“o risco dos escravos”)—and, with a realistic fatalism, organized the financial structure of the trade to avoid it. They simply passed it on to others. The essential technique was to operate the trade on commercial credit, so that the wealthy held title to less fragile trade goods, or legally enforceable merchant bills of exchange backed by the goods shipped out to Africa, to be paid through the returns on sales of surviving slaves owned by borrowers, mostly in Africa. This chain of debts extended into the very origins of the trade in the—by then—center of the continent, thus literally from the Bank of England (where British financial interests were financing trade through Portugal to end up with Brazilian gold) to the banks of the Zambezi. Every debtor along the way tried to pass ownership of (title to) the people whom they had acquired on to debtors of their own, so that the costs of the inevitable mortality depleted the accounts of someone else. In one paradigmatic maneuver, a seventeenth-century trader had sold off a coffle of captives at the onset of one of the smallpox epidemics that recurred throughout the

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history of the trade in Angola. He invested the proceeds in trade textiles, with which he sat out the wave of mortality that swept through the population, and then used them to buy a healthier inventory of surviving captives when it had passed. The captains of the ships that carried captives to Brazil held limited personal interests in the people crowded below the decks of their vessels—known in the business as “floating tombs”—and could always try to claim surviving individuals whom they carried on the accounts of shippers in Angola as their own when they reached port, to replace the individuals whom they in fact had owned but who died at sea. A quarter of a century later we are able to appreciate the utter pervasiveness of death in the lives of those involved in the trade, from survivors of the Middle Passage throughout the Americas to the comfortable deniers in mercantile counting houses in London, insulated from the human costs of the trade by thick layers of contracts, insurance, and other financial strategies anticipating the utter unreality of the mortgage derivatives of our own time. We are increasingly appreciative of the significance of burial societies among the survivors, particularly in their Brazilian expressions.42 Vincent Brown has extended the theme provocatively into the cultural politics of the British Caribbean.43 We Africanists are increasingly aware of the popular culture of zombies, witches, and other specters among the survivors, and perpetrators (and not always different people) in Africa.44 And Jim Sweet has just accented the counterpart of the obsession with death in the Black Atlantic, the search for therapy, and precisely in the African sense of health as embeddedness in a community of sharing, including suffering. His arresting biography of Mahi healer Domingos Álvares shows how Álvares emerged in Africa as a healer among the Mahi, as they came under assault in the 1720s from the armies of the waxing regime of Dahomey. He performed so effectively that he was captured and deported to slavery in the Pernambuco captaincy of northeastern Brazil, a time and place no less disturbed by slaving than Africa’s “Slave Coast.”45 There he thrived by treating the isolation and physical ailments—not necessarily unrelated—of the displaced African majority of the population, and sometimes Portuguese as well. Slaving as experienced, it seems more and more clear, created social pathologies, clinically “sick societies.” Álvares’s ability to create communities of the cured in the midst of the chaos of slaving, of course, threatened Portuguese masters in Brazil no less than it had disturbed Dahomey invaders in Africa, as the healing cults he created lessened the isolation that put most of the enslaved in the positions of vulnerability that exposed them to the abuses

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notorious in plantation slavery. From there Álvares was removed to Bahia, the captaincy to the south, where he repeated his successes and from where he was again expelled, this time to Rio de Janeiro still farther south, where he continued to thrive in the early 1740s on the wealth of the gold mines in Minas Gerais that the city’s port serviced. In Minas Gerais, Álvares succeeded so much that he gained his freedom. But manumission brought the unwonted (whether or not intended or anticipated) consequence of subjecting him, as a freedman, to the authority of the Inquisition, suspicious as ever of the African therapies he provided. He was seized and sent to Lisbon for the 1744 trial that produced the massive record from which Sweet built this biography. Convicted, he was rusticated to southern Portugal, where he disappeared from the historical record. The obscurity of the end of Álvares’s life illuminates the significance of the historical contexts of prominence of death and disruption in his prior successes. In rural southern Portugal he found himself in some of the most stable village communities in the world, knit together by age-old networks of families and friends. Their social illnesses stemmed from the intricacies of imbrication, not from isolation. Álvares seems to have attempted to exploit his skills in linking the lonely, but his disappearance shows that he found no market for them there. The explanatory power of historical contexts could not be clearer. Nor could the differing outcomes of Álvares’s attempts to transfer his successful strategy of healing from one disturbed by slaving to another not so. Human conservatism, and particularly the apparently quite reasonable, but not very historical, effort to hold on to what has worked in the past, turned out to create the very changes it sought to avoid. “Slavery” as such also turns out to have limited applicability to Africa, and hence should also be a problematic rather than a premise in biographical treatments of the Black Atlantic. Slaving is, as I have suggested, a very modern modeling of a great array of practices all over the world of uprooting individuals, isolating them, and taking in the survivors. Historians, focused as we ought to be on experience and meanings and the strategies people are able to adopt to act on them, defeat themselves when they engage the familiar, and always ongoing, efforts of our categorizing counterparts in the social sciences to distinguish—for example—the various criteria of exclusion of modern societies: thus, race, gender, and poverty are frequently grouped with enslavement in this regard and then—illogically enough—subjected to quests to distinguish what have been grouped around their similarity. But if isolation and impermanence—involuntary removal from contexts in which

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even the enslaved have built connections among themselves—are the historically defining characteristics of enslavement, then all these other abstractions feature the opposite, as they create permanent groupings and describe resident communities based on reproduction rather than recruitment. In Africa, the parallel muddle envelops efforts to relate slavery to a considerable range of modes of transferring people among the corporate groupings there that accord individuals significant legal standings. Thus the (socialanthropologically inspired) literature finds elements in marriages, hostagetaking, and—preeminently—pawnship shared with slaving. Pawnship is a temporary transfer of a member of a debtor group to the custody of another, creditor, group as a suitably human form of collateral for a loan.46 The arrangement lies entirely within the African tendency to view relations with people as wealth; the custody of the pawned person, and the services (usually) she renders the custodians, are thus an interest-bearing asset suited to communities constructed around wealth in people. Efforts to categorize the standings of individuals who, in Africa, are defined not only by their current relationships but also by the trails that have brought them to the positions where they find themselves are self-defeating. “Slave” is one of those, and thus not reflective of either the experiences of individuals so designated or their understandings of themselves, and hence not likely to alert biographers to their strategies as historical actors. The dominance of the modern category of “slave” (not to mention “slavery as an institution”) has been so strong among students of this concept that even the (heretofore) rare voices of the enslaved that we have been able to hear have been drowned out by the sociological static in our approaches to it. But the recent search for memories of the enslaved,47 elaborated through their own words, seems to me to be revealing the futility of lumping together processes and ways of relating that the actors in them differentiate. The plurality of words in African languages for what speakers of modern European languages try to clump within the single term “slave” has long been noted, but only as a kind of paradox rather than an opportunity to explore the experiential, historical reality that the words designate. Words express meanings; for historians, meanings motivate. We should take our sources seriously rather than beating them into conformity with our modern expectations.48 This obligation to respect our subjects extends in force to the biographers of the people who grew up on the worlds of those words. It implies a demanding depth of knowledge of the cultures in Africa from which people in the diaspora had come. But historicized attention to African backgrounds in turn reframes the

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most hallowed clichés of diasporic studies, all derived from sociological abstractions: the sense of consciousness of a “diaspora” itself, “survivals” of African cultural “traits” in the Americas, including the collective senses of self that were once denigrated as “tribal” but have now been rehabilitated so that they can be celebrated as “ethnicities,” and “creolization.”49 Work is proceeding apace in ways that are accounting for the post-slavery inventions of “Africa” itself as a concept relevant to people in the Americas, Europeans first, in senses that became increasingly deprecatory in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then in positive senses that countered that denigration by the people burdened with it. In spite of the persistent efforts of some of my most admired friends,50 I persist in emphasizing the contextuality, hence contingency and change, of the sort of mass characterization that we call “ethnic.” For Africans, identities were not abstract categories, populated by anonymous individuals; they were relational in very specific, personal, often multiple ways. Whoever they were depended on wherever they found themselves, in the sense of those with whom they were related. Among the many relational identities Africans might invoke in the course of even an ordinary day at home, they might have the occasion to draw on very broad shared concerns reflected in the common languages they spoke, but in most people’s worlds this broad sort of identification was inchoate, seldom motivating, and hence not significant, historically speaking. It became relevant primarily when engaging outsiders, whether itinerant traders or enemies. It was, in historical terms, highly contextual, and the considerations distinguishing insider and outsider shifted kaleidoscopically with changing situations or could be asserted in an effort to change given contexts of relationality. Engagement with the Atlantic commercial economy enabled many people in Africa to change their own situations, and the situations of others around them, very dramatically, and frequently in all the threatening ways that we associate with the violence of the slaving that produced the diasporans whose lives biographers are now trying to reconstruct. But viewing these dynamic strategies of ethnicization, or ethnically defined mobilization, as continuities, as static “ethnicities” on which people in the Americas might somehow have drawn, from afar, in the radically different historical contexts in which they found themselves, violates my historian’s faith in the alertness, creativity, and opportunism of the survivors of enslavement.51 Rather, according to the dynamics of historical change I have sketched here, the isolation of enslavement would have motivated its victims to

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foreground the background identities they have employed, however occasionally, in dealing with strangers. Over the centuries in question, growing violence in Africa was, in any case, sharpening large-scale ethnicized differences, as people grouped themselves for protection in larger, more anonymous numbers.52 The large numbers of people removed in the course of these conflicts and retained in Africa, probably greater than the numbers sent off for sale to Europeans, had only the most general sort of relationship to the people among whom they found themselves, beyond residence and—increasingly—language.53 We understand ethnicization in Africa best, then, as a historical process intensified by the growing mobility of the era of Atlantic slaving. Ethnicity, in essence, was an aggregated identity suited to people recently arrived, wherever they were, through slaving.54 In the parts of the continent most heavily repopulated through slaving, as well as among the refugee communities formed to escape its violence, we would expect identities of the ethnic sort to have become stronger. These historical strategies of forming ethnicized collectivities (not communities, in the ethical sense, in the precise historical sense of the term) for external consumption became even more relevant, hence motivating, in a diaspora formed by slaving. The survivors in the Americas had shared little or nothing with the people with whom they had found themselves driven toward the coast, held there in a churning mass of strange humanity awaiting sale to European slavers and embarkation; the seemingly endless journey into the unknown in the holds of the ships left survivors of the ordeal with bonds as “mates” that they recognized for the rest of their lives in slavery.55 But when they were finally sold off to plantations, mines, or households, or left in any other situation offering the company of predecessors from anywhere in Africa within the range of their linguistic competences (for adults, unlikely to have been singular), ethnicized relationships with strangers became primary, in some cases even singular. The plurality of such collectivities in urban environments and large production units intensified mobilization among the enslaved along these lines to compete for the limited resources available to them—another sense in which adaptive ethnic mobilization was one strategy favored by slaving. Ethnicized collectivities, in this historical sense of mobilizing to meet the challenges of change and contexts composed of novelty, is the opposite of strategies of descent, which reflect (at least ideological) continuities through time. Slavery’s absolutely fundamental subordination of the enslaved to their masters in itself foregrounded a very intense struggle with

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outsiders, the owners of the owned, intensifying the resort to ethnicized collectivity all the more. The masters’ perspectives must be added to this complex context of considerations motivating the enslaved to create ad hoc (and flexible) ethnicized collectivities as strategies for surviving their enslavement. Europeans, no less than Africans, throughout the Atlantic had entered a new and very unstable world of imposing awareness of outsiders, often hostile ones. Religiously formulated distinctions between Catholic and Muslim, and then Catholic and Protestant, were pervasive and alarming motivations behind exploration and exploitation of the ocean itself. In Atlantic spaces, in diasporas of their own, they were alone, except for the military protection that they might obtain— or merely assert—from sovereigns in Europe. There they identified with remote homelands as monarchical wholes in ways that Catalans, Aragonese, and Castilians—to take a single example—would not have done as routinely, or exclusively, in Iberia. The Atlantic was a space of catalytic openness that brought formerly latent identities to the immediate (and gradually predominating) fore, for Europeans as well as Africans. Categorical thinking applied with particular force to strangers, and so Europeans reduced the multiple and situational relationships that Africans cultivated to the singular, one-dimensional stereotypes of characterological ethnicity. Ethnic stereotypes served the marketing strategies of the slavers very well. In Africa they bought captive people from traders who often (and increasingly so over time, as the zones of major violence moved inland) had no way of knowing the origins of the captives they sold. They often had passed through many hands before they reached the coast, some of them retained long enough along their ways, and at young enough ages, that they had acquired more characteristics of their detainers than of their homes. The coastal traders caricatured their captives in these terms as they sold them to Europeans, playing on the expectations and stereotypes of strangers on the ships. The slavers, in turn, accented inherent, singular characters of their captives for purposes of marketing them to buyers in the New World, whose knowledge of Africa and its people was limited entirely to what they were told. People in Africa were turned thus into branded—in the marketing sense, as well as physically—commodities as they crossed the Atlantic. The African-sounding ethnic nomenclature and qualities attributed to them were commercial brand names. And not always favorable ones. Some of the traders evidently disabled competitors doing business along other parts of the coast by spreading

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unfavorable rumors about the people they delivered, sufficiently so that “Eboe” (whom I distinguish sharply from the modern Nigerian ethnicity of Igbo), evidently a creation of the English, acquired the ill repute of being suicidal.56 The enslaved themselves, dividing ethnically, may well have added fuel to the simmering rivalries to seek minimal gains by defaming the vulnerable, otherwise unknown others in their own predicament. When confronting masters, they invoked the relationship situationally appropriate for the literate domain of their record-keeping, identifying themselves in recognizable terms of their masters’ stereotyped expectations. Biographers would rely on abstract ethnic categories only at the considerable sacrifice of real lives, created by clever people attempting survive circumstances tending toward the desperate. The New World origins of the neo-African ethnic categories have been demonstrated in the instance of the nineteenth-century Brazilian origins of the modern African ethnic identity of “Yoruba,” in what today is southwestern Nigeria.57 On reflection, external invention of ethnic “tradition” parallels the process of creating the ethnic coalitions of modern Africa, not by the rural people who eventually adopted them for political purposes in the changing circumstances of the transition to independence in the 1950s, but rather by missionaries in need of standardized languages and ethnic identities to preach and teach and by the educated pupils in need of mobilizing large numbers of anonymous voters.58 A final comment on the perils of attempting to construct biographies out of the abstract modeling that pervades the study of “slavery” as if it were a structure controlling people’s lives rather than an ideological construction of the masters. Presumed domination condemns the enslaved to lives focused obsessively on resistance, making it an explanatory premise rather than the elemental human quest for self-respect that produced it. The occasional outbreaks of violence by the enslaved are actions in need of historical explanations, momentary convergences of an infinity of circumstances, provocations or opportunities in the contexts in which the enslaved found themselves. If there is a consistent theme in the biographies reconstructed thus far into the biographical turn, it is the determination of the enslaved to make the best of a bad situation, not of their own making, but a premise of life in Africa, and in the parts of the Americas where they ended up. The premise of slavery as a (constraining, reified) “institution” and its definition as “domination” also posits “freedom” as the goal, intention, and strategy of the enslaved, everywhere and at any time. However, freedom

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from slavery in any civic sense follows in this axiomatic way only as it was in fact institutionalized in the nineteenth-century United States, or—though in different ways—as it was idealized under the nineteenth-century French republics, or as the king’s protection and justice might be claimed as English liberties under royal law.59 The meanings of manumission were considerably more ambiguous under Spanish and Portuguese law, where the enslaved enjoyed at least theoretical access to royal courts and considerable moral standing as Catholics—or, more precisely, as they could claim the human relationships marked by the sacraments of birth, marriage, godparentage, and death. Beyond these contrasting degrees of the presence of a framework of civic political standing, the significance of such legally accessible personal freedoms grew through time, as the distances, mobility, and growing anonymity of life in the Atlantic strained late medieval and early modern European frameworks of patronage and clientage. Africans in early and mid-seventeenth-century Virginia, for example, may be understood better as drawn into patron-client networks of dependents from various backgrounds and in various legal standings than as denied civic freedoms by an institutionalized system of slavery.60 From Africans’ backgrounds in communities of belonging, and given their experiences of isolation through their enslavement, individual autonomy could not have carried the advantageous connotations of the modern idea of individual civic freedoms, guaranteed by an enveloping ideology of national identity and loyalties, and rule of accessible impersonal law guaranteeing “civil rights.” Even in the paradigmatic United States, a modern political culture of this Weberian sort grew only very gradually in the nineteenth century, as an incremental historical process extended out of earlier protections of patronage and clientage. Elsewhere in the Hispanic Americas and in Brazil, patron-client politics continued to prevail, passing through various patterns of armed strongmen—caudillos, patrões, coronéis, and others in their late nineteenth-century incarnations, and in other ways right down to the present, including in parts of the Caribbean. One sought personal protectors, or better, several patrons whom one could put into competition against one another over one’s fawning but implicitly conditional loyalties. The multiplicities of relationships Africans had known at home gave them personal autonomy to maneuver. But in the Americas slaves arrived with none of these options. Manumitted, they clung to former masters as clients. In flight, everywhere but in the United States, they clustered in colonies of maroons. Where poor and abandoned freed persons were numerous, as in

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nineteenth-century northeastern Brazil, they sought solace and solidarity in new versions of healing cults of the sort Domingos Álvares had excelled in creating, again importing African metaphors to blend with Catholic saints.61 Others adapted Christianity to the purpose, both in the Catholic lay brotherhoods in Brazil, and in the lay Protestantism accessible in English-speaking colonies and countries. The examples of similarly synthetic sodalities from the islands of the Caribbean are legion. These complex assemblages were profoundly fluid and historical, including elements adapted (not transported unchanged) from Africa. They were perhaps most “African” in their very flexibility, additive composites of the diverse experiences of the lives of their creators, in slavery and beyond, without the tensions between orthodoxy and innovation that grow as inscribed singular revelations recede over time into pasts of less and less relevance to the present. Africans think of time as additive, as ongoing compositions of experiences (and relationships), all retained to form the lived present as a compound, like the purposely diverse array of mnemonics assembled in African diviners’ baskets or Islamic amulets or minkisi figures in Kongo: these powerful evocations of life’s disorderliness appear chaotic to us. To their creators, they were diaries, compilations of selves constituted through the experiences and relationships of a life. No wonder that the enslavers in Africa stripped their captives and deprived them of the powers of these precious possessions. They treated the people they transported as the potentially hazardous materials that they were, bathing them and subjecting them to other rituals of decontamination of personhood. Enslavement, by the logic of this dynamic sense of self as an accumulation, was another layer of life, not the totalizing experience that modern sociology makes of “social death.”

A Bottom Line(arity) The implications of this life as an accumulation may well be challenging to implement in the linear form of biography. Much more can be sketched regarding the rich opportunities of the biographical form, in restoring historical people to the study of “slavery,” or better: the experiences of enslavement in the Atlantic Diaspora, and thereby also necessarily in adding Africans’ historical strategies to a world conventionally seen primarily through the conceptual lenses of modern individualism.62 History charts movement, and enslavement was—is still—the experience of movement in extremis,

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with terrifying lack of control, inexplicable abandonment, and solitude. The fundamental experience of moving as a slave through the Atlantic was the constant threat of being moved on, of being deprived, without warning, of whatever bonds the enslaved had accumulated through all the strategies of trying to belong, somewhere, or anywhere at all, along the way. These were the cruelties of the commercial world that the enslaved had entered, even in Africa, as they became assets in the lengthy chains of indebtedness that financed the commodity production (sugar, tobacco, rice, cotton), mining of specie, and associated commercial and infrastructural support systems in which they were employed.63 Purchasers of the enslaved acquired them on credit, and worked them with the relentlessness of debtors looking over their shoulders at creditors on their doorsteps. They were essential parts, often the bulk of the assets, in the estates of owners who died in debt, leaving them subject to dispersal to satisfy the claims of creditors—or, if anything remained for the heirs, then likely to be scattered among quarreling survivors.64 Business cycles of invisible origins forced the enterprises in which the enslaved had gathered into bankruptcy. Their owners’ indebtedness prompted speculative investments that failed. Life as an accumulation moved at a disorienting pace under these circumstances. Personal domination blended, perhaps even receded, into the challenges of disruption, renewed isolation, moving on, and starting all over again.

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Chapter two

Understanding the Slave Experience in West Africa martin klein

One of the biggest problems in researching African slavery is understanding the experience of slavery within Africa and articulating the slave voice. The most substantial research project in the history of slavery, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, has provided data on 35,000 voyages out of an estimated 41,000.1 It provides useful data on many questions: the numbers of people traded, locations of embarkation and debarkation, sex and age distribution, the size of ships and cargoes, shipboard revolts, and mortality. What the data do not tell us is what it meant to be a slave being traded or a slave in any given African community. Nor do they tell us what impact four centuries of violence linked to the trade had on African societies. Other studies are based largely on archival sources. Colonial administrators give us valuable information about colonial policies and African responses. They tell us what colonial officers thought, but they usually blithely assure us that African slavery was mild and sometimes even suggest that African slaves were content. Few administrators ever talked to slaves except when forced to deal with crises.2 The problem is that we know from other sources that slaves being moved were generally treated harshly, whether from Virginia to Natchez, from Dagomba to Kumasi, or by boat across the Atlantic or Indian Ocean.3

Published Slave Narratives Slave narratives dealing with Africa are very rare. Pier Larson has found about fifty of them.4 Furthermore, many of them are very short. Some were

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written from abroad long after leaving Africa and have little to say about Africa. Others are written from within Africa, but are brief. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the most important religious leader in nineteenth-century Africa, left behind only a long letter. As published by Philip Curtin, it runs seventeen pages, but at least half of those pages are citations and annotations.5 By contrast, his contemporary Frederick Douglass published three versions of his autobiography, which was important to the abolitionist struggle.6 A man of great learning, Crowther had other priorities. Writing his autobiography was not one of them. He was a bishop, more concerned about the spread of the Christian message than with telling his own story. This consideration shows up in other narratives. Adrian Atiman was a boy born in the bend of the Niger, enslaved, and then redeemed by the White Fathers while in transit to North Africa. He was educated and trained at Malta as a doctor. He spent sixty-eight years, the rest of his life, as a doctor and catechist in western Tanganyika. When he came to write his autobiography, he devoted only about a page to his early life.7 Even his medical work was only a device to a larger end, the spread of Christianity. Crowther made contact with his mother and other members of his family after returning to Nigeria. There is no evidence that Atiman ever made contact with family or even could have done so. For both, however, conversion to Christianity was a rebirth, essentially the beginning of a new life. For many other persons, we have only a small part of their lives. Randy Sparks’s Two Princes of Calabar deals with two members of a slave-trading family who were enslaved and sent to the West Indies.8 While in England they sought freedom, converted to Methodism, and eventually were able to negotiate their return to Calabar. They left behind lots of letters and memories. Sparks’s study provides useful insights into the slave trade, British society, and the ability of two knowledgeable and shrewd young men to navigate the system. It deals, however, with only seven years of their lives. Though the two princes invited Methodist missionaries to Calabar, the missionaries died and little is known of the later lives of the two young men, though they seem to have returned to the family business, and in fact, probably had little choice. There are other cases of African “princes” who are adopted by elements of British society, though not all leave behind data sufficient for a biography. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, from a Muslim slave-trading family in the upper Gambia, was fortunate that someone in Maryland noticed he was literate and a Muslim.9 He was brought to England, where he socialized widely in elite circles and then was sent back to Africa, where the Royal African Company

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hoped he would serve their interests. He did remain in touch with them, though it is not clear how valuable he was to the company. Other “princes” included William Ansah Sessarokoo from the Gold Coast and Abdul Rahman from Futa Jalon.10 There are major problems with getting slave biographies. In the United States, some slaves and many ex-slaves were literate. Others had the help of abolitionists eager to tell their stories. Some became important figures. Their escape from slavery and testimony about it was important. Africa was different. Very few of the slaves who crossed the Atlantic were in a position to write anything or even tell their tales to sympathetic supporters. Most were illiterate, or if literate, knew only Arabic, which they did not use for such mundane and secular purposes as writing their autobiography. There were, to be sure, a few, like Olaudah Equiano, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, and Venture Smith, who wrote their story and began it with their African roots.11 They were very able and resourceful persons who quickly learned European languages, adapted to alien cultures, managed to free themselves, and either wrote or found someone to write their story. Equiano left us one chapter on his African origins and enslavement and one on the Middle Passage. Though these chapters are very valuable and much used in African studies courses, the best parts of Equiano’s book tell of his very insecure life in slave-owning parts of the Americas and England. Baquaqua was from Borgou in northern Benin. He was kidnapped, sold into slavery, and shipped to Brazil. After several years working for a baker with whom he had some difficulties, he was sold to a ship captain, and when the ship was in New York, managed to jump ship. He later lived in Haiti and in Canada, where his autobiography was compiled with the aid of an abolitionist editor. It contains useful information about Borgou, about the Middle Passage, and about his varied experiences.12 Born a Muslim, he never took to Quranic studies and eventually converted to Christianity. Venture Smith was sold into slavery in New England. He was sold three times before he found a master willing to allow him to purchase his freedom. A physically strong and very disciplined man, he worked odd jobs and eventually bought not only his own freedom, but that of his wife and children. He eventually became a prosperous farmer and businessman in Connecticut.13 There are several problems with this literature. One is that many of the tales were told to someone who wrote down the narrative, as happened in the case of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. Some amanuenses, like the individual who transcribed Venture Smith’s memoirs, seem to have been faithful to the

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narrator. Others, like Benjamin Prentiss, the ne’er-do-well abolitionist lawyer who took down the narrative of Jeffrey Brace, insert a great deal of themselves in the narrative.14 Brace’s memoir contains long citations from the Bible and references to contemporary understandings of Africa. Though Baquaqua’s English was good—he had attended college—there is also some discussion of the role of the editor in compiling his autobiography. These narratives were generally written late in life. Descriptions of the author’s native societies, enslavement, and Middle Passage were generally a small part of the narrative in these accounts. There were problems of memory, which is always selective, sometimes creative, and can easily be distorted in representing events that took place fifty or sixty years earlier. Some narrators were young boys when they crossed the Atlantic. It is often difficult to figure out exactly where the author came from or to be sure of the stories he tells. In the case of the ablest of what Paul Lovejoy calls “freedom narratives,” there is even a debate about whether Equiano was born in Africa, and thus, whether his description of Igbo society, his enslavement, and his experience of the Middle Passage are valid.15 In some cases, the narrator has remembered remarkable details. Venture Smith remembered the port of departure, the name of the ship captain, and the steward who was his first owner, making it possible for Lovejoy to track down the ship in which Smith crossed the Atlantic, the inappropriately named Charming Susanna. On the other hand, though Smith describes how he was enslaved, even Lovejoy, the most knowledgeable student of these narratives, cannot be sure where he originated.16 Though the numbers are small, there are some very good narratives. Curtin’s Africa Remembered remains valuable, though significant subsequent work has been done on the authors of some of the narratives in Curtin’s volume. Lovejoy has written about four persons: Equiano, Baquaqua, Smith, and Mohammed Kaba Saghanughu, who never wrote a historical narrative. A learned Muslim, Kaba wrote a manuscript on praying, but he also left a record. There are also other accounts. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw seems to have been the first.17 He was enslaved in Bornu, and like the other authors, had an itinerant life, being sold first to Barbados and then to New York, where he was owned by a Calvinist minister. He learned to read, served in the British army, and eventually ended up in England, where he married and had several children with an English woman. At the time he wrote his autobiography, he was in poverty, dependant on his wife’s income as a weaver. Unlike Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, who were active in the

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abolition movement, nothing was known until recently about Gronniosaw besides what he told us and the date of his death, which was recorded in a local newspaper. Most of the authors of narratives were involved with Christianity, even Muslims like Baquaqua and Kaba. Thus, Archibald Monteath, enslaved as an Igbo boy, found dignity, freedom, and a purpose in life in the Moravian church, spending his last years as a full-time evangelist. Maureen Warner-Lewis has written an excellent biography of Monteath, starting with two narratives he wrote late in life.18 He says relatively little about his early life in Africa, though he has an interesting comparison of Igbo and Christian religion. Similarly, Catherine Mulgrave Zimmerman found purpose in Christianity. She was enslaved as a young girl and was being shipped to Cuba on a Portuguese schooner when it was shipwrecked in Jamaica in 1833. She was apprenticed to the Moravian mission, where she was able to get an education, converted to Christianity, and became a teacher. She returned to Africa with her first husband and became a teacher with the Basel mission on the Gold Coast. After her husband was expelled from the mission for misbehavior, she divorced him in 1849. Two years later, over the objections of the mission headquarters in Switzerland, she married Johann Zimmerman, head of the mission. Most of what is known about her comes from a two-and-a-half-page letter he wrote in 1852 and an obituary on her death.19 Many of the authors of these narratives come from Muslim areas in the north of West Africa, but even those who came from areas closer to the coast were often sold several times before making it to the coast. It is clear that many Africans dabbled in the slave trade and that kidnapping was a way to earn some money. Contrary to my original assumption, most slave-traders were petty traders. Pier Larson, in a very perceptive analysis, comments on a number of other themes in this literature. One is the tales of deceit and deception, particularly among those enslaved as children. They were often assured that they were being taken back to family until they arrived at the coast and realized they would never see home and family again. A second is the consciousness of different languages and cultures. They were always aware when they crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries and frequently commented on unfamiliar surroundings. They did not see themselves as Africans until taken from Africa. Finally, most remained nostalgic for their African homeland, of which they often preserved an idealized image. In the nineteenth century, some of those who remained in Africa eventually did return.20

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Nineteenth Century The nineteenth century saw different changes, as there were new forms of interaction between Europeans, Arabs, Turks, and Africans. There was a concerted attack on the Atlantic trade, which reduced the numbers crossing the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships and then ended the trade. The slave trade within Africa increased, due in part to new and more efficient rifles and the increasing demand for slave labor. And yet the nineteenth century also opened the doors of opportunity for some fortunate and resourceful slaves to create new lives. Shielded for centuries from direct contact with Europeans by African diseases, Africa was increasingly penetrated by explorers, missionaries, and colonial outposts, affording opportunities both within slavery and for freed persons. Slaves worked for the explorers, served diplomats and colonial officials, and took refuge at mission stations. Freedom was often, but not always, a reward for service. Even the cities through which slaves passed became more ambiguous sites, mixing danger and opportunity. Cairo, the site of regimes that aspired to a European form of modernization, became a particularly interesting arena of opportunity. Cairo and Khartoum, the capital of Sudan until the Mahdist victory of 1885, were places where Africans enslaved by brutal late nineteenth-century slavers interacted with both Europeans and modernizing Egyptians. The most interesting introduction to this world is the book by Eve Troutt Powell, Tell This in My Memory, about tales of slavery in Egypt and the Sudan at a time when merciless slave-raiding in the southern Sudan was making large numbers of slaves available for markets in the Sudan, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire.21 Of the six chapters, three focus on slave owners. The first is about Ali Mubarak, minister of public works under the Khedive Ismail, who compiled what Powell calls a “textual map”: a 20-volume description of Egypt, neighborhood by neighborhood, that provided a vast amount of information.22 The second chapter is about Babikr Bedri, who fought as a young man with the Mahdists, then became a trader and later an important educator.23 There is also a chapter on two early Muslim feminists, one from Egypt and one from Istanbul, who grew up in wealthy households with numerous slaves. All three chapters are interesting as elite perceptions of a slave system. The most interesting chapters of Powell’s book for us are the three that deal with freed slaves who found a new life through Christian missions. One was Salim Wilson, who was a Dinka, enslaved as a boy during the mid-1870s.

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His first master, who gave him the name Salim, was forced to sell him to a harsher master, who was linked to the powerful slaver Zubayr Pasha. Salim was freed as a result of a military victory by one of General Charles Gordon’s officers and became the servant of a Church Missionary Society missionary, Charles Wilson, from whom he took his family name. Wilson brought him back to England. He worked briefly in the Congo for another CMS missionary, but did not like it and returned to England, where he married, set up a grocery, lectured, and wrote an autobiography.24 The last two chapters deal with slaves freed by Italian missions. One deals with a group of former slaves who were educated and trained to become missionaries themselves. The most interesting of the group was Daniel Surur Farim Deng, a young Dinka, who was abducted with his mother and sisters in 1859, but escaped to an Italian mission in 1873.25 Clearly a valuable slave, his master visited him at the mission several times and even sent his mother to plea for him to return, but Deng clearly already knew what he wanted. He was baptized in 1874 and ordained in 1886. The last chapter is about Saint Josephine Bakhita, whose career was marked by the same gritty determination as Deng’s. Kidnapped at age nine, she was bought by the Italian consul in the Sudan. In 1885, with Mahdist victory immanent, the consul was evacuated to Italy and Bakhita pleaded to be taken with him. He, in turn, gave Bakhita to a friend, who ran a hotel in Suakin on the Red Sea coast. She was taken there briefly and then allowed to return to Italy with her master’s wife. She became increasingly involved with the Catholic Church, and when ordered back to Suakin she refused. Her mistress claimed she was a slave, but since Italy had abolished slavery and the Church supported her, she was not sent back. She was baptized in 1889, entered the novitiate in 1893, and in 1896 became a sister of the Canossian Daughters of Charity. The first version of her autobiography was dictated to a fellow nun in 1910, but in 1929 a teacher named Ida Zanolini interviewed her. The resulting autobiography has been translated into many languages and regularly reprinted.26 Bakhita was an important figure in the order throughout her life and often spoke about her experiences. In 2000, she was canonized by Pope John Paul II. Another historian who has worked in this area is G. Michael La Rue. A specialist in the history of Darfur, he has for about twenty years been producing well-crafted articles based on documentary sources on slaves and freed slaves in the Sudan and in Egypt. Working with limited amounts of data, he rarely gives us biographies, but rather assembles pieces of the lives of modest

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people, who for brief periods left tracks in the historical record. His goal is to bring enslaved Africans into history as real people. One of his articles is about Zeinab, a beautiful slave woman from Darfur, the mistress of a French pharmacist named Saint André, who worked for the Egyptian army and who showered her with gifts that enabled her to display her beauty. Based mostly on one published account of a trip up the Nile, La Rue’s article captures the pleasure Zeinab took from her life, but also her insecurity in a world where she had no family and violated Muslim standards for female conduct. When the pharmacist died, she married his servant, who had been critical of her relationship with a Christian and her immodest behavior.27 As I have shown, the presence of Christian missions enabled many slaves to escape slavery and build new lives and new identities. There were many other Europeans in Africa, some of whom were more generous than the Italian consul who bought Bakhita. They often, like the pharmacist SaintAndré, found servants or partners in the slave market, but then freed them, and if the former slave was a quick learner, educated him, often in Europe. Some of these former slaves took advantage of the opportunity. One was Selim Aga, who was enslaved in the Nuba mountains of Sudan at age eight and, after being sold eight times, ended up in the household of Robert Therburn, the British consul in Alexandria.28 He was then freed and brought to Scotland and raised as a member of the family. He wrote and spoke excellent English, wrote an account of his early life at twenty, and led a rich and varied life. He lectured for a while on the wonders of the Nile and went back to Africa as an aide to several British explorers, including Richard Burton. He was one of the few Africans the racist Burton liked and respected. James McCarthy has woven this story into a fascinating biography. Nicholas Said, originally Mohammed Ali ben Said, lived an incredibly rich and varied life that took him to four continents.29 Enslaved first at about twelve or thirteen, he was moved across the Sahara, sold several times to Arabs, then to a Turk and to a Russian diplomat. Given money to go home by the diplomat, Said ended up instead penniless in Canada, where he was advised to go to Detroit, where there was a Black community. He taught there for awhile, served in the Union Army, and after the war settled in the South. He knew seven languages and had wide-ranging curiosity, a voracious intellect, and an ability to adapt to diverse situations. By contrast, the enslaved man Dorugu lived much of his life in the shadow of European explorers. Taken captive in 1839 and sold a number of times, he eventually fell into the hands of German explorer Adolph

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Overweg, who freed him. He traveled with Heinrich Barth, who brought him to Germany. Eventually he dictated his story to the German linguist J. F. Schon, who was interested in Hausa language documents he could analyze linguistically. Dorugu returned to Nigeria in 1864 and lived out his life there. The manuscript was published in 1881, and in a modern English language edition in 1971.30 Almost all the people discussed in the first part of this chapter were exceptional human beings. They survived the trauma of enslavement and abuse. They learned new languages and adapted to different cultures. Operating within the constraints of slave systems, they figured out ways to purchase their freedom, they found patrons, and where escape was possible, they took advantage of opportunities. They also faced incredible racism. Europeans, including sometimes those who edited their texts, often looked on them with condescension, particularly regarding their language skills, even though what was most impressive about many of them was their ability to learn new languages. Many of them had difficulty finding work and faced periods of grinding poverty. Their accounts, whether written themselves or dictated to others, are almost all useful on the worlds they came from, their experience of slavery, and how they navigated a hostile world after being freed. We have dealt only marginally with slavers and slave-raiders, but there is extensive documentation about them as well as some biographical writing. The most impressive biographical work is Yves Person’s 2,400-page project on Samori, using 841 interviews and extensive colonial documentation. The problem with Person’s massive study is a problem with many biographies. The biographer identifies too strongly with his subject.31 It is compounded by the fact that nationalist scholarship saw Samori as a resistance leader and state-builder. Less attention is given to the fact that he did what he did by slaving on a massive scale. His approach to unifying the western Sudan was to conquer his rivals. Charles Andre-Julien did a ten-volume collection of African biographies, some of important slavers.32 There are numerous other biographical studies as well, most of nineteenth-century figures, for example, JaJa of Opobo from Nigeria and Mirambo, the East African state-builder.33 It would be interesting to get studies of figures who rose out of slavery like the Senegambians Egga and Moussa Molo, who built the state of Fouladou, or who were key figures in the slave trade like Francsico Felix da Souza, the Cha Cha of Dahomey. Of course, all such work would involve coping with silences and deciphering ambiguities.

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Missionary Sources Between 2007 and 2011, Sandra Greene, Carolyn Brown, Alice Bellagamba, and I organized three conferences in the quest for African sources on slavery and the slave trade.34 Our concern was that most of the sources from which the history of the trade has been written are European. Some good history has been written from these, but we felt that more African sources would give us a better picture of the African experience and in the process, and find the African voice and if possible the slave voice. At these conferences, 96 papers were presented by 84 persons, many on subjects beyond the scope of a book on biography. We had papers on archival material, missionary sources, Arabic language documents, court cases, folklore, songs, proverbs, and oral interviews. There are no full biographies, but there are various kinds of life histories, and there are documents that give us an illustrative picture of a part of someone’s life. We hope that the eventual publication of both the documents collected and papers analyzing those documents will provide a better understanding of the African experience of slavery and the slave trade.35 The best contributions to slave biography come from two sources, missionary archives and interviews. Court cases also often provide interesting snapshots of a brief period in someone’s life, and occasionally, an unconventional source like songs provides some data. In the latter part of this chapter, I deal with events that took place within Africa, most of which involved ordinary people. As the original nongovernmental organizations, missionary organizations were constantly looking for funds to support their missions and attract potential missionaries. To do this, they had to tell of their successes and regale European readers with the horrors of the slave trade. Many, therefore, collected and wrote up the life stories of converts who were exemplary or who survived the horrors of the slave trade. Thus, Edward Alpers discovered the story of Swema, a girl of Yao origin, while working in the archives of the Holy Ghost Fathers.36 Swema had been seized as a slave when her widowed mother was unable to pay a debt. By time the caravan reached Zanzibar, Swema was so lifeless-looking she was buried in a shallow grave. She was found by a young man who brought to her to the Holy Ghost mission, where she was nursed back to health and eventually converted. The story of her life was dictated to missionaries and published in French in an effort to raise money for the mission.37 Marcia Wright also had an article in Women and Slavery about Bwanika, a slave woman who changed hands ten times before marrying a porter of

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the British missionary Dugald Campbell, and eventually going to work in Campbell’s house.38 This was part of a series of studies Wright made of slave narratives taken from German and British mission sources in East Central Africa, pulled together into a very insightful book on the Strategies of Slaves and Women.39 These narratives illustrate the vulnerability of women to the brutal violence of the slave trade, but also the strategies they developed, particularly the quest for protectors. Like Bwanika, many of the women were captured, sold, and recaptured several times before finding a safe home at a mission station. The book is a vivid depiction of the victimization of women in the slave trade. More recently, Sandra Greene has found mission sources and used them to highlight crucial aspects of African slavery. In 2011, she published a book on slave narratives based mostly on life histories transcribed by missionaries.40 Aaron Kuku was an Ewe boy who was enslaved by the Asante, eventually escaped, returned to his home village, and freed his mother. He eventually became an evangelist with the Bremen Mission Society and told his story to an African minister from his church. Greene also presents two other narratives and the diary of a mulatto of slave descent. The book has several strengths. First, it presents the texts themselves. Often told in African languages, they are shaped by the values and objectives of the person who wrote them down and translated them. The tales told to African ministers have a more sympathetic view of African cultures and are more oriented to African audiences. The European missionary was interested in raising money or finding recruits in Europe, while his African counterpart was interested in making the church attractive to African readers. Second, Greene brings to her research a profound knowledge of the area she analyzes and presents a very critical reading of her sources. Klara Boyer-Rossol’s work is also suggestive on the problem of sources. Boyer-Rossol is writing a dissertation on the anthropology of the Makua of Madagascar, all of whom came to Madagascar in the slave trade. The Makua are unusual in that they preserve a strong sense of Makua identity in Madagascar. Boyer-Rossol has presented research on the life histories of several Makua converts written down and published by a Norwegian Lutheran missionary.41 These life histories are valuable in their description of the nature of enslavement, of slavery in Madagascar, and of the experience of conversion. Also interesting is the contrast between Makua enslavement narratives written down by a sympathetic missionary and the traditions of the enslavement process that can be collected today. The Makua of Madagascar do not

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deny their origins in Mozambique, though contemporary explanations of how they came to cross the Mozambique Channel differ from those given by those transported. Alpers, Wright, Greene, and Boyer-Rossol are also very suggestive on how to read and analyze these sources. Greene’s book is particularly rich in its discussion of the problem of analysis. All of these narratives deal with slavery within Africa and all are from people, like Wright and Crowther, who found dignity and meaning within Christianity.42

Life Histories The collection of life histories has been extremely useful to historians of women, and the use of such life histories can be helpful to the rest of us. These histories must be subjected to critical analysis both by comparison with other life histories and with the better-known public record. Memory distorts and selects. Used critically, however, life histories are a rich source for social change. There are several problems for the historian of slavery. One is that we only started studying slavery in the 1960s and 1970s when what could be defined as slavery had in most places been dramatically transformed. A second is a problem underlined by Pier Larson.43 There was and still is a stigma to slave origins. People of slave origin do not like to talk about it. If they leave their communities, they are generally silent about their origins. It is probable that a large proportion of the elite in many parts of Africa are of slave origin. Runaway slaves were a large percentage of those who gathered at mission stations and were among the first to get educated in European languages. They were the first to be employed by the colonial regime and their children built on their accomplishments. In the Americas, rising above one’s origins, whether a slave plantation or steerage on a trans-Atlantic voyage, is a source of status. We are proud of ancestors who rose above their poor origins and created the basis for our accomplishments. When we read that someone outstanding was born a slave or was a son or grandson of slaves, that fact merely underscores that person’s accomplishment. In much of Africa, people who remain close to the site of enslavement remain locked in their status, but those who move elsewhere or can in some way escape their origins try to do so, often inventing a false genealogy. Their children and grandchildren often know only the invented histories. This is true not only of the educated but also of merchants. The population of coastal cities, which generally originated in the slave trade, was predominantly servile. Slaves worked in trade, and if able were often given responsibilities. Their marginality pushed them

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to be entrepreneurial and a few became important traders, but to the degree that they were successful, they did not advertise their origins. The problem of stigma limits what informants tell European researchers, but it sometimes also limits what a knowledgeable African scholar writes. One African contributor decided not to publish a very fine paper because family members did not want to spread the word that some of them were descended from slave women. This would be less a problem in a Muslim society where many powerful people are descended from slave concubines, but it is a problem almost everywhere for descendants of male slaves. For those who remain close to the site of their enslavement, it is difficult to collect life histories. In my interviews, I set questions about slavery in more general interviews about social and economic changes and never confronted informants with what I knew about their origins. Sometimes, people opened up. One was a man who claimed to be one hundred three years old and openly referred to himself as jaam (slave). Shortly after World War I, he moved out of his village to a deserted hamlet several kilometers away and cleared land, gradually moving members of his family to the hamlet. He became prosperous enough to take in migrant workers who came into Senegal’s peanut basin to work during the growing season. When I interviewed him in 1975, his hamlet consisted of four households, forty to fifty people, all his descendants. He accumulated a herd of cattle, unusual at that time for Wolof peasants, and sold seven cattle to finance the pilgrimage to Mecca. That opened up an interesting tale. In order to make the pilgrimage, a former slave was supposed to buy his freedom under traditional law. The going rate was about 18,000 francs CFA, then about $U.S.70. When by chance, I found myself interviewing his “master,” the master complained that this man showed up one day, plunked down 18,000 francs, and announced he was going to Mecca. In other words, he was not properly deferential.44 He should have asked the price. Other times, I would get information in interviews that was not exactly biographical, but was useful in understanding the larger process of emancipation and its limitations. In retrospect, I realized that my research technique was defective. I tended to go from place to place, rarely interviewing the same person more than once. Felicitas Becker did her research in a Tanzanian village that had been a Swahili-owned slave plantation. No one admitted to being of slave origin, though when the question of servile origins was not presented directly, many of her informants talked extensively about slavery.45 Claire Robertson was not even interested in slavery. She was researching the life histories of

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Ga women for her dissertation. After a series of interviews with one good informant named Adukwe, she became aware the woman was of slave origin and was able to get her to talk about her life. Because of my work on slavery, Robertson asked me to read her narrative. This led to our publishing Women and Slavery in Africa. Adukwe had been enslaved as a young girl in northern Ghana.46 Her narrative was less about work than about kinship and gender relations. The social isolation implicit in her slave status shaped her life options. Interviews are not new. Rashid bin Hassani’s life history was written down during the colonial period. He was enslaved as a boy and experienced a harsh slavery, but he early became a porter and then a soldier. Service work eventually led to him becoming a forest guard for colonizers.47 One of the larger groups in slavery were women in harems, but there is very little literature on them. The exceptions are Ann McDougall, Emily Ruete, and Patricia Romero. McDougall has written a fine article on an African woman, Fatma Barka, who was purchased by a Moroccan trader in Timbuktu, became his concubine, and was brought to Morocco, where she was a wife, mother, merchant, factory worker, and in her old age a respected senior member of the family.48 Emil Ruete, born Sayyida Salme, was not a concubine but a royal princess, the daughter of Sayyid Said, founder of the Zanzibar commercial empire, but her account of palace life is valuable. She was married to a German commercial agent.49 Of course, the struggle of former slaves and their dependents sometimes presents us with vivid contemporary stories. Laura Fair has written about the effort of slave-born singers and athletes to transcend their servile origins.50 The possibility of getting life histories has been enhanced by the emergence of electoral politics in the states of the West African Sahara and Sahel: Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Benin. In all these states, servile and ex-slave groups have responded to the persistence of servile relationships by asserting their rights and showing a willingness to talk about themselves. Perhaps the most impressive effort to capture the lives of these people has been an unpublished dissertation by Meskerem Brhane, based on interviews with people of slave descent in Nouakchott, capital of Mauritania. Brhane’s short life histories capture a range of situations. In one case, a man became a militant when his mother’s master claimed her property when she died. In another case, an educated haratine (a member of a subordinate social group associated with descendants of slaves and subservient to noble or warrior groups) performed work that made him a valued resource to his qabîla (the larger lineage group or federation of groups to which he belonged). 51 Eric Hahonou, a French

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anthropologist, has been working on the struggles of ex-slaves in Benin and Niger. He has presented research about a rambling biographical reminiscence by Ouro Sè Guene, a member of the parliament in Benin from the largely slave Gando community, which is a majority in Borgou in northern Benin.52 In it, Sè Guene describes his own career, his success as a spokesman for Gando aspirations, and his program for asserting the rights of the Gando.

Other Sources There are other sources for slave lives, but they generally give only us a moment in a person’s life or data that can only be useful in connection with other data. Denis Fomin, for example, writes about dirges sung by slaves in the Cameroons Grassfields, in which the singer sings about his own life.53 The recent discovery and digitization of massive numbers of Arabic documents has also provided some interesting documents. Bruce Hall and Yacine Daddi Addoun found a body of correspondence between a trusted slave, who traded on behalf of a Ghadames merchant family, and members of that family.54 These letters give information about Saharan commercial life, but are probably most interesting in showing the way the trader interacted with members of his master’s family. Others have found records of lives in archives. Marie Rodet found petitions to the colonial administration from both slaves and those who wanted to keep control of their slaves.55 There are also songs sung by Bantu in Somalia about a rebel leader.56 The most valuable of these other sources are court cases. These, of course, vary in the amount of information they provide. Courts where transcripts were kept in some form are the most useful. As with any body of evidence, there are questions the historian must ask. Every actor in the court case— prosecutor, defense attorney, and witnesses—has a goal and a strategy. Any slave testifying has often been coached on how to achieve whatever is being sought. Nevertheless, such cases often open up a lot of information. For example, Silke Stickrodt has presented research on a slave woman named Aballow.57 Aballow was the major witness in a slave-dealing case against John Marman, probably the most important palm oil trader on the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. Marman dealt with slaves, had a number of factories along the coast. He also had a wife and children in England and a slave wife and child in Accra. While visiting his Little Popo factory, he was attracted to Aballow and exchanged another slave for her. He brought her back to Accra and got her pregnant. Her job in Accra was to take care of Marman’s child by

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his Accra wife. When Aballow let the child slip in some tar, the Accra wife beat her so badly she lost the child she was carrying. We see Aballow during a brief period of her life. All we know about her is what we learn from the transcript. For Marman, and for our understanding of the European merchant community, the case was much more important. Trevor Getz has presented a case from the Gold Coast regarding Abina Mansah, who was enslaved by the Asante and traded in the southern Gold Coast after the British abolition of the slave trade in 1874. Abina ran away when her new master tried to marry her off to someone she did not like. She found her way to people from her original community, and then to a man who helped her frame her case. Her master was then prosecuted, with Abina as the major witness. Getz supports his analysis of the transcript with a meticulous analysis of the values, perceptions, and attitudes of the different actors.58 Kristin Mann’s work on Lagos has given us valuable information about slaves and slave owners. She has written, for example, about Taiwo Olowo, a slave who became a wealthy and powerful slave trader.59 Her more recent work involves movement back and forth across the Atlantic between Lagos and Bahia among people who leave as slaves and return as free people. She is trying to reconstruct personal trajectories and family ties using both court records and other archival sources.60 Like others who experience traumatic catastrophes, slaves often felt deeply the separation from loved ones and yearned for return.61 On the Middle Passage and on American plantations, many slaves believed death would transport them back to Africa. Slaves in Africa yearned for a return from the sites of their enslavement to their homeland. This desire often involved contradictions, however. Kaba and Baquaqua became Christians, and in fact, accepted a kind of Christianity experienced in almost Muslim terms. At the same time, in all parts of the world, slaves were incorporated in what they see as a more civilized life. Whether Muslims in southwest Asia or Christians in the Americas or West Africa, many did not want to return to earlier homes because they believed they had found something better, or if like Crowther, they returned as Christians, they took pleasure in reunions, but did not return to their roots. Both Christianity and Islam were experienced as a rebirth. These two themes run through slave narratives. With the exception of the life histories, our three conferences produced no biographies, but they produced many segments of someone’s life. Often where we found the tracks some human being had left, that person had left

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tracks only at a brief moment in history.62 And yet, there were numerous examples of the ways we can use a part of someone’s life to get a fuller picture of the ways people from Africa and within Africa experienced the horrors of enslavement, the suffering of the slave trade, and the frustrations of life as a slave.

Conclusion The documents on which we build a picture of slave lives are often imperfect. Zacharie Saha collected the narrative of a man named Tabula, who was freed from enslavement on the island of São Tomé only in 1969, but Saha discovered it only after Tabula was dead and had to depend on an existing rather brief and uncritical interview. He could not go back and do further interviews. Nevertheless, the story of Tabula’s return home was the basis of a fascinating article on rites of reconciliation.63 This highlights one problem historians face. Most of our best sources are gone. The memory of slavery remains vivid only where some form of it persisted into the mid-twentieth century or later. Even then, we have only limited sources for the recreation of the brutal years of the late nineteenth century or the prime years of the Atlantic slave trade. We also must depend in most cases on a single source. We depend on people who have left tracks in the historical record and focus on the period during which those tracks exist. Finally, the inability to collect variants of most accounts makes the historian’s task more difficult, but it does not relieve us from the obligation to examine all sources critically. In many cases, we are dealing with events recorded many years after they happened. We know, however, that memory is imperfect and is shaped by changes in the situation of the narrator, by his values, and often by the necessity to tailor a narrative to the values and experience of the audience. Narratives are often also shaped by the values and perceptions of those who wrote them down. That being said, there are thousands of sources still to be explored by historians working in missionary archives or in colonial court case records, by archaeologists, and by anthropologists digging in the memories of individual villages. The historian trying to comprehend the experience of the slave must seek out diverse sources. Life histories and biographies are both a means to that larger end and a goal in itself. They make vivid the lived experience of individuals and groups. The problem in Africa is that certain kinds of documentation are often not to be found. For most of the people we seek to understand,

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we have no diaries, no personal correspondence, and often no evidence on the intimate life or development of the individual being studied. We are very dependent on the tracks that have been left by the people we study. In some cases, they do not exist. In others, they are buried in missionary archives and occasionally in colonial state archives or sometimes in the memories of individuals, families, and communities.

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Chapter three

Robinson Charley: The Ideological Underpinnings of Atlantic History sheryl kroen

In his 2005 Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, Bernard Bailyn gestured to the critical importance of the ideological and institutional context in which the field of Atlantic Studies was born. Recounting the story of the early conferences and publications in the 1950s that explored the foundations of an “Atlantic Civilization,” he acknowledged that the idea of Atlantic history provided a “historic, ‘inevitable’ Atlantic Community” that legitimized and sustained a variety of postwar governmental initiatives (including the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and NATO), with the direct support and encouragement of nongovernmental organizations (such as the Atlantic Council, American Committee for Atlantic Institutions, and American Council of NATO).1 He even cited an unnamed young Marxist historian who attacked R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot for their early work on the Atlantic Revolutions in precisely these terms, as “apologists for NATO and the newfangled idea of an Atlantic Community.”2 Yet Bailyn quickly backed away from this perspective, explaining, “however inconclusive and unsure, however close to the ideological concerns of the postwar years, the idea of the Atlantic Community had developed not abstractly or deductively, but empirically, from [historians’] own documentary research.”3 On the basis of my own empirical, documentary research—not on the history of the Atlantic over four centuries, but on the history of Western Europe in the critical decade that precedes the books and conferences in Bailyn’s account—I propose that we reopen this line of inquiry. The modern period, in particular the twentieth century, rarely figures in Atlantic history; yet my archival evidence suggests that if we are to

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understand the concept and the contours of Atlantic history and historiography as it has developed over its early decades, and if we are to appreciate the riposte represented by the Black Atlantic put forward in this volume, it is essential that we understand the ideological context in which the idea of an Atlantic Civilization was conceived. My window on that ideological context is the Marshall Plan, the aid package delivered to Western Europe from 1948 to 1952, precisely one of those “postwar governmental initiatives” that, according to Bailyn, was legitimized and sustained by Atlantic history. The Economic Recovery Program (ERP), as it was formally known, was designed to help Western Europe get back on its feet economically; as the label “economic miracle” that retrospectively came to define the reconstruction of Western Europe in this period suggests, it was an enormous success. While the levels of growth and prosperity achieved in Western Europe in a very short time are impressive, was there really anything “miraculous” about it? The richest country on the globe left standing after World War II, the United States provided aid and technical assistance for rebuilding the infrastructures and economies of the other most developed industrial nations (in Western Europe), at a time when America and Western Europe had favored access to resources across the globe. Given these conditions, there is nothing “miraculous” about the economic recovery of Western Europe. What is truly miraculous, however, is the ideological rehabilitation of Europe that accompanied its economic revival. Within five years after the fall of Hitler, the liberation of Auschwitz, and the reduction of Europe to an endless sea of rubble, Europe, with its partners in North America, was celebrated as one of “Two Continents, One Civilization.” Europe, in 1951, as the vanguard of civilization: who could make that argument? The information officers connected to the Marshall Plan, collaborating with their enthusiastic partners in Western Europe. And it took a lot of work. It took what Marshall Plan historian David Ellwood has called “the greatest international propaganda campaign ever produced in peacetime.”4 For four years, American and European information officers stationed in the capitals of eighteen Western European countries provided a steady stream of newspaper reports, radio shows, pamphlets, films, small traveling exhibits, and world-fair style spectacles that defined the Recovery and the world it was bringing into being. One of the most important concepts that emerged from this campaign was the idea of Atlantic Civilization. The spectacle of the Recovery orchestrated all over Western Europe

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between 1948 and 1952 looked very different depending on its context. Germany, for example, where the story was told almost entirely by the occupying Americans, and where the ideological challenges represented by the recent past were most severe, differed profoundly from the home-grown campaign orchestrated by the British Socialist Labour government working to create “fair shares for all,” but also to define Britain’s position after a war they had “won,” but which had greatly diminished its economic and political power and influence, especially in relation to the United States. And both Germany and Britain differed from France, which had succumbed to fascism, and was happy to collaborate with the Americans on the occasion of the Recovery to publicly pronounce its favored place in the postwar world. As different as these “recoveries” were, they were all united by the impulse to rewrite the story of the past and the present, to turn Europe in the rubble into a blank screen—a veritable tabula rasa on which to project a simple, utopian vision of Europe and the world’s peaceful, prosperous future. The Recovery offered the occasion to reinvent a liberal tale of origins, a very particular eighteenth-century liberal tale of origins, one whose mythical past was now situated explicitly in the Atlantic.5 In the spirit of this volume, I will share the vision of the Atlantic generated across Western Europe in the Marshall Plan era, and highlight the ideological impulse behind this effort, by carefully analyzing one biography. Commissioned in 1948 by the British Labour Government Central Office of Information (COI), and produced and widely disseminated as an elevenminute cartoon by John Halas and Joy Batchelor, Britain’s so-called “Walt Disney,” this film was touted in a press release as “the COI’s best cinema shop window on the information campaign” it had been staging since it took power in 1946. But this “biography” also offers a window on how the British government navigated the requirement of the Marshall Plan that recipients publicize and explain the recovery the United States was making possible. The 250-year biography of “Robinson Charley,” a clever rewrite of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe, is particularly useful as a window on this broader international propaganda campaign because it does explicitly what was more subtly accomplished across Western Europe, which was to use the occasion of the Recovery to recount the long historical foundations of the present as a series of “Robinsonades.” When Marx used the term Robinsonade in 1857, it was to mock not Defoe’s eponymous hero, but rather the manner in which liberal political economists since the eighteenth century had been celebrating and naturalizing the progress

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of capitalist civilization by recounting “Robinson-Crusoe-like-nursery tales.” In Marx’s words, “The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting point with Smith and Ricardo belongs to the insipid illusions of the eighteenth century.” Presented “not as a result of history, but as its starting point,” the property-owning and -improving, trucking, and bartering individual at the heart of liberal theory naturalizes, for Marx, the rise of capitalism, even as it expunges the “conquest, enslavement, robbery, and murder” that were, for him, constitutive of his history.6 As we shall see when we move from Robinson Charley in Britain to the information campaign in Germany and France, information officers agreed that the isolated individual, with all the natural proclivities of liberal civilization, was there to be regenerated from the rubble of Western Europe; his long historical adventure took place within an Atlantic frame; and his “history” bore no traces of violence or struggle or exploitation— not in the distant past, not even in the immediate past. The “Atlantic Civilization” born in the context of the Marshall Plan has clear ideological contours. Are they helpful for understanding the concept and contours of Atlantic history as it has developed over time? I think so. But before returning to that discussion, I will let the star of the British Recovery, “Robinson Charley,” introduce us to the Atlantic world within which its government was reorienting its population in 1948.

Robinson Charley (1948) The official account of Robinson Charley’s life, produced by the Economic Information Unit of the COI of the British Labour Government in 1948, begins in 1690 when Robinson Charley, his wife (Mrs. Charley), and his son (Charley Junior) were the sole inhabitants of a little island possessing a house, a storage shed, a boathouse, and a farm.7 Their fields, their livestock, and the sea provided them with food; the husband and wife raised sheep whose wool they spun, wove into fabric, and stocked, one bolt at a time, in their storage shed. “For many years—for centuries—the island was self-supporting. If Charley needed some luxury that he couldn’t make himself he could always sell a few surplus goods and buy what he needed from abroad.” Of the adventures he had on his initial journeys “abroad,” of the places he visited and people he met, the pirates he avoided, the navy that may have protected him, or the laws that regulated his trade or gave him his original title to his island we know nothing. We know only that he set off in his rowboat with three bolts of fabric and returned with ceramic pots full of spices.

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“Life went on like this until about 200 years ago (1748), when Charley started to use machinery to make his goods.” Now Mr. Charley used a steamboat instead of a rowboat, and devoted all of his and his wife’s labor to making bolts of fabric because, “making goods paid better than just farming by itself.” A factory allowed him to produce more bolts of fabric, take more trips, and return with more and more luxuries. “His prosperity increased, and so did the population.” Babies popped up in cradles on the lawn in front of Charley’s house, which was now twice the size of his original modest cottage; the paths connecting his factory to his storage shed, and the storage shed to the boathouse, were replaced by railroads. “Charley was the most goahead manufacturer and trader in the world.” In the early nineteenth century, Charley’s trading partners were identified—not the people, but the islands on which they resided, each equipped with a dock, ready to receive Charley’s boats. Here we see for the first time that Charley’s story takes place within an Atlantic frame, limited however, to Europe and North and South America (in that order). The music playing and the café tables and windmills dotting the landscape suggest that Europe, represented only by France and Holland, was Charley’s primary trading partner; but later, North America, recognizable from its teepees, mountains, and pine trees, became another favored destination. “Being first on the market [Charley’s] goods got a good rate of exchange.” “He was doing so well he was able to build big engineering works in other countries.” South America, identifiable by its shape, its mountains, its Spanish music, and one Spanish building, was now blanketed by railroads. “In the end [Charley] owned quite a bit of property abroad, and started up all sorts of other businesses.” “Charley’s Shipping Agent,” “Charley’s Railroad,” and “Charley’s Bank” sprang up along the coast of South America, and Charley’s boats (now marked “for hire” on the side) returned repeatedly to his increasingly prosperous island, bearing not goods, but sacks of money. “This made things easier at home.” Indeed Charley’s home became a mansion, adorned with lace curtains; he and his wife wore more elegant Victorian clothes. “Now Charley only had to work for two-thirds of his imports. He could pay for the other third out of the income from his overseas investments.” Around this time (the 1890s, from the style of the couple’s clothes), Charley started to get a little lazy and fat. While he was reducing his working hours (the sign on the factory door that once said 7-9 now read 8-6), while he was taking tea in his formal garden with his wife, while he was nodding off in the middle of the day, “other countries were getting industrialized, and their exports were beginning to edge on to some of Charley’s markets. But

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did this worry Charley?” Snorting and snoring, and shaking his head as if to ward off a nightmare, Charley seemed to say, “No!” “But he would worry!” the narrator exclaims. One war, and then another, jolted Charley from his slumber. In uniform, armed first with a bayonet, and then driving a tank, Mr. Charley headed off to fight while Mrs. Charley stayed behind with the children working in the factory, now producing munitions instead of fabric, and working, once again, from 7 to 9. The wars left Mr. and Mrs. Charley’s island in ruins. His boats were destroyed in battle, or like Charley’s Shipping, Charley’s Railroad, and Charley’s Bank “abroad” they were sold, sold, sold, to pay for the hard-won victory. Europe too was in ruins, and there was a worldwide shortage of food and raw materials. There was, however, in 1945 one prosperous island left in the Atlantic— that of Charley’s thankfully generous neighbor, Sam. Full of skyscrapers, bustling traffic, and rows and rows of stores with full shop windows, Sam’s island sent red, white, and blue-stamped boats full of much-needed supplies to help his suffering neighbors. This welcome relief from America “doesn’t mean more for Charley. It only gives him time so that he can prepare to pay his own way in the world.” But Charley knows how to do just that. By maintaining longer working hours (7-9), by innovating with new working methods that allow him to increase his production and thereby his exports, Robinson Charley will be able to restore his beautiful island and resume his position as a leader in the world. This story of Robinson Charley was designed by the postwar Labour Government with the very serious goal of helping its citizens both to understand the position in which they found themselves after World War II, and to remember the deep resources they had to draw upon as they faced the tough road ahead. Robinson Charley—the precise, very clever adaptation of Robinson Crusoe I have just summarized—was recounted for British citizens in an 11-minute color cartoon, commissioned to accompany “On Our Way,” one of many traveling exhibits by which the government communicated with its citizens about the role they were expected to play to set the nation “on its way” to recovery. From 1946, when the Labour Party took power, to 1948, when it commissioned this short film for this particular exhibit, the Economic Information Unit experimented with all manner of media. They spoke to their citizens in weekly “Reports to the Nation” in the press and on the radio; they papered factory walls, train stations, and schools with posters; they sent lecturers on tour and commissioned films to be shown in mobile cinemas accompanying exhibits sent to every corner of the British Isles. They

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orchestrated skits in holiday hotels and mannequin parades in the textile manufacturing districts. With the help of market researchers and pollsters, they kept their fingers on the pulse of public opinion and fine-tuned their information campaign to disabuse citizens of false assumptions and help them understand what was necessary both to create the social welfare state and to restore Britain to the leadership position it once enjoyed in the world.8 They also used this homegrown campaign to satisfy their commitment to explain the recovery being made possible thanks to Marshall Plan aid. In the context of this wide-ranging, unprecedented peacetime propaganda effort, the members of the Economic Information Unit were particularly proud of Robinson Charley. In a press release distributed in late 1948 describing the first three films in which he starred, the development of this character is explained, as well as the special role that film was seen to play in achieving the government’s information objectives. It begins, The change from war to peace brought its challenge to all branches of Government publicity. No longer was there a clear national ‘cause’, different sections of the community were apt to have their own ideas of the common weal. Interest in the nation’s affairs dropped, the horse no longer galloped up to the fount of information, it had to be led. War and all that it entails is the very stuff of film. White-papers are not. Social and economic legislation even if packed with latent drama are not easy film subjects. There is nothing to shoot until the buildings go up. That is one of the reasons why Films Division has given the Charley series of colour cartoons a big place in its programme of Monthly Release films. The monthly film (distributed free to some 3,500 cinemas all over Great Britain) is the COI’s best cinema shop window. Many subjects of real importance which we wanted to include in the series were nothing but ideas still in the blueprint or white-paper stage. Hence the need for a medium which could materialize the abstract, make pictures in the future and put flesh on any skeleton. Diagram or cartoon was the obvious answer, but there is all the difference in the world between a sequence of cold diagrams and a colour cartoon that will entertain an audience nurtured on Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. This was the challenge with which we faced John Halas and Joy Batchelor and their answer to it was Charley.9

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John Halas and Joy Batchelor, referred to repeatedly throughout the government correspondence as Britain’s Walt Disney, made all the short cartoons projected in the traveling exhibit, “On Our Way,” and a number of short and long films before they were faced with the seemingly impossible challenge of translating “the intricacies of some piece of legislation into visual terms . . . to do it in ten minutes and to make it both clear and amusing.” “John Halas and his wife Joy Batchelor, however, have a flair for just this very thing. They will seize any problem straight from the mouth of the Public Records Office, disappear into their ivory tower to worry it over, and before you can say Charley Robinson they will be back with the most charming little fairy tale that you have ever heard.”10 In fact the production process was a little more complicated than that, and required considerable back-and-forth between the ministry commissioning the film, the film unit within the COI, and the filmmakers. Scripts were proposed, written, and rewritten. The main character, Charley, also took a while to develop. As the press release explained, Not that Charley sprang into the picture fully fledged. His character was slow to form. He had to represent the point of view of the audience and at the same time he had to deliver a Government message. He had to be an ordinary chap, yet his personality had to be unique. He had to be slow on the uptake and slow to act, but tenacious once his mind was made up. Then there was his voice, it might have been Stanley Holloway or Wilfred Pickles; for a long time he was likely to be a North-countryman, but eventually he settled in the Home Counties and spoke through the lips of Harold Berens. His clothes gave a great deal of trouble. If he didn’t wear a tie the working man might take umbrage, if he did he was dangerously near the white collar worker. In the end a very plain tie was balanced by a boiler suit. Finally there was his signature tune to be chosen. His present motif (ocarina and clarinet) won by a short head over a rather nautical piece (piccolo and strings).11 Charley made his debut in New Town, a film produced for the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and released on March 15, 1948. According to the blurb put out by the Films Division, Charley bicycles along the spacious boulevard of the new town and conjures up a picture of the way things used to be—a long,

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uncomfortable bus-ride to work past drab houses along smoky streets. Then he tells how he and his friends decided to put things right by planning and building a new town, which takes shape before our eyes. The plan of Stevenage is used, passing incognito by appearing upside down. A special feature [of the film] is the graphic sequence showing how the Industrial Revolution changed the face of Britain. In just under one minute we can understand clearly what can only be explained in several pages in a history book.12 New Town was followed with the April 12, 1948, release of Your Very Good Health, where Charley was commissioned by the Ministry of Health to explain the new National Health Service Scheme. Charley is represented as a bit unconvinced at the outset, but as the narrator explains the many benefits of the new NHS Scheme—free medical treatment of all kinds, improved maternity and child welfare services (for Mrs. Charley and junior), health visiting and home helps services—Charley characteristically comes around and exclaims, “Sounds a bit of alright to me.” The press release enthuses, “It is interesting to watch the development of Charley as a personality. In this second film he has a little more chin, is a little more sure of himself. In the third film of the series (Charley’s March of Time, released in May, dealing with the National Insurance Act) he finally finds his feet and comes across with the greatest gusto.”13 When Michael Balfour from the Board of Trade sent a letter and sample script to the Film Division in February 1948 about a film his office wanted to commission that would use British economic history of the past 150 years to explain the government’s current export drive, Charley was finally given the chance the play the role for which he had been born (in fact, more than 200 years earlier). In Balfour’s original script, it was another classic economic everyman—not the hero of Daniel Defoe’s 1709 Robinson Crusoe, but Adam Smith’s 1776 inventive, self-interested, trucking, and bartering individual— who played the leading role. Balfour’s script began, “Once upon a time there was a man who lived in a nice house with a garden. This man was very good at making things with his hands and at devising ingenious machinery. As a result all the neighbours began to come and ask him to make things for them, bringing in exchange either the materials needed to make the things with or bread, butter, bacon, and other food for the man to eat. The man was kept busy from morning till night.” 14 Like Adam Smith’s naturally frugal, improving everyman who enjoyed the benefits of the division of labor, “Mr. Jack of

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all trades” devoted himself to the labor he did best, “turned part of his house into a shop and almost all the rest into a factory, while he himself lived in a dingy little cubby-hole off the boiler room. He had no time to spare for working in his garden.”15 But of course that was okay because his food was provided by his neighbors, and he got the reputation of being very rich! The rest of the original script goes through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and poses a series of “complications” that Mr. Jack-of-all-trades has to overcome. First some of his neighbors copied him, used his machines, benefited, if you will, from being “latecomers.” “Jack lost some customers, and had to share some of the wealth with his competition.” But that didn’t matter, since he still had plenty of business. But another problem developed: “our man began to be dissatisfied with the discomfort of his living conditions and his long hours of work . . . he began to shut up the shop punctually at 5 in order to have time to go to the cinema or the pub or the dog-races.” The suggested visuals in this section include “Pulling down factory, cut to nice flat with man sitting in armchair while maid lays lunch; shutters going up during day light, man going off. Pictures of man in cinema, pub, dog-races. Man doing daily dozen before breakfast, slapping chest. Man with hang-over, sitting with hands in pockets.” The most important crisis came when a couple of very bad fires broke out down the road. He rushed away to help in putting them out, leaving shop and factory empty and neglecting his customers. Moreover, he used up his complete stock of bucket, hoses, and ladders, and even had to borrow extra ones from other neighbors. After the second fire, Jack reviewed his books and realized his position was pretty serious: his neighbors got used to making their own goods, and those neighbors really hurt by the fires had little left to offer him in exchange for his goods. How was he going to make ends meet? His neighbor Sam—who had imitated our man Jack so successfully that he had become a millionaire—was fortunately as generous as he was rich and arranged to give our man what he needs so as to tide him over. (The visuals suggest that Sam’s house be represented as a skyscraper.) But our man has a tough time ahead, because if he doesn’t increase his production by the time Sam’s gift runs out he will be in danger of starving; he won’t be able to import the materials he needs to manufacture his goods. The visuals are even more menacing: food and goods appear and then disappear; Jack grows emaciated; his factories grow idle until the last potatoes on his plate vanish. What can he do? 1) He can concentrate on making things the neigbours still want, make as many as possible of them and see his wares

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are as good as they used to be (Visuals: Man at work, hard and with care.) 2) He can try and make sure that, in return for the things he produces, he only receives the things he really needs, and go without the rest. (Visuals: Man refusing pineapples, perfume.) 3) While he naturally doesn’t want to go back to living in a cubby hole next to the boiler room and working all day long, he can make the most of all the time he does not spend in the factory. (Man looking very fit, hard at work, refusing to look up when something happens outside.) Is it any surprise that Mr. Tritton from the Film Division responded to this script with an enthusiastic, “It could be done beautifully by Charley. I’m sure of that.” Elaborating, he wrote, “I’ve disregarded the visuals. The story is clear enough, and in light of my somewhat childish knowledge of economics it seems a fair analogy.”16 He also wrote, “I think the two fires are wrong. I would call them wars and have it straight.”17 It took exactly one week for John Halas and Joy Batchelor to transpose the original “Mr. Jack-of-all-trades” script into a treatment organized around Robinson Charley. But then began two months of negotiations over details. Some of the changes from Balfour’s initial script simply followed from the fact that Robinson Charley was now the star of the film. Instead of an opening sequence featuring a “nice looking chap smoking a pipe in an arm chair (like J. B. Priestley), and a bobby-soxer coming in and saying, “Oh! Dear” I wish I could understand the position of this country! Could you explain it to me Uncle Mac,”18 the film opened with Robinson Charley speaking directly to the audience, interrupting a boring narrator beginning to explain Britain’s economic history with a “Here! Turn it up! I thought this film was going to be about me!”19 Also some sillier ideas, like Balfour’s proposal that they include among the early neighbors “a lady of doubtful reputation called Miranda who is always haggling over the butcher’s bill,” or the Film Division representative Denis Forman’s proposal to John Halas that “we end the film with a musical number sung as a duet by Charley and his wife,” were simply scrapped.20 But most of the negotiations involved a delicate three-way dance between Board of Trade officials trying to propagate a very specific economic message (about exports and the present), information officers in the Film Division trying to “secure and hold” their audiences by making “films that inspire and amuse while educating,”21 and the filmmakers themselves, who, in the interest of the artistic quality of their film, continually rebuffed efforts by government officials to include more statistics, more facts, and in particular, more

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information about exactly what Charley (and Mrs. Charley) had to do in the present.22 In general, the Board of Trade representatives were frustrated by the proportion of the story devoted to the long history of Charley (40 of 60 frames), as opposed to the present crisis and what had to be done. But in the end they let the filmmakers have their way, intending to commission a follow-up on “Clever Charley” that would include all of the information that they didn’t manage to get into this film.23 The Board of Trade commented extensively on every single one of the 60 frames. Other than complaining about the excessive time spent on the historical dimension, their main concern was that “the historical treatment gives the impression that all our manufactures were exported. I don’t suppose that more than a quarter, at the very outside, was ever exported.” “This point,” the representative from the Board of Trade explained, “was of some publicity importance, because we know from our researches into public opinion that people have a very exaggerated idea of the proportion of our manufactures which we export, and this leads them to regard the export drive as making necessary a much greater diversion of supplies from the home market than is really the case.”24 They did try to convince the filmmakers to add some historical details—like the importance of the Far East in the heyday of Charley’s power (which they had not included). But they also told the filmmakers what to omit. In every case, the final film reflects the decision to accept these suggestions. First, they were asked to leave out the musical accompaniment of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” at the point in the film where Charley gets help from his neighbor because, “It’s the whole western hemisphere, not just the U.S. providing aid.” Second, in the original treatment Charley apparently returned from his first foray abroad to trade with pots of sugar. Without any explanation, the recommendation was simply made to “suggest silk and spices for imports, not sugar.” Third, and again, without elaboration, a sequence was cut “which shows Charley as more comfortable than 90% of the other Islanders.”25 After these many months of planning, writing, rewriting, and production, Robinson Charley was finally sent on the road with the exhibit “On Our Way,” to bring this inspiring story of Britain’s national past all over the country. After walking through a didactic, statistic-filled exhibit that explained what Britain was doing to meet its production and export goals industry by industry, visitors sat in a mobile cinema and were greeted by a government lecturer. Following a script provided by the COI, the lecturer enjoined his audience to consider the film they were about to see in light of their own,

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very particular local industries, their own lives, and most important, the contributions they, as individuals, could make to the national recovery.26 The visitors then sat and watched Robinson Charley—the carefully clad, accented character, fine-tuned to represent the average Briton—tell a reassuring and inspiring story for an audience facing the long, arduous road to economic recovery. Hard-working Charley, trucking-and-bartering Charley, ingenious, go-ahead trader Charley (with Mrs. Charley gamely by his side), had all the proclivities necessary to rebuild a wartorn Britain. And there was nothing in his history, or in the Atlantic world in which he made his fortune, to trouble anyone. There is absolutely no struggle in this story, for it had all been carefully excised. There was no trouble domestically. The story conveniently began in 1690, after the Glorious Revolution. There were no laborers other than Charley and his wife (90 percent of whom would have been less comfortable than Charley). Industrialization took place naturally, ineluctably, as paths transmuted into railroads, as one loom became a factory. Reduced working hours, like Charley’s own prosperity, came not from striking, or organizing, or political action of any kind; they just happened. Nor was there any struggle globally, where empty continents, equipped with docks, simply waited to be improved by trader Charley; Africa, the Caribbean, and the slave trade (the entire Black Atlantic) were written out by the simple decision to replace sugar with spices. There is no state helping trader Charley enclose the land on his own island and make it his own, to establish his dominion over the seas, to secure his privileged trading position in the world, to set up his banks, insurance companies, or even the welfare state his first three films were dedicated to explaining. Indeed, this Robinson Crusoe rewrite can be seen as the apotheosis of the tradition of Robinsonades to which Marx referred in 1859. Marx was not, in fact, referring to the original novel by Defoe. When he used the mocking term Robinsonade to describe the heroic narrative by which Europeans recounted and naturalized the progressive rise of capitalist civilization, he dated its origins not to Defoe’s early eighteenth-century novel, but to the liberal political economists of the Enlightenment, who based their grandiose theories about society and civilization around the “insipid illusion” that at its center was an ineluctable tale of progress and evolution that began with “natural man.” What Marx was railing against was the elevation of the “trucking and bartering” everyman, the “improving, property owner” into a product of nature rather than of history, the kind of “natural man” imagined in the treatises of John Locke and Adam Smith, rather than the hero of Defoe’s novel. For

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Defoe’s hero had a history, and it was mired in the violence and exploitation of imperial conquest and slavery. Robinson Crusoe only landed on his deserted island because his frustration with the lack of sufficient unpaid labor on his plantation in Brazil led him to try his hand at the illegal slave trade. It is true that in his twenty-seven years on the deserted island he industriously developed a home and a summer estate, domesticated animals, raised crops, and manufactured clothes and pottery. And it is also true that no matter what happened to Robinson Crusoe—and lots of bad things happened—he was able to turn a profit at every turn. But the hero was wracked by guilt about his ambitions. He constantly drew attention to the problematic conquest of America by competing European empires. He reflected on the ways religions (especially Catholicism) justified violent exploitation. In short, this complex, one could even argue ironic portrait of “economic man” making his fortune in the violent, exploitive world of the Atlantic slave trade was not the script Mr. Tritton had in mind when he suggested, “It could be done beautifully by Charley!” 27 Tritton, the members of the Film Division, and the filmmakers were drawing on a complex tradition, consolidated since the late eighteenth century, of spinning “Robinson-Crusoe-like nursery tales” about the origins and progress of Western civilization, Robinsonades that explicitly left out all the violence and struggle still present in Defoe’s novel. These proliferated in Marx’s century—in the treatises of political economy that he cited, but also in the widely read Robinson Crusoe rewrites that were ever more triumphal, ever more legitimizing of European conquest as the century wore on. These Robinsonades were elevated into official history when they became the organizing script behind the Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth century, the world fairs by which Europe (and by the twentieth century) America put themselves forward as the vanguard of civilization, the endpoint toward which everyone should want to go.28 Robinson Charley was designed as an entertaining, amusing alternative to the consistently grim story that comprised Britain’s information campaign in general, an effort to reassure a public tired of austerity, tired of rationing, who believed they were working overtime for lower wages only to export everything they made. It was also designed to reassure a public that in spite of their severe losses in the last war, in spite of the fact that the far-flung empire was crumbling, in spite of the apparent power and wealth of America (their rich neighbor Sam), Britain had the resources to reclaim its natural position of leadership in the world. In a context in which the United States was providing assistance for a European-wide recovery and requiring, as a condition of

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that aid, that recipients spend five cents of every Marshall dollar on an information campaign advertising that assistance, Robinson Charley also captures the proud, independent posture the British government consistently adopted in relation to the United States, Europe, and the story of the Atlantic being negotiated through the European-wide recovery. Like their counterparts in London, government information officers all over Western Europe commissioned journalists, photographers, artists, filmmakers, and specialists in exhibitions during the four-year tenure of the Marshall Plan (1948–1952) to explain, to visualize, to enact the recovery their populations were experiencing. As in Britain, they seized this opportunity, with the encouragement and assistance of their American benefactors, to reach back into the past to find legitimating, inspiring, usable narratives to guide their citizens toward a desirable future. Everywhere this gave rise to Atlantic dreaming, a tendency to recast the Atlantic as the crucible of civilization, a civilization founded on the basis of the division of labor, on the promise of the trucking and bartering “Jack-of-all-trades” proposed by Balfour, and transformed by Halas and Batchelor (with the blessing of the Economic Information Unit) into Robinson Charley.29 Nowhere else in the Europeanwide recovery have I found a Robinsonade to rival Robinson Charley in its explicit reworking of Robinson Crusoe; but everywhere I found information officers scouring the wreck that was postwar Europe to find usable building blocks of civilization, on which to tell stories about its past, and in the process to extol, above all, the history of doux or gentle commerce that held the key to curing all that ailed a war-ravaged Europe.

