For several decades, genealogist Paul Heinegg has been searching through the state archives of Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Delaware, looking for records about the lives of free African Americans before 1820. While he has published his findings, which are also available on his Website, www.freeafricanamericans.com, academic historians may have missed them and their challenge to typically held notions of the origins and history of free African Americans in early American history. For example, Heinegg’s work reveals that most free African American families that originated in colonial Virginia and Maryland descended from white servant women who had children by slaves or free African Americans, and many descended from slaves who were freed before the 1723 Virginia law requiring legislative approval for manumissions. Perhaps most intriguingly, Heinegg has found that very few families that were free during the colonial period descended from white slave owners who had children by their slaves, perhaps as few as one percent of the total.

The principal sources for Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland were all the surviving colonial county court order and minute books on microfilm–nearly a thousand manuscript volumes. Also important were the colonial and early national tax lists, deeds, wills and estate accounts, late-eighteenth to early nineteenth-century free Negro Registers, marriage bonds, colonial parish registers, census records, newspapers, and Revolutionary pension files. The sources encompass virtually every surviving public document relating to these families. The county court records give us a glimpse of the daily life of the ordinary people in the county. They include apprentice indentures (which usually contain the name, age, and parent[s] of the apprentice), suits for debt, and charges for various offenses. Many families appear in colonial deeds and wills without racial designation. Their African ancestry–and often their origin–is revealed only in their conviction by the court for the violation of a race-based law.

 

Virginia

When they arrived in Virginia, Africans joined a society that was divided between master and white servant, a society with such contempt for white servants that masters were not punished for beating them to death. They joined the same households with white servants–working, eating, sleeping, getting drunk, and running away together. Some of these first African slaves became free. John Geaween (Gowen), “a negro servant,” was free by 1641. Francis Payne of Northampton County paid for his freedom about 1650 by purchasing three white servants for his master’s use. Emanuell Cambow (Cumbo), “Negro,” was granted fifty acres in James City County in 1667. John Harris, “negro,” was free by 1668 when he purchased fifty acres in York County.

A number of men and women of African descent living on the Eastern Shore gained their freedom in the seventeenth century. There were at least thirty-three African Americans in Northampton County in the 1670s who were free, later became free, or had free children. They represented one-third of the taxable African Americans in the county. By the mid-seventeenth century, some free African Americans were beginning to be assimilated into colonial Virginia society. Many were the result of mixed-race marriages. Francis Payne was married to a white woman named Amy by September 1656 when he gave her a mare by deed of jointure. Elizabeth Key, a “Mulatto” woman whose father had been free, successfully sued for her freedom in Northumberland County in 1656 and married her white attorney, William Greensted. Francis Skiper was married to Ann, a African American woman, before February 1667/8 when they sold land in Norfolk County. Peter Beckett, a “Negro” slave taxable from 1671 to 1677 in Northampton County, married Sarah Dawson, a white servant. Hester Tate, an English woman servant in Westmoreland County, had several children by her husband James Tate, “a Negro slave to Mr. Patrick Spence,” before 1690.

As the percentage of African Americans in the population increased, so did tension between free African Americans and slaveholders. And as more and more slaves replaced white servants, the legislature passed a series of laws between 1670 and 1723 designating slavery as the appropriate condition for people of African descent. In 1670 free African Americans and Indians were forbidden to own white servants. In 1691 the manumission of slaves was prohibited unless they were transported out of the colony. In addition, interracial marriage was prohibited and the illegitimate, mixed-race children of white women were to be bound out for thirty years. In 1705 church wardens were allowed to seize and sell the farm stock of slaves to support the poor of the parish. And in 1723 the manumission of slaves was prohibited unless they had rendered some public service.

Despite the efforts of the legislature, white servant women continued to bear children by African American fathers through the late seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century. It appears that they were the primary source of the increase in the free African American population for this period. Over two hundred African American families in Virginia descended from white women. Many of these women may have been the common-law wives of slaves since they had several mixed-race children. Forty-six families descended from freed slaves, twenty-nine from Indians, and sixteen from white men who married or had children by free African American women. It is likely that the majority of the remaining families descended from white women since they first appear in court records in the mid-eighteenth century when slaves could not be freed without legislative approval, and there is no record of legislative approval for their emancipations.

Racial contempt for African Americans did not fully develop as long as there were white servants in similar circumstances. It was during this period, as late as the end of the eighteenth century, that free African Americans were accepted in some white communities. Since so many free African Americans were light skinned, many observers assume that they were the offspring of white slave owners who took advantage of their female slaves. Only three of the approximately 570 families in Virginia and the Carolinas were proven to descend from a white slave owner. They were the children of South Carolina planters, and like their fathers, they were wealthy slave owners who were accepted in white society.

 

By 1790 free African Americans were concentrated on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the counties below the James River, and the northeastern part of North Carolina. This was a pattern of settlement similar to that of newly freed white servants. Land was available in Southside Virginia and in the northeastern part of North Carolina at prices former servants could afford.

In 1782 Virginia relaxed its restrictions on manumission, but the descendants of families which had been free during the colonial period continued to comprise a major part of the free African American population due to natural increase. In 1810 the Going/Gowen family, free since the mid-seventeenth century, headed forty “other free” households with 105 persons in Virginia, sixty-two persons in North Carolina, eleven in South Carolina, and ten in Louisiana. The Chavis family, free since the seventeenth century, headed forty-one households containing forty-six persons in Virginia, 159 in North Carolina, and twelve in South Carolina.

North Carolina

In 1712 all fifteen members of the Anderson and Richards families were freed and given 640 acres in Norfolk County, Virginia, by the will of John Fulcher, creating such a stir that the legislative council on March 5, 1712/3, proposed that the assembly “provide a Law against such Manumission of Slaves, which in time by their increase and correspondence with other slaves may endanger the peace of this Colony.” In an effort to “prevent their correspondence with other slaves,” Fulcher’s executor, Lewis Conner, by a deed dated March 20, 1712/3, swapped their land in Norfolk County with land on Welshes Creek in Chowan County, North Carolina.

Many of those who were free in Northampton County, Virginia, settled in Craven County, North Carolina. James and Peter Black came to Craven County from Essex County, Virginia, where they had been free born. John Heath tried to sell them as slaves to William Handcock, but the Craven County court intervened on their behalf in 1745. Moll, Nell, Sue, Sall, and Will Dove, “Negroes,” came to Craven County from Maryland with Leonard Thomas, who was trying to keep them as his slaves in 1749, but William Smith traveled to Maryland and proved their claim that they were free born. The descendants of Nicholas and Bungey Manuel, “negro slaves” freed by the 1718 will of Edward Myhill of Elizabeth City County, Virginia, were in the Edgecombe County, North Carolina, militia in the 1750s.

The family histories of over 80 percent of the heads of families counted as “all other free persons” in the 1790-1810 federal censuses for North Carolina indicate that they were descendants of African Americans who were free in Virginia during the colonial period. 

Free African American immigrants were of sufficient number in 1723 that the North Carolina general assembly received complaints “of great Numbers of Free Negroes, Mulattoes, and other persons of mixt Blood, that have lately removed themselves into this Government, and that several of them have intermarried with the white Inhabitants of this Province.”

 

While some North Carolina residents were complaining about the immigration of free African Americans, their white neighbors in Granville, Halifax, Bertie, Craven, Granville, Robeson, and Hertford counties welcomed them. In 1762 many of the leading residents of Halifax County petitioned the assembly to repeal the discriminatory tax against free African Americans, and in 1763 fifty-four of the leading citizens of Granville, Northampton, and Edgecombe counties made a similar petition. They described their “Free Negro & Mulatto” neighbors as “persons of Probity & good Demeanor [who] chearfully contribute towards the Discharge of every public Duty injoined them by Law.” About ten years later a similar petition by seventy-five residents of Granville County included those of a few of the free African Americans of the county.

During the colonial and early national periods at least one member of most African American families in North Carolina owned land. Land ownership made for closer relations with the white community than with slaves. The McKinnie family, originally from Isle of Wight County, Virginia, was one of the leading white families in the area around the Roanoke River. Barnaby McKinnie, member of the general assembly from Edgecombe County in 1735, was witness to many of the early deeds of African American families. John McKinnie called Cannon Cumbo his friend when he mentioned him in his 1753 Edgecombe County will. Other leading white settlers who sold them land adjoining theirs and witnessed their deeds were Richard Washington, William and Thomas Bryant, Richard Pace, and William Whitehead. Arthur Williams, member of the general assembly for Bertie County in 1735, and John Castellaw, perhaps a brother of James Castellaw, a member of the assembly from Bertie County, had mixed-race common-law wives, Elizabeth and Martha Butler.

By 1790 free African Americans represented 1.7 percent of the free population of North Carolina, concentrated in the counties of Northampton, Halifax, Bertie, Craven, Granville, Robeson, and Hertford where they were about 5 percent of the free population. In these counties most African American families were landowners, and several did exceptionally well. The Bunch, Chavis, and Gibson families owned slaves and acquired over a thousand acres of land on both sides of the Roanoke River in present-day Northampton and Halifax counties, and the Chavis and Gowen families acquired over a thousand acres in Granville County. William Chavis, a “Negro” listed in the 1754 muster roll of Colonel William Eaton’s Granville County Regiment, owned over a thousand acres of land, a lodging house frequented by whites, and eight taxable slaves. His son Philip Chavis also owned over a thousand acres of land. Edward Carter was the fourth largest Dobbs County landowner with 23,292 acres in 1780. He was head of a Dobbs County household of eight “other free,” one white woman, and twenty slaves in 1790. In a most extraordinary move, in 1773 the Dobbs County court recommended to the general assembly that Edward Carter’s daughters be exempted from the discriminatory tax against female children of African Americans.

 

In mid-eighteenth century North Carolina tax assessors counted wealthy mixed-race families in some years as “mulatto” and in other years as white. Jeremiah and Henry Bunch, Bertie County slave owners, were taxed in Jonathan Standley’s 1764 Bertie County list as “free male Molattors” in 1764, but as whites in Standley’s 1765 Bertie list, and again as “free Molatoes” in 1766. Michael Going/Gowen was taxed in Granville County as white in 1754 and was called “Michael Goin, Mulattoe” in 1759.

Some of the lighter-skinned descendants of these families formed their own distinct isolated communities that have been the subject of anthropological research. Those in Robeson County, North Carolina, are called “Lumbee Indians”; in Halifax and Warren counties: “Haliwa-Saponi”; in South Carolina: “Brass Ankles” and “Turks”; in Tennessee and Kentucky: “Melungeons” and “Portuguese”; and in Ohio: “Carmel Indians.” Several fantastic theories on their origin have been suggested. One is that they were from Raleigh’s lost colony at Roanoke and another that they were an amalgamation of the Siouan-speaking tribes in North and South Carolina. However, the “people of color” in these areas were distinguished from nearby white communities because of a single, common characteristic: their African American ancestry. Indians, both slave and free, who lived among the English, blended into the African American population. They did not form their own communities. Even so, 38 percent of the population of Robeson County had an American Indian identity in the 2000 federal census.

New York and New Jersey

The history of free African Americans families in colonial New York and New Jersey is quite different from Virginia and North Carolina. Most were descended from slaves freed by the Dutch West India Company between 1644 and 1664 or by individual owners. Henry Hoff has studied these families, especially fourteen families he has traced for three generations or more. None of the fourteen families appears to be descended from a white servant woman and a African American man. However, Lutheran church records in the eighteenth century show a few couples like this having children baptized.

Four of the fourteen families began with one white spouse or partner, but only one was a white man who had a child by a slave woman–and their male-line descendants passed into the white population after a few generations of living in Tappan (on the New York-New Jersey border), which had two free African Americans among its original patentees. There was no legal ban to interracial marriage in colonial New York or New Jersey, and in these fourteen families, there were several instances of white men and women marrying African Americans.

The principal sources for New York and New Jersey were the informative records of the Dutch Reformed and Lutheran churches that permitted identification even when racial designations were omitted. For example, Willem Anthonissen, Negro, and Margariet Pieters were married in 1672. A decade later, Willem Anthony, widower of Margariet Pieters, married Maria Claerce, spinster, from England. Moreover, baptismal records of these churches list godparents, sometimes even stating relationships. Several free African Americans were church members and one of them, Arie van Guinee, was a prominent Lutheran layman in New Jersey in the early eighteenth century.

Court records were occasionally useful but not because of racial laws. For example, in 1765 Adam Arey sued Luke Pettersen in New Jersey for £100, and the complaint described the defendant as “a free mulatto fellow [who] lives among a parcel of free negroes somewhere along the North River.”