Robinsonades in the Recovery Like Defoe’s hero, who took thirteen trips back to his shipwrecked slaving vessel to gather what he could to rebuild a life on his solitary island, information officers combed through the rubble that was Europe to find what could be salvaged after almost a decade of barbarism and destruction. Indeed, in “Gateway to Germany,” a pamphlet produced by the Marshall Plan Ministry in West Germany, the population and its circumstances after 1945 were described in precisely these terms. “A mighty ship had foundered, the crew had salvaged nothing. The German people had become a nation of castaways and the fatherland an island of despair. . . . Millions of hungry Robinson Crusoes went about their tasks clothed in rags, and performed the most difficult, back-breaking work without proper tools. . . . And at

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their sides stood ‘Man Friday’—in the person of the tireless, over-worked German woman.”30 But in Germany it was not Robinson Crusoe who was the star of the recovery, but the hard-working Lockean, Smithian everyman, another version of Balfour’s Mr. Jack-of-all-trades, devoted to the improvement of his property. “For a time it seemed as though this country’s will to live had been broken, her culture and historical countenance blotted out. . . . But despite all this, the German people did not give up. One of their strongest traits, an almost fanatic reverence for toil, is probably what saved them. They had lost everything—except the property rights to the rubble which had once comprised their homes and shops.”31 The information campaign narrating the recovery in West Germany celebrated real, rather than fictive, Germans for their maniacal devotion to labor and their tireless energy for rebuilding. Photo essays such as the one featuring the auto worker Peter Kohlmann of Russelsheim brought newspaper readers into the life of a typical worker, toiling eight hours at the factory (in this case, the Opel Plant, owned by General Motors), riding his bicycle home from work, then spending many hours rebuilding his prewar home that had been destroyed by bombs.32 The 1951 German barge exhibit that traveled by river around West Germany featured a husband and wife, Hans and Gretel, in a similar story, building their own home, helping revive all the industries necessary to build the foundation and the walls, to install electricity and plumbing, to furnish and decorate, and finally to provide entertainment.33 Me and Mr. Marshall, a short film produced in 1949, focused on a miner who moved far from his family to volunteer in this most essential of industries, to help jumpstart not only Germany’s but also Europe’s recovery. Rebuilding was the most important rite of the recovery in Germany. Nowhere in ERP Europe was the act of transforming rubble into roads, into factories, into housing projects, nowhere were the before-and-after photographs that became shorthand for “the recovery is underway” more necessary and more ubiquitous than in Germany. For every finished building and every commodity that rolled off the conveyer belt was testimony to the rehabilitated, revitalized liberal laboring subject who was behind it all. “Notice the energy applied to re-create their country from out of the ruins and rubble,” concluded Gateway to Germany. “Then you will discover Germany in a different way.”34 Everywhere the vital role of “help from America” in Germany’s recovery was touted, not as in Britain, as a temporary stopgap, but as deep nourishment necessary for the recovery. In Germany, unlike in Britain, the red,

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white, and blue emblem of the ERP was ubiquitous—on every factory and housing complex rebuilt with Marshall dollars, on every railway car, and on every commodity arriving from America and produced in Germany with the help of Marshall money.35 If the film The Air of Freedom could present Berlin in 1950—the capital of the Third Reich a mere five years earlier—as the host of a world fair, capable of standing in as “a showcase on Western Civilization,” it was because only two years into the recovery, information officers felt confident that they had saved the average German from the allures of both fascism and communism by channeling his prodigious energy into laboring—to rebuild his own house, brick by brick, to mine the coal necessary to fuel Germany’s and Europe’s recovery, to provide the financial foundation for a stable, prosperous, and free Europe. The Atlantic was Germany’s lifeline, the source of its nourishment and rehabilitation. Nowhere was this point made more vividly than in the exhibit that traveled around Germany in 1949 and 1950; the exhibit recounting the story of Germany’s national recovery was mounted around a 12.5-meter long, 5.5-meter wide, 1.3-meter deep basin including a relief map of the Atlantic. It took 20–25 men 18 days of continuous work just to mount this “mobile” exhibit.36 As in Britain, and unlike in Germany, France had a long and usable past that could be selectively tapped as its government enjoined its citizens to cooperate and work hard to ensure their national recovery. And it was a past that involved France’s own participation in creating a nourishing, civilized, and productive Atlantic. The French story of the development of the Atlantic emphasized the wonders of technology, scientific development, and a selective set of ideals that bequeathed a legacy of social democracy and reform, not of revolution (especially not communist revolution). Just as the Economic Information Unit rewrote the economic and political history of Britain since 1690 as a triumphant story shorn of all violence, exploitation, and political struggle, the fledgling Fourth Republic leapt handily over the recent Vichy interlude and offered a cleaned-up version of both colonialism and its own domestic history of industrialization and political struggle. Transatlantique, a film produced by French directors André Sarrut and Jacques Asseo in 1953 for the Ministry of Finance and the ERP administrators in Paris, typifies the triumphant narrative regarding the development of the French Atlantic that served as a foundation for the French recovery. Just as the engineer hero replaced Daniel Defoe’s merchant trader in Jules Verne’s 1867 Robinson Crusoe rewrite, The Mysterious Island, and the Great Exhibitions across the nineteenth century in Paris celebrated the history of

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France and its empire as a consequence of technological and commercial progress, Transatlantique told the story of the discovery of America by adventurous explorers, and its development by successive technological innovations that brought North America and Europe into closer circulation and communication. The history of the Atlantic recounted in Transatlantique begins in 1492, with Christopher Columbus explaining to disbelieving crowds that the earth was round. The multitudes laughed, but Spain’s king and queen believed him and sent three boats across the ocean. This virgin voyage was not easy: there were storms, men on board got sick; but here the hardships end. Columbus appeared happy when he sighted Native Americans on shore. The boat landed and, as in Robinson Charley, there was no conflict. Europe, now portrayed with lots of eyes looking on, sent more and more ships, bearing the Union Jack and the colors of the French, Spanish, and Dutch; they each set up their own communities. Individuals were shown meeting, smoking, and talking amicably with Native Americans with whom they got to work, felling trees and building homes. A brief period of turmoil ensued when the British crown demanded taxes: the crown fell, the liberty bell rang, and its peal was heard across the ocean in France, where the Marseillaise played, the French king was deposed, and Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité were proclaimed for all, marking the heyday of the age of the Atlantic Revolutions. The British Isles were at the center of the story for the Industrial Revolution. Here we have Robinson Charley’s nineteenth century in fast motion: locomotives and steam ships proliferated, boats tugged the continents closer together. Planes appeared and a man in Kansas and people in Paris looked up and waved as the continents drew closer together still. New York and Paris were connected by telephone; newspapers with headlines in German, French, and English circulated between the continents. Architectural plans, manufacturing plans—ideas hatched in Europe—turned into machines and products in factories in America. Going back and forth from continent to continent, a man chopped down a tree on one side of the Atlantic, matchsticks appeared in a box on the other, a scientist used a matchstick to light a Bunsen burner on one side, a vaccine was sent to a doctor on the other, the doctor gave a shot to a pianist, who played his music on one side of the Atlantic while a woman, sewing, listened to the radio on the other. A ballerina leaped across the ocean, followed by more and more people, as the ocean gap closed until the final frame, where several sets of hands from either side of the Atlantic met in a

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handshake, one of which—and for the first time signaling the existence of a Black Atlantic—was black.37 France, in fact, was given a starring role in the ERP. Paris housed its bureaucratic headquarters since the program’s inception in 1948. But it was in 1951 that Paris became its symbolic center when it launched the Europe Train. This was a traveling exhibit that was the culmination of three years of experiments explaining and narrating the recovery, three years of reimagining the past and the future in light of the extraordinary accomplishments of the present. Workers laid tracks for the Europe Train on the Esplanade des Invalides, in sight of the Gare d’Orsay, Grand Palais, Petit Palais, and Eiffel Tower, monuments to the repeated efforts by the French governments of 1855, 1867, 1889, and 1900 to use the framework of the Great Industrial Exhibition to define France’s power and place in the world. In 1951, inaugurated by the Republican Guard, in a ceremony that featured every dignitary involved in the ERP, France used these very same fairgrounds to present itself as the symbolic capital of a new postwar Europe, redefined as a result of the recovery.38 The exhibit inaugurated on the Place des Invalides on October 13, 1951, was contained in a train comprised of eight cars.39 If October 13, 1951, was its official international ceremonial opening, the train had in fact been circulating around Europe since the previous spring. The train was adapted for viewing as it wended its way around Europe: the language of the displays was changed, the fifth car was completely re-outfitted to tell the local, national story of the country it was visiting.40 But everything else remained the same: the other seven cars, the entertainments, the maps, the basic story of Europe. And that was essential, because the train itself was designed to enact the story it was telling; the fact that visitors from “free Europe” were experiencing the same exhibit was part and parcel of the process of constituting the very thing the train was celebrating. When visitors walked onto the train and saw the map of “free Europe,” what they saw was the blinking lights indicating the past and future itinerary of the train itself.41 The first car presented the Europe that was coming together as a result of the recovery. The second car celebrated the products of that cooperation, literally, one commodity at a time. This car was one enormous elegy to the productivity, power, and superiority of Europe now that it was cooperating. Car 3 explained this stunning productivity by the bureaucratic structures that had been managing its cooperation since 1948. The eighteen participants in the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) are represented again and again:

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in maps, in headshots of their leaders, in complex diagrams outlining their organization. But it was in the fourth car—the literal heart of the eight-car exhibit—that the nourishing role of the Atlantic was enacted. The words at the entrance to the car read, “Europe once again stands, with its North American partners across the Atlantic as two continents, but one civilization . . . 275,000,000 Europeans and 163,000,000 Americans and Canadians are united in their ideas, their cultures, their economy.” “Two continents, one civilization” is depicted in a mechanical device that transforms an image of two hands clasped into a map of Europe and North America united, as the following ten posters explain, by exchanges of scientific information, films and theater troops, students, literature, and art.42 But dominating this fourth car is the moving model of the North Atlantic basin that occupied one full wall.43 The flickering lights representing traffic and communication between the two continents, by air and by plane by cable and by radio, picked up on the leitmotif of the circulation that defined the map of Europe at the entryway. In the center of the map was a screen on which was projected a slide show, enumerating the principal items of trade, as well as statistics on vital commodities produced and exchanged by the twenty countries. If the car representing the productivity of Europe seemed impressive to the visitors, it was nothing compared to the staggering statistics representing Europe and North America’s joint output: 45 percent of the world’s wheat, 79 percent of its steel, 71 percent of its cotton, wool and rayon, 77 percent of its electricity, 71 percent of its coal, 73 percent of its petroleum, 90 percent of its automobiles, and 83 percent of boats for shipping. The Atlantic car ended with a poster reiterating the message at its entryway, “275,000,000 Europeans + 163,000,000 Americans and Canadians belong to the community of free peoples,” and a recorded voice directly addressed the visitor: “You too are a part of this grand community of free peoples.”

Atlantic History in and Beyond the Crucible of the Recovery When George Marshall gave his speech at Harvard in June 1947 announcing the aid package that would bear his name, the logic for Robinson Charley, “Transatlantique,” and the stunning story of “Two Continents, One Civilization” celebrated in the Atlantic car of the Europe Train was already in evidence. After a brief overview of the destruction and dislocation produced by ten years in which all existing political, economic, and military institutions

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were turned to support the German war machine, he asked his audience to consider what was necessary to “rehabilitate Europe.” He offered his answer in a long, telling, but rarely quoted paragraph: The farmer has always produced the foodstuffs to exchange with the city dweller for the other necessities of life. This division of labor is the basis of modern civilization. At the present time it is threatened with breakdown. The town and city industries are not producing adequate goods to exchange with the food-producing farmer. Raw materials and fuel are in short supply. Machinery is lacking or worn out. The farmer or the peasant cannot find the goods for sale which he desires to purchase. So the sale of his farm produce for money which he cannot use seems to him an unprofitable transaction. He, therefore, has withdrawn many fields from crop cultivation and is using them for grazing. He feeds more grain to stock and finds for himself and his family an ample supply of food, however short he may be on clothing and the other ordinary gadgets of civilization. Meanwhile people in the cities are short of food and fuel [and in some places approaching the starvation level—oral addition]. So the governments are forced to use their foreign money and credits to procure these necessities abroad. This process exhausts funds which are urgently needed for reconstruction. Thus a very serious situation is rapidly developing which bodes no good for the world. The modern system of the division of labor upon which the exchange of products is based is in danger of breaking down. The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. The manufacturer and the farmer throughout wide areas must be able and willing to exchange their product for currencies the continuing value of which is not open to question.44 Marshall did not cite John Locke or Adam Smith that day, but recognizable in his speech to anyone familiar with European intellectual history is the idealist, positive portrait of the civilizing spirit of capitalism that by the end of the eighteenth century had begun to gain traction and popularity. No one has done more to help us appreciate the “arguments for capitalism before its triumph” that emerged in the eighteenth century than the scholar

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Albert O. Hirschman. In his 1977 Passions and the Interests, he recounts the process by which theorists (most importantly, Adam Smith) began to enumerate the many ways in which “interests” (to make profits) could serve as an effective bridle upon the infinitely more dangerous “passions” (for conquest, for power, for domination).45 If these new arguments in favor of the civilizing potential of doux (or gentle) commerce became widespread in the late eighteenth century as a response to the violence of the wars of religion and imperial conquest of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is hardly surprising that the barbarism of Europe in the twentieth century would lead to an analogous quest for a utopian future on the foundation of state-sponsored doux commerce. Nor is it surprising that Hirschman would have been attuned to the deep historical antecedents of this idea, given that he was, himself, a Marshall planner. In the decade after World War II, the eighteenth-century idea of doux commerce was re-invented and re-imagined as the antidote and cure for the horrors perpetrated in the heart of civilized Europe in the twentieth century. That was clear in Marshall’s speech. It was certainly clear in the information campaign I have described in this chapter. “Restoring faith in the division of labor as the foundation of civilization” required a massive rewriting of European history, one that information officers situated within an Atlantic frame. The Atlantic that was narrated and performed to serve the Recovery all over Western Europe between 1948 and 1952, and to testify to the promise of doux commerce, was emptied of conquest and slavery, of imperial wars and national competition, of racism and authoritarianism. The early practitioners of Atlantic history, I would argue—emphasizing as they did the commercial and administrative networks that tied the Americas to Europe, the Atlantic Revolutions, and the enlightened ideas that would ultimately flower into the democracies of North and South America—were likewise operating under the impulse to “rescue” the best of Western civilization after its most recent bloody catastrophe in Europe.46 It would take decades for historians to challenge the Robinsonade version of the Atlantic, dictated by faith in “the division of labor as the foundation of civilization.” Many of the historians who did so were, not surprisingly, Marxists, but they were also historians of those islands in “Robinson Charley” equipped with docks, just waiting for Europeans to arrive, as well as the islands not represented (in particular, Africa). They were also social historians interested in the resident “islanders” necessarily omitted from the Recovery’s Atlantic: Africans, South Americans, natives of the Caribbean, and, in the United

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States, African Americans and Native Americans. They were historians who rewrote the economic history of the early modern period, directing our attention away from the “center” (Europe and America) to the “periphery” (the rest of the Atlantic, but also the rest of the world). “Rehabilitating Europe” in the Marshall era produced the Atlantic Civilization still celebrated in Bailyn’s volume. While Bailyn has incorporated much of the research on the slave trade, the “periphery,” and most important, “the authorized violence without restraint, scorched-earth campaigns, the exuberant desecration of symbols of civility,”47 into this account, because of his emphasis on the “flow of ideas that permeated the Atlantic communities” during the age of Atlantic Revolutions, he still concludes on a mildly optimistic note. “It is this—the fusion of exploitative economic force, ruthless but ingenious, oppressive but creative, and the shared idealism of the Enlightenment—that is the ultimate and permanent legacy of Atlantic history in the early modern years.”48 More recently, however, Atlantic historians have moved in the direction of challenging this broader narrative. Just as postcolonial historians are explicitly questioning the basic progressive narrative against which everyone outside the West measures itself by “provincializing Europe,”49 Atlantic historians are rethinking the fundamentals of the story they tell about the past, in a way that acknowledges a very different legacy. Richard Drayton offers a lovely formulation that I think demonstrates this turn in Atlantic history. Whereas the early decades of Atlantic history were still dominated by what he calls the “imperialism of the division of labor . . . an imperialism driven by those who understood themselves as cosmopolitans, and as the diffusers of universal progress,” more recent Atlantic historians have tried to write a history that elucidates the “collaboration of labor.”50 Thinking of the “collaboration of labor” instead of the “division of labor” as that which defined the history of the past four centuries would be a very different spin on the Atlantic Car in the Europe Train of 1951. Instead of a representation of how “civilized” America and Europe were because of their staggering monopoly on productivity in the postwar world, instead of thinking of European and American development as a model of civilization toward which the world should orient itself, we would think of “how what we now call Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia were constructed together in the midst of a relationship, at once economic and cultural, military and political, that tended and still tends to allocate to the West a disproportionate share of the power to command and consume resources.”51 To tell that story

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requires a very different conception of the Atlantic than was possible in the immediate aftermath of World War II. This volume, dedicated to writing a history of the Black Atlantic, one complicated, nonmythological biography at a time, focusing precisely on what was written out of the idyllic Atlantic world in which Robinson Charley made his fortune, testifies to the degree to which Atlantic historians are moving beyond the Robinsonades born in the crucible of the Recovery.

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PA R T I I MOBILITY

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Chapter four

Black Pearls: Writing Black Atlantic Women’s Biography jon sensbach

Dark brown skin shiny with reddish light, she returns our gaze, an enigmatic smile tugging the corners of her full lips, head encased in a white cap, ribbon under the chin. Her white dress sports a pink ribbon on her chest; her right hand rests a little awkwardly across her stomach. A single word painted in cursive floats mysteriously by her head: Maria. In this portrait from about 1742, German folk artist Johan Valentin Haidt captured one of the few known likenesses of a black woman in the eighteenth century. Haidt, a member of the Moravian Church, painted dozens of portraits of prominent church leaders in Germany and America, including powerful men like Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and Bishop August Spangenberg, among the most influential figures in eighteenth-century Pietism. So who was Maria and why did she sit for Haidt?1 Church records tell a sparse story. Maria was a Dutch-speaking slave on the Danish West Indian island of St. Thomas when Moravian missionaries began preaching there in the 1730s. It is not clear whether she was born in Africa or the Caribbean, but she joined the mission, quickly rising through the ranks to become a “helper” or assistant for instructing enslaved women in Christianity. In the early 1740s she traveled with the missionaries to the Moravian town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the church’s headquarters in North America, where she married Andreas, another West Indian. From there the couple departed for Herrnhaag, a Moravian town in western Germany where, in 1746, Maria was ordained a deacon, an important post in the church leadership hierarchy that involved organizing, instructing,

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and counseling female congregants. In this interracial fellowship in rural Germany, “Maria, die Mohrin von Sanct Thomas” (“Maria, the Mooress from St. Thomas”) as she was known—who might even technically still have been a slave—exercised authority over scores of European women. For a church that derived much of its identity from its global outreach to the heathen and a multiracial celebration of spiritual equality, Maria had symbolic star power. So she sat for Haidt. Despite the artist’s technical limitations, his portrait captured her not as a slave, a drudge, or a barbarian, but a person suffused with divine grace. And like its subject, the picture has remained almost unknown inside and outside the church since her death in 1749.2 The sketchy outline of Maria’s biography is extraordinary enough: from plantation slavery to German Pietist fellowship; triangulated travels between the Caribbean, Pennsylvania, and Germany; likeness preserved on canvas in all its warmth and humanity. Her life is unusual as well in having been documented, however poorly, which can be said of very few women of African descent enslaved in the colonial Americas. By the millions, they were hustled on board the slave ships, worked their lives out on a plantation in Martinique or in some Virginia kitchen, and rated scarcely a mention in an inventory or a planter’s journal. Phillis Wheatley and Sally Hemings: these are the black women we know from the eighteenth century, the archetypes who stand in for all women of African origin. How many of us can name another? To be sure, the problem is almost as bad for enslaved and free men of color in the early Atlantic world—almost, but not quite. Far more black men were written about in colonial records, and had a chance to write about themselves, than black women. At a time of rising interest in individual lives as a window onto the slave trade, slavery, and freedom in the early Black Atlantic, the problem of retrieving women’s lives presents a particular challenge both in locating sources and in developing analytical perspectives to evaluate them.

Life Histories in the Black Atlantic To scholars not just of the Black Atlantic but across fields and disciplines, the prospect of using a single life to encapsulate a larger theme has grown increasingly attractive. Multiple influences on this trend are readily apparent: from anthropology, from the use of “thick description” as a tool for recovering and narrating human experience, and from the maturation of microhistory in the 1970s and 1980s as means of capturing in miniature the thoughts, emotions, and actions of ordinary people. Historian Marjoleine Kars describes

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the latter technique as “history in a grain of sand,” of using a smallness of historical scale to probe the intimate corners of a life that yields lessons both broader and deeper about the human character. “Just as an oyster creates a pearl around a grain of sand by patiently surrounding it with successive layers of nacre,” she writes, “so historians create meaning by embedding their historical grains in a consideration of larger issues and events.” Such grains, or what another scholar calls “ethnographies of the particular,” afford an author the opportunity to narrate a compelling story, engage in speculation and literary artifice, forge a close relationship with both the subject and reader, and even emerge from the authorial shadows to write in the first person as an active interlocutor of texts and other evidence. The recreation of the lost world of Martin Guerre, acknowledged Natalie Zemon Davis, was “in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.” In its purest form the genre serves as a sort of psychological archaeology, of which Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, and Jonathan Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang remain influential examples. My own field, early American history, has its own models in John Demos’s The Unredeemed Captive, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale, Alfred Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, and Allan Greer’s Mohawk Saint.3 The life histories revealed in these narratives have something to do with biography, of course, but as Jill Lepore explains, they emanate from different assumptions and proceed by different strategies. “If biography is largely founded on a belief in the singularity and significance of an individual’s life and his contributions to history, microhistory is founded upon almost the opposite assumption: however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness, but in its exemplariness, in how that life serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole.” To a biographer of George Washington, the implicit importance of the subject matter needs no elaboration, whereas the excavator of a sixteenth-century Friulian miller’s life has some explaining to do. A seemingly obscure life may or may not be typical of its time and place, but it can teach us something about the society in which it was lived. “Traditional biographers seek to profile an individual and recapitulate a life story,” Lepore elaborates, “but microhistorians, tracing their elusive subjects through slender records, tend to address themselves to solving small mysteries. . . . The life story, like the mystery, is merely the means to an end—and that end is always explaining the culture.”4 This approach yielded several instructive grains of sand well before microhistory emerged as an articulated genre of historical reconstruction,

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and before the Black Atlantic became a widely theorized concept. Philip D. Curtin’s 1967 anthology of first-person narratives by Africans enslaved in the Americas, Africa Remembered, introduced many readers for the first time to specific Africans who told their own powerful stories. Two monographs from roughly the same period, Douglas Grant’s The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century (1968) and Terry Alford’s Prince Among Slaves (1977), depicted the capture, American enslavement, redemption, and return to Africa by two African-born Muslims. Both books foreshadowed many of the themes that would come to characterize the idea of the Black Atlantic and the writing of life histories within it: the emphasis on the African origins of captives enslaved in America; their movement around the various Atlantic circuits of trade, communication, and exchange; and their immersion in New World slave cultures as active respondents to, rather than inert victims of captivity. And both works demonstrated that a single life in transit through these overlapping Atlantic zones could put a human face on the slave trade while illuminating in microcosm how it worked and upon whom it preyed.5 These pioneering efforts did not immediately produce a wave of new life histories from the Black Atlantic, but the 1990s began to see the emergence of more such studies, some more Atlantic in orientation than others, perhaps, but each in its own way attentive to the temporal and spatial particularities of its subject while using that life as a window onto transformative global processes of forced migration, servitude, and the struggle for freedom by people of African descent. The publication of new anthologies of writings by Africans and other Black Atlantic people has spurred this process, as has the unearthing of hitherto unknown first-person narratives and other new archival material. Far and away the dominant figure in this literature has been Gustavus Vassa/Olaudah Equiano, whose celebrated memoir established him in the eighteenth century, and reaffirmed him again in the late twentieth, as the quintessential survivor of the Middle Passage, general Atlantic maritime gadabout, and activist witness against the slave trade. The recent controversy over his birth origins has further fueled the interest in Equiano, whose singular story and fame qualify him as much as the subject of biography as of microhistory.6 Other Black Atlantic figures have also emerged as three-dimensional subjects through some combination of biographical and microhistorical study, ranging from prominent rebels and revolutionaries like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Denmark Vesey to lesser-known freedom seekers, religious

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leaders, survivors of the slave trade, and various sojourners, both Africanand American-born, whose peripatetic travels represented, as James H. Sweet argues, “a series of social deaths and rebirths, a repeating circuit of dislocation and dismemberment, marked by an unceasing desire to reconstitute the self through family, friends, and community.”7 But if the growing inventory of narratives conveys multiple lessons about the lived experience of the Black Atlantic, it also raises cautions about the meaning of those lessons. A weakness of Atlantic history, argues Trevor Burnard, is its “inattention to the interior life of individuals, especially ordinary individuals, whose connections to the larger themes of the Atlantic world were tenuous; and its fixation on extraordinary individuals, whose very extraordinariness raises questions about typicality.” The Atlantic creoles who darted in and out of ports, exploited and created opportunities for advancement, forged malleable identities, and built overlapping affective and economic networks, he contends, were “wildly atypical for Africans and African-Americans condemned to a short and brutish life on sugar, rice, or tobacco plantations, and thus hide the normative experiences of most slaves.” The solution is to “pay attention to people at both ends of the continuum”— both the Hobbesian and Panglossian conditions of captivity, as Michael Craton once observed.8 The point is not without merit, but it evokes at least two rejoinders. First, while it is true that the lives featured in most Black Atlantic biographies and microhistories are not typical, the success of such studies does not depend on their typicality. That is like saying that while The Return of Martin Guerre might be a good yarn, its usefulness would be buttressed by statistics showing that it was typical of large numbers of men returning from war pretending to be someone else. The point, rather, is to show that a life can be representative of something larger—of survival in the Middle Passage, of legal and extralegal avenues to freedom, of religious revelation and visioning, of attempts to build new kinship connections, and so on, some or all of which characterized most people in the Black Atlantic at some point. Second, no Black Atlantic life can be reconstructed without sources, and those documented in enough detail to enable such retrieval were by definition extraordinary. They became literate and seized the chance to write an autobiography; or a white person thought their story noteworthy enough to record it for them; or they did something unusual enough to merit being reported in a record of some kind—a planter’s journal, a missionary’s letters, a court proceeding, a freedom petition, an inquisition report. They led a rebellion or a religious movement; they made a

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dramatic escape to freedom and joined an imperial army; they worked cracks in the legal system to gain manumission; they boarded a ship that plied ports around the Caribbean, Europe, and the Gold Coast; they returned to Africa. Alas, “ordinary” lives—short, brutish lives lived out on a plantation—tended not to be written about unless they shared one or another of these motifs, at which point they, too, became atypical. And so, with all due acknowledgment of its difference, the rare story, the exception, must stand in for the great majority of lives that never made it into any sort of print form. Fixation or not, this kind of historical reclamation is a way of winning back the specific contours of individual experience from the paralyzing anonymity imposed by limitations in sources.

Gender in Black Atlantic Life Stories Belatedly, historians have begun turning their attention to African women in studies of the slave trade, American slavery, and the Black Atlantic, but with some exceptions, the lives of individual women remain hidden from view. This obscurity partly reflects a relative lack of documentary evidence about Black Atlantic women, an archival bias that is in some measure an inherited echo of the two-to-one ratio by which men predominated over women in the slave trade itself. There is simply less information about women in the kinds of sources historians traditionally use to study slavery, such as planters’ journals, court records, tax rolls, baptismal registers, and the like. Such documents are by definition already fragmentary and skewed toward the planters’ perspective, leaving the record largely silent on the personal lives of enslaved people.9 Different kinds of documentary silences about women of African descent hang heavily over the archive as well. Some silence reflects enslaved people’s inability to enter the written record, especially the bureaucratic apparatus of the colonial archive, other than as human commodities or as workers to be controlled and disciplined. Other silences reflect what Deborah Gray White calls a “self-imposed invisibility” among enslaved women deriving from a “culture of dissemblance,” or a strategic desire to conceal their activities from the prying eyes of the powerful. These are the “articulate silences” of black women’s experience, the yawning gaps in the record that, however much they reveal by what they do not reveal, amplify the difficulty of retrieving women’s experiences before, during, and after the Middle Passage. Little wonder that, after surveying recent writing on women in early America, Jennifer Spear

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concludes that with all the recent advances in social, cultural, economic history “the truly missing parts of this puzzle are African-American women.”10 The first-person captivity narratives by Black Atlantic authors such as Equiano and Venture Smith that form the basis for a growing number of biographical studies only widen the quantitative and qualitative documentary disparity between men’s and women’s experiences. Among the autobiographies of enslaved African survivors of the trade anthologized in several collections, only a scant few are from women; these accounts are much shorter than those by their male counterparts and scarcely provide enough material for a full biographical study.11 Men also heavily predominate in the emerging autobiographical canon of American-born, eighteenth-century Black Atlantic figures such as John Marrant, Boston King, and David George, whose memoirs describe the intertwined journey to physical liberation and spiritual freedom in Christianity that frames a compelling exodus narrative from revolutionary America to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. In the post-revolutionary United States, similarly, strong free black leaders such as Lemuel Haynes, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and Paul Cuffee embody a parallel archetypal “black Founding Fathers” counter-narrative of African American dignity and agency. As powerfully as all these declarations forecast an emancipatory Black Atlantic history, they can, if not treated with interpretive caution, unintentionally supply the basis for a Whiggish parable of masculine self-assertion and literary self-discovery.12 Individually and collectively, women have a tendency to disappear in this version of early Black Atlantic history. Because of the scarcity of direct testimony from black women, their experiences remain elusive at least through the early nineteenth century. There is no female Equiano to break free of the colonial archive and from the hegemony of early Black Atlantic male authorship, though Phillis Wheatley’s poetry probably comes closest to that mark. Important autobiographies by women of African descent begin to date from slightly later, principally from the 1830s onward. The narratives and other writings of the Hart sisters of Antigua, Mary Prince, Jarena Lee, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Maria Stewart, and others represent a testament against slavery and a witness for black women’s experience in the early nineteenth-century United States and British Caribbean. Still, for most of the period when the slave trade and slavery were transforming the Atlantic world, those experiences remain exceptionally difficult to document. As numerous scholars have pointed out, a focus on prominent rebel leaders, visionary antislavery

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activists, and powerful preachers has diverted attention from women’s activities that are perhaps less visible to historians but were every bit as visible to the communities within which they worked. The very things that make many Atlantic figures such appealing subjects—their mobility, supple identities, and adaptability to multiple languages and cultures—were often inaccessible to women, whose possibilities for voluntary movement were far more restricted. Thus, the challenge remains, as Leslie Alexander reminds us, “to analyze Black women through their own eyes rather than through the lens of whiteness and oppression.”13 Nonetheless, a handful of biographical studies of Black Atlantic women has emerged in recent years. These range from John Thornton’s reconstruction of the life of Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, an African Catholic mystic and prophet who was executed in Kongo in the early eighteenth century; to Daniel Schafer’s biography of Anna Kingsley, an African slave-turned slave­ owner and wife of a prominent planter in Spanish Florida; to Rebecca Scott’s and Jean Michel Hébrard’s investigation of the freedom strategies pursued through the courts and other legal means by “Rosalie of the Poulard nation” in revolutionary Haiti, Cuba, and New Orleans. All of these studies, and others, ingeniously excavate evidence in out-of-the-way places like court dockets, other legal papers, ecclesiastical records, and mission reports, showing enslaved and free women of color in flesh and blood who used the strategies available to them to secure freedom, protect their families, act on a religious impulse, or otherwise preserve some autonomous space. In the spirit of Natalie Zemon Davis’s Women on the Margins—as instructive a guide to Atlantic biographical writing as there is—such works demonstrate that Black Atlantic women might have been on the physical and emotional margins of empire, but they were very much at the center of their own world, which they vigorously inhabited and defined.14

Searching for Rebecca: A Life, an Archive, a Story The methodological challenges of writing this kind of history were formidable when I considered the life of an obscure woman from the eighteenth-century Black Atlantic whose little-known story I had stumbled across in previous research. Her name was Rebecca Freundlich Protten, a Dutch-speaking former slave of mixed African and European parentage in the Danish West Indian colony of St. Thomas who as a young evangelist in the Moravian Church, a German Pietist mission organization, helped inspire an enthusiastic embrace

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of Protestant Christianity among enslaved Africans in the 1730s. From scattered documentary fragments, I knew she had led a remarkable life, that she had married a white missionary, been tried and jailed for sedition, migrated to Europe and lived in Germany for twenty years. I also knew that, with her second husband, Christian Protten, an African-born missionary, she had lived her final twenty years as a school teacher to mixed-race children on the Gold Coast of West Africa. The singular story was an Atlantic biographer’s dream: an emancipated woman who had an interracial marriage in a slave society, whose triangulated travels took her from the Caribbean to Western Europe to West Africa, and who passed with seeming ease between English, Danish, Dutch, German, and a host of African cultures while organizing religious communities on both sides of the ocean. Ultimately I pieced together this life story in book form, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. Long before I thought it possible to write a book about such a littleknown person, I wanted to learn more about her, but the few references to her in secondary works were unhelpful. Most of these books were denominational Moravian histories that, in extolling the German preachers who labored among the slaves in St. Thomas, gave fleeting reference to a sometimesunnamed freed woman who worked alongside the evangelists, married one of them, and was thrown in prison. Perhaps this “mulatto” (as the mission histories invariably described her) religious worker had a larger role in the unfolding Caribbean drama than the sources revealed. Could I flesh out my sketchy image of her, and if so, what could her unusual Atlantic reversemigration story tell us about eighteenth-century black women’s experiences more broadly? The issue was sources—would there be enough to reveal more about her? The main published source of information about Protten was a history of the mission in St. Thomas by Christian George Andreas Oldendorp, a Moravian missionary and church historian who visited the island in the 1760s. A man of wide-ranging curiosity about West Indian slavery, African religions and languages, and the development of Christianity among the enslaved population, he was an early practitioner of oral history, interviewing missionaries and slaves, some of whom had been with the mission for thirty years, and studied thousands of pages of mission reports and letters. His book, published in 1777 under the German title Geschichte der Mission der evangelishcen Brüder auf den Caribischen Inseln S. Thomas, S. Croix, und S. Jan, was translated into English in 1987 as A History of the Mission of the

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Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John and has become known as an excellent sourcebook of ethnographic observations about African cultures in Africa and the Americas. But it also gave a sympathetic view of the black lay workers, including Rebecca, Maria, and many others, who latched onto the mission and became the chief evangelists in the slave quarters. Oldendorp’s account gave some information about Rebecca, but mostly it conveyed a sense of the turn to Christianity by enslaved Africans and creoles as a powerful popular movement that welled up out of the frustrations of captivity and that, significantly, was largely led by women.15 For anyone wishing to follow Oldendorp’s documentary trail, all roads lead to Herrnhut, the small town in eastern Germany founded in 1727 as the headquarters of the Moravian Church. There, a church archive holds many hundreds of thousands of pages of records from the organization’s elaborate web of missions in the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia since the eighteenth century. For historians of the Black Atlantic, this archive is a relatively unknown warehouse of rare and often spectacular material about people of African descent, incongruously stored in a nondescript building in central Europe. Like their Jesuit and Franciscan predecessors, Moravian missionaries thoroughly documented their labors around the world, compiling thick dossiers of daily reports, journals, letters, and baptismal registers that were sent back to Herrnhut (and to other regional archives such as in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) for storage. This archival cornucopia had an uneasy history in the twentieth century. The town, deep in a corner of Saxony just a few miles from both the Czech and Polish borders, lay directly in the path of the Soviet army advancing on Berlin in spring 1945. The Soviets set fire to the town, destroying the church where the archives had been stored; fortunately the records had been removed and hidden for safekeeping, preserving a priceless documentary heritage. But after the war, in the German Democratic Republic, the new archive was virtually inaccessible to historians from the West, effectively shutting behind the Iron Curtain a rich source of material about African people throughout West Africa and the British, Dutch, and Danish West Indies until 1989. Since that time, scholars from Western Europe and the U.S. have gradually become more aware of the archive, but its remote location, and the fact that many of the documents were written in a crabbed medieval-style German handwriting that requires special training to read, have conspired to minimize accessibility further. These lingering obstacles notwithstanding, the archive holds some

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remarkable stories, as I discovered. Initially skeptical of finding much, as I searched through mission journals from St. Thomas in the 1730s and 1740s— the very records Oldendorp had researched in the 1760s—I kept coming across references to Rebecca, as she was then generally known, suggesting, I suspected, that she was a key figure in the early mission, especially for her evangelical outreach to women. In fact, she was all over the documents. I found descriptions of her very first meeting with the missionaries, of her literacy lessons and itinerant preaching to enslaved women, of her marriage to German missionary Matthaeus Freundlich, of her arrest and trial, and of the brutal struggle over Christianity that embroiled slaves and masters for years. I found a few letters Rebecca had written in Dutch, and two more in German. The archives also held records about her twenty years’ stay in Germany, the death of Freundlich, her marriage to the African Christian Protten, and their final years as missionaries and teachers in Christiansborg, the Danish trading fort on the Gold Coast of West Africa. Most of this information was short and fragmentary, usually no more than a sentence or two, scattered in different holdings. Still, such diffuse snippets were plentiful enough to provide the outline for nearly every stage of her life, from the West Indies to Europe to Africa, and they confirmed my view of her as an essential figure in the rise of eighteenth-century black evangelical Christianity, an equivalent in her time and place to her contemporaries GeorgeWhitefield and John Wesley. Her own story was a window onto the dramatic spectacle of a mass popular movement of enslaved people defying slaveowners by the hundreds to claim Christianity as their own religion—an African Caribbean outpost of the Great Awakening. And when, in the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen, I later discovered a transcript from Rebecca’s trial, it supplied crucial additional evidence from a non-Moravian source about the authorities’ perception of her as a dangerous influence who needed silencing. Locating and mining sources was naturally just a first step in reconstructing Rebecca’s life. The next challenge was how to use these archival buckshot —many of them ambiguous, almost all of them written by someone else—as small building blocks for a narrative. How to put Rebecca at the center of her own world rather than simply cast her as the reflection of someone else’s? One technique was to milk as much out of each fragment as possible, by focusing on something she said or did, then exploring possible shades of meaning behind an action or idea. Historians do this all the time, and the resulting speculation (“she might have meant this, she could have done that”) can result in varying degrees of helpfulness. The practice can also lead to lots of textual

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deconstruction about the sources’ authorial intent and perception, some of which is useful, but too much of which can bog down a narrative. Still, such strategies are essential to transcending limitations in evidence. Building layers of context, as students of microhistory note, was also essential to situating Rebecca in particular times and places. Her life would make little sense to most readers without exploring the world of plantation slavery in the Danish Caribbean, the backdrop of German Pietism from which the Moravian Brethren came, the confrontation of African religions and Protestant Christianity, and so on. But too much context posed its own risk of swaddling the protagonist in enough protective layers to obscure readers’ sight of her. This problem became most noticeable as I contemplated the tripartite division of her life story. Her biography embodied mobility above all—geographic, social, and spiritual movement, but in different ways according to the circumstances. As a young person in the Caribbean, born about 1718, she was kidnapped on Antigua and sold as a slave to St. Thomas, where in time she moved from slavery to emancipation, from spiritual wandering to Christian conversion, from neophyte to evangelical leader to trial defendant. She was forever on the go, hiking long miles over rugged terrain to preach to enslaved plantation workers. The records made repeated reference to these kinds of activities, and it was relatively easy to show Rebecca as a powerful and energetic figure, full of physical and emotional strength, who saw herself on the frontlines of a divine mission, and around whom hundreds of enslaved people clustered and organized. And then, only twenty-four, at the height of her influence, she left St. Thomas for Germany. There the story took a different turn. Exhausted by imprisonment and her lucky release from jail, she intended to stay a short time, but it did not work out that way. After her first husband died, she remarried and settled into a life of relative comfort in Moravian congregational towns far from the frenetic and violent world she knew in the West Indies. Like her friend Maria, whom she joined in Germany, Rebecca had stature and some authority in the church, rising to a mid-level supervisory position, but she was no longer the center of any popular upsurge, the voice of any transformative movement. No amount of contextual elaboration from my narrator’s point of view could camouflage the fact that her life represented something far different at this point than what I had hitherto constructed it to be. Rebecca was not a progenitor of a religious movement that would have profound global repercussions, but a woman of color living quietly in Europe, surrounded almost entirely by white people. Of course I

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still sought to center her in that world, but it was a very different kind of emotional center. Framing the next phase of her life was in some ways even harder because the narrative focus shifted to her second husband, Christian Protten, whose life was in some ways just as interesting as hers. The son of an African woman and a Danish soldier, he was born in 1715 in or near Christiansborg, the Danish fort and slave-trading outpost on the Gold Coast. He was educated in a Danish school at the fort, then taken to Denmark at ten for further instruction in religion and trade. In the mid-1730s, he wrote a short autobiography describing a sense of spiritual and cultural rootlessness stemming from his divided heritage, but claiming to have found peace at last in the Moravian Church. He returned to Africa in the late 1730s as a missionary, but had no luck; his fellow Africans were not interested in what he was saying, and at one point a Dutch colonial governor threw him jail as a troublemaker. So he returned to Germany, where he met and married Rebecca in 1745, the couple becoming prominent examples of the church’s interracial character and, like Maria, even featured in their own family portrait. Christian Protten’s earlier travels, however, set the tone for the remainder of his life. Feeling at home neither in Europe or Africa, he shuttled between them, at one point leaving Rebecca alone in Germany for five years in the 1750s. Finally she accompanied him to Africa in 1764 where, after his death in 1769, she lived in poorly documented circumstances until her death in 1780. Because Christian left several thick journals of his travels and dozens of letters to church and royal patrons in Germany and Denmark, his paper trail was much more extensive than his wife’s, describing at length his sojourns in West Africa and returning constantly to his feelings of emotional torment. As a result, Christian’s story took over the narrative of the last segment of her life, and in developing his counterpoint to Rebecca’s trajectory of spiritual selfassurance and religious leadership, I became aware that at times she receded in her own tale as her identity turned much more on being a helpmeet. Though she taught school in West Africa before dying in anonymity, her impact is impossible to gauge, and again this phase of her life was far removed from the radical and dangerous organizing work she had done in her youth. How does a historian recount the life of one whose greatest influence flourished and was over in a few years, but who lived many years longer out of the limelight? I chose to deal with these narrative discrepancies by recounting her life’s progression in straightforward chronological fashion, attempting to show that each phase illustrated something different and important, not only about

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the way one woman negotiated the perils and prospects of the eighteenthcentury Atlantic, but also about the particular place and cultures with which her life intersected. At some point I became aware, however, that the story, and the outcome, could take at least two alternative forms depending on what the ultimate message was. What if, for example, Rebecca’s and Christian’s lives were framed as two parallel, and remarkably similar, stories unfolding on opposite sides of the ocean at exactly the same time? In alternating chapters one could depict the two protagonists, born three years apart to African and European parents, as spiritual wanderers who turn to Christianity (in both cases the Moravian Church), attempt to transcend society’s limitations, and embark on dangerous missions (she in the Caribbean, he in Africa), both even being imprisoned for their troubles. The point-counterpoint narrative possibilities were striking, especially as both lives led, by divergent routes, to Germany, where they intersected, synchronized, moved forward together, separated, and came together again. That approach would make for a very different book, one that was less about a singular woman’s sojourns (though that would still be a central aspect of the story) than about two overlapping lives working themselves out as far as individual will and larger historical forces allowed. Sometimes I wish I had written that book. Another possibility would have been to amplify the larger historical drama in which I sought to embed Rebecca’s life story—the rise of black Protestant Christianity as a potent religious force that reshaped the Atlantic world, fueled the antislavery movement, and remained a focal point for African American cultural life and political activism for centuries. One potential flaw of focusing on her life is that after her departure from the Caribbean in 1742, the transformative forces I argue she helped set in motion drop out of the narrative until the book’s epilogue briefly revisits the subject. What if, after tracking her journey to Europe, a different point-counterpoint method interwove her continuing story with that of the world she left behind? Alternating chapters could explore in greater detail how the germinating evangelical culture of the slaves stagnated for a while in her absence before a resurgence in the 1750s; how Africans and Creoles negotiated identities under slavery through the church; and how the example of black religious activism in the Caribbean influenced similar events in mainland North America and elsewhere. That approach would augment the point that, even as Rebecca’s own story took different turns, her influence lived on in larger ways. Sometimes I wish I had written that book, too. Be that as it may, the story of Rebecca Protten, in whatever form, can

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illustrate several broader points. One is that despite their limitations, colonial and ecclesiastical archives are often still the only source bases we have, and their secrets are far from tapped out. Where women of color were found throughout the early modern Atlantic world, we would expect them to leave archival footprints ranging from very faint to bold, and so they did, sometimes in outlines discernible enough to reveal traces of their lived experience. Stepping outside the Anglophone world when possible to think across and between colonial spaces can yield not only potentially rich new source material, but perhaps even undiscovered textual narratives that might speak directly of women’s agency while offering comparative insights into women’s experiences throughout the Black Atlantic. Second, given the paucity of formal narratives by women like those by Equiano, Venture Smith, or Boston King, we can redefine the very concept of narrative to include the kinds of archival fragments by and about African American women that usually constitute our chief source of information. Cryptic and incomplete though they are, these textual splinters represent a form of narration, a collective memoir left by women. And such documentary shrapnel from planters’ and travelers’ journals, an occasional stray letter written by enslaved people themselves, and clues gathered from archaeology and material culture are often just as valuable as more straightforward memoirs. Many of these sources are unscripted, improvised, spontaneous, and thus in some cases less guarded and more candid than a formal autobiographical structure allows. And these kinds of shards, assembled into some kind of narrative coherence, can open up women’s lives to literary archaeology, competing interpretation, and the careful scrutiny and hard choices long characteristic of the biographical genre. These relatively few lives can speak volumes about the many. While Rebecca Protten’s experiences by no means typified those of black women in the eighteenth century, they represented powerful impulses presumably shared by most: the attempt by enslaved and free black women to contest the effects of the slave trade; the search for self-determination and free will; and the quest for spiritual reckoning with a capsized world. Such lessons are what a life can teach us: the grain of sand waiting to become a pearl.

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Chapter five

Recovered Lives as a Window into the Enslaved Family cassandra pybus

On November 25, 1783, a war-weary George Washington finally laid claim to thirteen colonies of America, marching his victorious army through Manhattan streets packed with cheering patriots, their hats and bonnets adorned with ribbon cockades or sprigs of laurel. The public jubilation lasted for days, culminating in a spectacular display of fireworks to celebrate Washington’s victory. Yet, for all his great victory, Washington’s satisfaction was diminished by the magnitude of the loyalist exodus that saw 60,000 people leave America, including many thousands of runaway slaves.1 At Staten Island, just beyond his reach, hundreds of runaways were stowed aboard the last of the British fleet waiting for a fair wind to take them to Nova Scotia. From that safe vantage point they would have watched Washington’s triumphal fireworks light up the clear night sky. On the ship Concord, Daniel Payne had his own triumph to celebrate: only three years before, he was enslaved on Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation; now he was leaving America as a free man, and there was no way the general could stop him.2 I can tell you that Daniel Payne was a free man on board the Concord at Staten Island in the last week of November 1783 because of a remarkable document compiled by British authorities in the last frenetic months of their evacuation of America. The Book of Negroes, as it was called, was a meticulous list drawn up between May and November 1783, in which the British recorded the personal details of some 3,000 African Americans evacuated to Nova Scotia and elsewhere, the great majority of whom were originally enslaved workers who had defected to the British over the course of the long

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conflict. The list is organized by ship, with each person given a name, brief description, putative owner’s name, date of absconding, geographic location, a loyalist sponsor where appropriate and, occasionally, the name of a present owner. Sometimes women are listed with their young children, and here and there are noted as a wife, but in the main each person is recorded as a sole individual without any apparent connection to others on the same ship. The ages recorded of listed individuals are wildly inaccurate, the times of absconding can be ambiguous, and the names often completely misheard, but despite these flaws, the Book of Negroes is an extraordinary resource; historians simply do not have demographic data like this about enslaved people in America in the eighteenth century.3 The stories of the people whose names are listed in the Book of Negroes could be as heroic and awe-inspiring as any to come out of the revolutionary moment in American history, but nobody knows about them because enslaved individuals are largely invisible in the historical record. Of course, we do know that tens of thousands of enslaved people were engaged in the revolution, but know very little about their personal experiences. The archives allow us glimpses of action by enslaved subjects, which allow some individuals to make fleeting appearances in historical narratives; but to create a sustained biographical account of an enslaved actor in the revolutionary drama seems impossible, because recovering the lives of enslaved individuals from the detritus of history is extraordinarily difficult.4 In order to recover the lives of enslaved people, it is necessary to have some sort of biographic information of the kind that Boston King and David George provided in their conversion narratives, which have been thoroughly mined in accounts of black participation in the revolution by Ellen Wilson Gibson, Sylvia Frey, Gary Nash, Simon Schama, Maya Jasanoff, and myself, among others.5 Most recently the letters and writings of John Kizell have enabled Kevin Lowther to create a biography, but the biographical detail is from Africa and Lowther has next to no information about Kizell’s life in colonial America or his actual participation in the revolutionary upheaval.6 Reduced to the status of chattel and almost always illiterate, enslaved individuals leave the faintest of traces in the archival record of colonial and revolutionary America. Historians will search a very long time to find another enslaved subject as clearly individuated in the records as Elizabeth Hemings, the matriarch at the heart of Annette Gordon-Reed’s monumental study, The Hemingses of Monticello.7 What makes this woman and her children seem special is that they have a surname recorded in official documentation and

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private papers. “Betty Hemings” was separately identified among the slave property John Wayles willed Jefferson’s wife, and Jefferson continued to employ her full name consistently in his own accounts, though in the case of her children he used their surname erratically. In reconstructing the biography of Elizabeth Hemings and her family, Gordon-Reed has mined the huge archival trove of Jefferson’s papers, especially his meticulous (if carefully self-censored) plantation records and diaries, where the Hemingses can be individually identified. Still, we would be wrong to conclude that the Hemings family biography can be written because they occupied a unique position in the household of an exemplary man. In truth, there is not that much to be found about the Hemingses in Jefferson’s papers and it is the determined detective work of Gordon-Reed, together with earlier work by Cinder Stanton, that has enabled the Hemingses’ story to be fully told. 8 Nor should the public attention that is now lavished on that one family lead us to conclude that the Hemings family of Monticello was sui generis. There were many families like the Hemingses in eighteenth-century Virginia, we just need to look for them. That is no easy matter. Even the carefully nurtured archives of the Virginia elites are opaque when it comes to their enslaved property. The prerevolutionary documents relating to slave property that survive—such as wills, estate inventories, or lists of tithable property—have the same slave names over and over, with no way of distinguishing one person from another. One example is a list of sixty-two tithable slaves for the plantation of Virginia grandee Anthony Walke, recorded in 1775, which begins with six males each called Jemmy.9 No doubt Walke could distinguish these individuals by referring to them as Big Jemmy, Little Jemmy, African Jemmy, Jemmy Waggoner, and so forth, but such signifiers were rarely committed to paper. In any case, the signifiers changed as individuals grew older, were transferred to another plantation, took up another line of work, were given to a family member, or were sold to another owner. How then can historians possibly hope to provide enslaved subjects with the dignity of individual identities and biographies? The archives with which we work propel us into the uncomfortable position of discussing enslaved Africans just the way their owners did, as an undifferentiated mass. What is needed is a shift in attention. If we look with new eyes it is possible to unlock an individual story, and the Book of Negroes provides a key to many stories. The most significant thing about this unique document is that the majority of people listed in the Book of Negroes have a surname. This

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was first noticed by Herbert Gutman, one of the few historians to pay attention to the Book of Negroes, and he was excited to see that enslaved Africans had adopted familial surnames to identify and connect their kin as early as the 1780s. It was his view that these black evacuees had recently chosen their surnames as a statement of their new selfhood. He saw the fact that a majority of men listed in the Book of Negroes gave a surname that was not their putative owner’s name as “a powerful 18th Century African American desire to define their immediate slave families in ways that symbolically separated them from their owner.”10 To make his case, Gutman singled out Washington’s runaway Daniel Payne for special notice, believing that this young man had deliberately chosen a surname that was emphatically not the name of his illustrious master. This observation was made nearly four decades ago, and much more work has been done on slave families since Gutman’s groundbreaking book, but his view that newly emancipated people had freshly chosen their surnames as an assertion of their independence has remained a common assumption in the historiography. I made this assumption myself when I wrote Epic Journeys of Freedom, but closer interrogation of the entries in the Book of Negroes has revealed this was generally not the case, certainly not for people from the Lower Chesapeake in Virginia, who make up by far the largest cohort of slave runaways. After several years of cross-referencing the family surnames for the people from the Lower Chesapeake, I have concluded that surnames had been in use for two or three generations and were carried through the male line, probably as a way of identifying and locating enslaved families who could be widely dispersed through sale, property transfers, inheritances, marriages, and business transactions. The common pattern was for women to adopt the surnames of their husbands and children to take the surnames of their fathers. The surname usually can be linked back to an original owner, but there are also some people whose surname may have been that of a white father, as was the case for Betty Hemings, or rarer still the surname of a free black person. While the use of surnames is not entirely consistent in the listings in the Book of Negroes, it is quite consistent by the time these families were settled in Nova Scotia. The strong evidence for slave surnames that can be tracked into the seventeenth century, at least in the slave community of Tidewater Virginia, suggests that there was a prevalence of male-centered families in the Creole slave community that had existed for several generations. Take the case of George Washington’s slave Daniel Payne, whose name so excited Herbert Gutman.

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What Gutman entirely missed was that the Washington family and the Payne family were close neighbors from the seventeenth century and were connected through marriage, both in Westmoreland County and later in Fairfax County.11 My research into their familial connections strongly suggests that Daniel Payne’s ancestor was originally enslaved to the Payne family and took that surname. Because slave marriages across plantations were common, children and grandchildren with the Payne surname were widely dispersed through the neighborhood. So we find that Payne was a family surname among enslaved workers at the Lee plantation of Stafford Hall, which was very close to the Payne and Washington plantations in Westmoreland County.12 Enslaved workers with the surname Payne would also be dispersed through dowries, inheritance, and property transfers. In 1724, there was a land transfer between a member of the Payne family and Augustine Washington for the tobacco plantation on Pope’s Creek Westmoreland County, where George Washington was born.13 Hence it is highly likely that Payne was a surname of an enslaved worker owned by Augustine Washington and that a man named Payne, father or grandfather to Daniel, was among the ten slaves George Washington inherited from his father. It is the recording of surnames that make the Book of Negroes such a fabulous source, but unlocking the implications of the names, as well as the meaning of the other vital demographic information contained in that document, requires cross-referencing with other sources created by the British, especially the muster of black settlers at Birchtown, drawn up during 1783 and 1784 for the purposes of distributing rations to people at the biggest black settlement in Nova Scotia. In this list, everyone has a surname and age, and sometimes occupation. Crucially, it is organized by households, with the names and ages of wives, children, and other household members.14 There are also some musters for the smaller settlements of Digby and Annapolis, land grant schedules, parish records for births, deaths, and marriages, and various lists of people migrating to Sierra Leone in 1791; all are partial lists and frustratingly opaque, but provide surnames and some demographic information that illuminates and clarifies information in the Book of Negroes. The largest cohort of runaways in the Book of Negroes came from the region around the maritime port of Norfolk, and the task of locating these individuals is made possible because of the rich archival sources for that region, of which the most invaluable resource is the Norfolk Tithable lists (1730– 1780) that survive largely intact. This extraordinary data set was kept for tax purposes and is divided into about ten specific geographic areas in Norfolk

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County and records the slave property aged between sixteen and sixty belonging to named heads of households on which a tax must be paid.15 A far less complete set of tithables exist for neighboring Princess Anne County between 1763 and 1784, listing slave property above age twelve.16 These tithable lists are problematic, as slave owners had a financial incentive not to report the extent of their slave property and people who might be working away or hired out were usually not listed. Names in the tithables are unstable and unreliable because enslaved property was given only one name, invariably diminutive, or comical, or mockingly grandiose, such as you might give to a horse, and not always the name the individual chose to use. Surnames were never acknowledged for enslaved people, and rarely even for free blacks, while family members were not identified. Owners did recognize the familial bonds among their enslaved property in the private sphere; however, in the public sphere these slaves were accorded no more individuality than livestock. Runaway notices tell us that slave owners knew their chattel had surnames, but this was never given any official or public endorsement. So locating enslaved individuals and families in the historical landscape of prerevolutionary Virginia has proved a challenge, but reading the Book of Negroes against the colonial records from Virginia has allowed me to construct life trajectories, kin relationships, naming patterns, and religious affiliations for hundreds of people from the Lower Chesapeake.17 Here then is one life story.

* * * In the Book of Negroes for the ship L’Abondance bound for Nova Scotia is this entry: “Jane Thomson, 70, worn out, with a grandchild 5 years old. Says she was born free; lived with Col. Tucker, Norfolk, Virginia; left him 6 years ago.” Jane had defected to Lord Dunmore in 1776 when she was already well into her fifties. The muster at the settlement of Birchtown recorded that she was sixty years old and living in the household of Hannah Jackson, with children Peter and Robert Jackson, who were identified as her grandsons. Hannah Jackson looks to be a widow and she also defected to Lord Dunmore in 1776 and traveled on the same ship as Jane Thompson, described as “Formerly the property of Thomas Newton, Norfolk, Virginia.” There was an obvious connection between the two women since Thomas Newton was a business associate and close friend of Colonel Robert Tucker, and his son married Tucker’s daughter. Hannah was never listed as the property of the Tucker family, so

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it seems unlikely she was the daughter of Jane, and I could find no reason to connect her to any other Jacksons in the Book of Negroes. The chance discovery of a Nova Scotia land transfer revealed the critical detail that Jane Thompson was the mother of James Jackson, age fifty, listed on the ship London, in the employ of Captain Henry Mowatt of the Royal Navy.18 He was described as “Formerly slave to late Robert Tucker, Norfolk, Virginia,” recruited as a pilot for Lord Dunmore. James Jackson was given a land grant on Nutt Island with three other black pilots and their families, including his adult son, London Jackson, who defected to the British five years after his father at the end of 1780, when General Leslie briefly occupied Hampton and Portsmouth.19 London Jackson also traveled with Mowatt and was described as “Formerly slave to William Ballad, Hampton, Virginia.” This evidence of a family tie between James Jackson and Jane Thompson told me that Hannah was Jane’s daughter-in-law, and that Hannah’s husband must have been another son with the surname Jackson, presumed dead. I was then able to indentify another son in addition to James Jackson, in the form of John Jackson, who traveled alone on the same ship as Jane Thompson and also defected to General Leslie in Hampton late in 1780. He gave the name of his owner as Anthony Walke, who lived in Princess Ann County but was also a Norfolk merchant and associate of Colonel Robert Tucker. In the Birchtown muster, John Jackson is said to be much older, fortyone, with a wife Nancy, thirty-two, who corresponded to a woman in the Book of Negroes named Nelly Jackson, from Hampton, Virginia, who also defected to General Leslie in 1780 and traveled to Nova Scotia with James and London Jackson. If Jane Thompson had daughters in Nova Scotia, they are difficult to identify because women took their husband’s names. However, in the Birchtown muster a Betty Tucker is listed next to Jane Thompson. Betty Tucker must have come to Nova Scotia on a ship that evaded inspection and is not listed in the Book of Negroes, but her name and her proximity to Jane Thompson suggest a kin connection and I think she could be Jane Thompson’s daughter. Her husband was James Tucker, age fifty-five, who was absent from Birchtown at the time of the muster. He traveled to Nova Scotia with the Royal Artillery Department on one of the last ships to leave New York and is described as “Formerly slave to Capt. McFips, Norfolk, Virginia,” said to have left with Lord Dunmore. The name of his owner is misspelled; his long-term owner was Captain John Phrip, the Norfolk ferryman, a close friend of Colonel Robert Tucker, and the tithables indicate his original owner was John Tucker,

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who was also the original owner of Jane Thompson and the man from whom Colonel Robert Tucker inherited most of his mercantile empire. In the process of interrogating the complex kin relationships of white slave owners in the Lower Chesapeake, I was struck by how black patterns of kinship echoed that of their masters. This drew my attention to Grace Thompson, a widow who traveled to Nova Scotia with two of her daughters on the same ship as Jane Thompson, and who settled nearby in Birchtown. Grace and her daughters are described as “Formerly the property of Edward Thewston of Norfolk County, Virginia.” Again, the owner’s name is misspelled; he was Edward Thruston and was the uncle of Colonel Robert Tucker. Given the close connections between Tucker and Thruston, it seemed a real possibility that Grace was kin to Jane Thompson. There was a demonstrable connection between Grace Thompson and James Thompson, twenty-five, who had a wife, which suggested Grace was his sister-in-law. He also traveled on the same ship and also settled with his wife close to her at Birchtown. James is described as “Formerly the property of Edward Cooper, Hampton, Virginia,” and the time given for his defection indicates that he ran to General Leslie at the same time as John Jackson and London Jackson. He seems to be another son of Jane Thompson and Grace her daughter-in-law.20 This evidence begged the question of why this woman was named Jane Thompson and why she was said to be “born free” when her children were clearly enslaved. The answer to this conundrum was found in the most unlikely place: records of a commission established in London to process claims for compensation from refugee loyalists. Among the many Virginian claims for compensation was a belated claim from a Norfolk sailmaker named Talbot Thompson, lodged in February 1786 on behalf of his illiterate widow, Jeanne Thompson, who was living in Nova Scotia. Attached to the claim was a statement from the British governor of New York in 1782, acknowledging the death of Thompson and granting his widow Jane Thompson the right to administer his estate. 21 I first read Talbot Thompson’s claim some six years ago, and it had never dawned on me that this was a black man so I paid it no attention, until I happened upon his entry in the Norfolk Tithable list, where he was listed as a free black. Could it be that my Jane Thompson was the widow of this man, I wondered? Professor Michel Nicholls from the University of Utah supplied the answer to that question when he confirmed that Talbot Thompson’s wife was a slave of Colonel Robert Tucker before she was manumitted in 1769.22 Having now established to my own satisfaction that Jane Thompson had

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at least six children and five grandchildren who all defected to the British over a period of five years, I decided to try to reconstruct her biography.23 I had no idea how hard this would be, or how long it would take me, but what I found, after years of searching and cross-referencing a veritable mountain of arcane historical documents, is a remarkable story of a family; of freedom sought and won; of exhilarating achievements as well as tragedies and terrible disappointments: the stuff all human endeavor is built from.

* * * Jane was originally the property of John Tucker, a merchant mariner who came to Virginia with his brother at the turn of the century to extend their family’s Caribbean trading network. John Tucker called her Jenny or Jincy in his tithable lists and she was probably enslaved to him since her birth was as the child of his slave woman, Sabina. She first appears in his tithables in 1735 when she is about 16. She and Sabina are the only two females in John Tucker’s slave list; all the other slaves were maritime workers such boatmen, caulkers, coopers, pilots, and skippers, and their names regularly come and go in the tithable list. The Tucker brothers brought with them the Caribbean practice of conferring a high degree of authority and freedom of movement on elite maritime workers, so these slaves enjoyed an unusual level of independence and could work as the master of vessels in charge of the enslaved crew away for long periods trading around the Chesapeake, or the more distant Caribbean islands. 24 In 1737 John Tucker died, leaving the Tucker mercantile empire to his nephew Colonel Robert Tucker. The inheritance included Jane and more than a dozen valuable maritime artisans who manned and maintained the trading fleet. His will freed two of these men, called by him Caesar and Whitehaven, who doubtless called themselves by different names.25 They were not technically free because after 1723 it was not legal to manumit slaves in a will, and it is likely they continued to work for Colonel Robert Tucker as free men. I believe one of them was the man known as Matthew Doogood, named as free in Colonel Tucker’s tithable lists. He called himself Matthew Tucker, he told the Loyalist Claims Commission years later in London after he too defected to Lord Dunmore. 26 It is impossible to know what if any was his kin relationship to Jane. Another of the inherited slaves who also defected was a man who called himself Joseph Tucker, known as Joe (later Old Joe) in the tithables who was either Jane’s father or brother.27

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Jane came into Colonel Tucker’s household with several small children who were automatically his property also. Her husband is unknown, although he may have been one of the maritime slaves inherited from John Tucker. He had the surname Jackson, which probably derived from an extensive maritime family of that name in Norfolk. Given that Jane’s children were automatically the property of her owner, it made good economic sense for Colonel Tucker to retain the ownership of her husband. Of course, they were not married in any formal sense, as the sacrament of marriage was not allowed to slaves, but more than likely they were permitted to live in a domestic union and parent their children together in one of the many simple dwellings that Tucker owned in Norfolk, at least until the children were of an age to be put to work. Permitting the Jackson family to live together in a relatively stable domestic environment was a key element in Tucker’s labor management strategy. Like other Chesapeake slaveholders, he understood that cohesive slave families produced healthy children who would become valuable workers. Loving parents labored in their own time to grow vegetables and raise chickens to supplement the meager slave rations for their children; they tended to their children’s injuries and nursed their illnesses; and they patiently passed on to their children their own valuable skills. Any slave owner with a good head for business would grant an indulgence that transferred the cost of reproducing and training a slave labor force from master to slave. In this Colonel Tucker was a man of his time and place, though he may have been considered more indulgent than most. Just how many children were in the Jackson family, or how long they were able to live as family unit, cannot be surely known. The only traces of Jane’s children can be found in Tucker’s tithable lists over thirty years and the inventory of his estate drawn up at his death in 1767. All that can be known with certainty is that Jane had a son whose name was James Jackson and who was about four years old when he became the property of Colonel Tucker, who called him Jemmy. There appears to have also been a son named Edward Jackson, known as Ned, and doubtless Jane had more Jackson children, but only two additional children can be confidently identified: a daughter, Betty, born around 1740, and John, born about 1741. When Colonel Tucker married in April 1739, Jane was an excellent choice as a personal maid and wet nurse for his bride, seventeen-year-old Joanna Corbin, whose first child, named Frances for Tucker’s mother, was born in April 1740. Frances would have been given to Jane to nurse along with her

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own baby, but she died six weeks later. Over the period of her marriage, Joanna Tucker gave birth to eighteen children, most of whom Jane would have nursed, and nine of these babies stopped breathing before they could walk. There is no doubt that Jane held a special place in the Tucker household, where she was surely the intimate of Joanna Tucker, with whom she shared the painful loss of nine struggling infants. Likewise, she was closely bound to the Tucker children whom she nursed into healthy adulthood, who were childhood playmates for her own children.28 However much she was clearly treasured within the Colonel Tucker’s family, Jane was still property and her family life was necessarily fractured by the demands of her owner. Nevertheless, Tucker was a progressive master who tried to honor the customary rights of enslaved people to not work on Sunday and even part of Saturday. Where the family’s needs encroached on her free time, Jane could claim compensation, in time or money. While her children were small she had them with her, and she had part of Saturday and all day Sunday to spend with her family and tend to her garden and livestock.29 She lived a very different life from that of enslaved workers on the plantation. The town of Norfolk was a fluid, multiethnic, rough-and-tumble place, teeming with transients who mingled with enslaved locals in the ubiquitous taverns and the crooked lanes for raucous nights of drinking, gambling, fighting, whoring, and dancing. A chronic skill shortage in Norfolk meant that skilled slaves were in a position to negotiate for wages and earn substantial amounts of money, either being hired out by their owners on an incomeshare basis, or by hiring themselves in their own time. As well as the skilled artisans such as pilots, skippers, sailmakers, carpenters, and coopers, there was always a high demand for laborers and watermen to ferry goods across the river or unload or dispatch cargo at the wharves. Women like Jane could hire out as a spinner, weaver, cook, or seamstress. The market held in the town square three days a week presented commercial opportunities for Jane and her children to sell home-brewed beer, cakes and bread, eggs and poultry, and the vegetables and fruit grown in their garden plot.30 By the early 1750s, the Jacksons were no longer a coherent family group. James was a skipper working independently as a pilot in Hampton Roads, Betty worked in the Tucker house in Norfolk and was by then probably married to James Tucker, Edward was trained as a cooper and worked in the Tucker mercantile business across the river in Portsmouth, and a few years later John also moved to Portsmouth. By this time, their father was absent or dead and Jane had formed a new relationship with another enslaved

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mariner who was working independently as the skipper of a small vessel that carried mercantile goods up the James and York rivers.31 This man was Talbot Thompson, technically the property of Alexander Mckenzie, an English merchant in Williamsburg and Elizabeth City, but who operated as an independent contractor to other merchants. He did not work for Colonel Robert Tucker, but there were plenty of reasons for him to know Tucker’s slave Jane. Interaction between Tucker and Alexander Mckenzie was inevitable: they were in the same business, both were appointed by the Council of Colonial Virginia as commissioners to supply the British fleet at the siege of Louisbourg, and Colonel Tucker’s closest friend and godfather to his children was Mckenzie’s stepson.32 Since so very little can be known about the lives of enslaved individuals in the eighteenth century, it is not possible to say when Talbot and Jane began to live together as man and wife. The ages of their sons suggest that they had begun their relationship by 1750 and had at least two children: Samuel Thompson, born about 1752, and James Thompson, born soon after. Both children were the property of Colonel Tucker and they can be located in his slave inventory. It is unlikely that the family lived together on any permanent basis until 1758, when Mckenzie returned to live in Britain, leaving his power of attorney to Williamsburg lawyer Benjamin Waller. Mckenzie’s instruction was that Talbot Thompson could continue to hire out, and only be sold to a person of his “own liking.” It was not Thompson’s liking to be sold to any person, so he proposed that over the next five years he would be permitted to hire out in his free time to earn the sixty pounds necessary to buy his freedom. In making this arrangement, he later reported, he was “encouraged by gentlemen who knew his services and promised to assist him.” He did not supply the names of these gentlemen, but Colonel Tucker was sure to have been one of them.33 For Talbot Thompson, to be living and working independently was an unusual state of affairs, but not unique for elite slave artisans who hired out.34 At some stage he must have moved to Norfolk, which had become the maritime center of Virginia with the addition of the port of Portsmouth across the Elizabeth River, and its greatly increased mercantile capacity. In addition to a shipbuilding yard on the northern side of Norfolk, there was another large shipyard in Portsmouth, and at nearby Gosport the powerful chairman of the association of merchants, Andrew Sprowle, built a massive maritime complex for the Royal Navy to refit its North American fleet. Norfolk presented a host of opportunities for individual enterprise and

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personal freedom unknown to the vast majority of enslaved people. The population of the town at mid-century was about two thousand adults, and roughly half of the town inhabitants were enslaved people, engaged in a vast array of skilled and unskilled work. Hiring out was a regular pattern of labor management, so enslaved people got to interact closely with a whole range of white people who did not have the power of life and death over them. In the one- or two-room wooden houses that sprang up all around the town, white and black people lived side by side, and their children played together in the streets. On the waterfront, in the shipyards, at the rope works, shipwrights, sailmakers, coopers, and carpenters, enslaved and free, worked alongside their white counterparts, while sloops and brigantines constantly came and went in the Elizabeth River with racially mixed crews.35 This entrepreneurial environment provided plenty of opportunity for Talbot Thompson, who set himself up as a sailmaker. In less than five years, in the spring of 1761, he paid Benjamin Waller his purchase price of sixty pounds. This transaction did not make him a free man; he might now be his own master, but he could not confer freedom on himself. Nor could he be directly manumitted by Waller. The Commonwealth of Virginia took a dim view of giving freedom to slaves. Any attempt to manumit an enslaved person in a will or a legal deed had no legitimacy, and churchwardens were instructed to seize any persons so freed and sell them at public auction. The 1723 law that required that an enslaved person could be set free only at the discretion of the governor and council as a reward for “meritorious service,” as set out in a petition to the council from the slave owner. Between 1723 and 1761, the council had manumitted only a handful of people. Having paid his hard-earned money to Benjamin Waller, Talbot Thompson was in the extraordinary position of being both master and slave. A determined man with the backing of powerful white men, he lodged a petition to the governor’s council on his own behalf with a testimonial from Waller. The petition stressed “long, faithful and extraordinary services” to his former master, rather than the economic reality that he purchased himself from Mckenzie, and humbly requested that Benjamin Waller “be permitted and authorized to manumit and set free the Petitioner.”36 It no doubt helped his case that the most prominent members of the council were Colonel Tucker’s close relatives.37 In November 1761, the council took the unique step of agreeing to a petition from a slave. Talbot Thompson made history for being the first enslaved Virginian in the eighteenth century to officially succeed at buying his own freedom.

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Thompson wasted no time in establishing himself as a free agent who could run his own business enterprise. On May 18, 1762, he was in the courthouse in neighboring Princess Anne County to have Joseph and Peter Anderson, eleven and eight respectively, bound over to him to be apprentice sailmakers.38 It was remarkable enough for a free black man to take on apprentices, and even more remarkable considering that these two boys belonged to one of the few free black families in Virginia, whose status predated the 1723 legislation. Indeed, it was the emancipation of the Anderson family by John Flucher in 1711 that triggered the legislative process that put an end to individual manumission. The duplicitous and heavy-handed treatment meted out to this family is a story in itself and provides a stark indication of the unique position that Talbot Thompson had carved out.39

* * * White Virginians were determined to keep free blacks in an utterly subordinate and dependent position. As Governor William Gooch explicitly stated, it was essential to curb “the pride of the manumitted slave” and make sure such people remained “sensible that a distinction ought to be made between their offspring and the descendants of an Englishman.”40 Free black men could not join the militia, serve on juries, or vote; at the same time, they were given extra tax burdens, with a tithe levied on them and their wives. Women married to enslaved men were particularly harassed and constantly in the court because they could not legally marry their husbands, so their children were considered bastards.41 Virginia law required that bastard children of mixed race be indentured until they were thirty.42 Vulnerable free blacks needed a network of support with other freed people to resist the persistent attempts to cheat them and re-enslave their children. Ned Anderson, known as Free Ned, eked out a living in the maritime industry, and he doubtless knew Talbot Thompson and may have sought out Thompson to apprentice his daughter’s children. Only a few months later, the churchwardens were ordered to bind Joseph Anderson to a major planter in the county, but the boy was not removed from Thompson and ten years later was listed as a taxable person in his household in the eastern division of the town of Norfolk.43 At that time, Talbot Thompson undertook to apprentice the two Anderson boys. He had sons of his own he might have trained to work in his sailmaking business, except that these boys were the property of Colonel Robert Tucker

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and their labor belonged to him. Colonel Tucker may have been indulgent in allowing Jane to live with her enterprising second husband as if she were a free woman, and doubtless he was happy for Samuel and James Thompson to live with their parents until they reached puberty, but how they were to be trained, and what work they did, was a matter for his own economic priorities. The only way Talbot Thompson could hope to incorporate his sons in his business was to purchase them. The market value for Virginia-born youths was well beyond his capacity to pay in 1762. The long-term option was for Thompson to negotiate to successively buy his sons, as he had bought himself; he could not have foreseen that Colonel Tucker would lose his wits and die within five years, leaving a mountain of insolvency that required every piece of his property to be sold to resolve his debts. The catastrophe for the Tucker family was a catastrophe for the JacksonThompson family also. By negotiating with the executors, Talbot Thompson managed to secure Jane’s future by purchasing her for the modest sum of five pounds, her assessed value in the estate inventory drawn up late in 1767.44 It seems also he was able to negotiate a deal for her close relative Joseph Tucker (“Old Joe” in the inventory), who was assessed as less than worthless, so the executors were happy to have someone take him off their hands. There was little else Thompson could do to secure the future of the rest of his family but plead with Tucker’s family and friends that his children and stepchildren not be sold away to strangers.45 When the terrible day of the auction arrived, there was no competitive bidding. Collusion between the executors and the bidders saw all the furniture and plates, as well as the new fashionable coach with its horses, bought for Joanna Tucker at a small fraction of their value.46 The fate of the more than fifty or so men, women, and children on offer at auction is far from clear, but the tithable lists reveal that Joanna Tucker and her son were able to retain ownership of the long-serving members of her household, as well as a considerable number of valuable coopers, millers, and bakers. This meant that Jane’s son John Jackson and her daughter Betty Tucker stayed as the property of the widow, and Edward Jackson, a skilled cooper, remained with Robert Tucker. James Jackson and James Thompson were the most valuable property on offer and seem to have remained working independently as skippers and pilots in the Elizabeth and James Rivers. They cannot be identified in the tithable lists, and the scant evidence suggests that while nominally the property of the Tuckers, James Jackson was regarded as a free man; but at some stage his younger half-brother, James Thompson, became the property of Edward Cooper, a pilot in Hampton. Samuel Thompson

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also appears to have been working independently as a millwright and sawyer on the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River, but was nominally the property of Tucker’s cousin Elizabeth Thruston, the owner of Samuel’s wife, Grace. It is worth speculating that Talbot Thompson came to an arrangement to repay the cost of purchase of his sons over a period of years as he had earlier bought himself. Such an arrangement would explain why Samuel Thompson never appeared in the tithable list of Elizabeth Thruston. Even after her marriage to Cornelius Calvert in 1772, when all her slaves, including Grace, were consistently named in Cornelius Calvert’s tithable list for the plantation near the Southern Branch, there was no Sam. However, in 1773 “Samuel Thompson, a free Negro” was named as a taxable head of household in his own right in Norfolk, listed just above the name of his father. Clearly, there was community recognition that Samuel Thompson was a free man, but he had no such legal status. So Cornelius Calvert was within his rights, some years later, when he claimed compensation for the loss to the British of a slave named Sam, described as “a millwright and sawyer aged 22.”47 So Talbot and Jane Thompson had the comfort of knowing that they could always be together and that their children and stepchildren lived in close proximity. Within a year, Talbot Thompson took the audacious step of petitioning to make Jane a free woman, explaining to the council that Colonel Tucker’s slave had lived with him as his wife “for many years last past,” and now that she was his property he was “desirous of releasing her from slavery.” Annexed to the petition was a statement from Robert Tucker, Jr., confirming Jane’s “fidelity, extraordinary services, and constant obedience” to his family. In June 1769 the governor and council took the view that Jane Thompson was deserving of freedom, and that Talbot Thompson be permitted to set his wife free. To have received formal manumission for two people in less than a decade was a tremendous achievement, and Thompson understood that it would be unacceptable to petition for the manumission of any more. On the eve of Christmas in 1770, Talbot and Jane Thompson became owners of a large piece of unencumbered property on Cumberland Street with a street frontage of 270 feet, a two-story frame house with a cellar, several smaller houses, orchards, gardens, stables, a piggery, and a dairy—all that was necessary for a very comfortable life.48 Only four years after Jane Thompson was put up for auction, she was living in a way no black woman in Virginia could realistically aspire to: a free woman, released from the demands of labor and married to a respectable man who provided them with a good living. More than a few white women might envy such a life.

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By 1772, Talbot Thompson was doing well enough to make a further investment in his workforce, and to this end he acquired an enslaved man who worked alongside Joseph Tucker and Peter Anderson, learning to cut and stitch canvas.49 The older apprentice, Joseph Anderson, proved unsuitable to the trade, and when he turned twenty-one he stopped working in the sail loft. Releasing him from his bond, Thompson may have arranged another apprenticeship for him with the shoemaker William Stevenson.50 These two tradesmen had a stronger than passing acquaintance; Stevenson was an early convert to Methodism, as were Talbot and Jane Thompson, and their wider family.51 It is unclear exactly when the Jackson-Thompson family fell under the sway of John Wesley’s radical ideology, but they almost certainly owed their conversion to the itinerant preachers Robert Williams and Joseph Pilmore, who came to Norfolk in 1772.52 The primary mission of these Methodist itinerants was to organize self-sustaining “classes” led by an exhorter from within the group, which would convene several times a week in individual homes, or on common ground, to share religious experiences. These early Methodist classes were racially mixed and could even be led by a black exhorter.53 Such intense and emotionally heightened affairs made for powerful bonds of fellowship among the newly saved. By 1774, there was a solid core of twenty to thirty converts in Portsmouth, and about the same number in Norfolk, mostly maritime artisans and workers, but also a couple of shipbuilders, some merchants, and several ships captains.54 It was no small matter that many of these ardent Methodists were also Talbot Thompson’s clients, especially the mighty Andrew Sprowle of Gosport, who controlled all colonial business for the Royal Navy.55 Talbot Thompson was doing especially well in the turbulent year of 1775. There is no evidence he was involved in the political controversies that galvanized Norfolk. He had not signed up with the Continental Association or joined the Sons of Liberty, and there is no way of knowing his reaction to the presence of Lord Dunmore in the estuary of the Elizabeth River in summer 1775. His business got a big boost in September that year when a hurricane swept through the estuary, shredding the sails of almost every vessel and driving the smaller vessels in Lord Dunmore’s fleet ashore.56 This presented a great business opportunity, but also was the first real test of his allegiance. To contribute to refitting the damaged warships would mark him as a loyalist sympathizer. He could be under no illusions about the treatment that would be dealt out to any free black seen to be partial to Lord Dunmore’s cause.

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On the other hand, the Royal Navy had been a major client for many years, and the patronage of Andrew Sprowle was an important element of Talbot Thompson’s remarkable success. To refuse to work on Dunmore’s ships would brand him disloyal and a rebel in the eyes of his major patron and client. Talbot Thompson chose to serve the Royal Navy. It would not have been a difficult choice. He had no reason to believe the Continental Association had his interests in mind, and as a free black man with an enslaved family he had to be concerned about the prospect of an independent Virginia. It was the colonial legislature, not the British parliament, that severely restricted the options of free blacks and made it next to impossible for slaves to be freed. Nothing in the patriot rhetoric suggested that this state of affairs was going to improve. An independent Commonwealth of Virginia could very well become a place where only white people were free citizens with inalienable rights. When James Jackson chose to throw in his lot with Lord Dunmore, he was embarking on a far more dangerous course than his stepfather. Maybe he was prepared to take the risk because of what he knew of James Somerset, a man who had previously lived in Norfolk as the property of a business associate of Colonel Tucker. James Somerset, like James Jackson, was one of the elite enslaved workers who had freedom of movement and a considerable level of independence.57 In 1768, he was taken to London where he subsequently became the subject of a celebrated legal case, presided over by Lord Mansfield, which effectively put an end to slavery in England. News of the Somerset decision spread like wildfire through the ports of the Atlantic, and James Jackson would certainly have heard of it. Although slave owners were careful not to talk openly about the Somerset case for fear of inciting slave flight, their enslaved workers knew about it anyway. A notice in the Virginia Gazette of June 16, 1774, made the telling observation that a runaway slave would attempt to get on board a British ship because of “the knowledge he has of the late determination of Somerset’s Case.”58 James Jackson also understood that the Royal Navy was a ticket to genuine freedom, and he had exactly the skills they most needed: he knew how to navigate the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River. It was the skills of black pilots like James Jackson that allowed Dunmore to move a flotilla of small private vessels carrying his small army up the Southern Branch to Great Bridge on the night of November 13 (1774?). From Great Bridge, Dunmore marched overland to take control of Kemp’s Landing, where he set about restoring his authority. Once he had raised the

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royal standard, Dunmore paid out on James Jackson’s gamble by distributing his infamous proclamation promising to give freedom to any slaves who chose to fight for the king.