No Indians were involved with these fourteen families during the colonial era, but descendants of one family appear later in a triracial isolate, the Ramapo Mountain People.

Conclusions

Heinegg’s primary research was in Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland. The court records for Maryland are extensive but do not contain nearly the information found in Virginia and North Carolina records since relatively few free African Americans owned land in Maryland. Nevertheless, his reconstruction and analysis of Maryland, Delaware, and South Carolina families yields comparable conclusions to Virginia and North Carolina families.

The number of families studied for New York and New Jersey is very small, but limited conclusions can be drawn. Most free African American families descended from freed slaves. There were marriages in the early generations between white women and African American men, but none of the women were identified as servants, perhaps because New York had only a small population of white indentured servants.

 

Further Reading:

This article is a revised and abbreviated version of Paul Heinegg’s introduction to his work, Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina from the Colonial Period to About 1820, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Baltimore, 2001), and is published here with the permission of the publisher, Clearfield Company. See also, Heinegg, Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware from the Colonial Period to 1810 (Baltimore, 2000). The text of both these works is available at www.freeafricanamericans.com. See also Henry B. Hoff, “Researching African-American Families in New Netherland and Colonial New York and New Jersey,” forthcoming in The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record.

On early free African American communities in Virginia, see Joseph Douglas Deal III, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore During the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1993), and Reginald Dennin Butler, “Evolution of a Rural Free Black Community: Goochland County, Virginia, 1728—1832” (Ph.D. diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1989). On the history of sexual liaisons between white women and African American men in the South, see Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South (New Haven and London, 1997). For tri-racial isolate communities, see Virginia Easley DeMarce, “‘Verry Slitly Mixt’: Tri-Racial Isolate Families of the Upper South–A Genealogical Study,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 80 (1992): 5-35.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 5.1 (October, 2004).

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Paul Heinegg, a retired engineer, has been researching the history of free African Americans in the southeast for the past seventeen years, with an emphasis on the colonial period.

Henry B. Hoff, editor of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, has written on free African Americans in early New York and New Jersey.

For the better part of a century, social historians have wrestled with the problem of the one and the many—that is to say, the problem of properly situating the lives and agency of individuals in the response to and the shaping of broader historical currents. Social historians in the twentieth century, in Europe and the United States, sought to provide a corrective to the overemphasis on powerful men in the making of Western society through the systematic analysis of populations, communities, and group behaviors—with a particular desire to understand the lives and agency of those on the margins of society. By the 1990s, however, reaction against quantitative approaches, partly a response to the linguistic turn, set the stage for the shift in analytical modes and perspectives that historians have employed since.

Freedom Papers, To Free a Family, and The Accidental Slaveowner are representative of the ways scholars today are employing more nuanced approaches to the problem of the one and the many. These works also build upon several decades of research on migration, family, and kinship ties, and the work of Atlantic, global, and transnational historians, who’ve called greater attention to lives and historical processes that spill across any number of political, economic, and cultural boundaries. Again and again, the men and women in these works confound historians’ usual categories for understanding and explaining their actions and motivations.

 

These works further highlight the often close relationship between migration choices and personal, often far-flung, networks and pre-existing relationships.

In novel ways, all of these authors situate the agency of specific men, women, and children within the broader constraints imposed by big events. In Freedom Papers, Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard provide a trans-Atlantic and trans-generational account of the Vincent and Tinchant families, whose origins began with the capture and enslavement in 1788 of a West African woman called Rosalie. Sold into slavery in French Saint-Domingue, a colony teetering on the precipice of revolution and civil war, Rosalie’s remarkable life, and the lives of her children, ultimately connected “three of the great antiracist struggles of the ‘long nineteenth century'” (the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Cuban War of Independence). Freedom Papers is a human story of family and migration that began “with a passage from Senegambia to Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century” and “continued on to Santiago de Cuba, New Orleans, Port-au-Prince, Pau, Paris, Antwerp, Veracruz, and Mobile, with several returns to Louisiana and Belgium” (2-3). As such, it is a remarkable feat of scholarship, grounded in the necessity of locating a widely dispersed set of extant sources that offer glimpses into the experiences of men and women who literally criss-crossed multiple imperial, national, racial, legal, and socio-political boundaries.

In The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family, Mark Auslander unpacks both the historical reality and the “mythic imagination” that has, to the present day, surrounded the story of Bishop James Osgood Andrew, the first president of the Board of Trustees at Emory College, the forerunner of today’s Emory University, and Andrew’s slaves—including Catherine Boyd (or “Miss Kitty,” as most white authors have referred to her), who is the primary subject of the book. Among the narrative threads developed and nurtured by whites for more than a century and a half was that the “loyal” slave Kitty had preferred slavery to freedom, making Bishop Andrew an “accidental slaveowner” and thus sparking the controversy that led to the 1844 schism of the Methodist Episcopal Church into northern and southern branches. An important contribution to the study of historical memory, the story unfolds against the backdrop of abolitionist struggles, Civil War and Reconstruction, and spans the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras to recent decades.

Sydney Nathans’ To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker is a detailed investigation into the life and struggles of Mary Walker, who fled enslavement in North Carolina and, with the help of abolitionist friends and patrons in Philadelphia and Cambridge, Massachusetts, sought to purchase the freedom of the mother and the two children she had left behind. The years leading to her decision to flee (1844-48) coincided with the resurgence of slavery on the national political scene and the 1847 passage of a Pennsylvania law that allowed slaves entering the state to claim their freedom. Having fled to Philadelphia with the assistance of local abolitionists, Mary soon found her actions constrained, if not confounded, by the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and later, the Civil War. Each of these developments complicated an already fraught situation. According to Nathans, Mary’s case resembled that of more famous female runaways like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs—who also fled at a crucial moment when no other choice seemed possible, and who, like Mary, worried incessantly about the fate of family members still enslaved. Unlike these women, Nathans argues, “Mary Walker’s experience was a more wrenching, more protracted, and probably more representative struggle than that of [these] ex-slave women whose defiance made them heroines” (3).

Freedom Papers, To Free a Family, and The Accidental Slaveowner are all superb examples of what can be gained when knowledgeable, attentive, and imaginative scholars recognize and seize upon unexpected encounters with historical documents. As Scott and Hébrard realize, the story of Rosalie could never be told within a strict, nation-state framework. It is a quintessential Atlantic World story, and their history of it is a kind of micro-history-in-motion. Their “experiment,” as they call it, “rests on the conviction that the study of a carefully chosen place or event, viewed from very close to the ground, may reveal dynamics that are not visible through the more familiar lens of region or nation.” But they did not set out to tell this particular story. Rather, it was “a chance discovery in the Cuban archives” that led “to the heart of the problem of freedom, and of the phenomena of race, racism, and antiracism.” Through the painstaking research of these two historians, the story of this family evolved into a narrative of “individual and shared choices constrained by slavery, war, and social hierarchy” (5). Similarly, Nathans’ unearthing of Mary Walker’s complex story began with two chance encounters. The first was a reading of Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, in which Gutman published an 1859 letter by Mary Walker’s chief patron and sometime employer, the antislavery pastor Peter Lesley. The second and more decisive moment came when Nathans decided to investigate yet another case Gutman had stumbled upon, that of 114 enslaved people sent in 1844 from North Carolina to a cotton plantation in western Alabama. Like the other authors, Nathans faced the issue that very little of the surviving evidence is in Mary’s voice. Yet, delving into the voluminous records of the key people around her, evidence related to Mary proved abundant, if not always ideal.

For his part, Auslander encountered the story of “Miss Kitty” (Catherine Boyd) when he began teaching at Oxford College in 1999. By July 2009, Auslander had nearly given up on the idea of ever knowing anything about Catherine’s descendants when a chance discovery of an 1871 Freedman’s Bank record confirmed that she had indeed married a man named Nathan, and they had indeed had children together. Auslander and his wife immediately set out to find and interview Catherine’s descendants, and suddenly the prospect of a study that did more than trace historical memory became a real possibility. The result is a book that not only pieces together the long misunderstood genealogy of Catherine Boyd and her descendants, but does what David Blight’s influential Race and Reunion did not. Blight’s masterful work revealed how a “segregated historical memory” of the Civil War shaped the political destinies (and racial politics) of whites and blacks during Reconstruction and beyond. But because he limited his analysis to a fifty-year period, one wonders how that history of contested memory went on to shape the long Civil Rights movement, or its continued impact since. By showing how the purposefully selective historical memory of interested whites has shaped hundreds of “Miss Kitty” narratives over 150 years, Auslander (unlike Blight) reveals the historical effect of these narratives on race relations in Oxford to the present day. Integrating detailed historical research with the conceptual tools of structuralism, literary studies, history, and anthropology, Auslander wrote The Accidental Slaveowner as “a critical excavation of the mythologies that still surround American chattel slavery,” with the hope that such an examination might “be mutually enriching and transformative, for the descendants of the enslaved and the heirs of white privilege”—that it might help to “free all of us from their enduring hold and help us chart a new and more democratic path” (4).

Each in their own way, Freedom Papers and To Free a Family get at the problem of freedom under seriously constrained conditions. In the first instance, Scott and Hébrard show the highly contingent nature of freedom for the formerly enslaved when one nation’s general emancipation is not widely accepted. In the second, Nathans shows the fragility of one runaway’s freedom in a nation where slavery and fugitive slave laws remain the law of the land. Both particularly demonstrate how the formerly enslaved sought to either preserve or establish their and their family’s “legal” right to free status through explicit pursuit of documentation. Despite the first French emancipation of February 4, 1794, and the extension of both legal and de facto freedom to the entire island of Saint-Domingue in 1798—both occasions brought about as a direct, albeit contingent, result of the revolution in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti)—freedpersons wishing to flee the island nearly always risked re-enslavement. When Rosalie fled the southern peninsula of Saint-Domingue for Cuba in 1803, as the war with Napoleon’s expeditionary forces raged, she deposited a set of documents with French officials in Santiago de Cuba. Although these documents, technically, did not establish her legal right to freedom, these were Rosalie’s “freedom papers,” which also documented her African origins and former enslavement. Much of the book focuses on Rosalie’s efforts to secure improved freedom papers for herself and her children—an extremely complicated and protracted process. Along the way, Scott and Hébrard repeatedly demonstrate the highly contingent nature of freedom and slavery in Rosalie’s revolutionary Atlantic. The possibility of re-enslavement reared its head again with the expulsion of the French from Cuba in 1809, and the arrival of nearly 10,000 refugees in the Gulf of Mexico, particularly in New Orleans. Despite the legal prohibition on the importation of slaves, Governor Claiborne “improvised” an exemption, allowing French refugee slaveholders to bring several thousand slaves into U.S. territory. What remains unknown, this work suggests, is how many of these 3,000 “slaves” were in fact re-enslavements of men, women, and children who had lived free prior to their arrival in Louisiana, but were claimed to be the property of a French planter: “The burden of proof fell on the individual claiming to be free; there was no presumption that abolition in Saint-Domingue in 1793-1794 had effected a general transformation in status.” Hence Rosalie’s pressing concern for securing “freedom papers.” The line between re-enslavement and freedom was, as Scott and Hébrard show, “as much a matter of circumstance as of law” (70).

The risk of capture and re-enslavement was likewise a pressing concern for Mary Walker, and she worried about it constantly. Soon after her flight, Mary was taken in by Peter and Susan Lesley of Cambridge, Massachusetts. This would be a first real test to the lay pastor and his wife, who now moved from merely espousing abolitionist sympathies to actually assisting and harboring a fugitive slave. The Lesleys quickly discovered the difficulties of extending a helping hand in the face of competing state and federal the law. Friends helped, but initially none could or would take Mary as an employee. For her part, Mary sought out affidavits from allies in Philadelphia in an attempt to document her freedom under the Pennsylvania law of 1847, and asked Peter Lesley to secure legal opinion on whether the affidavits she had gathered would protect her in Massachusetts. An antislavery lawyer from New York informed Lesley that the clause in the Fugitive Slave Law which provided for the (relatively easy) establishment of claims by owners would likely override the Pennsylvania Law, and thus her master’s ability to reclaim her as his property. Despite the 1847 Pennsylvania law which may have induced her flight, her freedom remained tenuous.