* * * The fact that James Jackson and Talbot Thompson had already chosen to side with Lord Dunmore made defection an easier choice for their kinfolk. Whole families tried to go together, but that was not easily achieved, as most of the Tucker workforce was either hired out or sold off. The big problem was geography. The protection offered by Dunmore only applied in the limited spaces he actually controlled: a small fleet of warships in the river, a section of the Norfolk waterfront, and a rudimentary fort at Great Bridge. By 1775, Jane Thompson’s sons and daughters were spread across a number of owners in three or four different counties and a coordinated plan of escape was next to impossible; individuals had to seize the chance how and when it came. When Dunmore marched into Norfolk, nearly all the town’s elite had already evacuated, leaving their workforce behind, in the full expectation that these slaves would look after their property while they were gone. Instead, many of the most trusted slaves simply walked away and offered their services to the British. In the following week, the entire workforce of Joanna and Robert Tucker, Jr., came over to Dunmore, including Jane’s son Edward and daughter Betty (with her husband James Tucker), as well as Edward Jackson’s wife Hannah and their children. The close connections of those who had been the slaves of Colonel Robert Tucker ensured that by February 1776 nearly all of them had defected: the tithable lists after 1775 suggest that almost all Tucker’s original slave workforce left their various owners, taking with them their partners and children.59 However, John Jackson was not able to make a break from his new owner’s plantation on the Lymehaven River, at the far end of Princess Anne County.60 Nor was James Jackson able to draw his son London Jackson and half-brother James Thompson under Dunmore’s protective mantle. Both men were pilots in Hampton, but by December 1775 they were on their way to Philadelphia with their owners. 61 By the time London Jackson and James Thompson returned to Hampton, Lord Dunmore had long since left Virginia. The defeat of Dunmore’s forces of Great Bridge in December 1775 meant that Norfolk was no longer a safe place for a loyalist sympathizer, especially a free black. Taking a pitiful few belongings and the papers that proved their

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freedom and their property, Talbot and Jane Thompson sought refuge aboard Lord Dunmore’s fleet in the Elizabeth estuary. They took with them Jane’s daughter Betty Tucker, daughter-in law Hannah Jackson, and their various children. In such moments of adversity the bonds of Methodist fellowship were keenly felt, so perhaps the Thompson family found a berth on one of the ships of Andrew Sprowle. It could not have been comfortable, as every vessel was overflowing with refugees and bitter cold as winter set in, but it was safe from retribution. Or so they hoped. Huddled together on New Year’s Day, the waterborne loyalists watched in horror as the entire town of Norfolk was progressively engulfed in a raging fire. When the blaze was finally extinguished and the smoke dispersed, one of the largest towns in America was reduced to ashes. The terrible conflagration was not caused by Lord Dunmore, as was said at the time, but was the work of patriot militia going from house to house with firebrands.62 Talbot and Jane Thompson saw their house, the sail-loft, the stables, the piggery, and the orchard go up in flames. When the smoke had cleared, every item of comfort and respectability the Thompsons had owned, all they had worked for, was reduced to a charred ruin. They never set foot in Norfolk again. After the destruction of Norfolk, provisions for Dunmore’s floating town became scarce and he was desperate for flour. When a warship arrived in the river with several armed escort ships, carrying 100 marines and 250 crewmen, Dunmore was emboldened to create a base onshore. It was no coincidence that the site he chose was on Windmill Point, below Portsmouth, where Tucker’s mill and bakery complex had previously operated. Among Dunmore’s recruits were all Tucker’s millers, bakers, and the other artisans necessary to get the site functioning once again. The sailmaking skills of Talbot Thompson and Joseph Tucker were in demand to weatherproof temporary barracks being created for the Ethiopian Regiment, and while the men labored to make the site functioning and habitable, Jane Thompson, Betty Tucker, and Hannah Jackson were set to work with other women to sew uniforms from the bolts of heavy linen Dunmore had finally managed to acquire. Toward the end of February, the frenetic work at Tucker’s Windmill Point was slowed to a standstill. A wave of sickness swept the overcrowded fleet, first thought to be typhus or “jail fever” caused by the ships being so crammed full of people, but soon diagnosed by the naval surgeons as a virulent outbreak of smallpox. Ships’ carpenters were sent ashore to Tucker’s Windmill Point to refit several of the damaged buildings to create a hospital where the doctors

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could carry out a mass inoculation. This was risky business, as the debilitating sickness brought on by inoculation left the patients vulnerable to epidemic typhus and typhoid fever.63 Weak from sickness, Dunmore’s forces were effectively cut off from a food supply. The Royal Navy warships remained impregnable in the river’s mouth, but they were far too big to sail up the many branches and waterways to the plantations where food could be procured. Dunmore’s only effective capacity to get food and manpower was a fleet of privateers belonging to John Goodridge and his seven sons. They were very effective, returning from their forays up the various branches of the river with food supplies, as well as many fresh recruits. There was nothing haphazard about the recruitment of slaves by Goodridge’s privateers. The evidence strongly suggests that they were deliberately collecting the extended families of those who had previously defected to Dunmore: wives and children, brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents, all of them taken into Dunmore’s camp. The Goodridges were Methodists and it was no coincidence that many of the people they brought into Dunmore’s camp were Methodist also. In late March, a sloop returning from a foray up the Southern Branch brought in the black preacher Nathaniel Snowball together with his wife and children. The sloop also brought Snowball’s sister Grace, with her husband Samuel Thompson, the youngest son of Talbot and Jane Thompson. Sadly smallpox was no respecter of family. Even after the mass inoculation, an influx of new recruits at Windmill Point kept the contagion active and huge numbers of black recruits succumbed to a horrible death. Samuel Thompson and Edward Jackson were among many hundreds hastily buried in graves along the shore. The enormity of the epidemic wrought havoc on Dunmore’s military ambitions, and by early May it was clear that Dunmore’s strategic position was untenable. It was not until May 21 that he could confidently identify seven warships, thirty-seven merchant ships, and another forty-six smaller craft that were seaworthy and enough ablebodied seamen to sail them. On the day the evacuation began, Samuel Thompson’s widow Grace was mustered at Tucker’s Windmill Point as embarked on the Dunluce, but she was not aboard when it sailed away from Norfolk.64 Having lost her husband, Grace must have found it too great a wrench to leave her mother, and perhaps her children. She must have got herself off the ship and returned to her owner.65 When Dunmore’s flotilla finally sailed out of the Chesapeake toward New York in August 1776, Jane and Talbot Thompson, as well as James Jackson

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and the pregnant Hannah Jackson and her son, were still aboard. As the wind filled the sails of the fleet and carried them through the capes into the Atlantic, could they have known that they would never return to Virginia? Once safely settled in the British enclave in New York, they were effectively cut off from those of the family still in Virginia by the huge swath of patriotcontrolled territory in between them. Yet somehow the family members who remained in Virginia were progressively able to make contact with the British forces and get themselves to New York. This remarkable feat of family reunion was clearly well planned and executed, and must have owed a lot to the role James Jackson played as a pilot for the British throughout the war. In May 1779, Grace Thompson, her two daughters, her mother, and her brother were among some 500 people General Matthews brought back to New York from his destructive raid into Portsmouth. Eighteen months later, when the British once again reentered the Chesapeake and briefly occupied Hampton late in 1780, John Jackson and London Jackson, as well as James Thompson and his wife, all managed to get aboard the British ships and come to New York. They had barely been reconstituted as a family when Talbot Thompson died, in May 1782, right in the middle of the chaotic evacuation of New York. He obviously commanded respect among the British military elite, since the royal governor of New York took the time to provide Jane with an official document to acknowledge her as heir to her husband’s property in Norfolk.66 It was years after the family was relocated to Nova Scotia that Jane Thompson was able to gain a benefit from that property, having found a justice of the peace in Halifax to submit a claim to the Loyalist Claims Commission in London. If Jane ever saw the money that she was granted by the commission, it did little to mitigate her circumstances in Nova Scotia. In 1791, all her surviving family were among the many hundreds of black Methodist settlers from Birchtown who relocated to the new colony of Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa.67 Jane wanted to go with her family, but was considered too old and frail to make the journey across the Atlantic. Soon after the exodus to Sierra Leone, a fire swept through the nearly deserted settlement of Birchtown, destroying whatever property remained to her. Jane Thompson’s name appears on a list of destitute and distressed persons living alone at Birchtown in 1792, but her death was not recorded.68 Life did not end well for Jane Thompson; she was never able to recover the material comfort of her prerevolutionary life in Norfolk. However cold and alien her final resting place in Nova Scotia, surely she gained satisfaction in knowing her large

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extended family were no longer slaves, but independent landholders, with the rights and privileges of free British subjects. The considerable achievement of Jane Thompson and her family was of their own making; each one had seized the opportunity to take freedom rather than hope for the rare possibility of manumission to be bestowed on them. They were the authors of their own life stories, and not merely the supporting cast in the lives of their illustrious owners.

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Chapter six

From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman: The Story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo joão josé reis

On June 20, 1865, Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, approximately ninety years old, died in the city of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. He was survived by his widow, Rosa Maria da Conceição, and four children, three men—Damazio, Olavo, and Martinho—and a woman, Benta. Ricardo’s probate records registered property valued 42 contos de réis, distributed in twenty-seven slaves, three houses, including a slave quarter, and land. By any measure, the deceased was a rich man in urban Brazil of those days. In terms of wealth, he belonged to the 10 percent economic elite registered in probate records in nineteenth-century Salvador, individuals worth more than 20 contos. He was also a large urban slave owner. Manoel José Ricardo was, nonetheless, an African-born freedman, or liberto.1 There is no doubt that Ricardo was an extraordinary case of social mobility among African ex-slaves in Bahia, where slaves had been systematically gaining freedom on an individual basis, and in growing numbers, since at least the mid-seventeenth century.2 He was a member of the small world of Africans who had overcome slavery to become slave masters themselves, whereas the majority of freed people exited a life of slavery to enter a life of poverty. In mid-nineteenth-century Salvador, for instance, only 22 percent of libertos—no doubt a significant minority—who lived in Our Lady of Santana parish, a typical urban district, were slave owners, the majority masters of only one or two slaves.3 Around the same period, a city-wide survey of African freed persons that listed their occupations indicated that 43 percent were employed as porters, including sedan chair porters, and agricultural workers in

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small farms on the outskirts of Salvador sometimes owned by other freed persons; and another 18 percent, the vast majority of them women, worked as food peddlers. Few held more specialized trades as carpenters, masons, smiths, bakers, and so on.4 While Manoel Joaquim Ricardo was exceptional in terms of material success—although not a lonely figure at all—he can serve as a guide to the world of nineteenth-century African libertos in Bahia. His life can teach us about the possibilities and limits of mobility and assimilation in that society. What were the circumstances that facilitated such mobility? Did the kind of slavery to which the upwardly mobile African was subjected have anything to do with it? What were the legal as well as sociocultural barriers or avenues to mobility in nineteenth-century Bahia? Let us begin with Manoel Joaquim Ricardo’s master, Manoel José Ricardo. Born in the province of Pernambuco, Manoel José was a respectable businessman—he presided over the prestigious Santa Casa da Misericódia brotherhood and charity in the early 1830s, for instance—who invested in the trans-Atlantic trade with Europe and, since at least 1795, in the slave trade with Africa. He owned the São Manoel Augusto, a ship that made at least ten voyages between Bahia and Lisbon from 1800 to 1807.5 As for his business on the African coast, in four voyages listed in Voyages: The Slave Trade Database his ships received 1,074 captives in Africa and disembarked 1,011 in Bahia, a loss of 6 percent, perfectly fitting the average mortality rate for that route at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1795, Manoel José Ricardo’s corvette Nossa Senhora da Graça e Flor da Bahia carried 687 slaves from the Costa da Mina—the Bight of Benin region also known as the Slave Coast—623 of whom survived the 33-day Middle Passage. The same ship was captured two years later by the French on the Mina Coast before slaves embarked.6 Apparently, Manoel José Ricardo resumed his activity as trans-Atlantic slave trader only in 1804, when he bought a small ship, a bergantim named Ceres, for which he paid R$3,600,000 (three contos e seiscentos mil-réis), that could be repaid by selling between 25 and 30 slaves in Bahia.7 The Ceres appears twice in the Voyages database, with Manoel José Ricardo registered as its owner. On April 20, 1805, the ship left Bahia and spent almost a year on the Costa da Mina. At the beginning of March 1806 it returned from a port in that region (probably Ouidah) loaded with 202 slaves, twenty of whom died during the 46 days—only six days above the average—crossing the Atlantic. Four months later, the Ceres was again traversing the ocean, bound for the same destination, from where it carried 209 slaves, only three of whom died

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in the Middle Passage. Apparently Manoel José Ricardo sold his ship immediately after the 1806–7 voyage. His slave Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, our main character, was most probably transported in the hold of the Ceres to Bahia in one of these two slave trade trips, so he arrived in Bahia on either April 20, 1806, or March 5, 1807.8 Manoel Joaquim was a Hausa, probably a victim of the jihad led by Usuman dan Fodio in Hausaland that began precisely the year his future master was buying the Ceres, 1804. The conflict, which lasted for many decades, but which had its most intense phase leading up to the formation of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1809, produced thousands of captives for the transAtlantic slave trade, the majority of whom ended up in Bahia due to the nearmonopoly of Bahian traders in Costa da Mina.9 The proportion of Hausas among African-born slaves in the capital city of Salvador jumped from 5.5 percent in 1800–1804, to 8.1 percent in 1805–9, to 20.8 percent in 1810–14.10 After 1807 the Hausas felt they were strong enough to challenge slavery in Bahia by engaging in collective, violent resistance, and produced several conspiracies and revolts in 1807, 1809, 1814, and 1816, at least.11 I have not found any document regarding Manoel Joaquim Ricardo’s first years as a slave. I know, however, that his master kept him and a few others transported on the Ceres under his service. Manoel Joaquim, around thirty when he arrived in Bahia, was soon baptized, as can be read in his will, written just before he passed away.12 I next found Manoel Joaquim in 1826, when he appears in several baptismal records as godfather to adult African slaves.13 In 1830, at about fifty-five, his name emerged in a receipt that tells us he owned a small business in the main indoors market of Salvador—the Santa Barbara Market—where he rented (for three mil-réis a month) a stall in which he sold beans, rice, corn, and manioc flour. This document also suggests that Manoel Joaquim had been renting the place for some time. This and other surviving receipts linked to his commerce—one of which related to a large quantity of cereals he bought— attest to the fact that he was a respectable, established merchant in that market during the 1830s while still a slave. In those receipts, landlords and wholesale merchants who furnished him with products he sold would call him “Senhor Manoel Joaquim Ricardo,” an unusual treatment given to a slave. “Senhor” means sir, as in “Sim senhor” (“Yes, sir”). An 1832 dictionary of the “Brazilian language” defines senhor as “a courtesy title given to someone who . . . does not depend on someone else.” Senhor also means slave master, which is the first meaning registered in the celebrated 1789 Diccionário by Antonio de Moraes Silva (“someone

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one who has dominion over any slave or thing”).14 I do not know whether those who were writing those receipts knew that Manoel Joaquim was in fact a slave, but I believe they did, for the city, especially the business district, was small enough for them to know both the slave and his master, who lived in the same neighborhood where the Santa Barbara market existed. Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, by the way, carried not only the same name but also—as ex-slaves usually did—the same surname as his master.15 In the early 1830s, Manoel Joaquim Ricardo also became senhor in the sense of slave master. In 1833 he bought for R$150,000 (one hundred and fifty mil-réis) an African-born girl, approximately twelve, named Thomazia. Nothing is said about Thomazia’s mother: maybe they were separated after landing in Bahia, maybe her mother died in the Middle Passage, or maybe Thomazia embarked alone on the Mina Coast. In the bill of sale, her African past was reduced to what her owner believed was her nation, Nagô, or Yoruba; two years later, her new master corrected this information and told the parish priest she belonged to the Tapa nation—a Yoruba term for the Nupe used in Bahia—which is how her baptismal record identifies her. Again in that bill of sale, the slave Manoel Joaquim Ricardo is referred to as “Senhor Manoel Joaquim Ricardo,” and Thomazia’s former master, João Coelho de Oliveira, also wrote that “the said Senhor could possess her as she belongs to him from this day and forever.” So much noise about rights of ownership notwithstanding, Thomazia, I suspect, had been illegally imported from Africa after the prohibition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Brazil two years before Ricardo bought her.16 Toward the end of the 1830s, or even before, Manoel Joaquim Ricardo extended his business interests to the other side of the Atlantic, just as his master had once done. He had at least two partners who traveled to the African coast, specifically to the port of Ouidah, from where they sent merchandise in exchange for goods dispatched from Bahia by Manoel Joaquim. In 1839 and 1840, for example, Manoel Joaquim sent Joaquim Antonio da Silva, a liberto of the Jeje nation in Ouidah, china wares, coral beads, fishing nets, textiles, indigo, tobacco, sugar, molasses, and Brazilian rum (aguardente), most of them typical products, especially tobacco, of the slave trade in the Gulf of Benin region. The cargo, taxes, and transportation costs amounted to R$1,987,300, the price of thirteen Thomazias, the young slave girl Manoel had bought six years earlier. Tobacco and rum together weighed most, consuming 32 and 31 percent of the investment respectively.17 The years these letters were written are significant. The end of the 1830s

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saw a resurgence of the contraband slave trade when the Brazilian national government, now firmly held by the conservatives, effectively opened up the trade after trying to abolish the 1831 law that had made it illegal.18 There is good reason to believe that Manoel Joaquim Ricardo and his partners were buying slaves on the Slave Coast under the mantle of legitimate trade. There were surely other kinds of merchandise bought in the region to be exported to Bahia, such as palm oil, African textiles (pano da costa), and kola nuts. These products found their buyers almost exclusively within the African community itself. African women living in Bahia consumed pano da costa on a large scale. Palm oil was an essential ingredient of the African cuisine, and frequently advertised in the local press. In April 1838, the Correio Mercantil advertised: “Afordable palm oil recently arrived from Ouidah in the brig Espardarte for sale: whoever wants to buy go to Francisco de Souza’s warehouse . . . and will know with whom to deal.”19 Ouidah was the main port where Manoel Joaquim Ricardo and his partners did business. Manoel Joaquim Ricardo imported kola nuts from the Slave Coast. As a Hausa, Ricardo may have had previous experience in his homeland with the kola business, which was an important commodity in his nation’s longdistance caravan trade, in which he may have previously participated. The product, rich in caffeine, was used to make a refreshing beverage highly appreciated by Africans on both sides of the Atlantic, but it also served a number of ritual purposes, including Ifa (or Fa) divination of the Fon and Yoruba religious traditions. In 1841, letters exchanged between Manoel Joaquim and his partner José Pedro Autran, a Nagô ex-slave in Bahia then living in Ouidah, were confiscated on board a slaver captured by a British squadron. One of the letters—written on behalf of Manoel Joaquim by his faithful friend and scribe Manoel José d’Etra—reported to Autran that the kola nuts he had sent arrived in good shape, and another letter sent to his other partner, Joaquim Antonio da Silva, warned that he should carefully place the delicate kola nuts in barrels for transportation to Bahia. In the letter to Autran, Ricardo also said that he could not send the trade goods from Bahia that the Nagô merchant needed to do business at Ouidah because the capture of a brig, the Aurora, on the coast of Bahia had prevented ship owners from sending their vessels to Africa. In the letter to Autran he wrote that, “as for your order I could arrange nothing; it seems to me that to enter Heavens one does not pray as much as to carry [goods] to the [African] Coast.”20 The date on the letter, 1841, is also relevant. The year before, Britain’s Equipment Act—also known as the Palmerston Bill—enacted in 1839 started to be fully implemented, meaning that Her

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British Majesty’s vessels were now capturing any ship suspected of being engaged in the slave trade if it was considered merely equipped to do so, a law that targeted primarily Portuguese and Brazilian vessels. But Ricardo hoped for confirmation of the news that the Aurora had been considered a bad prize by the Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission against the Slave Trade in Rio de Janeiro. As a result, a certain captain was about to rent a small ship in which “Senhor Bento Simão would embark and carry not only your order but those of other” merchants, Ricardo confided to Autran. This passage of Ricardo’s letter gives us an idea of how the small trans-Atlantic trade was made possible through intermediaries who carried merchandise to traders who resided on Slave Coast ports.21 We should not dismiss the possibility that reference to kola nuts in Ricardo’s correspondence was a code to refer to slaves, an expedient commonly used by slave traders in letters that were sent back and forth across the ocean in the days of prohibition. Thus, according to British authorities in Sierra Leone, where one reads “kola nuts,” one should read “slaves” instead.22 If Manoel Joaquim Ricardo and his partners did import kola nuts— and that may very well have been the case—there is other evidence that they also traded slaves. For instance, they had business with Joaquim Alves da Cruz Rios, who, together with his father, José Alves da Cruz Rios, is listed by Pierre Verger as an important slave dealer in Bahia. Joaquim Cruz Rios was the main suspect in an investigation by the French consul in Bahia regarding slave contraband in 1846. He was also a big sugar planter, senhor de engenho—another, probably the highest scale of senhor in nineteenth-century Bahia. This senhor, however, was used to doing business and exchanging favors with small African trans-Atlantic traders.23 One last piece of evidence about Manoel Joaquim Ricardo’s involvement with the slave trade can be found in a legal battle with his partner Joaquim Antonio da Silva over the ownership of two African slave women, Francisca and Constança. They both claimed to be the rightful owner of the two slaves, but neither could provide a bill of sale to prove his claim, precisely because the women had probably been imported after the 1831 prohibition. In 1842, however, Ricardo shrewdly had them baptized as his slaves, the baptismal record being one of the documents that could eventually be used as proof of ownership. Silva was living in Ouidah at the time, and very ill, but he survived to confront Ricardo when he returned to Bahia. Ricardo claimed that he had bought Francisca and Constança long before 1838, the year his former partner had first traveled to the Mina Coast. If this is true, he owned at least three

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slave women when he was finally manumitted in 1841 at the time his master died, giving freedom to fifteen of his seventeen slaves. Needless to say, Manoel Joaquim Ricardo had a very special relationship with his master, Manoel José Ricardo. In the above mentioned legal case against Joaquim da Silva, contesting the objection by his former partner that Ricardo could not possibly own slaves because he was a slave himself, the Hausa freedman alleged that “he always had from the said master of him, since long ago, authorization to do business by himself and to acquire any property, but also ample license to live outside of the aforesaid master’s house.” Among the slaves Manoel Joaquim said he owned while still a slave himself, he mentioned Thomazia, Francisca, Constança, and “many other female slaves,” a circumstance that was known by “everybody in this City.”24 If Manoel Joaquim Ricardo lied about the two slave women in dispute, he was probably right about having acquired other slaves before he obtained his freedom. Only four years after his manumission, the African freedman registered seventeen slaves for tax purposes. It is unlikely that he had reached that level of slave ownership in just four years. With the exception of a fourteenyear-old girl, his slaves were adults, their ages ranging from eighteen to forty, all—including the girl—born in Africa, and only four of them men. The list included Thomazia, Constança, and Francisca. There was one sailor and one domestic servant; the rest were listed as hire-out slaves, the typical employment for captives in an urban setting. Masters would send slaves to the streets of Salvador to sell all kinds of goods—raw and cooked food, textiles, baskets, and other African products—or to work as porters, including sedan chair porters. As in other parts of the Americas, slaves—who often lived outside the masters’ houses—would pay masters a prearranged weekly fee, keeping for themselves everything they earned in excess of it. This was called the ganho or earning system, an important mechanism used by slaves to purchase their freedom. But four of Ricardo’s slaves registered in 1846 did not have a chance to buy their freedom from him because he sold them in Rio de Janeiro that same year, just after registering them. Here was another facet of the man’s business: he may have abandoned the trans-Atlantic trade by the mid-1840s, but he was active in the internal slave trade, a growing business since the coffee boom in southeastern Brazil started in the previous decade. The phenomenon of freed persons who owned slaves is well covered by the historiography of Brazilian slavery.25 What has so far received scarce attention from historians is the occurrence of slaves who owned slaves. It was

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not unique to the case of Ricardo, or to Bahia and Brazil. There is evidence of this arrangement in Cuba, for example.26 In Brazil many ganho slaves, instead of paying for their freedom in cash, would buy recently arrived Africans to replace themselves, an arrangement many masters preferred. Some candidates for freedom would train the “new negros” in the trade they had been employed as slaves. This form of slave ownership by slaves (which we could call temporary) was the most common one. But there were others, more organically part of the slaveholding system per se. Thomas Koster, the English administrator of a sugar plantation in Pernambuco, reported that in a local Benedictine plantation, a mulatto slave driver owned slaves, but the friars would not free him because they thought he was essential to the operation of their property.27 In a mining region of mid-eighteenth-century Bahia, a slave master wrote a document giving his slave permission to buy another slave in partnership with a freedman. Some time later, the same master found it fit to give his slave written permission to sell the said slave.28 Especially in the city, slaves managed to buy other slaves directly from the market, as in some of the cases recorded in baptismal books. Historian Carlos Eugênio L. Soares found thirty-three such cases in the Conceição da Praia parish records between 1734 and 1742, almost half the number of freed slave owners recorded for the same time span, seventy.29 One hundred years later, I located in the same parish—now Ricardo’s neighborhood—eleven African slaves who took their thirteen slaves to the church to be baptized in the short period between 1827 and 1830. The slaves of these slaves were all Africanborn, the majority (ten of thirteen) Nagôs, reflecting both the concentration of the Bahian trade in the Bight of Benin and the devastating Yoruba wars of the period. Most enslaved slave owners, on the other hand, belonged to the Hausa nation (six of the eleven known), like Manoel Joaquim Ricardo. Only two of these were women. Finally, this was not a product of Africa’s peculiar institution of slavery—where slave ownership by slaves was relatively common—for masters of slaves who owned slaves in our Bahian sample were primarily whites and not Africans (seven of ten).30 The Conceição da Praia parish priest, Manoel Dendê Bus, recorded these baptisms very casually but in great detail, explicitly writing that slave X was the slave of slave Y who was the slave of Z, a free or freed person. In one instance, however, in September 1834, the priest decided to do something different. The Hausa slave Ambrozio had brought to the baptismal font a recently born slave girl named Rosa, daughter of his Nagô slave Felicidade, twenty-eight. This time Dendê Bus decided to ask Ambrozio’s master about

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Rosa’s property status, and accordingly penned on the baptismal book that he “had declared in writing that he recognized as the slave of the said Ambrozio the above mentioned Felicidade, and therefore all her children.” Apparently the priest had forgotten that in 1827, without questioning, he had baptized Felicidade, and two years later Martinho, then twenty-three, also a Nagô, as Ambrozio’s slaves.31 The evidence suggests that the Roman legal tradition that allowed slaves to own slaves (servus vicarius) was not clearly incorporated into the Portuguese legal codes, though it did become part of the common law. Masters, however, could overturn common law at their will, and no court would decide against them. In other words, masters could obstruct their slaves from acquiring other slaves or, once having let them do so, expropriate them. Therefore we can reasonably conclude that slave ownership of slaves or any other kind of property depended on negotiations between masters and slaves based on which certain slave rights—the right to make money and buy property including people, for instance—had been seized by individual slaves and respected by individual masters. Besides slaves, Manoel Joaquim Ricardo invested in real estate property. Apparently the first properties he bought was two small parcels of land, one next to the other, for which he paid R$195,000 in 1845. The land was located on the outskirts of Salvador, a district known as Cruz do Cosme, where he would eventually move. The following year he made a bolder move in the real estate market and acquired for R$3,000,000 (three contos de réis) a threestory building in the port district of Conceição da Praia, where he established residence with his companion Rosa Maria da Conceição. Ricardo would rent part of the new property to other African freedmen to reside on or to shopkeepers to install their businesses. He also apparently used the building as a sort of boarding house, his clients again being African freed persons. In 1854, for instance, he gave lodging to José Maria Segundo, a forty-year-old man born on the island of Prince, who had arrived in Bahia from Lisbon; in 1856, an African freed woman named Esperança, a fifty-year-old merchant traveling from Rio de Janeiro, stayed in Ricardo’s house before embarking to the African coast.32 Ricardo would buy other houses in the city and more land next to the two suburban lots in his possession since 1845. I do not know precisely when he moved from the busy port district to the Cruz do Cosme neighborhood, a semi-rural parish where numerous freed Africans grew yams, an eating habit they had brought from the other side of the Atlantic. Ricardo built a

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three-bedroom house, surrounded by verandas, where he would live with his family until the end of his days. Next to the house he also built a large slave quarter. His new investment front was not free of problems. After the 1835 African Muslim revolt in Bahia, a provincial law was created that prohibited African freed persons from buying real estate. The legislature thus tried to prevent those Africans from using their houses as places for harboring fugitive slaves and organizing subversive meetings, as they had done in preparation for the recent uprising. Additionally, betting on “civilizing” the city, the government sought to make it more difficult for Africans to establish residence in Bahia after being manumitted. The law even stipulated that all freed Africans should eventually be deported back to Africa, a measure that was never enforced. Other measures in the same law included a head tax that applied only to freed Africans, and the summary deportation of those merely suspect of planning plots, even if they had been found not liable for prosecution by a police inquiry.33 The law that did not allow Africans to buy real estate may explain, in part at least, why those who had money to invest would buy slaves, which was perfectly legal, instead of houses and land.34 However, for a while the law was actually not enforced, and thus Manoel Joaquim Ricardo was able to buy a piece of land in 1845, which was appropriately registered in the pages of a public notary book. In the mid-1840s, however, the provincial assembly started a debate on whether the law should be revalidated precisely because it had apparently fallen into oblivion. In 1847, the provincial assembly decided for the continuation of the law “after a hot debate,” according to the newspaper Correio Mercantil.35 Perhaps anticipating the lawmakers’ decision, Ricardo employed a new strategy when he decided to buy that costly building in 1846: he bought it in the name of his three Brazilian-born sons, who were minors at the time. Their father could not be the owner of the property, but he could be their legal representative. In this way, Ricardo came to acquire several properties. As their children grew older, however, Ricardo and his wife became uncomfortable with this scheme, as can be seen in the bill of sale related to the aforementioned Cruz do Cosme farm in 1861, in which they declared that their sons could not dispose of or contract with any one anything concerning the property “while their Father Manoel Joaquim Ricardo and his wife were alive.”36 Four years later when he dictated his will, he was unambiguous about the fact that he had explored a loophole in the law to become an African real estate proprietor:

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I declare that before being married, and even after that, I bought myself real estate properties in the name of my sons as a result of having been forbidden to do so in my own name by virtue of the Provincial Law n. 9 of 13 May, 1835, and notwithstanding having thus done I demand that such properties be faithfully recorded and distributed as belonging to the couple since they were bought with my money, and they belong to all my heirs.37 Ricardo, to be sure, was not the only smart African freed person to use the expedient of registering property formally in the name of a relative. Even those who did not have immediate kin to do so would eventually find a way to get around the law. In 1868, the childless African freedman Lourenço Antunes Guimarães bought land in the name of his Brazilian-born nephew, the son of his African-born sister.38 We should consider the way Ricardo raised his children as a form of investment as well. He had had a common-law marriage with Rosa Maria da Conceição—a Nagô petty merchant and slave owner herself—since at least the mid-1830s, when they were still slaves. Their marriage was only made official when they married in the Catholic Church in 1860. This was not an act of religious faith alone, but a way of arranging a smooth transmission of Ricardo’s wealth to his heirs, including his wife, of course, who from then on would have the right to half of whatever the couple owned. The same goes for their offspring, who now became legitimate children. Long before that, however, the couple saw to it that the children should have an education. The three sons learned how to read and write, and the daughter probably did too—she actually married a Black creole teacher. As they became adults, Damazio and Olavo Joaquim Ricardo used their knowledge of letters to help their parents in their business dealings, writing and signing bills of sale, contracts, and manumission letters for them. As if knowing the limits of social climbing in Bahian society, the couple apparently did not consider their children fit for higher education, which in Brazil meant studying medicine in Bahia or Rio de Janeiro or law in Recife, capital of the province of Pernambuco. Damazio followed in his parents’ footsteps and became a merchant, while Olavo and Martinho were trained as carpenters. Martinho, however, the older of the boys, received special training in Europe. In a letter to the chief of police, Manoel Joaquim asked permission for Martinho Joaquim Ricardo, still a minor, to go to Europe “so he could learn a mechanical trade there.” Unfortunately, that is all I have found in the archives about one of the

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most curious of Ricardo’s moves. And so Martinho became a carpenter, or received additional carpentry training, in Europe.39 If Ricardo made use of common law rules and legal loopholes to overcome his circumstance as a slave and a freed African, what we know of his social life—or sociabilities, if you will—suggests that Brazilian society and polity did not offer rules, mechanisms, and loopholes flexible or wide enough for African freed persons, or their children, to explore them successfully and become full members of the free community. Studies about manumission have shown that African-born slaves had more difficulty obtaining freedom than those born in Brazil, the latter taking advantage of their more intimate relationship with masters and their families.40 And once free, Africans faced all kinds of discrimination. For example, they did not become citizens under the law like those born in bondage in Brazil. In other words, an ex- slave born in Brazil had the same rights as a free-born Brazilian. When Africanborn slaves were freed they became foreigners. They could not vote, for instance. In Bahia, particularly, a series of laws such as the one discussed above made their lives more miserable. And with time, other local laws were passed that attacked them on the labor front. In 1850 the provincial government forbade Africans from working on boats that carried loads from ship to shore, for example. On the cultural front, African religious practices were systematically the object of official prohibitions and their adherents had their houses and temples attacked by the police. Numerous priests, diviners, and leaders of Candomblé were deported from Bahia in the second half of the nineteenth century, usually accused of disturbing public order, suspicion of murder by poisoning, fraud, stealing, indecorous behavior, and so on. Even though Candomblé religion and African magical beliefs and practices had penetrated the local population, including some whites among whom allies were recruited, African cultural leaders—let us call them—lived on thin ice. And in any case, the majority of their clients and followers were Africans or Afro-Brazilians. There were ambiguities, alright: some police officers and other authorities repressed, while some tolerated African cultural manifestations such as Candomblé and public drumming or batuque. But tolerance is not exactly freedom.41 It is true that freed Africans did not live in a cultural or geographical ghetto. They lived side by side with the locally born, white and black, even if they lived in poor huts or overcrowded buildings. However, their social and cultural life was largely experienced among themselves. Ricardo confessed in strong terms his affiliation to Catholicism when he

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dictated his will just before dying. One of the main aspects of Catholic religious life happened around the baptismal font. Ricardo served as godfather— side by side with African godmothers, a secondary figure in the ritual—to at least twenty-two children and adults. All adults were African-born, recently arrived captives, and most of their masters were also Africans. The children were creole born of African mothers, and for three of them, Ricardo’s wife, Rosa Maria da Conceição, was the godmother. There are also baptismal records between 1833 and 1858 for forty-nine African and creole slaves—the latter invariably children of his many slave women—owned by Ricardo and other members of his immediate family, namely three owned by his wife and one by his son, Martinho. The godparents of the family slaves were all African-born freedmen, except for three for whom one of Ricardo´s African slaves acted as godfather. At least two of his slaves had as godfather an African freedman who had been a slave of Ricardo´s master and probably his shipmate or malungo. His name was Thomaz Ignacio Ricardo, a barber of the Jeje nation who also sailed to Bahia in the hold of the Ceres.42 Apparently Ricardo did not belong to any of the many black brotherhoods of Salvador, and although he declared himself to be a devout Catholic, he also had a foot in the African religion known as Candomblé in Bahia. His wife, Rosa Maria da Conceição, may have been the godmother of a famous Candomblé high priestess, Marcelina da Silva, Obatossi, the successor of her former mistress, Francisca da Silva, a.k.a Iyá Nassô, the founder of the Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká temple, the venerable Candomblé da Casa Branca, still alive and well in Bahia today and reputed to be the cradle of the most prestigious cult houses of the Nagô tradition.43 Iyá Nassô´s husband, José Pedro Autran, the attentive reader will remember, was Manoel Joaquim Ricardo´s business partner at Ouidah in the early 1840s. It appears that José Pedro Autran himself was a priest in Sango, and a known healer in Ouidah, according to his family tradition in that port city, which also establishes that he was from Oyo, Sango territory par excellence.44Another piece of evidence of Ricardo´s involvement with Candomblé was his close friendship with the Nagô diviner Domingos Sodré. When this man was arrested in 1862 for Candomblé practices, namely divination and use of concoctions to appease masters, the police reported that Ricardo also owned a “house for this kind of (ritual) meetings” in the Cruz do Cosme district. I have not found evidence that this was the case, but the officer knew the freedman well due to family ties with his former master.45

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Notwithstanding Manoel Joaquim Ricardo´s close connections with the African community, he was not an ethnic exclusivist. In other words, he did not circulate solely among Hausas, even though African ethnic identities that evolved around the notion of nation stood for an important aspect of Bahia´s cultural makeup. African nations—formed primarily on the basis of linguistic commonality—constituted the rationale behind membership in Catholic brotherhoods, Islamic groups, manumission societies, street labor groups, marriage and residential arrangements, and mobilization for revolt. Manoel Joaquim Ricardo probably did not escape this cultural imperative completely, especially during his first years of bondage in Bahia, but with time he seems to have moved away from it. There is no hint in the documents, by the way, of his affiliation with Islam, the religion that predominated among and functioned as a diacritical mark of the Hausas and other northern Nigerian groups enslaved in Bahia, namely Bornos, Nupes, Fulani, and Borgus. I could not detect individuals from any of these groups performing any particularly special role in Ricardo’s life. José Pedro Autran, his wife Francisca da Silva, and Domingos Sodré were Nagôs. His other business partner at Ouidah, Joaquim Antonio da Silva, and his malungo Thomaz Ignacio were Jeje. His scribe, good friend, and godfather to all of his male sons, Manoel José d’Etra, was a creole freedman. Ricardo’s own wife was a Nagô. Finally, I found no document from his days as a liberto in which Ricardo declared to be a Hausa: he always identified himself as “African.” Of course, it is possible that he hid his origin to avoid being identified as a militant Muslim—a common accusation against the Hausas46—but there is absolutely no evidence that he kept his Islamic faith, even if he once embraced it, after landing in Bahia. That Manoel Joaquim Ricardo became a merchant, and an international one at that, should perhaps have counted as a driving force toward his more cosmopolitan, pan-African, trans-Atlantic “identity.” A sizeable share of his clients in Bahia, especially those who consumed imported African goods, including slaves, were Africans of diverse origins. Being a slave owner probably also helped him develop a broader African worldview, for he had to deal with—to buy, sell, train, discipline, punish, and negotiate terms of bondage and manumission—Africans from diverse origins, none of whom, by the way, could be positively recognized as Hausa. His slaves were mostly Jeje (Gbespeakers) and Nagô, the latter being the most common victims of the transAtlantic slave trade when Ricardo entered in and prospered from trafficking in human beings. What emerges from what we know of Ricardo´s experience in Brazil is

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that his “creolization” process was largely a pan-Africanization one. There is in the Portuguese language, as well as in Spanish, a better term to define his persona than, say, “Atlantic creole.” Ricardo was a ladino, a man who had learned to manipulate the symbols and protocol of Bahian slave society, who became skilled in the white man´s ways without abandoning his Africanness. It was within the African community that his accomplishments in life could be more fully appreciated and translated into social power. His Africanness may have resulted from his own decision, and there is evidence to defend this hypothesis, but it was certainly also a result of the way Brazilian society, immersed in racial slavery as it was, treated people who had been born in Africa. Manoel Joaquim Ricardo is, therefore, representative of the possibilities of African achievement and obstacles to social climbing in nineteenth-century Brazil. Good terms with masters, a cosmopolitan outlook, strategic positioning in the labor market, business acumen, and perceptive investments could help a person overcome several barriers of slave society. That was Ricardo´s recipe for success in a nutshell. However, his accomplishments in material life, and his high status in the African community, did not translate into assimilation into the local, free society as would have been true if he was, say, a prosperous Portuguese migrant. It was only in death that Manoel Joaquim Ricardo became equal with the Bahian white elite. When Manoel Joaquim Ricardo died, an orchestra played during his funeral in a lavishly decorated chapel for the wake and mass, more than one hundred torches and candles burned, a fine coffin carried his body, a solemn seventh-day mass was said, and he was buried in the Third Order of Saint Francis cemetery. In these gestures, we can perhaps listen to a silent protest against a society that did not wholly accept Africans, even one who managed to overcome slavery to become a rich slave owner himself. Money and compromise with slavery could not absolve the original sin of an African birth, and would not guarantee everything freedom theoretically implied in a postcolonial slave society.

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PA R T I I I SELF-FASHIONING

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Chapter seven

David Dorr’s Journey Toward Selfhood in Europe lloyd s. kramer

International travel became one of the most common experiences for nineteenth-century American authors to describe in their first books. Journeys to distant cities and unfamiliar cultures provided new opportunities for personal freedom or empowerment; and despite important differences in the cultural “baggage” travelers carried on their long voyages, most aspiring writers set off from the United States with a post-Enlightenment confidence in what might be called the “autonomous self.” Travel for such persons helped expand the meaning of individual identities and personal autonomy because cross-cultural encounters could reshape the self-understanding of almost everyone who made long trips. Although the pervasive racism in nineteenthcentury Western societies posed special challenges for black travelers, the African American travel narratives from that era show how black writers both resembled and differed from European Americans as they used the cultural self-estrangement of long journeys to redefine their conceptions of selfhood, freedom, and national cultures. Most African Americans could not travel in the pre-Civil War era, of course, because they were enslaved in the American South; indeed, the most likely voyage for enslaved people was a trip “down the river” to another slaveholder or a distant plantation. There were nevertheless some remarkable African American travelers who described their international journeys in books that were published after they returned to the United States. Historians have become increasingly interested in the transnational experiences of people such as Phillis Wheatley, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, all of whom traveled in European countries

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before 1860.1 Among the lesser known antebellum African American travelers, however, the long journey of David F. Dorr (1827?–1872?) offers an especially intriguing example of how long international trips could transform personal identities, because Dorr went to Europe as the young enslaved traveling companion of his New Orleans “master”—a Louisiana businessman named Cornelius Fellowes. Dorr traveled through Western Europe, Egypt, and Palestine in 1851–53 and then narrated his journey as a story of personal pleasures, cultural enrichment, and rising social status in A Colored Man Round the World (1858), which was published in Cleveland after he had escaped from slavery. Although he included typical traveler’s accounts of famous sites and interesting people, Dorr also described his own unconventional journey toward a “colored man’s” freedom and personal self-assertion. Indeed, Dorr’s autobiographical narrative of his European journey exemplifies what Joseph Miller calls a (possibly) “consistent theme” in the biographical turn of Black Atlantic historiography: “the determination of the enslaved to make the best of a bad situation.”2 Dorr never wrote another book, so he remained more or less invisible in American cultural history until recent literary historians began to write about the “Black Atlantic” as a multicultural theme in modern black history and transnational cultures. Paul Gilroy’s influential study of early nineteenthcentury Atlantic migrations, for example, argues that black people in both the Americas and Europe repeatedly expressed a “double consciousness” in which their African heritage and identities were linked to a complex, overlapping history of European cultures and political ideas. Gilroy does not refer to the writings of David Dorr, but there are passages in Dorr’s book that show how cross-cultural “interweaving” (as Gilroy describes it) entered into the personal lives of African American travelers. Dorr’s mostly forgotten life and book drew repeatedly on the multicultural traditions that enabled “Black Atlantic” writers to construct new identities over the course of their long transnational journeys.3 It would be misleading to categorize David Dorr’s multilayered life as simply an antebellum American example of a wider “Black Atlantic” culture, but his autobiographical story of an emerging “free selfhood” suggests how travel could entangle the social history of race with the complexities of gender, nationality, and intellectual traditions. Dorr’s narrative in A Colored Man Round the World focused almost entirely on his travels in 1851–53 and offered only a few fragments about his earlier life—mainly in the dedication and a two-page preface. Dedicating his book “TO MY SLAVE MOTHER,” Dorr defined his own authorial identity as

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“a quadroon” from New Orleans. The term “quadroon” was used in Louisiana to describe people who had one black grandparent, which means that Dorr’s self-description affirmed his racial identity as a light-skinned “colored man.” He did not say more about his unnamed mother’s personal traits, however, and he never mentioned his father or his childhood experiences. There was thus much ambiguity in Dorr’s family history, which became all the more striking in his prefatory descriptions of Cornelius Fellowes as a “gentleman” who “treated me as his own son, and could look on me as free a man as walks the earth.” He also noted later that Fellowes was forty-eight when he and Dorr (about twenty-four) set off on their European travels.4 These ambiguous comments on the age and relations of the “master” and “slave” raise an obvious question that Dorr never addressed: was Fellowes actually Dorr’s biological father— someone who (in a familiar pattern) had been sexually involved with Dorr’s enslaved mulatto mother? A Colored Man left readers with many such biographical mysteries about Dorr’s parents and all the other members of his family. What Dorr’s book did provide, however, was an account of his own quest for an empowering male sexual identity that he sought to establish by pursuing the pleasures of a free man “round the world.” He portrayed his European travels, in short, as a long voyage toward the status and prerogatives of a male freedom that he could never achieve as an enslaved man in Louisiana. To return to Joseph Miller’s provocative reflections on the experiences of both Europeans and Africans who lived within the social system of modern slavery, one could say (drawing on Miller) that for David Dorr “the Atlantic was a space of catalytic openness that brought latent identities to the fore.”5 Dorr did not explain how he learned to read and write, but his travel stories conveyed knowledge of European history and culture that few enslaved persons were ever allowed to acquire. His book alluded to writers (for example, Shakespeare and Byron) and to French-language phrases that suggested some kind of European literary education. He nevertheless claimed in his preface that he had used only a school dictionary as he wrote his book, thereby apparently seeking to show that his knowledge came from his firsthand experiences in European cities rather than from his youthful reading. In any case, the most precise information about Dorr’s pre-travel and post-travel personal life emerged in his angry complaint that Fellowes failed to follow through on a promise for freedom that was offered while the two men were in Europe. “I called on this original man to consummate a two-fold promise he made me, in different parts of the world, because . . . I considered myself

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more than equaled in dignity and means.” The long trip had demonstrated Dorr’s inherent human equality, but Fellowes “refused me on old bachelor principles” after the travelers returned to New Orleans. Dorr did not define the precise meaning of “bachelor principles” (did Fellowes claim that what was said in Europe stayed in Europe?), but the broken promise of emancipation soon provoked Dorr to make another journey. “I fled from him and his princely promises,” Dorr explained in a concise summary of his flight to freedom in northern Ohio, “reflecting on the moral liberties of the legal freedom of England, France and our New England states.”6 Dorr thus explicitly linked his journey out of slavery to a sense of personal liberty that he had known in Europe and then lost again in Louisiana. Modern travel narratives frequently stress a new sense of freedom that develops during journeys to distant places, but this often-noted liberation from hometown constraints became all the more significant for a young man whose European experiences helped explain his eventual escape from slavery. Settling in Cleveland sometime after the mid-1850s, Dorr compiled his travel writings in a book that was probably published at his own expense. He adhered to the familiar conventions of travel literature as he described famous cities and historical sites, but his writing also juxtaposed tourist-style information with almost dreamlike passages about encounters with strange people and unfamiliar places. Although Dorr’s distinctive story of “a colored man’s” European experiences attracted no attention in contemporary anti-slavery publications, the book was briefly reviewed in three different Cleveland newspapers. A commentary in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (September 20, 1858), for example, reported that Dorr’s work was “a neat little volume” that offered a “graphic and racy sketch of the author’s travels in foreign lands—what he saw, heard and experienced.” The unidentified reviewer noted Dorr’s visits to numerous Old World countries, emphasized his “thrilling account of the scenes and sensations” in Paris during Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in1851, and praised the quality of the author’s prose. A Colored Man Round the World was therefore “an exceedingly interesting work,” the reviewer explained, because Dorr “indulges in no pompous rhetoric, but jots down in a free-and-easy, everyday style the incidents of his travel.” This book thus gave its readers an engaging, first-hand report on European pleasures and exotic places rather than a “pompous” narrative on history or morality. Equally important, it demonstrated the exceptional personal qualities of a “Quadroon” who was born to a “slave mother” and yet could “readily pass any where as a white man (and an excellent white man, too).”7 Although it is impossible to know Dorr’s response

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to this review, modern readers of his book can readily imagine his appreciation for the references to “an excellent white man” because Dorr constantly asserted his male-gendered position in almost every social context he described. More generally, the anonymous reviewer in the Plain Dealer (a personal friend of Dorr?) affirmed all three of the main identities that Dorr staked out for himself in his travel stories: (1) an educated person who knew European culture, (2) a respectable young man who knew how to be attractive to women, and (3) a free traveler who knew how to escape the social and racial hierarchies of slavery. Dorr arrived in Liverpool in the summer of 1851 and then moved on to London and Paris. His itinerary followed the typical nineteenth-century American “grand tour” of major European cities, but he also visited smaller towns in southern France, Switzerland, the Rhineland, and the Netherlands. He never explained how his status as an enslaved man limited or defined his travel options. The trip extended well beyond Western Europe, however, when Dorr wandered through the crowded streets of Mediterranean cities such as Naples, Constantinople, and Athens. He spent two winters in Paris (1851–52 and 1852–53) before making an adventurous boat trip up the Nile River, an overland trip across the desert from Egypt to Palestine, and a brief visit to Damascus, the multicultural capital of Syria. Returning finally to France by late summer 1853, Dorr sailed from Le Havre for New York and made his way back to New Orleans. The precise date of his later flight from Louisiana is unknown, but the place and date of his book’s publication confirms that he had definitely settled in Cleveland before 1858. Most of the surviving information about Dorr’s personal relationships, public actions, and political beliefs appears in his only published book, which means that historians know almost nothing about his life before or after his European trip. The well-informed modern editor of A Colored Man Round the World, Malini Johar Schueller, has found scattered references to Dorr in post-Civil War military records, but his name was never listed in the directories of Cleveland residents. There is some evidence he worked before 1860 as a clerk, and he definitely advertised plans to give public lectures on his European travels. One of his proposed lecture topics focused on “The Ballet Girls of Paris and the Quadroon Ladies of the South”—a subject that presumably linked Dorr’s knowledge of France with his “manly” understanding of European and American women. According to Dorr’s own report in a Cleveland newspaper, however, this particular lecture failed to draw more than two dozen people, so it was canceled and the would-be speaker on European affairs soon turned to other activities.8

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The Civil War radically transformed the last years of Dorr’s life. He joined the Seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment in August 1862, thereby finding a new way to assert his strong opposition to slavery and (perhaps) to affirm his independent manhood. The Seventh Ohio was attached to the Army of the Potomac during the battles at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg in 1863, but by November that year the regiment had moved to Tennessee for the Union military campaign around Chattanooga. Dorr was seriously wounded in the jaw and shoulder at the minor Battle of Ringgold Gap (November 27, 1863), where Confederate forces were protecting a retreat into Georgia after their decisive defeats at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. Dorr’s wounds led to enduring physical disabilities, a discharge from the Union Army (August 1864), and a postwar struggle to recover his health.9 Army pension records indicate that a doctor granted him a “permanent disability” status in 1867, for which Dorr received a modest monthly pension of $15. He eventually returned to New Orleans to live as a free man in his native city, yet his health continued to deteriorate. His last request for a pension increase (August 1872) reported that his health had collapsed, and his death was later noted in the pension file without further explanations of when, where, or why he died.10 Dorr’s journey to Europe and his subsequently published travel book may well have been the most satisfying experiences and accomplishments of his war-shortened life. He wrote about Europe with distinctive African American (or Black Atlantic) perspectives that shaped his interpretations of personal experiences and various social systems. Going well beyond the traditions of genteel travel stories, Dorr claimed individual freedoms that neither racism nor slavery could ultimately destroy in America, Europe, or the wider Atlantic world. The specific experience of foreign travel thus helped him become deeply aware of “manhood,” slavery, and politics, modern knowledge and modern religion; but he was concerned above all with the meaning of modern freedom—a freedom that he defined in his own male-gendered voice by both leaving and returning to America.

Dorr’s Search for Manly Freedom and Respect A Colored Man Round the World portrayed the physical pleasures and longed-for social position of a gentleman traveler. Dorr repeatedly emphasized his superior, first-hand knowledge of foreign cultures and also asserted an independent, gendered identity though his descriptions of diverse (and

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sometimes dreamlike) encounters with women. Sexual freedom could become a sign of independent manhood for an enslaved young man from Louisiana, which suggests why the freedom and equality of a “respectable” masculine trip could differ from the trans-Atlantic freedom of “respectable” women. Dorr’s search for respectability took on a distinctive, even erotic subtext that affirmed both his much-desired escape from slavery and the social prerogatives of a traveling “gentleman.” It was also true, however, that Dorr began and ended his book by stressing his conversations with respectable men. Arriving at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool on his first day in England, Dorr immediately received the deferential welcome that European or American gentlemen expected and deserved. A “well-dressed gentleman opened the door and descended the steps with an umbrella to escort me in,” Dorr explained with evident satisfaction. “‘Come right in here, sir,’ said he, leading me into a large room,” whereupon the “gentleman took my overcoat and hung it up.”11 The usual hierarchies in the enslaved man’s life were therefore turned upside down as he walked into his first European hotel, but this polite welcome simply indicated Dorr’s new stature as a well-respected world traveler. He was soon reading European publications in the hotel’s “newsroom” and meeting “noblemen from different parts of England” who freely discussed current affairs. When the conversation turned to slavery in America, one of the “noble-looking” gentlemen argued that a slave rebellion could probably overturn the whole system—a suggestion that (as Dorr noted) would be “treasonable” if the men had been talking anywhere in the southern United States. This early summary of a frank, “newsroom” conversation gave Dorr a narrative strategy to convey his new sense of freedom, his new connections with the social elite, and his own critique of slavery. He could put “treasonable” ideas in the voice of wealthy Englishmen, thus linking himself simultaneously to the upper-class men in a well-respected European hotel and the abolitionist sentiments of welleducated English travelers. Like other well-respected guests, Dorr apparently received deferential service from the hotel staff. Indeed, he reported that these helpful people resembled “the servants of all parts of my own country,” which was a bold comment for a man whose own home-country status was far closer to the “servant class” than to the position of the other gentlemen in the hotel newsroom.12 The opening pages of Dorr’s book thus began to establish the self-image of a well-respected traveler whose needs received the solicitous attention of men and women alike. “It is impossible for me to do anything for myself,”

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he reported in the present tense voice that he used for most of his narrative. “I have offers from nearly all parts of the Hotel, volunteering to do all that is to be done and more too.” Dorr may have found effective ways to encourage this assistance by adhering carefully to the recommendations of Murray’s Guidebook, which advised American travelers “to give a small bonus to the menials in public or private houses.” In any case, his generosity confirmed that Dorr was a respectable gentleman and seemed to enhance the goodwill of everyone who served him, including the owners of hotels. On the day of his departure from the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, Dorr explained, the “landlord” himself walked out to the coach “and wished me a happy voyage to London.”13 These early stories of respectful interactions with European servants and gentlemen became the prelude for social patterns that reappeared in every phase of Dorr’s long trip. He soon reached Paris, for example, where the staff at the “‘Hotel des Princes’ provided deferential assistance with plenty of French politesse and where the guests in the hotel dining room included “three noblemen of England, one Duke of Italy, three barons of the Rhine, and a broken down princess.”14 Nobody who read such lists could doubt the quality of people whom Dorr met in European hotels. The other guests at his Dutch hotel in The Hague included the father of the Dutch queen—an impressive personage who traveled with his own “guard of honor” and who, as Dorr explained in noting another social inversion, “bows to me” when going out to visit the city. Such respect was the leitmotif of Dorr’s journey. He included no reports of servants or elite nobles who treated him rudely or simply ignored the enslaved traveling companion of Cornelius Fellowes. Dorr never explained how he acquired his money or paid his bills, but he seemed to get as much service and respect as any American he knew. He hired local guides at every tourist site from the Waterloo battlefield to the churches in Jerusalem, he visited American consuls, he called on the pasha of Egypt (who refused to see unknown American visitors), and he met diplomats in Damascus.15 Dorr’s travel stories therefore suggested that he gained the respect of important people in every city he visited and also during every phase of his journey. Even his trip home to America reconfirmed the cultural status he had developed in Europe because other American passengers on the ship wanted to hear his views on key European issues of the day. The distinguished fellow travelers on this trans-Atlantic voyage included “Charles W. March, private secretary of Mr. [Daniel] Webster, and Geo. W. Kendall, the travelling editor of the New Orleans Picayune,” both of whom Dorr called the “happiest men

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aboard.” They enjoyed their dinners and fine wines, but they also “inquired of my opinion of thousands of little things that I thought hardly worth noticing.”16 The young, enslaved man who had traveled for more than two years in Europe and the Middle East was now prepared to offer his well-informed “opinion” to the most prominent Americans on his ship. Although he was still (in 1853) the enslaved servant of a Louisiana businessman, Dorr’s long trip had given him the confidence to assert a free man’s knowledge and personal autonomy. Dorr confirmed his sense of freedom through his stories about notable persons and his eyewitness accounts of famous people. In summer 1851, for example, he watched Queen Victoria move through the streets near London’s famous world’s fair at the Crystal Palace. A huge crowd had gathered to see the queen, but Dorr was able to observe her face and demeanor as she passed close to him in a carriage—a sighting that became a quasi-mystical moment in his life. “I felt a sort of religious thrill pass over me,” Dorr wrote, “and I said to myself ‘this is civilization.’” In fact, he described the entire English nation as “the most civilized and Christian power on this earth,” thus transforming his brief view of Britain’s ruling monarch into personal connections with a “civilization” that his American readers could never match at home. And what did he see when he glimpsed modern civilization’s royal embodiment? “Her color was too red and masculine for a lady. She was considerable stouter than I thought she was,” and yet this famous woman clearly possessed the qualities of a “great Queen.” Despite his lack of direct involvement with European court life, Dorr wrote about the British monarch’s imposing personal appearance and stressed his own subsequent encounters with numerous kings and famous public figures. In addition to the queen of Great Britain, Dorr would see the king of Greece, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the pope and cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, the duke of Tuscany, and prominent members of the French National Assembly.17 The sight of Pope Pius IX, for example, provided another narrative opportunity to reflect on Old World grandeur. Summarizing his view of the “great man,” Dorr wrote that the pope wore “a gorgeously jeweled crown” and was carried like a ruling monarch through throngs of worshipping Romans. “The people all would fall on their knees,” Dorr explained, “and the great man would bless them.”18 The pope’s personal grandeur and adoring followers thus impressed the traveler from New Orleans, but Dorr may have been even more fascinated by the Turkish deference to the Ottoman sultan Abdülmecid I, whom he saw proceeding through Constantinople with a whole caravan of

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attendants. According to Dorr, this monarchical procession included several pashas on golden-saddled camels, the sultan’s seven wives, troupes of musicians, and a vast crowd of admiring bystanders. Here, too, Dorr seemed to be attracted to the spectacle of royal power, though he clearly did not see the young sultan as a symbol of civilization. According to Dorr, Abdülmecid was uneducated, nervous, and fearful; in obvious contrast to the strikingly masculine British queen, Dorr portrayed the Ottoman sultan as effeminate and weak.19 Dorr’s respect for nobles and “civilized” rulers therefore did not extend beyond Western Europe, perhaps because a nineteenth-century American “gentleman” had to “know” that civilization itself flourished only in the great cities of Europe and the United States. Dorr thus claimed his “gentleman” status by reporting his encounters with famous people in famous places, but he also sought to differentiate himself from less knowledgeable American travelers who lacked the culture, manliness, or independence of a truly civilized person such as himself. His accounts of European cities thus included critical observations on the kind of American he saw in a large Parisian garden restaurant, where people danced or engaged in lively conversations, “but not one gentleman had his foot on the table, except an American quietly seated in one corner in a profound soliloquy.” This melancholy solitude seemed even worse when Dorr noticed that the boorish American was chewing tobacco, a vile national custom that violated the mores of cultured gentlemen. “I didn’t stop to see where he spit,” Dorr explained, “for fear he might claim nationality.”20 The presence of less cultured compatriots, however, gave Dorr another way to affirm his own manly respectability because he could contrast his more refined behavior with (for example) the pathetic situation of two “broken American youths” he saw at the famous German resort in Baden-Baden. The young men had lost all their money in the gambling casino, so they were waiting for funds to pay their hotel bills and meanwhile causing embarrassment for other American gentlemen who visited the resort. These broke Americans were “free men,” and yet Dorr could show that they were less self-reliant than the enslaved traveler from New Orleans. “I didn’t pride myself much here on my nationality,” Dorr noted in his description of Baden-Baden, “lest I would have some unprofitable fame.”21 Dorr’s references to unattractive Americans reminded readers that the author of A Colored Man Round the World was a better gentleman than many of the free men who flaunted their national identities in Europe. He became especially angry in Florence when he saw an older, wealthy man from

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California (Dorr sarcastically called him Mr. “Bullion”) “trying to pass himself off for a real American gentleman.” Mr. “Bullion” wanted to assert his social status by riding through Florence in an elegant carriage, but his actions showed he “had more money than brains.” When the Florentine police asked him to open a space in the street for the passage of the duke of Tuscany and other “gentlemen and ladies,” the American demanded deference to a citizen of the United States, rudely threw his legs over the front cushions in his open carriage, and stupidly spat tobacco juice. Although the haughty Mr. “Bullion” eventually obeyed the police, his rudeness gave Dorr another opportunity to elevate himself above a wealthy, white American who ignored the social codes in European cities: At first my national pride was somewhat lowered [Dorr wrote with reference to Mr. “Bullion”], but on second thought, I gloried in knowing that Americans are not responsible for every upstart that goes abroad and violates the rules and regulations of other communities because they are not made to suit his taste, for which no body ever cared but himself. The good people of Europe know full well that there is always thistles among roses and not all good among themselves.22 Dorr thus separated his honorable identity from the actions of unrespectable (white) Americans and linked his own cultural views to the “good people of Europe.” In fact, among all of the other American travelers that Dorr discussed, the African Americans stood out as the most impressive, respectable compatriots whom he encountered in the Old World. He constantly portrayed himself as an honorable “colored man,” of course, but he also described other African Americans who exemplified an independence and respect that they could only find in Europe. In the Parisian garden restaurant that attracted dancers, diners, and a solitary, tobacco-spitting white American, Dorr also came upon a “very rich” Louisiana “quadroon” named Mr. Cordevoille—and the contrasts with the lonely, spitting American could not have been more striking. Cordevoille had been a prosperous tailor who left New Orleans “on account of their prejudice to color.” He later settled in Paris, married a French woman, prospered in business, and made his way into French society. “Mr. Cordevoille was looking the very picture of a gentleman,” Dorr wrote in his sympathetic (selfreferential?) summary of the Louisiana expatriate’s life story; “he seemed to be a great object of respect to those that spoke to the lady he was conversing with

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in the French tongue. He reminded me more of Prince Albert in his manners than any other person around.” This “gentleman” greeted the Americans with a handshake that conveyed his social equality, and then invited the visitors to his country home outside Paris. Cornelius Fellowes and his white traveling companions accepted this invitation from a Louisiana “quadroon” because it was “the duty of gentlemen” in France to respond honorably to the invitation of another gentleman. Dorr apparently accompanied Fellowes on the trip to the countryside, where he saw his “master” spend a night in the house of a man white people would never visit in Louisiana. The stopover chez Cordevoille, in other words, showed how Europe could provide new social status for the few American men of color who established themselves in Old World cities. Dorr recognized, however, that his white traveling companions had crossed America’s racial boundaries; and “Lest it be a censure on these gentlemen,” he noted discreetly, “I refrain from going any further with a subject so delicate.”23 The story of Cordevoille’s Parisian status and freedom became the narrative prelude to a longer description of another independent, American “colored man” whom Dorr met later in Constantinople and Athens. Although he began his narrative of the visit to Constantinople by ridiculing the appearance and alien language of a poor African man he saw in the harbor (using racist stereotypes to suggest that this man could never be a gentleman), Dorr soon met a Tennessean who embodied his own conception of truly autonomous African American manhood. The man was named Frank Parrish, and he had come to Constantinople after a trip through Egypt with other Americans. Dorr reported that Parrish was a “free man” who “owned property in Nashville,” and though he specifically noted that he was traveling with a group of white Tennesseans, he never referred to Parrish as a “servant.” Dorr explained that Parrish “had come to Constantinople . . . to recover from wounds he had received from Arabs that shot him through the shoulder with his own gun” while he was trying to protect one of his white traveling companions. This heroic action in Egypt exemplified a manly courage that was also obvious in Parrish’s manly body. “Frank is a man about 45 or 50 years of age, and looks like a man in every sense of the word. He is not a yellow, or black man, but what we call ginger-bread color.”24 Parrish’s strong body suggested to Dorr the personal character of a bold man who viewed himself as inherently equal to every human being he met: men or women, Europeans or Arabs, white Americans or African Americans, and the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Dorr actually saw Parrish for the first

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time when he was watching the earlier-noted procession of the sultan and his attendants pass through the streets of Constantinople. Standing in a great crowd that awaited the sultan, Dorr saw a “very large man, from Nashville, Tennessee” who towered above every other person on the street. The stature of this imposing figure immediately impressed the younger Dorr, but the man’s exceptional actions said even more about his independent spirit and firm sense of equality: His name was Frank Parish. He had in his hand as large a hickory stick as ever a man carried to be a stick; he wore Turkish costume from head to foot. . . . The Sultan stopped every fifty yards and listened to the music. When he stopped close to Frank, he cast his eyes on his great form, and seemed to be interested; and Frank had brass enough to look at the Sultan as he did at other people. Frank took his pipe from his mouth and walked up to the Sultan’s carriage and offered his hand which the Sultan took, to the approbation of all present. The seven Sultanas [i.e., the Sultan’s wives] were looking at Frank all the time through their eyelits as if they liked the looks of him. . . . The Sultan could plainly see that his loyal subjects were but as infants, by the giant-like man that stood over them. Being surrounded by such dwarf-like men, he showed off to great advantage. The Sultan is a weak-looking man, and has the marks of fatigue well written on his forehead and limbs.25 Dorr thus described Parrish as the most impressive man he saw in Constantinople or in any other place he ever visited. This independentminded “colored man” appeared to embody the masculine strength and confidence that Dorr sought for himself throughout his European travels; and even the sultan of a great empire seemed to be “weak-looking” when he shook Parrish’s strong African American hand. Parrish and Dorr traveled in subservient social positions that differed from the status of a typical “gentleman” on the grand Old World tour, but they both used their European journeys to claim the social equality and personal freedoms not available to them in antebellum America. Indeed, when Dorr encountered Parrish again on the next major stop of their respective tours, he found that this “giant-like” fellow traveler had brought all his remarkable confidence and personal strength from Constantinople to Athens. Parrish’s striking assertion of social equality reappeared in what Dorr

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described as “another liberty with royalty,” which Dorr observed in Athens as he watched the Greek King Otho I come into a public area to listen to the music of a national band. Emerging from the crowd that had gathered to greet the king, the free-spirited Frank Parrish stepped forward with the same boldness that Dorr had admired in Constantinople. “As the King and his wife rode up to the band,” Dorr wrote, “his horses stopped just at Frank’s elbow, and Frank walked to the carriage and offered his red hand to the king, and it was, through courtesy, accepted.”26 Although this sympathetic report on yet “another liberty with royalty” focused on Parrish, it may well have reflected Dorr’s own desire to emulate a social confidence that his age, enslavement, or personal timidity prevented him from expressing—at least in the presence of kings. Parrish’s free spirit extended beyond his penchant for shaking hands with monarchs, however, as Dorr explained in descriptions of other Parrish sightings among the ruins of the Acropolis. The typical tourist walk through the ancient Greek temples led to a large, slide-like rock whose magical powers were reputed to provide an antidote to female infertility. This was the kind of magic that attracted Dorr’s interest, but he was unprepared for what he saw when he went to study the stone’s mysterious powers. Frank Parrish was seated near the famous rock, talking with a Scotswoman who had come to Athens as “a lady’s maid” and now seemed “to be proud of him as a beaux.” The “ginger-bread colored” man who had boldly shaken hands with the imperial sultan was now conversing freely with a white woman from Scotland, and Dorr began to wonder how such a Tennessean could move so effortlessly among European women as well as reigning monarchs. He was therefore “determined to hear Frank talk to this Scotchwoman,” and he soon positioned himself close enough to listen to the conversation. “He was telling her of his business, which was still going on in Nashville,” Dorr reported. “She believed it all, and Frank was in his glory.” When the business talk eventually ended, Parrish moved on skillfully to the more gallant challenge of a sentimental farewell. He knew, as always, how to take decisive, manly action. Parrish “was well versed for the occasion, in Byron. He took her by the hand and looked her in the face affectionately, and said with emotion, ‘Maid of Athens, ere we part, give, oh give me back my heart.”27 The poetry seemed to be perfect for this transitional moment. Indeed, the literary adieu gave Dorr new reasons to respect this African American man who casually greeted European kings and also flattered European women by citing Byronic verse amid the ruins of ancient Greek temples. “As Frank was

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going to my hotel I thought it well to make his acquaintance,” Dorr noted with his usual interest in new opportunities, so the two travelers fell into a conversation. Parrish said that he had noticed Dorr in Constantinople and recognized that he must be an American, but he had assumed that Dorr would have little interest in talking with “a mere barber from Tennessee.” He was wrong, of course, as we know from Dorr’s commentary on Parrish’s forceful handshake with the sultan. Dorr had quickly decided that Parrish was “a man in every sense of the word,” to quote again from the earlier assessment in Constantinople, and Parrish seemed to confirm his exceptional masculinity when he informed the younger traveler that “he had been married several times, and was now engaged at home.”28 The multiple marriages and other relations with women (even in Athens) provided final, conclusive evidence of Parrish’s enviable, independent manhood, in part because enslaved men could not enter into legally recognized marriages and in part because Dorr’s trip across Europe included a self-conscious desire for sensual relations with women.

Dorr’s Male Fantasies and the Quest for Independent “Manhood” Dorr’s arrival in Liverpool led quickly to his first encounters with European women as well as his first contacts with wealthy gentlemen. Barely settled into his hotel room, Dorr struck up a conversation with a young hotel worker named “Mary” who “looked so neat” that he decided to “be polite and become acquainted.” The notable theme in Dorr’s account of this meeting emerged, however, in his statement that a man was “like a dog in some particulars” and that even the briefest encounter with a potential “sexual mate” could provoke manly curiosity. He therefore told the story of meeting Mary in a first-person narrative that helped to establish his own identity as a man whom women would want to serve in every European city he visited. “I shall be here a week said I, and want you to take care of me.” According to Dorr, this comment stimulated Mary’s immediate interest, and by the time he saw her again in the hallway “her eyes fell upon me just as mine did on her.” The specific information about Mary’s “care” remained vague, except for references to Mary’s eagerness to collect and wash his clothes. In fact, he assured his readers, “I gave her to understand that nothing would give me more pleasure than to have her return again for them;” and this reference to the “pleasure” that Dorr derived from the woman who took his clothes carried the

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kind of double-entendre that he would often use to describe his contacts with women.29 It is of course impossible to know exactly what happened when Dorr met European women, yet he sought constantly to portray himself as an attractive young man whom women were eager to please. His much-desired status of autonomous manhood, in other words, depended on a hierarchical view of men/women relationships and an imagined male freedom that required readily accessible women. Dorr’s description of the early encounters with Mary set the narrative tone for later stories about his experiences in Paris, where the erotic subtexts expressed typical American male ideas about the sexual mores of French women. Although the maids at the Hotel des Princes could barely say an English word, they gave Dorr a warm welcome and “left me pretty certain that I was in Paris.” Elegant women also filled the hotel dining room, and Dorr began greeting a mysterious princess whom he passed in the hotel hallways or met in the nearby streets. Indeed, the young (enslaved) man from New Orleans quickly became an independent Parisian flâneur, observing well-dressed women on the boulevards and enjoying the social prerogatives of a male gaze. “I stood about, looking! Looking! Looking!” Dorr wrote in a summary of the freedom he felt in the city of lights; “Seeing what is novel enough to an American in Paris.”30 Following in the footsteps of many other American male travelers, Dorr soon visited the famous garden dances to watch international couples swirling around a “melodious band” and reveling in the “dizziness” of an open-air night party. The women danced in beautiful rhythm with gliding, fashionable male partners, who seemed to come from the whole world to find their pleasures in illuminated French gardens.31 The nightly dances therefore drew Dorr’s manly interests, but he also liked his casual social exchanges in French shops, restaurants, and cafés. Dorr admired the young women he saw in these public places, and he was apparently a happy man whenever he simply ordered coffee in a busy Parisian café. “Then look around, not slyly, but boldly,” he advised would-be male café visitors, “and you see some unassuming French demoiselle gazing upon you with such riveted force of interest, that the lashes of her eye moveth not.” This was the kind of female attention that flattered Dorr and also suggested freer, French sexual mores that became all the more intriguing for a young American man who could not even move freely across his own country. The French were “frank and free,” Dorr explained to his American readers. “If one admires a lady, she knows it almost before an opportunity presents itself;” and Dorr praised Parisians for living

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in the present, ignoring the troubles of daily life, and pursuing the special pleasures of food, wine, and love.32 There was, in short, a distinctive Parisian eroticism that Americans could rarely or never see at home, though Dorr was more than willing to hint at what adventurous travelers like himself might find in France. There were plenty of famous historical sites, of course, but there were other extraordinary sights for the “curious young men” who preferred the vulgarities of uninhibited spectacles. At one such (illegal) show, for example, Dorr watched “a dozen beautiful women habited like Eve before she devised the fig leaf covering” as they formed a provocative wreath “with each one’s head between another’s legs.” This strange performance continued toward a conclusion that “must be imagined,” Dorr explained, because he could not possibly provide other details of the “amusement” he had seen.33 The story of this unusual nightly “amusement” seemed somehow to extend Dorr’s account of Parisian eroticism toward a dreamlike evocation of what later psychologists would call “unconscious desires.” Indeed, the narrative in A Colored Man Round the World sometimes linked people, events, and desires in the odd juxtapositions of a fantasy dream, thereby suggesting that a “colored” American man in France (Dorr?) could actually live his dreams freely in real life—far removed from the shackles of daily existence at home. Dorr’s descriptions of his activities and fantasies in the French capital thus tended to blur the lines between dreams and reality, but these sometimes tenuous boundaries appeared to break down completely in his narrative of a dream he had one night at a hotel near the Seine. If the word “surrealistic” had been available in the early 1850s, Dorr might well have used this adjective to describe the adventures and desires that his dream conveyed. The “surrealistic” events took place in a dream, whereas the desires for personal freedom came from an enslaved personal life that was all too real. “Can a man dream with his eyes open?” Dorr asked his readers as he launched the story of his dream, “or can a man see with them shut? Before you say no, bear in mind that man is the shadow of his maker; and life, a dream.”34 The dream and the life of the dreamer could not be separated. Opening in the midst of an elegant, multi-course dinner at a fancy restaurant or a nobleman’s Parisian home, Dorr’s dream narrative carried him quickly from this extravagant party on to the bustling boulevards and into his seat at a table in a fashionable café. This dramatic transition, however, merely opened the door to new pleasures in a dream that moved rapidly through apparently disconnected adventures:

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A ballet girl entered and seated herself for la crème. I then called for some cream and we eat on the same side of the table. I asked her if it was good? She said she liked it, and asked me if mine was the same. As the color was different I could not say, without tasting hers, and we put our glasses together and satisfied ourselves on the difference, after which we took a vere du vin at the expense of one of us.35 Modern readers of Dorr’s dream/story would not need psychoanalytic training to recognize the multiple desires that fuse in this vivid scene: desires for the manly power of a wealthy noble, for sexual relations with a young French woman, for crossing or merging the differences of color, and for providing both la crème and the wine that confirms the couple’s mutual satisfaction. Above all, Dorr dreamed his desire for the power and freedom of a man who could live without constraints. Unfortunately, this happy interlude with the ballet dancer gave way immediately in the dream to a new scene in which Dorr again found himself among the wealthy nobles he had seen at the opening dinner party. The men and women in this elegant group communicated with complete, interpersonal transparency and shared a utopian social harmony. All the usual conflicts of human relationships had vanished in this happy fantasy of male/ female symbiosis: When a gentleman had anything to communicate, he was not obliged to exert himself in reaching, because the ladies would meet him half way. Everything was so harmonious that one could not go through the laborious task of telling his wish, without assistance from the hearer. . . . Every minute or two a couple would rise, and before the gentleman could give his arm the lady would reach for it. Even their tempers seemed to fit, as the ocean does the earth.36 The harmony that the dreaming Dorr had found in his café meeting with a French ballerina now expanded to a whole community of free men and women whose relationships suggested total equality rather than the realworld hierarchies of power, privilege, and slavery. It was a social dream of an imaginary place where everyone could simply be free, equal, and happy. Despite this satisfying denouement, the utopian conversation was not the last scene in Dorr’s long Parisian dream. In fact, after awaking for a brief glimpse of the calm-flowing Seine River, Dorr quickly plunged into another

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deep sleep and returned to his magical dream world of French pleasures. The new dream scene, “which pleased me most” (to quote again from Dorr’s narrative), placed him on a Parisian sidewalk amid beautiful women who were all looking for something they could not find. One of the women turned to Dorr and asked in French if he knew the time—though she was not really interested in the hour of the day. When Dorr began to answer her question, she lifted her dress to reveal the “whitest stockings I had seen since I left the Dutch, who don’t wear stockings at all.” Provoked by this unexpected sight, the dreaming Dorr pursued the woman “to see if there was anything good inside the stockings,” only to find that the stockings existed solely in his imagination, “like Santa Claus.” This abrupt disappointment jolted him from his sleep, and, as he noted with a whiff of regret, “Thus ends the dream with open eyes.”37 Social reality flowed back into Dorr’s life as his travel narrative moved on to Italy, Turkey, and other Mediterranean sites. The five-page description of his Parisian dreams nevertheless stood out in the narrative as a climactic summary of Dorr’s fantasies and aspirations for independent manhood. He actually put the story of his “surrealistic” dreams at the exact midpoint of his book, so that the previous travel experiences led gradually to this French dreamland and later experiences extended the dreamed images of freedom, equality, and male/female relations toward other places and people. Dorr’s stories about the free-spirited, gallant Frank Parrish, for example, seemed almost to become his African American dream come true. More generally, however, Dorr tended to link his aspirations for harmonious, erotic relationships to his recurring dream of freedom. Free relations with women, like the equal relationships with respectable men, offered social empowerment to enhance the liberties of a free, personal life. Dorr continued to write about women and sexual themes after his Parisian sojourn, but the later stories did not refer so specifically to the eroticism that fascinated him in Paris. There was nevertheless another remarkable story about Constantinople, where Dorr’s desire to be an independent gentleman shaped new fantasies about a Turkish woman. Arriving in the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Dorr began to notice the disorienting mystery of veiled women. As he explained the experience, women were the “source of low spirits to a man” because they moved “like spirits or shadows, and cannot be seen.” This mystery stimulated his sensual curiosity, however, and provoked his apparent psychological need to find admiring women. He thus encountered a woman he imagined to be a potential partner—maybe a successor to

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his servant-friend Mary at Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel. The Muslim woman was wearing a veil, but Dorr “knew she must have been pretty” after watching her for an hour and sensing that she was also looking at him. Although he heard her voice and saw her “delicate” hands, she was not available for his now-experienced male gaze, and, in contrast to his flânerie in Paris, he could not look at what he wanted to see. The local guide warned Dorr he could never know this woman. It would also be impossible to meet another woman whose mother had decided to sell her. Only a Muslim would be able to buy the young woman, the guide explained, which meant Dorr had no chance to make a deal. The fact that this young woman was for sale, however, attracted Dorr’s perverse interest; and in the strangest possible role reversal, the enslaved travel companion of Cornelius Fellowes wanted to know the cost for purchasing the woman he now yearned to meet. His guide suggested a price of roughly twenty-five dollars, giving Dorr an idea for how to achieve his goals: he proposed to buy the woman and present her as a gift to his guide. “He said he did not know how it could be done,” Dorr explained in a factual summary of his offer, but the impossible purchase led to a new question that conveyed the desire he had carried from Liverpool to Paris to Constantinople. “I asked him if he thought the girl would admire me; he had no doubt about that, and added, I need not have any uneasiness about that, as I could make her love me after she was mine, she was obliged to obey me according to Turkish laws.”38 Dorr could thus imagine himself to be a desirable, respected man, even when he could not act on his fantasies or use his money to buy love. Whatever else might be said about the gender hierarchies or cultural misconceptions in this story, Dorr’s proposal to buy another person seems especially strange for a “colored man” whose book began and ended with explicit critiques of slavery. Perhaps the would-be free gentleman (who had always lived under the patriarchal slave system) wanted to show that he understood how the purchase of women could signify a free man’s power and status. In any case, Dorr’s desire for manly independence led finally in Constantinople to an imagined inversion of his social position; the enslaved man would own another human being. It should be stressed, however, that this gendered fantasy was by no means the “endpoint” of Dorr’s journey. A Colored Man returned eventually to the critique of slavery that emerged first in the book’s preface and later reappeared in Dorr’s Parisian dreams and in the ultimate affirmation of the author’s existential identity as a free man.

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Dorr’s Affirmation of Free Selfhood? The enslaved traveler from Louisiana thus drew on the diverse experiences of his European journey to show the injustices of slavery and to stake out his personal claims for the identity of a free man. By the time he reached the final paragraphs of his book, Dorr was affirming his own freedom in what intellectual historians might call a “proto-existential” celebration of independent selfhood. Writing this book, as he described the process, had offered additional intellectual steps toward the ultimate destination of his long trip: the emergence of a new kind of man. “I feel in taking leave of this work,” he wrote in a concluding summary of the book’s meaning to its author, “as if I was parting with an old and familiar friend that I could stay much longer with, but I am afraid to stay much longer lest I enhance its value as a friend. A Friend? Yes, a friend.”39 Like many other authors in different times and places, Dorr realized that he had developed an intense intellectual and emotional relationship with his own book, so that leaving his written work resembled the sadness of ending long conversations with a best friend. Dorr never read Friedrich Nietzsche, of course, but his ambivalence about “parting” from his book anticipated Nietzsche’s famous, ambivalent farewell to his own words in Beyond Good and Evil (1886). Writing almost thirty years after Dorr said good-bye to A Colored Man Round the World, Nietzsche also spoke of his own text like a linguistic friend who must inevitably set off for unknown places. “Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, . . . you made me sneeze and laugh—and now?” Nietzsche went on to compare his evolving, written thoughts to the bright morning colors that change all too quickly into the shadowy colors of a late afternoon or the late autumnal colors of a withering plant. The metaphors in his literary farewell were thus more poetic than Dorr’s allusions to a parting friend, but Dorr would surely have understood the later German philosopher’s last words in a text that had also become his friend: “nobody will guess . . . how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved—wicked thoughts.”40 Linking Dorr to Nietzsche makes an unlikely connection between two writers who obviously lived in very different sociocultural contexts and confronted extremely different personal and intellectual issues. I nevertheless want to argue that Dorr’s concluding affirmation of his own, independent selfhood carried a surprising “proto-Nietzschean” emphasis on the noble

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quest for a free, self-defined, ethical code and personal identity. Stressing his desire to “tell the thing as I saw it” rather than to repeat the clichéd stories of other writers, Dorr praised his self-defined interests in the “strange places” he visited while he was still a “young man.” He viewed his trip as all the more exceptional because he was a young, enslaved traveler whose voyage “round the world” showed the willful determination of youth rather than the limitations of his dependent social position. His adventures thus confirmed that “youth must find his own crag on the mountain, rivet his eye of determined prosperity up the cliffy wiles of life, kick asunder impediments and obstacles, and climb on.”41 There was a typical nineteenth-century (Byronic) Romanticism in this assertion of youthful independence, but the themes also anticipated the later Nietzschean or existential insistence that free persons must “climb” beyond the obstacles that emerge in every human life. Dorr believed that his long journey offered useful lessons for anyone who yearned to be free, including enslaved persons in the United States. The challenges and opportunities of a long trip, as he explained in his concluding reflections, pointed the way toward a new life for anyone (enslaved and free alike) who decided to take self-creating personal actions. “When you hear can’t, laugh at it; when they tell you not in your time, pity them; and when they tell you surrounding circumstances alter cases, in manliness scorn them as sleeping sluggards, unworthy of a social brotherhood.”42 Although Dorr returned here to his personal emphasis on “manliness,” his larger theme emphasized the free human being’s ability to construct an independent identity—a strong, noble self that evolved on the margins or even outside the constraining “circumstances” of conventional social life. This argument evoked what I am calling “proto-Nietzschean” themes because, like Nietzsche, Dorr downplayed the inescapable social limits on independent human action. Dismissing the obvious constraints that shaped his own life, he insisted that a self-defined (noble) man must “kick asunder” the reigning social “impediments” and ignore all those who answered “can’t” to the demand for a free selfhood. When others denied the free man’s rights on the basis of his color, for example, the independent, self-defined person must assert the deeper unity of all human races. Indeed, Dorr claimed that the French scientist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon had shown already in the eighteenth century that the individuals on each continent were “nothing but the same man differently dyed by climate,” thereby providing scientific proof for underlying similarities that were far more significant than the superficial differences in skin color. To be sure, ignorant people would always

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look for racial differences or oppose the free actions of bold, independent persons, but Dorr dismissed such people as mere obstacles to bypass on the journey to manly independence. “Then away with your can’t,” he concluded; “when backed to the wall by the debator, you had better say, as I say while taking leave of you, au revoir.”43 This last sentence thus reaffirmed Dorr’s claim to equality with anyone who read his book. He had been an enslaved man who now refused to be a slave; and (like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) he would not allow others to define the limits of his freedom. This already bold assertion became even stronger as Dorr noted that he had chosen to leave the book and his readers. Only a free man could choose to leave others and also decide when it was time to say good-bye, au revoir. The farewell to his own book and his imagined readers became Dorr’s final assertion of personal freedom on a long journey toward “manly” independence that began during his trip to Europe, expanded during his self-emancipating flight to Ohio, and reached a public destination when he completed the self-referential narrative of A Colored Man Round the World. Dorr transformed his voyage into a gendered (male) narrative about distant countries and cross-cultural experiences, but his book showed that long voyages to unknown places could carry any modern traveler into new conceptions and personal experiences of autonomous selfhood. The enslaved man’s journey differed from the travels of most other nineteenth-century Americans. Yet he was able to use his long European voyage in distinctive ways to interpret, escape, and also relive common experiences of enslavement that Joseph Miller describes as the “challenges of disruption, renewed isolation, moving on, and starting over.”44 These challenges all appear in Dorr’s unusual travel book, which also suggests how the dehumanizing conditions of slavery could be defied through a “Black Atlantic” traveler’s deracinating encounter with cultures and societies in modern Europe.