In The Accidental Slaveowner, by contrast, it is Auslander who assiduously pursues documentation in order to challenge longstanding myths. For over a century, proslavery and neo-Confederate whites have worked tirelessly, producing hundreds of “Miss Kitty” narratives propagating the idea of the “loyal slave.” Analyzing George Gilman Smith’s elaborate 1882 account of the controversy, which he included in his biography of Bishop Andrew, Auslander shows how, in such narratives, “Kitty, the slave,” was depicted as “free to make a choice” between the freedom offered (deportation to Liberia) or continued enslavement, “whereas Bishop Andrew, the master, [was] represented as a slave of duty, bound to fulfill the terms of Mrs. Power’s request.” This Mrs. Powers, who supposedly bequeathed “Kitty” to a reluctant Bishop Andrew, turns out to have been a clever fabrication intended to obscure Andrew’s actual status as an owner of more than a dozen slaves. “This paradox,” Auslander writes, “is key to the enduring appeal of the narrative to white audiences through the generations: the slave was free to choose and, having made her choice, was allowed to live in virtual freedom. In contrast, the white bishop was constrained by his sense of honor to follow a certain course of action, and then was unjustly victimized by northern abolitionists for acting in such a manner” (89-90). In Auslander’s work, it is thus proslavery whites who are eager to document this so-called freedom.

These works further highlight the often close relationship between migration choices and personal, often far-flung, networks and pre-existing relationships. This was certainly the case for Rosalie’s descendants and their collateral ancestors. When in 1819 France lifted the prohibitions against interracial marriage and the immigration of “people of color,” the timing was right for the white refugee planter, Louis Duhart (the step-father by marriage of Rosalie’s daughter, Elizabeth), who had deep family roots in southwestern France, to “return home” with his wife (Elizabeth’s mother-in-law), the free-colored Saint-Domingue refugee Marie Françoise Bayot, and their children. The two married before the mayor of Pau in 1832, an act that simultaneously legitimated their two New Orleans-born sons—one of whom subsequently married into the Bonnafon family, a wealthy planter family with ties to Guadeloupe. Marie Françoise’s mixed-race grandsons (born to her “illegitimate” son, Jacques Tinchant, and Rosalie’s daughter, Elizabeth), attended the college royale in Pau, one of the best elite institutions of its era. In France, the Tinchant children enjoyed a level of educational opportunity and civic equality unimaginable for men of color in antebellum New Orleans. After a period of poor harvests and the political reaction that followed the 1848 revolutions, however, Elizabeth and Jacques’ son, Joseph Tinchant, decided he no longer had a future in France and returned to Louisiana, where his brother, Louis, had remained to run the family business. Joseph went on to marry into an extended family of free-colored artisans in New Orleans, served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and afterward extended his and his brothers’ commercial network to Mexico. Joseph’s brother Edouard Tinchant, who also served in the Union Army, later served in the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1867-68, but with the end of Reconstruction joined his brothers in Antwerp, where they ran a successful cigar manufacturing business begun sometime after the family migrated there in 1857.

Migration choices and the important role of family networks and supportive relationships in the immediate post-emancipation period likewise appear in Chapter 11 of To Free a Family, where Nathans draws on the journal and letters of Catherine Robbins, who was the aunt of Susan Lesley and who likewise came to know Mary Walker well. These sources are the main evidence for the story of Mary’s eventual family reunion after Union forces took control of Raleigh, North Carolina. In their correspondence with each other and in Catherine’s journal, Catherine and Susan both worried about how Mary’s two children, who planned to join Mary in Cambridge, would find work. Mary’s daughter Agnes, age 24, and her son Bryant, age 21, were both married, so there would be four adults to accommodate. In late June 1865, Bryant Walker arrived in Cambridge alone—his wife had stayed behind. Agnes and her husband arrived in July. Mary’s social network, which spanned the white and black communities of Cambridge and Philadelphia, would be helpful to them as they made this new start, as well as the fact that they could read and write. What is also telling is the manner in which Agnes, for example, sought through correspondence to maintain the connection to her former master, Mrs. Mordechai—through whom she hoped to learn the fate of other relatives and friends. The idea of a newly freed slave cultivating a relationship with a former master may seem counter-intuitive, but in both To Free a Family and Freedom Papers, individuals consistently rely on and make savvy use of their own personal networks, however large or small, and however distant.

Close examinations of such lives as Rosalie, Mary Walker, and Catherine Boyd reveal how race and family shaped social relations, but not always in the ways twenty-first-century readers have come to expect. In Scott and Hébrard’s account, race and family, and social relations generally, play out quite differently over time, and across geo-political spaces—within the same family. Jacque Tinchant’s life in France, as an American-born man of color, for example, was not the same as his step-father, Louis Duhart’s—a white man with deep family roots in France, “returning” from the colonies. France was, after all, still a slaveholding empire, and racial prejudice was persistent. Voting rights were only held by those who owned a certain amount of property, and Jacques Tinchant was a sharecropper. On the other hand, criticisms of slavery were on the rise in 1840s France, through the writings and activities of Victor Schoelcher, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Cyrille Bissette. When Jacques’ 21-year old brother, Joseph Tinchant departed from Bordeaux for Louisiana, no racial marker was attached to his name on the ship’s passenger list. A year later, though, when a U.S. census taker recorded Joseph’s name, as a member of his brother’s household, he placed an “M” next to the name, for mulatto.

In Mary Walker’s story Nathans likewise shows how race and class played out differently in each of her local worlds (Philadelphia, Cambridge, and briefly, the Sea Islands). In her Cambridge neighborhood, Mary worked for nearby families, where she would reside for a week or more at a time while sewing clothes for members of the household, and occasionally performing other duties. As Nathans observes, at this same time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was being serially published, and Mary came to represent for these white families “a living embodiment of bondage” and “a ‘white slave’ at that,” given her “fair” complexion (63). She was literate and well-read, invited to tea, and the neighborhood women made much of her (too much, she thought). In spring 1864, Mary took the opportunity to, as she put it, work “for the welfare of her race,” when she was invited by Lissie Ware to join her and her husband, Charles, as part of the South Carolina Sea Islands experiment. Mary arrived at a time of great stress in the colony, following the highly inflammatory whipping that Charles Ware meted out on one of the laborers, a pregnant woman—in a colony based on the premise that former slaves would work without brute coercion. Mary’s participation in this missionary experiment would test whether the freedmen and freedwomen of the Sea Islands would see her, this fair-skinned woman, as “of their race.” Or would they find her little different than the other New Englanders who brought a certain brand of Unitarian, abolitionist culture with them? According to Nathans, the Sea Island experience taught Mary (presumably in a way that was not so true in Cambridge or Philadelphia), that “color and caste created distance” (206). In short, despite her efforts to get to know the freedmen personally, Mary found herself “caught between freedmen she couldn’t help and reformers she couldn’t challenge” (211).

Each of these works complicate our often overly generalized understandings of how individuals and groups navigated the complex and frequently porous boundaries of family, race, and class in the pursuit of freedom. Scott and Hébrard’s nuanced analysis of Rosalie’s life in particular households and neighborhoods certainly disrupts the simplistic understanding of the Haitian Revolution as a struggle between “planters, free people of color, and slaves.” Through micro-history, Freedom Papers shows how “the relationships of godparenthood, marriage, legal ownership, manumission, and inheritance cut across these categories and shaped the behavior of Rosalie and those around her.” Moreover, Rosalie’s status shifted continually during the period we call the Haitian Revolution, from a slave to “a freedwoman, a conjugal partner, a mother, and then a refugee” (21). In To Free a Family, Nathans shows how runaways like Mary Walker did not always cut ties, even to their former slaveowners—all the more important when relatives were left behind. In Auslander’s “ethnographic history” of the Miss Kitty narratives, he finds that the history of whites acknowledging family relationships across racial boundaries has its own history. The increased denial of biracial kin among white families in the Civil Rights era was a change from previous decades. And in the era of slavery, various legal mechanisms were sometimes used (e.g., manumission, inheritance) that both acknowledged and materially benefited biracial kin.

Of course, for all of these studies, one could ask: how representative are these cases? But before we can answer such a question, we will need many more studies that pay this kind of close attention to the complex lives of individuals and families such as these. In the meantime, these close investigations are opening new pathways for handling the ever-looming problem of the one and the many.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 14.2 (Winter, 2014).

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R. Darrell Meadows is a comparative social and cultural historian whose published work has focused on plantation society, migration, social networks, and exile politics during the French and Haitian revolutions. He is director of the division of research and interpretation at the Kentucky Historical Society, and founding director of the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition.

Part I

Is interest in the racism of past and hallowed philosophers and statesmen the obsession of a politically correct society gone amok? Or is it an acknowledgement of the ways in which the racist ideas of our forebears still hold sway over our present social and political concerns? Does the racism of a thinker like Thomas Jefferson irremediably infect his writings and his legacy? Must it stalk him, creeping from century to century?

These sorts of questions rage around Jefferson. Clearly the third president means a great deal to many Americans. Since his death in 1826–and even before it–the “American Sphinx” has been invoked in countless contexts and to countless purposes. And Jefferson’s slaveholding and his attitudes towards race have been debated on-and-off for nearly two hundred years. But no aspect of Jefferson’s life has been more hotly contested than his relationship with Sally Hemings, his house slave and purported mistress as well as his wife’s illegitimate half sister. As historian Winthrop Jordan has put it, “What is historically important about the Hemings-Jefferson affair is that it has seemed to many Americans to have mattered.”

Yet it’s not at all clear what Thomas Jefferson’s political legacy, his racist writings, his slaveholding, his proclamations against slavery, his fear of miscegenation, and his (apparently) active miscegenation mean to us when taken together. Why do we care about this, particularly the purported relationship with Hemings, and what is it precisely we are caring about?

Jefferson presented his racial views in a number of contexts, most famously in the Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1787. In this work Jefferson argued against the French naturalist Buffon’s claims that America was a nation stilted by a brutal climate and thus materially incapable of greatness. Its animals were feeble and stunted in comparison to the hardy European breeds, and its native peoples hairless, enervated, and barely capable of reproducing themselves. Jefferson argued quite movingly for the nobility of Native Americans to bolster his case against Buffon as to the climactic splendor and present and future greatness of America. But as part of this argument he also argued for the deep inferiority of African Americans.

 

 

Here’s how Jefferson closed his chapter on “Laws”: “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

This argument for the separation of the races based on the natural inferiority of blacks derived from Jefferson’s “observations” of the childlike simplicity of blacks, their wild imaginations, their incapacity to reason and create serious art, their “disagreeable odour.” Jefferson also emphasized that blacks exhibited a uniform aesthetic preference for the “flowing hair” and “elegant symmetry of form” of whites, a preference as uniform as “the preference of the Oran-ootan for the black women over those of his own species.”

 

 

Despite this scientifically cloaked bigotry, Jefferson’s views about the inferiority of Africans and African Americans were not unique, and taken alone they are not what makes Jefferson’s racism of perennial interest. Two things seem to rub us differently about Jefferson’s racist statements and those of other statesmen and philosophers. First, they conflict with some of the most eloquent words ever penned about democracy and the rights of man, like these on toleration: “It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men: men governed by bad passions.”

Or these remarks on the consequences of this coercion: “The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.”

Here Jefferson invokes the metaphors of bondage, slavery, and slave revolt in a powerful plea for toleration. But it is not just the conflicts between bigotry and eloquence that make Jefferson a perennial object of interest. It is also something quite different–sex–and the ways in which Jefferson’s much disputed personal life mirrors American feelings about race. Whether one views Jefferson as a man of great character impugned by politically correct wags or as an active miscegenator keeping a hidden family of slave children and never admitting it, these different perspectives both respond to the sexual and racial miasma of plantation life. Was the life of the gentleman farmer a life of Cincinnatean virtue or of Neronian debauchery? And what to say of the great patriarch who was a Virginia planter and the mysterious relationship with Sally Hemings, which can be viewed as benevolent master and servant, as rapist and victim, or as lovers.

Part II

One might hope for a resolution to such a bundle of conflicts and perspectives, but it doesn’t appear forthcoming. From O.J. to death-row defenses, DNA analysis has functioned recently in American culture as a scientific meeting ground for race, sex, sin, and death. But in Jefferson’s case, DNA has failed to resolve much at all, establishing only that one of Sally Hemings’s children was fathered by Jefferson or his brother.

 

 

These “findings” have done little to end the bitter disputes like the current scandal over who can be buried in the Jefferson family burial ground. Just this April the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society published a group of scholarly essays attempting to establish Randolph Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings’s child, Eston. But other scholars counter that these essays fail to respond to some of the basic objections to the paternity of Sally Hemings’s children by anyone other than Thomas Jefferson, like the abundant statistical evidence totally independent of genetic evidence. Clearly genetics makes a poor court in such a complicated issue. If anything, it stifles more insightful discussion.

While electronic discussions continue on homepages and bulletin boards across the Web, the most sophisticated discussions of the Jefferson-Hemings affair are still to be found in print. Recently, Annette Gordon-Reed added a new “Author’s Note” concerning the DNA findings to her almost immediately classic Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, 1997; Paperback reprint with Author’s Note, Charlottesville, 1998). With impressive rigor and precision Gordon-Reed demonstrated that a number of eminent historians’ considerations of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings were distorted by hero worship, partisan jockeying, and pervasive if tacit assumptions about white supremacy.