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Chapter eight

Methodology in the Making and Reception of Equiano vincent carretta

Trust but verify. —Ronald Reagan Let it be remembered, that the nature of things is not altered by our conduct. We cannot make truth; it is our business only to find it. No proposition can become more or less certain or important, by being considered or neglected. —Samuel Johnson, Sermon 20 Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. —Attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan

A combination of innocence and inexperience led me to write the biography of the man now most commonly referred to as Olaudah Equiano. Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself in London in 1789. Any biographer of Equiano must approach his life and writings from multiple disciplinary perspectives: literary critics and scholars universally recognize his book as the foundational text in the genre of the slave narrative; anthropologists consider his autobiography to be the fullest account of eighteenth-century Igbo ethnography; and historians of the trans-Atlantic slave trade accept Equiano’s

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description of the Middle Passage as the most compelling one we have from a victim’s point of view. The discovery of records that say that Equiano was born in South Carolina have made writing his biography far more challenging than I had anticipated.1 As Jon Sensbach observes elsewhere in this collection of essays, Equiano’s “celebrated memoir established him in the eighteenth century, and reaffirmed him again in the twentieth, as the quintessential survivor of the Middle Passage, general maritime gadabout, and activist witness against the slave trade. The recent controversy over his birth origins has further fueled the interest in Equiano, whose singular story and fame qualify him as much the subject of biography as of microhistory.”2 Truly interdisciplinary work deals multi-methodologically with primary evidence in all the relevant disciplines. Crossing the turf boundaries that separate disciplines perhaps inevitably invites challenges to the biographer’s expertise beyond his or her own home discipline. But although the objects of study in history, literary history, and biography frequently differ—historians tend to study the representative individual, whereas literary biographers usually deal with the extraordinary author—the methodologies of historical, literary, and biographical scholarship fundamentally have much in common. All three types of scholars ideally consider their subjects diachronically. Each must take into account the times and places in which their subjects lived. Each ought to begin with a hypothesis that is tested by all the available evidence as inductively as possible. Each needs to recognize the difference between dispositive and probative evidence, and the likelihood that he or she is likely to discover far more of the former than the latter. Each must be able to distinguish among probable, plausible, and improbable explanations for, and interpretations of, the evidence he or she discovers. And each must read the relevant primary and secondary texts before commenting on them.3 The biographer of an autobiographer would seem to have a relatively easy job because his or her plot is already known. Certainly the task is less daunting than writing a biography of the eighteenth-century African American poet Phillis Wheatley has been because there are numerous gaps of several years in the records of her life. Literary scholars presumably approach their biographical subjects with an appreciation that autobiographies are works of art shaped by their authors to retrospectively impose order on their lives. Biographers should be expected to pay close attention to the textual evidence, as well as to the rhetorical context in which the subject’s autobiography was produced, distributed, and received. To a biographer, what an autobiographer leaves out may be as significant as what is included. He or she is likely to

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consider the various genres and conventions that influence a multi-generic text such as Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, which is simultaneously a spiritual autobiography, captivity narrative, travel book, adventure tale, narrative of slavery, economic treatise, apologia, and perhaps in part historical fiction, among other things. Anyone making the biographical turn to Equiano has to recognize that Equiano’s reconstruction of his own life is sui generis in the eighteenth century, despite rhetorical tropes and conventions he shares with earlier and contemporaneous authors. Unlike almost every other narrative by a contemporaneous author of African descent, Equiano’s autobiography is not an astold-to tale transcribed and edited by a white amanuensis. Equiano never sold his copyright: he controlled the text and paratext of his Interesting Narrative through all nine British editions published during his lifetime. Hence we can speculate more confidently about his rhetorical intentions than about those of any other eighteenth-century author of African descent. The substantive changes made in every edition of the Interesting Narrative were his. He was responsible for everything included and excluded in his autobiography. Equiano’s agency and his control of the narrative of his life were unprecedented and extraordinary. Hence, comparing Equiano’s own (re)constructions of identities in his Interesting Narrative with the (re)constructions by others of slaves like Domingos Álvares or Manoel Joaquim Ricardo may be of very limited usefulness.4 The existence of Equiano’s autobiography, however, must not lull his biographer into a false sense of certainty about the events covered in it. A biographer with literary training is likely to notice that Equiano’s reference to the loss of his unnamed sister may be indebted to a narrative tradition of references to familial separation, especially from a female sibling. This tradition can be traced back to the seventeenth century in obviously fictional (e.g. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko), as well as purportedly nonfictional (e.g. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative), narratives. Similarly, the episode in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in which he momentarily thinks he is about to be reunited with his sister at Gibraltar may be indebted to the conventional recognition scenes found in contemporaneous sentimental novels. The historically informed literary biographer should also note that images of familial separation were common in the verbal and visual attacks on the transAtlantic slave trade during the last decades of the eighteenth century. The border between fact and fiction in historical accounts during the eighteenth century was far more porous than it is today. Equiano reconstructs his life as

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a spiritual autobiography and employs literary devices such as the “trope of the talking book” to invite readers to see his experiences as universal in application rather than as peculiar.5 The historically informed literary biographer recognizes that a compelling rhetorical appeal to a reader’s feelings may be more of a sign of a talented storyteller or novelist than proof of the author’s veracity. I first saw a version of Equiano’s autobiography in a bookstore near the campus of the University of Maryland in the early 1990s. There I found a copy of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s recently published anthology The Classic Slave Narratives, which includes an edition of the Interesting Narrative that had been published in Leeds, England, in 1814, seventeen years after Equiano’s death. Although I had heard of Equiano before then, I had never seen a copy of his work. From what I had read about it, I ignorantly assumed that it was a text more appropriate for American literature courses than for the courses in eighteenth-century British literature I was teaching at the time. I envied my colleagues who taught American literature because they had authors of African descent they could teach in inexpensive editions. A significant percentage of the student body at the University of Maryland, both undergraduate and graduate, is of African descent. British literature was generally assumed to be all-white, all the time. Any Anglophone writer of African descent was ipso facto categorized as African American. Equiano had been conceded to the Americanists without a fight. Equiano was sometimes treated as an author in the tradition of autobiographical writing exemplified by Benjamin Franklin. They were both seen as self-made men who raised themselves by their own exertions from obscurity and poverty. Equiano has far more often been considered as a predecessor of Frederick Douglass in the development of the African American slave narrative. Both approaches evaluate the quality of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative anachronistically and teleologically by the extent to which he is deemed to have anticipated Franklin or Douglass rather than on its own merits. A glance at the posthumously published edition of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in Gates’s anthology made me question why an African American author would dedicate his book “To the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons of the Parliament of Great Britain.” The nineteenth-century editor who wrote the notes and Preface, as well as rearranged Equiano’s text, admits that he had “not been able to collect any particulars concerning Gustavus Vassa beyond what he gives of himself in the following narrative, except that he died a few years ago at some place in the South of England.”6

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I decided that Equiano’s Dedication, the rather vague prefatory details about his life, and the republication of his autobiography in England justified my inclusion of his book in courses I have taught ever since. I claimed Equiano as one of the earliest African British authors, thus suitable for my eighteenthcentury British literature course. I soon recognized, however, that the term “African British” was also too narrow a category for Equiano. Many of us teach what we research. I came to work on Equiano from the opposite direction: pedagogy led to research. Teaching Equiano’s Interesting Narrative made me curious about the text and its author. The only authoritative twentieth-century text of the Interesting Narrative was the magisterial facsimile of the first 1789 edition that Paul Edwards published in 1969. My curiosity led to a series of discoveries beyond those Edwards had made. Like everyone else, I had assumed that only eight editions of the Interesting Narrative had appeared during the author’s lifetime, the last in 1794. But I found that a ninth edition had also appeared in 1794, and even more unexpectedly, that the University of Maryland owned one of only three copies of it then known to exist. Another has subsequently turned up in Germany. I unsuccessfully encouraged graduate students to produce a critical edition of the Interesting Narrative as a dissertation. I also began to lobby publishers to get an authoritative copy into print. At the suggestion of Joseph F. Marcey, Jr., one of the presses I had urged to publish an edition of the Interesting Narrative eventually asked me if I would be willing to edit it. Michael Millman at Penguin agreed to let me include every text by Equiano I could find, as well as all the explanatory and textual notes I desired, including identification of every substantive change Equiano made in each of the nine editions. I did not know how much work I was asking to do because I had never edited or annotated a primary text. I chose as my methodological guide for the edition a maxim attributed to Ronald Reagan: “trust but verify.” Equiano is extraordinarily circumstantial in all but the first two chapters in his account of his life. He tells us in the Interesting Narrative that he was born in 1745 in what is now southeastern Nigeria. There, he says, he was enslaved at the age of eleven, and sold to English slave traders who took him on the Middle Passage to the West Indies. Within a few days, he tells us, he was taken to Virginia and sold to a local planter. After about a month in Virginia, he was bought by Michael Henry Pascal, an officer in the British Royal Navy, who renamed him Gustavus Vassa. Equiano kept Vassa as his legal name for the rest of his life. With Pascal, Equiano saw military action during the Seven Years’ War. In 1762, at the end

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of the conflict, Pascal shocked Equiano by refusing to free him, selling him instead into the horrors of West Indian slavery. A clever businessman, Equiano managed to save enough money to buy his own freedom in 1766. Once free, Equiano set off on voyages of commerce and adventure to North America, the Mediterranean, the West Indies, and the North Pole. In Central America he helped purchase slaves he supervised on a plantation. Returning to London in 1777, he became concerned with spiritual and social reform. He converted to Methodism and later became an outspoken opponent of the transAtlantic slave trade, first in his letters to newspapers and then in his autobiography. He either reclaimed or created his African identity as Olaudah Equiano publicly when he began to solicit subscribers for his Interesting Narrative in November 1788. Equiano published nine editions of the Interesting Narrative during his lifetime. He retained Gustavus Vassa as his legal name throughout his adult life, using Olaudah Equiano as his penname. In 1792 he married an Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen of Cambridgeshire. Susanna Vassa died in 1796. I discovered that Gustavus and Susannah Vassa had two daughters, Ann Mary, born in 1793, and Joanna, born in 1795. Thanks largely to profits from the sales of his book, when Equiano died in London on March 31, 1797, he was probably the wealthiest, and certainly the most famous, person of African descent in the English-speaking world. His burial place has not been located. Ann Mary died six months after her father, but Joanna Vassa survived to inherit ₤950 from her father’s estate on her twenty-first birthday in 1816. Her inheritance was worth, in present-day money, roughly ₤80,000, or about $140,000. Most literary scholars and historians have accepted Equiano’s narrative as transparent: a candid and guile-free account of his life. I was well aware that autobiographers are rhetoricians with designs on their readers; they do not write under oath. No sophisticated reader believes that the autobiography of either Franklin or Douglass is a transparent and unbiased reconstruction of the author’s life. Neither Franklin nor Douglass calls attention to the literary influences on the construction of his autobiography to anywhere near the extent that Equiano does. For example, Equiano intertextually frames chapter five, which describes his reaction to being sold by Pascal into slavery in the West Indies, by ventriloquizing fictional voices from a well-known contemporary sentimental poem and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Equiano does not simply quote from the earlier poems. He changes the voice of Milton’s demon Beelzebub from the past to the present tense to move from the personal to the political, and transforms his individual vision to a communal

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one through the use of the first person plural “we.” In effect, Beelzebub’s voice provides Equiano with the avenging figure he elides in his earlier quotation from The Dying Negro, as well as in an elliptical allusion to Moses’s act of violent revenge against a slave owner in Genesis 2:11–15. Equiano marshals ethos, pathos, and logos to make a rhetorically sophisticated argument that violent rebellion is inevitable if slave owners fail to ameliorate the condition of the enslaved.7 I tried to approach Equiano’s autobiography more inductively than anyone had done before. If one’s premise is that Equiano was an African American author, one tends to read his text in certain ways and consequently to distort or ignore much in it. For example, when a friend told me that he loved to teach the scene in which Equiano encounters “seahorses” as an early example of magical realism because “the surreal erupts through the otherwise realistic narrative,” I showed him verbal and visual evidence that “seahorse” was a common eighteenth-century term for arctic walrus. He responded that he would not share that information with his students because it would undermine the way he interpreted the text from the perspective of African American literary theory. I was initially very surprised to discover that no historian had sought to establish Equiano’s veracity by checking the archival evidence. I was much less surprised when I recognized that relatively few historians seemed to have read more than the first two of the twelve chapters of the Interesting Narrative. My working hypothesis in annotating the Interesting Narrative was that Equiano’s own account of his life was factually reliable. I assumed that editing him obligated me to test that hypothesis by trying to verify or falsify as many of the dates and events that Equiano mentions as I could. And I assumed that I was obligated to reconsider my hypothesis in light of what I might find. None of the previous commentators on Equiano or his autobiography had bothered to systematically check the relevant documentary evidence available in various British archives. For example, I correctly guessed that the Royal Navy kept detailed records in the eighteenth century. In the process of annotating the Interesting Narrative, I made some startling discoveries that profoundly challenged my sense of who Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was. My biographical discoveries, for example, cast doubt on Equiano’s story of his birth and early years. Baptismal and naval records say that he was born in South Carolina around 1747. I included my intriguing discoveries in the endnotes of the Penguin edition of Equiano’s writings, which first appeared in 1995. No one at the time seemed to notice.

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In 1998 James Walvin, an eminent historian of slavery and the slave trade, published the first biography of Equiano: An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797 (London: Continuum). Although Walvin very usefully places The Interesting Narrative in its general historical context, he accepts the veracity of Equiano’s own account of his life and identity without question or qualification, and without directly investigating the archival biographical evidence and considering its possible implications. Nor does Walvin pay much attention to Equiano as either a literary artist or a significant figure in book history. I decided that another biography of Equiano was justified because his life was his text. Equiano deserved an interdisciplinary biography that dealt with his art as well as his life and times, and was grounded in original archival research. I also decided to eschew the relatively deductive approach by many other commentators, who treat Equiano’s claims about his birth as a thesis to which the evidence must conform, even if that means arbitrarily backdating events without fully considering the implications of doing so, possibly inflating the significance of some details while ignoring or dismissing others, and asserting Equiano sometimes meant the opposite of what he says.8 My 1999 essay in the journal Slavery & Abolition brought the controversy about Equiano’s birthplace to the attention first of historians and later to literary critics. I have always stressed in publications and talks that Equiano may well not have been responsible for the information in his baptismal record because he was an enslaved boy at the time. His naval record, however, was made when he was a free adult and presumably the source of the information. I have always maintained in print and public that the documentary evidence for a South Carolina birth is not conclusive, but critics and historians must try to account for why that evidence exists, and why Equiano chose to suppress it in his Interesting Narrative. Several historians and literary scholars have risen to the challenge, with very limited success, in part because of unfamiliarity with the literary tropes and conventions Equiano uses, the generic influences on his autobiography, the Royal Navy’s policy on slavery, the implications of the 1772 Somerset decision, the naval status of an “able seaman,” the distinction between a privately engaged servant and a slave, as well as the improbability that someone asserting to his English readers what historians Paul Lovejoy and James H. Sweet call “British respectability” would choose a colonial rather than metropolitan birthplace to do so.9 Sweet contends “that the burden of proof falls on Carretta to explain the situational contexts that might have inspired claims of a ‘Carolina’ birth.”10

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The most elegant response is that Equiano may have been telling the truth when he told the purser that he was born in South Carolina. The odds that a “lazy or negligent” purser would have fortuitously stumbled upon the same birthplace recorded at Equiano’s baptism fourteen years earlier strike me as extremely low. Of the ninety crewmembers on the Racehorse in 1773, among them men who listed birthplaces in Africa, various European countries, several British colonies, and throughout Britain, Equiano was the only one identified as having been born in South Carolina. If that was true, he had every rhetorical reason to suppress that information in a text designed to oppose the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He certainly never deals with that record in his autobiography. In the absence of any documentary evidence, Sweet turns to the methodology of a novelist to reveal that Equiano was “fraught with selfreflexive anxiety” when he gave South Carolina as his birthplace.11 Literary scholar John Bugg believes that “Equiano may have listed an American birthplace to deflect those pursuing runaway slaves.”12 Why would someone wanting to conceal an enslaved past choose South Carolina, the most fully developed slave society in North America? Besides, what is the likelihood that anyone hunting runaway American slaves would target royal naval vessels sailing between England and the North Pole? Bugg also implies that Equiano may have fabricated his participation in the expedition. The naval records and the presence of the name of the commanding officer of the Racehorse among Equiano’s subscribers make Bugg’s suggestion highly improbable. If Equiano invented an African birth, he clearly had a good rhetorical reason for doing so in the late 1780s, and there was little risk his fiction would be detected because of the absence of accessible records. But what motive would he have had for falsely claiming to have participated in a famous voyage, especially when witnesses were available to refute him? I have repeatedly argued that Equiano had the means, motive, and opportunity for inventing an African birth that rendered him the credible witness both sides called for in the late eighteenth-century argument over abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As I say in my biography, “Reasonable doubt raised by the recent biographical discoveries inclines me to believe that the accounts of Africa and the Middle Passage in the Interesting Narrative were constructed—and carefully so—rather than actually experienced and that the author probably invented an African identity. But we must remember that reasonable doubt is not the same as conviction. We will probably never know the truth about the author’s birth and upbringing.”13 The care with which Equiano prepared and presented The Interesting Narrative is reflected

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in the timing of its publication. Organized and sustained opposition to the trans-Atlantic African slave trade was a very recent development when the autobiography first appeared. Mainly through the efforts of the philanthropist Thomas Clarkson, from 1787 on the organized opposition to the African slave trade gathered, published, and offered to Parliament evidence against the infamous practice. But before 1789, the evidence and arguments against the slave trade came from white voices alone. The only published black witnesses were clearly fictitious, found, for example, in the poems of Hannah More and William Cowper.14 Clarkson, one of Equiano’s original subscribers, acknowledged the desirability of hearing the African victim’s point of view. In An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1786), Clarkson dramatized the trans-Atlantic slave trade by placing the trade in “the clearest, and most conspicuous point of view.” Employing the virtual reality of fiction to convey factual experience, he imagined himself interviewing a “melancholy African.” “We shall,” he wrote, “throw a considerable part of our information on this head into the form of a narrative: we shall suppose ourselves, in short, on the continent of Africa, and relate a scene, which, from its agreement with unquestionable facts, might not unreasonably be presumed to have been presented to our view, had we really been there.”15 Defenders of slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade also recognized the rhetorical power a victim’s voice would have. Gilbert Francklyn includes a letter dated November 30, 1788 in his An Answer to the Reverend Mr. Clarkson’s Essay (London, 1789). He accuses Clarkson of inventing black witnesses against slavery—witnesses, Francklyn insinuates, who were actually white men speaking in blackface: “Horrid picture of West India tyranny and brutality! And this is drawn upon the authority of people whose names Mr. Clarkson ventures not to produce. . . . I challenge Mr. Clarkson to produce a single man of decent character who ever gave him such an account. I do not mean a gentleman—I do not mean even a white man: I defy him to produce a Negro of character who would not turn pale in fabricating such assertions. I call upon Mr. Clarkson to produce any book he ever perused . . . in which he found such stories related.”16 Equiano quickly met Francklyn’s challenge. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was probably first published on March 26, 1789.17 However, the subscription solicitation that Equiano sent to Josiah Wedgwood indicates that the book was ready for publication in November 1788, when illness forced William Wilberforce to delay his planned attack in the House of Commons on the slave trade, and just as King George III

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lapsed into the madness from which he would not recover until February 1789. Wilberforce’s incapacitating illness and the King’s distracting condition rendered the anticipated assault on the slave trade impracticable and impolitic before the spring of 1789. Within weeks of the appearance of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Clarkson published the evidence he had gathered from white witnesses in The Substance of the Evidence of Sundry Persons on the Slave-Trade Collected in the Course of a Tour Made in the Autumn of the Year 1788 and An Essay on the Comparative Efficiency of Regulation or Abolition as Applied to the Slave Trade. And on April 25, 1789, less than a month after the appearance of his Interesting Narrative, Equiano, along with several other people of African descent, published a letter in the newspaper The Diary; or Woodfall’s Register thanking his subscriber William Dickson for having just attacked the slave trade in his Letters on Slavery. Equiano and the distributor he shared with Dickson must have been delighted with Dickson’s observation in Letters that “no literary performance would be better received by the humane and liberal people of England, than a vindication of African capacity by the pen of an African.” On May 12, 1789, William Wilberforce commenced the delayed assault in the House of Commons on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In effect, and probably intentionally, Equiano’s autobiography was an extra-parliamentary rhetorical complement to the publications by Clarkson and others, as well as to Wilberforce’s famous speech against the trade. The question of identity is at the center of any autobiography or biography. The question is even more significant in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative than usual because his identity was his ethos: his claim to an African birth rendered his description of the Middle Passage the eyewitness account that both proponents and opponents of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were calling for. Equiano rightly perceived an accusation that he “was born in the Danish island of Santa Cruz, in the West Indies” as designed “to hurt [his] character, and to discredit and prevent the sale of [his] Narrative.”18 Attempts to pin Equiano down to a single African, American, or British identity are doomed to failure because he had multiple identities simultaneously: the various overlapping identities the author displays in The Interesting Narrative should warn us not to try to limit him to one nationality. Once he was free, Equiano judged parts of North America reasonably nice places to visit, but he never revealed any interest in voluntarily living there. By Equiano’s account, the amount of time he spent in North America could be measured in months, not years. Whether he spent a few months, as he claims, or several years, as other evidence suggests, living in mainland North America, he spent far more time at

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sea. He spent at least ten years on the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea during periods of war and peace between 1754 and 1785. The places he considered making his permanent home were Britain, Turkey, and Africa. He ultimately chose Britain because he was not permitted to go to Africa. Equiano was truly a “citizen of the world,” as he once called himself, the epitome of what historian Ira Berlin has labeled an “Atlantic creole.”19 Much is at stake in the controversy over where the man who either reclaimed or invented an African birth was born. Excerpts from Equiano’s book now appear in every anthology and on any website covering American, African American, British, and Caribbean history and literature of the eighteenth century. The most frequently excerpted sections are the early chapters on his life in Africa and his experience on the Middle Passage crossing the Atlantic to America. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any historical account of the Middle Passage that does not quote his eyewitness description of its horrors. Interest in Equiano has not been restricted to academia. He has been the subject of television shows, films, comic books, and books written for children. The story of Equiano’s life is part of African, African American, Anglo-American, African British, and African Caribbean popular culture. My methodological guide in writing Equiano’s biography is a maxim Samuel Johnson expressed in his undated “Sermon 20”: “Let it be remembered, that the nature of things is not altered by our conduct. We cannot make truth; it is our business only to find it. No proposition can become more or less certain or important, by being considered or neglected.” (Samuel Johnson, Sermon 20). Equiano first came to England years earlier than he says. He was clearly willing to manipulate at least some of the details of his life. From the available evidence, one could argue that the author of the Interesting Narrative invented rather than reclaimed an African identity. If so, Equiano’s literary achievements have been underestimated. I anticipated that my biography—Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-Made Man­—would be controversial.20 I had already encountered resistance from some African Americanists who objected to my having stressed Equiano’s Britishness in the introduction to my edition of his writings. When I challenged one such literary critic, who was publicly railing against me at a conference, to name where or when I had ever said or written the absurdities he was attributing to me, he responded that he would never read anything I have written because he already “knew what I meant.” I have frequently been told I should have either dismissed the pesky data or tried to explain the rec­ ords away. I have even occasionally been advised I should have suppressed the

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evidence, and been denounced for not having done so. A historian at another conference challenged me to produce a birth certificate from South Carolina with Vassa’s or Equiano’s name on it to prove he had been born there. She presumably knows that by that evidentiary criterion almost no identifiable enslaved people can be said to have been born in South Carolina. People can get quite exercised over the question where Equiano was born. He is a Nigerian national hero, particularly in Igboland. Several members of the audience at a conference in England in 2003 threatened me physically because I discussed the records in my keynote address. I have occasionally been accused of being a self-promoting racist who disrespects other disciplines, and who is methodologically naïve. According to linguist Catherine Acholonu, I made public Equiano’s baptismal and naval records that I “claim to have discovered” because I am “intent on sensationalizing the whole matter” of her disputed assertion that she has found Equiano’s birthplace in Africa.21 She later refers to me as an “enfant terrible hungry for fame, with loads of vested interests and ulterior motives.”22 Dorothy Chinwe Ukaegbu, a cultural anthropologist, also employs Acholonu’s ad hominem tactics in two essays in Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World, accusing me of “impugning ethnographic research results” because I have expressed skepticism about Acholonu’s methodology: “Among Carretta’s criticisms is the issue of the longevity of the subjects upon which Acholonu relied for evidence. According to Carretta, it is not feasible for a person to live to be one hundred and fifty years old as Acholonu had calculated in the genealogy of her Isseke data.”23 Ukaegbu concludes that “By such conduct, Carretta left himself open to possible questions about his motives and the basic intent of his work”.24 I confess that I am suspicious of any methodology that depends on the testimony of 150-year-old witnesses. One can disagree with someone, however, without being disagreeable or descending to name-calling and insinuating malevolent motives. Disagreement can lead to creativity. In his review in the Journal of American History of my biography, historian Ugo Nwokeji does not seem to have read the book I think I wrote. Nwokeji and I apparently disagree profoundly on the rules of evidence and argument. Deeming the historicist approach I take in Equiano, the African illogical, Nwokeji dismisses the records that say Equiano was born in South Carolina. He does so with the presentist assertion that since many recent immigrants fudge their personal histories (he gives no equivalent examples), Equiano probably did so as well. In trying to explain eighteenth-century behavior, why cite alleged current practices

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rather than documented contemporaneous evidence? Shouldn’t historians, literary scholars, and biographers at least consider the eighteenth-century evidence rather than suppress it? Nwokeji mocks and dismisses as “fruits of [my] mind-reading indulgences” my argument that because Equiano’s friends, subscribers, collaborators, publishers, and opponents were publicly calling for precisely the kind of first-person victim’s point of view that he supplied in his autobiography, he must have been aware that the abolitionist movement needed the African voice he provided. Nwokeji implies that most of my biography is devoted to misinterpreting the controversial evidence about Equiano’s birthplace. Misrepresenting my position and ignoring evidence in the biography, Nwokeji paradoxically refers to additional references to a Carolina birth—in records that no one else has ever seen, and whose sources he fails to cite. Nwokeji doubles the amount of documentary evidence for a South Carolina birth as he faults me for misinterpreting documents I never discuss, and doubt exist. Why does Nwokeji apparently fabricate records that increase the number of times Equiano is said to have been born in South Carolina? Why not go all the way and imagine ones that say that Equiano was born in Africa? To Nwokeji, my attempt to write a life-artand-times study of Equiano ultimately produced nothing more than “a carefully contrived controversy of Equiano’s identity.”25 As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, we all have a right to our own opinions, but we do not have a right to our own facts. Equiano’s “unique first-hand account of eighteenth-century Igboland” is valued so highly because so little other direct information about the mideighteenth-century Igbo exists.26 Relying on Acholonu’s questionable linguistic evidence and the presence of fewer than ten words of arguably Igbo origin in Equiano’s autobiography, some historians have claimed that “there are simply too many Igbo-language words in the narrative for Equiano to have invented them all.”27 Compared to the publicly available information about some other West African ethnic groups and political states in the eighteenth century, very little was known in Britain about either Igbo culture or Benin, even though almost a quarter of the enslaved Africans sent to North America came from the Bights of Benin and Biafra during the last decades of the period. And what little other information existed came through white intermediaries or observers. Hence, Equiano’s representation of Igbos was very difficult for his contemporaries to falsify. Scholars and critics have increasingly come to recognize that the apparent uniqueness of Equiano’s account does not guarantee its reliability and

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authenticity.28 G. I. Jones finds Equiano’s description of his “home and travels in Nigeria . . . disappointingly brief and confused.” He believes that “the little he can remember of his travels is naturally muddled and incoherent” because Equiano “was only eleven years old when he was kidnapped.”29 A. E. Afigbo believes that Equiano based his description of Africa on his personal recollections,30 even though he acknowledges that “After reading The Interesting Narrative, one of the first things that strikes the critical scholar is how scanty and muddled Equiano’s ‘recollection’ of Igbo society is.”31 Afigbo was one of the first commentators to recognize that much of Equiano’s account of Igboland came from information he received from other enslaved Africans; that Equiano’s youth would have limited his knowledge of Igbo customs and society; that much of the information about the Igbo he gives us can also be found in contemporaneous published sources, many of which we know he was familiar with; and that the data unique to his account are often either false, such as the spontaneous growth of cotton and the use of women warriors, or unverifiable precisely because of their uniqueness. Afigbo attributes many of Equiano’s mistakes and omissions to rhetorical choices he made as “a skilful propagandist” in service of the movement to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade.32 Evidence unknown to Afigbo suggests that Equiano’s skills as a propagandist served personal and ethnic causes as well. We must keep in mind, moreover, that the notion of an eighteenth-century Igboland is an anachronism. As Chinua Achebe has observed, the consciousness of the Igbo identity that Equiano asserts is a quite recent phenomenon: before the 1960s, “the Igbo people . . . did not see themselves as Igbo. They saw themselves as people from this village or that village. In fact in some places “Igbo” was a word of abuse; they were the “other” people, down in the bush.” 33 During the much later colonial period, the peoples in Africa who were earlier called “Igbo” by others, and who shared a common language, increasingly came to identify themselves as Igbo. As Joseph Inikori reminds us, modern commentators may be retrojecting a post-eighteenth-century conception of Igbo identity into the earlier period: “It should be noted . . . that a pan-Igbo identity as we know it today did not exist during the Atlantic slave trade era. . . . Igbo as an ethnic category is a twentieth-century development reluctantly accepted by several of the constituent groups on political and administrative grounds. Since Igbo was used pejoratively [during the eighteenth century] to refer to the densely populated uplands, the major source of slaves and by extension to slaves, it is not surprising that many of these groups have been reluctant to accept the Igbo identity.”34

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Historians of the trans-Atlantic slave trade have a vested interest in the veracity of Equiano’s account of the Middle Passage because they consider it a locus classicus. According to historian Trevor Burnard, “We don’t read The Interesting Narrative because it is well written. . . . We don’t read it, moreover, in the way that Carretta seems to suggest it might now be read, as an intriguing example of how an African American could become a self-made man by refashioning his identity in response to changing circumstances. . . . Equiano has become a canonical text because it has the ring of authenticity. . . . If it is not a first-person account of the travails of an African, then its appeal diminishes considerably. Indeed its appeal declines so much that we can no longer use Equiano as a guide to the Middle Passage. . . .”35 Burnard would have us toss out the baby with the bathwater: “once we doubt whether Equiano was an African, it becomes harder, contra Carretta, to believe him in other areas. I have, for example, always had my doubts about the provenance of his name: I have surveyed thousands of slave names in Jamaica and have never come across a name as outlandish as Gustavus Vassa.”36 As the documents I reproduce and the evidence I discuss in my biography demonstrate, there can be doubt that Gustavus Vassa and the man now better known as Olaudah Equiano were one and the same. My assessment of Equiano’s achievement is similar to that of historian Jon Sensbach. Sensbach points out that “Whatever is not strictly ‘true’ in [Equiano’s] narrative—whatever he did not actually see or do what he said he did—becomes a kind of larger Truth in its universalism.” Paradoxically, Equiano’s voice is so representative of the millions of fellow people of African descent who suffered the Middle Passage and its equally horrific aftermath because his own life was so unrepresentative. Unlike those to whom he gave a voice, because of the training and education he gained during and after his years with the Royal Navy, Equiano never experienced the grinding agricultural existence endured by the vast majority of his enslaved contemporaries. As Sensbach notes, Equiano may have been “acting as a kind of oral historian, a funnel or repository for communal memory.” If he had not experienced the Middle Passage himself, he could have heard detailed accounts of it from friends like Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. I agree with Sensbach that if Equiano engaged in self-fashioning, his life and Interesting Narrative raise “complicated questions” about the choices of identity available to diasporan Africans.37 The responses by the scholarly community to Equiano, the African have generally been quite favorable. The American Society for Eighteenth Century

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Studies, for example, chose it co-winner of the 2004–6 Annibel Jenkins Prize for Best Biography of the Year. Like many authors, however, I find the disagreements with, and criticisms of, my work to be of greatest interest. The reviewer in Eighteenth-Century Studies wishes that I had said more about the recent critical history of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.38 Fair enough, but to have done so, I think, would have risked turning a work of literary biography into one of literary criticism. The reviewer in Early American Literature suggests, probably rightly, that I may be too inclined to take Equiano at his word about his account of events in his life that cannot be checked against external records.39 Burnard also says that I “always give Equiano the benefit of the doubt.”40 No doubt contributing to that impression was my choice to let Equiano speak in his own words as often as possible rather than paraphrasing him. Mea culpa. Acknowledging that partisanship is a biographer’s occupational hazard, I would also stress that in editing Equiano’s writings and reconstructing his life and times I have tried to be as scrupulous as possible in verifying the information he gives us. The problem, of course, is that much of what Equiano tells us, especially in the first two chapters of his autobiography, is not falsifiable by external evidence. The reviewer in the American Historical Review, who thinks me too tentative in the conclusions I draw from contradictory evidence, may also be correct.41 Cathy N. Davidson, a literary critic, fails to appreciate the significance of the occasion of Equiano’s Narrative. She correctly notes in a lengthy review essay that I do not track down Equiano’s origins in South Carolina. I do not do so because I am unaware of any leads to follow beyond the baptismal and naval records. Davidson asks, “Given anti-American sentiment in a Britain still stinging from the loss of its wealthiest colony in 1789, why would Equiano not have used this opportunity to write a stirring indictment of the evils of slavery in a country that had recently won a revolution against England, a hypocritical country that touted its own desire for freedom while supporting slavery?” (Davidson mistakenly thinks South Carolina, rather than Jamaica, was Britain’s “wealthiest colony” in the eighteenth century.) A South Carolina birth would have been rhetorically useless to Equiano because, as he makes clear with his opening address “to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and the Commons of the Parliament of Great Britain,” his goal was to “inspire your hearts with peculiar benevolence on that important day when the question of Abolition [of the trans-Atlantic slave trade] is to be discussed”42 What the opponents of the trade needed was the voice of a native-born African who had experienced the horrors of the Middle Passage. Davidson’s review is initially

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relatively balanced. She eventually becomes so “exasperated,” however, that she accuses me of rendering Equiano a “huckster” because I note his business acumen and argue that he desired to do well by doing good. She presumably would prefer that he had not carefully led his audience to anticipate his autobiography, that he had not held on to his copyright so that he could maximize his profits, that he had not conducted book tours throughout the British isles, and that he had not been fully aware of the need and desire for the kind of narrative he provided. Her “huckster” is my entrepreneur. She ultimately calls my “justification for Equiano’s greatness . . . far more offensive than the insinuation of mendacity.” Davidson ironically chose to publish in the journal Novel her refusal to accept the possibility that Equiano may have engaged in fiction-making.43 Because of the richness and complexity of Equiano’s life and works, I agree completely with Paul Lovejoy’s observation in his review of my biography that Equiano “remains a subject worthy of continued study and research.”44 Much of the “continued study” he calls for has been the subject of exchanges we have been having in private, public, and print conversations since the publication of my 1999 article in Slavery and Abolition, despite our disagreements about the rules of evidence and argument. Lovejoy takes a more faith-based, deductive approach to textual evidence than I. Convinced that Equiano was born in Africa and that he was a lifelong emancipationist, Lovejoy revises dates and interprets evidence to fit his argument. For example, faced with the inconvenient fact that Equiano expressed pride in his role as a slave driver on a plantation in Central America, Lovejoy dismisses the whole project as a “caper.”45 I devote relatively little space in Equiano, the African to the controversy over Equiano’s birthplace. As my reviewer in Early American Literature says, Equiano’s “role in the history of abolitionism and his self-insertion into Anglophone literature” are far more important and prominent issues in my biography than the question of his African identity. But Equiano’s biographer is obligated, I believe, to try to account for the existence of the records, as well as for why they are suppressed in his autobiography. But how does one begin a biography when the place and date of the subject’s birth and background are so uncertain? I decided to begin at the point when my author first publicly revealed his Equiano persona. Given the conflict between Equiano’s claim in his autobiography and the external documentary evidence, in the biography I have tried to give a balanced account and interpretation of that evidence and its implications. For example, giving Equiano the benefit of the doubt, I have

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identified the most likely ship that would have brought him from Africa to the New World, if indeed he had been born in Africa. And I tried to put the controversy over his nativity in perspective. What impress me most about Equiano are his remarkable achievements as a rhetorician, abolitionist, seaman, businessman, and writer. Rising from the legal status of property to become probably the wealthiest person of African descent in the British Empire during his lifetime, Equiano was even more the self-made man than his contemporary Benjamin Franklin, to whom he is sometimes compared. And virtually single-handedly, Equiano founded the tradition of the African American slave narrative. Rather than seeing Equiano as a man operating at the margins of his world, I have tried to recreate Equiano’s world to give readers a sense of Equiano’s life at the center of his time. A genius at self-representation, Equiano defied convention first by writing his autobiography, and then by publishing, marketing, and distributing it himself. Unlike the vast majority of eighteenth-century authors, white as well as black, Equiano never sold the copyright to his book. He was thus able to control the content and distribution of his autobiography in the nine editions that appeared in England, Ireland, and Scotland before his death. Publication of his Interesting Narrative enabled him to reclaim the social status, equivalent to that of a British gentleman, that he says he had lost when he was enslaved. Having raised himself from poverty and obscurity to international fame, Equiano epitomized a selfmade man who profited from marketing that image of himself. He offered his own life as a model for others to follow. Equiano’s transformation from a nominal Christian who tolerated the existence of slavery to a born-again Christian and ardent abolitionist anticipated the changes he hoped to make in his readers, as well as the transformation he called for in the relationship between Britain and Africa. By combining his own experiences with those of other people of African descent, Equiano refashioned himself as the African so that he could represent the millions of his fellow diasporan Africans who lacked his mobility and access to an education and publication. Equiano could paradoxically represent others because his own life was so atypical. Rejected in his attempts to be sent by Europeans to Africa as a missionary or diplomat, Equiano used his Interesting Narrative to transform himself into an African missionary and diplomat to a European audience. As the frontispiece to Equiano’s autobiography demonstrates, Equiano’s purpose in publishing his book was as much spiritual as it was abolitionist: he offers the Bible to his readers, most of whom

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he knew would be white. In recreating his own life, Equiano forged a compelling story of spiritual and moral conversion to serve as a model to be imitated by his readers, and to be adopted by later emancipationists. I have sought to produce in Equiano, the African a nuanced and contextualized treatment of Equiano’s complex combination of imbricated identities.

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Chapter nine

Remembering His Country Marks: A Nigerian American Family and Its “African” Ancestor lisa a. lindsay

In the mid-1850s, James Churchwill Vaughan accomplished a feat that no other African American had ever done: he traveled to Africa and found his ancestral family. Born and raised in South Carolina, James was the son of a Yoruba man known as Scipio Vaughan, who had been captured in what is now Nigeria in the late eighteenth century. On his deathbed in the 1840s, and perhaps having heard of the American Colonization Society, Scipio had urged his nine children to find his African motherland. When James Vaughan got the chance, in 1852, he enlisted as a Liberian colonist, leaving his siblings and widowed mother in South Carolina. Three years later, he joined a party of Southern Baptist missionaries passing through Liberia on the way to “Yoruba country.” In what became southwestern Nigeria, James Vaughan met people bearing what he recognized as his father Scipio’s “tribal marks,” who embraced him as a long-lost relative. Ultimately, however, they did not accept him into their community because he was a Christian, and Vaughan remained instead in the orbit of the missionaries with whom he was then working and living. In nineteenth-century Yorubaland, “tribal marks” (or “country marks”) were typically cut into the skin of children to show to what political and geographic communities they belonged. Drawings of several design varieties, labeled by geographic origin, appear in Samuel Johnson’s monumental History of the Yorubas, written in the late 1800s largely from oral traditions collected at the royal court in Oyo.1 Such facial scars were especially important in the

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era of the slave trade, and in fact only free members of communities, not slaves, were marked. One observer wrote that “tribal marks” allowed people to trace children carried away into slavery.2 So in Vaughan’s story, tribal marks, in essence, did what they were supposed to do: they allowed kin and community members dispersed by the slave trade to find each other again. If Vaughan did not go live with the people bearing his father’s country marks, it was because of religious and cultural differences; still, he knew who his people were and how to find them. Moreover, he knew who his ancestors were. Thus Vaughan was able, in some sense, to undo the natal alienation that the slave trade had imposed on him and his family. Vaughans both in Nigeria and the United States have been repeating the story of James Vaughan’s encounter with his father’s scar-bearing countrymen for generations. In 1925, James Vaughan’s daughter Aida Arabella Vaughan Moore brought the story to the American branch of the family when she traveled to the United States to visit relatives and place her daughter in school. The cousin who hosted Mrs. Moore in Camden, South Carolina repeated the story; years later the cousin’s daughter Mabel Smythe wrote that she had heard it as a child.3 In 1975, a more detailed version was printed in a feature article on the Vaughan family in Ebony magazine.4 Since then, Nigerian and American Vaughans have made the Ebony article the authoritative source on their family’s trans-Atlantic history, and they repeat the version printed there. The problem with the tribal marks story is that it is unlikely to be true. In 1869, James Vaughan’s American niece Maria Sophronia Lauly began compiling an extensive family history in the front pages of a stately new Bible. Her first entry, under “Marriages,” was the 1815 union of her grandparents (and the parents of James Vaughan), Scipio Vaughan and Maria Conway. On the next page, under “Births,” she wrote of her grandfather, “Sippio Vaughan was born March the 26th in Richman [sic] Virginia 1780.” 5 Other evidence also casts Scipio Vaughan’s alleged African origin into doubt. In the documentation from South Carolina where Scipio Vaughan’s name appears, he is described as a “negro,” not an African. His master, Camden planter and newspaper publisher Wilie Vaughan, wrote in his 1814 will “that the annual Labour of my negro man Scipio be appropriated as a fund for the education of my Children.” Eight years later, the executor of Wilie Vaughan’s will listed sums earned through the hired labor of the “Negro Scipio.”6 Finally, very few Africans from the Bight of Benin (the broad region encompassing Yorubaland) arrived in Virginia or the Carolinas in the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, making it unlikely that Scipio Vaughan or even

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one of his parents could have had the “country marks” James Vaughan reportedly saw.7 Questions about the geographic origins of enslaved Americans are in the forefront of contemporary attention to the “Black Atlantic.” Released on CDROM and then in an expanded online edition, the magnificent Transatlantic Slave Trade Database has allowed researchers to locate the African regional origins of enslaved people sent to the Americas, in groups and sometimes even individually.8 In a much more controversial way, some DNA testing companies lately promise to identify for modern individuals their ancestors’ putative ethnic origins in Africa and elsewhere.9 Meanwhile, Vincent Carretta’s research has called into question the geographic origin of Olaudah Equiano, an African slave famous for penning his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; or, Gustavas Vassa, the African: Written by Himself (1789), a key text in the British abolition movement and in the canon of African American slave narratives. Although the Narrative describes Equiano’s childhood in Igboland, now southeastern Nigeria, and his harrowing experience of the Middle Passage, written evidence suggests that Equiano was instead born in South Carolina—a claim some scholars passionately dispute.10 Wherever he was born, scholars agree that the man known in life as Gustavus Vassa and in literature as Olaudah Equiano consciously shaped his public identity for instrumental reasons in specific contexts. Similarly, the narrative about James Vaughan’s African roots suggests that we should be thinking about diasporic African identities not so much as based on specific locations or ethnicities—when they can even be known—as on particular constellations of subjectivities, goals, and contexts. The story about James Vaughan’s African identity as reflected in “tribal marks” has been so compelling for Vaughans in Nigeria and the United States that they have passed it across the Atlantic and kept it alive for over a century. No doubt it is possible to imagine that the story could be literally true in some modified way. But when, where, and why James Vaughan talked about his ancestral origins may be as revealing about his life, in different ways, as the precise location of his father’s birth. And when his descendants in Nigeria and his siblings’ descendants in America talked about their ancestor’s tribal marks, they too were positioning themselves in particular contexts. The repetition of the story does not so much make it “true” as attest to its continuing relevance under differing circumstances. Although the story sometimes varied, in each case it has played an important role in maintaining the Vaughans’ diasporic identities and family connections.

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* * * If James Vaughan’s daughter told the story of tribal marks to her American cousins—as documentary evidence suggests—then one may presume that she heard it from her father directly, or from her older brothers, who knew their father better than she did and may have heard it from him.11 This begs the question of why James Vaughan would have told it. One likely answer is utility: the tale of the tribal marks established Vaughan’s claim to belonging in Yorubaland, even while it justified his independence from kin groups and other entanglements. In other words, it helped him to be both an insider and an outsider, a position that was often quite strategic even if occasionally dangerous. From the time he arrived in Yorubaland, James Vaughan’s goal seems to have been independence. Sometimes he affiliated with missionaries or with the community of African and foreign Christians, and at other times he cast his lot with local political or social groups; but a desire for economic, social, and political autonomy runs through his biography. At first, it was necessary for him to live with the Baptist missionaries, like T. J. Bowen, who employed him and who had brought him from Liberia. He moved with them to the town of Ijaye, just north of Abeokuta, and also spent time constructing mission buildings farther north in Ogbomosho, where he was baptized in 1855. But as he became increasingly proficient in Yoruba and learned his way around socially, James Vaughan built his own homestead outside of the town of Ijaye. Within several years, one of the missionaries wrote that Vaughan “had lived in the country so long that [he was] native in all respects except in dress and in religion.”12 Along with another African American who had traveled from Liberia with him, he even took part in the warfare between Ijaye and the city-state of Ibadan which erupted in 1860. Vaughan and his friend are remembered in the landmark History of the Yorubas as “two ‘AfroAmerican’ sharp-shooters, who harassed the Ibadans a good deal with their rifles.”13 Ibadan warriors took their revenge by plundering Vaughan’s house and seizing him as a captive.14 After Vaughan’s singlehanded escape, he rejoined the American missionaries until he could get back on his feet. During the year-long siege of Ijaye by Ibadan forces, the Baptists took in about forty orphaned Ijaye children and brought them to the new mission compound in nearby Abeokuta, called “Alabama.” There, Vaughan assisted in the establishment of an industrial school for the boys and girls.15 After the war ended, Vaughan settled outside

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the town wall, where he resumed carpentry and farming, trained some of the Ijaye orphans as his apprentices, and began to build his own family. He married a woman from the kingdom of Benin named Sarah Omotayo, who gave birth to their first child, James Wilson Vaughan, in 1866. But his Christian connections set him at odds with local authorities. The following year, political leaders in Abeokuta, frustrated with the expanding influence of the British in Lagos, expelled all Christians from the town. With only the clothes he wore and £5 in his pocket, Vaughan put his son on his shoulders and walked with his wife and about a dozen others for three days until they reached Lagos.16 Vaughan made a new beginning in Lagos as a carpenter, and later opened what became a lucrative hardware business. He bought land in and around Lagos and built his own house in the heart of the city. A steady stream of apprentices worked with him, acquiring skills, borrowing money without interest, and adopting his last name.17 But Vaughan’s efforts to build up his household suffered tragic setbacks: four out of the six Vaughan children born in Lagos died, and in 1877 an enormous town fire destroyed their house. 18 As always, Vaughan rebuilt, and thereafter became an iron dealer with two stores on opposite ends of the city. By the time he made his will in the 1890s, he had land and houses in central Lagos, as well as property valued at £2,000.19 Although Vaughan prospered in Lagos, he never reached quite the same status as other members of the Lagos elite, and he only partially shared social or political ties with them.20 His sons did not marry into the top families, in spite of their wealth, although his much younger daughter Aida Arabella did. He and his family did not attend St. Paul’s Anglican Church, where many social and business alliances were reinforced. Instead, Vaughan continued to associate with the small group of Baptists in Lagos. But Vaughan insisted on his independence even from fellow Baptists. Missionaries had gone home during the American Civil War and its aftermath, leaving the Lagos church in the hands of Sarah Harden, the Sierra Leonean widow of an African American Baptist missionary; Moses Ladejo Stone, one of Vaughan’s apprentices and a former child refugee from Ijaye who had been raised at the Abeokuta mission; and Vaughan, who became the church’s financial patron. In 1872 Lagos Baptists prevailed upon Vaughan to write to the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention to request a missionary. Vaughan did so reluctantly, and purposefully set himself apart from his fellow Baptists: “Excepting myself, our church are all natives of Africa. . . . They are uncultivated Christians, and have not moral courage enough to stand hard by the cross.”21

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Yet if Vaughan did not always identify with local Baptists, he was even more alienated from imported ones. An obnoxious Mississippian named W. J. David arrived in 1875 to lead the Baptist church, but by that time the Lagos congregation had become used to doing things themselves. A series of conflicts culminated in 1888, when Rev. David dismissed the beloved African pastor Moses Stone. Stone, Vaughan, Sarah Harden’s American-educated son Samuel, and others accused David of racism and even likened him to a slave trader. They founded a new, non-missionary church that quickly attracted the entire, two-hundred-person Baptist congregation. 22 The Native Baptist (later, Ebenezer Baptist) Church was the first independent Christian church in West Africa, and perhaps beyond, and its founding was followed by a wave of “separatist” movements in other churches. But while the independent church movement in colonial Nigeria was in general connected with Yoruba cultural nationalism, the Ebenezer Baptist Church’s prime movers were all linked to the United States as well as to Yoruba society. Their opposition to missionary oversight was more about respect and autonomy than about blending Yoruba traditions with Christian theology and practice. Vaughan’s dogged pursuit of independence as well as prosperity helps to explain why he might have told his children (and others) the story of his father’s tribal marks. First, it established a claim to belonging in Lagos by asserting that Vaughan’s ancestors were Yoruba. To be sure, in the second half of the nineteenth century southern Nigeria’s most important commercial city was full of strangers, including Yoruba ex-slaves and their descendants who had migrated from Sierra Leone, Brazil, and Cuba, as well as free, slave, and ex-slave newcomers from nearby towns and the Nigerian hinterland. The presence of so many refugees from slavery made Lagos a place where many sought to build new lives and new identities (even as the majority of midnineteenth century Lagos’s population remained enslaved).23 Sierra Leoneans and Brazilians in Yorubaland, however, numbered in the thousands; and many were indeed able to connect with kin they had left behind when they had been bound for the Americas. In contrast, Vaughan was only one of a handful of Americans or Liberians in the area, and his only family connections were through his wife and children, his apprentices, and perhaps the people bearing his father’s tribal marks. Even if they were not physically present, Vaughan’s reputed Yoruba relatives helped establish his claim to inclusion, and to reassure his children that they belonged. Second, the story helped to demonstrate James Vaughan’s cultural competency. Not only did the people he met bear his father’s tribal marks, but he

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was able to recognize and place them. In the earliest recorded versions of the story, it is not specified exactly what the tribal marks looked like or what geographic location they referenced. It is implicit, however, that they identified their bearers with a particular place, which was also Scipio Vaughan’s ancestral home. By having the ability to read these markings, either because he was instructed in South Carolina by his Yoruba father or because of experiences he had gained in Yorubaland, James Vaughan demonstrated that he was (at least partially) an insider because of both culture and descent. At the same time, though, the story also positioned Vaughan as an outsider by helping to explain his independence from kinship and other local networks. What an American refugee from slavery understood as freedom— economic self-sufficiency and political independence—would be construed in nineteenth-century Yorubaland as poverty, a tragic estrangement from mutual obligations of kinship and patronage. Vaughan was not completely isolated in Lagos: he had a family, apprentices, and employees; friends from among the business class; and fellow Baptists. But his insistence on autonomy kept him somewhat aloof from the web of social, kinship, and patronage ties that bound the Lagos elite together, connected Lagosians from all walks of life, and joined the city with other towns and villages. By pointing to a Yoruba kinship group that existed but nonetheless was separate from him because of his religion, the tribal marks story helped to justify James Vaughan’s position as both inside and outside local culture and society. Vaughan’s children and grandchildren were both richer and, naturally, more Nigerian than he had been. Each of his two sons ultimately ran one of his stores, and by 1920 they were listed in the Red Book of West Africa, a business guide primarily for Europeans.24 Vaughan’s sons remained active in the Ebenezer Baptist Church, which James served as a deacon and Burrell as the church organist. They sent their much younger sister Aida Arabella to England for her education, where she met members of the prominent Nigerian Moore family. Later she married Eric Moore, a barrister and member of the Lagos Legislative Council. Their daughter Kofo Moore (later Lady Kofo Ademola) in 1935 became the first African woman to earn a degree from Oxford University. She rose to prominence as an advocate for women’s education and social reforms, and as the wife of Nigeria’s first African Chief Justice, Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, son of the alake [ruler] of Abeokuta. In 1933, Dr. James C. Vaughan, grandson and namesake of the family patriarch, became the first president of the Nigerian Youth Movement, one of Nigeria’s earliest political parties, dedicated to advancing the rights of able Nigerians and fighting racial discrimination.

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Thus, two generations after James Vaughan came to Yorubaland, his descendants were in the forefront of Nigerian society and politics. If Vaughan had good reasons for telling a story that positioned him as both an insider and an outsider, it is not clear when or how often he told it. A newspaper tribute after his death praised him, but reminded readers that he was from elsewhere: “As a foreigner he has exerted a potent influence in the whole Yorubaland. . . .”25 Further, neither Vaughan’s obituary nor the long inscription on his tombstone make reference to any ancestral connection to Yorubaland, although they were presumably written by his sons. The biography on Vaughan’s grave marker in Lagos’s Ikoyi Cemetery says this: Sacred to the memory of James Churchill Vaughan, native of Camden, South Carolina, born April 1, 1828. He migrated to Africa in the year 1853, leaving behind a large family, owing to the oppressive laws then in force against colored men in the Southern States. His life in Africa was characterized by many vicissitudes in all of which he proved himself equal to the attendant difficulties. He died on the 13th of September, 1893. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God. Job XIX. 26 These tidbits of evidence do not preclude Vaughan having told the story of his father’s alleged tribal marks, of course, but they suggest that it was not a key part of how he was remembered. What was central to his memory, and his self-presentation during his lifetime, was his industriousness and his identity as both an American and a resident of Africa. His obituary, in fact, described him in part as “a first-class workman and possessed of that push and energy imbibed from America . . .”26 The only known photograph of James Churchwill Vaughan, taken in the late 1880s, shows a stern-looking, bespectacled gentleman in suit and waistcoat—not unlike other portraits of elite Christian Africans in their Western dress. Through the last years of his life, James Vaughan corresponded with his American family, sending bags of gold coins to his niece Harriet Carter, for instance, after white terrorists burned a school in Camden and hotel she owned with her husband in nearby Winnsboro, South Carolina.27 Vaughan’s children also remained connected to their American relatives, however tenuously. In 1922, Aida Vaughan Moore arranged for an American cousin named Sarah Thompson to visit the Vaughans in Lagos. Three years later she made her own journey to see relatives in the United States. As a wealthy

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widow and trader in the 1940s, Aida Vaughan Moore built a magnificent twostory bungalow on the outskirts of Lagos which she named “Conway House” after her father’s maternal family in South Carolina, the Conways. Her brother James Wilson Vaughan called his own house “Camden House.” His daughter, Aduke Akibayo, ran a business in Abeokuta she named “Alabama Stores,” after her father’s birthplace. Even as late as the 1980s, two of James Vaughan’s greatgrandsons founded a construction company called “Conway United.” 28 In 1936, twenty-one-year-old Oxford student Kofo Moore (later Ademola) wrote as part of a short autobiography, “The paternal branch of my mother’s line originated from America. We are still in touch with these relations. Two of our cousins have visited Nigeria and my mother and elder sister have been in America in recent years.”29 Through the middle decades of the century Kofo Moore was able to maintain these contacts, particularly because as the wife of Nigeria’s Chief Justice she traveled several times to the United States. She exchanged visits and letters through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with Jewel Lafontant, a Chicago lawyer appointed deputy solicitor-general by President Richard Nixon; the academic and diplomat Mabel Smythe; and other members of the far-flung Vaughan family. The 1975 publication of Ebony’s feature on the Vaughans brought together even a wider range of American and Nigerian relatives. These days, Vaughan descendants in the United States, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere keep in touch by email and Facebook as well as through visits and letters. Some are working toward a film version of their ancestor’s life, which will likely include a scene in which James Vaughan encounters Africans bearing his father’s tribal marks.

* * * James Vaughan’s daughter Aida Vaughan Moore likely brought the story of the country marks to America when she visited in the 1920s. There, it passed orally through the generations, eventually surfacing in print in the 1970s. For American Vaughans in the era of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Alex Haley, the tale was not only colorful and fascinating, but a source of pride. If James Vaughan found his father’s people in Yorubaland, then he and his relatives were no longer vaguely “African” American (or Afro-American, or “Negro”), but in fact were Yoruba descendants. In their telling, the part of the story in which James Vaughan remained estranged from his scarbearing relatives was irrelevant; what mattered were the primordial ties to a specific African group. Furthermore, it did not matter so much where exactly

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Vaughan’s origins were—any named African community would have served the same function—as long as his American relatives knew about them. The story worked for them as a response to the predicament, as James Baldwin described it, that “the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past.” 30 Aida Vaughan Moore’s 1925–26 voyage to the United States included visits with relatives in Camden, South Carolina, and Chicago. In Camden, she charmed the descendants of her father’s cousin, with whom she stayed, but she also “created something of a stir by refusing to set foot in the kitchen (on the ground that kitchens were for servants, not for lady visitors).”31 In Chicago, Moore visited the cousin who shared her name, Aida Arabella Carter Stradford. Not long before Moore’s arrival, Stradford’s attorney husband had rescued his father, J. B. Stradford, from a Tulsa, Oklahoma, jail. The senior Stradford, a successful businessman, had been wrongfully charged with inciting the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, which destroyed thirty-five city blocks and killed an estimated 250 people.32 After her cousin’s stay, Aida Stradford began compiling documents and oral histories to produce a biography of her greatgrandfather Scipio Vaughan.33 In this family of civil rights activists and “race leaders,” the connection to Africa helped establish who they were. “Mother was always talking about our African relatives,” recalled her daughter Jewel Lafontant in 1975. “As a small child I knew that Africa was not a jungle, and I was proud of my African cousins.”34 Beginning in the 1950s, several layers of connections between American and Nigerian Vaughans moved the tale of Scipio Vaughan’s reputed tribal marks back and forth across the Atlantic. The American cousin Mabel Smythe (who, the reader may recall, heard the story from her mother) may have told it when she met Aida Moore’s daughter Kofo Ademola and Ademola’s cousin Ayo Vaughan-Richards on a visit to Nigeria with Operation Crossroads (a precursor to the Peace Corps) in 1958. The following year, Kofo Ademola traveled to the United States as part of an official tour with her husband. In Chicago, she met her cousins the Stradfords, whom her mother had visited thirty years previously. As Mrs. Ademola’s friend and biographer later recounted, “This brought home to the Admolas how unusual it was for African Americans to be able to discover their original roots in Africa, and to maintain contact with the relatives they found.”35 Vaughan-Richards also got to know the Stradfords, especially Jewel Stradford Lafontant, who had been a small child when Aida Moore first visited her family in Chicago. The friendship between Lafontant and Vaughan-Richards, two successful, charismatic

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women connected through family history across thousands of miles, was celebrated in Nigerian and American newspapers in 1973 and the feature in Ebony two years later.36 Although each telling of the tribal marks story repeated certain key features—namely that James Vaughan had recognized his father’s facial scars on people he saw in Yorubaland—the particularities of the scars, and the ethnic or geographic groups which they signaled, varied or were absent altogether. Mabel Smythe’s version, based on what her mother heard during Aida Vaughan Moore’s 1925 visit to South Carolina, says only: Mother had told us the story of how one African arrived in the US, married a woman of our family, then urged his children—at least one of them—to return to his father’s people. Eventually one son, whose last name was Vaughn, returned to Niger [sic], found his father’s family (which he recognized through the ritual facial scars like those of his father), and settled there, marrying a local woman.37 The 1973 New York Times article reported that Scipio Vaughan’s son “returned to Nigeria, where the people had the same tribal scars as his father.” When interviewed in the mid-1980s, Mabel Smythe recounted again that “They say that he [James Vaughan] found his father’s people by looking at the tribal marks on their faces. . . . This is written up. You can find accounts of it in the histories.”38 For the American version of the tribal marks story, a specific type of facial scar, connected to a specific polity or ethic group, was not necessary. American Vaughans remembered that their ancestor was Yoruba, and that was precise enough to ground the “African” part of their identities. But in Nigeria, “Yorubaland” is a big place, and Yoruba people are identified with sub-regions and individual towns, each known for particular histories, communities, and alleged attributes. Increasingly, at least some Nigerian versions of James Vaughan’s story came to include references to the particular ethnic and regional identity signaled by his father’s tribal marks.

* * * James Vaughan’s great-granddaughter Ayo Vaughan-Richards first traveled to the United States in the 1950s to study nursing in Chicago. There, she heard family tales from her cousin Aida Stradford and formed an enduring

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friendship with Stradford’s daughter Jewel Lafontant. In the 1970s, it was largely through the efforts of Vaughan-Richards and Lafontant that the transAtlantic Vaughan family gained the attention of the press, especially because Vaughan-Richards had become a well-known television personality in Lagos. And it seems to have been Vaughan-Richards who added an important detail to the story of Scipio Vaughan’s tribal marks: that they connected him specifically to Abeokuta and its sub-district of Owu. The first printed reference (that I have seen) to Scipio Vaughan having originated specifically in Abeokuta was in an article in the Lagos Sunday Times from February 1973. The article focused on Jewel Lafontant, who had recently been appointed deputy solicitor general of the United States, and her family ties with Nigeria. As part of a detailed biography of Scipio and James Vaughan, it reported that “Papa Vaughan,” Mrs. Lafontant’s ancestor, was born in the Owu district of Abeokuta.39 The source for this information had to have been Ayo Vaughan-Richards, not only because she was mentioned in the article, but because its author, the local historian Kunle Akinsemoyin, was a close associate of her husband’s.40 Vaughan-Richards was also the likely source for the drawing of Scipio Vaughan’s tribal marks included in the feature on the Vaughans in Ebony magazine.41 The marks, according to the caption, identified Scipio as “an Egba, a member of the Yoruba tribe”—Egba being the predominant ethnic identity in Abeokuta. But, as they did in the South Carolina family Bible, historical facts cast doubt on Scipio Vaughan’s alleged origins. If Scipio Vaughan actually did come to South Carolina from Yorubaland in the late eighteenth century, he could certainly have carried Egba tribal marks. People known as Egba, whose facial scars are pictured in Johnson’s History of the Yorubas, were subject to warfare and banditry and sold into Atlantic slavery during this time.42 But Abeokuta, where Vaughan-Richards placed her enslaved ancestor, was not founded by Egba refugees until 1830, when Scipio Vaughan was already a grown man in South Carolina. Similarly, someone Scipio Vaughan’s age could have originated in Owu, a Yoruba kingdom destroyed by warfare in the 1820s, whose citizens also bore a distinct set of tribal marks.43 But Owu refugees did not form their own quarter in Abeokuta until the town was founded, too late for the Vaughan ancestor to have been captured from there. When James Vaughan came to Yorubaland in the 1850s, he probably did encounter refugees from Owu and their descendants in Abeokuta and elsewhere. And perhaps somehow that became a part of a story told to his descendants. But it also seems likely that Ayo Vaughan-Richards came to the conclusion that her

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Vaughan ancestors had been Egba (or in other versions, Owu) on her own. Her father’s cousin Michael Ayo Vaughan (a grandson of James Vaughan), in contrast, thought that the family’s ancestral origin was not Abeokuta or even Nigeria. In a 1974 interview, he recounted that James Vaughan first “settled in Liberia, that being his father’s place, and established a farm there” (emphasis added).44 Vaughan-Richards was convinced that Scipio Vaughan originally was captured in the vicinity of Abeokuta, however, and she worked to enlist the support of the traditional ruler there for a biography and film about her ancestor that she hoped to produce. In 1984, she reported to her cousin Jewel Lafontant, “We have met the King of Egbaland officially, he is very proud and enthusiastic about our family project. Scipio Vaughan originated from Egbaland as you know.”45 Two years later, Vaughan-Richards gave a lecture on the multinational Vaughan family at the United States Information Service headquarters in Lagos. In her narration, when James Vaughan arrived in Abeokuta in 1855 he recognized the tribal markings of the Owu people, refugees there, as those of his father.46 Vaughan-Richards’s USIS speech moved from the Vaughan family’s trans-Atlantic connections to a call for closer relations between Africans and Americans in general. “My dream,” she asserted that day in 1986, is one of increased socio-cultural, political, religious and business activities between black Americans and Africans which will strengthen Black solidarity and friendship. . . . Black American and black African solidarity is a long standing historical condition that must be continuously nurtured. To help make this dream come true, immigration laws will have to be modified for black Americans, and the past hostilities of indigenous Africans towards returning ex-slaves must never rear their ugly heads again.47 With that last comment, Vaughan-Richards pointed to a specific resonance of her ancestor’s alleged country marks for her family’s present. Her cousin Olabode Vaughan, now the family’s unofficial historian, told me that in spite of their elite status, the Vaughans were still sometimes considered outsiders in Lagos because of their relatively shallow Yoruba roots: “You are a Vaughan?” people might ask, “Nibo niwo ti wa? [Where are you from?]”48 The story of the tribal marks provided an answer yet again: Abeokuta, the home of a long line of eminent Nigerians, some of them connected through marriage to

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the Vaughans; and specifically its Owu district, the origin of, among others, Nigeria’s once-and-future-president (1977–79 and 1999–2007), Olusegun Obasanjo. Yet Vaughan-Richards came to a new conclusion about her family’s origins later in 1986, when she discovered what she called “the final link”: an ancestral connection not to Abeokuta but to a different town, Ogbomosho. Moreover, she came to believe that James Vaughan had not only found people with his father’s tribal marks when he went to Ogbomosho in 1855, but he had found his father’s brother, a man named Akanmu, still living in the family house. “While carrying out research in Ogbomosho,” Vaughan-Richards and her husband recounted, we noticed a sign to a building on the main road, ‘Vaughan-Thomas (Nigeria)’. Enquiries led to Mr. Oluwole Akinkumi. He said that he named his firm after his father who was baptised Thomas and a relative, Vaughan, who had been taken as a slave to America. His son had returned to Ogbomosho and been welcomed, but his Christian religion was not accepted by them. He drifted away and contact with him was lost during the unsettled times that followed. The family house Ile Alapo still exists in Ogbomosho although part of it has been modernised. The family tree linking the Akinkunmi to the Vaughans goes back to Fatokun whose ancestors came to Ogbomosho via Old Oyo from Nupe.49 Yet even while Vaughan-Richards was delighted to discover her putative relatives in Ogbomosho, she never really kept up with them. In an echo of her great-grandfather, who reportedly drifted away from his father’s people even though he recognized them, Ayo Vaughan-Richards may have found these kinship connections to be more compelling in the abstract than in the flesh.

* * * The tale in which the African American James Vaughan recognized his father’s tribal marks on faces in Nigeria has been repeated and modified so much that it has taken on a life of its own. Still, it is worth remembering that it is probably untrue. What has kept the story alive is its broad plausibility, and—perhaps more important—the fact that its tellers so deeply wanted it to be true. For each of the narrators, the story validated who they

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were: diasporic Africans, planted on one side of the Atlantic with roots on the other. For James Vaughan, the tale became a way of describing how and why he was both an insider and an outsider in Yorubaland: it was a metaphor for his liminality as well as a cultural strategy for mitigating it. For Vaughan’s American nieces and nephews and their descendants, it gave them a place in Africa to call home, even if that place was only vaguely named. And for Ayo Vaughan-Richards and some of her Lagosian relatives, it established the longevity of their Nigerian heritage. Vaughan’s story about country marks, as well as his biography itself, helps to reframe the meanings of African roots in the Atlantic world. As with the Equiano controversy as well as with James Sweet’s recent work on another Black Atlantic migrant, it suggests that identity, or at least identity based on geographic origin, can be a strategy, and a potentially flexible one at that.50 The question we may ask of stories of origin like Vaughan’s is not where does he come from (the kind of question the slave trade database or a swab of the cheek might allow us to ask), but how they deal with the practical problems of social identification in specific circumstances. Vaughan’s father’s country marks may not tell us specifically about slaving networks between the Bight of Benin and South Carolina, but they do tell us about how Vaughan and his descendants came to terms with the lasting memory of those traumas, and the predicaments of identity in their own lives and times.

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PA R T I V POLITICS

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Chapter ten

The Atlantic Transformations of Francisco Menéndez jane landers

For some twenty years now, I have been tracking the Atlantic trails of a Mandinga man known to me as Francisco Menéndez. I first encountered him through a 1738 petition to the Spanish governor of Florida in which he acted as spokesman for a group of African runaways from Carolina slavery. Menéndez called on the governor to honor Spain’s religious sanctuary policy, first established in 1693, and to free all of the Africans who had come to Florida, only to find themselves unjustly reenslaved. Petitioning in support of Menéndez was Chief Jorge, a leader of the Yamasee War with whom Menéndez had fought for several bloody years before they were defeated and fled southward.1 After two decades among the Spaniards, Menéndez would become the leader of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first free black town in what is today the United States, and his story would shape my career as an historian. Francisco Menéndez and Chief Jorge launched me on my first biographical quest into the Black Atlantic, and thanks to the rich archival documentation available for Africans and Indians throughout the Spanish world, I have been employing the biographical methodology ever since. My recent book showcases just some of the fascinating individuals I have met in the Spanish records who engaged in the turbulent geopolitics and revolutions of their day. And as Menéndez first proved to me, the actions of a few individuals can have perhaps unintended and, certainly unforeseen, imperial and trans-Atlantic consequences. 2 My quest to identify Menéndez was triggered by reading Peter H. Wood’s wonderful Black Majority, which concludes with a band of slave rebels from

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Stono escaping down the King’s Highway to St. Augustine.3 In my search for the survivors of that slave rebellion, I encountered Menéndez, a refugee from the earlier Yamasee War of 1715, and, eventually, I came to the earliest documented group of freedom-seekers from Carolina who reached Florida in 1687.4 We will never know how many others may have attempted that brutal journey and failed. This early foray into biographical history produced a dissertation chapter and a journal article, but more importantly, it led to an archaeological investigation, a major museum exhibit, and, eventually, Mose’s designation as a National Historic Landmark. Today, a museum in St. Augustine honors Menéndez and his fellow freedom-seekers. Perhaps most importantly, the story of Menéndez and his “subjects” has made its way into K-12 and university textbooks, thus altering, at least in some measure, what has tended toward an Anglocentric narrative of early American history. School children in St. Augustine now play the roles of Mose villagers at somewhat anachronistic “Juneteenth” celebrations.5 My initial research focused on Menéndez’s life in Spanish Florida, but I have since gained comparative perspective researching the experience of Africans in archives in Mexico, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil. Having eschewed a national framework, I found a new scholarly home in Atlantic history, which introduced me to the rich scholarship of pre-colonial Africanists and also to the new Indian history. New online research tools such as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and the amazing Portal to the Archives of Spain (PARES), among others, have also allowed scholars to range more widely across the Atlantic world. I am now revisiting Menéndez’s story and attempting to fill in more of his African past, his years among the Yamasee, and his final years in Cuba. This essay represents my first attempt to incorporate new understandings and historical research into Menendez’s biography. The only clue I have to Menéndez’s African origins is that he identified himself, and Spaniards also identified him, as Mandinga. I know, too, that English slavers brought him to Carolina early in the eighteenth century and that much of their early slave trade concentrated along the Gambia River. With that fragmentary evidence, we can begin to piece together some of his African past. Portuguese merchants introduced Catholicism, Portuguese social patterns, and European material culture to the Gambia as early as the fifteenth century, while integrating themselves into local familial and economic networks that facilitated their trade. In a pattern that would be transplanted to the Americas, they married or cohabited with local women and their children

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bore Portuguese names, wore crucifixes, and practiced a form of Catholicism. These Luso-Africans spoke crioulo, a blend of Portuguese and African languages, as well as a variety of local African languages. Their Portuguese-style houses reflected the wealth and status of alcaides, or village leaders, who acted as culture brokers between locals and Europeans.6 Once a year, a priest from the Cabo Verde island of Santiago traveled to the mainland to perform marriages and baptisms for the polyglot Luso-Africans living there.7 Portuguese Jews also found a fuller measure of religious tolerance in the Atlantic Islands, and like their Catholic countrymen they became traders in Cabo Verde and along the Gambia where they established their own mixed-race families.8 By this time, Muslim merchants were already well-established in the Senegambia region, often living in their own villages strategically placed near existing indigenous villages. Muslim traders introduced Arabic, Islam, and Koranic education and literacy into Senegambia, along with trade. Muslim holy men known as marabouts gained status as local healers and sold amulets or gris-gris containing protective Koranic prayers. Some Muslim converts along the Gambia were noted for their strict observance of law, while others practiced a fairly relaxed form of Islam; many drank, for instance, and in this ecumenical locale, some non-Muslims also attended Koranic schools.9 The Mandinga, to whom Francisco Menéndez claimed connection, were the most powerful of the many African groups living along the Gambia River, and most were Muslims. They were ruled by noble lineages which acquired that status by having founded towns, as Menéndez would later do in Florida. Mandinga rulers established a series of small kingdoms along the Gambia River and collected tribute in the form of cattle, poultry, rice, and other agricultural produce from their weaker Fula and Sereer neighbors.10 In the seventeenth century English and French traders began appearing in the region, looking to purchase elephant “teeth,” beeswax, cattle hides, and slaves from Mandinga merchants. Mandinga mansas charged them land-use taxes as they had other weaker African groups, and in addition, they charged head taxes on each foreign resident and for each ship entering their ports. In 1661 the Royal Adventurers of England Trading in Africa occupied a small island in the middle of the Gambia River and in 1670 the Royal African Company won a government monopoly over the Gambian trade and built Fort James on that island. Then, in 1681, French competitors representing the Compagnie du Senegal established Albreda on the northern bank of the Gambia River, almost directly across from Fort James. Mandinga rulers grew wealthy on tribute and trade, and English and French observers reported that

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like the Luso-Africans, some of them also lived in European-style houses and wore elaborate mixes of African and European clothing. They also held slaves. 11 In Mandinga society, as in the Iberian world, a person might be enslaved for debt or crimes, or, in cases of dire necessity, they might sell themselves or their children and thereby be consigned to the jongo caste. It is unknown how the young man who would become Francisco Menéndez was enslaved or by whom. Although the Mandinga considered slaves property that could be sold, or even killed by their masters, they could not be sold or killed without a public trial and they might also be allowed to work some days for their own gain. Should they remain in a household for several generations, they would be given the surname of their owner and a second name denoting their slave origins.12 Urban slaves in the Spanish world might also be regarded as part of the extended family and were permitted to work for their own profit at their owner’s discretion and accumulate property (peculium).13 Thus, the Gambia region in which Francisco Menéndez was raised in some ways prepared him for the new worlds he would come to know. The Gambia had long been a multicultural and multilingual world where Mandinga, Fula, Wolof, and Serahuli speakers bartered with Portuguese, Arabic, English, and French speakers, each learning to accommodate the other to some degree . . . all in the interest of the deal.14 Given what English ship captains and factors described of life along the Gambia, it is entirely possible, then, that before being transported to Carolina, Menéndez would have already interacted with a variety of peoples and cultures and acquired the “linguistic dexterity, social plasticity, and cultural agility” that would serve him well in his next world.15 In 1670, as English traders from the Royal African Company were settling into Fort James, across the Atlantic Barbadian planters were launching the new English colony of Carolina, on land still claimed by Spain as La Florida. Charles Town was “only 10 days journey” from St. Augustine, and the undermanned Spanish garrison was compelled to make a feeble, and unsuccessful, attempt to eject the “usurpers.” The abortive Spanish expedition was commanded by St. Augustine’s royal treasurer, don Juan Menéndez Márquez, who would later become Francisco Menéndez’s owner in St. Augustine.16 Thus began almost a century of conflict over the so-called “debatable lands.” The ensuing Anglo-Spanish hostilities triggered waves of migration, raids, and counter-raids all along the Atlantic coast, engulfing indigenous groups and African slaves in imperial contests for control of the Southeast.17 Whether encouraged by the English, or of their own volition, Yamasee

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Indians long allied to the Spanish soon began attacking the chain of Spanish missions along the Georgia coast.18 Unable to defend their Christian charges, the Spaniards tried to relocate them southward but some revolted and fled instead to the interior and an English alliance.19 In the early months of 1685, several thousand Yamasee accompanied by “3 nations of the Spanish Indians that are Christians, Sapella, Soho, and Sapicbay” relocated from St. Augustine to lands they formerly held along the coast, such as the Pocotaligo, on St. Helena.20 Later that year, some fifty Yamasee from St. Helena raided the Christian Timucuan village of Santa Catalina de Afuica, on St. Catherine’s Island, killing eighteen people and taking twenty-five others as slaves back to Carolina. As an added insult, the former Christian converts also brought back church ornaments from the ruined Spanish missions.21 Despite this instability, Carolina’s commitment to and investment in African slavery continued apace. Early settlers brought small numbers of enslaved Africans with them to begin the hard work of clearing forests and building housing and periodically imported more from Barbados and Jamaica. They also enslaved local Indians, as their compatriots in Virginia and other colonies were doing, but the demand for ever more labor proved greater than local indigenous supply.22 In 1674, the Lords Proprietor of Carolina ordered Andrew Percival to “begin a Trade with the Spaniards for Negroes” but this plan must not have been realized and in 1699, Captain W. Rhett imported the first known shipment of slaves from the African coast in the ship Providence. Soon, Carolina planters were importing larger lots of enslaved people from Africa, primarily from the Gambia.23 By 1709, Governor Edward Randolph reported to the Board of Trade that there were “four negroes to one white man” in Carolina.24 The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database lists no voyages from Africa to the North American mainland for the years 1670–1720, but reports such as Randolph’s indicate a larger volume of Africans imported into Carolina than earlier supposed, with a significant increase in slave imports between 1709 and 1711.25 It is probable, then, that the Mandinga youth who became Francisco Menéndez arrived at the Carolina frontier during this period of heavy African importation.26 Many of the newly imported Africans were destined for the dense pine forests and swamps of Carolina where settlers early established critical timber and naval stores industries, encouraged by British bounties on tar, pitch, rosin, and turpentine.27 Enslaved Africans also cut and sawed timber that planters shipped to Charleston and on to other parts of the British Caribbean. As Peter H. Wood has shown, early Carolina’s “black pioneers” also became

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“cattle-hunters” in the Carolina forests. All these occupations allowed even recently imported Africans a certain amount of autonomy and mobility, as well as access to native peoples and their knowledge of the geopolitics of the region. Africans also came to know the lay of the Carolina landscape by serving as “path-finders” and linguists for Indian traders and planters.28 Francisco Menéndez may have held any of these occupations, but he never referred to his enslaved past in his Spanish correspondence and we do not know how he came to be enslaved by other Africans or how long he waited on James Island before being herded into the hold of a slave ship. We do not know his African name or what name he was given by the Englishman who bought him in Charles Town. We know only that he entered Carolina’s multicultural frontier sometime in the early 1700s, joining other Africans and still more numerous indigenous captives to form the region’s “charter generation” of slaves.29 Over the next ten years or so, he came to know English chattel slavery and also previously unknown Indian cultures. Soon, Menéndez, like other Africans and Indians alike, would be swept into the ongoing AngloSpanish contest for control of the Atlantic Southeast. Given their numeric weakness, both the English and the Spaniards used Indian and African surrogates to do much of their fighting on this unstable Atlantic frontier. In 1683 the governor of Spanish Florida, Juan Márquez Cabrera, followed the lead of short-handed governors across the Spanish Atlantic and created a new pardo (mulatto) and moreno (black) militia in St. Augustine. 30 The men swore before God and the cross their willingness to serve the king, and while their pledge may have been formulaic, it was also an effort to define their status as members of the religious and civil community, and as vassals of a monarch from whom they might expect protection or patronage in exchange for armed service.31 These black militiamen were significant for their linguistic and cultural abilities, their knowledge of the frontier, and their military skills, and the Spaniards regularly included them in their raids against Carolina.32 The repeated cross‑currents of raids and migrations across the Southeast acquainted many blacks and Indians alike with the routes to St. Augustine, as well as with the enmity existing between the English and Spanish colonies.33 It did not take long for overworked slaves of the English to attempt to reach the enemy of their oppressors. In 1687 eight black men, two women, and a nursing child arrived at St. Augustine in a stolen canoe and requested baptism into the “True Faith.”34 Given the multicultural nature of the Gambia region, and early missionary reports of Portuguese-speaking slaves in Carolina, it is quite possible that

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some of the runaways reaching Florida had already been exposed to Roman Catholicism.35 Thus, they may have known of the protections and opportunities the Catholic Church offered, possibly even manipulating confessional politics to their own advantage in making a shared request for religious sanctuary.36 As required of a good Christian ruler, the Spanish governor, Diego de Quiroga, saw to the African runaways’ Catholic instruction, baptism, and marriage, and refused to return them to Captain William Dunlop, the Carolina Indian trader who arrived from Carolina to recover them the following year.37 The slaves’ “telegraph” quickly reported the outcome of the negotiations, and the Spaniards recorded new groups of runaways being received in St. Augustine in 1688, 1689, and 1690. Carolina’s governor, James Colleton, complained that slaves ran “dayly to your towns.” Unsure about how to handle the refugees, St. Augustine’s officials repeatedly solicited Spain for guidance and finally, on November 7, 1693, Charles II issued a royal proclamation “giving liberty to all . . . the men as well as the women . . . so that by their example and by my liberality others will do the same.”38 The initiative and determination of those eight enslaved men and women who risked their lives to become free thus led to a major policy revision at the Spanish court that would shape the geopolitics of the Southeast and the Caribbean for the next century, as it would the life of Francisco Menéndez.39 Shortly after Menéndez reached Carolina, the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713) embroiled the Atlantic Southeast in new waves of violence. Carolina’s governor, well-known slave trader James Moore, led a combined force of about a thousand men, including Yamasee allies and armed slaves, in a series of devastating raids on the Spanish coastal mission sites. Thousands of Florida Indians were slaughtered and thousands more became slaves in Carolina or the Caribbean.40 French allies joined Spain’s tri-racial forces in a counterattack on Charles Town in 1706, but despite some initial success, this retaliatory expedition failed.41 During the war, Carolina officials created a militia of 950 “freemen,” each of whom was to present for service “one able slave armed with gun or lance.”42 It is tempting to wonder if Menéndez was one of those newly armed slaves who saw repeated service against St. Augustine’s black and Indian militias.43 In these engagements, Carolina’s slaves would have witnessed armed black men in service to Spaniards and once again been reminded that Spanish Florida offered them a refuge. More would seek sanctuary in Florida as a result of the Yamasee War that erupted in 1715. Most studies of the Yamasee War have blamed that conflict on Carolina’s

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Indian traders who exploited the local indigenous groups, enmeshing them in ruinous debt. The distraught Yamasee filed repeated complaints against these traders with the Carolina Commissioners of Indian Trade. They charged that John Wright, the Indian Agent posted at the paramount Yamasee village of Pocotaligo, on St. Helena Island, forced them to carry burdens, demanded that they build a house for him next to that of the council house, and debauched their young girls.44 In another incident “Lewis King of yr Pocotalligo Town” complained against traders Cornelius MacKarty (sic) and Samuel Hilden for “stripping and beating Wiggasay and Haclantoosa, two of his people att one of their playes.”45 Attempts by authorities to try to curb the worst of these abuses were largely ineffective, and the traders lived almost as rulers in their host towns.46 During this same period, the Spanish governor was gifting delegations of Yamasee in St. Augustine. In an effort to resolve long-simmering hostilities, on April 14, 1715 the commissioners sent a delegation of traders to Pocotaligo. They included William Bray, who had tracked some of his runaway slaves to St. Augustine earlier in the year, Thomas Nairne, Samuel Warner, John Cochran, and John Wright, against whom the Yamasee had filed numerous complaints. The Yamasee received the delegation of traders, but on Good Friday, they tortured and put them to death before rising in a well-coordinated attack against the English.47 Recognizing the chance for their own liberation, Francisco Menéndez and other enslaved Africans joined in common cause with the Yamasee against their mutual enemy, although Carolinians reported their slaves had been “taken.”48 The Yamasee and their African allies fought several major battles at Pocotaligo and another at Salkehatchie, but eventually were driven ever southward.49 For three years, the man who became Francisco Menéndez and several other slaves who had risen against the English fought with the forces of the Yamasee chief Jorge, all the while gaining valuable military skills and cultural, political, and geographic knowledge. In those years, Menéndez transformed himself from English chattel into a valued Yamasee warrior. The Yamasee almost succeeded in eradicating white settlement in Carolina, but reinforcements from Virginia and North Carolina helped turn the tide, leading the Yamasees to seek refuge among the very Spaniards they had once harried. Chief Jorge and his African allies, among whom was Francisco Menéndez, escaped together to Spanish Florida where they hoped to claim the religious sanctuary promised in 1693 by Spain’s Catholic monarch.50 Menéndez’s hopes of freedom would not be fulfilled for another twenty years.