The end result was what Gordon-Reed called “The Corrosive Nature of the Enterprise of Defense.” Gordon-Reed’s investigation revealed how obvious answers to nagging questions about Jefferson and Hemings were cast aside because historians assumed that black informants–particularly Madison Hemings and Jefferson’s other alleged descendants–had less access to the truth than whites. Furthermore, historians had ignored reams of additional evidence which were collected as far back as 1974 in Fawn M. Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York, 1974). There were quite legitimate reasons for historians to reject Fawn Brodie’s psychoanalytic approach, but Brodie’s precious baby of documentary evidence was thrown out with the psychoanalytic bathwater. Instead of weighing the evidence reasonably, historians offered defenses for Jefferson of the circular He – couldn’t – have – done – that! – Why? – Because – his – character – was – such – that – he – didn’t – do – such – things! – Why? – Because – he – didn’t – do – such – things – so – he – couldn’t – have – done – that! variety. (Which is not to say that only defenses are corrupt. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution 1785-1800 [Chicago, 1996] seems nearly as corrupted in its prosecution, placing the Hemings-Jefferson affair and Jefferson’s enthusiasms for the French Revolution in salacious parallel.)

Gordon-Reed’s book received excellent reviews and was quickly–perhaps too quickly–judged decisive. This positive reception unsettled the author, as she remarks in her new preface: “What I hope is not lost in all the focus on DNA is the original message of the book: the treatment of Jefferson and Hemings reveals the contingent nature of blacks’ participation in shaping the accepted verities of American life . . . very few reviewers grappled with the role that the doctrine of white supremacy played in all of this. The preferred response was to focus on the carelessness of the historians discussed in the book, bypassing the central question about the source of that carelessness” (xiii).

Gordon-Reed fears her book will be treated as a detective story, the DNA test the smoking gun, and “The Corrosive Nature of the Enterprise of Defense” as merely a set of clues. Although her historical arguments for the Hemings-Jefferson affair are in many ways more convincing than the DNA tests, the purpose of the book was something more (and more important) than settling the Jefferson/Hemings question for good. Gordon-Reed notes that the complexities of the eighteenth and ninenteenth-century records, how they were read through (sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit) white supremacist assumptions, and the importance of understanding the historical record itself, threaten to be silenced by the public perception of DNA as the final truth of paternity and thus somehow, magically, explanatory of race.

But our attitudes about the whole affair, our recognition of certain claims as legitimate and others as unfounded are as much part of the corrosive nature of defense as the contortions of the historians. One of Gordon-Reed’s most controversial examples is our very desire to treat the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings as rape or coercive act when, given the long-term nature of the relationship, it likely may have been something entirely different, even a loving relationship. Gordon-Reed opens her pivotal chapter on “Thomas Jefferson” by describing a mock trial of Thomas Jefferson, put on by the New York Bar, with Charles Ogletree as prosecutor, Drew Days as defense attorney, and William Rehnquist as trial judge. “The issue to be decided by the trial was whether examples of hypocrisy in Jefferson’s life significantly diminished his contributions to American Society.” Although the judge, and the majority of the audience (including Gordon-Reed and her husband), voted to acquit and forgive, forgiveness says little about the historical record, or its meaning. The question rather is, What is the legacy of guilt and hypocrisy?

Part III

Fortunately a recent collection of essays does a surprisingly good job at drawing out many of these issues and questioning them, if not offering ultimate solutions. Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville, 1999) is a set of papers given at a conference in March 1999 in the wake of the DNA testing and Annette Gordon-Reed’s book. All of the essays in the collection say something fruitful about the problem of discussing a figure like Jefferson, his legacy, and race in America. And they provide a range of perspectives, from putting the Jefferson-Hemings affair in historical context to considering its meaning in terms of Jefferson’s legacy, the practice of history, cultural memory, and the weight of the present.

 

 

A particularly noteworthy example is “Bonds of Memory: Identity and the Hemings Family” by Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, both of whom work at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in Monticello. “Bonds of Memory” interweaves the authors’ very different autobiographical experiences as black and white Americans with a narrative about the fate of the Hemings family on either side of the color barrier and an affirmation of the legitimacy of oral history. Stanton and Swann-Wright pull off an almost impossible task in producing an essay that is profound, historically precise, not at all self-indulgent, and signals the inseparability of our contemporary experience of race from our historical apprehension of it.

In effect, Stanton and Swann-Wright illustrate that how Jefferson looks to us is not determined entirely by the man himself. Our response to Jefferson varies according to the impact his hypocrisies and declarations have had on our lives. I would perhaps view them differently if I were white, or black, passing successfully (like some of Sally Hemings’s children), barely passing (like some others living in fear of being unmasked as blacks), newly discovering I was passing (like some of those who discovered they were descendants of Sally Hemings’s unions with a Jefferson, whether Thomas or Randolph, and were deeply confused by their identities), or someone who doesn’t fall so neatly into the bipolar disorder of contemporary American race.

This range of autobiographically influenced responses to Jefferson is well illustrated by the fact that, although there was apparently considerable agreement at the March 1999 conference about Jefferson, “considerable controversy was generated by the question: Within the social and cultural contexts of their day, what sort of relationship could Hemings and Jefferson have had?” Gordon-Reed had argued that we have little basis to claim that there was no love in the relationship and we should be careful in how we describe it given the lack of evidence. There is a popular cultural tradition, in Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings (New York, 1979) and most recently in the CBS miniseries Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, which represents the relationship as a kind of antebellum West Side Story. Gordon-Reed argued that the persistence of this tradition–and the way it rankles intellectuals– means it should not be so quickly dismissed. (Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s most famous biographer whom Gordon-Reed showed to be one of Jefferson’s most corrupt defenders, even campaigned against the airing of Chase-Riboud’s book as a made-for-TV-movie.)

Why is the idea that Jefferson might have loved Hemings so dangerous? The likely answer is sex and race–and more particularly miscegenation. Clarence Walker opens his “Denial is not a River in Egypt” by describing his college students’ great discomfort whenever the issue of miscegenation arises. This kind of discomfort is part of what makes the issue so loaded. And defenses of Jefferson as a man incapable of an “illicit” affair with a slave sometimes seem to mask a Jeffersonian horror at the fact that blacks and whites were often not as “distinct” as whites might have pretended.

That DNA evidence hasn’t resolved the question of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings is, perhaps, fitting, since it’s not even clear what the question is. What was Jefferson guilty of: Rape? Love? Hypocrisy? Being a typical member of the Virginia planter class? Being an atypical bundle of contradictions?

What then to say about the consequences of the Jefferson-Heming’s affair for Jefferson’s meaning for democracy and liberalism? Jack Rakove takes this topic on circuitously in his not entirely successful essay, “Our Jefferson.” Rakove attempts to assess what is valuable in Jefferson’s legacy and to examine to whom that legacy belongs. But in doing so he lapses into apologia: that Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia should not be read too harshly, that Jefferson himself was conflicted in racial matters, and that “Jefferson was born into a world that was only beginning to understand that slavery was an evil of a kind radically different from the other wrongs of life.”

In forging “Our” Jefferson, Rakove argues that owning Jefferson as a forebear is far more than an affirmation of the joys of democracy and the wages of hypocrisy and moral responsibility. As another ruminative essay, Gordon Wood’s “The Ghosts of Monticello,” shows quite successfully, the difficulties of dealing with a symbolic figure like Jefferson are always changing, as the present places different pulls on their legacy. Although the last few years’ debate about Jefferson hasn’t solved any problems or come to many agreements, it offers an opportunity to look at a man about whom we know a great deal (although perhaps not as much as we’d like) and a woman about whom we know hardly anything. The mysteriousness of their relationship for their progeny on both sides of the color line and for those of us who are attempting to understand it is made more apparent, which is perhaps all one ought to ask for. While Jefferson’s white family decides who can be buried in the family graveyard, it is likely that absolute standards will be asked for in areas where there are few. Meanwhile, we might remember that, although we know much about cradle and grave (and perhaps less about cradle than we might like), it is what was in between that is far more interesting.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

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Aaron Garrett is assistant professor of philosophy at Boston University and author of the chapter on “Human Nature” in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

What are we to conclude from a list of burials at one London parish during the first half of 1588 in which three of the twenty-four interments are of “Mary, a blackamore from Doctor Hector’s,” “Isabell, a blackamore,” and “a man blackamore [who] laye in the streete”? These entries suggest that people of African origins or descent, although very much a minority, were not unusual in sixteenth-century London. And they compel us to rethink the story of Atlantic slavery.

A seemingly simple list of burials can tell us a great deal. The wording of the entries suggests that these three “blackamores” were poor, although whether they were apprentices, servants, or slaves is impossible to say. And the absence of full names for any of them, in contrast to all but two other Londoners on the list, suggests also that they were not baptized, which may mean that British Africans were in a distinct theological as well as social minority.

Elizabethan plays generally confirm what the London burial list hints at. Several plays from the 1580s conflate exotic black Moors with the devilish plotters of medieval religious drama (where Lucifer and his damned progeny were signified by blackened faces), while others, including Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, depict black Moors as beasts of burden. In early seventeenth-century plays, black characters frequently appear as maids and servingmen. Like Mary and Isabel, they receive no surname and are described in cast lists simply as “a blackamoor” or “Moor,” “servant to . . . ” Plays like The White Devil (John Webster), Sophonisba (John Marston), Monsieur Thomas (John Fletcher), and The Knight of Malta (Fletcher and Nathan Field) seem to mirror in art the social status of blacks in the culture at large. But how do Shakespeare’s complex representations of Moors in Titus Andronicus and Othello complicate this picture?

 

Evidence like plays and parish lists are small pieces of the larger puzzle of the early history of American slavery and its roots in England before Jamestown was settled. Although historians have long recognized that English explorers and merchants visited the West African coast in the second half of the sixteenth century and that scores, perhaps hundreds of people of sub-Saharan origin or descent lived in Renaissance England, no consensus has emerged on the significance of those African-English encounters. Tudor and early Stuart England’s perceptions and treatment of “Blackamores” are as hotly contested topics among Renaissance scholars as are, among Americanists, the history of slavery and prejudice in the early British colonies.

The evidence for answering these questions lies primarily in the host of published and manuscript writings in English repositories, most notably the British Library in London, the Public Record Office in Kew, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. But except for the new British Library and the Bodleian, no single collection of early English books and manuscripts in the world matches that of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. And because most writings about the first two centuries of English exploration and colonization in America were penned or published in England, the Folger’s remarkable collection is invaluable–and for many American researchers, very convenient–for most aspects of early colonial history, including the history of slavery and racism.

Predictably, the Folger Library holds the standard works that reveal, here and there, early English perceptions and treatment of West Africans: the compendia of exploration narratives by Richard Eden, the younger Richard Hakluyt, and Samuel Purchas; original editions of narratives by George Best, George Sandys, Captain John Smith (King James’s own copy of the Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles), and innumerable others; the records of Parliament, the Crown, and other political institutions; and an incomparable assortment of early English dramas, with their many depictions of Africans. Among the library’s less heralded holdings are scores of volumes of community and parish records–including the revealing London list of burials mentioned above–major and minor manuscript collections (on paper or microfilm), and a substantial number of prints, paintings, maps, and other visual records, especially from the Renaissance but also before and after that era.

The tenure of Louis B. Wright from 1948 to 1968 as director of the Folger was a godsend for American historians. Before his appointment, Wright had published several books on colonial America, most notably First Gentlemen of Virginia (San Marino, Calif., 1940) and editions of William Byrd’s diary and Robert Carter’s letters, as well as Middle-class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill, 1935) and several other works on Tudor-Stuart England. Wright had also helped to transform the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino from a magnificent private collection into a major research institution. He worked the same magic at the Folger Library, with a caring eye on the American side of Shakespeare’s world. The Folger now has a substantial array of modern monographs, reference works, and document collections on early America to enhance its magnificent rare book holdings.

The Folger’s collections have proved invaluable to a project we have undertaken on Africanism in early modern England and English America. After Winthrop Jordan’s discussion of English impressions of black Africans in White over Black (Chapel Hill, 1968), several literary scholars have examined more closely the black presence in Renaissance and Restoration drama. Our project differs from Jordan’s broad overview and more recent closely focused studies by integrating literary and historical methods, concerns, and sources into a systematic examination of English images of black Africans from the late fifteenth century to the beginning of the eighteenth.