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During the Yamasee War, the indigenous geopolitics of the Southeast had shifted once again. One month after the outbreak of the war, and in response to the perceived weakness of the English, Coosa’s paramount Chief Chalaquiliche ordered his subjects to switch their allegiance to the Spaniards. He sent four lesser chiefs to St. Augustine to relay this offer and their spokesman, one Yfallaquisca, also known as Perro Bravo, laid eight chamois cords full of knots before Spanish officials. Each knot denoted a town promising to switch allegiance to the Spaniards (a total of 161 towns) and Perro Bravo asked that the cords be sent to the king of Spain, noting that towns of fewer persons were not even represented.51 Spanish officials in St. Augustine settled many of their new Indian allies in villages on the periphery of St. Augustine, generally grouping them by language. Perro Bravo lived at the Yamsee village of Pocotalaca (after Pocotaligo) and somehow claimed ownership of Francisco Menéndez and three other African “slaves” who after fighting with the Yamasee considered they had liberated themselves. One of Perro Bravo’s other slaves may have been Francisco Menéndez’s Mandinga wife, who fled with him from Carolina. Perro Bravo told Indians and Spaniards alike that if he were not paid for the slaves he would kill them, and that he had many other lands in which he could live.52 The threat apparently paid off, and at a meeting at the Indian village of Nombre de Dios in the fall of 1718, the acting governor of Florida, Juan de Ayala y Escovar, purchased the endangered Africans for some corn and liquor.53 Thus, in approximately two decades of his youth, Menéndez had experienced enslavement by Africans, Englishmen, Yamasees, and Spaniards, with only a brief period of freedom during the Yamasee War. Spanish slavery was not what Menéndez sought, but it would be different than slavery he had experienced under any others. His was an anomalous enslavement. Although the manner of his purchase seems to have made him a Crown slave, owned by the government rather than by an individual, there is no evidence he was ever treated as such.54 Rather, it seems that he may have lived some time with the governor himself, since his wife took the name Ana Maria de Escovar.55 Meanwhile, ever growing African population and the fear that slaves might ally with Spaniards in Florida led Carolina planters to obsess about slave rebellion. Carolinians discovered alleged slave plots in 1711 and 1714 and in 1720 the townspeople of Charles Town uncovered a major slave conspiracy in which at least some of the participants “thought to gett to Augustine.” Fourteen got as far as Savannah before being captured and executed.56 In

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1724, ten more runaways reached St. Augustine, assisted again by Englishspeaking Yamasee Indians, and they stated they knew that the Spanish king had offered freedom for those seeking conversion and baptism.57 Following the precedent first set in 1687, Florida’s governor, Antonio de Benavides, offered to purchase the runaways for two hundred pesos apiece and he sent don Francisco Menéndez Márquez to Charles Town to negotiate with their owners, who angrily rejected the offer as insufficient.58 The governor also inquired of Spain if sanctuary was indeed to be offered, since the runaways had appeared during a time of truce between Spain and England. As often happened, the governor received no reply, and after the English threatened to reclaim their lost slaves by force, he sold the unlucky fugitives at public auction to the leading creditors of the St. Augustine treasury. In this way don Francisco Menéndez Márquez acquired the Mandinga man who would take his name at his Catholic baptism.59 The African now had a powerful patron—a royal official and a wealthy landowner—who served as his godparent and made him part of his household. Don Francisco was sent on repeated diplomatic and military missions to Carolina, and it seems likely he would have taken with him the slave who had fought his way through that terrain and who also knew so well the Yamasee and English geopolitics. In 1725, don Francisco was sent to destroy a fortified English settlement at Stuart’s Town and the following year Francisco Menéndez was named captain of St. Augustine’s black militia.60 Thereafter, Menéndez led important military engagements against the English from whom he had fled, each of which would have enhanced his status in the Spanish community. In these years, Carolina slaves continued to flee to Florida. Some of the runaways were seasoned warriors who had fought with the Yamasee against the English, and some may have also been warriors in their homelands. They became effective additions to the black militia and joined in subsequent Spanish raids against their former masters. The same year Menéndez was made captain of the slave militia, planters near Stono “had fourteen Slaves Runaway to St. Augustine” and the governor of Carolina complained to London that the Spaniards not only harbored their runaways but “They have found a New way of sending our own slaves against us, to Rob and Plunder us.”61 Carolina’s Governor Arthur Middleton claimed that “Six of our Runaway slaves and the rest Indians” in two canoes attacked near Pon Pon in the fall of 1727 and carried away white captives. Another account of the same raid said that “Ten Negroes and fourteen Indians Commanded by those of their own Colour,

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without any Spaniards in company with them” had been responsible, and that they had also brought back to St. Augustine one black man and a mulatto boy. That same year, Spanish raiders and Carolina runaways struck again at a plantation on the Edisto River and carried away another seven blacks.62 In fact, Governor Antonio de Benavides had offered thirty pieces of eight for every English scalp and one hundred pieces “for every live Negro” the multiracial raiders brought back to St. Augustine.”63 On each of these occasions, the black raiders would have been commanded by Francisco Menéndez. By this time, Governor Benavides was so convinced of the black militia’s ability that in 1733 he proposed sending the runaways north to foment rebellion in Carolina and, once again, planned to pay them for English scalps, but the Council of the Indies rejected this design.64 The repeated raids from Florida triggered an English response in 1728, when Colonel John Palmer led a retaliatory attack against St. Augustine. On that occasion the black militia led by Francisco Menéndez proved one of the city’s most effective defense forces. In recognition of that service, the Spanish Crown commended the enslaved forces for their bravery and in 1733 also issued a new decree reiterating its offer of freedom to runaways from Carolina.65 Francisco Menéndez, however, remained enslaved and so persisted in his efforts to achieve the freedom promised by the Spanish king. Over the years he had spent as a slave of important Spanish officials, he had learned a number of valuable skills for navigating Spanish culture. He had become a Christian and participated in Catholic communal rituals. He understood the idiom of extended family and the importance of hierarchy and patronage systems. Somehow he had even become literate in Spanish. He acquired a measure of honor for these social skills and most of all for his military valor. On behalf of his community, he presented several petitions to the governor and to the auxiliary bishop of Cuba, who toured Florida in 1735, but uncertain of the legalities, these officials wrote Spain seeking guidance and Menéndez and his community remained enslaved.66 Their fortunes would change in 1737 with the arrival of a new Spanish governor and the advent of renewed hostilities with the English. Once more Captain Francisco Menéndez solicited freedom for himself and others in a petition that listed thirty-one individuals unjustly enslaved, including some who had been taken to Havana, and the names of the persons who claimed ownership over them. This time Menéndez’s petition was supported by another from his old ally, the Yamasee chief, Jorge. Jorge claimed to be the chief

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who had led the Yamasee uprising against the British and stated that he and the other Yamasee chiefs “commonly” made “treaties” with the slaves. The use of the terms “allies” and “treaties” implies Yamasee recognition of the slaves’ autonomy and utility. Jorge stated that Menéndez and three other Africans had fought bravely for him for several years until they were ultimately defeated and headed to St. Augustine, hoping to receive the Christian sanctuary promised by Spain. Jorge also testified that in St. Augustine Perro Bravo had betrayed the Africans by selling them into slavery, but he did not blame Perro Bravo, for as a heathen, he knew no better.67 Instead, Jorge blamed the Spaniards who bought the unlucky blacks, who in his estimation had been patient and “more than loyal.”68 Florida’s newly arrived governor, Manuel de Montiano, was expecting war with England at any moment, and the combined petitions and stated alliance of Africans and Indians must have no doubt made an impression on a governor in need of their services. He wisely chose to investigate. After reviewing all relevant documentation on the issue, on March 15, 1738, Governor Montiano granted unconditional freedom to all fugitives from Carolina. The powerful men who had received the slaves in payment for loans to the cash-strapped government vehemently protested their emancipation, but Governor Montiano ruled that the men had ignored the royal determination expressed in repeated decrees and, therefore, all deals were null and void and all the enslaved were free.69 When the Crown reviewed the governor’s actions, it approved and ordered that not only all the blacks who had come from Carolina to date “but all those who in the future come as fugitives from the English colonies” should be given prompt and full liberty in the name of the king. Further, so that there be no further pretext for selling them, the royal edict should be publicly posted so that no one could claim ignorance of the ruling.70 In 1738, after two decades of Spanish slavery, Francisco Menéndez was once again transformed and became a free man at last. Governor Montiano assigned the newly emancipated Spanish subjects lands two miles north of St. Augustine and recognized Menéndez as leader of the new free black town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose the former slaves established there. Further, in his official correspondence the governor described the almost one hundred residents of the new town as Menéndez’s “subjects.”71 The new homesteaders, in turn, promised to be “the most cruel enemies of the English” and to spill their “last drop of blood in defense of the Great Crown of Spain and the Holy Faith.” Governor Montiano modeled the village of “new Christians”

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after the nearby Christian Indian villages, assigning a Franciscan father to live at the site and be responsible for the Africans’ Christian instruction. It must have been a challenge for the churchman, for Africans of distinct cultural and political backgrounds made up this community, including those designated in Spanish records as Congos, Carabalíes, Minas, and Mandingas, and some men had indigenous wives. All the African men were formed into a black militia under the command of Captain Francisco Menéndez. 72 Although in its decrees, the Spanish Crown emphasized religious and humane considerations for freeing the slaves of the British, political and military motives were equally, if not more, important. In harboring the runaways and eventually settling them in their own town, Florida’s governors were following the Spanish policy of repoblación, populating and holding territory threatened by foreign encroachment.73 But if the interests of Spain and Florida were served by this policy, so too were those of the ex-slaves like Menéndez. Spain offered them a refuge within which they could live free and maintain their families. They made creative use of Spanish institutions to support their corporate identity and concomitant privileges.74 They adapted to Spanish values where it served them to do so and, thereby, gained autonomy. They reinforced ties within their original community through intermarriage and use of the Spanish institution of godparenthood or compadrazgo. And over time, they formed intricate new kin and friendship networks with slaves, free blacks, Indians of various nations, “new” Africans of various ethnicities, and Spaniards in St. Augustine that served to stabilize their population and strengthen connections to the Spanish community.75 Over the next quarter century, Menéndez and his free Mose militia defended their adopted homeland against British, pirate, and Indian attacks. During the War of Jenkins’ Ear, General James Oglethorpe led a combined force of Georgians, Carolinians, and their allied Indians in a determined effort to drive the Spaniards from Florida. The 1740 invasion was supported by a Royal Navy fleet sent from Jamaica that bombarded St. Augustine for a full month. Captain Menéndez and the Mose militia fought bravely in the defense of the Spanish city, but Mose was occupied by the English. Menéndez was with the Spanish forces that eventually retook Mose, but the village was so badly damaged in the fighting that its residents moved back into St. Augustine.76 Thereafter, Menéndez wrote several eloquent letters to the king of Spain detailing his military services and requesting a proprietary captainship. He argued that he had worked with “loyalty, zeal and love” and had “been continually at arms, and assisted in the maintenance of the bastions, without

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the least royal expense . . . to defend the Holy Evangel and sovereignty of the Crown.” And he signed with a flourish. In cover letters, Governor Montiano highly recommended Menéndez to the king and supported his requests. When the monarch failed to respond, Menéndez took to the seas as a Spanish corsair, seeking, he said later, to make his way to “Old Spain” and discuss the matter with the king in person.77 As a corsair, Menéndez took part in the capture of several English ships loaded with valuable cargoes and also an attack on the English settlements at Okracoke, but in 1741 he had the misfortune to be captured by the English corsair Revenge. Some of the English sailors on board had recently witnessed “Spanish Negroes” being burned at the stake in New York for supposedly plotting to take the city.78 When they discovered that Menéndez had captained Florida’s black militia at the Battle of Mose, they tied him to a gun, gave him two hundred lashes, “pickled” his wounds, and threatened him with castration in retaliation for atrocities committed against the English. Finally, the English captain who claimed Menéndez as a prize sold him back into slavery in the Bahamas. After only three years of freedom, Menéndez was a slave once more. It is still unknown how he regained his freedom—whether by escape or by Spanish ransom—but by 1759 he was again the leader of Mose.79 Shortly thereafter, shifting geopolitics would once again alter Menéndez’s life. In the course of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) the British captured Havana. In the peace treaty that concluded that war the following year, Spain gladly ceded Florida to the English in order to recover the “pearl of the Antilles.” The beleaguered population of Florida—Spanish, Indian, and African—was evacuated to other still Spanish locales. In that exodus, Menéndez led his freed “subjects” into exile in Cuba.80 Initially, Captain Francisco Menéndez and eight other free black families were settled at the small fishing village of Regla, across the bay from Havana.81 All the exiled Floridanos, Spanish, Indian and African alike, received government subsidies and Captain Menéndez and his wife received double that of the other Mose residents. Menéndez and his community stayed at Regla for approximately one year before being granted new homesteads and relocating to the Matanzas frontier. In the newly created town of San Agustín de la Nueva Florida, they began their lives anew. 82 As I have written about earlier, life on the Cuban frontier proved difficult, and after at least one murder and much disaster, many of the free blacks of Mose gave up their land grants and disappeared from our view. In subsequent research, I found that other Mose militia men, like Antonio Eligio de

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la Puente and Tomás Chrisostomo, left their frontier homesteads and moved their families into the nearby city of Matanzas. While less developed than Havana in the eighteenth century, Matanzas did have a free black Catholic brotherhood of the Rosary and probably enough other urban institutions that some would have stayed on and made lives for themselves there. Spanish officials in Cuba generated records on the Floridanos as long as they supported them and I continue to track them. After repaying much of the cash advance Spain gave the new homesteaders (that covered the cost of an African slave for each, tools, and seed), Menéndez also gave up his land. It seems likely that being a literate and urban individual with military and sailing experience, he would have probably returned either to Regla or Havana, where his opportunities were greater. I am tracking what became of him in my current book project. The arc of Menéndez’s fascinating life, during which he reshaped his identity and circumstances multiple times, demonstrates how enslaved persons learned about and acted on possibilities to regain lost liberty. The polyglot and literate Menéndez personified Ira Berlin’s cosmopolitan Atlantic creole—someone with “linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility.”83 There is a good likelihood that he may have already demonstrated these characteristics on the African coast. In the Americas, he simply added to his repertoire.

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Chapter eleven

Echoes of the Atlantic: Benguela (Angola) and Brazilian Independence roquinaldo ferreira

This chapter reconstructs the trajectory of Francisco Ferreira Gomes, a black man born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who was arrested in the city of Benguela, Angola, in 1824 on charges of plotting a revolt that would cause Benguela to secede from Portugal. According to the accusation, Gomes and four accomplices intended to “surreptitiously arrest the governor [of Benguela] and then hoist the flag of the empire of Brazil.”1 This would have turned Benguela— the second-largest slave port in Angola—into an overseas province of newly independent Brazil. To achieve their goals, the secessionists, who had the support of troops and sailors from slave vessels, allegedly sought military support from Brazil, which provoked a crisis that seriously threatened Portuguese control of Benguela. In the words of the bishop of Angola, “Some merchants [of Benguela] had requested that the royal prince [of Brazil] dispatch ships to subjugate this kingdom [of Angola] and Benguela.”2 These accusations were by no means the only controversial episode in Gomes’s eventful career in Benguela, which had begun when he was sent to the city as a criminal exile in 1800. Gomes would stay in Benguela for thirtyfour years, marry an African woman, and found a dynasty of slave dealers who remained in the city after he had returned to Brazil in 1834. His career in Angola was controversial. In 1811, he was arrested on the charge of perjury; later he was accused of authoring pamphlets (pasquins) against the government of Benguela. These incidents led to his temporary discharge from the military, into which he had been recruited shortly after arriving in Benguela.3 Although they shed light on Gomes’s early political ambitions, these events

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pale in comparison to the much more serious charge of plotting the secessionist revolt against Portugal in 1824. As a result of the accusation of fomenting secessionism, Gomes and his followers were put in jail and called “thieves, niggers, and bode [goat]”— deeply derogatory terms. They were later sent to jail in Luanda, the capital city of Angola, and one was deported to Brazil. Strikingly, all men were wealthy merchants. To argue against the arrest, in fact, they claimed that the combined value of their businesses was worth four times more than Benguela’s royal treasury, which they were accused of planning to ransack before escaping to Rio de Janeiro to seek support from the emperor of Brazil. The five men were allowed to appoint representatives to manage their businesses before they were transferred to Luanda—but were also warned that they would be killed if they talked to one another during the trip. The draconian reaction against Gomes grew out of deeply rooted Portuguese fears about Benguela’s century-old ties to Brazil, in addition to metropolitan fears about the repercussions in the city of Brazilian independence from Portugal in 1822. Adding to the explosive nature of the charge of secessionism, the revolt was also said to be driven by racial animosity toward the small white population of Benguela. This was revealed in several accounts produced by colonial officials. As the governor of Benguela explained to authorities in Luanda, the situation was critical “because the troops [in Benguela] are black and the commander is black and Ferreira Gomes . . . also is [black].”4 Later, a witness interrogated by authorities stated that Gomes’s plan was to “wash his feet in the blood of European [white] loyalists.”5 An examination of the Benguelan secessionist sedition demonstrates that, by the early nineteenth century, links between Angola and Brazil were not only commercial and cultural in nature, but had also assumed a political dimension. To understand the accusations against Gomes, the Benguelan revolt must be placed in the broader context of the Atlantic, and more specifically in relation to the process of Brazilian independence from Portugal. Beginning with the shipment of slaves to Brazil in the 1730s, Benguela had been tightly linked to Brazil, particularly Rio—and, by contrast, had weak ties to Portugal.6 Once Brazil became independent in 1822, there was widespread fear that Angola would follow suit. As the governor of Angola Cristovão Avelino Dias stated, “This country [Benguela] cannot afford not [emphasis added] to belong to Brazil, due to its geographical location [in relation to Brazil], commercial relations [with Brazil] that have lasted centuries, all types of aid that are easier for Brazil to provide and

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that Portugal will never be able to provide due to the distance [between Benguela and Portugal].”7

The Rise of Francisco Ferreira Gomes It is impossible to write about Benguela’s secessionist racial revolt without telling the story of Gomes himself. His arrest was a stunning reversal in a career marked by an equally striking rise to wealth and power. As the owner or co-owner of at least three ships, Gomes was responsible for the shipment of almost seven thousand slaves to Brazil between 1809 and 1831.8 This slave dealer, who was himself black, was also the owner of two properties in Benguela proper—one of them possibly used as a guesthouse by the government —and farms (arimos) in nearby regions. His wealth derived not only from business with Brazil through the slave trade, but also from extensive business dealings in several regions of the Benguelan highlands, in places such as Caconda, Quimbanda, Quibuta, Hanha, and Galanga.9 Between 1823 and 1829, Gomes received at least sixteen licenses from the Benguelan administration to dispatch caravans with goods to the interior— the highest number of licenses issued to any Benguela merchant during that period.10 To illustrate the extent of his investments and business activities, one of the caravans his son and commercial partner, José Gomes Ferreira, dispatched to the Benguelan highlands included one hundred porters.11 While selling products imported from Brazil in the Angolan sertões, these caravans mainly brought slaves to Benguela. In 1826, for example, Gomes requested a license from the Benguelan administration to “dispatch back to the interior (sertão) of Galanga the blacks who led a caravan of slaves from there.”12 Gomes’s extraordinary career—from a poor degredado to the life and wealth of a top slave dealer—is even more remarkable in light of the fact that he may have been born into slavery in Brazil. This is suggested by an account from 1824 stating that he had been redeemed (resgatado) from captivity by his father, Miguel Ferreira Gomes. If correct, this information would add even more dimensions to an already extraordinary character. It would mean, for instance, that Gomes’s father, who was born in Benguela, would have spent time in Rio, where he would have then fathered Francisco Ferreira Gomes. Indeed, Miguel Ferreira Gomes was an officer (lieutenant) in the Benguelan Henriques battalion. In 1812, he fled Benguela to the sertões after an altercation with authorities in the city.13 Afterwards, his name disappears from the records.

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Given the sketchy information about Gomes senior’s trajectory, it is almost impossible to precisely determine Francisco Ferreira Gomes’s status in Brazil. Was Gomes senior one of the top—and highly mobile—Benguelan merchants who frequently traveled to Brazil? If so, he could easily have fathered a child in Brazil. In fact, Antônio José de Barros, a powerful merchant from Benguela, had done so during a business trip in Rio a few decades earlier. While still a slave, Barros’s child had traveled to Benguela to reconnect with his father, evidence of the frequency of travel between Rio and Benguela. Barros had never met his enslaved son, but acknowledged that he had “spent time in Rio de Janeiro [where I] had sinful sexual intercourse with a mixedrace woman, Ana, who is a slave.” Similar to what Gomes’s father may have done, Barros then “decided to free him [his son] from slavery on principle and not because I was sure he was my son.”14 At any rate, Gomes’s career in Benguela was undeniably successful. A few years after arriving in the city at the age of fifteen, he was recruited into the Henriques battalion, a military unit modeled after a well-known Brazilian battalion that helped expel Dutch forces from Brazil in 1654.15 As discussed in Chapter V, the majority of the degredados sent to Angola were recruited as members of regular and irregular military forces. These degredados generally attempted to desert the military and enter the slave trade in the sertões. In contrast, Gomes stayed in Benguela and used his appointment in the Henriques battalion, as well as future appointments in the civilian administration, to achieve social mobility in the city.16 By the end of the eighteenth century, there were two companies of Henriques, one of them stationed inland at Caconda, and the number of soldiers stood at 260.17 This battalion had been created in the 1760s, and was responsible for patrolling Benguela’s shores against foreign vessels trying to smuggle slaves out of Benguela. Duties included military recruitment and capturing runway slaves, among others.18 In 1808, for instance, an officer in the battalion became the main colonial authority in Cabo Negro—which lay south of Benguela and was outside Portuguese control—after leading an expedition that had staked out control over the region.19 Other Henriques soldiers were fluent in local languages and helped the Benguelan administration in missions in nearby regions.20 Gomes was promoted to commander of the battalion in 1823.21 In the words of the governor of Benguela, “In this city, the blacks belonged to the Henriques,” and white and mixed-race people (mulattoes) were enlisted in the other militia forces that coexisted in town.22 More importantly, the

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Henriques battalion was a place where several Brazil-born individuals could be found; in general, they were men who had been sent to Benguela as degredados. In 1812, for example, Felipe Antunes was described as a sergeant who had served in Rio and “earned a living in business with that city of Rio de Janeiro.”23 In Benguela, Gomes married the daughter of Joannes José Gaspar, a black man who had been appointed as a colonial administrator in Dombe Grande, a nearby region controlled by allied sobas that played a significant role in supplying food to Benguela.24 While Gomes’s business with Brazil illustrates the importance of Benguela’s trans-Atlantic links, his marriage to an African woman gave Gomes ties to a rising family in the sertões of Benguela. In 1797, Joannes José Gaspar was listed in a census as an “officer (cabo) in Dombe Grande, [a] black man, thirty-five years old, married to Dona Leonor Pereira da Costa, thirty years old and mixed-race.” At the time, Gaspar owned a rather simple house in Benguela city.25 Fourteen years later, he had become “one of the principal potentates of the outskirts of this city and owner of slaves and a retinue of free aggregates.”26 By then, as the commander of African troops recruited in Dombe Grande and nearby regions, Gaspar’s responsibilities included collecting taxes and food supplies for the Benguela hospital from the native population.27 In addition to his position in the Henriques battalion, Gomes became an accountant for José da Costa Muniz, a large merchant in Benguela, most likely because he was literate in Portuguese.28 Literacy would also pave the way for appointment as a middle-level officer (almoxarife) in the royal treasury, which was perhaps the most important branch of the civilian administration in Benguela.29 Gomes was responsible for acquiring food and hardware supplies for the Benguelan administration, paying free workers who performed tasks for the administration, and paying the salaries of military and civilian personnel, among other tasks. In 1814, for example, he was ordered to “purchase from the merchants from this city [Benguela] one hundred and ten sacks of manioc flour from Brazil to supply the regular troops and people working for the local government.”30 In the same year, he paid one thousand and five hundred réis to Manoel Garcia Mendes, who had “repaired the royal marks that are used to brand slaves for the local market.”31 Later, he was ordered to make a payment to the mundombes, “who conducted slaves and cattle sent to the soba of Socoval in Quilengues as payment of the king’s fifth.”32 How representative was Gomes’s career of a pattern of social mobility in Benguela? Like others before him, he held appointments in the military

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and civilian administrations. António José da Costa, for instance, was born in Braga, Portugal, and went to Benguela as a criminal exile in 1767. In Benguela, Costa was immediately recruited into the military forces, similar to Gomes’s trajectory. By the early 1790s, Costa had become a local representative of Lisbon merchants seeking to enter the Benguelan slave trade.33 By the end of his career in Benguela, Costa had not only been appointed the top commander (sargento mor) of the local military forces, but also the chief officer of the Benguelan royal treasury.34 Like Gomes, he owned properties in nearby Catumbela, traded with regions as far inland as Bailundo, and held positions in the civilian and military Benguela bureaucracy.35 José Rodrigues Maia, a former degredado who arrived in Benguela in the 1760s, is another example. As the local representative of a state company created to ship slaves to the Brazilian states of Grão Pará and Maranhão, Maia oversaw the shipment of 16,586 slaves between 1772 and 1786.36 At the same time, he also became one of the top private merchants in Benguela, working as a local representative for Lisbon-based investors.37 Maia was a member of the guerra preta, a military unit that traditionally consisted of Africans who had been recruited from regions controlled by African chiefs allied to the Portuguese.38 His influence and wealth are demonstrated by two episodes. In 1785, he convinced authorities to authorize an expedition to Cabo Negro, a region outside Portuguese control, even promising to fund the expedition in exchange for exclusive rights to embark slaves from Cabo Negro.39 Later, Maia wrote a letra de risco (bill of risk) worth more than five million réis on behalf of Francisco Dias de Oliveira, who used the funds to purchase goods in Rio to finance his slaving activities in Benguela.40 Gomes’s tenure at the royal treasury lasted six years.41 Since the local bureaucracy depended heavily on the royal treasury, one might surmise that Gomes’s several appointments in the office greatly enhanced his social mobility. Beginning as a scribe [escrivão], he was later promoted to interim head of the treasury. Traditionally, this position had been shared by two of the leading merchants.42 Although it did not include a salary, the post provided many opportunities for financial gain. As the head of the royal treasury, for instance, Gomes had the power to inspect ships entering and leaving Benguela to ensure compliance with regulations related to imports of products and shipments of slaves. An episode involving Antonio Lopes Anjo, Gomes’s main partner in Benguela and himself a former head of the royal treasury, provides insight into tasks performed by the head of the royal treasury. In 1816, a ship (the

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sumaca Olinda) arrived in Benguela from Pernambuco to replenish its food supplies on the way to Luanda. During an onboard inspection, Anjo and other officials seized the ship and arrested its master on the grounds of illegal importation of gunpowder. This decision affected not only merchants who had invested in the ship, but also the slaves onboard, since long delays in the harbor dramatically increased their risk of mortality. To release the ship, Governor of Benguela José Joaquim Marques da Graça had to overrule Anjo’s decision.43 Gomes was once accused of authorizing merchants to embark slaves on ships in exchange for berths for his associates and himself.44 Later, he was described as someone who had enriched himself “to the detriment of the royal treasury.”45 It is worthwhile to point out that by realizing financial gains from state appointments, Gomes was doing nothing out of the ordinary. Using state appointments to advance personal business was a longstanding strategy that had been employed by merchants in Luanda as well. In 1801, for example, while remarking on the fact that the head of the Luanda custom house owed a significant amount of money to the Luandan administration, Governor of Angola Miguel Antonio de Mello said that he had “strong reasons to believe that [the official] had funds in Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco, which he secretly managed to use to his advantage.”46 The use of state resources by private individuals was, of course, a key feature of colonial societies in other parts of the Portuguese Atlantic as well.47 Gomes’s strategy of using administrative posts to advance his business interests is further illustrated by his appointment as the official estate guardian for orphaned minors (curador dos orfãos). This position gave him direct access to the estates of wealthy merchants who had died in Benguela. As the curador, he became the legal overseer of minor heirs of deceased merchants. Not surprisingly, he was accused of taking advantage of the position to marry his son, José Ferreira Gomes, to the heir to a fortune of sixty contos of réis. According to the accusation, the orphaned girl was “a twelve-year-old minor who had been educated by her mother and relatives who were simple black people.”48 Furthermore, Gomes was appointed a judge in the office of defuntos e ausentes, a position that included paying off deceased merchants’ outstanding debts and receiving payments owed to them. Crucially, this position also involved the supervision and transfer of deceased merchants’ assets and funds to heirs in Portugal and Brazil. These tasks were usually beset by obstacles. Because merchants frequently lent funds and merchandise to sertanejo

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traders—who then traveled long distances inland—it was frequently almost impossible to collect these loans. The case of the Portuguese Francisco Barboza Rodrigues is illustrative. One of the wealthiest merchants in Luanda, Rodrigues died in 1799, but his son was unable to collect his inheritance.49 Several of the individuals to whom Rodrigues’s father had lent funds “resided in different districts of this kingdom [Angola].” Worse yet, they refused to pay what they owed, “counting on the fact that they are wealthy and the judicial process is slow.”50 No specific accusation was ever made against Gomes during his time in the office of defuntos e ausentes, but an analysis of the position confirms that it would have provided an ideal place for personal enrichment. Since early times, the defuntos e ausentes had been a focal point of corruption and mismanagement in Angola. This is demonstrated by the accusations made by relatives of deceased merchants—usually their widows and children in Brazil and Portugal, which usually targeted the officials charged with overseeing estates. As early as 1715, for instance, these complaints reached such a level that merchants in Luanda requested the dispatch of an official from Lisbon to investigate the chronic mismanagement and theft of dead people’s assets and properties.51 The Pernambuco-based relatives of a man who had died in Luanda described officials in the defuntos e ausentes “as a band of thieves” (corja de ladrões).52 In addition to the relatives of merchants who had died in Angola, Brazilian and Portuguese investors who had dispatched goods to trade for slaves in Angola were also affected by the lack of transparency of the defuntos e ausentes office. To avoid the disappearance of his funds in Angola, Francisco Rodrigues da Silva, the captain of a slave ship who left Lisbon for Angola in 1767, made his junior partner Possidónio da Costa sign a document committing to collect and send to Lisbon Silva’s assets in case he died in Luanda.53 More influential merchants were sometimes successful in obtaining support from the Portuguese crown in the event their agents died in Angola.54 Others, however, had to contact Angolan officials on their own. Antonio Martins de Miranda, a merchant in Rio, sent a petition to the governor of Angola stating that his partner had died in Luanda and the funds of their slave expedition were being held by the office of defuntos e ausentes.55 To collect inheritances, European and Brazilian heirs were forced to hire trading houses or individuals in Angola to help them locate assets and collect debts owed to deceased relatives. Examples of people who resorted to this strategy are abundant. In 1759, Josefa de Almeida Loba, “widow of José

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Rodrigues Teixeira, who died in Benguela, appointed captain António de Pontes, who is about to leave for Angola, as her legal representative with the power to collect and receive everything she had recently sent to her husband and everything else that the said husband owned.”56 A similar account reports that Josefa Maria Caetana, “widow of António Gomes da Cunha . . . appoints captain António Pontes Lisboa, who is about to leave for Angola, with the power to collect and receive everything that belongs to her . . . especially the estate of her son Sebastião José da Cunha, who died in Benguela, and of whom she is the sole heir.”57 Problems faced by relatives were such that, in 1755, Mathias Rodrigues Vieira, a merchant based in Rio, warned the mother of a Lisbon-based merchant to act quickly if she wished to obtain her son’s inheritance.58 Such a strategy was not always effective. A Pernambucan widow whose husband had died in Angola was forced to struggle for almost thirty years to collect her inheritance.59 As José de Almeida e Vasconcelos de Soveral e Carvalho, 1st Baron of Mossâmedes and Governor of Angola, acknowledged in 1784, the “estate of deceased individuals was rarely sent to Europe.”60 This forced relatives to travel to Luanda, as demonstrated by Manoel Pinto de Miranda, a resident of Rio, who “came to this city [Luanda] to collect the inheritance of his son Joaquim Pinto de Miranda, who married Joana Corrêa de Brito, the widow of Joaquim Pinto de Miranda, and died without children and a will.” Traveling to Luanda was also the only choice left to Manoel Gonçalves Pedrinha, a resident of Salvador, who “came to me [Governor of Angola José de Almeida Barboza] some days ago in a deplorable state and said that he had come from Bahia seven years ago to look for the estate of his brother who had died in this city but he had not found anything.”61 By the middle of the eighteenth century, systemic corruption and mismanagement of the defuntos e ausentes forced the Portuguese crown to determine that Portuguese and Brazil-based creditors were to be paid immediately after the death of a merchant in Angola. While welcomed by merchants who were based abroad, the measure was fiercely opposed by Angola-based merchants on the grounds that they also lent funds to traders—some of whom were foreigners—and should not be penalized. In successfully objecting to the legislation, Angola-based merchants had in mind cases like that of Marcos da Silva Ribeiro. Ribeiro had sued to receive the inheritance left by his cousin, who had died as a capitão mor in the Angolan sertões. As the executor of the will explained, there were no assets or uncollected funds to send to Portugal because of the many loans that the capitão mor had contracted in Luanda.62

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As stated by an official, “No one died in Luanda without being in debt with four or more creditors, thus it was not necessary to create legal distinction [between local and outside investors].”63

Business and Social Networks Gomes’s main partner in Benguela, Antonio Lopes Anjo, was a Portuguese merchant whose career trajectory was similar to Gomes’s. Like Gomes and other merchants examined in this chapter, Anjo had been a clerk (escrivão) in the office of defuntos e ausentes in Benguela, in 1795.64 He also displayed a high degree of mobility across the Atlantic, having traveled to Rio at least once, in 1803.65 In 1816, as noted earlier, he had been appointed the head of the royal treasury in Benguela.66 In 1827, the year he died in Benguela, Anjo was wealthy and regularly lent funds to other traders in the city.67 Although the reason Anjo went to Benguela is unknown, other merchants’ careers provide insights into why individuals like him settled in Benguela to engage in commerce. In 1735, for instance, Marsal Domingues stated that he had come to the city because he had been hired to take goods from Rio to the city; he was a volante, a mid-level trader who oversaw daily aspects of the slave trade.68 José Caetano de Araújo, a merchant based in Rio, stated in 1754 that “he was a merchant operating in the trade in Luanda and Benguela and that he wanted to settle in Benguela for a few years because of the many commercial dealings he had in the city.”69 Similarly, Manoel José Esteves came to Benguela to oversee shipments of slaves to Brazil and the sale of cargoes shipped from Lisbon and Brazil.70 As demonstrated by Frutuoso José da Cruz—who had been born in Rio but lived in Benguela for almost two decades in the late eighteenth century— these individuals were able to establish deep roots in the city.71 Although they eventually became commercial agents, many of them, such as José da Silva Teixeira, got their start as sailors on slave ships. Teixeira was described as part of a recently arrived “new group of merchants who are creditworthy and reliable,” all from Rio.72 To entice Teixeira to settle in Benguela, the local governor offered him a position in the army.73 In addition to arriving with goods worth two hundred thousand cruzados that belonged to merchants in Rio, Teixeira was the co-owner of a ship he had bought with partners in Lisbon.74 In a 1797 report by the colonial administration that listed Benguelan settlers, Teixeira was described as a “lieutenant of the [Benguela] militia, white, single, 37-year-old merchant.”75

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Although the specifics of commercial transactions by Gomes and Anjo are unknown, there is a large amount of information about commercial partnerships among other Benguelan merchants. In 1760, for example, the Lisbon-based José Ferreira da Fonseca and the Benguelan resident José Carneiro da Silva became partners “in the profits and losses in all businesses related to a partnership” to ship slaves from Benguela to Rio. While Fonseca provided the money and merchandise, Silva was responsible for taking the cargo to Benguela. In Ferreira’s words, Silva “would not enter into this partnership with anything but the task of administering it, having as an obligation to sell the merchandise taken to that presídio [Benguela].”76 Later, Manuel Gonçalves Jardim and José Pereira Torres, crew members of two ships leaving Lisbon for Benguela and Luanda in 1765, established an equal partnership in the gains and losses derived from the cargo shipped to Angola.77 Together with Anjo, Gomes was the owner of two ships: the Desengano Feliz and the Trajano.78 As demonstrated by historian Leonor Freire Costa, co-ownership of ships was common in several parts of the Portuguese empire.79 In Benguela, this was the case for Aurélio Veríssimo Vieira, who co-owned the ship Nossa Senhora da Piedade with António Francisco dos Santos, also a Benguela-based merchant.80 Benguela merchants also shared ownership of ships with merchants in Brazil and Portugal. Thus, José de Sousa, the local representative of the holder of the contract to collect taxes on slaves exported from Benguela, owned the ship Nossa Senhora da Piedade in partnership with Jerônimo Pereira and his brothers from Rio, and Luiz Antonio Gomes was co-owner of the corveta Nossa Senhora do Rosário Santo António e Almas together with Francisco José in Rio.81 This arrangement was so common that by the early nineteenth century, the majority of ships used to carry slaves from Benguela to Brazil were co-owned by merchants from Rio.82 The fact that Gomes and Anjo seemed to have been two of the few Benguela merchants who owned ships without having to rely on Brazilian partners speaks to their financial strength. In addition to importing large quantities from Brazil to Angola, these two merchants rented out space on their ships to other Benguelan merchants. For instance, at least fifteen merchants requested permission to unload cargo from the Desengano Feliz when the ship returned to Benguela from Rio on May 24, 1823.83 But the best illustration of their financial strength was the fact that Gomes and Anjo did not need to borrow money from other merchants to acquire slaves.84 As a result,

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their ships were considered as efeitos próprios ships, which meant that they could depart from Benguela immediately after loading slaves and prior to ships that only transported slaves across the Atlantic.85 This gave the two merchants a critical advantage in the slave trade, as the amount of time that ships stayed in Benguela had a direct impact on mortality among slaves onboard. It appears that by taking advantage of the efeitos próprios regulation, however, Gomes and Anjo violated a law meant to bolster trade with Portugal. This law had been issued in 1784, at a time when commerce by merchants based in Portugal was “declining and had been surpassed by trade by merchants from American colonies [Brazil].”86 According to the new law, only merchants from Portugal could apply for efeitos próprios licenses: “From now [1784] on no ship of a morador of his land [Benguela] will be considered as an efeitos próprios ship, unless the owner shows that the ship brought the cargo used to purchase slaves.” By excluding Benguelan merchants from obtaining efeitos próprios licenses, the crown gave ships owned by Portugal-based merchants priority over ships of Brazil-based merchants in the departure from Benguela.87 In Brazil, Gomes and Anjo’s main contact was Amaro Velho da Silva, one of the wealthiest merchants in Rio, from whom they purchased products sent to the sertões of Benguela to trade for slaves.88 This pattern was not a novelty. Since the 1730s, when ships began carrying slaves from Benguela to Brazil on a systematic basis, Brazil was the primary source of products used in Benguelan slaving. Early evidence of imports of goods from Brazil to Benguela is illustrated by Miguel Antonio Monteiro’s purchase “in this city [Rio de Janeiro] of a cargo of Indian textiles, knives, textiles, and tobacco loaded on a ship to Benguela” in 1746.89 Further evidence of these transactions involved José Pinheiro dos Santos, who contracted a loan in Lisbon to “purchase in this city [Lisbon] the fazendas that I will take to Benguela” with the financial backing of a merchant from Salvador, Bahia.90 The fact that Gomes and Anjo chose Rio as the primary focus of their business in Brazil was not surprising. Other Benguela merchants also held close ties to Brazil, as abundantly illustrated by their wills. In 1781, for instance, a Benguelan merchant, Domingos José da Silva, stated, “I acknowledge that at the moment I have one conto and four hundred-plus réis with José Luiz Teixeira, who lives in Rio de Janeiro.”91 In 1789, José Manoel, a merchant who had recently died in Benguela, acknowledged in his will that he had debts in Rio and Benguela.92 In 1795, José António da Costa, the owner of the sumaca São Lourenço, had commercial ties with four merchants in Rio: Bernardo

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Lourenço Vianna, António Teixeira Passos, Manoel Ferreira da Cruz, and Manoel de Souza Guimarães.93 In 1796, António José de Barros wrote in his will, “[I] declare that I have accounts with [the Rio-based merchants] Narciso Luis Alves Pereira, Frutuoso José da Cruz, captain José Maria Arsénio de Lacerda, and António José da Costa (who left Benguela not long ago).”94 Three years later, José António de Carvalho wrote in his will, “I declare that Narcizo Luiz Alvares Pereira, resident in Rio de Janeiro, has several accounts with me and has received several slaves, and wax, but has not sent the proceeds of [the sales].”95 In the same year, António José de Barros declared, “I had another commercial partnership with captain Manoel Gonçalves Moledo, resident in the same Rio [de Janeiro].”96 The close ties that Benguelan merchants had with Rio entailed constant traveling across the Atlantic. Most of the merchants making the back-andforth journeys were either junior partners of trading houses or low- to mid-level traders—the so-called volantes—who traveled on slave ships and supervised the daily operation of the slave trade on behalf of major merchants in Brazil and Angola. As described by Veríssimo Rodrigues Chaves, volantes dealt with “cargoes and moneys of other investors and were responsible for reporting to these investors without any guarantee of profit for themselves.”97 Many top merchants would also display this high degree of trans-Atlantic mobility, usually to deal with investments in Brazil. In 1796, for instance, Antonio José de Barros requested a license to travel to Rio on his ship to “settle an account with a partner [Moledo] with whom he had liquidated a large partnership.”98 As Barros stated in his will, Moledo “owes me a significant amount of money, but has raised questions about the debt and has tried to damage my reputation so much that I found myself obligated to travel to Rio on my ship Pensamento Feliz to settle with him financial issues related to the commercial society.”99 In 1826, the tenente de milícias Francisco Paulo da Graça received a two-year license to go to Brazil to “settle financial obligations with Brazilian partners”100 These travels were greatly facilitated by Rio’s relative proximity, which could be reached in fifteen to twenty days, and, as stated by Governor of Angola Manoel de Almeida e Vasconcellos, were a “general custom of the Conquistas, particularly in Africa, where all wish to leave as soon as their circumstances allow it.”101 While merchants traveled to Brazil for practical experience and career advancement, these relocations could also be dictated by the economic environment in Benguela. In 1771, for example, Governor of Angola Inocêncio de Souza Coutinho remarked, “Some merchants who had

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left for Brazil have now returned.”102 Despite being a central part of Benguela’s trans-Atlantic networks, the high turnover among merchants was damaging to the local economy, as pointed out by authorities: “The lack of former wealthy moradores who gave Benguela its reputation [in the trade] deeply hurts the city’s economy.”103 This led the Angolan administration to restrict travel out of the city at least once, in 1798.104 Although the relationship between Benguela and Brazil derived mostly from the slave trade, the ties between the two regions also included intense social, religious, and family exchanges across the Atlantic Ocean. The trajectory of José Ferreira Gomes, who was Francisco Ferreira Gomes’s son, is a case in point. After being sent by his father to Rio for education in the 1810s, the younger Gomes returned to Benguela in 1821, at the age of 17, and almost immediately become his father’s partner.105 In this role, he assisted his family’s trading house in a variety of ways, such as traveling to Brazil on business trips at least twice.106 After his father retired to Brazil in 1834, he became the primary manager of the family business, a position that he held until being arrested on a charge of illegal slave trade in the 1840s. Gomes senior sent his son to be educated in Rio because Benguela had a limited number of private tutors; several other merchants did the same.107 Schooling in Brazil produced Atlantic connections that went well beyond formal education; by sending their children to Brazil, merchants reduced the geographic distance with Brazil and reinforced professional ties with trading communities on both sides of the Atlantic.108 In addition to developing familiarity with Brazil, the years of education abroad helped merchants’ offspring build social networks that benefited business and provided a stable business framework. Like Gomes junior, many of the children sent to Brazil would later return to Angola and join their fathers’ trading companies.

Echoes of the Independence of Brazil Given the fact that Francisco Gomes Ferreira was a product of Benguela’s social landscape and pursued social strategies that deviated little, if at all, from other merchants’ strategies, why would he become the leader of a secessionist revolt against Portugal? And how do we explain the accusation that this revolt was fueled by racial hatred against the white residents of the city? To understand these accusations, one needs to examine Benguela’s political instability not only in the context of the city’s volatile internecine struggles, but also in the broader context of the Atlantic—and mainly the history of

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Brazilian independence from Portugal in the 1820s and the events that affected Portugal in that decade. To be sure, Benguela had a long history of political instability that stemmed from internal conflicts in the city. Since the early eighteenth century, conflicts between merchants and city officials had been an integral part of the city’s political life. Most of the city’s officers had been sent to the city as criminals or political exiles, and they were inclined to allow illegal activities to thrive because they were underpaid—or even unpaid—by the colonial administration.109 In one case, in 1742 Manoel de Souza improperly allowed a ship to take slaves to Brazil in exchange for money.110 Not surprisingly, the city officers’ loyalty and performance were questioned by the governor based in Luanda in 1750.111 In the 1760s, Governor Inocêncio de Souza Coutinho remarked that the only way to enforce laws in Benguela would be to increase the number of officials born in Europe.112 Due to rampant corruption, merchants seeking to invest in the slave trade in Benguela frequently had to resort to bribery.113 In the 1760s, Governor Souza Coutinho described Benguela “as a colony of thieves and smugglers that was quickly turning into a useful and stable settlement.”114 In the 1770s, upon his retirement to Lisbon, Souza Coutinho suggested that a separate government for Benguela should be created as part of an overhaul of the Portuguese administration of Angola.115 Hoping to rein in local politics and improve oversight of public finances and trade, Lisbon eventually established a separate governorship for the city. By the 1780s, however, Benguela was reputed to be uncontrollable.116 Under Governor of Benguela José Maria de Almeida Machado e Vasconcellos, local politics was said to be dominated by a “half dozen proud and insubordinate merchants,” who routinely evaded taxes on slaves shipped to Brazil. In the meantime, the governor entirely lacked resources to enforce colonial power.117 In addition to its failure to increase metropolitan control over Benguela, the creation of a separate governorship was deeply resented by local elites, who saw it as an attempt to curtail their autonomy. The resulting political turmoil was exacerbated by repeated charges by Benguelan merchants that governors were improperly investing in the internal and Atlantic trades in slaves.118 According to the merchants, governors routinely charged illegal fees to sertanejos and pumbeiros who came to the city to sell slaves, which led to a decrease in the supply of slaves to Benguela. In addition, governors were frequently accused of smuggling slaves with French and British ships.119 The governors’ illegal activities were part of a larger pattern of slave

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smuggling in Benguela. In 1792, for instance, Governor Francisco Paim de Câmara Ornelas and the local justice of the peace were jailed and had their assets seized after being found guilty of benefiting from smuggling.120 After extensive investigation, it became clear that Ornelas had illegally shipped almost two thousand slaves each year to Brazil, where he had several commercial partners in Rio and Bahia. As charged by the merchants, smuggling with British and French ship was also rampant. Revealingly, authorities stated that “in those lands [Benguela] trade with foreign ships was not conducted clandestinely but so openly that one of the witnesses [of the investigation] remarked that the only individual who was not involved was Benguela’s priest.”121 By the end of the eighteenth century, Benguela’s political struggles had been compounded by the economic crisis stemming from the decline of slave shipments from the city. Between 1796 and 1799, the number of slave ships sailing to Brazil decreased from twenty to twelve. Exports of slaves dropped from approximately ten thousand slaves to four thousand, which crippled public finances.122 Several factors contributed to this situation, including a shortage of Indian textiles—the most important commodity used in the internal slave trade—and the fact that the Benguelan coast was chronically plagued by piracy by French ships, which so disrupted the slave trade that investors began turning away from the city. In 1799, for instance, five slave ships were taken by French corsairs.123 Although exports of slaves rebounded slightly in the early 1800s, Benguelan politics remained deeply affected by factionalism. Between June 1810 and January 1811, the city had three governors, all of whom were unable to consolidate power because their authority was continually undercut by political factions.124 To make matters worse, the local establishment continued to nurture deep suspicion and resentment toward Luandan authorities. An incident from 1818 is revealing: When unrest in Benguela led to the arrest of a priest, instead of seeking support from Luanda, the Benguelan administration turned to Lisbon, which deepened dissatisfaction among authorities in the capital city of Angola.125 But what pushed Benguela politics over the edge was the independence of the city’s primary commercial partner: Brazil. This could not have been entirely unexpected, since, as discussed above, the close links between Benguela and Brazil were not restricted to commerce, but included familial and cultural ties as well. Unsurprisingly, the ramifications of Brazil’s struggle for independence extended to Angola, mostly through individuals who lived in

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Angola and traveled frequently to Brazil. Many of the reports were little more than rumors, but fueled fears among Portuguese authorities that the independence movement in Brazil would eventually inspire challenges to their own authority in Angola. These played a critical role in the way Angolan authorities responded to Benguela’s chronic instability, including the alleged secessionist revolt in 1824. Political developments in Brazil had been affecting Angola even before Brazil severed ties to Portugal in 1822. In 1817, for instance, in response to an anti-colonial revolt in the Brazilian province of Pernambuco, Portugal instructed the Luandan administration to apprehend ships of individuals implicated in that revolt.126 What was the exact nature of their ties to the Pernambucan revolt? This is an unanswerable question, but Portuguese documents suggest that metropolitan authorities were alert to the possible impact on Angola of the nascent anti-colonialism in Brazil. Seeking to staunch the flow of information, Lisbon prohibited the circulation of Portuguese newspapers in Angola.127 Whatever the efficacy of this measure, it once again highlighted Portugal’s awareness that Angola and Brazil were the central pillars of a tightly connected zone that was only superficially under Portuguese control. Despite Portugal’s attempts to shield Angola from the events unfolding in Brazil, rumors that the captaincies in the northeast of Brazil were revolting against Portuguese control circulated widely and caused turmoil in Luanda in 1821. “There were gatherings [in the city] at night where several issues were discussed, including developments in Europe, in addition to [discussions about] the captaincies of Bahia, Pernambuco, Maranhão.”128 An anonymous letter warned Governor of Angola Manoel Vieira de Albuquerque e Tovar that he would be arrested and sent to “Rio de Janeiro, like those [rebels] of Pernambuco did with the General [governor of Pernambuco].”129 Amid rumors about imminent clashes between Portuguese loyalists and Brazilian sympathizers, residents of Luanda were said to abandon the city in 1822.130 Similar instability also affected Benguela. On June 24, 1817, for instance, a party to celebrate the nativity of Saint John, hosted by João da Costa Lemos, brought together “horrible degredado soldiers and sailors . . . all eating and drinking, playing the guitar [viola], shooting their guns, to the point that his neighbors were disrupted.” During the party, a soldier named José Antonio da Silva said aloud to his companions: “Friends, everybody has risen [to arms] in Pernambuco, and the same has happened in Brazil. This will be confirmed with the first ship [that arrives in Benguela], and thus we should organize a

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movement, for we will all improve, and the biggest prize will go to the one who first hoist the banner of freedom.” As a result of the seditious message, Costa Lemos was jailed and Silva received a harsh physical punishment.131 In the following years, news of political unrest in Brazil continued to reach Angola. In 1821, for instance, a Benguelan judge stated that a revolt was being plotted against the local government and that “even the Africans [gentios] of the African dwellings [senzalas] know of the sedition.”132 Particularly unsettling were reports that Portuguese troops were fighting Brazilian troops in a bid to maintain a hold on Salvador, the second-largest city in Brazil.133 In Luanda, the battle for Salvador prompted Governor of Angola Cristovão Avelino Dias to write a long letter reflecting on its possible impact on Angola. According to Dias, “It is probable that if Bahia [where Brazilian forces were then battling Portuguese forces] is lost, Brazil will seek to annex this kingdom [of Angola].”134 In Luanda, the potential for a revolt against Portuguese control was significantly reduced by the arrival of an expeditionary Portuguese battalion consisting of 435 soldiers in 1823. However, one of the city’s residents wrote a letter to Governor Cristovão Avelino Dias to alert him that that “there were houses of synagogues in this city where plots are being organized against the state.”135 Later, the information that Lisbon might dispatch troops to restore Portuguese control over Brazil prompted Dias’s successor to declare that “if at least part of Brazil is not subjugated [to Portugal], it will be inevitable that Portugal will lose its possessions on the western African coast because it will be impossible to cover expenses [to maintain these possessions] without taxes from exports of slaves.”136 Given the Atlantic connections between Angola and Brazil, it is not surprising that the Portuguese reflexively assumed that secessionism would sweep Angola. Despite its essentially transitional nature, Brazilian independence provided a venue for popular groups whose political aims diverged from those of the elite groups that ultimately drove Brazil to independence. As historian Jeffrey Mosher writes, “The challenge to traditional political authority created opportunities for the lower classes to assert themselves.”137 Although there was no military clash in Rio, the capital city, “a war against Portuguese troops in Salvador, which lasted one year (1822/1823), dominated the years of independence” in Bahia, causing the already noted effects in Luanda.138 Equally important, these conflicts revealed a strong anti-Portuguese component to Brazilian nationalism, as revealed by a seditious movement in Bahia that demanded the expulsion of Portuguese nationals in 1824.139

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Angola was also deeply affected by the liberal revolution in Portugal in 1820. While seeking to restore Brazil’s colonial status, the Portuguese revolution gave birth to provisional juntas in several parts of the Portuguese empire, including Luanda and Benguela.140 The process through which the first juntas were created did not fit into the “pre-existing juridical or political procedures” of the Portuguese empire.141 Despite the fact that only members of the upper class could vote in the elections that formed the juntas, the existence of the juntas disrupted the political status quo by giving a stronger voice to local elites while undermining the monarchy and its representatives.142 The juntas reflected local interests and adopted liberal principles not always supportive of the royal family in Rio, leading to the overthrow of Portuguese governors in Bahia and Pará.143 In Benguela, the junta would also channel local aspirations, giving voice to lingering grievances about the city’s subaltern position in relation to the central government of Portuguese Angola in Luanda. During the formation of the Benguelan junta, Gomes and Anjo strongly argued that instead of a provisional junta, Benguela’s elites should install a provincial government fully independent from Luanda.144 At the time, Gomes was said to “behave disorderly in all sessions of the junta, insulting those who disagreed with him.”145 During debates in the junta, the two allies, Gomes and Anjo, moved from attempting to control the body (Anjo was then, at the end of 1821, its president) to opposing it altogether. In May 1822, for instance, Gomes was characterized as a member of a movement to “destroy the provisional government and whose project was to promote sedition.”146 More importantly, Gomes and Anjo played a critical role in sending to Luanda a request seeking approval for Benguela to deal with Rio directly in matters related to trade and politics. While the request sought to capitalize on chronic complaints about Luanda’s meddling in Benguela’s affairs (and reflected Benguela’s close economic ties Brazil), it was not an attempt to sever links to Portugal altogether. However, Portuguese authorities interpreted it as proof that Benguela “requested to unite with Brazil.” In the words of Luandan authorities, “Rio de Janeiro would not be able to meet requests from this city [Benguela] because Benguela was a province of Africa, and not of Brazil, and this city [Benguela] could not sever links [to Portugal] on its own and without instructions from the cortes [in Lisbon].”147 While informing Lisbon of the secession underway in Benguela, Luandan authorities responded positively to demands by the so-called secessionists’ leaders. Illustrating the Atlantic dimension of the political crisis, the demands

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made by Benguela’s “rebels” were published in the Brazilian newspaper Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro. 148 To quell the presumed sedition, the Luandan government initially considered sending two hundred soldiers to Benguela, but, faced with turmoil in Luanda as a result of Brazil’s independence, authorities ended up dispatching two envoys to negotiate with leaders of the alleged Benguelan movement. The envoys committed to redressing several longstanding grievances of Benguela’s elite, such as the need for funds to renovate Benguela’s military forts and the establishment of fees for ships sailing into the city from Luanda.149 Despite this attempt to reach a compromise, the crisis gained momentum with the appointment of João António Pussich as the new governor of Benguela in 1823. Pussich claimed that he had only been able “to land in the city because they (the secessionists’ forces) did not have sufficient military support to repel him.”150 According to the new governor, Brazilian sympathizers included traders and sailors who had close ties to Brazil through the slave trade. In his words, “Mestres of the ships docked in this port are allied with some of the merchants of Benguela who own ships here [in Benguela] and have significant funds in Rio.”151 Pussich reported the arrival of two ships from Rio, both with “rebel flags,” and the delivery of documents from the newly independent Brazil to the Benguelan rebels. Suggesting that he was besieged by conspirators, the governor also stated that if he “continued to monitor those individuals from Rio de Janeiro, they had a pistol ready to kill him.”152 To act against the presumed secessionists, Pussich ordered the confiscation of properties and assets of all Brazilian merchants in Benguela, including “all goods or money in the possession of the merchants of this kingdom [Brazil] and their agents (volantes) who lived here; all rural and urban buildings and the vessels that belonged to the merchants of that empire [Brazil].”153 In addition, he prohibited the trading of slaves to Brazil. But tensions escalated further when, at the end of 1823, the governor was overthrown by rebel soldiers on charges of corruption. According to the accusations, the governor had been accepting bribes to allow ships to sail to Brazil, thus violating the recently passed ban.154 Although mostly cast as a reaction against illegal acts perpetrated by Pussich, the coup reflected social tensions arising from a food shortage in Benguela; also, and more importantly, it further deepened the city’s political crisis. Seeking to diffuse the situation, Luanda appointed a new governor to Benguela, Joaquim Bento Fonseca, a move that would instead escalate the

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crisis. In a show of force meant to strengthen Fonseca’s power in the eyes of Benguelan political factions, three warships escorted the new governor to the city.155 Fonseca’s interpretation of the situation was strikingly similar to his predecessor’s. In his words, captains and sailors would join forces with “armed black men” and members of the Benguelan armed forces “to arrest me and those who belonged to the party of Portugal” and then sail to Rio, “where they planned to request support from the Emperor [of Brazil]” against Portugal.156 Due to the military forces that had accompanied him to Benguela, however, the new governor was able to crack down on the presumed rebels quite effectively. Benguela’s instability was influenced in part by the Brazilian newspaper Malagueta, a radical publication that had advocated for Brazilian independence from Portugal and remained influential in Rio.157 Articles that appeared in Malagueta supported constitutional power against absolute forces in Brazil, and this was perceived as subversive by Portuguese authorities in Angola. To rein in the situation, Fonseca issued orders for “arresting and sending a merchant to Luanda, a black man [Domingos Pereira Diniz], “who was not trustworthy, but was very powerful in the slave trade and had been the leader of the revolt against Governor Pussich.”158 In addition, the new governor prohibited individuals who worked for the Benguelan administration from participating in freemasonry gatherings.159 These occurred mostly at the house of the Brazilian merchant Justiniano José dos Reis—who was also a top slave dealer—and included fierce criticism of Portuguese absolutism. In one of the meetings, a participant said, “I have said several times that what is good [a reference to the constitutional power in Portugal] is shortlived and that the devil [i.e., absolutism] worked to end the constitution and restore absolute monarchy.”160 By arresting individuals who participated in these meetings, authorities hoped to stop freemasons from “meeting secretly every night to discuss revolutions in their Brazil.” This strategy did not work, however—as Fonseca himself admitted—and forced the governor to further develop repressive policies: “I found myself in the inevitable situation of ordering the arrest of the Brazilian Silvério Mariano.”161 Justiniano José dos Reis, the man in whose house the freemasons gathered to discuss politics, was also arrested—but, perhaps because he was a powerful merchant, was soon released from jail. Authorities warned him “to avoid the gathering of heinous and vagabond people,” a reference to sympathizers with Brazilian independence. These individuals, as Governor Fonseca pointed out, “did not have anything to lose but

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sought to instigate and obtain the support of those [merchants] whose commercial activities were such that they had too much at stake” to get involved in politics.162 The governor soon turned to Francisco Ferreira Gomes and Antônio Lopes Anjo, first accusing them of instigating Benguelan troops to hoist the Brazilian flag in Benguela and later of planning to ransack the city’s royal treasury for gold and silver.163 “Because they called for murdering the pés de chumbo [Portuguese citizens]”—an expression widely used in Brazil to insult Portuguese nationals—Gomes, Anjo, and their followers were arrested and taken to Luanda.164 Even though the leaders of the secessionist revolt were taken to jail in Luanda, the situation remained tense in Benguela. This is illustrated by an incident involving Tomé Fernandez Afonso, a black man and vicar of the Benguelan Nossa Senhora of Pópulo church, who was accused of planning for “the second time to organize his party to hoist the Brazilian flag, since the first adherents of the party, that is, Francisco Ferreira Gomes, a very close friend of the vicar, had not achieved their goal.”165 In the words of the governor of Benguela, Afonso was a “black priest and a son-of-a-bitch.”166 But who were the potential supporters of the Benguelan secessionist movement? And what about the presumed racial motivation that fueled the planned sedition? As opposed to the mostly white Portuguese settlers, the Brazil-born population consisted primarily of blacks and individuals of mixed race.167 Although exact information about these individuals is missing, details from previous decades reveal that many would have been tavern owners, such as the fifty-year-old black tavern owner Joaquim Teixeira, who was born and married in Rio.168 Another native Brazilian was an unidentified black soldier in the Benguelan Henriques battalion, who “came to this city [Benguela] to trade in slaves.”169 Yet another example is the thirty-three-yearold black Antônio Botelho da Cruz, a lieutenant in the Henriques battalion of Rio, who worked as a carpenter in Benguela.170 Would these individuals be Gomes’s supporters against the white Portuguese? Fonseca’s allegations that the presumed revolt was fueled by racial animosity were at odds with Benguela’s social and racial fluidity. In 1776, the top echelon of the business community was described as “fifteen or sixteen white men.”171 In 1798, while the number of Benguela’s white merchants stood at thirty-one, the number of mixed-race merchants was thirteen.172 Far from a society stratified along racial lines, however, the city was a frontier society where wealth and culture were more valued than race. This was demonstrated

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by Joaquim Lopes dos Santos, one of Gomes’s allies, a black man who may have been born in slavery in Brazil.173 Santos went to Benguela in 1807 and initially worked as cooper [tanoeiro], later becoming an officer [alferes] in the Henriques battalion and eventually making his way into Benguela’s trading community.174 In 1823, he was sent to prison in Luanda and forced to return to Brazil. According to the accusations, Santos did not “have a good behavior, was untrustworthy and rebellious, and sought to seduce simple people to form factions” against the local government.”175 When he returned to Brazil, Santos wrote a fiercely critical pamphlet attacking Governor Pussich, whom he accused of political persecution. In this pamphlet, the black man—and, possibly, former slave—made no reference to racial animosity in Benguela.176

Conclusion The trajectory of Francisco Ferreira Gomes’s career provides several insights into Benguela’s social, cultural, and commercial milieus. His business activities provide invaluable information about the sprawling networks that Benguela merchants built with associates in Brazil, Portugal, and the Angolan sertões. By building partnerships with Portuguese merchants and marrying into the local population, Gomes pursued a career strikingly similar to other merchants in town. This is also demonstrated by the way Gomes benefited extensively from positions in the civilian and military administrations to achieve social mobility. As demonstrated by an examination of Gomes in relation to other merchants, his trajectory was not unique and, instead, illustrates Benguela’s fluid social and cultural milieus. More importantly, Gomes’s rise to wealth and power demonstrates that race was not the driving force that shaped social relations in the city. Gomes’s career was seriously disrupted by political instability generated by the process of independence of Brazil, Benguela’s primary business partner and the homeland of many members of Benguela’s expatriate community. Events taking place in Brazil affected Angola, and shaped Portuguese reaction to the presumed secessionist sedition in several ways, with two having the most profound impact. First, Portuguese authorities correctly interpreted as real the possibility that Brazil might make territorial claims over Angola, given the close commercial, social, and cultural connections between the two regions. And second, news produced in Brazil (both about Brazil’s process of independence and the allegedly pro-Brazil movements in Luanda and Benguela) led to political agitation in Luanda and Benguela. By claiming

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that the Benguelan sedition was fueled by racial animosity toward whites, the Portuguese used a racial ideology then becoming pervasive in the Atlantic, ushering in an approach that would later be deployed to wrest power from local elites, including members of the Gomes clan. This ideology saw Benguela’s conflicts in racial terms, largely ignoring the eminently fluid nature of social relations in the city.177

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Chapter twelve

Rosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution rebecca j. scott and jean m. hébrard

In memory of Marie Louise (Loulou) Van Velsen, kin-keeper

On December 4, 1867, the ninth day of the convention to write a new postCivil War constitution for the state of Louisiana, delegate Edouard Tinchant rose to make a proposal. Under the Congressional Reconstruction Acts of 1867, the voters of Louisiana had elected ninety-eight delegates—half of them men of color—to a constitutional convention charged with drafting a founding document with which the state could reenter the Union. Edouard Tinchant was a twenty-six-year-old immigrant to New Orleans, principal of a school for freed children on St. Claude Avenue. Having made something of a name for himself as a Union Army veteran and vigorous proponent of equal rights, he had stood for and won election from the multiracial Sixth Ward of New Orleans.1 In this speech on the floor of Mechanics’ Hall, Tinchant proposed that the convention should provide “for the legal protection in this State of all women” in their civil rights, “without distinction of race or color, or without reference to their previous condition.” Over the next weeks, Tinchant plunged into additional debates on voting rights and public accommodations, staking out a position in favor of a wide suffrage and the same “public rights” for all citizens. Then, in the last days of the convention, he returned to the topic of women’s rights, and particularly the recognition of conjugal relationships

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that had not been formalized by marriage. He proposed that “to prevent concubinage in this State, the General Assembly shall enact such laws that will facilitate all women, without distinction of race or color, to sue for breach of promise [of marriage]. The General Assembly shall also provide to compel to marriage upon application of one of the parties, such persons who may have lived together not less than one year consecutively.”2 This eagerness to compel men to marriage is surprising in a twenty-sixyear-old male, and his implicit call to formalize interracial unions is notable for its boldness.3 Who was this brash young man? Tracing the French-born Edouard Tinchant back through the surviving archival record, we find him studying in public schools in the city of Pau in the south of France during the 1848 revolution and then emigrating with his parents to Belgium after LouisNapoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état. Drawing on experience from New Orleans, Edouard’s older brothers developed an international cigar-trading business based in Antwerp. Edouard himself turned up in New Orleans in early 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, ostensibly to work with his brother Joseph, a tobacconist there. After the city was taken by Union forces in April, Edouard made his abolitionist beliefs public, and volunteered to serve in a newly constituted Union Army regiment of men of color. Demobilized in August of 1863, he returned to the cigar trade, but wrote exuberant letters to the editor of the New Orleans Tribune laying out his vision of citizenship and equality. These youthful experiences help to explain the intensity of Edouard Tinchant’s refusal of legalized caste distinctions and of what he called “aristocratic tyranny.”4 But there is more. In addition to building on his political education in Europe, and invoking his service in the Union Army, Tinchant also described himself in a letter to the editor in 1864 as a “son of Africa,” and he later referred to himself as of “Haitian descent.” These hints led us to the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence, where we located documents that reveal a still-deeper story, that of Edouard Tinchant’s enslaved grandmother, a woman first called “Rosalie of the Poulard nation,” and later Rosalie Vincent.5 Examining each of the surviving documents in which Rosalie Vincent intervened, one discerns her efforts to achieve freedom and to protect her sons, her daughters, and her grandchildren. Edouard Tinchant’s conceptions of citizenship and of women’s rights can from this perspective be anchored in three generations of experience, with enslavement and the Haitian revolution as the points of departure. This family’s story, in turn, becomes part of a history of vernacular concepts of rights and dignity in the Atlantic world,

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concepts rooted in the awareness of individual and family vulnerability. The family’s multiple encounters with administrative and legal writings—including manumission papers, baptismal records, wills, and marriage contracts— suggest some of the dynamics of their engagement with law as they sought to assert and document freedom and to secure its full benefits. Their story also suggests the importance of citizenship to those who had known statelessness in its starkest form, that of enslavement and deportation.6

Jérémie, Saint-Domingue An early documentary trace of the woman called Rosalie is a 1793 notarized contract from Jérémie, on the northern coast of the southern peninsula of the French colony of Saint-Domingue. In this document, a free black woman named Marthe Guillaume [Aliés], a marchande (female merchant), sold a slave designated “a négresse called Rozalie nation Poulard” to a mulâtre freedman named Jean-Baptiste Mongol, a butcher. Despite its geographical isolation from the colony’s sugar-producing centers of the north and west, the district of Jérémie held a substantial population of slaves, most of them employed in the production of coffee, others working in town or as domestics.7 The term “Poulard” following Rosalie’s name referred to speakers of Pulaar, and by extension to the group generally called Peul in French and Fulbe in English. She had evidently been made a captive years before, somewhere in the broad area across which Pulaar speakers had migrated, extending from the Senegal River valley to the upper Guinea coast and inland to Mali and beyond. She may have been purchased in the Galam trade, the annual convoy of boats that traveled upriver from the West African island port of Saint-Louis du Sénégal to exchange fabric, paper, and other merchandise for gum Arabic (used in textile processing) and captives.8 It is possible that she had initially been brought to the Caribbean on an English slaver, for a vigorous contraband trade through Jamaica to southern Saint-Domingue had flourished before the French Revolution. Given her age, however, it seems more likely that she came on a French ship leaving the port of Saint-Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River at some point between the early 1780s, when the French took Saint-Louis back from the English, and 1792, when the direct trans-Atlantic slave trade was interrupted by revolution in Saint-Domingue and in France.9 Ethnonyms designating Senegambian origins were relatively infrequent in Saint-Domingue. Most African-born slaves appeared in the records with the designation Congo, Arada, or Nagó, suggesting origins further south in

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Africa. Even among the approximately 10 percent of African-born slaves who were from Senegambia, the labels Bambara, Sénégal, or Mandingo, rather than Poulard, were the most common. Thus while a name like Jean nation Congo could refer to any of several people in a particular neighborhood, the designation Rosalie nation Poulard, applied to a young woman living in the relatively small community of Jérémie, can reasonably be assumed to refer to a single individual.10 By the date of the first appearance of Rosalie nation Poulard in the archival record, France had been in revolution for three and a half years, with reverberations throughout its colonies. Free men and women of color knew that this was the moment to push for rights that had previously been denied them.11 In the enormously complex web of events that we now refer to as the Haitian Revolution, struggles in the district of Jérémie were particularly convoluted. Following the slave uprising in the Northern Plain in August of 1791, some slaves and free people of color in the southern peninsula pushed to break the monopoly on power of their white neighbors. In December of 1791 the town council of Jérémie faced attacks from men they characterized as “brigands,” and the councilors implored the revolutionary government in France to send help. In the councilors’ view, it was the gens de couleur (free people of color) who had triggered an uprising of the ateliers (the slave work forces) in the outlying districts.12 Although some families of mixed ancestry owned large coffee plantations and dozens of slaves, thus sharing the economic interests of their white counterparts, others simply worked in the countryside as farmers or in town as artisans, and were closely tied to those still in slavery. It was in this milieu that Rosalie had been held in the early 1790s, by a man named Alexis Couba, who had himself been freed from slavery in 1778. Couba had first acquired a slave named Anne, whom he married in 1781. Under the Code Noir that formally governed in such matters, Anne became free by virtue of the marriage. Alexis Couba had gone on to acquire at least one more slave: Rosalie nation Poulard, whom he had subsequently transferred to the marchande Marthe Guillaume.13 Marthe Guillaume owned several properties in the center of town, and had married one of her daughters into the family of Noël Azor, himself an activist man of color closely involved with the ongoing political struggles. Marthe Guillaume’s business dealings regularly took her before the local public notaries, where she was required each time to display her own proof of freedom in order to have standing to make a contract. As of the early 1790s,

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then, Rosalie was held as a slave in the extended household of an entrepreneurial free woman of color, a household linked through marriage to additional free families of color in the countryside, and led by a woman adept at dealing with law and formal writing. The ties between Rosalie and Marthe Guillaume seem to have been sufficiently close that in a January 1793 draft of her will, Marthe Guillaume planned to grant Rosalie her freedom. But a few days later she changed her mind, selling Rosalie to the butcher named Jean-Baptiste Mongol.14 Events in the colony were evolving rapidly, however, bringing the whole structure of hierarchy, color privilege, and the ownership of persons into question. Hoping to forestall further revolt by placating free people of color while temporizing on the question of slavery, in April of 1792 the National Assembly in Paris had eliminated formal legal distinctions of color among free people in the colony. Alarmed white planters, however, had no desire to relinquish these social distinctions, and their recalcitrance led to further confrontations with their neighbors. When the municipal council in Jérémie was seated without any members of color, protests among the people “formerly known as colored” began again, followed by uprisings in the countryside.15 The civil commissioners sent by the French Republic to try to manage the crisis could see that this kind of impasse would further undermine order on the island. By June of 1793 the commissioners were persuaded that the only way to retain the colony for France was to ride the crest of the wave of claims made by slaves and free people of color, in order to use those energies to thwart incursions by the Spanish who controlled the other half of the island of Hispaniola, as well as threats from competing military and political groups who declined to defer to the commissioners’ authority. They had formed armed Legions of Equality from among the population of color, and took the key step of declaring the abolition of slavery in the north. These decrees were to be extended to the south in October of 1793. Officially, slavery would soon be gone in places like Jérémie, and the law would recognize no claims to property in men and women.16 Faced with the prospect of losing control over those whom they held as slaves, a group of wealthy white property-holders, including men from Jérémie, had been seeking help from the British. By the autumn of 1793, the British were willing to step in, aiming both to humble the French and to grab a piece of the still-rich colony. Redcoats dispatched from Jamaica landed at Jérémie in late September of 1793. The presence of British troops from 1793 onward shielded slaveholders in the district of Jérémie from the direct legal

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effects of the abolition of slavery won by the rebels. The British were nonetheless faced with continuing pressure from General André Rigaud, a man of color fighting throughout the south in the name of the French Republic. By the end of 1794 Republican forces had regained control of Léogane to the east and Tiburon to the south. At the same time, the British confronted what one colonist described as “une masse de Canaille attachée à la République” (a rabble still attached to the Republic), that is, a population of non-elite whites and other citizens unwilling to shift their loyalty to the British occupiers.17 Despite Republican attacks on a fort near the outlying coastal settlement of Les Abricots, the British were still in control of Jérémie in December of 1795, when we find Marthe Guillaume back in possession of Rosalie. This time, however, Marthe Guillaume came to a notary not to sell or to buy, but to register the affranchissement (individual manumission from the bonds of slavery) of Rosalie, designated négresse Poulard (Poulard black woman). The text of the document spoke only of Rosalie’s fidelity, and made no reference to any payment by Rosalie or anyone else—though such payment could well have occurred surreptitiously outside the view of the notary. The document granted full liberty to Rosalie, and enjoined her to follow all the laws governing freedmen and freedwomen in the colony. Marthe Guillaume promised to seek the necessary formal ratification of Rosalie’s freedom from the occupying British authorities.18 The relationship between law and slavery, however, was in a state of flux. With antislavery Republican forces pressing at the edge of the area of British control, and the British governor promising freedom to some black men in order to persuade them to enlist in support of the occupation, it was not easy to maintain the social subordination essential to bondage. At the same time, the governor’s advisors among the planters exhorted him to block all nonmilitary manumissions—in their view, the colony held too many free men of color already, and manumissions of individual women entailed a loss of the labor power of their future children as well. Governor Adam Williamson thus refused to countersign the manumissions proposed by Marthe Guillaume.19 Rosalie’s status was now thoroughly ambiguous. No longer claimed by her former owner, but without a properly ratified manumission paper to prove her freedom, she was now mobile but vulnerable. Attacks against the British occupation of the colony gained strength in the years that followed, and by 1798 the British withdrew their forces.20 The Republicans took control, and General André Rigaud was acknowledged by the French to be the ruler of this portion of Saint-Domingue, though to the

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north General Toussaint L’Ouverture sought to extend his own forces southward. The formalities of full abolition could now in principal be observed in the region around Jérémie, with all those who had been enslaved henceforth designated affranchis, cultivateurs, or simply nègres and négresses libres. Rosalie was, along with everyone else, now legally free.21 She next appears in the written record the following year, this time designated Marie Françoise dite Rosalie négresse libre—Marie Françoise, called Rosalie, free black woman. The reference to a baptismal name—Marie Françoise—and to her familiar name of Rosalie is intriguing. This was a sacramental record, so perhaps a neglected baptismal name was being recalled for the purposes of the church.22 The event was an important one: the priest of the neighboring parish of Cap-Dame-Marie, which served the rural district of Les Abricots, was recording her as the mother of a “natural child,” whom he baptized with the name Élisabeth Dieudonné.23 The term “natural child” indicated that the parents were not married. The baby’s father, however, was present and acknowledged paternity. The father’s name was given simply as Michel Vincent, without a courtesy title. (As a European and a property owner, Vincent might have expected the title Sieur.) From other records we learn that his full name was Michel Étienne Henry Vincent, and that he owned a small farm in the coastal community of Les Abricots. Son of a notary from Le Mans, in France, he had migrated to Saint-Domingue around 1770, acquiring a monopoly privilege on the sale of meat in the district of Les Cayes, and marrying a rich widow. But with the 1789 revolution in France, and its counterpart in the colonies, such a royal monopoly lost its value. His wife, moreover, had adroitly secured her own property for her children by a previous marriage. Apparently ruined financially, Michel Vincent started over in the coffee country around Jérémie. The town of Jérémie had held only 180 houses in 1789—several of them owned and rented out to Europeans by the marchande Marthe Guillaume. Michel Vincent was not a man of much property, though he occasionally went to the notary to sell off small pieces of his land in Les Abricots to his neighbors, including the citizen Jean called Tomtom and the citizen Olive, both designated cultivateurs, the term often used for former slaves in the countryside. By the mid-1790s, Michel Vincent’s wife had died. It is not difficult to imagine circumstances under which this widowed Frenchman slipping down the social ladder might have met the newly free Rosalie.24 Under ancien régime rules, Michel Vincent’s presence as the father at the 1799 baptism fell short of full legitimation of the child through marriage.