We have barely begun to tap the Folger “vault.” Not surprisingly, much of the evidence–like the parish records and early Renaissance dramas–is difficult to interpret. The remaining parish records may reveal that our preliminary sample was not representative of London, or that it was representative of the metropolis but not the hinterland; other dramas may undercut our preliminary findings on early English representations of Moors. The work ahead, like the Folger Library’s resources, is challenging, but those resources are the ideal starting point for our investigation. And beyond the Folger lie many other English and American libraries and archives, with their own hidden riches, and stories to tell.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).

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Alden T. Vaughan is professor emeritus of history at Columbia University. Virginia Mason Vaughan is the Peter D. and Andrea B. Klein ’64 Distinguished Professor at Clark University, where she teaches in the English department.

The Transatlantic Progress of Sugar in the Eighteenth Century

I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves,
And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves…
I pity them greatly, but I must be mum,
For how could we do without sugar and rum?

“Pity for Poor Africans,” William Cowper,1788

oh
peerless
smell of cane
cloud on triangular
horizon whip trilling a red
aria molasses the smelling hull
& chained bones the practical sharks
trailing hoping for fresh bodies overboard

(dark/
dark/pale/
dark/pale/dark/
dark/exchange/fresh/
exchange/flesh/exchange/
fresh/blood/blood/blood/blood/
dark/dark/pale/dark/pale/dark/exchange
flesh/exchange/fresh/exchange/flesh/blood)

&
the sea
taste blessed rape
hollowed out burn & brand
some girls mostly boys this holy
trinity of godless dirty savages island
patois rum down a throat lump in some tea
the science of journey & the peerless smell of cane

I Cannot Recall Phillis Wheatley (Boston, Winter 1763)

 

Celestial Nine! propitious to my pray’r.
In vain my Eyes explore the wat’ry reign…

“Ocean” by Phillis Wheatley, c.1779

Yes, I shall be a good girl.
See? I am practicing my lessons—
today I am reading that Odysseus
sailed the ocean like me,

that Muses hold me in their arms—
they are ladies like my Ma.
Mistress Susanna turns her head when I ask,
when shall I see my Ma at last?

She says I am not bad if I cannot recall
how Ma would say cup or spoon or yam
in that other place.
She says, Ma shall understand.

She says, once I learn a word
I own it, even one from the Bible—
but do not forget how great God is.
He will scrub my dirty skin clean.

Over there—
is it such a long journey to get back?
I cannot recall how far I traveled,
but I am stronger now.

I wish to show Ma
that my teeth grew in and I am so big
and I promise—I promise—not to get
sick if I ride on the ship again.

Today snow came down,
though Ma does not have a word
for that at our house.
Someone outside is lying on the ground.

A sad soul has slipped and fallen on the ice—
that’s what that crying means.

Blues for Harpsichord (Boston, Nearly Spring 1770)

 

… Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and Crispus
Attucks, the unhappy Victims who fell in the bloody massacre
of the Monday evening preceeding!

Boston Post Boy, March 12, 1770

The air is charged with grace and wealth, the tune
of coins, a parlor box—some ladies’ toy.
The music of the rich, a myth in nearly spring—
a tame, wet desert and men’s bewigged dreams.
The wives, rouged, play weak games and sway
their panniers, bone-threaded waists—there’s lace
in this calm scene, when outside, a few steps
away, the realness: stinking wharf; the ship
disgorging tea and African stuffing;
slick streets; and soon, the saucy boys’ mad brawl
with outmanned, well-gunned Redcoats—Crispus will
not live to see black liberty: he’s dead on this
wild night despite the harpsichord’s blank noise.
A prelude, a fugue—a glittered affray.

The Art of Mastering #2 Phillis Wheatley (Boston, October 28, 1772)

 

Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?
And why not every man?

Traditional Negro Spiritual

It didn’t even happen (probably):
the courthouse—
Phillis climbing the steps,

her narrow back lifted, bone by bone,
her pretty face confronting
the combined authority, the terror

of eighteen white men gathered
to examine a slave girl’s poetic
capabilities, to see if she could read—

and what of her humanity?
On that documented day,
most of those eighteen

were someplace else (maybe)—
across town at another meeting—
but we like our fairy tales established.

We’d like (alright, I would)
to think of Phillis as a Daniel in skirts,
armed with God’s fickle intentions.

A graceful African prophet versus
the descendants of Puritans and slave traders.
Would she have spoken in careful tongues,

subduing those men, her personal
Holy Ghost filing down beasts’ teeth?
Would she—

an innocent unaware of the world—
have pushed power aside
or forced it to the knees?

That day, we don’t know. (It’s unclear.)

Another day, one wonders
if she worked the word
as hard as I imagine.

If her Muses’ songs were clean.
I’m sure she smiled too readily
to make pounds and shillings

to gain her freedom—
she quickly wrote those elegies
for grieving white ladies

but did she believe her way
was wrong yet strolled along?
Did she know that lies you tell

in your youth can’t be smoothed over?
(I know
but I smiled, too—

anyway.
So I’d like to think survival.
I’d like her to reach forward

and show me how to write
the ironically righteous.
I’d like us both to live

until we are darkly wrinkled,
then lie down and die together,
then rise up and be our own gods.

Reader, laugh right now
at my curdling sentimentality—
Phillis and I understand.)

To Task Susanna Wheatley (Boston, February 1774)

 

I have lately met with a great trial in the death of my mistress,
let us imagine the loss of a Parent, Sister or Brother the tenderness
of all these were united, in her, —I was a poor little outcast &
stranger when she took me in…

“Letter from Phillis Wheatley to Obour Tanner,” March 21, 1774

Phillis,
I must speak freely to you.
The work of woman

is to withstand.
To understand that death
is at hand always.

Blood first—
remember I said freely—
then a bloodier travail

and if you are lucky
you’ll leave that bed
with your life

and if you love the miracle,
your child.
Dead, death, dying—

in the beginning
and at the end.
I advise you never to marry

or bear children,
never to task
the breakable body

that has been chastised
with childbirth since eviction
from the Garden.

I ask you
to remain with me,
and help your mistress

end her days
with your witty, dark
face filling her gaze.

I know what you
cannot undertake.
Miss Susanna knows best.

Miss Susanna
will tell you
of gone babies:

John Born 21 December 1746

A Christmas gift,
like Our Lord who tore
his mother’s soul to pieces.

The hopeful stroking
of the pearl-side shell,
the first seeking within,

then urgent quickness.
An ache to be rubbed
but not comforted.

Susanna Born 15 May 1748

What of some man’s
weightless love?
Nothing to compare.

Nothing, but when
the third child
stops breathing as well—

my girl, the softness so real
upon a full breast—
for Mother there shall be

no rest, no sleep,
until Mother is buried—
maybe.

Here Lyes Sarah Who Died
11 May 1752
Aged 7 yrs 9 months and 18 days

A (Small)Pox on You (Boston 1776)

 

Who lives in this House &
what is the name of the Head

A different season, even though
the trees look the same—
rarely a long life.
Instead, the cheerful threat
of death’s bad timing,
come to overtake
you like a fool quick in love.

How many Persons in this house
have had the Small Pox
both white and black

Once suffered always immune—
live or in the grave—but first,
sick Patriots, sick British,
sick Natives, sick slaves:
invasion by familiars
of New World kin.

How many belonging to this family
are now in the service

The city battling the enemy,
within and around, when any neighbor
can bring horror to the air
around your mouth—
take your husband, take your faith,
take your freedom, take your child,
take your wife, take your land—
take your eyes before it’s done.

Is it Continental or Colonial
Is it by Sea or Land
If by sea
in what vessel

How many of each have died

Notes to Poems

“The Art of Mastering #2”: This poem was written after I read Joanna Brooks’s essay, “Our Phillis, Ourselves” inAmerican Literature 82.1 (March 2010). In the essay, Brooks refers to a well-known article written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Writing, ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” published in Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985). In response to Gates’s discussion of the now-famous “examination” of Phillis Wheatley by the eighteen “notable citizens” of Boston, Brooks states, “But there is in fact no known record of such an event…nowhere does it state that the signatories had examined her themselves.”

“To Task”: Italicized portions of this poem come fromBoston City Records of Births and Deaths, located on the New England Historic Genealogical Society database.

“A (Small)pox on You”: Italicized portions in the poems are from Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Vol. 18 (1770-1777).

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Statement of Poetic Research—”Phillis Wheatley’s Word” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

As a student at two historically African American colleges during the early 1980s, I was taught Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, but my professors’ implicit message was that black folks had the responsibility to read her because of her historical status as an African American “first.” Not one of my professors ever mentioned we should read Wheatley because of her artistic merit as a poet. It was stressed to me that Wheatley was neither a political revolutionary nor a “real” poet with any recognizable talent. And frankly, I agreed; based upon my reading of Wheatley’s most well-known poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” and its then-troubling first line—”‘Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land”—I dismissed her poetry for over twenty years.

But in 2003, I read an article by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The New Yorkerentitled “Phillis Wheatley on Trial,” an excerpt from his full-length The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, which addresses Wheatley’s early life and times and the reception of her only book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Gates’s point is that because of eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas of race and Reason, it was difficult for some white New Englanders to imagine Wheatley as a person, much less someone capable of writing poetry. Thus, they focused on Wheatley’s proving her literacy and her humanity and less, Gates implies, on her actual skills at writing poetry. Gates makes an intriguing social argument in his book, so intriguing that I bought the book (in expensive hardback), and once I finished it, I reread Wheatley’s poems, collected in Vincent Carretta’s Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings (2001). I also reread Wheatley’s Poems online—in a digital edition so that I could see the way the poems had looked on the page originally.

And then, I got hooked on Phillis Wheatley—even though I still wasn’t sure whether I liked her poetry or not. That word “mercy” kept bothering me, with its bland happiness. I kept coming back to “mercy” because, by that time, I had a feeling Phillis Wheatley was trying to tell me something important, something I was missing but that I would get if I would only stop and pay attention to her.

I wondered if anyone else kept returning to “mercy” as well, so I started looking for other Wheatley secondary sources and encountered Katherine Clay Bassard’s Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing (1999). I can say with complete confidence that if I had never read Bassard’s book I would not have embarked on my current poetry project on Phillis Wheatley, for Bassard places Wheatley’s work within a racially gendered perspective—not just black or woman, but both—something that male scholars, white or black, had not done. Bassard analyzes Wheatley’s work in terms of Wheatley’s acknowledgement, not dismissal, of her traumatic experience of the Middle Passage.

After I read Bassard’s book, I started paying closer attention to Wheatley’s poetry. For example, in “To The Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth” Wheatley writes, “I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate / Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat,” while in “To the University of Cambridge, in New England,” a poem addressed to the students at Harvard, she writes, “Father of mercy, ’twas thy gracious hand / Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.” In the first poem, the word “snatch’d” is violent, while in the second poem, Wheatley presents the word “mercy” in a slightly different context than in her other, more well-known poem (“On Being Brought from Africa to America”). In “To the University of Cambridge,” this particular “mercy” is not what causes Wheatley’s kidnapping, but one that allows her survival in transit, a journey not just from Africa but the journey she survived in “safety.” Thus, “dark abodes” seems to refer to the Middle Passage, and not Africa. Most striking in both poems is Wheatley’s daring, her addressing white males and telling them about her slavery, her trauma. This claiming of voice is an act of incredible courage on the part of an eighteenth-century black woman who was still a slave at the time, and who had no literary forbears in her racially gendered context.

“You white men did this to me,” Wheatley essentially says in these two poems. “You made me a slave when I was free. You took me away from the only home I ever knew, from my parents and my childhood. It hurt me and it still hurts. And not only am I going to raise my voice and talk about how it hurts, you’re going to listen to me talk about how it hurts.”

And suddenly—just like that—I saw the brilliance of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry.

When my epiphany took place, I was a college professor and the author of my own three books of poetry. I decided to write a few poems about Wheatley, this woman who had made my own life as a black female poet possible, but I knew I needed to find out more about her. I was lucky enough to secure a 2009 Baron Artist Fellowship to the American Antiquarian Society in order to conduct research on Wheatley. When I arrived at the AAS, I was advised to start my research with William H. Robinson’s germinal biography, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (1984), out of print and not available at my own university library, as well as theBlack Biographical Dictionaries, 1790-1950 (1987), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Randall K. Burkett, and Nancy Hall Burkett. I quickly discovered that all secondary Wheatley sources pointed to the nineteenth-century textMemoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave (1834) by Margaretta Matilda Odell, and all the secondary sources largely relied upon Odell’s Memoir for the primary documentation about Wheatley’s early life. Odell describes herself as a “collateral descendant” of Susanna Wheeler Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley’s former mistress; however, I could not find a family link between Odell and Susanna Wheatley in any of my research. Although some of the later histories of Phillis Wheatley provide bits and pieces of documentation for Odell’s claims about Wheatley’s life in Memoir, there remain huge gaps in the research, and further, Odell’s book was written fifty years after Wheatley’s death, and every immediate adult member of Wheatley’s “white family” (John, Susanna, Mary, and Nathaniel) had died even before Phillis Wheatley did.