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Under much contested French revolutionary rules, however, natural children could under certain circumstances make inheritance claims alongside those of legitimate children. It was anyone’s guess what rules might hold by the time Michel Vincent died, but he seems to have been making some effort to secure the baby Élisabeth’s future in the face of uncertainty, giving her a recognition of paternity and a godmother and godfather to whom she might turn for assistance in an emergency. The baby’s godfather was le Sieur Lavolaille, a ship’s carpenter. The baby’s godmother was Marie Blanche Peillon, widow Aubert. Like the father, the godmother carried neither a courtesy title nor a color qualifier. She apparently had sufficient status to discourage the priest from attributing a color marker to her, though documents drawn up some years later in Louisiana refer to her as a femme de couleur libre (a free woman of color).25 By 1799 the sedimented layers of respect and disrespect that characterized ancien régime slaveholding society had been thoroughly churned up by the Haitian Revolution, but the crucial fact of freedom remained insecure. As Napoléon Bonaparte consolidated power in Europe, he moved to subordinate the long-free and the recently freed in Saint-Domingue and secure his vision of an American empire. In late 1801 First Consul Bonaparte sent an expedition under his brother-in-law, General Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, to wrest power away from the black and brown men who had come to hold the title of general in Saint-Domingue. The district commander in Jérémie attempted to resist, but troops from France succeeded in entering the town in early 1802, and then received reinforcements by sea. In May of 1802 the consuls in Paris reauthorized the Atlantic slave trade and reasserted slavery in the French colony of Martinique, signaling Bonaparte’s ultimate intention to restore slavery in Saint-Domingue as well.26 Black soldiers in Saint-Domingue who had been loyal to the French Republic could see the growing risks of a French reoccupation under Napoleonic auspices. French commanders in turn became more suspicious of black men who remained in their ranks, and their hostility to their own black troops triggered still further defections to the opposition. By October of 1802 General Leclerc reported that insurrection had broken out in Jérémie, and that plantations there had been burned. The last letters written by General Leclerc before yellow fever carried him away convey something of the situation in the colony: “All of the blacks are persuaded by the letters coming from France, by the law reestablishing the slave trade, and by the decrees of General Richepanse which reestablish slavery in Guadeloupe, that we want to turn them into slaves.” “These men,” he wrote, “do not want

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to give up.” The rumor was spreading that the French would soon be forced to leave. The remaining black troops who had fought under the French moved quickly to shift to rebel lines, pulled by events and pushed by the murderous contempt shown for them by Leclerc and his brutal successor General Donatien Rochambeau.27 In the last weeks of March 1803, Rochambeau ordered a coordinated attack by French forces and Polish legionnaires on the rebel-held cities of the south, but to no avail. Some plantation laborers from Les Abricots joined the insurrection as black revolutionaries advanced rapidly toward Jérémie from the south, attacking French garrisons along the way. The revolutionaries used fire as their most frightening weapon, burning fields and hillsides as they advanced.28 It was on May 10, 1803, that the next document in which Rosalie appears was created. As unbridled war approached, Michel Vincent made plans to leave for France—but without Rosalie or the children. Rosalie now faced the prospect of becoming a solitary mother and a refugee of war in a countryside literally in flames. Under the circumstances, Michel Vincent was apparently persuaded—probably by Rosalie herself—that if he was going to abandon them he owed her an effort to give additional written force to her legal freedom and that of her children. Without the aid of a notary, but apparently using an earlier manumission document as a model, Michel Vincent covered a sheet of paper with improvised legalistic language. (He was, after all, still a notary’s son, and such language may have come easily.) This was a document drawn up in a moment of great danger, a shield designed to ward off the worst. It was something between a text and a talisman, an unofficial declaration intended to have the force of a notarized document, but which lacked the signature of a notary.29 This 1803 text begins by identifying Marie Françoise called Rosalie as négresse de nation Poulard. In the next lines of the document, Michel Vincent declared—altogether falsely—that Rosalie and her four children were his slaves. He enumerated the children: “Juste Theodore Mulatre, Marie Louise dite Resinette Mulatresse, Etienne hilaire dit Cadet mulatre, et Elisabeth dite Dieudonné Mulatresse.” Étienne, the younger boy, had been given Michel Vincent’s own middle name. Élisabeth had been recognized as his at baptism. Each was designated as mulâtre or mulâtresse, implying mixed African and European parentage. It seems quite possible that Michel Vincent was the father of all of Rosalie’s children.30 Michel Vincent then declared that he granted freedom to Rosalie and her

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four children, using the conventional language of gratitude for Rosalie’s loyal services, “in sickness and in health.” He promised to exact no further services from her, except those that she might provide of her own good will, and for which he would pay her wages. She was free to go wherever she wished and to pursue her own affairs. He declared that the document was to have as much force as if it had been authenticated by a notary. In view of his possible departure for France, he gave the bearer of the document the power to “pursue its ratification before the chiefs of this colony, or in whatever other country allied to France the said négresse might go and establish herself.”31 The form of this 1803 manumission document is quite odd. We know that four years earlier, Rosalie had already been designated a négresse libre when Michel Vincent went to baptize their daughter Élisabeth Dieudonné, and that Élisabeth had been born free. Rosalie herself had been provisionally freed through manumission by Marthe Guillaume in 1795, and then definitively freed by virtue of the edicts of emancipation passed by the French National Assembly. So in what sense did she and her children need to be freed once again? The answer may have to do with the power of paper in a situation of uncertainty, and the symbolic and juridical potential of documents, even unofficial ones. With war raging around them, it was difficult to know what was going to happen next, and whether the abolition of slavery in SaintDomingue would hold. Moreover, conditions in Les Abricots were becoming so dangerous that Rosalie might herself need to flee to one of the nearby Caribbean islands—and nearly everywhere else in the Americas slavery was still in place. Even the most rigid slaveholding societies nonetheless generally acknowledged the right of a slave owner to relinquish a claim to his or her own particular “property” in another human being, subject to varying degrees of government regulation.32 So an individual grant of freedom signed by a white man declaring himself to be a slave owner was likely to travel a good deal better than a French Republican decree, or than the unratified private document created by the black woman Marthe Guillaume under a now defunct British occupation force. And Michel Vincent would have to declare them all to be his slaves in order to have the authority to free them.33 Michel Vincent’s plan to leave for France never materialized. In the turmoil of May and June 1803, he may have been unable to find a passport, money for passage, or a willing captain. Perhaps his health worsened; perhaps he lost heart when the moment came to leave his children; perhaps he simply ran out of time. A bitter eyewitness account of these weeks written

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by a French planter and officer named Peter Chazotte enables us to envision something of what happened next. Chazotte writes that in June of 1803, in the face of the advance of black rebels from the south, the French general Jean Sarrazin ordered French troops and the Polish legions accompanying them to withdraw from the rural districts around Jérémie. Chazotte was enraged at what he perceived as a cowardly decision, but rode from plantation to plantation conveying the order and warning civilians to flee. Reports soon reached him that “the country . . . over our mountain was all on fire.” As flames approached, people struggled to find some path of retreat and refuge. In the bay at Les Abricots “there being but two small vessels, it was agreed to embark first the white women and children, and after the colored ones.” Those who could not make it on board trudged on foot along the dirt highway toward Jérémie, a mass of the displaced, black, white, and brown, with only what they could carry with them. “We abandoned the small town of Abricots at the moment when a column of a thousand blacks rushed in it, with flaming torches in their hands.”34 The town of Jérémie, however, offered no permanent refuge. France and Britain were again at war, and the French troops could not hope for supplies or reinforcements from metropolitan France. Within days the town would be evacuated by the French commander, whose besieged French and Polish troops were near starvation. Some civilians went over to the lines of the revolutionaries, hoping for the best; others tried to escape by boat. Hostile English ships hovering in the vicinity captured some of the departing boats, both military and civilian, but many passengers eventually made it to the nearest safe havens, Santiago and Baracoa, on the eastern coast of the Spanish colony of Cuba.35 Michel Vincent, Rosalie, and at least one of the children were among them.36

Santiago de Cuba The Cuban port city was staggered by the arrival of boatloads of refugees from various ports in Saint-Domingue, eventually numbering close to eighteen thousand. White refugees, women of color, children, and loyal “domestics” were permitted to land; the ragged French troops were generally not allowed into the city.37 Out of fear of revolutionary contagion the authorities ordered all men of color over the age of thirteen among the refugees to be held offshore, and deported to the mainland (Tierra Firme) at the first opportunity. In the eyes of Spanish administrators, former slaves who had witnessed or

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participated in the Haitian revolution were an unequivocal threat, though a few could perhaps be trusted if they accepted re-enslavement and showed proper subordination to those who had once been their masters.38 Michel Vincent and Rosalie made their way ashore, separately or together, and their daughter Élisabeth landed as well. Rosalie’s daughter Marie Louise may have made it to Cuba, but Rosalie’s sons Juste Théodore and Étienne Hilaire vanish from the record. Perhaps they had remained behind in revolutionary Saint-Domingue, soon to become Haiti, or were trapped on the boats held offshore by order of the Spanish governor. It is nonetheless possible that they entered Cuba surreptitiously and stayed out of view of the list makers and record keepers.39 For a time, Michel Vincent apparently worked as a mareschal, a farrier, attending to horses, and he and Rosalie raised pigs and chickens. With so many French citizens in refuge in Cuba, the officers of the Agence des Prises de la Guadeloupe, men charged with adjudicating the property of ships seized by French privateers, improvised a temporary response to the problem of dealing with the refugees’ affairs. Neither a consulate nor an embassy, this office did not legally have the authority to notarize documents or to undertake diplomatic tasks. Their main goal was to gain revenue from the sale of prize ships, and channel it into the maintenance of the remaining French colonies, now largely isolated by British control of the seas. But these bureaucrats unofficially served the “functions of a chancery,” and copied or took deposit of relevant papers that the French refugees might give them. By 1804 Michel Vincent had apparently become ill, and on March 14 he submitted a last will and testament to their office in Santiago, where it was homologué (validated).40 Three days later, Rosalie herself came to ask the same officials to register the freedom papers that had been drawn up in Les Abricots ten months earlier. With Michel nearing death, Rosalie seems to have hoped that by causing this text to be written into a French register she could give it greater legal force, leveraging up the authoritativeness of her fragile proof of freedom. As Rosalie could see from events around her, other women arriving from Saint-Domingue, as free as she was under the French Republican decrees, were treated in Cuba as slaves, and sold from one putative owner to another. Indeed, there was no guarantee the revenue-hungry French officials would be immune from the same temptation. But she took the chance.41 The French scribe in Santiago began his task as if it were a slave owner who stood before him, writing, “Registration of freedom by—” Then he stopped, inserted a period, and began again with a different preposition, clarifying that

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this text dealt with the freedom of the woman named Marie Françoise called Rosalie. At this crucial moment Rosalie was, in effect, authorized to attest to her own liberty. In a last gasp of revolutionary-era practice in France and Saint-Domingue, the official gave her the courtesy title citoyenne (citizen) as he transcribed her text into his records. He also provided her with a copy of the new document with his own signature added. In truth, the courtesy title citoyenne carried almost no legal content; the Agence des Prises was not a true consulate, and acts registered by the agent would not necessarily be respected by Cuban colonial courts. For the moment, however, with this hybrid text in hand, and the man who claimed to be her former master acting in accordance with it, Rosalie apparently retained her freedom in Santiago. But within days Michel Vincent was dead, and an executor was named to carry out the terms of his will.42 The report of the executor has survived in the registers of the French officials in Santiago, a vivid record of the way that the direct intrusion of a formal proceeding could disrupt the arrangements negotiated in the legal limbo of war and revolution. The executor, François Vallée, a tailor and fellow refugee from Saint-Domingue, began by explaining what he had done with the moveable goods belonging to the estate. He had sold “the little pigs” as well as the serpes et haches (billhooks and axes), yielding a modest seven and a half gourdes, equivalent to an equal number of Spanish piastres. He had given the red horse, along with the chickens and the chaudières (kettles), to Citizen Rosalie, who was described as the légataire particulière (individual legatee) of Michel Vincent. So far, so good. Then the executor reported that he had been about to give Marie Louise Désir to Rosalie as well, as called for in the will. This might possibly have been Rosalie’s daughter, elsewhere designated Marie Louise dite Resinette. But it seems more likely that this was someone whom Michel had held as a domestic servant, and whom he treated as property subject to donation when he drew up his will. But the executor testified that given the debts that encumbered the estate, he had not delivered Marie Louise to Rosalie. The implication was that she would be retained by the executor as a servant or sold as a slave in order to pay off Michel Vincent’s creditors.43 Rosalie’s daughter Élisabeth Dieudonné eventually came into the custody of her godmother, the widow Aubert, who had also fled from Les Abricots to Santiago. Counting on more prosperous Saint-Domingue refugees for help, however, was a risky strategy, for many of them were busily converting the people of color who had fled with them back into slaves. The widow Aubert may have taken protective custody of Élisabeth, but she hardly eschewed

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slaveholding. Whether she treated Élisabeth as a daughter, as a servant, or as a combination of the two, is difficult to discern.44 In the era of the Napoleonic wars, moreover, all of the Saint-Domingue refugees in Cuba were vulnerable to shifts in European politics. When Bonaparte’s forces marched into Spain in 1808, the relationship between Spain and any French subjects in the Spanish colonies was suddenly cast into doubt. Once Spaniards in the Iberian Peninsula rose up against Napoléon’s forces in May of 1808, France came to be widely perceived as an enemy in the colonies as well. In earlier years, the Spanish colonial government had offered some refugees in Cuba the possibility of swearing allegiance to the Spanish crown, and local authorities had been pleased with the rise of coffee plantations developed by émigré planters. But after the uprisings in the peninsula there was strong pressure to expel the French from Spain’s colonies, forcing the hand even of their protectors. In April of 1809, the governor ordered all French nationals to leave the island.45 For Rosalie and her daughter Élisabeth, the situation had become untenable. They were not protected by the 1793–94 general abolition, which no French official would any longer enforce. Moreover, they were part of a refugee population whose wealthier members had quickly resumed the habits of a slaveholding society, but whose host community was now ready to expel them. Those ordered to depart would again have to try to find a boat, money for passage, and passports. Once again, the family would be fractured. Élisabeth accompanied her godmother, the widow Aubert, to New Orleans. Rosalie—an African woman whose status as a free person was utterly insecure in any slave society—seems to have remained for a time in Santiago, and then found her way back to now-independent Haiti.46

New Orleans In spring and summer 1809, dozens of ships filled with French-speaking refugees from eastern Cuba arrived in the port of New Orleans, and territorial governor William C. C. Claiborne faced an immense political problem. Many of the men and women on board those ships claimed that others among the passengers were their slaves. These “slaves” included men and women freed in Saint-Domingue, some of whom had already been re-enslaved in Cuba, as well as a few Africans and Creoles purchased as slaves in Cuba itself. But the U.S. Congress had very recently outlawed the international slave trade, and no one was legally permitted to bring slaves into the country from abroad. One logical solution would have been to give formal recognition to the

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French abolition decrees of 1793–94, and declare all those who had come from Saint-Domingue to be free. But this was not the kind of solution that the governor of the slaveholding territory of Louisiana was likely to contemplate. Instead, Claiborne took the circumstances to be extraordinary, and eventually allowed the passengers to land, some as free men and women, others as slaves.47 The widow Aubert, godmother of Rosalie’s daughter Élisabeth, had made the passage successfully from Santiago to New Orleans. The widow’s companion, Jean Lambert Détry, a Belgian innkeeper turned carpenter, bought two plots of land in Faubourg Marigny, close to the river, on Rue Moreau. Détry began to work as a contractor, employing several slave sawyers. The widow quickly became an active businesswoman, buying and selling plots of land and slaves. It was in her household that the young Élisabeth Dieudonné would be raised, with the widow serving as a surrogate mother—and perhaps also as taskmaster.48 When Jean Lambert Détry died in 1821, he left a “mystic testament”— that is, a will prepared privately and placed under seal with a notary. He left most of his property to two young women of color who were the natural daughters of his friend and executor François Xavier Freyd, but he gave the widow Aubert the usufruct of most of this property during her lifetime—and as it turned out, she lived to be ninety. He specified that two of his slaves were to be freed as soon as they attained “the age required by the law for manumission.”49 Détry also designated a bequest of $500 for the widow Aubert’s goddaughter Élisabeth Dieudonné, the child of Michel Vincent. Détry explained the bequest by referring to her as his own goddaughter, though this was not technically accurate. Perhaps the years of living with the widow Aubert had given him this status de facto.50 In effect, from his long conjugal relationship with the widow Aubert, Lambert Détry had developed an extended network of dependents, most of them free people of color. Détry made no mention in his will of potential heirs-at-law who might be back in Belgium, but after his death a group of those kin hired a lawyer and tried to invalidate the will, invoking Détry’s open “concubinage” with the widow Aubert. They quickly settled, taking a share of the proceeds.51 With the promise of the bequest from Détry in hand, Élisabeth Dieudonné (who was also sometimes called Marie), now twenty-three, became engaged to marry a young man named Jacques Tinchant, son of a Saint-Domingue refugee woman of color, Suzette Bayot. At the moment the marriage contract was drawn up in 1822, it was the widow Aubert who appeared with the

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prospective bride at the notary’s, claiming that she had been like a mother to her since she was a child, and asserting that the bride’s actual mother was currently living not in New Orleans but in what the widow still called “SaintDomingue.” Élisabeth’s mother had taken on the surname of the man who never married her, and was now referred to as Rosalie Vincent.52 Over the years from 1799 to 1822, the web of kin and fictive kin woven around Rosalie Vincent’s children had been a source of both danger and security. We do not know what demands the widow Aubert may have made on Rosalie and her daughter Élisabeth. Élisabeth had achieved freedom at birth, then been separated from her mother to come under the patronage of the widow Aubert, and now saw her path to marriage smoothed by the promise of a bequest from the widow’s companion Lambert Détry.53 A year or so after their marriage, Élisabeth Dieudonné and Jacques Tinchant took their distance from the widow.54 Jacques went on to develop a flourishing business as a carpenter and a builder, and in 1835 he went to a notary to constitute a formal société with his half-brother Pierre Duhart, with the goal of buying land, building houses, and reselling. They acquired one or two slaves whose labor supplemented their own.55 As Jacques and his wife ascended into the ranks of property owners and began a family, some of the documents they had signed along the way seem to have troubled them. In November of 1835 they went to a notary to “rectify” Élisabeth’s name as it had appeared on their marriage contract, in order that she be able to have a recognized surname. The couple now held out a copy of her baptismal record, in which her father Michel Vincent had recognized his paternity, and they asked that her name be corrected to Élisabeth Dieudonné Vincent.56 The sudden and quite convenient appearance of the baptismal record— thirty-six years after its creation and thirteen years after Élisabeth’s marriage —is puzzling. There is one clue: the document they proffered was not the 1799 original, but a copy made by a Haitian official in the 1820s. Given what we now know about Élisabeth’s mother Rosalie, a hypothesis emerges. In Les Abricots, Saint-Domingue, with the production of the manumission document signed by Michel Vincent, and then again in Santiago, with the recopying of that paper by a French official, Rosalie Vincent had shown a keen awareness of the importance of official paper. It is possible that as a girl in the Muslim society of the Senegal River valley, the woman later called Rosalie might already have learned the importance of words written in ink on paper, and of an amulet or talisman that could protect one from harm.57 But whether Rosalie brought this awareness with her from West Africa, or learned it in

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the house of the trader Marthe Guillaume on the Place d’Armes in Jérémie, or saw it for herself in the household of Michel Vincent in Les Abricots, the lesson had taken hold. One function of official documents is to render irrelevant any inquiry into the putative facts behind them. Their official nature itself makes the words on paper peremptory—they supersede the complicated history on which they rest.58 “Rosalie is my slave and I hereby declare her free.” With an official signature, these words could become the kind of “freedom paper” that an African-born woman in the slaveholding city of Santiago would need to be able to show if stopped and questioned, or if she had business of her own to carry out at a notary. It would not matter that she had not been a slave when she left Saint-Domingue, and that Michel Vincent had in fact never been her master. Slavery was the creation of positive law, and that positive law had been abolished in Saint-Domingue. But in slaveholding societies like Cuba, freedom too was a creation of positive law for persons of African descent, for the presumption might be slavery. So Rosalie, free in one polity, had to find a way to become free in another. And she did. Rosalie’s daughter Élisabeth faced a different challenge. Her freedom was not questioned, but her legitimacy and her standing were, for she was a “natural child,” bereft of a surname of her own. Even a recognized sacramental marriage to Jacques Tinchant could not expunge that stigma. But maybe Rosalie could. In April of 1835, a two-masted ship, the brig Ann, landed in New Orleans after a journey from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. On its passenger list we find the name Rosalia Vincent. The Spanish form of the name Rosalie may date back to the time in Cuba; we know where the surname Vincent came from. It seems a good bet that Rosalie herself had obtained a copy of Élisabeth’s baptismal certificate from the authorities at Jérémie, perhaps shortly after she learned of her daughter’s marriage in 1822, and held it for safekeeping. She could then climb aboard a ship with that paper on her person, in order to bring it to New Orleans, where its power could be amplified by taking it before a cooperative public notary.59 With the notary willing to view the document as sufficient proof of paternity, Élisabeth Dieudonné now laid claim to the surname Vincent by birth from her father. Given the distinction made in the Louisiana Civil Code between recognition and legitimation, it is not entirely clear that Michel Vincent’s name on the baptismal record actually conferred on his “natural daughter” the legal right to adopt his surname. But the New Orleans notary,

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who had for years handled many of Jacques Tinchant’s business dealings, assented.60 When Élisabeth Vincent’s name appeared in subsequent records, it no longer resembled that of a child born to a former slave mother, but was instead indistinguishable from the names of those born to families who had always been free.61 We have a final confirmation that Rosalie Vincent, now in her late sixties, had indeed made her way to New Orleans. In 1836, Jacques Tinchant and Élisabeth Vincent brought their most recent child to be baptized in the Cathedral of Saint-Louis, in the heart of the Vieux Carré. They gave the child the name Juste—that of his mother’s brother, Rosalie’s son, lost from sight in the course of the evacuation of Jérémie over thirty years earlier. It had taken three generations to reach this point, but like his older brothers, the baby Juste was designated a legitimate child, not a natural child. Alfred Duhart— the son of the New Orleans freemason and teacher Louis Duhart and of Jacques Tinchant’s mother Suzette Bayot—stood as godfather. The woman the parents chose as godmother made no mark of her own on the sacramental record, but the priest recorded her name: Rosalie Vincent.62

Epilogue and Conclusion By 1836 the social relations that sustained slavery were hardening in Louisiana, and soon the state legislature would try to block the ascent of free people of color on nearly every front. Jacques Tinchant’s mother, Suzette Bayot, had already left the United States altogether, sailing for France and settling in the Basses-Pyrenées, where she was able to legalize her union with Louis Duhart.63 A few years later their son Pierre, Jacques Tinchant’s halfbrother and business partner in New Orleans, followed them to the town of Gan, where he married a young Frenchwoman. In 1840 Jacques Tinchant and Élisabeth Vincent, accompanied by four of their five children, made the same journey. (Their eldest boy remained in New Orleans.) The story of their life in France, the birth of their son Edouard, their family’s establishment of a cigar business in Belgium, and their sons’ lives in Gan, Pau, Veracruz, New Orleans, Mobile, and Antwerp, is far too long to recount here.64 But we might conclude by returning briefly to that extraordinary moment in the history of Louisiana with which we began this essay. Rosalie Vincent’s grandson Edouard Tinchant—the youngest of Jacques and Élisabeth’s children—arrived in New Orleans from Antwerp in 1862 at the age of twenty-one. Born in France, he was coming to the city that his

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parents had left, as he later recalled, because his father refused to raise his sons in a New Orleans characterized by “infamous laws and stupid prejudices.” After volunteering in the Union Army, Edouard drew upon his political eloquence and his polished French to make a name for himself, writing letters to the editor of the New Orleans Tribune to explain and advance his equal-rights credo, and becoming principal of a school for freed children when the war ended. With suffrage now open to nearly all adult males, he was elected to represent the Sixth Ward of New Orleans in the constitutional convention of 1867–68.65 In the end, only a portion of Edouard Tinchant’s ideals would make it into the final draft of the 1868 Louisiana Constitution, and enforcing the equality of “civil, political and public rights” guaranteed in the state’s new Bill of Rights turned out to be no easy task.66 Moreover, after the convention ended, Edouard Tinchant found himself without employment. With his wife and young children, he spent the remaining years of Reconstruction in Mobile, Alabama, building his own modest cigar manufactory. When Reconstruction ended, and white supremacy emerged triumphant, Edouard and his wife Louisa Debergue, like his parents in 1840, boarded a ship for another shore. They would raise their own children in the northern European city of Antwerp. If they could not thus entirely escape what Edouard called “stupid prejudices,” they could at least get out of the reach of “infamous laws.”67 Just before they left the United States, Louisa gave birth to a girl. They named her Marie Louise, perhaps recalling her great-aunt Marie Louise who had been freed once by French law in Saint-Domingue in 1793–94, and again by her father’s action in 1803, only to disappear from view in the years of exile. And in the generations that followed, their descendants would continue the name, down to Edouard’s great-granddaughter Marie Louise Van Velsen, who lived on into the twenty-first century in Antwerp.68 Edouard Tinchant’s life history and political imagination were Atlantic in scope. At different moments he claimed French citizenship, American citizenship, and Haitian ancestry. When we go back another two generations and trace the woman who was first denominated Rosalie of the Poulard nation, briefly called Citizen Rosalie, and finally called Rosalie Vincent, we can see that the family’s Atlantic perspective swept even further, to the middle valley of the Senegal River, to the town of Jérémie on the southern peninsula of Saint-Domingue, to the crowded city of Santiago, Cuba, and finally to independent Haiti. Edouard Tinchant’s convictions had been built on his awareness of the histories of the men and the women in his family who had faced

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the multiple “infamous laws” that accompanied slavery. Along with the intergenerational transmission of trauma, there had also been the development of habits of engagement with writing and with the law. When Rosalie had faced a crisis of war and potential abandonment in Les Abricots in 1803, she knew that the situation called for the creation of a powerful piece of writing. And she knew, as Michel Vincent was approaching death in 1804, that she needed to make sure that the manumission document he had penned was recopied into the papers of the French authorities in Santiago. Decades later, even after her younger daughter Élisabeth was herself married and a mother, Rosalie traveled from Haiti, apparently carrying a copy of the baptismal record that would belatedly confer a surname on Élisabeth. Élisabeth, in turn, would with her husband Jacques abandon their apparently successful business in New Orleans and move with their children to France, a country where the boys could attend public schools. In Edouard Tinchant, these habits of engagement with writing, reinforced by his study of French and Latin rhetoric at the lycée in Pau, would expand once he reached Louisiana into eloquent public letters and vigorous legislative initiatives. Refusal of racial hierarchy was for him a matter of first principles, as was the question of equal rights for women. Edouard could not change the past, in which the freedom of Rosalie of the Poulard nation was denied, and his mother’s claim to the surname Vincent required such effort. But when the moment arrived he, like Rosalie before him, seized the opportunity to write freedom into the present.

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Afterword james t. campbell

Some years ago, I was asked to review a book about slavery for the Sunday book review section of a prominent national newspaper. I began with a datum that I often cite in my classes, intended to establish a sense of the institution’s scale and significance in the making of the modern world. I repeat it here: Of the human beings who migrated from the Old World to the New between Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 and 1830, at least three of every four were enslaved Africans. A few days after submitting my review, I received an email from the editor telling me the review would run the following Sunday. He added that he had corrected the proportions of free and enslaved migrants in my lead, since I had obviously reversed the figures. A flurry of emails followed, which culminated with the disbelieving editor demanding documentation of my figures—the only time I have ever had a book review fact-checked. In the end, he conceded the point, but only after I agreed to reduce the ratio of enslaved to free migrants to a more conservative two of every three. One can draw any number of morals from this little tale, but the point that impresses me is the one that I had hoped to make in the first place: most Americans today have no concept of the scope, scale, and historical significance of the trans-Atlantic slave trade or of the New World plantation complex it fueled. Indeed, on few if any topics is the gulf between academic and popular understandings so great. Recent decades have seen a veritable explosion of slavery scholarship, illuminating not only the shifting currents of the trans-Atlantic trade but also the growth of New World empires, the circulation of slave-produced commodities, the rise of abolitionism, the

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relationship of slavery to European economic growth, and the complex circulation of people, ideas, and identities within what Paul Gilroy has called “the Black Atlantic.” Very little of this scholarship, however, has found its way into the wider public, certainly not in the United States, where most people continue to imagine slavery as marginal and anomalous, a “peculiar institution” of the American South, foredoomed by the inexorable march of human freedom. This book seeks to rectify that misperception. The contributors seek not simply to reassert the Black Atlantic as a formative historical site but to repopulate it, to recover the lives and legacies of a few of the millions of Africans and African-descended people who lived and died in the maelstrom of Atlantic slavery. Anyone researching the history of the Black Atlantic immediately confronts a conundrum. Because enslaved Africans were so valuable, they were accounted carefully, giving rise to a large and diverse documentary record, a vast archive of ship’s logs, account books, inventories, deeds of manumission, marriage and baptismal registers, bills of sale, court records, wills, and petitions. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was particularly well documented— far better documented, in fact, than the contemporaneous migration of Europeans. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (slavevoyages.org), a digital clearinghouse created by historian David Eltis and an international network of collaborators, contains records of nearly 35,000 unique slaving voyages, the first launched in 1514, the last in 1866, three and a half centuries later. We can now say with some confidence that about 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World, of whom about 1.8 million died en route. We know that over five million of those who survived the passage landed in Brazil; that another five million or so were scattered through the sugarproducing islands of the Caribbean; and that mainland North America, what is today the United States, received about 400,000 enslaved Africans, something less than four percent of the total. Scholars interested in different European nations’ changing shares of the traffic, trade into and out of particular ports, Middle Passage mortality rates (either for individual voyages or in the aggregate), ratios of male to female captives, the duration of voyages, or the frequency of shipboard insurrections will all find a wealth of material in the database. Unfortunately, our grasp of the material dimensions of slavery and the slave trade is not matched by our understanding of the lived experience of the enslaved, which remains sketchy and uneven, especially for the sixteenth,

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seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. The reasons are not far to seek. Slavery consumed people. Adding together captives who died in Africa, in coffles marching to the sea or in fetid coastal castles and barracoons, with the roughly 15 percent who died in the Middle Passage and the equal or greater number who died during the so-called “seasoning” process in the Americas, close to half of those snared in the nets of Atlantic slavery were dead within a year of capture. Most of those who were not would follow soon enough: average life expectancy on a Caribbean sugar plantation in the seventeenth century was something less than seven years. In such circumstances, few of the enslaved had the opportunity to inscribe their names on the historical record, and such records as do exist typically betray little of the inner worlds of those they name. Extant first-person accounts of the Middle Passage by people who endured it are particularly scarce; a recent inventory counted just fifteen. (With Vincent Carretta’s discovery of the South Carolina origins of Olaudah Equiano, that number has been reduced by one.) This asymmetry in available evidence has provoked considerable uneasiness among historians, who often find themselves, as Cassandra Pybus drily puts it, in the “uncomfortable position” of discussing enslaved people in the same undifferentiated, quantitative terms as their enslavers—in short, as commodities. There are several possible responses to the predicament. Probably the easiest is simply to cede the experiential terrain to imaginative artists. Slavery and the slave trade have generated a myriad of powerful fictional accounts, from Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oronooko: The Royal Slave (the first female-authored novel in the English language) to recent works such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, as well as a rich array of visual imaginings: the iconic etching of the slave ship Brooks, with its human cargo packed like cordwood, the harrowing opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s Amistad, the stark silhouettes of Kara Walker’s “Slavery! Slavery!” and “Grub for Sharks.” Some historians, unwilling to surrender the ground to artists, have resorted to what one might call “thick description,” seeking to conjure the experience of enslavement by meticulously reconstructing the specific contexts through which enslaved people moved. Books such as Joseph Miller’s Way of Death, Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden, Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women, Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship, and Stephanie Smallwood’s Saltwater Slavery reference few individual captives, yet they all have immeasurably enriched our understanding of slaves’ travail. The essays in this book represent yet another approach, what Miller calls “the biographical turn.” Like the poet glimpsing the universe in a grain of sand, the essays

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collected here seek to recover the experience of enslavement through the prism of individual lives. As several contributors note, historians’ resort to life history is not new. Ironically, it was Philip Curtin, whose classic 1969 study, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, laid the foundations for the quantitative turn, who also pioneered the biographical turn, with the publication, two years earlier, of Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Curtin’s anthology was immediately followed by Douglass Grant’s The Fortunate Slave, which recounted the extraordinary odyssey of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, whose unlikely tale of enslavement and exile, redemption and return, had all the trappings of an eighteenth-century novel. A trickle of books and articles followed, including several recounting tales of enslaved princes, real-life versions of the fictional Oronooko. In recent years, the trickle has grown into a substantial stream, thanks in part to the labors of the authors featured in this book, many of whom have spent years pursuing previously obscure individuals through the archives. Academic publishers have also done their part, churning out anthologies and scholarly editions of slave narratives, most of them long out of print, a few never before published. When Curtin published Africa Remembered, most historians had never heard of Olaudah Equiano, let alone individuals such as Ottobah Cugoano, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, Domingos Álvares, and Venture Smith. Today we have books by or about each. Weighed in the scale of New World slavery, the number of individual lives recovered in this ongoing biographical turn seems puny—a few hundred from a holocaust of millions. But these stories have great significance for historians. Not only do they illuminate dimensions of slave experience previously hidden from view; they also raise important questions about the historical enterprise itself, about the ways in which historians understand and represent the past. Probably the first question to be asked of the biographical turn is whether the works that constitute it are actually biographies. Revealingly, most of the authors in this book avoid the word, characterizing their contributions instead as “microhistories” (a term popularized in the 1980s by historians like Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Zemon Davis) or “life histories.” To some extent, this self-description is simply a concession to the limitations of available sources, which preclude the kind of expansive treatment we have come to expect of full-blown “biographies.” But it also reflects contributors’ desire to avoid some of the ideological baggage with which biography is freighted.

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Few biographers today subscribe to the tenets of Thomas Carlyle, who believed that the best way to understand the past was by chronicling lives of heroic leaders (what Emerson, Carlyle’s correspondent, called “representative men”); yet most biographies published today continue to focus on the eminent, or at least prominent—on political leaders and business tycoons, generals and movie stars, adventurers and athletes. Influential in life and memorialized in death, such figures require no justification for commanding the biographer’s attention. Equally important, they leave footprints—sources enabling their biographers not only to reconstruct their actions but also to explain (or at least plausibly to impute) their motives. The individuals featured in this collection are very different. With the exception of Equiano, none was eminent or “representative.” Nor were they influential or historically significant in the conventional sense, though their actions sometimes had wide-ranging political consequences. Most lived and died in obscurity, where they remained until unearthed from the archives. While several achieved literacy, only Equiano and David Dorr left behind personal testaments or substantial documentary records. The lives of the rest have had to be painstakingly pieced together from scattered, fragmentary sources, virtually all produced by people other than the subjects themselves. Interior lives—motives, values, and aspirations—remain almost completely opaque. Yet if the lives recounted here do not lend themselves to traditional biography, they offer ideal subjects for that genre we know as life or “micro” history, an approach with a very different interpretive and narrative logic. As Jill Lepore has written, “If biography is largely founded on a belief in the singularity and significance of an individual’s life and his contributions to history, microhistory is founded upon almost the opposite assumption: however singular a person’s life may be, the value of examining it lies not in its uniqueness but in its exemplariness, in how that life serves as an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole.” Such allegories abound in this book. In tracing the trans-Atlantic odysseys of individuals such as Francisco Ferreira Gomes, Rebecca Protten, and James Churchill Vaughan, we learn not only about the astonishing variety of enslaved experience but also about the business of slave trading, the birth of New World slave cultures, the wages of imperial rivalry and war, the spread of evangelical Christianity, the rise of abolitionism, the growth of legitimate commerce, and the reciprocal reverberations of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Far from signaling a retreat into academic pointillism, the life

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histories offered here open out to the fundamental processes and structures that defined the Atlantic world. Precisely because these stories are so various and idiosyncratic, it is difficult to generalize about them. But certain themes are obvious. All the individuals featured in this book were born into slavery; all or nearly all died as free people. This is obviously not a representative sample but it is, to return to Lepore’s formulation, an exemplary one. Every system of slavery known to history offered the enslaved at least some pathways to freedom, and most had substantial bodies of law and custom defining the status and obligations of those who traveled them. Far from undermining the institution of slavery, the existence of such pathways and protocols was essential to maintaining it, as Orlando Patterson has argued. The life histories collected here throw these issues into sharp relief. Compared to what we know of slavery in other places and times, manumission in New World slave societies was relatively rare, and it became rarer over time, a reflection, in part, of the increasing rigor of racial ideology. Manumission was rarest of all in the United States, which went as far as any society in human history in carving an unbridgeable gulf between slavery and freedom. But however narrow and rocky the road, avenues to freedom remained, and the individuals in this book found them. At least two—Rosalie of the Poulard Nation (also known as Rosalie négresse libre, Citoyenne Rosalie, and Rosalie Vincent) and the extraordinary Francisco Menendez (who survived enslavement by Africans, the English, Spaniards, and the Yamasee)—traversed them multiple times. A second set of themes revolves around mobility. Even in a historical field defined by movement—the history of the Black Atlantic, as Paul Gilroy memorably put it, is a tale of “routes” rather than “roots”—the geographic mobility on display in these stories is astonishing. The prototypical example, of course, is Equiano. While it now seems clear that he did not experience the Middle Passage described so powerfully in his autobiography, he made innumerable other trans-Atlantic voyages, reaching virtually every corner of the eighteenthcentury world—Malaga and Montserrat, Georgia and Jamaica (where he managed a plantation), London and the Low Countries, Constantinople and the Arctic. Other individuals in this book were only slightly less traveled. The redoubtable Jane Thompson held her family together through the upheaval of the American Revolution, following the retreating British from the Virginia Tidewater to New York to Nova Scotia, from which some of the family embarked for Sierra Leone. David Dorr, an enslaved man from New Orleans, accompanied his owner (who was also perhaps his father) on the Grand Tour

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of Europe, a journey recounted in his aptly titled memoir, A Colored Man Round the World. The religious pilgrimage of Maria the Mooress carried her from a plantation in the Danish West Indies to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to a village in western Germany; her compatriot, Rebecca Protten, traced an almost identical journey but added a final leg, establishing a Moravian mission on the Gold Coast. Along with geographic mobility, the lives traced here reveal surprising degrees of social and economic fluidity. The world of the Black Atlantic was an extraordinarily turbulent place, teeming with all manner of people and interests, all vying for advantage. As such, it presented not only perils but also possibilities, eddies of safety and opportunity for those with the enterprise, imagination, or simple luck to find them. The individuals in this book all proved adept at finding such eddies. Consider the case of Francisco Ferreira Gomes. A Brazil-born freedman—a degredado, in local parlance—Gomes traveled to Angola as a member of a Portuguese Henrique battalion, one of a host of black and native military auxiliaries that rival European empires deployed across the Atlantic world. His success as a soldier, combined with an advantageous marriage to a local African woman, helped him to secure a lucrative administrative post in the royal treasury in Benguela, a position that he parlayed into a prosperous career as a slave trader. Gomes’s story was obviously not typical, but it is, again, powerfully exemplary, illuminating many of the institutions and networks that constituted the Black Atlantic as an historical space. Though the particulars differ, the same might be said of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, who survived capture, the Middle Passage, and years of enslavement to become a prosperous merchant in Bahia, Brazil; of James Churchill Vaughan, who traveled to his ancestral continent under the auspices of a Southern Baptist mission society; or even of Equiano, who found footholds in several of the eighteenth century’s most important transAtlantic institutions, including the British Navy, the Methodist church, and the emerging slave trade abolition movement. If these stories reveal something of the structure of the Black Atlantic, they also highlight the skills and capacities that the enslaved and their descendents needed to survive within it. For all the differences in personality and context, the individuals described here exhibited many common attributes, including personal resilience, adaptability, social agility, and a broadgauged cultural and linguistic facility—an ability, in João José Reis’s words to “manipulate the symbols and protocol” of the societies in which they found themselves. Literacy was a particularly precious skill. As Rebecca Scott and

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Jean Hébrard put it, writing possessed an almost “talismanic power” in the Atlantic world, a power to establish facts and cement status in an otherwise chaotic and changeable world. The classic example is again Equiano, whose Interesting Narrative stands not only as one of the great works of literary selfinvention in the English language, but also as one of history’s most powerful anti-slavery texts. But writing played a crucial role in all the lives recounted here. We see its value in Rosalie of the Poulard Nation’s long struggle to secure some document that would confirm her status as a free woman, as well as in Francisco Menendez’s petitions to Spanish officials in Florida, demanding that they honor their promise of freedom to enslaved fugitives fleeing from the Carolinas. We also see it, more perversely, in Manoel Joaquim Ricardo’s use of a false baptismal certificate to claim ownership of a man who was not legally his slave. It is important, of course, to maintain a sense of proportion here. In dispelling one myth of “Robinson Charley” (the enterprising everyman conjured by postwar British information officers), we ought not to create another, in which enslaved Africans and their descendants, armed with inventiveness and fueled by an unquenchable thirst for freedom, triumphantly transcended their bondage. Atlantic slavery remained a way of death for the vast majority of those sucked into its maw. And even those who defied the odds remained perilously exposed and acutely vulnerable. Contingent events—events as intimate as the death of a patron or as momentous as the French Revolution— could undo years of determined effort. It is hard to imagine a human being more enterprising than Francisco Menendez, yet even he would spend all but a few years of his life in bondage. Having finally won his freedom, he became leader of the first free black community in what is today the United States, only to be thrown back into the fire by the resumption of hostilities between Spain and Great Britain in the War of Jenkins’ Ear. He survived that conflict too, despite two hundred lashes endured on a British corsair, only to see the community he had built handed over to his erstwhile captors in the treaty ending the Seven Years’ War. Francisco Menendez was no helpless victim, but neither was he the sole author of his destiny. All this points to one final set of themes. Amidst the evidence of individual self-assertion, creativity, and cunning in these stories, there is also a consistent counter theme—what one might call an impulse to connection. Precisely because the waters of the Black Atlantic were so treacherous, few people tried to navigate them alone. Sometimes this meant establishing relationships with European people—with masters and other powerful patrons,

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government militias, mission societies, and so forth. Menendez, for example, owed his name and, ultimately, his freedom to his owner, a Spanish official, who served as godfather at his Catholic baptism. But more often it meant creating solidarities with other African and African-descended people. This process began almost immediately—one of the most poignant terms of affiliation in the New World was “shipmates,” used by people who had endured the Middle Passage together—and it continued through all the upheavals and uprootings that followed. The life histories in this book are full of people making marriages, creating families (sometimes from biologically related materials, more often not), fashioning all manner of religious, ethnic, linguistic, and religious allegiances. If the essence of slavery was alienation, the dissolution of those social relationships and recognitions that define us as human, then the essence of enslaved experience was affiliation. Because most of these relationships existed outside the purview of whites, they are not well documented. Their affective content remains obscure, as do the motives that impelled them. Cleary some affiliations were strategic in nature. As Lisa Lindsay notes, James Churchill Vaughan’s story about discovering people who shared his father’s “country marks”—a story cherished by generations of family members on both sides of the Atlantic—cannot have been true, but it did provide Vaughan with a valuable network of allies in his new home. It is also possible, as several contributors to this volume suggest, that the impulse to connect reflected the persistence of a distinctly African sensibility, a worldview that conceived wealth and well-being not in Western, individualistic terms, but rather in terms of relationships with other people. At a still broader level, the impulse to connect may simply bespeak a deep human need for solidarity—a need that must have been particularly keen among people who had endured the serial separations of slavery. Whatever the motives, the result of these processes, unfolding over centuries, was a sociological crazy quilt. Historians searching the Black Atlantic for tidy ethnic identities or a linear transition from “African” to “African American” will be disappointed. Instead they will find a welter of shifting, overlapping, situational loyalties and identities, all dissolving and reforming in response to changing events. They will find, in short, people like those depicted in this book. Imagining that one can truly understand another human being is a necessary illusion for living in the world—and also for writing history. But it is a difficult illusion to sustain in regard to inhabitants of the Black Atlantic. Most we never see. Those we do see appear only fleetingly, often wrenched into

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curious postures. If we were artists like Kara Walker, we would stop there. But as historians, we seek to connect the impressions, using narrative to invest our characters with coherence and continuity, much as a movie projector creates an illusion of continuous motion from discrete images. In the end, however, there is much that we do not, that we cannot, know. What we can say with some degree of certainty is that about 12.5 million Africans were carried to the New World in slave ships, that about 10.7 million of them survived the passage, and that they and their descendants built the world we live in today.

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notes

Introduction: Biography and the Black Atlantic 1. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) set in motion a new interest in cultural cross-currents and transnational movements. The monumental project Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org, by aggregating tens of thousands of individual slaving voyages, documented the vast scale and complexity of the movement of individuals through slave trading. 2. Robin Law and Paul E. Lovejoy, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2001); Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009); Sandra Greene, West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); and others mentioned in notes below. Also see Paul E. Lovejoy, “Biography as Source Material: Towards a Biographical Archive of Enslaved Africans,” in Source Material for Studying the Slave Trade and the African Diaspora: Papers from a Conference of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, April 1996, ed. Robin Law (Stirling: Conference of Commonwealth Studies, 1997), 119–40 on Lovejoy’s ongoing work on the “Slave Trade of the Nigerian Hinterland,” part of the UNESCO Slave Route project. 3. Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Toni Morrison, A Mercy (New York: Knopf, 2008); Manu Herbstein, Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2005); Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound (New York: Knopf, 2000). 4. Julius S. Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1986; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Though popularized by Paul Gilroy, the term was coined by Robert Faris Thompson in Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1983). 5. In this way, Gilroy’s view of the Atlantic was rather similar to that of historians

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such as Bernard Bailyn, who identified broad cultural continuities resulting from contacts in an Atlantic communicating zone. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 6. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 15. 7. C. L. R. James and Eric Williams made this argument more than half a century ago. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; New York: Vintage, 1989); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 8. Caryl Phillips made this point at the National Humanities Center symposium on “The Black Atlantic and the Biographical Turn” in his opening address, “Imagining the Black Atlantic World,” February 2011. Also see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000). 9. See, for instance, Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Gilroy himself paid scant attention to the continent of Africa in The Black Atlantic, even though, as Charles Piot, “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100, 1 (2001): 155–70, has shown, cultural forms and identities within Africa were reshaped in the violence, dislocation, and political upheaval of the slave trade era, even in places far from the coast. The major corrective is John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), but Allison Games echoes the critique in “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review 111, 3 (June 2006): 741–57. For an even wider critique, see Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13, 1 (2002): 169–82. 10. Experience is of course mediated by perception, language, and ideology, a point made most forcefully by Joan Scott in “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 791–92. 11. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114, 5 (December 2009): 1231–49. 12. Lovejoy, “Biography as Source Material.” 13. Bernard Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20, 1 (1996): 19–44. See also William O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic History,” Atlantic Studies 1 (2004): 66–84 and Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten.” 14. For more on this point, see James H. Sweet, “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114, 2 (2009): 279–306. 15. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 16. Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon, 2006).

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17. See the forum, “AHR Roundtable: Historians and Biography,” American Historical Review 114, 3 (June 2009): 573–661. 18. For example, Crais and Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus. 19. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005) and “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20, 3 (1999): 96–105. 20. James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 68, 2 (April 2011): 181– 208. 21. For example, Fredrick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 22. For example, see Sweet, Domingos Álvares. 23. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, chap. 6. 24. On this point, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, 1 (2006): 1–14. 25. Largely as result of Berlin’s influence, historians of North America have come to use the term “creole” in ways that differ from the practice of historians of Latin America and the Caribbean, for whom the term typically designates people born in the Americas rather than in Europe or Africa. Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 53, 2 (April 1996): 251–88. See also Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 26. W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (New York: Viking, 1947), 22. 27. Frederick Cooper, “Globalization,” in Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 91–92. In broad outline, our call for attention to specific networks and discrete linkages is similar to Peter A. Coclanis’s suggestion that the Atlantic world be seen as one of many overlapping networks of commerce and connection. See his “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?” William and Mary Quarterly 63, 4 (2006). Chapter 1. A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn 1. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 2. Thanks to the dedicated leadership of David Eltis, with a host of able collaborators, http://slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces. 3. Philip D. Curtin, ed., Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967; reissued Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1997); Jerome S. Handler, “Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in

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Barbados,” Slavery and Abolition 19 (1998): 129–41, and “Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British America,” Slavery and Abolition 23, 1 (2002): 23–56. The biography section of the ongoing bibliographies of slavery published in Slavery and Abolition (myself as compiler through 2004, with Thomas Thurston of the Gilder-Lehrman Center at Yale University carrying on ably since then) show the heavy concentration of autobiographies of freed, escaped, and formerly enslaved individuals in the antebellum United States. 4. Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). See also Stephanie E. Smallwood, “African Guardians, European Slave Ships, and the Changing Dynamics of Power in the Early Modern Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, 4 (2007): 679–716. 5. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: John Murray, 2007). Another recent approach to penetrating the overpowering darkness of those holds, still in an aggregate way, is Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). 6. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). For a glimpse of subsequent controversy, “Olaudah Equiano, The South Carolonian? A Forum [Vincent Carretta, Paul E. Lovejoy, Trevor Burnard, Jon Sensbach],” Historically Speaking 7, 3 (2006): 2–16. Paul E. Lovejoy and Robin Law, eds., The Biography of Muhammad Gardo Baquaqua (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2001). 7. Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 8. As in newspaper advertisements meant to locate and retrieve runaway slaves, which have long been marshaled for statistical analysis of aggregated abstract, but thereby isolated, aspects of these dramatic moments in the lives of the (some formerly) enslaved. The trial records of the accused in the slave insurrection panics frequent in the English colonies are now being exploited productively to reveal individuals’ strategies at these moments of high drama, in dealing with enslavement itself, in exploiting the masters’ anxieties to pursue the politics among the enslaved, and saving themselves from official persecution comparable to the famed witch hunts of Salem, Massachusetts. See Jason Sharples, “The Flames of Insurrection: Fear and Power in Early American Slave Societies, 1670–1780,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2010. In the French colonies, see Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Athens: University of Georgia Press 2007). Gunvor Simonsen, “Slave Stories: Gender, Representation, and the Court in the Danish West Indies, 1780s–1820s,” Ph.D. dissertation, European University Institute, Florence, 2007, makes thoughtful and intensive use of trial records to attempt to penetrate the worlds of the enslaved, though once again in moments of crisis, heavily mediated by translation of languages, the formalities of procedure in courts of law, and the conventions of scribal recordings of same.

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See also a study of the New Haven, Connecticut, court records of the inquiry into the Amistad incident: Benjamin Lawrance, “‘All we want is make us free’? The Voyage of La Amistad’s Children Through the Worlds of the Illegal Slave Trade,” in Child Slaves in the Modern World, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). 9. I refer here to my effort to model the experiential aspects of being enslaved, my closest approximation to biography, in “Retention, Re-Invention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities Through Enslavement in Africa and Under Slavery in Brazil,” in Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil During the Era of Slavery, ed. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus/Humanity, 2003), 81–121. 10. Now (and finally) moving toward a systematic statement in Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (inaugural David Brion Davis Lectures, Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition) (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012). 11. In a broad sense, including the abstract modeling of all the modern social sciences—in the phrases evoked here, sociology itself, political economy, economics, anthropology, and intellectual history or the history of ideas. All of these I contrast epistemologically with the historical dynamics I demonstrate here. 12. And does so explicitly in the still-reigning sociology of slavery: Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). The brilliance of this work lies in its exploration of the psychodynamics of this relationship. 13. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Nation-states are not less powerful as motivating concepts for being products of the human imagination. 14. Patterson’s first published monograph, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1967), was explicitly in the tone of historical sociology. 15. Patterson draws this emphasis from the philosophical reflections of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). 16. The most prominent objections were excited by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). For examples of the scorn heaped on Time on the Cross, see Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright, intro. Kenneth Stampp, Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Also held culpable was Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade. The critique of Curtin’s counting has been deflected onto the massive database of slave voyages assembled by David Eltis and many collaborators; for a thoughtful reflection on the issues, Stephanie Smallwood, “Review Essay: Eltis, Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, and Eltis/Behrendt/Richardson/

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Klein, The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, 1 (2001): 253–61. 17. Patterson does not refer to analogous psychoanalytic phrasings of the ambiguities and contradictions of this sort of relationship as a sadomasochistic pairing. This dynamic, including the master’s ultimate dependence on the anything-but-totally dominated slave, resonates for psychologists as a familiar pattern of dominators who attempt to displace internal pain by inflicting suffering on a particular other. 18. As John Edwin Mason terms freedom (in a different sense) in a fine study of the end of slavery at the Cape of Good Hope (southern Africa) in the 1820s and 1830s; see Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003). 19. And generalized further as “weapons of the weak” by James C. Scott, in Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). 20. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Moses I. Finley, “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?” Historia, 8, 2 (1959): 145–64, first proposed the ironic association of the “progress,” at least as celebrated by nineteenth-century Progressives, with the moments in the past—particularly ancient Greece—they identified as paradigmatic. In the United States, Thomas Jefferson, personal slaveholder and civic libertarian, has come to epitomize the apparent paradox yet again. See Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008). 21. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966; rep. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Davis clearly held “slavery” constant as an “institution” to dramatize the change in attitudes in the eighteenth century, and also because the lack of detailed evidence on the history of slavery in Europe (or anywhere else) at the time he wrote left him no real choice. Davis has not yet moved on to consider the utility of the cause of abolition to imperialists of the later nineteenth century; see Joseph C. Miller, “The Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery: Historical Foundations,” in From Chains to Bonds: The Slave Trade Revisited, ed. Doudou Diène (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 159–93; in French, “L’abolition de la traité des esclaves et de l’esclavage: fondements historiques,” in La chaîne et le lien: une vision de la traite négrière, Actes du Colloque de Ouidah (Paris: UNESCO, 1998), 225–66. Others have explored the intricate contradictions of the abolitionist rhetoric of the age of European imperialism, most recently and most comprehensively Suzanne Miers, “Slavery and the Slave Trade as International Issues, 1890–1939,” Slavery and Abolition 19, 2 (1998): 16–37, and Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Pattern (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira, 2003). 22. Which also does not distinguish “slavery” from innumerable other relationships of inequality, in social or civic terms, or overwhelming personal and psychological dominance. At base, it is the civic invisibility, the specifically “civic death,” of the slave

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that underlies the logic of the field, as represented in this discussion by its two most insightful articulators, Davis and Patterson. Historiologically, however, civic identities did not acquire functional, or motivating (i.e., historical) significance—earlier ideological statements aside—until the 1830s and 1840s, and then significantly so mostly in Britain, the United States, and France. Elsewhere “republican” constitutions abolished monarchy, but not the more personalistic, patron-client politics that kings had personified. For a version of this ambiguity, generated by framing the argument within the conventional typological (i.e. abstract, hence not historical) contrast between (rather than the ambiguous, incremental, contradictory process leading from) “empire” and (toward, rather than the reifying “to”) “democracy,” see Jeremy Adalman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113, 2 (2008): 319–40. 23. The logic of this dynamic reverses the vectors of energy denoted by the same word in Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974). For historians, margins are the growth points of the action, not the passive dependencies of Wallerstein’s highly structural European “core.” In the vein of this variant of the venerable “frontier thesis” of American history, see Igor Kopytoff, “The Internal African Frontier: The Making of African Political Culture,” in The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies, ed. Igor Kopytoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 24. Consider the contrasting epistemology of history with the predominantly sociological tone of most of what passes for “world history,” not always sufficiently distinguished from avowedly sociological “world systems” analysis; e.g. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, (New York: New Press, 2000), or the profoundly economistic Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For a historical contemplation of the relationship between processes and particularities, Joseph C. Miller, “A Theme in Variations: A Historical Schema of Slaving in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Regions,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., “The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia,” special issue of Slavery and Abolition 24, 2 (2003): 169–94. 25. I make no claim as to history’s necessity or sufficiency as a way of knowing, but rather only to its distinctiveness and value as such. Historians cannot think without drawing eclectically on the theorizing of our colleagues in the social and human sciences; the converse does not hold. 26. See Chapter 3. 27. For a thoughtful contrast of similar events in the same locale, as experienced differently in differing temporal contexts, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Transformações ideológicas na atlântica América espanhola: as imagens as narrativas das rebeliões de 1624 e 1692 na Cidade do Mexico” in Formas, sons, cores e movimento na modernidade atlântica: Europa, Américas e África, ed. Júnia Furtado (São Paulo: Annablume, 2007), 173–84. Since motivation arises significantly from “contexts” conceptualized as external to the actor, an implicit further defining feature of historical epistemology is that it deals primarily with the collective (or social, or cultural) reactions to human agency. Modern Western thought handles changes internal to the individual actor in the distinct modes

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of psychology or religious experience and blends them with history in biographical (or autobiographical) examination of the self in relation to contexts, thus paradigmatically titled “So-and-So: Life and Times.” The modern liberal emphasis on the individual as actor distinguishes the Western historical epistemology from collective agency of the sort inherent in Marxist “political economy,” as well as from other—in fact, most—nonWestern collective historical epistemologies. These modes of thought do not pose the classic modern apparent contradiction between “the individual and society.” 28. With all respect to the eminent, late Moses I. Finley, “Slavery,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968), vol. 14, 307–13. 29. Edward Ayers, eminent historian of the nineteenth-century American South, formerly dean of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia, now (2010) president of the University of Richmond. 30. Although often involved, like sadomasochistic impulses (see Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), human greed is not a “cause” of slaving in a historical sense; rather, slaving enables abusive actions by placing vulnerable and isolated individuals at the unrestrained disposal of individual inclinations that society, or culture or mores, otherwise contain. 31. A phrase, Google informs us, attributed to Claude Lévi-Strauss in reference to animals (or plant species, depending on the quoter): “Not only are [they] good to eat, but [they] are good to think with’,” from The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), original French La pensée sauvage (1962). Henrik Schunk, “In What Respects Are Animals ‘Good to Think With’? An Evalution of Claude Levi-Strauss Animal Comperative Theory in Totemism” (sic.) http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/HenrikSchunk/Papers/103325/. 32. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 12 (Patterson’s italics, but my parenthetical glosses for implied emphasis relevant to the arguments of this paper). 33. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, 2 vols. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), including Miller, “Introduction: Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves: Experiences from Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Early Atlantic,” vol. 1, 1–38, and “Displaced, Disoriented, Dispersed, and Domiciled: Slaving as a History of Women,” vol. 2, 284–312. Also Campbell, Miers, and Miller, eds., Children in Slavery. 34. E. Ann. McDougall, “A Sense of Self: The Life of Fatma Barka (North/West Africa),” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Études Africaines 32, 2 (1998): 398–412, presents an articulate example. 35. Joseph C. Miller, “Retention, Re-Invention, and Remembering: Restoring Identities Through Enslavement in Africa and Under Slavery in Brazil,” in Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil During the Era of Slavery, ed. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus/Humanity, 2003), 81–121. 36. Sandra E. Greene, “Remembering Slavery: Life Histories from Ghana,” Paper,

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conference on “Rethinking Africa and The Atlantic World”—Stirling University, Scotland, September 3–6, 2009, and other versions of this paper presented in the series of conferences on memories of slavery, or—better—enslavement, organized by Greene, Martin A. Klein, and Alice Bellagamba: “African Trajectories of Slavery: Perceptions, Practices, Experiences” (Centre of African Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, May 25–26, 2007); “Micro-histoire et histoires de vie d’esclaves” (Centre International de Recherches sur les Esclavages, Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, May 29–30, 2007); “Tales of Slavery: Narratives of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Enslavement in Africa” (Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto, May 20–23, 2009); “Searching for the African Voice: Studying Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa” (Buea, Cameroon, December 14–16, 2010). I anticipate publication of Greene’s forthcoming Reading West African Slave Narratives, and of the four or five volumes of “memories” that are emerging from these conferences. See also Ana Lucia Araujo and Paul Lovejoy, orgs., three panels on “Discussing History and Representation: Remembering and Reconstructing the Experiences of Slavery and the Slave Trade,” American Historical Association, 123rd annual meeting, New York, January 2–5, 2009. Also see Indrani Chatterjee, “A Slave’s Quest for Selfhood in EighteenthCentury Hindustan,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 37, 1 (2000): 53–86. 37. Miller, “Retention, Re-Invention, and Remembering.” 38. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 39. The spellchecker on my computer just attempted to correct the spelling of this word to “negrophage”; I refrain from commenting further on this (minor?) mystery of the Digital Age. 40. Miller, Way of Death. 41. And quite innocent of the Old Buzzard. 42. Thanks to the ongoing work of João José Reis, inter alia: A morte é uma festa: Ritos fúnebres e revolta popular no Brasil do séc. XIX (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1991); trans. H. Sabrina Gledhill as Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in NineteenthCentury Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For biography, “Domingos Pereira Sodré: um sacerdote africano na Bahia oitocentista,” Afro-Asia 34 (2006): 237–313, and in English as “Domingos Pereira Sodré, a Nagô Priest in NineteenthCentury Bahia,” in The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa: Essays in Honor of Robin Law, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2008), 387–410; Luis Nicolau Parés and Roger Sansi, eds., Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Also the growing corpus of Luis Nicolau Parés, including Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés, “Marcelina da Silva: A Nineteenth-Century Candomblé Priestess in Bahia (Brazil),” Slavery and Abolition 10, 1 (2010): 3–26; A formação do candomblé: história e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia (Campinas: UNICAMP, 2006). 43. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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44. Among many, Robert Martin Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Pier M. Larson, Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar: History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2000); Rosalind Shaw, The Dangers of Temne Divination: Ritual Memories of the Slave Trade in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Elizabeth Isichei, Voices of the Poor in Africa (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2002); John K. Thornton, “Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World,” William & Mary Quarterly 60, 2 (2003): 273–94; Nicolas Argenti, The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 45. James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 46. Paul E. Lovejoy and Toyin Falola, eds., Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa, expanded edition (New Brunswick, N.J.: Africa World, 2003). 47. See Chapter 3. 48. David Schoenbrun’s linguistic work is demonstrating that the morphemes in Eastern Bantu languages that European observers have glossed as “slave” derive from a semantic root bearing on recency of arrival in the community where the individuals so designated derive their primary social standing. David Schoenbrun, “Language Evidence of Slavery to the Eighteenth Century,” in Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa, ed. Henri Medard and Shane Doyle (Athens: Ohio University Press 2007), 38–75. 49. A very boringly lengthy footnote would only begin to indicate even the recent contributions defining the present states of these debates. 50. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); also various works of Douglas B. Chambers, e.g., “The Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave-Trade: A Rejoinder to Northrup’s ‘Myth Igbo’,” Slavery and Abolition 23, 1 (2002): 101–20, and a review of Carretta’s Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, H-Atlantic, H-Net Reviews, November 2007. 51. Some scholars continue to insist on continuity, at least in nomenclature, even as they demonstrate the dramatic historical changes in categories created around slaving, or defending from it. The starting point is the article by Paul E. H. Hair, “Ethnolinguistic Continuity on the Guinea Coast,” Journal of African History 8, 2 (1967): 247–68; Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations Along the GuineaBissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003), and further in From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 52. Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), for the “Kabre” of northern Togo, but the process was pervasive. 53. The demographics of this process have been modeled, though without extended consideration of their cultural implications, in Patrick Manning, Slavery and

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African Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For language implications, Jan Vansina, “Portuguese vs. Kimbundu: Language Use in the Colony of Angola (1575–c. 1845),” Bulletin des Séances (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer) 47, 3 (2001): 267–81. 54. The point has been argued most explicitly for the late nineteenth-century invention of “Swahili” as the (territorially, not relationally, defined) coastal identity of the great diversity of people assembled there from remote regions in the interior through the slaving of the era. Jonathon Glassman, “The Bondsman’s New Clothes: The Contradictory Consciousness of Slave Resistance on the Swahili Coast,” Journal of African History 32, 2 (1991): 277–312. 55. Anthropological modeling of “cults of affliction” in Africa is relevant and has been introduced into discussions of the diaspora. See, e.g, John M. Janzen, Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World (New York: Garland, 1982); Wyatt MacGaffey, “Twins, Simbi Spirits, and Lwas in Kongo and Haiti,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 211–26. For the zar cult in Islamic North Africa and the Ottoman empire in this sense, Ehud R. Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). 56. See the fascinating study of rumor in eastern Angola in Beatrix Heintze, “A Rare Insight into African Aspects of Angolan History: Henrique Dias de Carvalho’s Records of His Lunda Expedition, 1880–1884,” in, A Scholar for All Seasons: Jill Dias, 1944–2008, ed. Joseph C. Miller, Philip J. Havik, and David Birmingham, special issue of Portuguese Studies Review (Spring 2011). 57. Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–19; J. Lorand Matory, “The English Professors of Brazil: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yorùbá Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, 1 (1999): 72–103. 58. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and numerous subsequent studies. 59. Orlando Patterson explored the complexity of the notion in its classical Greek and Roman roots in Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 60. The classic demonstration of this point, never appreciated for its implications for “slavery” in the early Chesapeake, is Timothy H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). The institutional paradigm of North American slavery that this book broke remains paradoxically stable, in spite of three decades of consistent challenges to it. The book has thus been reissued in a “25th anniversary edition” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). And see John C. Coombs, The Rise of Virginia Slavery, 1630–1730 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, forthcoming). 61. Another field so rich and copious that the literature defies even selective or

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exemplary citation here, other than to acknowledge the contributions of Luis Nicolau Parés cited in n 42. 62. Acknowledging yet another recent contribution along these lines: Beatriz G. Mamigonian and Karen Racine, eds., The Human Tradition in the Black Atlantic 1500– 2000 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). 63. Joseph C. Miller, “Slavery and the Financing of the Atlantic World,” plenary address, conference on Debt and Slavery: The History of a Process of Enslavement, Indian Ocean World Centre—McGill University, Montréal, May 7–9, 2009; “Investing in Poverty—Financial Aspects of the Global Historical Dynamics of Commercialization,” Presentation, Conference on Understanding African Poverty over the Longue Durée, International Institute for the Advanced Study of Cultures, Institutions and Economic Enterprise, Accra, Ghana, July 15–17, 2010. 64. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), is an elegant example, though every study of slaveholders’ wills also makes the point. Chapter 2. Understanding the Slave Experience in West Africa 1. www.slavevoyages.org. 2. One of my most important sources was a questionnaire filled out by administrators through French West Africa in 1904. Only one administrator, J. C, Brevié, later a governor-general, referred to his conversations with slaves and compared their answers to those of their masters. See J. C. Brevié, “Report on Slave in the Cercle of Bamako,” Archives de la République du Sénégal, K 19. Whatever the shortcomings of administrators, the reports in K 16 to K 20 contain much valuable information. 3. The accounts of European explorers are replete with descriptions of slave caravans moving ragged and emaciated persons from one place to another, often chained and yoked and always carefully guarded. See Martin Klein, “The Slave Trade in the Western Sudan During the Nineteenth Century,” in The Human Commodity: Perspectives on the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, ed. Elizabeth Savage (London: Frank Cass, 1992). On the treatment of slaves in transit in the United States, see Robert Gudmestad, The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 4. Pier Larson, “Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora,” Journal of World History 19 (2008): 431–64. 5. J. F. Ade Ajayi, “Samuel Ajayi Crowther of Oyo,” in Africa Remembered, ed. Philip Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 289–316. See also J. F. Ade Ajayi, Patriot to the Core (Ibadan: Spectrum, 2002); Jesse Page, The Black Bishop: Samuel Adjai Crowther (1908; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979). Curtin’s book contains ten documents, seven of them autobiographical. 6. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

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(Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845); Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855); Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage and His History to the Present Time (Hartford, Conn.: Park, 1881). 7. “Adrian Atiman, by Himself,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 21 (1946): 46–76. See also Roger Fouquer, Le docteur Adrien Atiman: médecin-catéchiste au Tanganyika (Paris: Spes, 1964). 8. Randy Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 9. Philip Curtin, “Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of Bondu,” in Curtin, Africa Remembered, 17–59; Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa; Who was a Slave about Two Years in Maryland; and Afterword being Brought to England, was Set Free; and sent to his Native Land in the Year 1734 (London: R. Ford, 1734); Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). 10. William Ansah Sessarakoo, The Royal African, or, Memoirs of the Royal Prince of Annamaboe comprehending a distinct account of his country and family, his condition while a slave in Barbadoes, his voyage from and reception here in England (London: W. Reeve, G. Woodfall and J. Barnes, 1749); Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 11. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, ed. Robert Allison (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1995 [1789]). Most Africans in eighteenth-century England were quite poor, but Equiano was one of several who used their literary talents to contribute to the abolitionist cause. See Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the inhabitants of Great Britain by Ottobah Cugoano (London, 1787). 12. Paul Lovejoy and Robin Law, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2007). 13. Venture Smith, A narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa, but Resident above sixty years in the United States of America (New London: C. Holt, 1798). 14. Kari Winter, ed., The Blind African Slave, or Memoirs of Boyereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 15. Vincent Carretta has argued that Equiano was born in North Carolina, which calls into question his description of Igbo society. See Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). For criticism of this view, see Paul Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006): 317–47.

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16. Paul Lovejoy, “The African Background of Venture Smith” in Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom, ed. James Brewer Stewart (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010). 17. James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince as Related by Himself (Bath: W. Gye, 1770). 18. Maureen Warner-Lewis, Archibald Monteath: Igbo, Jamaican, Moravian (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2007). 19. Paul Lovejoy, “Les origines de Catherine Mulgrave Zimmerman: considerations méthodologiques,” Cahier des Anneaux de la Mémoire 14 (2011): 247–63. 20. Larson, “Horrid Journeying.” 21. Eve Troutt Powell, Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Sudan, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012). 22. Ali Mubarak, Al-Khitat al jadidah al-lawfiqiyah li misr al qahirah (Cairo: 1886– 1998). Also of value as a description of Cairo is Terence Walz, “Slavery and Other TransSaharan Africans in Cairo in 1850,” paper presented to the conference, Tales of Slavery: Narratives of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Enslavement in Africa, Toronto, May 20–23, 2009. This is based on a census in 1848, which provided much detail on slaves and exslaves in Cairo. It is scheduled to be published in a book of papers from this conference and another held in Bellagio, Italy. 23. Babikr Bedri, The Memoirs of Babikr Bedri, trans. from Arabic by Youssef Bedri and George Scott, vol. 1 (London: Oxford, 1969), vol. 2 (London: Ithaca Press, 1980). 24. Salim Wilson, Jehova-Nisi: The Life Story of Hatashil-masha-katish of the Dinka Tribe of the Sudan (Birmingham: C. Caswell, 1901). A later version was published as Salim C. Wilson, I Was a Slave (London: Stanley Paul, 1939). 25. Francil Pierli and Marie Terese Ratti, “Sr. Mary Josephine Zeinab: The Chosen One from the Nuba Mountains,” in Announcing the Light: Sudanese Witnesses to the Gospel (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 1998). On Deng, there is an English language text entitled “Slave and Priest” in Archivo Comboniani Roma, Sezione A, Cosella 30, Busta 1-1. 26. Ida Zanolini, Tale of Wonder: Saint Giuseppina Bakhita (Rome: Canossian Daughters of Charity, General House, 2000). 27. George Michael La Rue, “Zeinab from Darfur: An Enslaved Woman and Her Self-Presentation in Egypt and the Sudan,” in African Voices of Slavery and the Slave Trade, ed. Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene, and Martin Klein (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See also George Michael La Rue, “The Brief Life of Ali, the Orphan of Kordofan: The Egyptian Slave Trade in the Sudan, 1820–35,” in Children in Slavery Through the Ages, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press. 2008); George Michael La Rue, “My Ninth Master was a European: Enslaved Blacks in European Households in Egypt, 1798–1848,” in Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire, ed. Terence Walz and Kenneth Cuno (Cairo:

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American University of Cairo, 2010). On the biography of a slave trader, see George Michael La Rue, “Kabit ‘Ali at Home: A Brief Biography of a Darfur Caravan Leader,” African Economic History 13 (1983): 56–83. 28. James McCarthy, Selim Aga: A Slave’s Odyssey (Edinburgh: Luath, 2007). 29. Nicholas Said, The Autobiography of Nicholas Said, a Native of Bournou, Eastern Soudan, Central Africa (Memphis, Tenn.: Shotwell, 1873). Many scholars refer to him by his original name, Mohammed Ali Ben Said, but Nicholas was the name on his autobiography and probably the name he used in the United States, where he spent the last decades of is life. 30. Anthony Kirk-Greene and Paul Newman, eds., West African Travels and Adventures: Two Autobiographical Adventures from Northern Nigeria (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971). 31. Yves Person, Samori: une révolution Dyula (Dakar: Institut Fondamentale d’Afrique Noire, 1967–75). The amount of detail also makes the book hard to read. 32. Charles-Andre Julien, ed., Les africains, 10 vols. (Paris: Jeune Afrique, 1977). 33. On JaJa, see S. J. S. Cookey, King JaJa of the Niger Delta: His Life and Times, 1821–91 (New York: Nok, 1974); E. J. Alagoa, JaJa of Opobo: The Slave Who Became King (London: Longman, 1970). On Mirambo, see Norman Bennett, Mirambo of Tanzania, ca. 1840–1884 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). On the most important Sudano-Egyptian slave trade, see Flora Shaw, “The Story of Zubehr Pasha, as Told by Himself,” Contemporary Review 52 (1887): 333–49 564–85, 658–85, based on interviews with Zubayr Pasha after his arrest and detention by the Egyptians. 34. The first conference, Finding the African Voice: Narratives of Slavery and Enslavement, was held in Bellagio, Italy, September 24–28, 2007. It aroused so much interest that we organized a larger one, Tales of Slavery: Narratives of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Enslavement in Africa in Toronto in May 2009. In order to get more African participation, I joined with Denis Fomin, Idrissou Alioum, Ibrahima Thioub, and Pail Lovejoy in running a third conference in December 2010 in Buea, Cameroon: Searching for the African Voice in the History of Enslavement, the Slave Trade, and Slavery. 35. We hope to eventually publish five books. In 2013, Cambridge University Press will bring out a collection of documents, African Sources on Slavery and the Slave Trade and Markus Wiener will publish Bitter Legacy: African Slavery Past and Present. We hope during the following year to bring out the methodology of researching African slavery; a collection of papers from the first two conferences; and papers from the Buea conference. 36. Edward A. Alpers, “The Story of Swema: Female Vulnerability in NineteenthCentury East Africa,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). For an earlier story of a slave who found rebirth in religion, see Petro Kilekwa, Slave Boy to Priest: The Autobiography of Padre Petro Kilekwa, trans. from Chinyanja by K. H. Nixon-Smith (London: Universities Mission to Central Africa, 1937). 37. J. Gaume, Suéma, ou La Petite Esclave Africaine enterée vivante: histoire contem-

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poraine dediée aux jeunes chrétiennes d’ancien et du nouveau monde (Paris: Congrégation du Saint Esprit, 1970). 38. Marcia Wright, “Bwanika: Conciousness and Protest Among Slave Women in Central Africa,” in Robertson and Klein, Women and Slavery in Africa, 346–67. 39. Marcia Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa (New York: Lilian Barber, 1993). German missionaries and colonial administrators have also published a number of narratives. Particularly important is Elise KootzKretschmer, Stories of Old Times, trans. M. Bryan (London: Sheldon Press, 1932). 40. Sandra E. Greene, West African Slave Narratives: Texts for Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). See also Greene, “Experiencing Fear and Despair: The Enslaved and Human Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Southern Ghana,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. For a study of memories and silences in the history of the slave trade that focuses, like Greene’s work, on the anlo Ewe, see Ann C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston: Beacon, 2005). 41. Klara Boyer-Rossol, “Makua Life Histories: Testimonies on Slavery and the Slave Trade in Nineteenth-Century Madagascar,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. 42. On a runaway slave in Senegal, see also Hilary Jones, “The Testimony of Lamine Filalou: A Young Man’s Experience of Enslavement and His Struggle for Freedom in French West Africa,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. 43. Larson, “Horrid Journeying.” See also Martin Klein, “Studying the History of Those Who Would Rather Forget,” History in Africa 16 (1989), 209–17. 44. Martin Klein, “He Who Is Without Family Will be the Subject of Many Exactions: A Case from Senegal,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. 45. Felicitas Becker, “Common Choices, Individual Voices: Memories of Slavery Around a Former Slave Plantation in Mingoyo, Tanzania,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. 46. Claire Robertson, “Post-Proclamation Slavery in Accra: A Female Affair?” in Robertson and Klein, 220–45. 47. “The Story of Rashid bin Hassani of the Bisa Tribe,” recorded by W. F. Baldock in Margery Perham, Ten Africans (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 81–119. 48. Ann McDougall, “A Sense of Self: The Life of Fatma Barka,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 32 (1998): 285–315. 49. Emily Ruete/Sayyida Salme, An Arabian Princess Between Two Worlds: Memoirs, Letters Home, Sequels to the Memoirs, Syrian Customs and Usages, ed. E. Van Donzel (Leiden: Brill, 1993). For another aristocratic Muslim woman, see Beverley Mack, “Hajoya Ma’daki: A Royal Hausa Woman,” in Life Histories of African Women, ed. Patricia Romero (London: Ashfield, 1988), 47–77. 50. Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in PostAbolition Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001). 51. Meskerem Brhane, “Narratives of the Past, Politics of the Present: Identity, Sub-

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ordination, and the Haratines of Mauritania,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1997. Brhane is not working in the academic world and probably feels little desire to publish this valuable work, but see Meskerem Brhane, “Histoires de Nouakchott: narrations de Hrâtîns sur le pouvoir et l’identité,” in Groupes serviles au Sahara: approche comparative à partir du cas des arabophones de Mauritanie, ed. Mariella Villesante-de Beauvais (Paris: CNRS, 2000), 195–234. 52. Eric Hahonou, “The Struggle for Political Emancipation of Slave Descendants in contemporary Borgou (Republic of Benin),” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, Bitter Legacy. 53. S. D. Fomin, “Slave Voices from the Cameroon Grassfields: Prayers, Dirges, and a Nuptial Chant,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. 54. Bruce Hall and Yacine Daddi Adoun, “The Arabic Letters of the Ghadames Slaves in the Niger Bend, 1860–1900,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. 55. Marie Rodet, “Gender, Migration, and the End of Slavery in the Region of Kayes, French Soudan,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. Rodet has written extensively on the experiences of women in western Mali in the early twentieth century. 56. Francesca Declich, “Singing Songs and Performing Dances with Embedded Historical Meanings,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. 57. Silke Strickrodt, “Aballow’s Story: The Experience of Slavery in Mid-NineteenthCentury West Africa,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. 58. Trevor Getz, “Interpreting Gold Coast Supreme Court Records: Regina vs. Quamina Eddoo,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. For an expanded history of this case in graphic format, see Trevor Getz and Liz Clarke, Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 59. Kristin Mann, “The Rise of Taiwo Olowo: Law, Accumulation, and Mobility in Early Colonial Lagos,” in Law in Colonial Africa, ed. Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts (Portsmouth N.H.: Heinemann, 1991), 85–107. 60. Kristin Mann, “A Tale of Slavery and Beyond in a British Colonial Court Record: West Africa and Beyond,” in Bellagamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. 61. Holocaust survivors were similar. For many, the first thing they did after the end of the war was to try to find relatives. See for example, Martin Gilbert, The Boys: The Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). 62. The metaphor of looking for tracks comes from Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Use of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write, trans. from French (New York: Vintage, 1964). 63. Zacharie Saha, “Two Slaves from Cameroon: Tabula and Pa Jacob,” in Bella­ gamba, Greene, and Klein, African Sources. Chapter 3. Robinson Charley: The Ideological Underpinnings of Atlantic History 1. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 9, 11. 2. Ibid., 28. In a footnote, he identifies the historian as Eric Hobsbawm.

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3. Ibid., 29. 4. According to the provisions of the bilateral treaties that established Marshall aid, 5 percent of every dollar received had to be spent on an information campaign. David W. Ellwood has done more than anyone to direct our attention to this 5-percent clause, which produced, in his words, “the greatest international propaganda campaign ever produced in peacetime.” See his “Italian Modernization and the Propaganda of the Marshall Plan,” in The Art of Persuasion: Political Communication in Italy from 1945 to the 1990s, ed. Luciano Cheles and Lucio Sponza (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 23. See also his Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar Reconstruction (London: Longman, 1992) and Guenter Bischof and Dieter Stiefel, eds., Hannes Richter, digital ed., Images of the Marshall Plan: Films, Photographs, Exhibits, Posters (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2009), p. 11. 5. My forthcoming book The Recovery elaborates fully on the arguments I present here with separate chapters on France, Germany, Britain, and Europe as a whole, based on documents culled from archives in Koblenz, Paris, London, and Washington. 6. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone from 2nd German ed. (1859; Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1904), 265. The second quote comes from his discussion of primitive accumulation in Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1867), 873, in which he contrasts the “idyllic” depiction of the eighteenth-century world of doux commerce with the world of capital that for him “comes into the world, dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (926). 7. The following summary and quotations are taken from the final script for the film, “Robinson Charley,” National Archives, Kew Gardens, INF12 269. 8. For the best study of this information campaign to date see William Crofts, Coercion or Persuasion? Propaganda in Britain After 1945 (London: Routledge, 1989). 9. Included in the dossier on the first film in the series, Charley: New Town, INF6 1349, under the title, “From White Paper to Colour Cartoon.” There is no date on this document, but since it includes reference to the first three Charley films, the last released in May 1948, it is probable that this press release was written shortly thereafter. Of the hundreds of films produced in this state-sponsored information campaign, Robinson Charley was one of the most often projected, not only at the end of On Our Way, but also in schools, commercial cinemas, and even factories. INF 328 contains a chart comprised of “Titles with the widest coverage between 1948 and 1949.” The first four Charley films occupy four of the top seven spots, with Robinson Charley at number four even though it had only come out in January 1949 (halfway through the period covered in this study). INF12 343 includes summary reports on the information effort, including details on specific sites where Robinson Charley was screened. 10. “From White Paper to Colour Cartoon,” in dossier on Charley: New Town, INF6 1349. For an overview of the films of Halas and Batchelor see Halas and Bachelor Cartoons: An Animated History (London: Southbank, 2007). 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.

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13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. INF12 269, Enclosed in correspondence dated February 17, 1949 from Michael Balfour, information division, Board of Trade to Helen de Mouilpied, Films Division, COI and follow-up note to Miss Mouilpied from Mr. Tritton (also in the Films Division) from February 20, 1948. All quotes concerning this original script from Balfour are taken from this document. 16. From my research into the biographies of the men and women who worked in the Economic Information Unit and the Film Division, I have discovered that they were a highly educated group, mostly Oxbridge graduates, at least one of whom specialized in economics and history. The minor details, in both the proposed script and the final cartoon script, betray an intimate knowledge of The Wealth of Nations as well as Robinson Crusoe. In the final sequence of the proposed script, for example, when Charley proposes to go without pineapples and perfume, he is citing precisely the examples used by Smith to characterize the profligate aristocracy as opposed to the moderate, frugal, and ultimately successful middle-class Smith champions. 17. Letter to Miss de Mouilpied from Mr. Tritton, dated February 20, 1948, in reference to original script for Robinson Charley, INF12 269. 18. INF 12 269, dated February 17, 1949, from Michael Balfour. 19. Ibid., final script also contained in folder INF12 269. 20. Ibid., “Miranda” idea from original script from Balfour; duet idea in note from Denis Forman to John Halas dated February 28,1948. 21. INF12 130, quotations taken from draft memo on “The Film Programme,” 1949–50, prepared by Robert Fraser, explaining what the information officers thought they could accomplish with film. Date: May 17, 1949. 22. INF12 269. Requests were made by the Board of Trade to include the following specific statistics in the final sequence: how much more coal (4 million more tons than last year), more steel (1 1/3 million tons more than last year), more cotton (160 million more tons than last year), and more electricity (1/10 more than last year) Charley must produce. “To accomplish this Mrs. Charley is wanted in the cotton mills. We must all work harder and more cleverly. We must give up wasteful ways that use too many people on a job. We must keep the prices of our goods low, and we can’t expect to have more until we deliver the goods!” None of these statistics or statements made it into the final script. 23. Ibid., This follow-up film was never made. This decision is explained in a letter on August 18, 1948 to S. C. Leslie, Economic Information Unit at the Treasury. Other Charley films were made: Charley Junior (about the Education Act), Farmer Charley, and Coal Miner Charley, but not Charley Saves His Bacon, Clever Charley (on productivity), The Female of the Species (on Mrs. Charley), Wide Boy Charley (on the black market) or Charley Raises the Wind (on inflation)—all of which were discussed and considered in extensive correspondence. 24. INF12 269, Quote from Denis Forman in Film Division on corrections suggested by Board of Trade on April 12, 1948.

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Notes to Pages 77–82

25. Ibid. 26. INF12 229: “Talks and Exhibition, April–August 1949” explains the formula to be employed when projecting this film in the specific case of Leicester. “The program is to consist of one or two selected films taking about twenty minutes, including ‘Robinson Charley.’ The speaker will open with, ‘May I break into this film for a few minutes to tell you how important the people of Leicester are to Britain?’” 27. Many scholars have interpreted Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as a triumphant capitalist adventure tale. See especially Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic, 1979) and Ian Watt, “Robinson Crusoe as Myth,” Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism (April 1951): 95–119. While there is no doubt that Robinson Crusoe rewrites over the nineteenth century became legitimizing, capitalist adventure tales, I see a dramatic difference between Defoe’s complex rendering of both his hero and the world in which he operated and the rewrites that followed. I also believe this corresponds to a major shift in thinking about “economic man” from the early to the late eighteenth century, which was consolidated across the nineteenth century, and revived after World War II. 28. The scholarship on the Great Exhibitions of the nineteenth century is vast. While many books and articles touch on the degree to which these spectacles reinforced a kind of triumphant narrative of liberal capitalism, I am discussing here only Paul Young’s recent Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victoria New World Order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) explicitly discusses the way they narrated a world order around the concept of the division of labor. 29. In the speech in which Marshall announced the Marshall Plan, in June 1947 at Harvard, he explicitly diagnosed the problem facing Europe as the loss of faith in the division of labor, which he defined as “the foundation of civilization,” reprinted in Stanley Hoffmann and Charles Maier, eds., The Marshall Plan: A Retrospective (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984). 30. “Gateway to Germany,” KA, B140 299, Publication on behalf of German Federal Ministry of the Plan (Bonn: Verlag fur Publizistik of MBH Bonn, 1952), images of the rubble, 4–8, text from 6, 8. 31. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, especially second treatise, chapter V, “On Property,” the heart of the possessive individualist rendition of liberal theory C. B. McPherson analyzes in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 32. National Archives, United States (hereafter NA), 286MP Germany, still pictures, 683–734. 33. Bundesarchiven Koblenz, B146 387, full script of “German National Barge” exhibit. 34. “Gateway to Germany,” 31. 35. The decision discussed above to omit “Yankee Doodle Dandy” from the segment of “Robinson Charley” when boats arrived from America is consistent with the British

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government’s general avoidance of what they called “spectacles of generosity” around the red-white-and-blue symbol of the ERP. 36. NA, 286-GER 813–818, photo of exhibit in Nuremburg. 37. This film, like all the films produced by the French government in this period in cooperation with the American information officers in the Marshall Plan office in Paris, is housed at the Ministry of Agriculture in Paris. This summary is based on my reconstruction of the script from watching the film at the ministry. 38. The following description of the Europe Train comes from two sources: (1) the still pictures collection (MP GEN) at NA; (2) Archives Nationales, in Paris, F60ter 394, contains a document outlining the full contents—text, visuals, and mechanical devises —described in the following section. 39. NA, Still Pictures, MP GEN, Image of the Europe Train on the Place des Invalides in Paris, GEN 1197. 40. Ibid., image with visitors listening to their statesmen explain the recovery in the local language in the telephone exhibit lining the outside of the train, GEN 734. 41. Ibid., Europe defined by the circulation of the Europe Train, GEN 709. 42. Ibid., GEN 699 (both hands, as far as I can tell from the poor quality of the photograph, are white). 43. Ibid., GEN 698. 44. Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s Address at Harvard Commencement, June 5, 1947. 45. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). 46. R. R. Palmer, one of the earliest exponents of the idea of the Atlantic Revolutions, is the best example of a historian who devoted a lot of time and energy to rescuing a liberal narrative of the West in the wake of fascism. His textbook, co-written with Joel Colton, A History of Western Civilization, kept alive the postwar narrative of “triumphant liberalism” for decades. 47. Bailyn, Atlantic History, 63–64. 48. Ibid., 107, 111. 49. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). My contribution to this project involves historicizing the liberal narrative itself, demonstrating how, at critical historical moments like The Recovery, what Chakrabarty calls “History 1” was consolidated and reconsolidated in the West. 50. Richard Drayton, “The Collaboration of Labor: Slaves, Empires, and Globalizations in the Atlantic World, ca. 1600–1850,” in Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (New York: Norton, 2002), 99–115, 113. 51. Ibid., 106.

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Notes to Pages 93–96

Chapter 4. Black Pearls: Writing Black Atlantic Women’s Biography 1. The portrait is housed in the Unitätsarchiv, Moravian Church Archive, in Herrnhut, Germany. It can be seen online at the “Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas” website, http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery Portraits and Illustrations of Individuals, second row from the bottom. 2. Maria’s story is described in Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 3. Marjoleine Kars, “History in a Grain of Sand: Teaching the Historian’s Craft,” Journal of American History 83 (March 1997): 1340; David Gentilcore, “Anthropological Approaches,” in Writing History: Theory and Practice, 2nd ed., ed. Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 165–86, n23 on “ethnographies of the particular;” Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 5; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (New York: Penguin, 1982); Jonathan D. Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (New York: Penguin, 1998); John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Random House, 1994); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990); Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 4. Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 133. 5. Philip D. Curtin, Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967); Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, 2007). Among many works on the idea of Black Atlantic history, I cite one representative example: Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” in Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil, ed. Kristin Mann and Edna Bay (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 3–21. 6. Anthologies include Vincent Carretta, Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); John Saillant and Joanna Brooks, eds.,“Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002); and Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr, eds., Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995). On Equiano, see James Walvin, An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797 (London: Continuum, 1998); Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Paul E. Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006): 317–47; the exchange between Carretta and Lovejoy in Slavery and Abolition 28 (2007): 115–19, 121–25; and

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Alexander X. Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation, and Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting Narrative,” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (2006): 123–48. 7. Jerome S. Handler, “Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British America,” Slavery and Abolition 23 (2002): 23–56; Paul Lovejoy, “Narratives of Transatlantic Slavery in the Life Stories of Two Muslims,” in Africa and Trans-Atlantic Memories: Literary and Aesthetic Manifestations of Diaspora and History, ed. Paul Lovejoy, Naana Opoku-Agyemong, and David Trotman (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2008); Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1999); James Brewer Stewart, ed., Venture Smith and the Business of Slavery and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010); Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Paul E. Lovejoy and Robin Law, eds., The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 2001); Robert E. Desrochers, “‘Not Fade Away’: The Narrative of Venture Smith, an African American in the Early Republic,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 40–66; James H. Sweet, “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 279–306, quote at 304; Maureen Warner-Lewis, Archibald Monteath: Igbo, Jamaican, Moravian (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2007); Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint L’Ouverture (New York: Vintage, 2008); J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009); William R. Ryan, The World of Thomas Jeremiah: Charles Town on the Eve of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 8. Trevor Burnard, “The British Atlantic,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 111–36, 130; Michael Craton, “Hobbesian or Panglossian? The Two Extremes of Slave Conditions in the British Caribbean, 1783 to 1834,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (1978): 324–56. 9. Recent works on African and African American women in slavery and freedom include Darlene Clark Hine, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Patricia Morton, Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating

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Notes to Pages 99–100

Perspectives on the American Past (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996); Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Claire C. Robertson and Martin Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (New York: Heinemann, 1997); Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, vol. 2, The Modern Atlantic (Athens.: Ohio University Press, 2007); Pamela Scully and Diane Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005); David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., Free Women of Color in the Americas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Sandra Lauderdale Graham: Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 10. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, ed. Roger N. Lancaster and Michaela di Leonardo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 434–38. The term “articulate silences” is adapted from King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Jennifer M. Spear, “The Distant Past of North American Women’s History,” Journal of Women’s History 16 (Winter 2004): 41–49. On disparities in sources as a function of archival bias, see also Kimberly Springer, “Unexpected: Women, Sources, and Histories,” Journal of Women’s History 16 (Winter 2004): 28–33. 11. Women’s narratives include Belinda, “Petition of an African Slave, to the Legislature of Massachusetts,” Boston, 1782, in Carretta, Unchained Voices, 142; Katharine Faull Eze, “Self-Encounters: Two Eighteenth-Century African Memoirs from Moravian Bethlehem,” in Crosscurrents: African Americans, Africa, and Germany in the Modern World, ed. David McBride, LeRoy Hopkins, and C. Aisha Blackshire-Belay (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998), 29–52; and Jerome S. Handler, “Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in Barbados,” Slavery and Abolition 19 (1998): 129–41. 12. John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Eddie Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 13. Leslie Alexander, “The Challenge of Race: Rethinking the Position of Black Women in the Field of Women’s History,” Journal of Women’s History 16 (Winter 2004): 50–60. Examples of nineteenth-century women’s narratives and other writings include William Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nine-

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teenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, ed. Moira Ferguson (London: Pandora, 1987); and Moira Ferguson, The Hart Sisters: Early African Caribbean Writers, Evangelicals, and Radicals (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 14. John Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1685–1706 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Daniel L. Schafer, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008); Rebecca J. Scott, “Microhistory Set in Motion: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Itinerary,” in Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz, ed. George Baca, Aisha Khan, and Stephan Palmié (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 84–111; Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Michel Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727–1852,” William and Mary Quarterly 59 (2002); Cassandra Pybus, “‘One Militant Saint’: The Much Traveled Life of Mary Perth,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9 (2008); Michael Zeuske, “Two Stories of Gender and Slave Emancipation in Cienfuegos and Santa Clara, Central Cuba: A Microhistorical Approach to the Atlantic World,” in Scully and Paton, Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, 181–98; Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 15. C. G. A. Oldendorp, History of the Mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John, ed. Johann Jakob Bossart, English trans. and ed. Arnold R. Highfield and Vladimir Barac (Barby, 1777 republished Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma, 1987). When published in 1777, this volume was a severe abridgement of Oldendorp’s massive manuscript. In recent years an editorial team of scholars has restored and published Oldendorp’s original text in its four-volume entirety. Oldendorp, Historie der caribischen Inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan: Kommentiere Edition des Originalmanuskirptes, vol. 1, ed. Gudrun Meier, Stephan Palmié, Peter Stein, and Horst Ulbricht; vol. 2, parts 1–3, ed. Hartmut Geck, Gudrun Meier, Stephan Palmié, Aart H. van Soest, Peter Stein, and Horst Ulbricht (Berlin: Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000, 2002). For more explanation, see Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival, 252 n7, 235–38. Chapter 5. Recovered Lives as a Window into the Enslaved Family 1. Taking into account the people who had left from the southern ports, as well as from Boston and other northern ports, plus those in the army and navy, the number of slave runaways who left America as free people must have been close to 9,000. See my analysis in “Thomas Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 62 (April 2005): 244–64.