There are some truths in Odell’s Memoir. According to Marriages in Boston, 1700-1809, Phillis Wheatley did marry John Peters (on April 1, 1778); both are listed as “free negroes.” Odell maintains that Peters was still alive after Wheatley died in 1784 and that he demanded his dead wife’s papers from white friends who were in possession of them. In July 2009, when I visited the Northeast Division of the National Archives in Waltham, Massachusetts, I found a “John Peters” listed on the Boston, Massachusetts, 1790 census; this John Peters was a “free man of color” and there is no other African American John Peters anywhere in Boston in that census year. However, the documented truth in Odell’s Memoir is mixed in with unproven statements. For example, there is no published record of Peters’s selling his dead wife’s papers to cover his debts or moving “South” after her death as Odell asserts; further, given the racial climate of the U.S. South during the late eighteenth century, to say nothing of the prevalence of slavery there, relocating to this area would have been an extremely strange move for a free black man. There are no primary birth, baptismal, or death records for any—let alonethree—children born to Phillis Wheatley and John Peters. In the notices published in New England newspapers that provide Wheatley’s death date as on (or very close to) Sunday, December 5, 1784, no child is mentioned as dying with or being buried alongside her.

Given the lack of documentation for Odell’s family link to the white Wheatleys and the lack of proof for most of her assertions about Wheatley’s life, it is distressing that, in 176 years, scholars have not questioned Odell’s right to speak for Phillis Wheatley. This blind trust continues the disturbing historical trend of African Americans, and black women in particular, needing white benefactors to justify their lives and history. In this case, Odell provides no documentation for her portrait of Phillis Wheatley’s life, yet her unproven word has been reproduced by the most renowned Wheatley scholars in the world, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Vincent Carretta.

Within a few short days into my fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society and my encountering the issues surrounding Odell’s Memoir, I was seized with self-doubt about my poetry project. Once I found out that I couldn’t take what I thought I knew about Wheatley for granted, I wondered if I should continue; before arriving at the AAS, I had already written some poems about her, based upon Odell’s book. Though mine wasn’t a conventional history project, I wanted to take what was true and make some emotional leaps with those facts. Now, I realized, I didn’t really know much. I was heartbroken and, frankly, very angry. Then, I decided to try to document all that I could find about Phillis Wheatley and was encouraged to do so by the librarians and researchers at the AAS (especially Caroline Sloat and Elizabeth Pope). Using Odell’s Memoir as a guide, I started the tedious yet exhilarating work of primary documentation, so that I could write the poems I now wanted—needed—to write. I am still in the process of attempting full primary documentation.

A year later, my planned, short series of poems on Wheatley has become a book-length project-in-progress entitled The Age of Phillis, which not only imagines Wheatley’s life and times, but also the era of the American Revolution in Massachusetts. After rereading Wheatley’s poetry, what strikes me is her preoccupation with spirituality, motherhood, race, and her own contemporary politics. And although Wheatley’s “voice” certainly adheres to the poetic constraints—and feminine restraints—of her time, it is not an overstatement to locate Wheatley as a literary ancestor of the contemporary black poet Lucille Clifton, who one would characterize as a feminist poet in full command of artistic agency. As scholar Joanna Brooks observes, Wheatley was “conscripted into emotional labor… She grew an audience, developed a network of supporters, published a remarkable first book, and engineered her own manumission.” Thus, the overarching narrative that runs through The Age of Phillis is that of an unfree woman in search of her agency, one whose work is concerned with the actual death of children (prematurely torn from their mothers) as a means of mirroring her own figurative death and traumatic separation from her African mother/land. Framing this narrative is the political era of the American Revolution and the ironic colonial preoccupation with liberty from England in the midst of the horrific yet lucrative slave trade.

Surely, Wheatley’s work is “young”—what first book of poetry isn’t young, with its flaws and missteps? If one were to unearth early versions of the poems of Wheatley’s white contemporaries, I’m sure we could find similar flaws and missteps. While I don’t believe that Wheatley should be given a pass with her poetry, neither do I feel as if she should be held to a higher artistic standard than other poets who happen to be white and/or male. And I would strongly dispute anyone who argues that Wheatley’s work is essentially juvenilia. By finishing this project imagining the life and times of this brilliant and complex woman, I hope to make it impossible for anyone approaching the work of Phillis Wheatley to ever again dismiss her courageous artistry.

Further reading

Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral(London, 1773) is her only book of poetry; however, see Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings edited by Vincent Carretta (New York, 2001) for the latest collection of all extant Wheatley writings; also, see The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Revised and Enlarged Edition) edited by Julian Mason (Chapel Hill, 1989); and see The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley edited by John C. Shields (New York, 1988).

John Wheatley’s statement in Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral recounts her earliest biography; see also Margaretta Matilda Odell’s Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave. Dedicated to the Friends of the Africans (Boston, 1834). William H. Robinson’s Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (New York, 1984) provides a bio-bibliography of Phillis Wheatley. See Marriages in Boston, 1700-1809 (http://www.AmericanAncestors.org) for information about Phillis Wheatley’s 1778 marriage to John Peters. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Randall K. Burkett, and Nancy Hall Burkett, Black Biographical Dictionaries, 1790-1950 (Alexandria, Virginia, 1987) for historical context on late eighteenth-century African American women.

Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2004) provides an excellent and comprehensive history of the Transatlantic slave trade and an exploration of Middle Passage trauma. See Vincent Carretta’s “Introduction” in Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings (New York, 2001) for a discussion of slavery themes in Wheatley’s poetry; also see Will Harris, “Phillis Wheatley, Diasporic Subjectivity, and the African American Canon,” MELUS 33.3 (2008): 27-43. For an examination of Wheatley’s poetry and her racially gendered identity as an unfree person, see June Jordan’s “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley,” Massachusetts Review 27.2 (Summer 1986): 252-262. For a discussion of Phillis Wheatley’s Middle Passage trauma and its connection to spiritual utterance in her poetry, see Katherine Clay Bassard, Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing (Princeton, N.J., 1999). See Joanna Brooks’s American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures (New York, 2003) for a discussion of Christian themes in Wheatley’s poetry.

For a discussion of Phillis Wheatley’s elegies and their connection to literary patronage of her work, see Joanna Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves,”American Literature 82.1 (March 2010): 1-28. Frances Smith Foster’sWritten by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 (Bloomington, Indiana, 1993) provides a discussion of eighteenth-century African American women writers and their literary context. For critical reception of Wheatley’s poetry over two centuries see John C. Shields’s Phillis Wheatley’s Poetics of Liberation, Backgrounds and Contexts(Knoxville, 2008). For eighteenth-century Enlightenment theory and its connection to critical reception of Wheatley’s poetry see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Phillis Wheatley on Trial,” The New Yorker (January 20, 2003): 82; also see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York, 2003); and see Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781). For Enlightenment theory and its ordering of the races, see David Hume, “Of National Characters” in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London, 1753); also see Immanuel Kant, “Of National Characteristics, So Far As They Depend Upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime” in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, translated by John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley, 1981). For a multidisciplinary discussion of the development of race theory, see C. Loring Brace, Race is a Four-Letter Word: The Genesis of the Concept (New York, 2005).

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This article originally appeared in issue 11.1 (October, 2010).

 

In 1760, probably in New York, Jupiter Hammon’s poem “An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries” was printed as a broadsheet. The sheet identified the poem as Hammon’s and identified Hammon as “a Negro belonging to Mr. Lloyd of Queen’s Village, on Long Island.” On this basis, Hammon is regularly regarded as the first African American to publish a poem in what is now the United States. Though his poem, true to its title, concerns itself mostly with pious claims about salvation, slavery enters in its eighth stanza:

Dear Jesus by thy precious Blood,
The World Redemption have:
Salvation comes now from the Lord,
He being thy captive Slave.

Hammon was nearly fifty years old at the time of this broadsheet publication, and he had been an active Bible reader since at least his early twenties. He had every reason to know that no abiding eighteenth-century Christology took slavery as a predominant metaphor. The poetic conceit of this stanza, then, appears to be a pointed act of invention.

 

One does not have to interpret especially creatively to begin to imagine why an intelligent enslaved man with poetic leanings might figure Christ as himself enslaved. Accordingly, the alchemy of a classroom setting is all that’s required to transform this eighth stanza into a small nugget of pedagogical gold. The stanza brings together the biographical and the metaphorical aspects of this poem, enabling students and other fledgling readers to see how and why an African American voice could enter the print and literary archives of American literature and assume a critical stance toward that very enterprise. It is tempting to teach Hammon’s poem—and, indeed, much of early African American writing—in precisely this way. Like nearly all other early African American stories that matter, the one told by this poem appears to be about slavery.

Yet the problem with such an interpretation is how overdetermined it is. Few works meriting serious literary study—as, I think, Hammon’s poems do—are so consistently interpreted along a single critical axis. One root of this problem is that Hammon’s poems are not often taught. The most popular American literature textbooks (such as the Norton or the Heath anthologies) instead abound with selections from Hammon’s contemporaries Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, both of whose extant publications are more substantial, and both of whose autobiographical writings recount the transatlantic slave trade. These latter authors would accordingly seem to better represent eighteenth-century African American experiences to college students, not least because our students read literature to learn that there are many more experiences in the world than one finds growing up on Long Island.

The problem, then, is not interpretations of Hammon’s poems themselves, which may point toward slavery as a crucial metaphor or context; rather, the problem is an overdetermined interpretive frame that presumes that these poems matter most when they say something about slavery. The problem, in other words, is that professors and teachers have come up with few means or reasons other than slavery to interpret these extraordinary verses. When Hammon does show up in anthologies or on syllabi, his status as an enslaved African American blots out nearly any other significant aspect of his biography or his art. Much as his white contemporaries did, we read Hammon as a slave, rather than an artist.

To be clear, in my own literature classrooms, I willingly support discussions about slavery, even when these subordinate an aesthetic engagement with poetry to a more political or broadly culturalist discussion of the time period in which the poems were written. I also acknowledge that it would be incorrect to argue that Hammon’s poems harbored no interest in slavery; the recent discovery of his manuscript poem “An Essay on Slavery,” for example, shows a side of Hammon that—at least by 1786—found the constrained form of the quatrain suitable to a vocal critique of the peculiar institution. Hammon, like many African Americans, enslaved or free, had thoughts about slavery. But my point here is to insist on the likelihood that, like many African Americans, Hammon also had thoughts about all kinds of things besides slavery. Presuming that Hammon’s poetry matters when it’s first and foremost about slavery denies the complexity of early African American experiences that may not simply conform to an interpretive paradigm of slavery and resistance.

Because such a paradigm often animates our syllabi and our anthology selections, those same syllabi and anthology selections tend to underplay and underappreciate that early African American authors were not solely enslaved and formerly enslaved. Resisting slavery—and observing the hypocrisy of American political culture—was, of course, as scholars of black history since the 1960s have shown, part of the lives of these historical actors, as it remains for many African Americans today. But there were undoubtedly many other parts of their lives. Among contemporary scholars, Frances Smith Foster has argued powerfully against confusing the nineteenth-century black press for the antislavery press. But a similar point would be evident to any reader who thinks of Hammon’s piety, or Wheatley’s devotion, or Frederick Douglass’s courage, or William Wells Brown’s showmanship, and sees in these aspects of these people’s personalities a complexity that registers (sometimes subtly, but always unmistakably) in the texts they left behind. In all those cases, slavery was something with which these personalities engaged, but the affective textures and small pleasures and wry moments and petty defeats also adumbrated in their texts are most often interpreted in ways that tend to subordinate the quirks of personality to the historical forces of slavery.

 

By contrast, such conclusions are rarely reached with white-authored texts. One would not hesitate, for example, to interpret the metaphorical whiteness of the whale in Moby-Dick as a symptom of Herman Melville’s dark theological humor. Why would one hesitate to similarly value Hammon’s curious metaphoric of Christ’s slavery in “An Evening Thought” as a genuine if idiosyncratic expression of his own piety? Historical interpretations of early African American texts tend to want to pronounce what is African American about them (which, somehow, is almost always slavery). These texts less often end up on our syllabi so that we may teach our students how to honor what is individual, personal, or human about them. We often conclude instead that Melville is a satirical genius and that Hammon was a clever slave. The well-meaning condescension in this tacit contrast should give us far more pause than it tends to.

If one problem with equating early African American literature with slavery is that so doing risks reducing the experience of black Americans to the condition of being enslaved, a second problem is that such an equation creates the impression that slavery only matters when it’s being recounted. We teach texts that may justly be seen as examples of the creative ways that African Americans survived and responded to the unimaginably huge machinations of American racism, yet we do so as though such responses were the whole of the story of American racism. It’s frankly absurd that in our classrooms, black-authored texts so often carry the burden of representing to students a set of institutions that white Americans largely perpetuated. White-authored texts deserve to share the burden of telling the story of race and racism in America—and that’s true whether one looks, on the one hand, to something like Thomas Jefferson’s derisive comments on Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho, or, on the other hand, to something like the early abolitionist sentiments of an activist like Anthony Benezet. Race, racism, and slavery are an ineluctable part of white Americans’ American history. Indeed, it is these traits that allow white Americans to have a history in the first place, as historians have shown that no one would call themselves “white Americans” if not for the long-simmering racist pseudo-science that created an alibi for social inequity out of a “white” population that in fact has little meaningful genetic resemblance.

Hammon may seem like a desultory point of departure for these meditations, not least because, compared to the urgent political work of antiracism, the stakes for interpreting poetry don’t often feel especially high. Yet as college students in our present continue to organize themselves into a movement for expansive racial justice on campuses across the county, teachers with some knowledge of Jupiter Hammon may find their expertise suddenly sought after. In November 2015, for example, students at Yale issued a demand for “An ethnic studies distributional requirement for all Yale undergraduates and the immediate promotion of the Ethnicity, Race & Migration program to departmental status,” observing, with notable deference to the expertise of their professors, that “Curricula for classes that satisfy the ethnic studies distributional requirement must be designed by Yale faculty in the aforementioned areas of study.” These students, like others at institutions across the country, are asking for support with their extraordinary, courageous work from faculty with relevant expertise. Giving our students the support they need requires, among other things, taking our expertise and channeling it beyond any cursory vision of “diversity” that may already reside in our syllabi and our instruction.

I’m suggesting in other words that one step in making this student-led diversification meaningful requires faculty to admit once and for all that our curricula as they exist already tend to grant white people and white people’s experiences far more diversity than they do for non-white people. As it stands, early American literature and history lessons, however unwittingly, may be reinforcing the idea that white people historically had all kinds of experiences, while black people had slavery. These unwitting lessons may stem not from the ways we teach, but from the materials we teach. With some limited exception, the authors, subjects, and characters who populate our lessons in early American literature and history classes are overwhelmingly white. White people have had the best and most unrestricted access to paper, ink, print, and paint, which have fostered their self-expression. White people have had the best and most unrestricted access to libraries, seminaries, universities, and historical societies, which have kept their records. White people’s histories have been designedly exclusive and jealously guarded. White people’s histories have long stood as official histories, and especially as official national histories. To counter the racism of these official histories, teachers have sought to include other voices, other experiences; and in so doing it has often made sense to counter the supremacy of pervasive whiteness with some kind of representative blackness. Yet we have done so with too little appreciation for the logic according to which attempts to make blackness into a representative counterweight indirectly confirm the pervasiveness of white American history. Many African American-authored texts can do such work very well, but we’d be foolish and more than a little racist to imagine that they were created only for this purpose.

Importantly, however, early African American texts like Hammon’s were not created to affirm the antiracist politics of our moment, either. For that reason, the act of teaching these texts stands to open up our contemporary moment to some greater analytical complexity. Black Lives Matter is but one contemporary movement among many doing amazing, necessary, and powerful work to respond to systemic, horrifying moments of racist violence. But this movement says more than that black people shouldn’t be killed. Not-death is an abysmally too-low bar for survival. Black Lives Matter asserts that black people need to breathe, to live, and to thrive. To say that black lives matter is, in other words, to insist on the realization and representation of a full, complex humanity for black people outside as well as inside the academy. And so, within the de facto racism of the university context, teaching the poems of an enslaved poet as though they must be first and foremost about slavery risks reproducing the problem as though it were the solution. It is here that acknowledgment of the idiosyncrasies of Hammon’s poetry may serve as a useful intervention.

If you’re one of the teachers who already teaches early African American texts with care and depth, that’s wonderful. The rest of us, however, need to commit to teaching more of these texts and, further, commit to teaching them in ways that acknowledge that early African American texts were created to do things besides counterbalance white American history. Some of the readiest solutions would be to make sure our syllabi and our reading lists include multiple black-authored texts when discussing early African American experiences, and multiple white-authored texts for thinking through slavery, race and racism in early America (things we do not much do, if the Society of Early Americanists syllabus exchange is any indicator of current practices).

A key pedagogical aim here would be to represent the diversity of early American black experiences themselves. Multiple, competing texts offer students a means toward understanding that there is no singular or representative “African American experience.” Early black Americans were people, and people are different from each other. There are accordingly many ways and many idioms—political, poetic, and otherwise—in which early black Americans expressed themselves, with varied motivations and multiple consequences. In our well-meaning desire to create syllabi that include representative selections from early African Americans, the experiential and formal diversity internal to early African American texts is too often shortchanged. Insisting on and attending to the multiplicity of human experiences and interpretive contexts for early African American literature offers one practical and urgent occasion to show to our students that black lives matter.

Further Reading

On the recent discovery of Hammon’s manuscript poem, see Cedrick May, “An Enslaved Poet on Slavery,” Yale Alumni Magazine (May/June 2013). For a fantastic account of the ordinary in early African American experience, see Tara Bynum, “Phillis Wheatley’s Pleasures,” Common-place 11:1 (October 2010). For a more recent, contemporary account, see Aimee Meredith Cox, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Durham, N.C., 2015). On the history of whiteness, see Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York, 2010). On the history and legacy of racism at U.S. universities, see Stephen Craig Wilder, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York, 2013). More generally, my thinking about these issues owes a lot to Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May-June 1990): 95–118, Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-American Print Culture,” ALH 17:4 (Winter 2005): 714–740, M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, N.C., 2006), and Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago, 2004).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

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Jordan Alexander Stein is co-editor of Early African American Print Culture (2012). He teaches English at Fordham University and tweets @steinjordan.

 

 

Maritime Minstrelsy Along the Transoceanic Frontier

The significant global footprint America’s nineteenth-century maritime community possessed certainly did not escape observers at the time. One editorialist at the Sailor’s Magazine, a periodical devoted to nautical affairs, remarked in 1832 that the nation’s seamen “are visiting every port in the world, they are mingling among the nations, they have intercourse with every kindred and people and tongue, and are situated to exert a mighty influence.” The New Bedford Port Society asserted as well that mariners were “by no means unimportant as it regards our national character.” Unquestionably “the most numerous and frequently the most important ambassadors of nations,” shipboard laborers “supply the principal elements from which the conclusions are formed in distant regions, of the people who send them forth.”

Sailors, in other words, were chiefly responsible for introducing the United States to the world, and would shape public opinion overseas regarding Americans. “We judge of other nations by the individuals we see,” the Sailor’s Magazine further reasoned, just as Americans “estimate the character of our Brethren of other States in the Union by the specimens we have seen of their citizens.”

If peoples overseas would judge America and Americans by its largest class of representatives, it seems significant that those men often appeared in blackface. Whatever conclusions individuals abroad reached about the United States derived in part from maritime minstrel recitals. Many mariners, in fact, appeared anxious to perform American racial caricatures for people they encountered overseas.

Blackface minstrel shows remained among the most wildly popular modes of entertainment available to antebellum citizens, particularly those who dwelled within the northeast’s commercial corridors. Tracing its origins as a theatrical form to the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, minstrelsy had, by the 1830s, been transformed into mass entertainment by the likes of men such as Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice. A white traveling actor who worked developing towns along the nation’s western rivers, Rice reportedly observed and then replicated on stage the song and dance of a crippled enslaved stable hand from Louisville. Using burnt cork to black his face, appearing in the garb of a “plantation darkey,” and using dialect associated with peoples of African origin, Rice initially inserted his act as a short accompaniment to longer dramatic productions. That routine quickly became the minstrel mega-hit “Jump Jim Crow,” named after the song’s chorus where Rice, in affected speech, claimed to “Wheel about, an’ turn about, an’ do jis so/Eb’ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.” Debuted in 1828, Rice’s number grew in scope as the actor responded to enthusiastic audiences by continuously adding new verses and steps. By 1830, the flutter of his feet—and a growing army of imitators’—ignited a popular cultural wildfire. Regularly packing houses in New York, Rice became a transatlantic sensation by 1836 after he completed tours of England and France. It was with minimal exaggeration that an 1855 retrospective in the New York Tribune could claim that “[n]ever was there such an excitement in the musical or dramatic world; nothing was talked of, nothing written of, and nothing dreamed of, but ‘Jim Crow.’ ” Indeed, it appeared as though “the entire population had been bitten by the tarantula; in the parlor, in the kitchen, in the shop and in the street, Jim Crow monopolized public attention.”

 

Yet stories of blackface minstrelsy’s plantation origins like the one Rice told are probably apocryphal. He and many of the era’s best-known white caricaturists, after all, grew up in Manhattan’s racially integrated dockside districts. There they would have witnessed all manner of pseudo-theatrical spectacles, from masked mummers to free blacks dancing for eels, oysters, and loose change. Historians now agree that this vibrant urban culture of song, dance, and holiday exhibition among the city’s poorest white and black residents is the more likely source for minstrel material. What would later sicken Frederick Douglass as “the filthy scum of white society [stealing] from us a complexion denied to them by nature” traced its origins to cross-racial contacts along the New York waterfront. This harborside habitation provides a window into one of blackface’s more curious and understudied dimensions: international, nautical performances. Seafarers made it so. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and their immediate environs—that is, the country’s largest seaports, its gateways into the wider world—hosted thousands of minstrel shows annually, their seats packed with sailors. The famed theatres of E.P. Christy, Daniel Emmett, and Henry Wood opened their doors to largely white, male audiences, many of whom, upon witnessing the display, thereafter hopped aboard vessels bound outward across the globe. Ships’ decks served as readymade venues for the execution of minstrel shows abroad, and seamen often seized the opportunity to perform before mixed crowds of fellow mariners, local officials, and indigenous peoples. The enthusiasm some sailors showed for reproducing American racial spectacle overseas suggests not only their own warm embrace of the era’s popular theatre, but also their aspiration to familiarize foreign societies with the nation’s cultural landscape. In the foreground of that landscape lay the questions of class, race, and slavery which blackface performance worked to articulate.

The best documented of these episodes occurred during Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s famed 1852 mission to “open” Japan. President Millard Fillmore, with the staunch support of Secretary of State Daniel Webster, had authorized the use of four vessels to establish formal diplomatic and commercial relations between the United States and Japan. America’s presence in the Pacific had grown steadily over the nineteenth century, and with the U.S.-Mexico War securing for the nation permanent frontage along the globe’s greatest ocean, hungry eyes now gazed upon the lucrative prize that was East Asian trade. Japan presented the prospect not only of new customers for American goods, but, more significantly, the strategic location for coal depots required by transoceanic steamships. The expedition itself would be an instrument meant to forge another link in what Webster and the mercantile interests he represented began to call the “Great Chain” of saltwater commerce that would connect the United States to the wider world (fig. 1).

Using supposed Japanese mistreatment of shipwrecked American sailors as a pretext for armed intervention, American officials charged a reluctant Perry (who had expected to spend the remainder of his career in the comfort of a Mediterranean sinecure) with the difficult task of convincing that relatively hermetic realm to associate with what its leaders considered to be a barbarous outside world. Perry’s squadron, an assemblage of the United States Navy’s most modern steam warships, bristled with cannon meant to impress upon the Japanese the violent alternative that continued isolation would entail. Other scholars have made much of the “gifts” to the ruling daimyo included as part of the expedition. In the printing presses, Colt weaponry, telegraphic demonstrations, and miniature steam locomotive, they find a “technological imperative” behind America’s civilizing mission. Without denying the centrality of industrial expertise to American imperial agendas, though, we need to ask why a minstrel show organized by the squadron’s white sailors became central to narrative and pictorial accounts of the expedition (fig. 2).

 

For the seamen who blacked up, “demonstrating America” was not reduced to displaying feats of engineering. Rather, exposing the Japanese to American civilization meant educating them in the proper racial order. If the “Land of the Rising Sun” was to become civilized, its inhabitants would require instruction in the sort of prejudice befitting civilized peoples. Just as blackface is thought to have tutored recently arrived immigrant populations in the United States in domestic racial hierarchies, so, it was hoped, would it function abroad in broadcasting the implicit inferiority of dark-skinned peoples everywhere. Certainly the Japanese themselves were the targets of racially based animosity across the nineteenth century. But if Asiatic peoples were not the equal of the omnipotent Anglo-Saxon, they might nevertheless revel in their superiority over still lowlier races (fig. 3).