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Notes to Pages 108–112

2. For an account of the victory parade and fireworks, see Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2002), 183. 3. The original of the Book of Negroes is held at PRO30/33/100 in the Archives of the United Kingdom (NAUK). This has been digitalized and carefully transcribed and is available at the website http://www.blackloyalist.info. A copy sent to Congress in 1783 is held in the National Archives of the United States, but it is incomplete, with about a quarter of the names missing. 4. Gary Nash did a wonderful job in recovering the life of the slave Thomas Peters in his marvelous essay “Thomas Peters: Millwright and Deliverer,” http://revolution.h-net. msu.edu/essays/nash.html. 5. Ellen Wilson Gibson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: Capricorn, 1976); Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); Gary Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York: Ecco, 2006); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon, 2006); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Vintage, 2011). 6. Kevin Lowther, The African American Odyssey of John Kizell: A South Carolina Slave Returns to Fight the Slave Trade in His African Homeland (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011). 7. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: Norton, 2008). 8. See also Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997); Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day: African-American Families of Monticello (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000). 9. Manuscript records, Princess Anne County Box 1, barcode 1156718, Virginia State Library. 10. Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 244. 11. The branch of the Payne family connected to Washington was that of William Payne of Westmoreland County, Virginia, and his son William Payne, who moved to Fairfax County, Virginia, about 1733, while he maintained his property next to the Washingtons’ in Westmoreland County.  A later descendant, Colonel William Payne, was one of George Washington’s honorary pall-bearers. 12. The Payne family are well documented at Stratford Hall, http://www.stratfordhall.org/learn/paynes.php. 13. The land was adjacent to Augustine Washington’s original plantation and he got the land from Elizabeth Payne and her husband. See Brooke Payne, The Paynes of Virginia (Richmond: William Byrd Press, 1937).

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14. Muster Book for Free Black Settlement of Birchtown 1783–84, MG9/B9-14, National Archives of Canada. 15. The Norfolk Tithables have been put in order and transcribed by Elizabeth Wingo and her son Bruce. See Norfolk County Tithables, vol. 1, 1730–1750; vol. 2, 1751– 1765; vol. 3, 1766–1780 (Norfolk: Va.: E.B. Wingo, 1979, 1981, 1985). Having checked them against the originals, I can vouch that they have a high degree of accuracy. 16. The Princess Anne County Tithables are in several boxes at the State Library of Virginia, barcode numbers 1183691, 1156718, 1114833. 17. The information about hundreds of individuals plus supporting documentation can be found on my website, http://www.black.loyalist.info. 18. This could be one of two men mustered with Lord Dunmore in May 1776: Edward Jackson or Francis Jackson, neither of whom reappear in the records afterward and who doubtless died of epidemic disease. See Peter Jennings Wrike, The Governor’s Island: Gwynn’s Island Virginia During the Revolution (Gwynne, Va.: Gwynn’s Island Museum, 1993), 227. I believe it was most likely Edward Jackson, identified as Ned in Colonel Tucker’s tithable lists. 19. Land sale deed reprinted in Clara Dennis, Down in Nova Scotia (Toronto: Ryerson, 1934), 342–43. 20. Slaves who correspond in age and first name to James Jackson, Edward Jackson, John Jackson, James Thompson, Samuel Thompson, and Betty Tucker can be consistently found in Tucker’s slave lists. See Wingo, Norfolk County Tithables. 21. Memorial of Talbot Thompson, AO 13/25/479 National Archives of UK (NAUK). 22. I am greatly indebted to Mick Nicholls for confirming the identity of Jane Thompson’s husband and providing me with the documents of their respective manumissions. See his research on Talbot Thompson in “Straddling Hell’s Boundaries: Profiles of Free People of Color in Early Virginia,” manuscript, 1991, Rockefeller Library, Williamsburg, Virginia. 23. The construction of the Jane Jackson-Thompson family is partial and only includes children who can be located in British records between 1775 and 1783 and who correspond to slaves named in Tucker’s inventory and tithable lists. All source material on which I have drawn is available at www.blackloyalist.info. 24. As Jeffery Bolster has shown in both the Caribbean and the Chesapeake, slaves regularly had control of smaller coastal and inter-island vessels, acting as captains and managing crew. See W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 132. 25. Will of John Tucker, transcribed in The Southside Virginian: A Journal of Genealogy and History 11, 1 (1993): 19–20. 26. Memorial of Matthew Tucker, AO 12/99/15 (NAUK). 27. Joseph Tucker is named in the muster of Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, Virginia Gazette (Dixon and Hunter), August 31, 1776. 28. Robert Tucker, Jr., took the unusual step of writing a memorial to the governor stressing Jane’s fidelity and extraordinary service to his family. The close relation-

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Notes to Pages 118–121

ship between elite house slaves and white families is discussed in Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) and Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988). 29. For a discussion of slave community in eighteenth-century Virginia, one still cannot go past Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the EighteenthCentury Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). See also Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 5. 30. See Michael L. Nichols, “Aspects of the African American Experience in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg and Norfolk,” Colonial Williamsburg Research Report 330, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library, Williamsburg, Va., 1991, and Thomas C. Parramore, Peter C. Stewart, and Tommy L. Bogger, Norfolk: The First Four Centuries (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994). 31. Information about Talbot Thompson working as an independent contractor comes from communication with Peter Wrike, research fellow, Omohundro Institute of Early American Culture and Society. 32. This was Edward Hack Moseley, a Virginia grandee who was, like Robert Tucker, a member of the House of Burgesses and a partner in developing the Dismal Swamp. 33. Petition of Talbot Thompson, Executive Journals of the Council of Virginia (EJCV) 6:200. 34. See Nichols, “Aspects of African American Experience.” 35. Parramore, Stewart, and Bogger, Norfolk, 70–85. 36. EJCV 6:200. 37. Tucker’s stepbrothers were William and Thomas Nelson and his brother-in-law was Richard Corbin; the three were arguably the most powerful men in Virginia. 38. Princess Anne County minute book, 7 [1753–62], 488. 39. The discussion of Fulcher’s will is in EJCV 3: 332; legal issues around the Anderson family’s land grant can be found in Order Book of the County Court of Norfolk court 1710–17, 118–19, 134, 137, 138, 141, 145, 150, 155, 158, 171, 191; 1734–36, 1, 10–11; and the Norfolk Deed book 10:2a, 42b. For a fuller account of the Anderson family and other free black families from Virginia, see www.freeafricanamericans. com/. 40. Emory Evans, ed., “A Question of Complexion: Documents Concerning the Negro and Franchise in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 71 (1963): 414. 41. See Brown, Good Wives, 227–41. 42. William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, From the First Session of the Legislature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969), vol. 4, 133. 43. October 21, 1762 Orders 1759–63, 210.

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44. Inventory of Colonel Robert Tucker, Norfolk County Appraisements, 1755– 1783: 117a–120. 45. The forced sale of Tucker’s fifty or more slaves for debt is very reminiscent of the slave auction that followed Jefferson’s death, where the free man Joseph Fossett negotiated with prospective buyers to secure the future of his children and grandchildren. See Cassandra Pybus, “Jefferson and Slavery,” in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Francis D. Cogliano (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 271–83. 46. Auction notice in Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), August 18, 1768. 47. Claim of Cornelius Calvert in “General Assembly House of Delegates reports of Losses Sustained from the British, 1782–1783,” Box I Accession 40909 State Records Collection, Library of Virginia. 48. Indenture between Samuel Boush and Talbot Thomson, December 24, 1770, AO 13/25/479 (NAUK). 49. The name Othello appears in the 1773 tithables, but the following year the name is Murray, probably the same man. The Loyalist claims submitted on behalf of Talbot Thompson included an unnamed male slave killed at the battle of Great Bridge whom I assume to be Othello/Murray. 50. Joseph Anderson was bound to William Stevenson June 18, 1772, Norfolk Deed Book 25, f247. 51. Williams Stevenson was the person who arranged for the Methodist preacher Joseph Pilmore to come to Norfolk. See Frederick Maser and Howard Maag, ed. The Journal of Joseph Pilmore, Methodist Itinerant for the Years August 1 1769 to January 2 1774 (Philadelphia: Message Publishing for United Methodist Church, 1969), 148–54. There is strong circumstantial evidence that Jane and Talbot Thompson were among the early converts to Methodism; their family were all Methodist and she was part of a Methodist company in Birchtown. 52. See William Wallace Bennett, Memorials of Methodism in Virginia (Richmond: author, 1871); William Warren Sweet, Virginia Methodism: A History (Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1955). 53. Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism in the Southern Mind, 1770–1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) provides an excellent discussion of the potency of early Methodism. One early black preacher in Norfolk was Mary Perth and an account of her proselytizing comes from a letter from Rev. Clarke, the chaplain in Sierra Leone, July 29, 1796, published in Evangelical Magazine 4 (1796): 464. See also Cassandra Pybus, “‘One Militant Saint’: The Much Traveled Life of Mary Perth,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9, 3 (Winter 2008). 54. “A petition from the Methodist Society of Norfolk to the Bishop of London May 18, 1774,” Fulham Palace Papers. The fifty-eight signatures, all prominent white men, represent about half the membership. 55. Andrew Sprowle was singled out as a prominent Methodist convert by Francis Asbury. See Elmer T. Clark, J. Manning Potts, and Jacob S. Paton, eds., The Journals and Letters of Francis Asbury, vol. 1 (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1958).

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Notes to Pages 124–129

56. An account of the hurricane, which Asbury saw as a stern message from God, can be found in The Journals and Letters of Francis Asbury, 163. 57. James Somerset was owned by Scots merchant Charles Steuart; his name can be found in the same tithable list as James Jackson. 58. See the “Newsworthy Somerset Case” on the Colonial Williamsburg website, http://research.history.org/Historical_Research/Research_Themes/ThemeEnslave/ Somerset. 59. Based on the evidence of the Norfolk Tithable lists after 1774 and the claims lodged by Norfolk slave owners for property lost to the British, “General Assembly House of Delegates reports of Losses Sustained from the British, 1782–1783.” 60. Tithables for Princess Anne County, 1775. 61. In response to a request from the Continental Congress for experienced Virginia pilots, William Ballard and Edward Cooper were dispatched to Philadelphia. Since their slaves did the piloting, it stands to reason they took their pilots London Jackson and James Thompson with them, which explains why these two were not able to defect at the same time as James Jackson. 62. “Journal and reports of the Commissioners Appointed by the Act of 1777 to ascertain Losses occasioned to individuals by the burning of Norfolk and Portsmouth in the year 1776,” held in the Norfolk Public Library. This document recorded that Talbot Thompson lost four houses worth 400 pounds. His land and animals were confiscated and sold. For contemporary accounts of the fire, see Robert L. Scribner, ed., Revolutionary Virginia: the Road to Independence, 7 vols. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976–1983), vol. 5, 15–17. 63. For the smallpox epidemic see Phillip Ranlet, “The British, Slaves, and Smallpox in Revolutionary Virginia,” Journal of Negro History 84 (1999): 218 and Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 17–19. 64. “Women embarked at Mill Point May 21, on Board the Dunluce” in Virginia Gazette (Hunter and Dixon), August 13, 1776 . 65. Grace was recorded in the tithables of Mary Thruston in 1778. 66. James Robertson Esq; Captain General and Governor-in-Chief of the Province of New York, November 18, 1782, AO 13/25/479 (NAUK). 67. Various lists of settlers for Sierra Leone include London Jackson and family; John Jackson and family; James Thompson and his family; Hannah Jackson and her sons; Grace Thompson and her daughter; and Betty Tucker. See the “List of Blacks who gave their names for Sierra Leone” CO217/63 (NAUK) and “List of Methodists and Their Tutors...Sierra Leone,” Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago. 68. Names of poorest and most distressed sufferers of fires, 1792. RG 1, vol. 224, 3, p. 99, PANS, cited in Birchtown Archaeological Survey, comp. Laird Niven (Lockeport, Nova Scotia, 1994).

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Chapter 6. From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman: The Story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo I would like to thank members of our research group, Slavery and the Invention of Freedom, at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, which was also presented and commented on at the conference The Biographical Turn and the Black Atlantic, at the National Humanities Center, particularly Lisa Lindsay and John Sweet. Luis Nicolau Parés and Lisa Earl Castillo read and commented on this chapter. Research was supported by the Brazilian Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento. 1. For wealth distribution in nineteenth-century Salvador, see Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, Bahia, uma província no Império (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1992), esp. 607. 2. See Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684–1745,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54, 4 (1974): 603–35. 3. João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil: a história do levante dos malês em 1835, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 370. 4. “Mapa demonstrativo do número de Africanos libertos nesta Cidade, com declaração do negócio em que se empregão,” March 20, 1847, Arquivo Nacional, IJ1 403, Ministério da Justiça. Ofícios do Presidente da Província da Bahia. 5. Eduardo Frutuoso, Paulo Guinote, and António Lopes, O movimento do porto de Lisboa e o comércio luso-brasileiro (1769–1836) (Lisbon: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses, 2001), 505–75. 6. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, voyages # 51234 (1795) and # 51282 (1797). On mortality for the Bight of Benin/Bahia slave route in 1776–1830, see David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 184. 7. Bill of sale in Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (APEBA), Livro de Notas do Tabelião, vol. 150, fls. 202v–203. Slave prices in Katia Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1888 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 79. 8. Voyages database, voyages # 51434 and # 51476. 9. On the 1804 jihad, see, for instance, Murray Last, The Sokoto Caliphate (New York: Humanities Press, 1967); Hugh Johnston, The Fulani Empire of Sokoto (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); Mervyn Hiskett, The Sword of the Truth: The Life and Times of the Shehu Usuman Dan Fodio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); and Joseph P. Smaldone, Warfare in the Sokoto Caliphate: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), among many titles. On the Bahian trans-Atlantic slave trade, see Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Benin et Bahia de Todos os Santos (Paris: Mouton, 1968). 10. The distribution of the African-born slaves by nation is based on an ongoing investigation of slave lists in probate records. A previous study found the Hausa represented 17 percent of the African slaves between 1811 and 1819, the Nagô 15 percent,

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and the Jeje 20.4 percent. See Maria José Andrade, A mão de obra escrava em Salvador, 1811–1860 (Salvador: Corrupio, 1988), 189. 11. On the Hausa revolts in Bahia, see João José Reis, “La révolte haoussa de Bahia en 1807: résistance et contrôle des esclaves au Brésil,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 61, 2 (2006): 383–418; Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil, chap. 3; Stuart B. Schwartz, “Cantos e Quilombos numa Conspiração de Escravos Haussás: Bahia, 1814,” in Liberdade por um fio: a história dos quilombos no Brasil, ed. João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 373–406. 12. APEBA, Judiciária, 04/1457/1926/18, fl. 1. 13. Arquivo da Curia Metropolitana de Salvador (ACMS), Livro de batismos da Conceição da Praia, 1824–1834, fls. 25v, 39v, and 44. 14. Luiz Maria da Silva Pinto, Diccionario da Lingua Brasileira (Ouro Preto: Typographia de Silva, 1832); and Antonio de Moraes Silva, Diccionario da língua Portugueza (Lisbon: Officina de Simão Tadeu Ferreira, 1789). 15. APEBa, Judiciária, 51/1821/04, fls. 434–38. 16. Bill of sale by João Coelho da Silva, December 12, 1833, APEBa, Judiciária, 51/1821/04, fl. 433. 17. “Factura que fasemos por nossa Conta e risco para a Costa d’Africa em diferentes Embarcações como abaixo vai declarado,” August 12, 1840, APEBa, Judiciária, 51/1821/04, fl. 95. 18. See figures on the slave trade to Bahia in the Voyages database website, consulted December 9, 2011. On tolerance of the imperial government with what the author calls “systemic” slave contraband, see Tâmis Parron, A política da escravidão no Império do Brasil, 1826–1831 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2011), esp. chap. 2. See also Robert Conrad, Tumbeiros: o tráfico de escravos para o Brasil (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985). 19. Correio Mercantil, 445 (April 19, 1838). 20. Manoel Joaquim Ricardo to Joaquim Antonio da Silva, Bahia, April 24, 1841, National Archives of Great Britain, Foreign Office, 315, 50, doc. 48. I thank Lisa Castillo for calling my attention to this document. The letters were confiscated on board the Nova Fortuna, a brig seized by the Royal Navy. On kola, see Paul Lovejoy, Karavans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700–1900 (Zaria, Nigeria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1980). 21. On the formation of a community of returnees in West Africa and their involvement with trans-Atlantic commerce, see, among other references, Verger, Flux et reflux, chap. xvi; Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros: os escravos libertos e sua volta à África (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1988); Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slave Port, 1727–1892 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 4 and 5; Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), chap. 1; Monica Lima, “Entre margens: o retorno à África de libertos no Brasil, 1830–1870” (Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2008); Robin Law and Kristin Mann, “West Africa in the Atlantic Community: The Case of the Slave Coast,” William and Mary Quarterly 56, 2 (1999):

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307–34; and Lisa Lindsay, “To Return to the Bosom of their Fatherland: Brazilian Immigrants in Nineteenth Century Lagos,” Slavery & Abolition 15, 1 (1994): 22–50. 22. Walter W. Lewis and M. L. Melville, “Report of the Case of the Brazilian Brigantine ‘Nova Fortuna,’ Francisco José da Mota, Master,” Sierra Leone, June 22, 1841, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Class A, Correspondence with the British Commissioners Relating to the Slave Trade (London: William Clowes, 1842), 152. 23. APEBa, Judiciária, n° 51/1821/04, fl. 97. Pierre Verger, Flux et reflux, 456–57 and passim; and Ubiratan Castro de Araújo, “1846, um ano na rota Bahia-Lagos: negócios, negociantes e outros parceiros,” Afro-Ásia 21/22 (1998–99): 91. Cruz Rios had business with other small African-born slave traders who had once been slaves themselves in Bahia, according to Pierre Verger, Os libertos: sete caminhos na liberdade de escravos na Bahia no século XIX (Salvador: Corrupio, 1992), 117–18. About Joaquim Cruz Rios’s connection with the illegal slave trade, see also Pierre Verger, “Influence du Brésil ao Golfe du Benin,” in Les Afro-Américains (Dakar: IFAN, 1952), 59ff; on Rios the planter, see B. J. Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 136. 24. APEBa, Judiciária, n ° 51/1821/04, fl. 430v. 25. For a good synthesis of the literature, see Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. chap. 9. 26. María E. Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), chap. 7, regarding slaves owned by the Spanish crown who had, nevertheless, a special legal status; for a couple of examples from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarding more conventional slaves, see Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22, 2 (2004): 339–69. Orlando Patterson’s claim that the servus vicarius (the slave of a slave) was “a universal occurrence” should be taken cautiously. See his Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 184. 27. Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil (London, 1816), 427. 28. Arquivo da Prefeitura Municipal de Rio de Contas (APMRC), Livro de Notas do Tabelião,1738–1742, n° 6, fls. 29–30; inventário de Cristovão Ribeiro de Novais, 1746, APMRC, Judiciário, Fundo Cartório dos Feitos, Série Inventários. I thank Katia Lorena for providing copies of these two documents. 29. Carlos Eugênio L. Soares, “Sacramento ao pé do mar: batismo de africanos na freguesia da Conceição da Praia, 1700–1751,” in Olhares sobre o mundo negro: trabalho, cultura e política, ed. Antônio Liberac, C. S. Pires, and Rosy de Oliveira (Curitiba: Progressiva, 2010), 83, table 8. 30. ACMS, Livro de batismos da Conceição da Praia, 1824–1834, fls. 78, 83, 108, 126v, 135v, 138, 139, 160v, 179v, 235v, 249. I believe that slaves were buying slaves in the context of a buyer’s market, in which the supply of slaves had increased, and prices decreased, as a result of the intensification of the trans-Atlantic trade in the years before the announced 1831 prohibition.

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31. ACMS, Livro de batismos da Conceição da Praia, 1824–1834, fl. 108 (September 2, 1827); fl.. 179v; and ACMS, Livro de batismos da Conceição da Praia, 1834–1844, fl. 18. 32. APEBA, Policia do Porto, 1851–55, livro 5666, fl. 305; and APEBA, Policia do Porto, 1855–56, livro 5669, fl. 34. 33. I discuss this law in detail in Reis, Rebelião escrava, 498–503. 34. There were also market reasons, for it was more profitable to own slaves than to own urban or rural property: the income brought home by hire-out slaves was usually higher than that obtained from renting houses or land. Slavery was ideal for the small investor as long as the prices of slaves did not get too high, as they did after the final abolition of the trans-Atlantic trade in 1850. See Zephyr Frank, Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004). 35. Correio Mercantil, March 3, 1847. 36. APEBA, Livro de notas do tabelião, 361, fl. 94. 37. APEBA, Judiciária, 04/1457/1926/18, fl. 1v. 38. See Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, “Viver e morrer no meio dos seus,” Revista USP 28 (1995–96): 179. 39. APEBA, Policia. Pedidos de passaportes, 1856–57, 6364. 40. For Bahia, see Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684–1745.” Hispanic American Historical Review 54, 4 (1974): 603–35; Kátia M. de Queirós Mattoso, “A Propósito de cartas de alforria,” Anais de História 4 (1972): 23–52; Mieko Nishida “Manumission and Ethnicity in Urban Slavery: Salvador, Brazil, 1808–1888,” Hispanic American Historical Review 73, 3 (1993): 361–91. The same rule applied for the rural setting: Katia Lorena Novaes Almeida, “Alforrias em Rio de Contas—Bahia, século XIX,” M.A. thesis, Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2006. 41. See João José Reis, Domingos Sodré, um sacerdote africano (São Paulo: Companhia des Letras, 2008); Rachael E. Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Renato da Silveira, O candomblé da Barroquinha: processo de constituição do primeiro terreiro baiano de Keto (Salvador: Maianga, 2006); and Luis Nicolau Parés, A formação do candomblé: história e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia (Campinas: UNICAMP, 2006). 42. Thomaz Ignacio Ricardo´s manumission was registered in 1841, but he had been freed—probably on condition of accompanying his master until the latter died, a very common proviso—since 1812 “for the good services . . . and good behavior” as a slave of Manoel José Ricardo. APEBA, Livro de Notas do Tabelião, 275, fl. 76. 43. See Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés, “Marcelina da Silva e seu mundo: novos dados para uma historiografia do Candomblé ketu,” Afro-Ásia 36 (2007): 111–50. 44. Interview conducted by Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés with Pére Vil­ aça, Ouidah, Brazil, February 20 and 27, 2012. I thank these scholars for this information. 45. Pompilio Manoel de Castro to chief of police, July 26, 1862, APEBA, Polícia, 6234. 46. Reis, Rebelião escrava, 342–48.

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Chapter 7. David Dorr’s Journey Toward Selfhood in Europe 1. For analysis of the cultural significance of nineteenth-century African American travelers, see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Gilroy includes a helpful brief commentary (19–29) on the trans-Atlantic travels of Martin Delany (1812–85), whose experiences in Canada, Africa, and England before the Civil War influenced his “transnational” ideas and identity. See also the discussions of Delany’s travel and writing in Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), esp. 1–17, 177–223, and Levine’s introduction to Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 1–22. A helpful account of William Wells Brown’s travels in Europe (1849–54) is available in Ezra Greenspan’s introduction to William Wells Brown, A Reader, ed. Ezra Greenspan (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2008), ix–xxvi. Like David Dorr, Brown was born into slavery (in Kentucky), but in contrast to Dorr he traveled after escaping from enslavement. This volume includes excerpts from the travel book that Brown (1814–84) wrote about his journeys in England and France, The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (Boston: Jewett, 1855). Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) was born in Africa, transported to America as an enslaved child, and grew up in Massachusetts and worked in domestic service until she was twenty. Educated by her Massachusetts family, Wheatley began to write poetry and traveled to England, where she gained her freedom. She returned to Boston, married, and lost all three of her infant children before her own early death in 1784. See the helpful discussions of Wheatley’s life in Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. and intro. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2001), xiii–xxxvii, and in John C. Shields, Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation: Backgrounds and Contexts (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008). 2. The quotation comes from Joseph Miller’s wide-ranging chapter in this volume, “A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn.” Miller offers provocative observations on the social dislocations that flowed from enslavement, and (after reading his insightful analysis) I would like to describe my account of David Dorr’s European travels as a dialogical exchange with his interpretation of the enslaved person’s response to the “terrifying lack of control,” the “inexplicable abandonment,” and the experience of being completely “alone” in a disorienting social context. 3. For Gilroy’s discussion of the cross-cultural “double consciousness” among black writers, see the first chapter (“The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity”) in The Black Atlantic, 1–40. This transnational interest in connecting African and European cultural histories clearly appears in Dorr’s book. For more on the narrative conventions that shaped African American autobiographical writings, see the well-informed analysis in William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Pressm 1986), 1–31; and for diverse examples of African American travel writing since the early nineteenth century,

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see Farah J. Griffin and Cheryl J. Fish, eds., A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). 4. David F. Dorr, A Colored Man Round the World, ed. Malini Johar Schueller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 7, 12, 61. This is a modern reprint of the first edition, published in Cleveland by Dorr in 1858 (all my quotations from this book use Dorr’s spelling and grammar). The author was identified as a “Quadroon.” Schueller’s excellent introduction to this reprinted edition (iv–xliii) discusses the complexity of the multiracial “quadroon” identity in antebellum New Orleans (xv–xvii). Racial boundaries became more rigid in Louisiana during the 1850s, and in 1857 the legislature made the manumission of slaves illegal. This was the slave/race system from which Dorr fled. See the discussion of Louisiana’s racial boundaries in Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 14–16. 5. Miller, “Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn.” 6. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 12. For examples of allusions to Byron and Shakespeare, see 27, 47, 140. 7. Ibid., xiii. The entire, anonymous review from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 20, 1858, is reproduced in Schueller’s introduction. 8. This biographical information comes from Schueller’s Introduction, xi–xv. Few scholars have written anything about Dorr’s life or writings. In addition to Schueller’s well-researched account, there are brief discussions of Dorr’s work in Erik S. Schmeller, Perceptions of Race and Nation in English and American Travel Writers, 1833–1914 (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 55–59, and William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 61–67. 9. Schueller provides this summary of Dorr’s military career in the Introduction to Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, xii–xv. Information about the campaigns of the Seventh Ohio Infantry Regiment can be found at “Ohio Civil War,” http://www.ohiocivilwar.com/cw7.html. 10. Schueller, Introduction, in Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, xxxix. 11. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 14. 12. Ibid., 16–17. 13. Ibid., 17–18. 14. Ibid., 30–31. 15. Ibid., 60, 72, 165–66, 177, 184–85, 188. 16. Ibid., 190. Charles W. March (1815–64) had published a memoir, Reminis­cences of Congress (New York, 1850), shortly before his trip to Europe. George W. Kendall (1809–67) had traveled widely in parts of Mexico the United States would later seize during the Mexican War. He published travel articles in the New Orleans Picayune and wrote two successful books about his journeys and subsequent observations of the war in Mexico (using the name Geo Wilkins Kendall): Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1844), republished as Across the Great Southwestern Prairies, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), and The War Between

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the United States and Mexico Illustrated (New York: Appleton, 1851). Kendall’s newspaper reports on the war have been republished in Dispatches from the Mexican War, ed. and Intro. Lawrence Delbart Cress (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). Dorr’s conversations with such authors may have encouraged his own ambition to write a travel memoir. 17. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 22, 35, 98, 126–28, 141, 156. 18. Ibid., 98. 19. Ibid., 125–27. Sultan Abdülmecid I (r. 1839–61) was known for introducing reforms to the Ottoman Empire and for his alliance with Britain and France during the Crimean War against Russia (1853–56). He died at thirty-nine from tuberculosis, so perhaps Dorr’s account of the sultan’s physical contrasts with Queen Victoria had some basis in what he could observe during his brief views of each. For a brief summary of Abdülmecid’s reign, see Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Masters, eds., Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 9. 20. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 40. 21. Ibid., 52. 22. Ibid., 155–56. 23. Ibid., 39–40. For more on the views of race in nineteenth-century New Orleans, see Justin A. Nystrom, New Orleans After the Civil War: Race, Politics and a New Birth of Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 18–21, 140–59. 24. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 118–19, 126–27. Parrish was accompanying a white lawyer named Edwin Ewing, but Parrish was a free man who also worked as a barber in Nashville. For more on Parrish and the people who traveled with him, see the journals of Randall McGavock in Pen and Sword: The Life and Journals of Randal W. McGavock, ed. Herschel Gower (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Commission, 1959), 288–89. Gower also discusses Parrish in his introductory essay, 52–53. 25. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 126–27. Dorr used only one “r” in Parrish’s name. 26. Ibid., 141. Otho I became king of Greece as part of the international agreement that confirmed Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832 (a settlement reached among European diplomats in London). Otho was a son of the king of Bavaria (his German name was Otto), and he became an increasingly unpopular outsider in Greek society. He reigned from 1833 until he was forced to give up the throne to a brother in 1862. 27. Ibid., 138–40. The lines Parrish quoted were the opening words in Byron’s “Maid of Athens”—a poem Byron wrote for a young Greek girl he met during a visit to Greece in 1810. 28. Ibid., 126, 140. 29. Ibid., 15–17. William Stowe uses this early scene in Dorr’s narrative to suggest the “problematic” aspects of Dorr’s book. To be sure, the self-flattering sexism in Dorr’s accounts of women creates problems for a modern reader, and Stowe finds that Dorr’s entire literary persona is “often repugnant”—though he also recognizes the complexities

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of Dorr’s desire to define himself as a free man. Stowe’s judgment apparently reflects his understandable dislike for the attitudes of nineteenth-century Louisiana “gentlemen,” yet this interpretation of Dorr’s work focuses on only a few passages and downplays the recurring efforts to affirm African American autonomy (for example, in Dorr’s portrait of Frank Parrish). See Stowe, Going Abroad, 62–67. 30. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 29–32. 31. Ibid., 36–38, 94. On the mid-nineteenth century, foreign fascination with Parisian pleasures and lights, see Lloyd S. Kramer, Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 15–36. 32. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 94. 33. Ibid., 95. 34. Ibid., 87. The word “surrealism” was not used before the early 1920s, when postwar Parisian writers and artists invented the term to stress the creative significance of dreams and dreamlike juxtapositions. See, for example, the perceptive analysis and striking examples in Mary Ann Caws, Surrealism (New York: Phaidon, 2004). 35. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 89. 36. Ibid., 90. 37. Ibid., 91. 38. Ibid., 120–24. 39. Ibid., 191. 40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 236–37. 41. Dorr, Colored Man Round the World, 191. 42. Ibid., 191–92. 43. Ibid., 192. 44. Miller, “Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn.” Chapter 8. Methodology in the Making and Reception of Equiano 1. I first revealed the documentary evidence in endnotes to my edition of Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 1995), and subsequently in a series of elaborations of the evidence and its possible implications: “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa?: New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20 (1999): 96–105; “More New Light on the Identity of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 226–35; Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005; New York: Penguin 2007). 2. Jon Sensbach, this volume. 3. For a very useful discussion of the similarities and differences between the methodologies of historical and literary studies, see Eric Slauter, “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World,” Early American Literature 43 (2008), 153–86, and the responses

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by Alison Games (187–90), Bryan Waterman (191–95), Eliga H. Gould (197–203), and Elizabeth Dillon (205–10). 4. See the chapter in this volume by João José Reis, “From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman: The Story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo,” and James H. Sweet, Domingos Álveres, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 5. The importance of the trope of the talking book is most fully developed in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Trope of the Talking Book,” chap. 4 in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 127–69. 6. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York: New American Library, 1987), 9. 7. Vincent Carretta, “Equiano’s Paradise Lost: The Limits of Allusion in Chapter Five of The Interesting Narrative,” in Imagining Transatlantic Slavery, ed. Cora Kaplan and J. R. Oldfield (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 79–95. 8. The most recent argument that Equiano was born an Igbo in Africa is made by Paul E. Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,” Slavery and Abolition 28 (2006): 317–47. For what I see as significant flaws in Lovejoy’s argument and methodology, and Lovejoy’s reaction, see my “Response” and his “Rejoinder,” Slavery and Abolition 28 (2007): 115–25. A fuller and more balanced treatment than Lovejoy’s of the question of Equiano’s birthplace is Alexander Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation, and Gustavus Vassa’s Interesting Narrative,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, 1 (2006): 123–48. 9. James H. Sweet, “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 279–306; 302. 10. Ibid., 301. 11. Ibid., 302. 12. John Bugg, “The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano’s Public Book Tour,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 121 (2006): 1424–42; 1425. 13. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African, xiv–xv. 14. Representative examples of fictional black voices can be found in volumes 4–6 in Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Debbie Lee, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999). 15. Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London: J. Phillips, 1786), 117–18. 16. Gilbert Francklyn, An Answer to the Reverend Mr. Clarkson’s Essay (London: J. Walter; C. Stalker and W. Richardson, 1789), 191–192. 17. The World announced on March 24, 1789 that The Interesting Narrative would be published on March 26. 18. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, rev. ed., ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003).

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Notes to Pages 183–186

19. Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of AfricanAmerican Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 53 (1996): 251–88. 20. Carretta, Equiano, The African. 21. Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, “The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano,” in Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World: History, Society, and Atlantic Diaspora Connections, ed. Chima J. Korieh (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World, 2009), 49–66; 59. 22. Ibid., 61. 23. Dorothy C. Ukaegbu, “Igbo Sense of Place and Identity in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” in Chima, Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World, 67–92; 70. 24. Dorothy C. Ukaegbu, “Status in Eighteenth-Century Igboland: Perspectives from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” in Chima, Olaudah Equiano and the Igbo World, 93–116; 111. 25. Ugo Nwokeji, Review of Equiano the African, Journal of American History 93 (2006): 840–41. 26. Elizabeth Isichei, A History of the Igbo People (New York: St. Martin’s, 1976), 21; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 1998), 310, notes that “Almost all we know about the [Igbo] region in the eighteenth century comes from the testimony of Olaudah Equiano, an Igbo who was enslaved as a youth around 1755.” 27. Sweet, “Mistaken Identities?” 302. 28. S. E. Ogude, “Facts into Fiction: Equiano’s Narrative Reconsidered,” Research in African Literatures 13 (1982): 30–43; 32, argues that because an eleven-year-old was very unlikely to have the almost total recall Equiano claims, “Equiano relied less on the memory of his experience and more on other sources” in his account of Africa. Ogude, “No Roots Here: On the Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano,” Review of English and Literary Studies 5 (1989): 1–16, denies that the linguistic evidence Catherine Acholonu offers in “The Igbo Roots” supports Equiano’s account. Despite Ogude’s skepticism about Equiano’s veracity, he does not question Vassa/ Equiano’s fundamental identity as an African. In her review of Paul Edwards, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, and Catherine Acholonu, “The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano,” Journal of African History 33 (1992): 164–65, Elizabeth Isichei remarks of Equiano’s description of Africa, “I have come to believe that it is a palimpsest, and that though he was indeed an Igbo (though even this has been questioned) he fused his own recollections with details obtained from other Igbo into a single version” (165). Katherine Faull Eze, “Self-Encounters: Two Eighteenth-Century African Memoirs from Moravian Bethlehem,” in Crosscurrents: African Americans, Africa, and Germany in the Modern World, ed. David McBride, LeRoy Hopkins, and C. Aisha Blackshire-Belay (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998), 29–52, considers “Equiano’s Igbo past mostly a reconstruction of European or Colonial American travel narratives, most obviously, Anthony Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea,” 33, 50n22. 29. G. I. Jones, “Olaudah Equiano of the Niger Ibo,” in Africa Remembered: Nar-

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ratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, ed. Philip D. Curtin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 60–69, 61, 69. 30. A. E. Afigbo, Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture (London: University Press, 1981), 183. 31. Ibid., 151. 32. Ibid., 155. 33. Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann, 1975), 177. 34. Joseph Inikori, “The Development of Entrepreneurship in Africa: Southeastern Nigeria During the Era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” in Black Business and Economic Power, ed. Alusine Jalloh and Toyin Falola (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 41–79; 78n44. Quoted in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 129–30. 35. Trevor Burnard, “Good-bye, Equiano, the African,” in Recent Themes in the History of Africa and the Atlantic World: Historians in Conversation, ed. Donald A. Yerxa (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 100–105; 103. 36. Ibid., 103–4. 37. Jon Sensbach, “Beyond Equiano,” in Yerxa, Recent Themes, 106–10; 108, 110. 38. John Bugg, Review of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2006): 571–73. 39. John Saillant, Review of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, Early American Literature 41 (2006): 600–603; 600. 40. Burnard, “Good-bye, Equiano,” 104. 41. Joanne Pope Melish, Review of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, American Historical Review 111 (2006): 795–96. 42. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 7–8. 43. Cathy N. Davidson, “Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself,” Novel 40 (2006): 18–51; 42, 37, 42, 43. 44. Paul Lovejoy, Review of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, Journal of Southern History 73 (2007): 150–51; 151. 45. Paul Lovejoy, “‘Freedom Narratives’ of Transatlantic Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition 32 (2011): 91–107; 102. Chapter 9. Remembering His Country Marks: A Nigerian American Family and Its “African” Ancestor 1. Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate (Lagos: C.S.S. Bookshops, 1976 [1921]), 104–9. Johnson descended from the Oyo royal family, was born in Sierra Leone, received his education from CMS missionaries, preached and taught as an Anglican minister, became involved in local politics in Ibadan and Oyo, and helped mediate the Yoruba wars at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1897, after twenty years of research and writing, he submitted his

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Notes to Pages 193–195

finished History to publishers in Britain, who rejected it. The book was finally published in 1921 through the efforts of Johnson’s brother Obadiah Johnson. See Toyin Falola, ed., Pioneer, Patriot, and Patriarch: Samuel Johnson and the Yoruba People (Madison: African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin, 1993), especially Falola’s Introduction. 2. Louis M. Duval, Baptist Missions in Nigeria (Richmond, Va.: Educational Department, Foreign Mission Board, Southern Baptist Convention, 1928). 3. Mabel M. Smythe, “One Black Family,” unpublished autobiographical essay, 1969, in Hugh H. and Mabel M. Smythe Papers, Library of Congress, Box 96 Folder 3, “Dibble Family Material.” The 1925 visit is described in an Aerogram letter from A. Moore in Lagos to Mr. HH Smythe in New York, August 22, 1957, in file marked “Nigerian Field Trip—General,” Hugh Smythe Papers, vol. 2, no. 20, microfilm reel 1, Schomburg Library. 4. Era Bell Thompson, “The Vaughan Family: A Tale of Two Continents,” Ebony 30 (February 1975): 53–64. 5. Bible currently in the possession of Elsie Taylor-Goins of Columbia, South Carolina. I thank her for showing it to me. 6. Wilie Vaughan will, signed June 23, 1814 and recorded November 12, 1820, and Wilie Vaughan estate papers (Apartment 70, package 2506), Kershaw County Courthouse, Probate Office. 7. Between 1775 and 1810, of 93,608 slaves who disembarked in Georgia and the Carolinas, only 812 are estimated to have come from the Bight of Benin; during the same period, no Bight of Benin captives disembarked in the Chesapeake region. In the Chesapeake during that period, the largest contingent of African slave arrivals (474) came from Senegambia. David Eltis et al., in Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 2nd ed. (2009), http://www.slavevoyages.org. 8. Ibid. 9. For example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is involved with one such venture, described at http://www.africandna.com. For an overview and sharp critique of DNA testing for ancestry, see Troy Duster, “Ancestry Testing and DNA: Uses, Limits—and Caveat Emptor,” Gene Watch (published by Center for Responsible Genetics) 22, 4 (2009), http://www. councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=202. 10. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth-Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20, 3 (1999): 96–105. The responses include Paul E. Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, Alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,” Slavery and Abolition 27, 3 (2006): 317–47 and others listed in James H. Sweet, “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114, 2 (April 2009): 279–306, n 4. 11. Aida Vaughan Moore was only eleven when her father died in 1893, but her two brothers were in their twenties.

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12. R. H. Stone, In Afric’s Forest and Jungle; or, Six years Among the Yorubans (New York: Fleming Revell, 1899), 129. 13. Johnson, History, 353. 14. Stone, In Afric’s Forest and Jungle, chap. 15; Johnson, History, 334–35; Stone to Rev. James B. Taylor, February 22, 1860, Richard H. Stone Papers, AR551-2, Box 57, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archive, Nashville, Tennessee. 15. Duval, Baptist Missions, 93; Stone, In Afric’s Forest and Jungle, 185; “Report of the Ijaye Relief Committee, 1861,” National Archives of Nigeria, Ibadan. 16. “The Late James Churchwill Vaughan,” Lagos Weekly Record, September 23, 1893. 17. “James Churchwill Vaughan,” Lagos Standard, December 6, 1905. 18. Ayo Vaughan-Richards’s notes from the family Bible, in Jewel Lafontant Mankarious papers, 30/310 IV ss.2. Box 2, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio. 19. James Churchwill Vaughan, Will, January 20, 1893, Lagos Probate Registry, vol. 1, pp. 259–62. I am grateful to Kristin Mann for sharing this with me. 20. Michael Ayo Vaughan interview with Kristin Mann, March 1974, Lagos. Again, I am grateful to Kristin Mann for sharing her notes with me. 21. Brother J. C. Vaughan, of Logos [sic], to FMB, October 7, 1872, in “Appendix A: Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention” (Mobile, Ala.: St. Francis Street Baptist Church, 1873), 18, http://archives. imb.org/solomon.asp. 22. The foundation of the Ebenezer Baptist Church is described in many sources. See, for instance, Cecil F. Roberson, “A History of Baptists in Nigeria” (Nashville: Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archive, 1986), chap. 9; J. F. Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria, 1841–1891: The Making of a New Elite (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), chap. 8; James Bertin Webster, The African Churches among the Yoruba, 1888–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); E.A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria, 1842–1914: A Political and Social Analysis (London: Longman, 1966), 197–201; The Making of the First Indigenous Church in Nigeria: An Abridged History of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Lagos, 1888–1999 (Lagos: EBC, 2000); and Lagunju Babalola, A Short History of Ebenezer Baptist Church (Ibadan: Baptist Press, [1963?]) in 552AR, International Mission Board archives, Richmond, Virginia. 23. Kristin Mann, Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760–1900 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 24. Allister Macmillan, The Red Book of West Africa: Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures, and Resources (London: Frank Cass, 1968 [1920]), 108. 25. A Yoruba Historian, “From ‘A General History of the Yoruba Country’: James Churchwill Vaughan,” Lagos Standard, December 6, 1905. 26. “The Late James Churchwill Vaughan,” Lagos Weekly Record, September 23, 1893. 27. Thompson, “The Vaughan Family,” 57.

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Notes to Pages 200–204

28. Interview with Olabode Vaughan (son of Dr. J. C. Vaughan), July 14, 2003, Lagos; interview with Kunle Ademola (son of Kofo Moore Ademola), July 13, 2003, Lagos. 29. Kofoworola Aina Moore, “The Story of Kofoworola Aina Moore, of the Yoruba Tribe, Nigeria,” in Ten Africans, ed. Margery Perham (London: Faber and Faber, 1963 [1936]), 324. 30. James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” from Notes of A Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955). 31. Smythe, “One Black Family.” 32. Stradford, who had jumped bail to get out of Tulsa, was posthumously cleared of all charges in 1996. See “Seventy-Five Years After the Fact and Six Decades After His Death, a Black Tulsa Businessman Has Been Cleared of Wrongdoing in Connection With One of the Deadliest Race Riots in American History,” New York Times, October 26, 1996, and “Oklahoma Officials Clear Black Man in 1921 Riot and Apologize to Family,” Jet, November 18, 1996, 8. Stradford’s brief biography is in his obituary: “J. B. STRADFORD DIES IN CHICAGO: Pioneer Business Man Amassed Fortune,” New York Amsterdam News, January 4, 1936, 4. 33. Stephen Birmingham, Certain People: America’s Black Elite (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), chap. 12. 34. Thompson, “The Vaughan Family.” 35. G. Rosiji, Lady Ademola: Portrait of a Pioneer; Biography of Lady Kofoworola Aina Ademola, MBE OFR (Lagos: EnClair, 1996), 81. 36. Kunle Akinshemoyin, “How America Strengthens Ties with Nigeria,” Sunday Times (Lagos), February 11, 1973, 14; Special to the NYT, “Return to West Africa Isn’t New for Blacks From the Americas,” New York Times, September 2, 1973; Thompson, “Vaughan Family.” 37. Smythe, “One Black Family.” 38. Mabel Murphy Smythe (Haith) interview with Ann Miller Morin, May 2, 1986, for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Foreign Affairs Oral History Project, Women Ambassadors Series. I’m grateful to Mary Rolinson for sharing this interview transcript with me. 39. Akinshemoyin, “How America Strengthens Ties with Nigeria,” 14. 40. Kunle Akinshemoyin and Alan Vaughan-Richards collaborated on a book about the architectural history of Lagos, Building Lagos (Lagos: F. & A. Services, 1977). 41. Correspondence between the article’s author Era Bell Thompson and Ayo Vaughan-Richards is in the Era Bell Thompson Papers, Chicago Public Library. 42. S. O. Biobaku, The Egba and Their Neighbours, 1842–1872 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957). 43. A. L. Mabogunje and J. D. Omer-Cooper, Owu in Yoruba History (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1971). 44. Michael Ayo Vaughan interview with Kristin Mann, March 1974, Lagos. 45. Ayo Vaughan-Richards to Jewel Lafontant, October 30, 1984, in Jewel LafontantMankarious Papers, 30/310 IV. ss.2. Box 2, Oberlin College Archives.

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46. Ayo Vaughan-Richards, “The Vaughan Family: A Nigerian-American Family,” text of a lecture at USIS Lagos, February 12, 1986, in Jewel Lafontant-Mankarious Papers, 30/310 IV. ss. 2. Box 2, Oberlin College Archives. Although Vaughan-Richards seemed to have moved back and forth between Egba and Owu as ethnic designations for Scipio Vaughan, these groups had distinct origins, as a 2007 controversy in the Nigerian press made clear. See, for instance, Lekan Akinosho, “Egba-Owu Controversy: The Distortion of History,” Nigeriaworld (December 19, 2007), http://nigeriaworld.com/ articles/2007/dec/191.html. 47. Vaughan-Richards, “The Vaughan Family: A Nigerian-American Family.” 48. Interview with James Olabode Vaughan at his house in Surulere, Lagos, June 27, 2006. Similarly, Ayo Vaughan-Richards’s daughter explained to me that the family history and trans-Atlantic connection had been important to her mother at least in part because of the value placed on lineage by the “Lagos aristocracy” to which she belonged. Email from Remi Vaughan-Richards, May 2, 2010. 49. Ayo and Alan Vaughan-Richards, “J. C. Vaughan: Research on a Book on James Churchwill Vaughan, 1826–1893,” April 18, 1986, Jewel Lafontant-Mankarious papers, 30/310 IV ss.2. Box 2, Oberlin archives. It is unclear how, in this story, the name Vaughan would have remained in Ogbomosho. 50. In addition to the references in note 10, also see the exchange of letters between Carretta and Sweet, American Historical Review 114, 3 (June 2009) and James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Chapter 10. The Atlantic Transformations of Francisco Menéndez 1. Petitions of Francisco Menéndez and Chief Jorge, Memorial of the Fugitives, included in Manuel de Montiano to Philip V, March 3, 1738, Santo Domingo (hereafter SD) 844, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), on microfilm reel 15, P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History, University of Florida (hereafter PKY). 2. Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 3. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1974). 4. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 5. Jane G. Landers, “Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review 95, 1 (1990): 9–30; Kathleen Deagan and Darcie MacMahon, Fort Mose: Colonial America’s Black Fortress of Freedom (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995). 6. Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia, 2nd ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), chap. 3; Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa: Containing a Description of the Several Nations for the Space of Six Hundred Miles up the River Gambia (London, 1738),

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Notes to Pages 211–213

39; Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade; or, A Discovery of the River Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians (London: Dawsons, 1968); Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Peter Mark, “Portuguese” Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth–Nineteenth Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 7. Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa, 29. 8. Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta, The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On general toleration of Judaism and Islam in Catholic Iberia, see Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Toleration and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 9. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place, 83. 10. Ibid. 11. Charlotte A. Quinn, “Niumi: A Nineteenth Century Mandingo Kingdom,” Africa: A Journal of the International African Institute 38, 4 (1968): 443–55. 12. Ibid. The oldest patriarch of the noble clan would become the mansa, or ruler, of the town and below these nobles were endogamous occupational groups such as leatherworkers, ironsmiths, potters, and praise-singers (griots). 13. In the Americas, slaves also gained rights to self-purchase or coartación. Landers, Black Society; Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Thesis Revisited,” Law and History Review 22, 2 (Summer 2004): 339–69; and “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, 4 (November 2007): 659–92. 14. Quinn, “Niumi.” 15. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 16. The Spanish flotilla of three ships and fourteen piraguas was undone by a storm. John E. Worth, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast: An Eighteenth-Century Spanish Retrospective on Guale and Mocama (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 181. 17. Herbert E. Bolton and Mary Ross, The Debatable Land: A Sketch of the AngloSpanish Contest for the Georgia Country (1925; reprint. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968); J. Leitch Wright, Jr., The Only Land They Knew: American Indians in the Old South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), chaps. 5 and 6; Verner W. Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (New York: Norton, 1981), 6–10. 18. David Hurst Thomas, “The Archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: Our First 15 Years,” in The Spanish Missions of Florida, ed. Bonnie G. McEwan (Gainesville, Fla.: Luther’s, 1993), 1–34. 19. Rebecca Saunders, “Architecture of the Missions of Santa María and Santa Catalina de Amelia,” in The Spanish Missions of Florida, ed. McEwan, 35–61. 20. On January 10, 1685 Lord Cardross (Henry Erskine) wrote the Lords Proprietors, “Wee thought fitt to acquaint you that yesterday some more of the nation of the

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Yamasees arrived at St. Helena to settle with those of their nation formerly settled there having come from about St. Augustine.” Sainsbury Transcripts, 1928–1947, vol. 2, 1, cited in William Green, Chester De Pratter and Bobby Southerlin, “The Yamasee in South Carolina: Native American Adaptation and Interaction Along the Carolina Frontier,” in Another’s Country: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies, ed. J. W. Joseph and Martha Zierden (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 13–29. In February 1685, the Indian trader Caleb Westbrooke reported that over 1,000 Yamasee accompanied by unnumbered “Christian” Indians had arrived from the Lower Creek region. Sainsbury Transcripts, 1928–1947, vol. 2: 8–9, cited in ibid. 21. John H. Hann, “Summary Guide to Spanish Florida Missions and Visitas with Churches in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” The Americas 46 (1990), 472 and Apalachee: The Land Between the Rivers (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988), 188; John Tate Lanning, The Spanish Missions of Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 178, 220–22; Worth, Struggle for the Georgia Coast, 148–49. 22. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empires in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002). 23. Case of the St. Christopher, 1703–1794. The Royal African Company sent Daniel Johnson on the Christopher to the Gambia to purchase slaves. Johnson left half of his shipment with his father, Daniel Johnson, Sr., in Bermuda and shipped the other half on to Carolina. In 1709 the London customs house mentioned the Loyall Johnson, a ten per-cent vessel “to Carolina, Designed 200, Carried 180,” and sometime before August 30, 1711, Colonel William Rhett sent out another ship for Guinea. Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America (Washington, D.C.; Carnegie Institution, 1931), vol. 4, 137, 243, 250–51, 255, 255n. The Carolina preference for slaves from the Gambia, as expressed by Charles Town trader Henry Laurens, continued into the 1770s. Landers, Atlantic Creoles, chap. 1. 24. Governor Edwards reported only 1,100 families (presumably white) in the province in 1709. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial, 1699, cited in Donnan, Documents, 104. 25. A colonial census of 1719 reported the same black/white ratio with a colonial population of “9580 souls including 1360 freemen, 900 free women, 60 white servant men, 60 white servant women, 1700 slaves, 500 Indian men slaves, 600 Indian women slaves, 1200 negro children slaves and 300 Indian children slaves.” The report added that “negro men slaves [are increased in the last five years] by importation 300, negro women slaves 200 and negro children 600.” Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina Under the Proprietary Government, 1670–1719 (New York: Macmillan, 1897). McCrady cited slave import figures of 24 in 1706, 22 in 1707, 53 in 1708, 131 in 1709, 170 in 1710, 419 in 1711, and 81 in 1712. http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces 26. Calendar of State Papers, 1708–1709, cited in Donnan, Documents, 255, 259, 444–54. 27. By 1713 St. John’s Parish planter William Cantey, Jr., and a crew of thirteen slaves produced 200 barrels of pitch per year. Wood, Black Majority, 108–10.

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28. Ibid., chap. 4. 29. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 64. 30. Roster of Black and Mulatto Militia for St. Augustine, September 20, 1683, SD, AGI. None of the forty-two men and six officers of St. Augustine’s free black militia bore an African nation surname, although several surnames indicate other origins— Catalán, Lima, Mexicano—where Spaniards held sway, meaning the men probably had lived for some time among the Spaniards. Many of them shared surnames, which may indicate possible kinship ties but might also mean that they were once owned by the same families, among which were some of the oldest in Florida such as Menéndez, de Soto, Rutiner, and de Hita. It is testimony to his need that the Spanish governor formed such a unit because both he and his predecessor complained frequently that the troops provided from New Spain in the 1670s were “sons of blacks, chinos (persons of mixed race), and mulattoes,” “only good for work as cobblers, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths, and cattle hands,” occupations persons of African descent held throughout the Spanish Americas. Luis Arana, “Military Manpower in Florida, 1670–1703,” El Escribano 8, 2 (1971): 40–63. The free mulatto Corporal Crispín De Tapia, for example, managed a store in St. Augustine. SD 226, AGI, legajo 157A, John B. Stetson Collection (hereafter SC), PKY. On the history of black military service in the Spanish circum-Caribbean, see Jane Landers, “Transforming Bondsmen into Vassals: Arming the Slaves in Colonial Spanish America,” in Arming Slaves in World History, ed. Philip Morgan and Christopher Brown (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 120–45. 31. Roster of Black and Mulatto Militia for St. Augustine, September 20, 1683, SD 266, AGI. 32. Wood, Black Majority, 95–130. 33. Helen Hornbeck Tanner, “The Land and Water Communications Systems of the Southeastern Indians,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 6–20. 34. “William Dunlop’s Mission to St. Augustine in 1688,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 34 (January 1933): 1–30. 35. On June 13, 1710, the Reverend Francis LeJau wrote, “There are 3 or 4 Portuguese slaves in this parish very desirous to receive the communion among us.” Later he specified that they were from Madeira. Frank J. Klingberg, An Appraisal of the Negro in Colonial South Carolina (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1941), 13–19. 36. Among the acts of charity a good Catholic was urged to perform were to offer protection to the miserable and to shelter fugitives. Maureen Flynn, “Charitable Ritual in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain,” Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (Fall 1995): 1–30. On Catholicism in Kongo, see Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Making of the Foundations of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 37. The Spanish governor also took advantage of their artisanal skills. The governor assigned the men to work as ironsmiths and laborers on the new stone fort, the Castillo

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de San Marcos, and the women became domestics in the governor’s own household. He claimed to have paid all of them wages; the men earning a peso a day, the wage paid to male Indian laborers, and the women earning half as much. Royal officials to the Charles II, March 3, 1699, cited in Irene Wright, “Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose,” Journal of Negro History 9 (1924): 151–52. 38. Royal decree, November 7, 1693, SD 58-1-26, SC, PKY. 39. Despite the royal decree of 1693, in 1697 Governor Laureano de Torres y Ayala returned six newly arrived blacks and an Indian “to avoid conflicts and ruptures between the two governments.” Joseph de Zúñiga to Charles II, October 10, 1699, SD 844, microfilm reel 15, PKY. 40. The Yamasee Indians subsequently filed a formal complaint with the Commons House of Assembly against trader John Cochran (whom they later killed at Pocotaligo) for taking their St. Augustine plunder. Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650–1708, ed. Alexander S. Salley (New York: Scribner’s, 1911); Records of the British Public Records Office (1934), 38. 41. Ibid., 116–22. 42. Governor and Council to Proprietors, Board of Trade, September 17, 1708, in The Colonial South Carolina Scene, Contemporary Views, 1697–1774, ed. H. Roy Merrens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 32. 43. The inability of the Spaniards to protect even the Nombre de Dios mission outside their very walls led many of their once loyal Indian allies to defect to the English. Charles W. Arnade, The Siege of St. Augustine in 1702 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1959): 35. See also John J. TePaske, The Governorship of Spanish Florida, 1700– 1763 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1964), 110–13, 130–32, 196–97. 44. Indian Book, I, Pt. 1, 65–66, cited in Chapman J. Milling, Red Carolinians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), 137. 45. Indian Book, I, Pt. 1, 58, cited in ibid., 137. On April 17, 1712, the Commissioners of the Indian Trade accused Samuel Hilden of intercepting and buying slaves from the Yamasee Indians before they got to their towns. William L. McDowell, Jr., ed., Journal of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, September 20, 1710–August 29, 1718 (Columbia, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1922), 23 46. Indian Book, I, Pt. 1, 58 cited in Milling, Red Carolinians, 137. Many of the complaints of the chiefs related to the traders’ abuse of their women. Trader John Fraser was convicted of misconduct at Pocotaligo and charged with having violently beaten Tomatly king, but abuses continued. Later Fraser was supposedly warned by the Yamasee warrior, Sanute, of the impending conflict, but he never informed the other traders. Hewatt on Carroll, Historical Collections, 1: 192–94, cited in Milling, 136. 47. George Rodd, “Relation,” B.P.R.O., VI, 74 in South Carolina Records. The Yamasee killed ninety English the first day, including traders Wright, Ruffy, and Cochran. They tortured Thomas Nairne for three days with lightwood splinters before he expired. Milling, Red Carolinians, 141–42. Also see William L. Ramsey, “‘Something Cloudy in

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Notes to Pages 216–218

their Looks’: The Origins of the Yamasee War Reconsidered,” Journal of American History (June 2003): 44–75 and Ramsay, “A Coat for Indian Cuffy: Mapping the Boundary Between Freedom and Slavery in Colonial South Carolina,” in Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World, ed. Rosemary Brana Shute and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009). 48. Landers, Black Society, chap. 1. 49. Milling, Red Carolinians, 142–46. 50. Landers, Black Society, 25. 51. Testimony of the four caciques, May 28, 1715 and subsequent report by Governor Francisco de Córcoles y Martínez, January 25, 1716, SD 58-1-30, AGI, SC, PKY. The four caciques were Ysiopojole, “heathen” cacique of Canapa, in Apalachicola; Yfallaquisca (also known as Perro Bravo or Mad Dog); “heathen” War Chief of Satiquich (elsewhere spelled Salquicha or Salaquiliche), also in Apalachicola; Alonso, Christian mico (chief) and governor of Ocute, in Tama; and Gabriel, “heathen” son of Santiago, a Christian of the Yamasee nation. The Spaniards who met with Perro Bravo included the governor, his treasurer, and the royal accountant, Captain Francisco Menéndez Márquez, who would later give our protagonist his Spanish name. See also Mark F. Boyd, “Diego Peña’s Expedition to Apalachee and Apalachicola in 1716,” Florida Historical Quarterly 28 (July 1949): 1–27 and John H. Hann, “St. Augustine’s Fallout from the Yamasee War,” Florida Historical Quarterly 68 (October 1989): 180–200. 52. Governor Antonio de Benavides to the King, August 25, 1718. Buckingham Smith Papers, Reel 1, frames 747–66 PKY. 53. Landers, Black Society, chap. 2. 54. Crown slaves in Cuba were primarily males assigned to public works and who lived in communal barracks. Evelyn Powell Jennings, “War as the ‘Forcing House of Change’: State Slavery in Late-Eighteenth Century Cuba,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 62, 3 (July 2005): 411–40. 55. List of Individuals from the Presidio of St. Augustine housed in Regla in the house of Don Gonzalo de Oquendo. Cuba 1076, f. 395, AGI. 56. The following year Carolina enacted a new and harsher slave code. Wood, Black Majority, 298–99, 304. 57. Memorial of the Fugitives, 1724, SD 844, microfilm reel 15, PKY. 58. For the exchange on this mission, see the letters of Governors Arthur Middleton (Carolina) and Antonio de Benavides (Florida) in Documentos históricos de la Florida y la Luisiana, siglos XVI al XVII (Madrid: Suárez, 1912), 252–60. 59. The governor gave the proceeds to the envoy from Carolina, who would have preferred to reclaim the former slaves. Other buyers included several military officers and even some religious officials. Antonio de Benavides to Philip V, November 11, 1725, cited in ibid., 164–66. Carolinians charged that the Spanish governor “Makes Merchandize of all our slaves, and ships them off to Havanah for his own Profit,” and they were at least partially correct. Accord, June 27, 1730, SD 844, microfilm reel 15, PKY; Wood, Black Majority, 305. Some of the slaves sold at the 1729 auction were taken to Havana by

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their new owners. Nine years later, Governor Manuel de Montiano would try to retrieve them. Decree of Manuel de Montiano, March 3, 1738, SD 844, microfilm reel 15, PKY. 60. Memorial of the Fugitives, 1724, SD 844, microfilm reel 15, PKY. 61. June 13, 1728, BPRO Trans., vol. 12, 61–67, cited in Wood, Black Majority, 305. 62. Four blacks who fled or were taken from a plantation near Port Royal in 1726 were later spotted in St. Augustine. Arthur Middleton, June 13, 1728, BPRO Trans., vol. 13, 61–67 and John Pearson, October 20, 1727, BPRO Trans., vol. 19, 127–28, cited in Wood, Black Majority, 305. 63. Ibid. 64. Antonio de Benavides to Philip V, April 27, 1733, SD 833, AGI. 65. The crown actually issued two separate edicts in 1733. The first, on October 4, 1733, forbade any future compensation to the British, reiterated the royal offer of freedom, and specifically prohibited the sale of fugitives to private citizens, no doubt in response to the auction of 1729. The second, on October 29, 1733, commended the blacks for their bravery against the British in 1728, but also stipulated that they would be required to complete four years of royal service as an indenture prior to being freed. Royal decree, October 4, 1733, SD 58-1-24, SC, PKY; Royal decree, October 29, 1733, SD 58-1-24, SC, PKY. 66. Report of the Visita of Bishop Francisco de San Buenaventura, April 29, 1736, SC 5543, PKY; TePaske, Governorship, 167–69. Memorial of the Fugitives, included in Manuel de Montiano to Philip V, March 3, 1738, SD 844, microfilm reel 15, PKY. 67. In 1717 Perro Bravo appeared in household #8 on the census of Pocotalaca. 68. Memorial of Chief Jorge, included in Manuel de Montiano to Philip V, March 3, 1738, SD 844, microfilm reel 15, PKY. It is possible that this Jorge was father of the Yamasee youth educated in England to be a native missionary for the Society for the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The young Prince George returned with Commissary Gideon Johnston in 1715 in the midst of the Yamasee War and later wrote, “I have had noos that my Father as gone in Santaugustena and all my Friends.” A later account reporting that the father had been killed proved untrue, and another report that he had been captured, returned to Charles Town and then sold with the rest of his family as slaves was unconfirmed. Nor are there further reports about the young Prince George after Commissary Johnston’s death in 1716. Frank J. Klingberg, “The Mystery of the Lost Yamasee Prince,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 63 (1962): 18–32. 69. Petition of Diego Espinosa and reply by Manuel de Montiano, May 5, 1738, SD 845, microfilm reel 16, PKY. Diego de Espinosa was a successful mulatto cattle rancher whose fortified ranch twenty miles north of St. Augustine on the Diego Plains served as an important outpost guarding the Spanish city. 70. Philip V to Manuel de Montiano, July 15, 1741, AGI 58-1-25, SC 5943, PKY. 71. Manuel de Montiano to Philip V, Sept. 16, 1740, SD 2658, AGI, cited in Landers, Black Society, 41. 72. Scholars hotly debate the origins and meaning of these African ethnonyms. I

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Notes to Pages 221–226

have used them throughout as they appear in Spanish documents. See, for example, Paul E. Lovejoy, “Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora,” in Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (London: Continuum, 2000); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations, and New World Developments,” Slavery and Abolition 18, 1 (1997): 122–45. 73. On repoblación, see Documentación Indiana en Simancas (Valladolid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1990), 250–57. 74. Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World, 1492–1700 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3–8, 32, 133–52. 75. On the function and significance of godparents, see George M. Foster, “Cofradía and Compadrazgo in Spain and Spanish America,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 9 (1953):1–28. 76. Landers, Black Society, 35–36. 77. Ibid., 35–45. 78. Thomas J. Davis, A Rumor of Revolt: The “Great Negro Plot” in Colonial New York (New York: Free Press, 1985); Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 2005); J. Franklin Jameson, Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period (New York: Macmillan, 1923. 79. Although English records describe him as “the old captain,” on the Mose census, Menéndez’s age is given as forty-five and he remains married to Ana Maria de Escovar, thirty-nine. Census of Joseph de León, February 11, 1759, SD 2604, AGI. 80. Landers, Black Society, 59–66. 81. Cuba 1076, AGI. 82. List of those who arrived from Florida, September 16, 1764, Cuba 1076, f. 395, AGI. 83. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 24. Chapter 11. Echoes of the Atlantic: Benguela (Angola) and Brazilian Independence 1. “Termo de Denúncia e Declaração de Francisco Vieira da Cunha,” October 7, 1824, AHU, Angola, cx. 146, doc. 114. 2. “Ofício do Bispo de Angola” on November 20, 1824, AHU, Angola, cx. 146. 3. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on April 16, 1812, AHU, Angola, cx. 124, doc. 87. 4. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on September 24, 1824, AHU, Angola, cx. 152. 5. “Termo de Denúncia e Declaração de Bernardo José do Posso” on October 8, 1824, AHU, Angola, cx. 15. 6. Mariana Candido, “Merchants and the Business of the Slave Trade at Benguela, 1750–1850,” African Economic Review 35 (2007): 8. 7. “Ofício do Governador de Angola” on October 19, 1823, AHU, Angola, cx. 143.

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8. “Certidão de Manoel Xavier Ribeiro” on November 3, 1831, AHU, Angola, cx. 170, doc. 64. 9. “Requerimento de José Ferreira Gomes” on January 8, 1825, AHU, cx. 138. 10. “Requerimento de Antonio Fernandes da Silva” on January 18, 1823, AHA, cx. 138; “Requerimento de Francisco Piedade da Trindade,” January 24, 1829, AHA, cód. 7182, fl. 128. 11. “Requerimento de José Ferreira Gomes” on July 11, 1828, AHA, cód. 7182, fl. 97. 12. “Requerimento de Antonio Lopes Anjo” on September 2, 1826, AHA, cód. 7182, fl. 16. 13. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on April 16, 1812, AHU, Angola, cx. 124, doc. 87. 14. “Testamento de António José de Barros” on September 10, 1799, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 2, doc. 3 A, fls. 16–17. 15. “Portaria do Governador de Benguela” on September 22, 1813, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 133 v. For descriptions of Henriques troops in Brazil, see Kalina Vanderlei P. da Silva, “Os Henriques nas vilas açucareiras do Estado do Brasil: Tropas de homens negros em pernambuco, séculos XVII e XVIII,” Estudos de História 9, 2 (2002); Kalina Vanderlei P. da Silva, “Nas solidões vastas e assustadoras’—Os pobres do Açúcar e a conquista do sertão de pernambuco nos séculos XVII e XVIII,” Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 2003; Silvia Lara, Fragmentos setecentistas: escravidão, cultura e poder na América portuguesa (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007), 167. 16. For the relationship of military forces and social mobility by people of African descendant in the Americas, see Salvador Montoya, “Milicias negras y mulatas en el Reino de Guatemala (siglo XVIII),” in Local Government in European Overseas Empires, 1450–1800, ed. A. J. R. Russell-Wood (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 415–27; Ben Vinson III, “Race and Badge: Free-Colored Soldiers in the Colonial Mexican Militia,” The Americas 56, 4 (2000): 471–96; Ben Vinson, III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The FreeColored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University, 2001); Ben Vinson, III, and Matthew Restall, “Black Soldiers, Native Soldiers: Meanings of Military Service in the Spanish American Colonies,” in Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 15–52; José Eudes Arrais Barroso Gomes, “As Milícias d’el rey: Tropas militares e poder no ceará cetecentista,” M.A. thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2009. 17. “Carta Geral desta Capitania (Benguela)” on March 28, 1798, AHA, cód. 441, fls. 31v.–35; “Carta do Governador de Benguela” on October 13, 1800, AHA, cód. 443, fls. 59v.­–60v. See Ralph Delgado, O Reino de Benguela: do descobrimento a criação do coverno cubalterno (Lisboa: A Beleza, 1945), 247. 18. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on July 27, 1796, AHA, cód. 441, fls. 1–5v.; “Portaria do Governador de Benguela” on November 16, 1811, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 90v. 19. “Carta do Diretor de Cabo Negro” on July 12, 1808, AHA, cód. 445, fl. 22. 20. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on May 24, 1804, AHA, cód. 442, fls. 259–

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Notes to Pages 227–229

259v.; “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on April 16, 1812, AHU, Angola, cx. 124, doc. 87. 21. “Patente Francisco Ferreira Gomes” in October 1823, AHU, Angola, cx. 143, doc. 12. 22. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on January 2, 1799, AHA, cód. 442, fls. 68v.–69. There were blacks in the regular forces as well. For example, Domingos Pereira Diniz, a black man born in Luanda who played a significant role in Benguela politics in the 1820s, was an infantry captain in the regular troops. See “Portaria do Governador de Benguela” on March 21, 1811, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 71. 23. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on April 16, 1812, AHU, Angola, cx. 124, doc. 87. 24. “Ofício do Regente da Feitoria Real do Dombe Grande” on January 14, 1812, AHA, cód. 445, fls. 131–34v. 25. “Relação dos Moradores da Cidade de Benguela” in 1797, IHGB, DL32,02.02. 26. “Ordem do Governador de Benguela” on September 3, 1811, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 86. 27. “Portaria do Governador de Benguela” on November 7, 1814, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 155. In 1817, for example, amid a crisis in the supply of beef to Benguela, the city governor ordered Gaspar to “request on my behalf that the Sobas of his district readied fifteen cows at a price reasonable and according to the custom, to be slaughtered in this city [Benguela], since there a shortage of beef in this city.” See “Portariado Governador de Benguela” on April 19, 1817, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 230. 28. “Ofício do Regente da Feitoria Real do Dombe Grande” on January 14, 1812, AHA, cód. 445, fls. 131–34v. 29. “Portaria do Governador de Benguela” on January 4, 1814, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 139. 30. “Portaria do Governador de Benguela” on September 13, 1814, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 152v. 31. “Portariado Governador de Benguela” on April 28, 1814, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 145v. 32. “Portariado Governador de Benguela” on November 3, 1814, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 154v. 33. “Procuração de José Pinheiro Salgado” on July 27, 1790, ANTT, 3º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa, cx. 152, livro 713, fls. 6–6v.; “Procuração de José António Pereira” on July 27, 1790, ANTT, 3º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa, cx. 27, livro 134,fls. 92–92v. 34. “Depoimento de António José da Costa” on September 16, 1789, AHU, Angola, cx. 74, doc. 49; “Ofício do Provedor da Fazenda Real” on March 3, 1796, AHU, Angola, cx. 84, doc. 9, fl. 15. For the military responsibilities of the sargento mor, see David Tengwall, “A Study in Military Leadership: The Sargento Mor in the Portuguese South Atlantic Empire,” Americas 40, 1 (1983): 73–94. 35. “Notícias de Benguela e seus Distritos em 1797,” IHGB, lata 32, pasta 2, fl. 50v.; “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on December 13, 1796, AHA, cód. 442, fls. 23–24. 36. “Memória sobre o Abuso Pernicioso do Comércio deste Sertão” on November 12,

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1786, AHU, Angola, cx. 71, doc. 60; “Carta da Junta de Administração da Companhia de Comércio de Pernambuco e Paraíba” on March 14, 1781, ANTT, AHMF, livro 291. 37. “Procuração de Sebastião António” on April 24, 1776, ANTT, 9º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa (former 4º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa), cx. 9, lv. 42, fl. 41 e 41v.; “Procuração de Domingos Rodrigues Chaves” on May 7, 1778, ANTT, 3º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa (former 11º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa), cx. 145, livro 670, fls. 55–56. 38. “Carta Patente para José Rodrigues Maia” on July 6, 1776, AHU, Angola, cx. 77, doc. 66. 39. “Ofício de Luiz Cândido Cordeiro Pinheiro Furtado” on September 26, 1785, AHU, Angola, cx. 70, doc. 49. 40. “Letra de Risco,” April 26, 1790, ANTT, FF, JU, África, maço 19, doc. 13; “Testamento de Francisco Dias de Oliveira,” August 20, 1790, ANTT, FF, JU, África, maço 19, doc. 13, fls. 102–6. 41. “Oficio do Governador de Benguela” on February 7, 1821, AHA, cód. 447, fls. 187–89. 42. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on March 17, 1820, AHA, cód. 447, fl. 119. Twenty-five years earlier, for example, it had been held by Antonio José de Barros, one of the top merchants in town. See “Ofício do Provedor da Fazenda Real” on March 3, 1796, AHU, Angola, cx. 84, doc. 9, fl. 15. 43. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on May 17, 1816, AHA, cód. 446, fls. 76–78. 44. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on October 21, 1820, AHA, cód. 447, fls. 160–63. 45. “Ofício do Governo Provisorio de Benguela” on April 22, 1822, AHA, cód. 448, fls. 18v.–21. 46. “Carta do Governador de Angola” on March 16, 1801, AHA, cód. 7, fls. 123–25. 47. For Rio de Janeiro, see João Fragoso, “Fildagos e Parentes de Pretos: Notas sobre a Nobreza Principal da Terra do Rio de Janeiro (1600–1700),” in Conquistadores e negociantes: histórias de elites no antigo regime nos trópicos: América lusa, séculos XVI a XVIII, ed. João Fragoso, Carla Maria Carvalho de Almeida, and Antonio Carlos Jucá de Sampaio (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2007), 51. For Salvador, see John Norman Kennedy, “Bahian Elites, 1750–1822,” Hispanic American Historical Review 53, 3 (1973): 415–39; Alexandre Vieira Ribeiro, “O Comércio de escravos e a elite baiana no período colonial,” in Conquistadores e negociantes, 333; Ribeiro, “O Comércio de Almas e a obtenção de Prestígio Social: Traficantes de Escravos na Bahia ao Longo do Século XVIII,” Locus 12, 2 (2006): 9–27. 48. “Ofício do Governo Provisório de Benguela” on May 27, 1822, AHA, cód. 448, fls. 22v.–23. 49. “Carta Régia” on September 3, 1799, BML, cód. 24, fls. 178–178v. 50. “Ofício de Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho” on September 3, 1799, AHU, cód. 550, fls. 21–21v. 51. “Registro de Petição dos Homens de Negócio de Luanda ao Senado da Câmara” on December 11, 1715, BML, cód. 12, fls. 214–215v.

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52. “Carta de Pascoal José Fernandez” on September 9, 1819, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 29, doc., fls. 10–11v. 53. “Sociedade e Obrigação entre Francisco Rodrigues da Silva e Possidónio da Costa” on June 2, 1767, ANTT, 8º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa, cx. 9, livro 45. 54. “Ofício de Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho” on November 22, 1799, AHU, cód. 550, fls. 55–56. 55. “Decreto” on August 27, 1808, AHA, cód. 255, fls. 130–130v. 56. “Procuração de Maria Josefa” on October 20, 1759, ANTT, 3º Cartório de Lisboa (Inácio Matias de Melo), cx. 3, livro 13. 57. “Procuração de Josefa Maria Caetana” on March 20, 1766, ANTT, 11º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa (former 8º A Cartório Notarial de Lisboa), maço 4, cx. 6, livro 34. 58. “Carta de Mathias Rodrigues Vieira para Agostinha Maria da Luz” on August 12, 1755, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 1, doc. 1. 59. “Petição de Luiz Ferreira de Moura e Capitão António Marques” in 1767, ANTT, Feitos Findos, Justificações Ultramarinas, Africa, maço 21, doc. 7, fl. 2. 60. “Apontamento do Barão de Mossamedes, undated but around 1784,” AHU, Angola, cx. 68, doc. 29. 61. “Ofício de José de Almeida Barboza” on December 19, 1810, AHU, Angola, cx. 121 A, doc. 26. 62. “Extrato de Carta de Manoel Francisco Regadas” on September 7, 1789, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 23, doc. 16, fls. 40v.–41. 63. “Carta Régia” on January 7, 1791, AHU, cód. 1633, fls. 32v.–33v. 64. “Testamento de Antonio Xavier de Cairos” on March 29, 1795, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 16, doc. 7, fls. 43–45v. 65. “Caderno de Receita e Despesa do Inventário de Antonio Fernandes da Silva” on June 11, 1803, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 4, doc. 20. 66. “Portaria do Governador de Benguela” on September 30, 1816, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 197v. 67. “Requerimento de Antonio Lopes Anjo” on May 21, 1827, AHA, cód. 7182, fl. 50. 68. “Petição de Marsal Domigues” on March 23, 1735, AHU, Angola, cx. 28, doc. 18. 69. “Petição de José Caetano de Araújo” on September 11, 1754, AHU, Angola, cx. 39, doc. 64. 70. “Procuração de Domingos Dias da Silva e José Alves Bandeira” on June 18, 1765, ANTT, 10º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa (former 2º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa), cx. 8, livro 15 (43, 44, 45). 71. “Autos de Residência do Juiz de Fora de Benguela” in 1780, AHU, Angola, cx. 63, doc. 2; “Certidão de Frutuoso José da Cruz” on September 27, 1796, AHU, Angola, cx. 84, doc. 38. By the time Cruz returned to Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1790s, he was so well connected that several Benguelan merchants continued to rely on him to oversee the offloading and sale of slaves they had shipped to Rio de Janeiro. See “Primeiro Testamento de José António de Carvalho” on January 8, 1798, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço

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22, doc. 5; “Testamento de Joaquim Antonio da Roza” on September 12, 1799, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 12, doc. 8. 72. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on March 16, 1797, AHA, cód. 442, fls. 30–32; “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on February 28, 1797, ANTT, Ministério do Reino, maço 604, cx. 707. 73. See “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on August 12, 1796, AHA, cód. 442, fls. 13v.–14. 74. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on May 3, 1796, AHA, cód. 518, fl. 236. 75. “Mapa das Pessoas Livres, Escravos e Casas de Sobrado, Terras, Cobertas de Palha, e Senzalas” in Benguela in 1796, IHGB, lata 81, pasta 2, fl. 8. 76. “Sociedade de José Ferreira da Fonseca e José Carneiro da Silva” on December 20, 1760, ANTT, 12º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa (former 5 A Cartório Notarial de Lisboa), nº 14, cx. 3, nº 3. To manage the partnership, whose goal was to ship slaves to Rio de Janeiro, Fonseca appointed correspondents in Rio in 1765. See “Procuração de José Ferreira da Fonseca” on August 1, 1765 ANTT, 10º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa (former 2º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa), cx. 8, livro 15 (43, 44, 45). 77. “Procuração de Manuel Gonçalves Jardim” August 9, 1765, ANTT, 10º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa (former 2º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa), cx. 8, livro 15 (43, 44, 45). 78. “Requerimento de Francisco Ferreira Gomes e Antônio Lopes Anjo” on May 24, 1823, AHA, cx. 138; “Requerimento de Francisco Ferreira Gomes” on May 25, 1824, AHA, cx. 138. 79. Leonor Freire Costa, “Informação e incerteza: Gerindo os riscos do negócio bolonial,” Ler História 44 (2003): 120. 80. “Testamento de Aurélio Veríssimo Vieira” on September 2, 1805, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 14, doc. 1, fls. 8v.–11v. 81. “Testamento de José de Sousa” on April 15, 1780, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 21, doc. 12; “Testamento de Luiz Antonio Gomes” on June 8, 1785, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 3, doc. 14. 82. “Ofício do Desembargador Fiscal” on April 10, 1811, IHGB, Dl 1132, 05. 83. AHA, cx. 138; fls. 34v–35. 84. “Requerimento de Antonio Lopes Anjo” on March 3, AHA, cx. 138, fl. 106; “Requerimento de Francisco Ferreira Gomes e Antonio Lopes Anjo” on August 11, 1826, AHA, cód. 7182, fl. 10v. 85. “Requerimento de Antonio Lopes Anjo” on March 3, AHA, cx. 138, fl. 106; “Requerimento de Francisco Ferreira Gomes e Antonio Lopes Anjo” on August 11, 1826, AHA, cód. 7182, fl. 10v. 86. “Apontamento do Barão de Mossamedes, undated but around 1784,” AHU, cx. 68, doc. 29. 87. “Carta do Governador de Benguela” on September 16, 1785, AHU, Angola, cx. 70, doc. 47. Although this regulation was reinstated twice, it is not clear whether it was fully enforced. In 1801, for example, Governor of Benguela Francisco Infante de Si­ queira Correa da Silva acknowledged the existence of the regulation, but added that his

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predecessors had granted efeitos próprios licenses not only to ships from Portugal but also to those from Brazil and Benguela. See “Bando do Governador de Benguela” on December 4, 1800, AHA, cód. 518, fl. 136; “Edital sobre as Embarcações de Bando” on January 2, 1801, AHA, cód. 518, fls. 141–141v.; “Edital sobre a Preferencia dos Navios de Portugal e América” on October 20, 1801, AHA, cód. 518, fls. 157–58. For the reinstatement of the 1784 law, see “Cópia de Carta para o Ouvidor Geral de Angola” on August 27, 1803, AHA, cód. 302, fls. 129v.–130. 88. “Portaria do Governador” on March 11, 1815, AHA, cód. 519, fl. 165 v. 89. “Petição do Alferes Miguel Antônio Monteiro” in 1746, ANTT, FF, JU, maço 28, doc. 14 A. 90. “Escrito de Obrigação de Domingos Gonçalves de Melo” on August 9, 1769, ANTT, 10º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa (former 2º Cartório Notarial de Lisboa), cx. 12, livro 23 (67, 68 and 69). 91. “Testamento de Domingos José da Silva” on September 3, 1781, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 22, doc. 4. 92. “Testamento de José Manoel” on December 21, 1789, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 16, doc. 9. 93. “Testamento de José António da Costa” on April 17, 1795, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 30, doc. 11. 94. “Testamento de António José de Barros” on September 10, 1799, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 2, doc. 3 A, fls. 13–14. 95. “Primeiro Testamento de José António de Carvalho” on January 8, 1798, ANTT, FF, JU, Africa, maço 22, doc. 5. 96. “Testamento de António José de Barros” on September 10, 1799, ANTT, FF, JU, África, maço 2, doc. 3 A, fl. 15. 97. “Petição de Veríssimo Rodrigues Chaves” in 1785, AHU, cx. 70, doc. 9. 98. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on April 24, 1796, AHA, cód. 442, fls. 2–5v. 99. “Testamento de António José de Barros” on September 10, 1799, ANTT, FF, JU, África, maço 2, doc. 3 A, fl. 15. 100. “Carta para o Governador de Angola” on November 28, 1826, AHU, cód. 542. 101. “Carta do Governador de Angola” on February 6, 1797, AHU, 1632. 102. “Ofício do Governador de Angola” on August 1, AHU, Angola, cx. 55. 103. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on August 12, 1796, AHA, cód. 442, fls. 13v.–14. 104. “Carta Geral desta Capitania (Benguela)” on March 28, 1798, AHA, cód. 441, fls. 31v.–35. 105. In 1827, Gomes junior was listed as co-owner of the Brigue Maria with his father. See “Requerimento de Francisco Ferreira Gomes and José Ferreira Gomes” on January 24, 1827, AHA, cód. 7182, fl. 35. 106. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on October 27, 1825, AHA, cód. 449, fl. 59; “Requerimento de José Ferreira Gomes” on February 4, 1826, AHA, cx. 138, fl. 163v. For a trip that José Ferreira Gomes took to Brazil in 1830, see the online “Movimentação

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de Portugueses no Brasil, 1808–1842” dataset on the homepage of the Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro. 107. “Relatório de Miguel Antonio de Mello” on December 24, 1798, AHU, Angola, cx. 89, doc. 67. “Requerimento de Agostinho Rodrigues da Silva” on August 1, 1825, AHA, cx. 138, fl. 133. See also “Atlantic Microhistories: Slaving, Mobility, and Personal Ties in the Black Atlantic World (Angola and Brazil),” in Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic, ed. Nancy Naro, Roger Sansi, and David Treece (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 99–128. 108. For Bermuda, see Michael Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 365. 109. “Petição de Manoel de Siqueira Monteiro” in 1732, AHU, Angola, cx. 27, doc. 58; “Carta da Junta da Real Fazenda de Angola” on June 3, 1770, AHU, Angola, cx. 54, doc. 28. 110. “Carta Régia” on June 30, 1742, AHU, cód. 546, fls. 126–126v. 111. “Resposta do Governador de Angola” on December 30, 1750, AHA, cód. 2, fl. 44. 112. “Ofício do Governador de Angola” on December 16, 1767, AHU, Angola, cx. 51, doc. 59. 113. Francisco Inocêncio de Souza Coutinho, “Memórias do Reino de Angola e suas Conquistas, escritas em Lisboa nos anos de 1773–1775,” Arquivos de Angola, 2 serie, vol. IV, num. 49. Janeiro, 1939, 173–202. 114. “Carta do Governador de Angola” on December 16, 1767, AHU, Angola, cx. 51, doc. 62. 115. Coutinho, “Memórias do Reino de Angola.” 116. “Ofício do Governador de Angola” on January 12, 1780, AHU, Angola, cx. 63. 117. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on October 12, 1788, AHU, cx. 73, doc. 44. 118. “Certidão de Antonio Freire de Andrade,” September 3, 1788, AHU, Angola, cx. 84, doc. 9. 119. “Certidão do Escrivão da Real Fazenda” on January 2, 1793, AHU, Angola, cx. 78, doc. 17. 120. “Parecer do Conselho ultramarino” on October 19, 1792, AHU, cód. 481; “Resolução Régia” on April 8, 1795, AHU, cód. 1633; Governor Ornelas died before being taken in custody to Lisbon. See “Consulta do Conselho Ultramarino” on June 2, 1797, AHU, cód. 27, fls. 236v.–237v. 121. “Testemunho de João Pedro Barrocas” on May 31, 1796, AHU, cx. 84, doc. 9. 122. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on December 5, 1797, AHA, cód. 442, fls. 49–49v. See also Joseph Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 226–27. 123. “Ofício de Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho” on March 17, 1800, AHA, cód. 254, fls. 159v.–161v.

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Notes to Pages 239–241

124. “Carta do Governador de Angola” on August 10, 1812, AHA, cód. 323, fls. 90v.–91. 125. “Carta do Governadro de Angola” on February 5, 1818, AHA, cód. 155, fls. 26–28. 126. “Ofício de Thomaz Antonio da Villanova Portugal” on August 26, 1817, AHA, cód. 361, fl. 29. 127. “Provisão do desembargador do Paço” on July 9, 1818, AHA, cód. 361, fls. 57–57v. 128. “Ofício do Governador de Angola” on February 17, 1821, AHU, Angola, cx. 140. 129. “Carta Anônima” on March 26, 1821, AHU, Angola, cx. 140, doc. 46. 130. “Proclamação aos Soldados do Regimento de Linha e Esquadrão de Cavalaria de Luanda” on February 8, 1822, AHU, Angola, cx. 141, doc. 9. 131. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on July 12, 1817, AHA, cód. 446, fls. 140–42. 132. “Ofício do Juiz pela Lei” on October 9, 1821, AHU, Angola, cx. 152. 133. Thomas Wisiak, “Itinerário da Bahia na Independência do Brasil (1821–1823),” in Independência: História e historiografia, ed. István Jancsó (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2005), 447–75. 134. “Carta do Governador de Angola” on June 26, 1822, AHU, Angola, cx. 142. 135. “Carta do Governadro de Angola” on May 11, 1824, AHA, cód. 157, fls. 5v.–6. 136. “Ofício do Governador de Angola” on November 24, 1824, AHU, Angola, cx. 146, doc. 27. 137. Jeffrey Mosher, Political Struggle, Ideology, and State Building: Pernambuco and the Construction of Brazil, 1817–1850 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 57. See also Luiz Geraldo Santos da Silva, “Negros patriotas: Raça e identidade social na formação do estado nação (Pernambuco, 1770–1830),” in Jancsó, Brasil: Formação do estado e da nação, 497–520; Luiz Geraldo Santos da Silva, “Um projeto para a Nação: Tensões e intenções políticas nas Províncias do norte (1817–1824),” Revista de História 158 (2008): 199–201; Luiz Geraldo Santos da Silva, “O Avesso da independência: Pernambuco (1817–1824),” in A Independência brasileira: novas dimensões, ed. Jurandir Malerba (Rio de Janeiro: FGV Editora, 2006), 343–85. For an overview of recent historiography on Brazilian independence, see João Paulo Pimenta, “A Independência do Brasil e o liberalismo Português: um balanço da produção acadêmica,” Revista de Historia Iberoamericana 1, 1 (2008): 65–103. 138. Hendrik Kraay, “Muralhas da Independência e Liberdade do Brasil: A Participação Popular nas Lutas Políticas (Bahia, 1820–25),” in Malerba, A Independência Brasileira, 309. See also Matthias Assunção, “Elite Politics and Popular Rebellion in the Construction of Post-Colonial Order: The Case of Maranhão, Brazil, 1820–1841,” Journal of Latin American Studies 31, 1 (1999): 1–38; Sérgio Armando Diniz Guerra Filho, “O Povo e a guerra: Participação das camadas populares nas lutas pela independência do Brasil na Bahia,” M.A. thesis, Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2004; João José Reis and

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Hendrik Kraay, “‘The Tyrant Is Dead!’ The Revolt of the Periquitos in Bahia, 1824,” Hispanic American Historical Review 89, 3 (2009): 399–434; Mark Harris, Rebellion on the Amazon: The Cabanagem, Race, and Popular Culture in the North of Brazil, 1798–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 6. 139. Ana Rosa Cloclet da Silva, “1808 e seus impactos no processo de politização das identidades coletivas: Minas gerais (1795–1831),” Revista de História 159 (2008): 218; Reis and Kraay, “The Tyrant Is Dead!” 414. 140. For the creation of provisional juntas in Brazil, see Flávio José Gomes Cabral, “Conversas reservadas: ‘Vozes públicas,’ conflitos políticos e rebeliões em pernambuco no tempo da independência do Brasil,” Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 2008; Andréa Slemian, “Sob o império das leis: Constituição e unidade nacional na formação do Brasil (1822–1834),” Ph.D. dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo, 2008, 63–120. 141. Denis Bernardes, O Patriotismo constitucional: Pernambuco, 1820–1822 (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2006), 317. 142. Flávio José Gomes Cabral, “Os efeitos da notícia da revolução liberal do Porto na província de Pernambuco e a crise do sistema colonial no nordeste do Brasil (1820– 1821),” Fronteras de la Historia 11 (2006): 389–413. For Rio de Janeiro, see José Celso de Castro Alves, “Plebeian Activism, Popular Constitutionalism: Race, Labor, and Unrealized Democracy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1780s–1830s,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2006, 42–48. For Bahia, see Maria Aparecida Silva de Sousa, “Bahia: de capitania a província, 1808–1823,” Ph.D. dissertation, USP, 2008, 225–35. 143. Marcia Regina Berbel, A Nação como artefato: Deputados do Brasil nas cortes portuguesas (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1999), 57. 144. “Instrumento de Pública Forma” on July 5, 1825, AHU, Angola, cx. 149. 145. “Ofício do Governo Provisorio de Benguela” on March 30, 1822, AHA, cód. 448, fls. 16v.–17v. 146. “Ofício do Governo Provisorio de Benguela” on April 22, 1822, AHA, cód. 448, fls. 18v.–21. 147. “Carta da Junta de Governo de Angola” on December 13, 1822, AHA, cód. 156, fls. 62v.–64. 148. “Ofício da Junta Provisória de Luanda” on December 13, 1822, AHA, cód. 507, fls. 218v.–219v.; “Exposição de Leonardo José Vilela e Joaquim José Ferreira Campos” on January 15, 1823, AHU, Angola, cx. 142, doc. 44; “Ofício da Junta de Fazenda de Angola” on December 22, 1822, AHU, Angola, cx. 142, doc. 44. For the press in Rio de Janeiro, particularly A Malagueta, see Isabel Lustosa, Insultos impressos: a Guerra dos jornalistas na independência, 1821–1828 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000), 155–61; Alves, “Plebeian Activism, Popular Constitutionalism,” 202; Marco Morel and Mariana Monteiro Barros, Palavras imagens e poder: O surgimento da imprensa no Brasil do século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: DP & A, 2003). 149. “Carta da Junta de Governo de Angola” on February 21, 1823, AHA, cód. 156, fls. 65–65v.

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150. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on May 8, 1823, AHU, Angola, cx. 142. 151. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on July 24, 1823, AHU, Angola, cx. 143. 152. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on May 13, 1823, AHU, Angola, cx. 142, doc. 40. 153. “Decreto da Junta Provisória de Benguela” on June 2, 1823, AHU, Angola, cx. 142. The original order included the sale of the assets in a public auction and the end of maritime trade between Benguela and Brazil. These steps were never implemented, and Brazilian merchants were allowed to use their assets as long as they paid a fee (fiança) to the government. See “Ofício do Juiz de Fora” on April 11, 1824, AHU, Angola, cx. 144. 154. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on November 4, 1823, AHU, Angola, cx. 143; “Artigos dos Aactos mais Notáveis das Violências e Extorsões Praticadas pelo Governador de Benguela” on January 16, 1824, AHU, Angola, cx. 144. 155. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on June 29, 1824, AHA, cód. 449, fls. 5v.–6. 156. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on July 24, 1824, AHA, cód. 448, fls. 48–51v. 157. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on August 25, 1824, AHA, cód. 449, fls. 12v.–13. For radical political stances by the editor of the Malagueta, see Alves, “Plebeian Activism, Popular Constitutionalism,” 206. 158. “Lista dos Documentos Mandados Expedir pelo Governador de Benguela” in 1824, AHU, Angola, cx. 144, doc. 113. 159. “Portaria do Governador de Benguela” on July 13, 1824, AHA, cód. 520, fls. 3 v.–4. 160. “Partes dadas no Quartel do Governo” on July 21, 1824, AHA, cód. 508, fls. 29v.–30. 161. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on August 25, 1824, AHA, cód. 449, fls. 12v.–13. 162. “Requerimento de Justiniano José dos Reis” on August 28, 1824, AHA, cx. 138, fl. 81. 163. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on September 30, 1824, AHA, cód. 449, fls. 17v.–18, 19v. 164. “Ofício do Governador de Benguela” on November 6, 1824, AHA, cód. 449, fls. 21v.–22. 165. “Portaria do Governador de Benguela” on October 20, 1824, AHA, cód. 520, fl. 15v. 166. “Testemunho de João Nunes de Queiroz” on September 18, 1826, AHU, Angola, cx. 152; “Ofício do Governador de Angola” on November 18, 1824, AHU, Angola, cx. 152. 167. “Mapa da Cidade de Benguela relativo ao ano de 1800,” AHA, cód. 442, fls. 171v.–172 168. “Notícias de Benguela e seus Distritos em 1797,” IHGB, lata 32, pasta 2, fl. 9v., 11, 21.

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169. “Autos de Residência do Juiz de Fora de Benguela” in 1780, AHU, Angola, cx. 63, doc. 2. 170. “Relação dos Moradores da Cidade de Benguela” in 1797, IHGB, DL 32, 02.02. 171. “Carta do Juiz de Fora de Benguela” on July 28, 1778, AHU, Angola, cx. 61. 172. “Mapa das Pessoas Livres e Escravas” in Benguela in 1798, AHU, Angola, cx. 88, doc. 46. 173. “Ofício do Governo Provisorio de Benguela” on April 22, 1822, AHA, cód. 448, fls. 18v.–21. 174. “Requerimento dos Negociantes de Benguela” in 1821, AHU, Angola, cx. 140, doc. 83. 175. “Ofício do Governo Provisorio de Benguela” on April 22, 1822, AHA, cód. 448, fls. 18v.–21. 176. Instead, he claimed to have been unfairly arrested due to a mistake while on military duty. See Joaquim Lopes dos Santos, Memória da Violência praticada pelo Governador de Benguela João Antonio Pusich contra o Alferes Joaquim Lopes dos Santos (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1824). Chapter 12. Rosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution An earlier version of this essay was published in John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris, eds., Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World (College Station: Texas A&M University Press for University of Texas at Arlington, 2010), edited and updated for the present publication. A preliminary version appeared in Genèses (Paris) 66 (March 2007), 4–29, under the title “Les papiers de la liberté: une mère africaine et ses enfants à l’époque de la Révolution Haïtienne,” reprinted by permission We wish to express our gratitude to the many colleagues who have discussed ideas and helped us locate documents. The generosity of John Garrigus and David Geggus has been simply extraordinary, and we are very much in their debt for research leads, insights, and timely corrections. We also thank Orli Avi-Yonah, José Luis Belmonte, Sueann Caulfield, Myriam Cottias, Natalie Z. Davis, Mamadou Diouf, Laurent Dubois, Sam Erman, Ada Ferrer, Eric Foner, Sylvia Frey, Lindsay Ann Gish, Valérie Sega Gobert, Jane Guyer, Marial Iglesias Utset, Martha S. Jones, Jochen Kemner, Martin Klein, Paul Lachance, Dawn Logsdon, Jorge Macle, Fernando Martínez Heredia, María de los Angeles Meriño, Mary Niall Mitchell, Vernon Palmer, Aisnara Perera, Esther Pérez, Rebekah Pite, Lawrence Powell, David Robinson, Sylvain Sankalé, Judith Schafer, Scott Shapiro, François Weil, and Michael Zeuske. The staffs of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba in Havana, the U.S. National Archives in Washington, the Special Collections of the Library of the University of Florida-Gainesville, the Archives Départementales in Pau, the Archives nationales du Sénégal in Dakar, the Archives nationales in Paris, and the Archives nationales d’Outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence have been generous with their time and effort. Ann Wakefield, Howard Margot, Charles Johnson, and the staff of the New Orleans Notarial Research Center have gone beyond the call of duty, as have John Lawrence,

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Alfred Lemmon, and John Magill of the Historic New Orleans Collection, and Wayne Everard, Greg Osborn, and Irene Wainwright of the Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library. We owe particular thanks to Keith Manuel of the Department of History at the University of Florida, who photographed additional documents for us in the Jérémie Papers at the University of Florida libraries. Descendants of Jacques Tinchant and Élisabeth Vincent now living in France and Belgium, particularly Philippe Struyf and Marie Louise Van Velsen, as well as genealogists Raymond Bulion, Augusta Elmwood, Andrée-Luce Fourcand, Philippe and Bernadette Rossignol, and Barbara Snow, have shared leads and ideas of various kinds. We also thank Martha S. Jones, Peter Railton, Anne F. Scott, Thomas Scott-Railton, and William Scott, who have taken time from their own work to read or listen to various early drafts. Along the way, we have presented this work at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris; the Barnard Center for Research on Women in New York City; the Program in Latin American Studies and Department of History at Princeton University; Centro Juan Marinello in Havana, at Rice University in Houston; the 2006 conference “The Reluctant Archive” at the University of Michigan; the Université Cheik Anta Diop in Dakar, and other seminars and workshops. We are very grateful to those audiences for their comments and suggestions. 1. On Edouard Tinchant’s life history, see Rebecca J. Scott, “Public Rights and Private Commerce: An Atlantic Creole Itinerary,” Current Anthropology 48 (April 2007): 237–49. Evidence on Tinchant’s service as principal, and on his commitment to integrated schools, is in the minutes of the September 16, 1867, meeting of the Orleans Parish School Board, now held in Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans. 2. Official Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention for Framing a Constitution for the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: Roudanez, 1867–68), 35, 116–17, 192. 3. The issue of marriage across what white supremacists saw as a “color line” arose in other state conventions as well. See the discussion of the Arkansas debates in Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 4. In a letter to his parents in October 1863, Edouard described the tension of concealing his political sympathies from those he described as the “confédérés les plus endiablés” (the most furious Confederates) who gathered at the Tinchant cigar store on St. Charles Avenue. Edouard referred to himself, with a mild degree of self-mockery, as “le plus enragé abolitionniste de la Nouvelle Orléans” (the most fanatical abolitionist in New Orleans). See Edouard Tinchant to Mes chers parents, October 28, 1863, from the family papers of the Tinchant family; a transcription of this letter was courteously provided to us by Philippe Struyf, Brussels. 5. For a discussion of the language of Edouard Tinchant’s letters of 1864 and 1899, see Scott, “Public Rights and Private Commerce.” 6. On slavery as statelessness, see Linda K. Kerber, “The Stateless as the Citizen’s

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Other: A View from the United States,” American Historical Review 112 (February 2007), 1–34; esp. 16–17. For a full narrative and interpretation of the Vincent/Tinchant family history across five generations see Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 7. The sale to Mongol is in “Vente par Marthe Guillaume à Mongol de la Nsse Rozalie,” January 14, 1793, Notary Lépine, File 6C-119, Jérémie Papers, Special Collections, University of Florida Libraries (hereafter SC, UFL). Mongol’s circumstances are described in detail in his November 3, 1787 marriage record. Freed himself in 1782, he purchased and then married a slave named Lisette, thus freeing her and legitimating their two children. St. Domingue, État Civil, Jérémie, 1783–1786, SOM 5Mi/60, Centre d’accueil et de recherche des Archives nationales (CARAN). The classic description of the individual parishes of the colony is from Méderic Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civil, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle de Saint-Domingue, 1797 (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 2004). 8. On the history of the Peul, see Oumar Kane, La Première hégémonie peule: le fuuta tooro de Koli Tengella à Almaami Abdul (Dakar: Karthala and Presses Universitaires de Dakar, 2004). See also Frédérique Dejou, Roger Botte, Jean Boutrais, and Jean Schmitz, eds., Figures peules (Paris: Karthala, 1999). 9. In view of the age attributed to her in a later notarial record, we estimate her birth to have taken place around 1767. On the slave trade to Saint-Domingue, see Jean Mettas, Répertoire des expéditions négrières françaises au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Serge Daget and Michèle Daget (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1984); Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and David Geggus, “Sex Ratio, Age, and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records,” Journal of African History 30 (1989): 23–44. 10. Geggus, “Sex Ratio,” explores the demographics of the enslaved population in Saint-Domingue, with particular attention to the distribution of ethnonyms. We have also found Poulard to be quite rare as a descriptor in the notarial records of Jérémie. 11. See most recently Florence Gauthier, L’Aristocratie de l’épiderme: le combat de la Société des Citoyens de Couleur, 1789–1791 (Paris: CNRS, 2007). 12. See the letters from the mayor and council in dossier 13, DXXV/65, CARAN. See also Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), esp. Part 3, “The South.” 13. The marriage of Alexis Couba and Anne, which makes reference to his affranchissement (manumission), is dated January 9, 1781 and recorded in SOM 5Mi/59, CARAN. The transfer of Rosalie from Alexis Couba to Marthe Guillaume is referred to in the first draft of Marthe Guillaume’s last will and testament, dated January 8, 1793, Notary Lépine, File 6C-116, Jérémie Papers, SC, UFL. 14. The sale of Rosalie is “Vente par Marthe Guillaume à Mongol de la Nsse Rozalie,”

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Notes to Pages 252–254

January 14, 1793, Notary Lépine, File 6C-119, Jérémie Papers, SC, UFL. The February 28, 1783 marriage of Marthe Guillaume’s daughter Marie Anne [Aliés] to Jean Baptiste Azor dit Fortunat is on SOM 5 Mi/60, CARAN. For a fuller discussion of Marthe Guillaume, see Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, chap. 2. 15. See “Addresse a tous les citoyens chargés des autorités civils & militaires, & à tous les citoyens de la Colonie,” dated Jérémie, Maison commune, le 7 mars 1793, l’an second de la République française,” copy in dossier 895, DXXV/113, CARAN. 16. See Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Laurent Dubois, A Col­ ony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), esp. 162–65. 17. The quotation is from Bérault de Saint Maurice, transcribed in David Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 62–68. 18. “Affranchissement de la négresse Rosalie par Martonne,” December 2, 1795, Notary Dobignies, File 9-218, Jérémie Papers, SC, UFL. Marthe Guillaume’s other dealings with the British appear in her list of creditors and debtors in Notary Lépine, File 6C-210, both in Jérémie Papers, SC, UFL. 19. See Williamson to Murray, January 13, 1796; and the discussion under the heading affranchissement, 69, “Copie des lettres écrites par le Conseil privé,” File T81/15, National Archives of the United Kingdom. 20. On the complexity of their departure, see Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution, 373–81. 21. Rigaud’s efforts to assure agricultural production, however, were built on renting out lands to men and women able to pay the price, which often left former slaves working almost as before on the lands of others. See Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 197–98. 22. Perhaps, though this is more speculative, her baptism was very recent, con­ nected in some way to the relationship with the baby’s father. The absence of a surname, by contrast, is unsurprising. The taking by a freed person of any surname used by a white family had been formally prohibited in late colonial Saint-Domingue. Although the prohibition was sometimes ignored, recently freed people often appear in the records without a surname at all. The designation négresse libre (free black woman) was by 1799 an anachronism: everyone in Saint-Domingue was now legally free. Its use both evoked the stigma of previous slave status, and echoed the pre-abolition term that signaled possession of valid proof of individual manumission. A copy of the baptismal certificate is in “Rectification de noms d’épouse Tinchant dans son contrat de marriage,” November 16, 1835, Act 672, 1835, Notary Theodore Seghers, New Orleans Notarial Archives Research Center (henceforth NONARC). For the 1773 ordonnance concerning surnames, see Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le vent (Paris, 1784–1790) 5: 448–50.

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23. This inclusion of the nickname “Dieudonné” in a baptismal record is puzzling; generally only a saint’s name would be given at the moment of baptism, though nicknames were widely used afterward. For a detailed discussion of the document, see Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 40–41. On naming practices in the French Antilles, see John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and Myriam Cottias, “Le Partage du nom,” in Jean Hébrard, Hebe M. Mattos, and Rebecca J. Scott, eds., Écrire l’esclavage, écrire la liberté, special issue Cahiers du Brésil Contemporain 53/54 (2003): 163–74. 24. At the time of his marriage, Michel Vincent had been identified as the fermier de boucherie in the southern town of Les Cayes. See the parish registers of Les Cayes du Fond (1698–1782) in SOM 6Mi/37, CARAN. His marriage to Nicole Catherine Bouché Widow Randel is on p. 177, year 1772. Vincent’s rare trips to the local notaries in Jérémie were to sell off portions of his land, and he showed little of the buying, borrowing, and lending characteristic of his more prosperous planter neighbors. See, for example, the sale document dated 13 pluviose an 7, in Joubert 4–13, Jérémie Papers, SC, UFL. The description of the region and the count of houses are in Moreau de Saint Méry, Description topographique, 2: 762–816. Marthe Guillaume’s business dealings are abundantly recorded in the papers of the notary Lépine, both those held in the Archives Nationales d’Outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence (henceforth ANOM), and those in the Jérémie Papers, SC, UFL. See also Jean Hébrard, “Les deux vies de Michel Vincent, colon à Saint-Domingue (ca. 1730–1804),” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et contemporaine 57 (2010): 50–77. 25. On the use of the term sieur in Saint-Domingue, see John Garrigus, “Colour, Class and Identity on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution: Saint-Domingue’s Free Col­ oured Elite as Colons Américains,” Slavery and Abolition 17 (1996): 19–43, esp. 25–29. Throughout the eighteenth century, many children were born to unions of French colonists and African women, and as adults they often established themselves as artisans, traders, entrepreneurs, and in some cases landowners. In the latter decades of the century, these men and women and their descendants had been increasingly stigmatized by whites seeking to monopolize power and civic standing. See Garrigus, Before Haiti. For the widow Aubert’s activities in New Orleans, see below. By the time Michel Vincent actually died, the revolutionary-era rules on inheritance had been replaced by the Napoleonic Code Civil, which reduced the claims that natural children could make. See Jean-Louis Halperin, “Le droit privé de la Révolution: Héritage législatif et héritage idéologique,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 328 (2002). 26. Fick, The Making of Haiti, 210–13; Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’histoire d’Haïti (Paris: Dezobry et Magdeleine, 1853–1860); Yves Benot, La Démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: Découverte, 1992); Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 368–70. 27. See the letters of Leclerc in Paul Roussier, ed., Lettres du général Leclerc, commandant en chef de l’armée de Saint-Domingue en 1802 (Paris: Société de l’Histoire des Colonies Françaises et Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1937), 200, 201, 255. On the tumult of 1802–1803, see also Dubois, Avengers, and Ardouin, Études.

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Notes to Pages 256–258

28. See Jan Pachoński and Reuel K. Wilson, Poland’s Caribbean Tragedy: A Study of Polish Legions in the Haitian War of Independence, 1802–1803 (Boulder, Colo.: East European Monographs, 1986), chaps. 4 and 5; Fick, The Making of Haiti, 234–35. 29. “Enregistrement de liberté,” 26 ventôse an XII, folio 25 verso, register titled “Actes déclarations & dépots divers, 10 Pluviose An XII–12 Avril 1809,” in the volume “Registre Comprenant du 10 Pluviose an XII au 10 Vendémiaire an XIII,” 6supsdom/3, Agence des Prises de la Guadeloupe, Dépôt des Papiers Publics des Colonies, (herein­ after APG, DPPC), ANOM. 30. “Enregistrement de liberté . . . ,” 26 ventôse an XII. The nickname “Résinette” may be an affectionate diminutive from raisiné, a grape jam (suggestion courtesy of Valérie Sega Gobert). We have not located baptismal information for the other three children, though some fragments in the Jérémie Papers are suggestive, listing the baptism in 1795, apparently in the same parish of Cap-Dame-Marie, of “Marie Louise mulatresse” and “Jean Théodore Mulatre.” See the untitled pages, apparently the continuation of a répertoire, located in Folder 12, Box 5, Jérémie Papers, SC, UFL. 31. “Enregistrement de liberté,” 26 ventôse an XII. For the text in French of this document, see Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, “Servitude, liberté et citoyenneté dans le monde atlantique des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles: Rosalie de nation Poulard,” Revue de la Société Haïtienne d’Histoire et de Géographie 83 (July–September 2008): 1–52. 32. Manumissions could be regulated in terms of the age and conduct of the slave in question, and the competing rights of the owner’s heirs and creditors. Louisiana, where Élisabeth Dieudonné would eventually end up, imposed greater and greater restrictions over time. See Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846–1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). 33. For parallel documents created in a situation of comparable uncertainty in Guadeloupe, see Dubois, Colony of Citizens, chap. 2. 34. Peter S. Chazotte, Historical Sketches of the Revolutions, and the Foreign and Civil Wars in the Island of St. Domingo (New York: Applegate, 1840), 32–35. 35. Pachoński and Wilson, Poland’s Caribbean Tragedy. The descriptions of the evacuation of Jérémie found in the Rochambeau Papers, SC, UFL, are equally vivid. See, for example, the report by a ship captain in item 2021, “Copie du rapport du citoyen Pruniet capitaine de la falouche la doucereuse venant de Jérémie.” 36. Michel Vincent, identified as a mareschal (farrier), appears in the reference to “Testament de Michel Etienne Henry Vincent Mareschal demt ordint au Bourg des Abricots,” Actes Déclarations et Dépôts Divers, St Yago de Cuba, 1806–1809, Vol. II, 6supsdom/2, APG, DPPC, ANOM. For Rosalie’s presence, see discussion below. 37. Gabriel Debien, “Les colons de Saint-Domingue réfugiés à Cuba (1793–1815),” Revista de Indias 54 (1953): 559–605, esp. 590, 593; Alain Yacou, “Esclaves et libres français à Cuba au lendemain de la Révolution de Saint-Domingue,” Jahrbuch fur Geschichte von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas (Cologne) 28 (1991): 163–97;

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Laura Cruz Ríos, Flujos inmigratorios franceses a Santiago de Cuba (1800–1868) (Santiago de Cuba: Oriente, 2006). 38. Some refugees circumvented customs formalities by landing on the shore without reporting to the commandant at the port. Evidence of both official and clandestine landings is scattered through the records in the Fondo Correspondencia de los Capitanes Generales, including Legajos 63, 445, and 471, Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana (ANC). 39. The presence of Élisabeth in Santiago is confirmed in later evidence that in 1809 she went on from Santiago to New Orleans with her godmother. See Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, chap. 4. 40. No copy of Michel Vincent’s will itself has yet come to light, though reference is made to it in Vol. II, 6supsdom/2, APG, DPPC, ANOM. On the French refugees in Santiago, see also Debien, “Colons”; Yacou, “Esclaves”; and Olga Portuondo Zúñiga, Entre esclavos y libres de Cuba colonial (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 2003), 58–97. 41. See, for example, the sale of another woman, coincidentally also named Rosalie. The seller claimed to have lost his proof of title, but asserted ownership based on a brand on her body. Sale, Brebion to Marsand, 12 fructidor an 12, in Archives coloniales, Saint Domingue, Agence des Prises de la Guadeloupe, Correspondence, Actes, declarations & dépôts divers St. Yago de Cuba, An XII–An XIV. This volume, now in the ANOM [and cited above], was microfilmed as film #960762, Genealogical Society of Salt Lake City. This citation is from the microfilm edition. 42. “Enregistrement de liberté,” 26 ventôse an XII. 43. “Remise de Succn par Vallée,” 9 floréal an XII, 6supsdom/3, APG, DPPC, ANOM. No mention is made in the executor’s report of any heirs-at-law in France. In 1827, when France agreed to recognize independent Haiti in exchange for a massive indemnity, Michel Vincent’s remaining legitimate kin and heirs, including a grandnephew living in France, emerged and appealed to the French government for a portion of the indemnity. See V 141, Vincent (Michel Étienne Henry), 1390, Indemnités traités, in 7supsdom/97, DPPC, ANOM. 44. The widow Aubert later claimed to have been like a mother to Élisabeth since her early childhood. See the 1822 marriage contract of Élisabeth with Jacques Tinchant, discussed below. On reenslavement, see Martha S. Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York” and Rebecca J. Scott, “Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution,” both in Law and History Review 29 (November 2011): 1031–60, 1061–87. 45. The intrigues and politics surrounding these expulsions were very complex. See Portuondo, Entre esclavos, 78–82. 46. The departure of the refugees from Santiago was in practice a halting, incomplete, and negotiated process. Its complexity can be glimpsed in the correspondence, passenger lists, and registers in the Fondos Asuntos Politicos and Correspondencia de

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Notes to Page 262

los Capitanes Generales, ANC. The evidence of Rosalie’s presence in Haiti is discussed below. 47. On the flight of refugees from Santiago to the United States, see the essays in Carl A. Brasseaux and Glenn R. Conrad, eds., The Road to Louisiana: The Saint Domingue Refugees 1792–1809 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992); and the work of Paul Lachance, including “Repercussions of the Haitian Revolution in Louisiana,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David P. Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 209–30. See also Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007). For the day-to-day drama and governor’s difficulties, see Dunbar Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, vols. 4 and 5 (Jackson, Miss.: State Department of Archives and History, 1917). 48. The land purchase document is “Vente de terrain par Bd Marigny à Lambert Détry,” 20 Juillet 1809, Notary M. de Armas, Acts No. 2, NONARC. On the Louisiana Schedules of the Third Census of the United States (1810), Lambert Détry appears as the eighth entry on Rue Moreau, in a household containing one white man, three “other free people,” and thirteen slaves. See U.S. National Archives (USNA) Microcopy M252, Roll 10, Page 272. Détry and the widow appear in adjacent records of slave purchases in the notarial acts of Philippe Pedesclaux, March 8, 1817, NONARC. 49. One of these slaves was named Blaise; the other was called Marie Louise in the executor’s report, and Marie Joseph in the copy of the will filed with the judge. It is remotely possible that she was Rosalie’s older daughter, Marie Louise dite Résinette, who could have been remanded into slavery in Santiago, and could have been purchased by Lambert Détry. The age and birthplace given in the record do not seem to match, however, and Marie Louise was a common name. Liquidation & partage de la Succon Lambert Détry, aux termes de la transaction judiciaire passée entre les héritiers & les légataires de feu Lambert Détry, File D-1821, Inventories of Estates, Court of Probates, Orleans Parish, Louisiana City Archives, Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library (hereinafter NOPL). 50. See Liquidation & partage, cited above. Détry referred to this legatee as Marie Dieudonné, f. de c.l., but the executor later identified Marie Dieudonné as the wife of Jacques Tinchant, making it clear that this is indeed Rosalie’s younger daughter, Élisabeth (who seems to have acquired the name Marie along the way). See also the 1822 reference to “Marie Dieudonné f. de couleur et Libre demeurant par [illeg] en cette ville faubourg marigny chez marie Blanche Vv Aubert, f. de c. l. et qui l’ayant recueillie des sa plus tendre enfance lui a constament tenue lieu de mere; née a Saint Domingue, fille naturelle et majeure de rozalie vincent qui réside en ce moment à Saint Domingue . . . .” Marriage contract, Jacques Tinchant and Marie Dieudonné, September 26, 1822, p. 31, Vol. 22, Notary M. Lafitte, NONARC. 51. The group presenting themselves as the “lawful heirs”—Jean Joseph Détry; Marie Françoise Détry, widow of Jean Georges Paternot; Marie Thérèse Détry, wife of Antoine Bauman; Joseph Germain Détry; and Thérèse Détry, wife of Pierre Joseph Gui-

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otte—hired P. Derbigny as their attorney, and charged that the will was null and void “because it is not clothed with the formalities required by our law and also because it contains dispositions which are prohibited by these.” Moreover, they claimed that the clause under which the widow made her claim “is void, because it is a legacy by universal title, which legacies are forbidden between persons who lived together in a state of open concubinage, as these defendants aver that the pltff and the late F. L. Détry did live, and were living at the time of the said Détry’s death.” The case file is listed as Marie Louise Blanche, widow Aubert, fwc vs. Détry Jean (François X. Freyd, testamentary executor of) Year 1822, case number 206 in Court of Probates (Numbered Series). The original is now filed with the “flattened records” in the City Archives, Louisiana Division, NOPL. We owe special thanks to Irene Wainwright of the NOPL for having located this document, which was not microfilmed with other court records of this kind. 52. See the marriage contract cited in n. 50 above. The manuscript sacramental record of the wedding lists the bride’s mother (“la expresada Madre de la contrayente”) as one of the witnesses, but it is hard to know whether Rosalie Vincent herself was present at the marriage, or whether the priest simply took the widow Aubert for the bride’s mother. (The surviving manuscript record is a copy, and the copyist seems to have skipped a line, thus garbling the first reference to the bride herself.) See Act 328, September 28, 1822, in Saint Louis Cathedral, Marriages of Slaves and Free Persons of Color, Vol. 1, Part 2, in Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans (hereafter AANO). A summary transcript appears in Charles E. Nolan, ed., Sacramental Records of the Roman Catholic Church of New Orleans, vol. 15 (New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 2000), 368. 53. For a powerful evocation in fiction of the complexity of relationships of this kind, on into the twentieth century, see Maryse Condé, Victoire: les saveurs et les mots (Paris: Mercure de France, 2006). 54. Jacques sued to try to extract the promised bequest from the widow. She countered that the couple’s room and board had in fact consumed the equivalent of the bequest, and that she owed him nothing—indeed, that he owed her $103.20. In the course of this unseemly quarrel, the widow Aubert compiled a written record that revealed the importance to each of these households of the labor of an enslaved woman named Gertrude, aged around twenty-two, who had been given as a wedding gift to Élisabeth. The hiring-out of Gertrude yielded $140 annually—a sum larger than the food expenses of the couple for an entire year. See Jacques Tinchant v. Marie Blanche Widow Aubert, docket #3920, Parish Court, Orleans Parish, Louisiana Division, NOPL. 55. See “Société entre Jacques Tinchant et Pierre Duhart,” Act. 62, 1835, Notary Théodore Seghers, NONARC. Their business affairs are documented through the volumes of Seghers. Pierre Duhart was the son of Jacques Tinchant’s mother Marie Françoise dite Suzette Bayot, and Louis Duhart, a white schoolteacher and freemason. Because of Louisiana’s ban on marriage across the color line, the relationship of Bayot and Duhart was technically “concubinage,” though Suzette Bayot was sometimes referred to as Suzette Duhart. Bayot and Duhart migrated to France in the 1830s, and married there. See the death certificate of Marie Françoise Bayot, November 8, 1840, in Gan,

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Notes to Pages 263–265

Décès 1821–1853, 5Mi 230, Roll 6, in Archives Departementales des Pyrénées Atlantiques, Pau (ADPA), and Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, chap. 5. 56. See “Rectification de noms d’épouse Tinchant dans son contrat de mariage,” November 16, 1835, Act 672, 1835, Notary Theodore Seghers, NONARC. 57. During the eighteenth century, one of the primary items of trade along parts of the Senegal River was paper, and in the Islamic culture of northern Senegambia reading was prized and writings were known to hold power. See P. David Boilat, Esquisses sénégalaises, 1853 (Paris: Karthala, 1984); James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade. We thank Mamadou Diouf, Boubacar Barry, Martin Klein, Ibrahima Thioub, and Rudolph Ware for discussions of Senegal in this period. 58. Many thanks to Scott Shapiro, Yale University, for this observation. 59. Rosalia Vincent appears on the passenger list with an estimated age of fifty— which seems to be an underestimate by about eighteen years; she was said to be twentysix years old in 1793, hence born in 1767. But there appears to be nothing very precise about the ages scrawled on the passenger list, and there is subsequent confirmation (see below) that Rosalie Vincent, mother of Élisabeth, was indeed in New Orleans in the months that followed. The ship’s manifest is reproduced in “List of all Passengers taken on board the Brig Ann whereof Charles Sutton is Master at the Port of Port Au Prince and bound for New-Orleans,” arriving April 20, 1835; microfilmed as part of Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New Orleans, 1820–1902, USNA Microcopy 259, Roll 12. 60. By 1825, Louisiana law had made legitimation difficult, and narrowed even the mechanisms for the lesser act of recognition: See Civil Code of the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: J. C. de St. Romes, 1825), Book l, Title VII, Chapter 3, Section 1, Art. 217, and Section 2, Arts. 220 and 221. 61. It was standard practice in civil law for a married woman to retain her maiden name on official documents. By 1839 she was signing documents as Élisabeth Vincent, dropping the informal Dieudonné altogether. See Échange d’immeubles, August 6, 1839, Act 646, Notary T. Seghers, NONARC. 62. The baptismal record—in which someone has re-introduced an error from the original marriage contract in which Marie [Élisabeth] Dieudonné was confused with her mother-in-law Suzette Bayole [Bayot]—is Act 326, St. Louis Cathedral, Baptisms of Slaves and Free Persons of Color, Vol. 25, Part l, in AANO. On the formal requisites for serving as a godmother, see Virginia Meacham Gould, “Henriette Delille, Free Women of Color, and Catholicism in Antebellum New Orleans, 1727–1852,” in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 63. Under the 1808 Digest of the Civil Laws Now in Force in the Territory of Orleans, “marriages contracted by free white persons with free people of color” could not be celebrated and were void in Louisiana. See Title IV, Chapter II, Article 9, of the Digest (Baton Rouge, La.: Claitor’s Publishing Division, 2008). On Bayot and Duhart, see note

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Notes to Pages 265–266

351

55 above. On conditions for free people of color more generally, see Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., Louisiana in the Age of Jackson: A Clash of Cultures and Personalities (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 304; and Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). 64. For the full story, see Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers. 65. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, chaps. 6 and 7. 66. For a discussion of the concept of public rights, and its echoes in the later Plessy case, see Rebecca J. Scott, “Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy challenge,” Michigan Law Review 106 (March 2008): 777–804. 67. For their departure, see the passport application of Edward Tinchant, issue date May 29, 1878, New Orleans, in Passport Applications, 1795–1905, General Records of the Department of State, RG 59, reproduced on USNA Microcopy M1372. 68. For the name of their daughter, see the July 3, 1878 entry for the family of Edouard Tinchant with the Administration de la Sureté Publique No. 148, in M.A., Vreemdelingendossiers 1878, Stadsarchief, Felixarchief, Antwerp. Their youngest child is listed as Marie Louise Julie, born in New Orleans on March 14, 1878. For information on the subsequent generations, we thank Marie Louise (Loulou) Van Velsen, who generously shared photographs, letters, documents, and memories of her great-grandfather Edouard Tinchant, her grandmother Marie Louise Tinchant, and her mother, also named Marie Louise. We also thank the Struyf family, descendants of Joseph Tinchant, for their assistance and hospitality in Belgium.

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contributors

James T. Campbell is Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History at Stanford University. His first book, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa, received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Organization of American Historians Frederick Jackson Turner prize. His book Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Previously a professor of History at Brown University, Campbell chaired the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. Vincent Carretta, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, specializes in eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic historical and literary studies. Author of more than 100 articles and reviews, he has also written and edited eleven books, including Equiano, the African: Biography of a SelfMade Man; The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, the First African Anglican Missionary, coedited with Ty M. Reese; and Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. His numerous fellowships include from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Humanities Center. Roquinaldo Ferreira is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia, specializing in Early Africa, colonial Brazil, and the Atlantic World. He is the author of numerous articles and chapters on the slave trade from Angola as well as the book Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave. He has held fellowships from the ACLS and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Jean-Michel Hébrard is Professeur Associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and visiting professor at the University of Michigan, as well as a member of the Centre de Recherche sur le Brésil Contemporain and of the Centre International de Recherche sur les Esclavages. He has published

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354

Contributors

numerous articles and books on the history of writing, particularly in southwest Europe, including Discours sur la lecture, 1880–2000 and, with Rebecca J. Scott, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. Martin Klein, Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, University of Toronto, has had a distinguished career in African history, focusing on Francophone West Africa and particularly Senegal, Guinea, and Mali. His many publications include Islam and Imperialism in Senegal: Sine-Saloun, 1847–1914; Women and Slavery in Africa, co-edited with Claire C. Robertson; the edited volume Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia; Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa; and the Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition. The recently inaugurated American Historical Association book prize in African history bears his name. Lloyd S. Kramer is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, specializing in modern European intellectual history, with particular attention to nineteenth-century France. He is the author of Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848; Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions; and Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775. He is co-editor of Learning History in America: Schools, Cultures and Politics and A Companion to Western Historical Thought, and coauthor, with R. R. Palmer and Joel Colton, of A History of the Modern World (10th edition). Among his many honors, he is a former fellow of the National Humanities Center. Sheryl Kroen is Associate Professor of modern European history at the University of Florida. She has published Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, and articles on nineteenth-century France as well as consumer culture and democracy in Europe. Kroen has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the French Government (Chateaubriand Fellowship), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Humboldt Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. Jane Landers is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions and Black Society in Spanish Florida; co-author of The Atlantic

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Contributors

355

World: A History, 1400–1888; editor of Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida and Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas; and co-editor of Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America and The African American Heritage of Florida. Landers also directs the Eccelsiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies Digital Archive project. Among other awards, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Conference on Latin American History, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminars program for the Comparative Study of Cultures. Lisa A. Lindsay is Associate Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she teaches African history and the history of the Atlantic slave trade. She is the author of Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria and Captives as Commodities: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and co-editor of Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the ACLS, National Endowment for the Humanities, UNC, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. Joseph C. Miller is T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola; the award-winning Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830; The Problem of Slavery as History (2012); and over eighty articles and book chapters. He is co-editor of Children in Slavery Around the World; Women and Slavery, the New Encyclopedia of Africa; and the Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery; and has compiled a definitive bibliography of Slavery and Slaving in World History, containing some 25,000 entries. Miller has held numerous fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and served as president of the American Historical Association and the African Studies Association. Cassandra Pybus is Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of Sydney. She has published extensively on Australian, American and trans-Atlantic history, including Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty; Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers; and Other Middle Passages (ed. with Marcus Rediker and Emma Christopher). Pybus

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Contributors

has been a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Georgetown University, Visiting Professor at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor in History at King’s College London. João José Reis is Professor of History at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. He is the author of Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1993), and Death is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Popular Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, which won the Jabuti Prize for Nonfiction from the Brazilian Book Council, and the Clarence H. Haring Prize from the American Historical Association. His book O Alufá Rufino: tráfico, escravidão e liberdade no Atlântico negro, with Flavio Gomes and Marcus Carvalho, won the Casa de las Américas prize. He has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the National Humanities Center, and a visiting professor at Princeton University, the University of Michigan, Brandeis University, the University of Texas, and Harvard University. Rebecca J. Scott is Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 and the award-winning Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, and is co-author of several publications including Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies and Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Humanities Center, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jon Sensbach is Professor of History at the University of Florida, where he teaches courses on the Black Atlantic, the Atlantic slave trade, colonial America, and the American Revolution. He is the author of A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763– 1840 and Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. He has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center and a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture.

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357

John Wood Sweet is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he specializes in early American history and the history of sexuality. He is author of Bodies Politic: Colonialism, Race and the Emergence of the American North and coeditor of Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Mellon Foundation, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. He is currently writing about a book about Venture Smith, African-born author of the first American slave narrative.

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index

Aballow, 62–63 Abeokuta (Nigeria), 195, 196, 198, 200, 203–5 abolition: of slave trade, 63, 180, 188, 312n34; of slavery, 28, 252–54, 257, 261, 262 abolitionism, abolitionists, 9, 19, 33, 50, 51, 189, 190, 249, 269, 273. See also antislavery abolitionist movement, 52, 185, 194, 275 Achebe, Chinua, 186 Acholonu, Catherine, 184, 185 Addoun, Yacine Daddi, 62 Ademola, Sir Adetokundbo, 198 Adukwe, 61 Afigbo, A. E., 186 African Americans, 8, 10, 21, 36, 88, 97, 99, 107, 108, 111, 149–50, 159, 160, 162, 167, 173, 175, 187, 192, 195, 196, 201, 277 African origins, 50, 96, 210 Africans, 2–4, 7, 10, 37, 41, 43, 45, 46, 52, 53, 55, 87, 96, 97, 101, 102, 105, 106, 110, 111, 131, 135, 138–40, 142–45, 151, 185–87, 190, 193, 199, 200, 204, 206, 209, 210, 213–14, 216, 217, 220, 221, 229, 241, 261, 269, 270, 274, 276, 278, 291n11; LusoAfricans, 211, 212 Aga, Selim, 55 The Air of Freedom (film), 82 Albreda (the Gambia), 211 Alford, Terry, 96; Prince Among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the Americas, 96 alienation, 3, 10, 15, 193, 277 Allen, Richard, 99 Alpers, Edward, 57, 59 Álvares, Domingos, 38–39, 46, 174, 272 American Colonization Society, 192 American Committee for Atlantic Institutions, 66 American Council of NATO, 66

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Anderson, Joseph, 121, 124, 307n50 Anderson, Peter, 121, 124 Andre-Julien, Charles, 56 Angola, 12, 38, 224–47, 275. See also Benguela Anjo, Antonio Lopes, 229–30, 233–35, 242 Annapolis, Nova Scotia, 112 antislavery, 253; antislavery activists, 99–100; antislavery movement, 9, 106 Arada (ethnic group), 250 archives, 3, 20, 57, 62, 98, 103, 107, 109, 110, 141, 178, 210, 270, 272, 273; church, 102–3; colonial, 98, 99, 249; missionary, 57, 64, 65 Asante (ethnic group), 58, 63 assimilation, 7, 24–25, 35, 132, 145 Athens (Greece), 153, 160–62 Atiman, Adrian, 49 Atlantic Civilization, 66, 67, 69, 88 Atlantic Council, 66 Atlantic creole, 12, 97, 145, 183, 223 Atlantic history, 2, 4, 14, 15, 66–67, 69, 87, 88, 97, 99, 210 Atlantic world, 1, 2, 5, 6, 8–12, 69, 78, 89, 94, 97, 99, 106–7, 154, 206, 210, 249, 274–76 Aubert, Marie Blanche Peillon (“Widow Aubert”), 255, 260, 261, 262, 263, 347n44, 349n54 autobiography, 9, 20, 49, 50, 51, 54, 97, 105, 200, 274; Equiano’s, 172–91. See also life histories Autran, José Pedro, 135, 136, 143, 144 Bahamas, 12, 222 Bahia (Brazil), 7, 39, 63, 131–45, 230, 232, 235, 239–42, 275 Bailyn, Bernard, 4, 66, 67, 88, 280n5; Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, 66 Bakhita, Saint Josephine, 54, 55

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360

Index

Baldwin, James, 201 Balfour, Michael, 74, 76, 80, 81 Bambara (ethnic group), 251 baptism, 211, 214, 215, 218, 254, 256, 277, 344n22; baptismal records, 98, 102, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 143, 178–80, 184, 188, 250, 254, 263, 264, 267, 270, 276, 345n23, 350n62 Baptist Church, 197, 198 Baquaqua, Mahommah Gardo, 20, 50–52, 63, 272 Barbados, 51, 213 Barka, Fatma, 61 Batchelor, Joy, 68, 72, 73, 76, 80 Bayot, Suzette, 262, 265, 349n55 Becker, Felicitas, 60 Behn, Aphra, 174, 271; Oroonoko: The Royal Slave, 174 Belgium, 249, 262, 265 Bellagamba, Alice, 57 Benavides, Antonio de, 218, 219 Benguela (Angola), 12, 224–47, 275 Benin, 50, 61, 62, 185, 196 Berlin (Germany), 82, 102 Berlin, Ira, 12, 183, 223, 281n25 Bight of Benin, 62, 132, 138, 185, 193, 206 biography, 1–3, 6, 8, 16, 20, 28, 34, 38, 39, 46, 49, 52, 55, 57, 68, 89, 94–96, 100, 104, 109, 110, 116, 172, 173, 179, 182, 183, 185, 187–89, 195, 199, 201, 203, 204, 206, 210, 272, 273 Birchtown, Nova Scotia, 112–15, 129 Black Atlantic, 1–3, 5, 6, 9–11, 14–16, 19, 37–39, 67, 78, 84, 89, 94, 96–100, 102, 107, 150, 154, 171, 194, 206, 209, 270, 274, 275, 277, 278 Board of Trade, 74, 76, 77, 213 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon, 249 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 255, 261 Book of Negroes, 108–14, 304n3 Borgu (ethnic group), 144 Borno (ethnic group), 144 Boyer-Rossol, Klara, 58–59 Brace, Jeffrey, 51 Brazil, 4, 7, 12, 25, 38, 45, 46, 50, 79, 131, 134, 137, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145, 197, 210, 224–46, 270, 275. See also Bahia Brhane, Meskerem, 61 Britain. See England British Labour Government Central Office of Information (COI), 68, 69, 72, 73, 77

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Brown, Carolyn, 57 Brown, Vincent, 38, 271; The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, 271 Brown, William Wells, 149, 313n1 Bugg, John, 180 Burnard, Trevor, 97, 187, 188 Bwanika, 57, 58 Cabrera, Juan Márquez, 214 Campbell, Dugald, 58 Canada, 50, 55 Candomblé, 142, 143. See also religion capitalism, 2, 4–6, 8, 14, 19, 37, 69, 86 Carabali (ethnic group), 221 Caribbean, 14, 21, 38, 45, 46, 78, 87, 93, 94, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 106, 116, 183, 213, 215, 250, 257, 270, 271 Carlyle, Thomas, 273 Carretta, Vincent, 8, 9–10, 20, 194, 271; Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, 9, 183, 184, 187, 189, 191 Carter, Harriet, 199 Catholicism, 79, 142–44, 210, 211, 215, 219; Catholic Church, 7, 54, 141, 157, 215. See also religion Central America, 177, 189 Charley, Robinson, 4, 14, 16, 68–80, 83, 85, 87, 89, 276. See also Robinson Charley (film) Charley’s March of Time (film), 74 Chaves, Veríssimo Rodrigues, 236 children, 7, 13, 15, 16, 34, 50–52, 59, 62, 71, 101, 109–12, 115–23, 126–28, 131, 139–43, 183, 192, 193, 195–99, 202, 210, 212, 231, 232, 237, 248, 249, 253–58, 263, 265, 266, 345n25 Church Missionary Society, 54 citizenship, 8, 249–50, 266 civil rights, 13, 45, 201, 248 Civil War (United States), 13, 14, 149, 153, 154, 196, 248, 249 Claiborne, C. C., 261–62 Clarkson, Thomas, 181, 182; The Substance of the Evidence of Sundry Persons on the SlaveTrade Collected in the Course of a Tour Made in the Autumn of the Year 1788, 182 clothing 86, 212 Code Noir, 251 Colombia, 210 colonialism, 2, 4,–6, 8, 14, 15, 82; anti-colonialism, 14, 240

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Index Columbus, Christopher, 2, 83, 269 commerce, 80, 87, 133, 177, 233, 235, 239, 273 community, 7, 8, 11, 27, 38, 48, 55, 62, 63, 66, 72, 85, 97, 111, 123, 135, 142, 144, 145, 166, 192, 193, 195, 201, 214, 218, 219, 221, 222, 245, 246, 261, 276 Compagnie du Senegal, 211 comparison, 5, 25, 26, 52, 59, 210; comparative method, 26 Conceição, Rosa Maria da, 131, 141, 143 Congo (ethnic group), 221, 250, 251 Congressional Reconstruction Acts, 248 Constantinople, 153, 157, 160–63, 167, 168, 274 Cooper, Frederick, 15 Corbin, Joanna, 117 Cordevoille, Mr., 159–160 Costa, António José da, 229, 236 Costa da Mina (“Slave Coast”), 132, 133 Costa, Leonor Freire, 234 Couba, Alexis, 251, 343n13 Council of the Indies, 219 court cases, 57, 62, 64; court records, 63, 98, 270 Coutinho, Inocêncio de Souza, 236, 238 Cowper, William, 181 credit, 37, 47, 86; creditor, 40, 47, 218, 232, 233, 260. See also debt creolization, 41, 145 Crowther, Samuel Ajayi, 49, 59, 63 Cuba, 12, 13, 52, 100, 138, 197, 210, 219, 222, 223, 258–61, 264, 266 Cugoano, Cuobna Ottobah, 51, 187, 272 Cuffee, Paul, 99 Cullen, Susanna, 177 culture, 1, 6, 8, 15, 40, 50, 52, 56, 58, 85, 95, 96, 100–102, 106, 149–51, 154, 158, 171, 185, 198, 211, 212, 214, 219, 245, 273; “culture of dissemblance,” 98; institutional, 20; literary, 10; material, 107, 210; political, 45; popular, 21, 38, 183 Curtin, Philip D., 19, 37, 49, 51, 96, 272; Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, 51, 96, 272; The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, 37, 272 Dahomey (ethnic group), 38, 56 Damascus (Syria), 153, 156 David, W. J., 197 Davidson, Cathy N., 188–89

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Davis, David Brion, 25, 26–28, 384n21 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 95, 100, 272; The Return of Martin Guerre, 95, 97; Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, 100 death, 14, 37–39, 45, 63, 112, 120, 128, 145, 199, 216, 232, 267, 273, 276. See also mortality; social death debt, 37, 47, 57, 122, 174, 212, 216, 230, 231, 233, 235, 236, 260; debtors, 37, 40, 47 decolonization, 2 Defoe, Daniel, 4, 68, 74, 78–80, 82, 298n27; Robinson Crusoe, 4, 5, 68, 69, 71, 74, 78–82, 298n27 dehumanization, 23 Delany, Martin, 149, 313n1 democracy, 5, 82 Demos, John, 95; The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America, 95 Deng, Daniel Surur Farim, 54 Denmark, 105 Détry, Jean Lambert, 262, 263, 348n48 Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman, 49, 50, 272 diaspora: African, 1, 2, 8, 11, 40–42, 187 190; Atlantic, 46 Dickson, William, 182; Letters on Slavery, 182 Digby, Nova Scotia, 112 dignity, 11, 13, 35, 52, 59, 99, 110, 152, 249 Dinka (ethnic group), 53, 54 disease, 7, 53, 305n18 domination, 22, 24, 25, 27, 33–36, 44, 47, 87 Dominican Republic, 210 Dorr, David F., 8, 11, 150–71, 273, 274; A Colored Man Round the World, 9, 150– 71, 275, 314n4 Dorugu, 55–56 double consciousness, 150 Douglass, Frederick, 49, 175, 177 doux commerce, 87 Drayton, Richard, 88 Du Bois, W. E. B., 14 Dunmore, Lord, 7, 113, 114, 116, 124–27 East Central Africa, 58 Ebony (magazine), 193, 200, 202, 203 Economic Recovery Program (ERP), 67, 81, 82, 84 Ecuador, 210 Edwards, Paul, 176 Egba (ethnic group), 203–4, 323n46

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362

Index

Egypt, 53, 54, 150, 153, 156, 160 eighteenth century, 6, 10, 13, 14, 27, 33, 68, 69, 78, 79, 86, 87, 93, 94, 96, 99, 100–103, 107, 109, 110, 119, 120, 138, 170, 172–75, 178, 180, 183–86, 188, 190, 192, 203, 210, 223, 227, 232, 233, 238, 239, 275 Ellwood, David, 67, 296n4 emancipation, 1, 5, 10, 13, 60, 104, 121, 152, 220, 257 England (Britain), 4, 9, 20, 21, 37, 49, 50, 51, 54, 62, 68, 69, 72, 74, 76–82, 119, 125, 135, 152, 155, 157, 175, 180, 182, 183, 185, 188, 190, 198, 211, 218, 220, 258, 276 Enlightenment, 11, 14, 78, 88, 149 enslavement, 1, 2–3, 6, 8, 10, 15, 20, 21, 25, 28, 33–37, 39–41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 56, 58–60, 63, 64, 69, 96, 162, 171, 217, 249, 250, 259, 271, 272, 274, 275, 282n8. See also re-enslavement; slavery epistemology, 26, 29, 30, 32, 285n27 equality, 9, 13, 94, 152, 155, 160, 161, 166, 167, 171, 249, 266 Equiano, Olaudah (Gustavus Vassa), 9–10, 20, 50, 51, 96, 99, 107, 172–91, 194, 206, 271–76; The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 9, 172–91, 194, 276 Equipment Act (Palmerston Bill), 135 ethnic stereotypes, 43–44; racial stereotypes, 160 ethnicity, 10, 42,–44; ethnicization, 41–42. See also identity ethnonyms, 250. See also ethnicity Europe, 1, 2, 4, 9, 13, 14, 43, 55, 58, 66–89, 98, 101–6, 132, 141–42, 150–54, 156–60, 171, 232, 238, 240, 249, 255, 275; Central, 102; Western, 66–69, 80, 87, 101, 102, 150, 153, 158 Ewe (ethnic group), 58 experience, 1–3, 5, 8–10, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20–23, 28, 31–34, 36–40, 46–48, 51, 54, 56–58, 61, 63, 64, 94, 97–99, 101, 107, 109, 124, 135, 144, 149, 151, 152, 154, 164, 167, 169, 171, 175, 180, 181, 183, 187, 188, 190, 194, 198, 210, 217, 249, 270, 271–73, 277, 280n10 explorers, 53, 55, 83 Fair, Laura, 61 family, 7, 10, 13, 49, 52, 55, 60, 62, 63, 97, 110–14, 116–18, 121, 122, 124, 125, 129, 130, 143, 151, 192–94, 196, 197, 199,

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201–5, 212, 219, 228, 237, 249–50, 261, 263, 265, 274, 277. See also kinship Fellowes, Cornelius, 150–52, 156, 160, 168 Ferreira, Roquinaldo, 11, 12 fiction, 10, 174, 181, 189, 271. See also novel Florida, 11, 12, 100, 209, 210–12, 214–22, 276 Fodio, Usuman dan, 133 folktales, 36 Fomin, Dennis, 62 Fonseca, Joaquim Bento, 243–45 Fort James (the Gambia), 211, 212 France, 13, 21, 68–70, 82–84, 152, 153, 160, 165, 249–52, 254–58, 260, 261, 265, 267 Francklyn, Gilbert, 181; An Answer to the Reverend Mr. Clarkson’s Essay, 181 free blacks, 113, 121, 125, 221, 222 freedom, 3, 5, 7–9, 11–13, 25, 34, 39, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56, 60, 94, 96–100, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125–27, 130, 131, 137, 138, 142, 145, 149–52, 154, 155, 157, 160, 161, 164– 67, 169, 171, 177, 188, 198, 210, 216–20, 222, 249–53, 255–57, 259, 260, 263–64, 267, 270, 274, 276, 277 Frey, Sylvia, 109 Fulani, or, Fula (ethnic group), 144, 211 Fulbe (ethnic group), 250 The Gambia, 11, 49, 210–14 ganho (“earning system”), 137, 138 Garvey, Marcus, 200 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 175; The Classic Slave Narratives, 175 gender, 39, 61, 150, 153, 154, 168, 171 genocide, 14 geopolitics, 12, 209, 214, 215, 217, 218, 222 George, David, 99, 109 Germany, 6, 56, 68, 69, 80–82, 93–94, 101–6, 176, 275 Getz, Trevor, 63 Ghana, 61 Gibson, Ellen Wilson, 109 Gilroy, Paul, 1–2, 10, 14, 150, 270, 274; Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 2, 279n1 Ginzburg, Carlo, 95, 272 globalization, 15 Godechot, Jacques, 66 Gold Coast, 2, 6, 36, 50, 52, 62, 63, 98, 101, 103, 105, 275 Gomes, Francisco Ferreira, 12, 224–47, 273, 275

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Index Gomes, José Ferreira, 230, 237 Gomes, Miguel Ferreira, 226 Gomez, Michael, 36 Gooch, William, 121 Gordon-Reed, Annette, 109–10; The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, 109 Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, Florida, 209, 220 Grant, Douglas, 96, 272; The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century, 96, 272 Greece, 157, 315n26 Greene, Sandra, 36, 57–59 Greer, Allan, 95; Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits, 95 Gronniosaw, James Albert Ukawsaw, 51–52, 174 Guene, Ouro Sè, 62 Guillaume, Marthe, 250–54, 257, 264 Gutman, Herbert, 111–12 Hahonou, Eric, 61 Haidt, Johan Valentin, 93, 94 Haiti, 13, 50, 100, 259, 261, 264, 266, 267. See also Saint-Domingue Halas, John, 68, 72, 73, 76, 80 Haley, Alex, 200 Hall, Bruce, 62 Harden, Sarah, 196, 197 Hausa (ethnic group), 56, 133, 135, 137, 138, 144 Hausaland (Nigeria), 133 Haynes, Lemuel, 99 healing, 39; healing cults, 38, 46 Hébrard, Jean, 11–13, 100, 276 Hemings, Elizabeth, 109–10 Hemings, Sally, 94 Herbstein, Manu, 1 Hirschman, Albert O., 87; The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph, 87 historiography, 20, 67, 111, 137, 150 Holland, or, the Netherlands, 70, 153 Ibadan (Nigeria), 195 identity, 94, 105, 144, 150, 159, 163, 168–70, 179, 182, 187, 194, 206, 221; ethnic, 42, 44, 58, 177, 180, 182, 183, 186, 202, 203; formation of, 1, 8, 201; gendered, 151, 154; national, 45, 182, 199; racial, 151; relational, 8, 41 ideology, 11, 15, 21, 45, 124; racial, 247, 274

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363

Igbo (ethnic group), 44, 51, 52, 172, 185, 186 Igboland (Nigeria), 184–86, 194 Ijaye (Nigeria), 195, 196 individualism, 10, 16, 24, 46 Inikori, Joseph, 186 interviews, 54, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 101, 202, 204; oral history, 101 isolation, 9, 10, 20, 24, 25, 28, 33–39, 41, 45, 47, 61, 171, 250 Italy, 54, 167 Jackson, Edward, 117, 122, 126, 128 Jackson, Hannah, 113, 127, 129 Jackson, James, 114, 117, 122, 125–26, 128, 129 Jackson, John, 114, 115, 122, 126, 129 Jackson, London, 114, 115, 126, 129 Jackson, Nelly, 114 Jackson, Peter, 113 Jackson, Rebecca Cox, 99 Jackson, Robert, 113 Jamaica, 52, 187, 188, 213, 221, 250, 252, 274 Jasanoff, Maya, 109 Jefferson, Thomas, 110 Jeje (ethnic group), 134, 143, 144 Jihad, 7, 133 Jim Crow, 14 Johnson, Samuel (1709–1794), 183 Johnson, Samuel (1846–1901), 192, 203, 319n1; The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate, 192, 195, 203 Jones, Absalom, 99 Jones, G. I., 186 Jorge, Chief, 209, 216, 219, 220, 329n68 junta, 12, 242 Kars, Marjoleine, 94 kidnapping, 50, 52, 54, 104, 186 King, Boston, 99, 107, 109 Kingsley, Anna, 100 kinship, 7, 61, 97, 111, 113–16, 193, 195, 197, 198, 205, 221, 263. See also family Kizell, John, 109 Klein, Martin, 3–4 Kramer, Lloyd, 3, 8, 9, 11 Kroen, Sheryl, 4, 5 Kuku, Aaron, 58 La Rue, G. Michael, 54–55 ladino, 7, 8, 145

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364

Index

Lafontant, Jewel Stradford, 200–204 Lagos (Nigeria), 63; Vaughan family in, 196–200, 203, 204 Landers, Jane, 11–12 language, 35, 40–42, 44, 50, 52, 55, 56, 59, 100, 160, 186, 211, 217 Larson, Pier, 48, 52, 59 Lauly, Maria Sophronia, 193 law, 120, 121, 135, 139, 140–42, 204, 235, 249, 250, 252, 253, 264, 266, 267, 274 Law, Robin, 20 Leclerc, Victor-Emmanuel, 255–56 Lee, Jarena, 99 Lepore, Jill, 95, 273, 274 Leslie, General, 114, 115 liberalism, 6 Liberia, 192, 195, 204 life histories, 1, 6, 8, 12, 57–61, 63, 64, 95, 96, 266, 272, 274, 277. See also autobiography; biography Lindsay, Lisa, 8, 10, 277 Lisbon (Portugal), 39, 132, 129, 229, 231–35, 238, 239, 240–42 literacy, 103, 211, 228, 273, 275 Liverpool (England), 153, 155, 156, 163, 168 Locke, John, 78, 86 London, 38, 80, 115, 116, 125, 129, 153, 156, 157, 172, 177, 218, 274 Louisiana, 9, 13, 150–53, 155, 157, 159, 160, 169, 248, 255, 262, 264–67 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 96, 254 Lovejoy, Paul, 20, 51, 179, 189 Lowther, Kevin, 109 Luanda (Angola), 225, 230–34, 238–46 Madagascar, 58 Maia, José Rodrigues, 229 Makua (ethnic group), 58 Mali, 61, 250 Mandinga, or Mandingo (ethnic group), 209–13, 217, 218, 221, 251 Mann, Kristin, 63 Mansah, Abina, 63 manumission, 24, 25, 34, 39, 45, 98, 121, 123, 130, 137, 141, 142, 144, 250, 253, 256, 257, 262, 263, 267, 270, 274. See also selfpurchase marginality, 3, 27, 28, 59 Maria (“the Mooress from St. Thomas”), 6, 93–94, 102, 104, 105, 275 Marman, John, 62–63

13472_Biography and the Black Atlantic.indd 364

maroons, 45 Márquez, Francisco Menéndez, 218 Marrant, John, 99 marriage, 13, 40, 45, 101, 103, 111, 112, 117, 141, 144, 163, 193, 204, 211, 215, 228, 249–52, 254, 262–64, 270, 277; intermarriage, 221 Marshall, George, 85–87 Marshall Plan, 4, 66–69, 72, 80 Marx, Karl, 5, 68, 69, 78 Maryland, 49 masculinity, 163; manhood, 154, 155, 160, 163, 164, 167 masters, 3, 6, 7, 21, 22–26, 28, 30, 33–36, 42–45, 50, 60–63, 103, 115, 117, 118, 120, 131, 133, 134, 137–39, 142, 143, 145, 151, 212, 218, 259, 277, 284n17. See also slave owners Mauritania, 61 McDougall, Ann, 61 McKenzie, Alexander, 119, 120 memory, 51, 59, 64, 187, 199, 206 men, 13, 21, 34, 94, 97–99, 120–22, 127, 137, 139, 155, 156, 158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 175, 211, 214, 215, 221, 248, 249, 253, 255, 258 Menéndez, Francisco, 11–12, 209–23, 274, 276, 277 merchants, 7, 12, 59, 61–63, 119, 124, 133, 210, 211, 225, 227, 229, 230–32, 234–38, 243, 245, 246 Methodism, 7, 49, 124, 177; Methodist Church, 275. See also Protestantism; religion methodology, 180, 184, 209 Mexico, 210 microhistory, 94–96, 104, 173, 272, 273 Middle East, 157 Middle Passage, 2, 7, 9, 19, 24, 37, 38, 50, 51, 63, 96–98, 132–34, 173, 176, 180, 182, 183, 187, 188, 194, 270, 271, 274, 275, 277 migration, 1, 7, 15, 96, 101, 150, 212, 214, 270 military service, 214, 215, 218, 219, 221, 227. See also soldiers Miller, Joseph C., 2–3, 9, 150, 151, 171, 271; Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830, 271 Mina (ethnic group), 221 Ministry of Town and Country Planning, 73 missionaries, 44, 49, 53, 54, 57, 58, 192, 195, 196; Moravian, 6, 93, 101–3 mobility, 5–7, 12, 14, 42, 45, 100, 104, 214,

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Index 233, 236, 274, 275; social, 7, 104, 131, 132, 227–29, 246, 275 modernity, 2, 6, 11, 23, 24, 29 Mongol, Jean-Baptiste, 250, 252 Monteath, Archibald, 52 Montiano, Manuel de, 220, 222 Moore, Aida Arabella Vaughan, 193, 199–201 Moore, Eric, 198 Moore, Kofo (Lady Kofo Ademola), 198, 200, 201 Moravian Church, 52, 93, 100, 102, 105, 106 More, Hannah, 181 Morgan, Jennifer, 271; Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, 271 Morocco, 61 Morrison, Toni, 1, 271; Beloved, 271 mortality, 37, 38, 48, 132, 230, 235, 270. See also death Mosher, Jeffrey, 241 Mowatt, Henry, 114 Mozambique, 59 Muslims, 43, 49, 52, 53, 63, 96, 168, 211. See also religion, Islam Nagô (ethnic group), 134, 135, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 250 names, 109–14, 134, 187, 212, 263, 264; naming, 7, 24, 111, 113 Nash, Gary, 109 nation, 6, 11, 12, 22, 144; nationalism, 197, 241 Native Americans, 11, 83, 88 Native Baptist Church (Ebenezer Baptist Church), 197, 198 NATO, 4, 66 networks, 3, 11, 12, 14, 15, 35, 39, 45, 87, 97, 116, 121, 198, 206, 210, 221, 237, 246, 262, 270, 275, 277 New England, 50, 152 New Orleans, Louisiana, 13, 100, 150–54, 157–59, 164, 248, 249, 261–67, 274 New Town (film), 73–74 New York, 7, 50, 51, 83, 114, 115, 128, 129, 153, 222, 274 Nicholls, Michel, 115 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 169–70 Niger, 61, 62 Nigeria, 7, 10, 44, 49, 56, 176, 186, 192–206 Nigerian Youth Movement, 198 nineteenth century, 7, 19, 22, 36, 44–46, 49,

13472_Biography and the Black Atlantic.indd 365

365

52, 53, 56, 64, 70, 79, 82, 83, 99, 131, 132, 136, 142, 145, 149, 153, 158, 170, 171, 175, 192, 197, 198, 225, 234 Norfolk, Virginia, 112–29 North America, 12, 14, 29, 67, 70, 83, 85, 93, 106, 177, 180, 182, 185, 213, 270 Nova Scotia, 7, 99, 108, 111–15, 129, 274 novel, 8, 174, 271, 272. See also fiction Nupe, 134, 144 Nwokeji, Ugo, 184–85 Obasanjo, Olusegun, 205 Ogbomosho (Nigeria), 195, 205 Old Buzzard, 36–37 Oldendorp, Christian George Andreas, 101– 3; A History of the Mission of the Evangelical Brethren on the Caribbean Islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John, 101 Olowo, Taiwo, 63 Omotayo, Sarah, 196 opportunism, 26, 35, 41 Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), 84 Ottoman Empire, 53, 157, 160, 167 Ouidah (Benin), 132, 134–36, 143, 144 Owu: district, 203, 205; ethnic group, 204 Palestine, 150, 153 Palmer, John, 219 Palmer, R. R., 66 Paris, 82–84, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 164, 167, 168, 252, 255 Parrish, Frank, 160–63, 167, 315n24 Pascal, Michael Henry, 176–77 patronage, 45, 125, 198, 214, 219, 263 Patterson, Orlando, 2, 22–25, 31, 33–36, 274; Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, 22, 23 pawnship, 40 Payne, Daniel, 108, 111–12 Pennsylvania, 93, 94, 102, 275 Perro Bravo (Yfallaquisca), 217, 220 Person, Yves, 56 Phillips, Caryl, 1 Phrip, John, 114 Pilmore, Joseph, 124 plantations, 4, 42, 59, 60, 63, 94, 97, 98, 108, 110, 112, 123, 128, 138, 177, 219, 251, 255, 258, 261, 271; plantation complex, 2, 269 poetry, 99, 162 politics, 5, 11, 61, 154, 199, 238, 239, 242,

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366

Index

244, 245, 261; cultural politics, 38. See also geopolitics Portugal, 12, 37, 39, 224–26, 229–32, 234, 235, 237, 238, 240–42, 244, 246 post-emancipation, 10 poverty, 7, 39, 51, 56, 131, 175, 190, 198 Powell, Eve Troutt, 53; Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Sudan, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, 53 Prentiss, Benjamin, 51 Prince, Mary, 99 propaganda, 4, 67, 68, 72 Protestantism, 46, 101, 104, 106. See also Baptist Church; Methodism; religion Protten, Rebecca Freundlich, 6, 100–107, 273, 275 Pussich, João António, 243, 244, 246 Pybus, Cassandra, 6–7, 271; Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty, 6, 111 race, 2, 14, 39, 121, 150, 170, 211, 227, 228, 245, 246, 248, 249 racial formation, 2 racism, 5, 11, 56, 87, 149, 154, 197 Rahman, Abdul, 50 rebellion, 12, 30, 36, 97, 155, 178, 210, 217, 219 Red Book of West Africa, 198 Rediker, Marcus, 19, 271; The Slave Ship: A Human History, 271 re-enslavement, 259 Reis, João José, 7–8, 275 religion, 10, 79, 87, 105, 154, 195, 198; African, 52, 101, 104, 142, 143; Christianity, 6, 10, 29, 46, 49, 50, 52, 59, 63, 93, 99, 101–3, 106, 205, 273; Islam, 63, 144, 211. See also Baptist Church; Candomblé; Catholicism; Methodist Church; Muslims; Protestantism resistance, 9, 14, 25, 44, 56, 133 respectability, 127, 155, 158, 179 revolution, 12, 74, 78, 82, 83, 209, 242, 244, 249; American, 7, 109, 273, 274; Atlantic, 66, 83, 87, 88; French, 250, 251, 254, 273, 276; Haitian, 13, 249, 250, 251, 255, 259, 273 Ricardo, Damazio Joaquim, 131, 141 Ricardo, Manoel Joaquim, 7, 131–45, 174, 275, 276 Ricardo, Manoel José, 131, 132, 133, 137 Ricardo, Martinho Joaquim, 139, 141–43 Ricardo, Olavo Joaquim, 131, 141

13472_Biography and the Black Atlantic.indd 366

Rigaud, André, 253 Robertson, Claire, 60–61; Women and Slavery in Africa, 61 Robinson Charley (film), 77, 79, 80, 83, 85, 296n9 Robinsonade, 5, 68, 78–80, 87, 89 Rochambeau, Donatien, 256 Rodet, Marie, 62 Romero, Patricia, 61 Royal African Company, 49, 211, 212 Ruete, Emily (Sayyida Salme), 61 runaway slaves, 59, 108, 111–13, 125, 180, 209, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221, 303n1 Saghanughu, Mohammed Kaba, 51 Saha, Zacharie, 64 Said, Nicolas (Mohammed Ali ben Said), 55 Saint-Domingue, 250–66. See also Haiti Salvador (Brazil) 131–33, 137, 139, 143, 232, 235, 241 Samori, 56 Santiago (Cuba), 258–261, 262–64, 266, 267 Schafer, Daniel, 100 Schama, Simon, 109 Schueller, Malini Johar, 153 Scott, Rebecca, 11–13, 100, 275 self-fashioning, 5, 10, 11, 187 self-purchase, 50, 56, 60, 120, 137 Senegal, 60 Senegambia, 211, 251 Sensbach, Jon, 6, 7, 187; Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World, 6, 101 Sereer (ethnic group), 211 Sessarokoo, William Ansah, 50 seventeenth century, 3, 37, 45, 111–12, 131, 174, 211, 271 Sierra Leone, 7, 99, 112, 129, 136, 197, 274 Silva, Antonio de Moraes, 133 Silva, Francisca da (Iyá Nassô), 143 Silva, Marcelina da (Obatossi), 143 sixteenth century, 95, 270 slave markets, 55 slave narratives, 48, 58, 63, 172, 175, 190, 194, 272 slave owners, 53, 63, 113, 115, 117, 125, 131, 138, 141, 144, 145, 178, 257, 259. See also masters slave ownership by people of color, 124, 131, 143, 212, 226, 228, 251–52, 263; by slaves, 134–39

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Index slave stigma, 59, 60, 344n22 slave trade, 2, 6, 7, 9–10, 19, 23, 37, 49, 52, 53, 56–58, 63, 64, 78, 79, 88, 94, 96–99, 107, 132, 133–37, 144, 172–74, 177, 179–82, 186–88, 193, 210, 226, 227, 229, 233, 235–39, 243, 244, 250, 255, 261, 269–71, 275; traders, 5, 52, 63, 132, 136, 176, 215, 275. See also slaving slavers, 11, 22, 24, 26, 28, 33–37, 42, 43, 53, 54, 56, 210; ships, 135, 250. See also slaving slavery, 1–10, 14, 19–46, 48, 50, 53–61, 64, 79, 87, 94, 98, 99, 101, 104, 106, 123, 125, 131–33, 137, 138, 145, 150–55, 166, 168, 169, 171, 174, 177, 179, 181, 188, 190, 193, 197, 198, 203, 209, 213, 214, 217, 220, 222, 226, 246, 251–53, 255, 257, 264, 265, 267, 269, 270–72, 274, 276, 277; plantation slavery, 2, 39, 94, 104 slaves, 7, 10, 12, 21, 23–26, 31, 33–37, 40, 45, 47, 48, 50, 53–55, 57, 59–64, 93, 94, 97, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108–30, 131–45, 171, 174, 177, 179, 180, 186, 193, 197, 209, 211–23, 225–31, 233–39, 241, 243, 245, 246, 250–65, 276; the enslaved, 3, 6–8, 11, 12, 19, 20, 22–26, 28, 30, 31, 33–38, 40, 42–45, 47, 55, 93, 94, 98–104, 107–13, 116, 118–21, 124, 125, 149–51, 153, 155, 157, 158, 163, 164, 168–71, 178, 179, 184–87, 194, 203, 213, 215, 216, 219, 223, 249, 26–72, 274–76 slaving, 1, 3, 7, 19, 21, 22, 25– 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38–42, 56, 80, 206, 229, 235, 270 Smallwood, Stephanie, 19, 271; Saltwater Slavery, 271 Smith, Adam, 4, 74, 78, 86, 87 Smith, Venture, 50, 51, 99, 107, 272 Smythe, Mabel, 193, 200–202 Snowball, Nathaniel, 128 Soares, Carlos Eugênio L., 138 social death, 23–25, 31, 33, 34, 46, 97 sociology, 23, 25, 27, 46 soldiers, 227, 241, 243, 255 South America, 70, 87 South Carolina, 9–11, 173, 178–80, 184, 185, 188, 192–94, 198–203, 206, 271 Spain, 83, 209, 212, 215–23, 261, 276 Sparks, Randy, 20, 49; Two Princes of Calabar, 20, 49 Spear, Jennifer, 98 Spence, Jonathan, 95; The Death of Woman Wang, 95

13472_Biography and the Black Atlantic.indd 367

367

Spielberg, Steven, 271; Amistad (film), 271 Sprowle, Andrew, 119, 124, 125, 127 Stradford, Aida Arabella Carter, 201, 202 St. Augustine, Florida, 210, 212–21 St. Catherine’s Island (United States), 213 St. Thomas (Island of) (United States Virgin Islands), 6, 93, 94, 100–104 Stanton, Cinder, 110 Stewart, Maria, 99 Stickrodt, Silke, 62 Stone, Moses Ladejo, 196, 197 Stuckey, Sterling, 36 subjectivity, 8 Sudan, 53–56 Sweet, James H., 38–39, 97, 179–80, 206 Swema, 57 Tabula, 64 Tapa, 134. See also Nupe Thompson, Grace, 115, 123, 128, 129 Thompson, James, 115, 119, 122, 126, 129 Thompson, Jane, 7, 113–19, 122–24, 126–30, 274 Thompson, Samuel, 119, 122–23, 128 Thompson, Sarah, 199 Thompson, Talbot, 115, 119–29 Thornton, John, 100 Thruston, Edward, 115 Thruston, Elizabeth, 123 Tinchant, Edouard, 248–49, 265–67 Tinchant, Jacques, 262–65 trade, 4, 7, 15, 69, 96, 105, 132, 135, 211, 238, 242 Transatlantique (film), 82–83, 85 transnationalism, 11 tribal marks, 10, 192–95, 197–205; country marks, 192–94, 200, 204, 206, 277 Truman Doctrine, 66 Tucker, Betty, 114, 122, 127 Tucker, James, 114, 118, 126 Tucker, John, 114, 116, 117 Tucker, Joseph, 116, 122, 124, 127 Tucker, Matthew (Matthew Doogood), 116 Tucker, Robert, 113–16, 119, 121, 122, 126 Turkey, 167, 183 twentieth century, 4, 14, 20, 36, 64, 66, 79, 87, 102, 176, 186 Ukaegbu, Dorothy Chinwe, 184 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 95; A Midwife’s Tale, 95

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368

Index

United States, 4, 12, 14, 19, 21, 25, 27, 36, 45, 50, 67, 68, 79, 80, 99, 149, 155, 158, 159, 170, 193, 194, 197, 199–204, 209, 265, 266, 270, 274, 276 Unsworth, Barry, 1, 271; Sacred Hunger, 271 Vaughan, Dr. James C., 198 Vaughan, James Churchwill, 10, 192–206 Vaughan, James Wilson, 196, 200 Vaughan, Olabode, 204 Vaughan, Scipio, 192, 193, 198, 201–4 Vaughan, Wilie, 193 Vaughan-Richards, Ayo, 201–6 Vesey, Denmark, 96 Vincent, Élisabeth Dieudonné, 254–57, 259–67 (Vincent), Etienne Hilaire, 256, 259 (Vincent), Juste Théodore, 256, 259 (Vincent), Marie Louise, 256, 259, 266 Vincent, Michel Étienne Henry, 254–60, 262–64, 267 Vincent, Rosalie (“of the Poulard Nation”), 12–14, 100, 249–67 violence, 5, 11, 14, 35, 41–44, 48, 58, 69, 79, 82, 87, 215; racial, 1, 2 Virginia, 7, 10, 45, 48, 94, 110–16, 119, 121, 123, 125, 126, 129, 176, 193, 213, 216, 274; Fairfax County, 112; Norfolk County, 112–13, 115; Princess Anne County, 113, 114, 121, 126; Westmoreland County, 112. See also Norfolk Vita, Dona Beatriz Kimpa, 100 Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 19, 48, 132, 194, 206, 210, 213, 270 Walke, Anthony, 110, 114 Walker, Kara, 271, 278 Waller, Benjamin, 119, 120 Walvin, James, 179; An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797, 179 War of the Spanish Succession, 215 warfare, 10, 14, 195, 203 Warner-Lewis, Maureen, 52

13472_Biography and the Black Atlantic.indd 368

Washington, Augustine, 112 Washington, George, 95, 108, 111, 112 Wayles, John, 110 wealth: in relationships, 40, 277; in property, 7, 12, 13, 79, 131, 141, 177, 190, 211, 225, 226, 229, 230, 245 Wedgwood, Josiah, 181 West Africa, 7, 52, 61, 63, 101–5, 197, 263 West Indies, 6, 49, 102–4, 176, 177, 182, 275 Western Civilization, 4, 14, 79, 82, 87 Western Europe, 66–69, 80, 87, 101, 102, 150, 153, 158 Wheatley, Phillis, 94, 99, 149, 173, 313n1 White, Deborah Gray, 98 white supremacy, 6, 8, 10, 14, 266 Wilberforce, William, 181–82 Williams, Robert, 124 Wilson, Salim, 53–54 women, 6, 13, 21, 34, 58, 59, 61, 93, 94, 98–102, 107, 109, 111, 121, 164, 167, 248–49, 267 Women and Slavery in Africa, 61 Wood, Peter H., 209, 213; Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion, 209 World War II, 4, 14, 67, 71, 87, 89 Wright, Marcia, 57–559; Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa, 58 Yamasee Indians, 210, 212–13, 215–20, 274 Yamasee War, 11, 209, 210, 215, 217 Yao (ethnic group), 57 Yoruba, 10, 44, 134, 135, 138, 192, 195, 197, 198, 200, 202–4 Yorubaland, 10, 192, 193, 195, 197, 198–200, 202, 203, 206 Young, Alfred, 95; The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, 95 Your Very Good Health (film), 74 Zeinab, 55 Zimmerman, Catherine Mulgrave, 52 Zimmerman, Johan, 52

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acknowledgments

Several years ago, as we both were working on own projects reconstructing the life stories of particular members of the African diaspora, we were struck by the number of other historians at work on similarly biographical approaches to the Black Atlantic. We thought the time was right to reflect on the appeal of this biographical turn and to consider the potential and limitations of this kind of approach. So we invited a disguished group of historians of Africa, the Americas, and Europe to contribute essays to this volume, with the intent of bringing together a variety of case studies and methodological reflections. We were delighted by the enthusiastic response to this proposal, and by the all-star team of historians who generously offered to share their work and thoughts. This group effort was greatly enriched by the National Humanities Center, which graciously agreed to provide a forum for the contributors to come together, share their essays, and discuss their common interests over the course of a three day symposium. For making this gathering possible and for facilitating such a rich and productive dialogue, we are very grateful to the National Humanities Center. We would particularly like to thank Kent Muliken, former director of the fellowships program, for his support of our proposal and for his guidance and enthusiasm for the project. Pat Schrieber organized the event itself with her characteristic aplomb and attention to detail. Don Solomon handled public outreach and shepherded us through our television debut. Karen Carroll lent us her rigorous editorial eye. We thank them and everyone else at the Center, including director Geoff Harpham, for the extraordinary support they provide for scholars and their work. From start to finish, the scholars who shared their work in this volume made the endeavor a great pleasure. We appreciate their illuminating scholarship, their professional courtesy, and their good company. Thanks also to Vincent Brown for his smart and helpful comments on the first draft of

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Acknowledgments

our Introduction. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, Bob Lockhart, assisted by Rachel Traube, enthusiastically welcomed and oversaw the volume. Project editor Alison Anderson guided the book through publication smoothly. Nora Doyle proofread the manuscript and produced the index with great efficiency and intelligence. We are deeply grateful to all of them for sharing this journey with us.

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