We do know what the Japanese saw, if not how they saw it. Certain portions of the show found their way into the pages of expedition journals. Those reports reveal a flurry of affected speech, “dancing that surpassed all,” and slapstick comedy routines, so that by the show’s conclusion, one observer thought that the Japanese “commissioners would have died with their laughter.” Perry’s official interpreter, S. Wells Williams, asserted that “the exhibition was a source of great merriment to them and every one present, for the acting was excellent.” Other sailors also believed the performance a great hit among the Japanese, though one man took enough time to consider the question of reception: “The guests seemed quite pleased—they laughed a lot—but why? Perhaps even they did not know.” The Commodore himself did not fail to record the event, albeit tersely. The treaty commissioners “were entertained on deck with the performances of the very excellent corps of Ethiopians belonging to the [ship] Powhatan,” wrote Perry, who praised the “hilarity which this most amusing exhibition excited.” He invoked the famed American minstrel proprietor E.P. Christy to depict the Japanese laughing “as merrily as ever the spectators at Christy’s have done,” so much so, in fact, that one man draped his arm over Perry’s shoulder for support as he doubled over, and, as the commander complained, “crushed my new epaulettes.” Francis Hawks, the expedition’s official chronicler, concurred with the Commodore: “[the] exhibition of Negro minstrelsy … would have gained them unbounded applause from a New York audience even at Christy’s.” And importantly, as Hawks made entirely clear, the minstrel show was the sailors’ initiative, or, in Perry’s words, “got up by the sailors” (fig. 4).

Portraying sailors as particularly invested in the minstrel portion of the expedition’s agenda encourages us to compare it to those more “official” components of Perry’s mission. The Commodore paid particular attention to the appearance of ships, weaponry, uniforms, and other ceremonial vestiges. His diplomacy consisted of gifts, niceties, and calibrated decorum, all designed to display the power and prestige of the American nation. Yet George Preble, one of the expedition’s lieutenants, remembered Perry confiding among the men that their contribution to the mission remained crucial: “The Commodore … said the success of his treaty depended upon the success of the entertainment.” Hence, declared Preble, “we did our best.” The crew, in other words, were conceded minstrelsy as their own form of diplomatic ritual. In denigrating African Americans, they communicated to Japanese onlookers, in some essential way, the United States. And if broadcasting race was a primary motive of the minstrels overseas, there is some evidence to suggest its success: later accounts of prejudice in the Meiji empire note that Japanese diarists, in the words of one scholar, consistently referred to blacks as “pitifully stupid, grotesque, dirty, unmannered, physically repulsive subhumans … with faces resembling those of monkeys.” In that sense, supposedly “American” minstrelsy could be seen as a tool to sustain not only white national identity in the United States, but also national or cultural identities in Japan and elsewhere predicated upon black inferiority (fig. 5).

 

It was not simply the “Opening of Japan” that was attended by minstrel diplomacy. Rather, sailors showed enthusiasm for the ritual wherever they traveled. An unidentified midshipman aboard the USS United States wrote in 1844 at Mazatlan, along Mexico’s Pacific coast, that numbers of the ship’s sailors organized themselves for a minstrel show aimed at “jollification.” The “whole of them amused themselves with patting juba and dancing breakdowns … and singing negro songs.” Local officials, native peoples, and even the French Consul all attended the event, which seemed to please every spectator. Richard Henry Dana, while ashore at Santa Barbara, California, remarked that one of his shipmates “exhibited himself in a sort of West India shuffle, much to the amusement of the bystanders.” Other portions of the text made clear that “West India” was a synonym Dana used to connote “blackness,” as in the objection to hauling hides atop his head because it “looked too much like West India negroes.” Meanwhile, in 1841 Merida, Mexico, diplomat John Lloyd Stephens was welcomed ashore by a local brass band playing the minstrel song “Jim Crow” under the erroneous impression that it was the U.S. national anthem: “The band, perhaps in compliment to us, and to remind us of home, struck up the beautiful national melody of ‘Jim Crow.'” An honest mistake, Stephens thought, given the frequency with which American naval bands were appropriated for minstrelsy overseas. In Hakodate, a relatively remote whaling port in northern Japan, a group of men aboard the bark Covington in 1858 came ashore to witness the traditional theatrical practice known as kabuki. Quickly bored with the entertainment (the actors “were not what would be called ‘stars’ at home,” one sailor quipped), the mariners provided their own, as described by seaman Albert Peck:

There were about fifty sailors collected here and after witnessing the performance for a while the stage was taken possession of by them and there being fiddlers banjo players &c. amongst them a negro concert was improvised and the stage resounded to the steps of the Juba dance with varieties which gave immense satisfaction to all in the theatre.

All, that is, save the Japanese actors, who, Peck noted, “appeared highly indignant at being interrupted in their performance and driven from the stage.” The remaining three weeks of the vessel’s time in port saw the theater repurposed for minstrelsy, homage paid to William Henry Lane, also known as Master Juba, famed African-American dancer in New York’s Five Points slum.

And while the routine rendered before Japanese treaty commissioners may have been the most significant blackface display during the Perry expedition, it was by no means an isolated event while the squadron was abroad. “There are always good musicians to be found among the reckless and jolly fellows composing a man-of-war’s crew,” Perry professed, and regular evening entertainment aboard ship ordinarily involved minstrel favorites such as “‘Jim along Josey,’ ‘Lucy Long,’ ‘Old Dan Tucker,’ and a hundred others of the same character.” They “are listened to delightfully by the crowd of men and boys collected around the forehatch, and always ready to join the choruses.” Another observer remarked that “every morning … the cooks and sailors get together forward with a banjo and tambourine, singing all the nigger melodies with a voice and taste that would make the Christy Minstrels applaud.” Minstrelsy, then, was embedded in the ship’s daily routine.

 

Other diarists noted the frequency with which the Perry squadron’s sailors applied the burnt-cork mask throughout the voyage’s three year duration. Aboard the USS Powhatan at Hong Kong in December of 1853, Thomas Dudley noted that “we are amusing ourselves and friends on shore. Minstrelsey and balls have been given on board two of the [flotilla’s] steamers, and we have done our share … winning merited applause for [our] excellent endeavors.” Several months later and farther north along the Chinese coast, “all Shanghae was invited [aboard ship] and came, first we gave them 2 hours entertainment from the negro minstrels [for whom] there was unbounded applause, all went off first rate, then we had refreshments, and then a grand ball.” Later still, the ship’s “minstrels gave performances which delighted the residents of Canton.” And in a letter home to his sister dated December 20, 1853, Dudley went on in great detail regarding the regularity with which the navy’s sailors turned blackface performers:

We have a minstrel band of 9 performers, that do beat Christy’s all hollow. One of them does up Lucy Long tip top, and they are always well received. Every Monday we have a performance—alternatively the theatre and “nigger band”—on these occasions the ship assumes a gala appearance and great things are done. The Captain has a great supper for admirals, governors, and other big fish. The Wardroom for Lieut and less fry while we of the steerage entertain the still smaller fry, such as midshipmen, passed mids, etc. etc. The suppers are great, as is everything else. The Susquehannah has a theatre every Wednesday, the Winchester on each Fridays and the Mississippi on Tuesdays, so you see we do not lack for that kind of amusement. Society in China there is not and so we are obliged to turn our ships into playhouses, to interest the men, and amuse ourselves.

In claiming that ships were consistently converted “into playhouses” for the exhibition of a well-practiced “nigger band,” Dudley dramatically illustrated the far-reaching influence of American minstrelsy at the time. Diagnosing China as devoid of “society,” he prescribed racial caricature as an elevating panacea. His assurances that all who bore witness were enamored of the display (the troupe “merited applause” in Hong Kong; they “delighted” in Canton) echoed other observers likewise invested in recording Jim Crow’s sensational reception around the world. Here lay a gesture toward cultural imperialism: America’s mass entertainment embraced by “admirers” overseas living in a social vacuum and desperate for the fulfillment promised by an outside power’s theatrical ingenuity. Boasting of blackface’s endless international appeal clearly celebrated the beginnings of U.S. penetration and domination overseas, but it also negated the need to question or challenge the minstrel show’s potentially problematic representations of slavery and black culture. Affirmation abroad, then, ensured the medium’s perpetuation at home, which, in turn, further guaranteed regular exportation of minstrelsy overseas and the deeper entrenchment of racial stereotypes regarding African Americans.

 

And naval squadrons more generally seem to have been potent vehicles for the diffusion of minstrel performance. Even before venturing to Japan, the federal government had played an active role in securing America’s position in the Pacific. Building upon the piecemeal efforts of individual commercial ventures, Congress in 1836 authorized the largest exploratory expedition ever sent into the region by any nation. An array of objectives motivated the venture, some scientific, others economic and political. Departing in 1838 with a fleet of five warships and nearly one thousand sailors, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes eventually led the United States Exploring Expedition on a four-year circumnavigation of the globe chiefly celebrated for the discovery of the Antarctic continent.

Yet exploration is often a mutual act, as the squadron’s sailors tacitly acknowledged by offering minstrel performances to inquisitive Polynesian onlookers. Charles Erskine, a member of that expedition, wrote in his memoir that while traversing the Pacific Ocean the crew aboard the Peacock “treated the natives to a regular, old-fashioned negro entertainment.” The “natives” were Fijians from the island of Rewa held hostage while awaiting the progress of a manhunt ashore for a key player in the massacre of American sailors some years before. Attempting to entertain their “guests,” the sailors smeared grease on their faces and began to shuffle the decks. Referring to the black dandy “Zip Coon,” a common minstrel character who parodied the “ludicrous airs” exhibited by some northern free blacks, Erskine claimed that “Juba and Zib Coon danced and highly delighted them, [and] the Virginia reel set them wild.” Next, two of the crew tied themselves together, were draped in a blanket, and mimicked the braying of a donkey, while their “comical looking rider, Jim Crow Rice … made his appearance.” Charles Wilkes, expedition commander, thought “the dance of Juba came off well [and] the Jim Crow of Oliver, [the ship’s carpenter,] will long be remembered by their savage as well as civilized spectators.” Indeed, it was the audience, “half civilized, half savage,” which “gave the whole scene a remarkable effect.” The wild popularity of minstrelsy afloat was further hinted at by Wilkes, who claimed that the “theatricals were resorted to” in large part because “the crew of the Peacock were proficients, having been in the habit of amusing themselves in this way.”

It seemed that wherever the fleet moved, the crew insisted on replicating American minstrelsy overseas. In Tahiti, an attempt by officers to stage for the natives a rendition of Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers fell flat when the “savage” audience began to grumble that there was too much “parau,” or talk. A group of sailors saved the show by smearing their faces and demonstrating “comic songs” popular in America. Wilkes noted in an aside that the Tahitians believed “the rendition of this slow-talking and quick-footed caricature of blacks” was the real thing, “and could not be convinced it was a fictitious character.” Given that much of what could be considered a successful minstrel show within the United States depended upon a knowing interplay between performer and audience, a spectator’s inability or unwillingness to acknowledge the spectacle’s fiction created a radically different dynamic. The failure of native viewers to separate costumed from concrete blackness marks an essential difference between minstrelsy abroad and within the United States, where audiences and performers generally recognized the genre’s conventions and caricatures. When observers were clueless, as at Tahiti, the show’s meaning was up for grabs.

Despite that seeming interpretive instability, however, accounts persisted in emphasizing the positive response of worldwide audiences, as when Francis Hawks noted that minstrel shows “produced a marked effect even on their sedate Japanese listeners, and thus confirmed the universal popularity of ‘the Ethiopians’ by a decided hit in Japan.” Literal diplomatic breakthrough became a function of blackness’ comic skewering overseas. Hawks felt that the two countries became closer to one another in shared mirth over the denigration of African peoples. The chronicler even emphasized that it was at this moment, post-performance, that a Japanese commissioner named Matsusaki chose to embrace Perry, exclaiming “Nippon and America, all the same heart.” It is crucial to emphasize here the “universal popularity” that Hawks, Erskine, and Wilkes alike ascribed to the “Ethiopians,” “Zib Coon,” and “Jim Crow.” American mariners claimed that the sources for mutual understanding—as simple as a collective chuckle—were founded in the ridiculous (mis)representation of black people.

We cannot know how “universal” the delight truly was. More significant is that observers read it as such, citing the goodwill generated by minstrelsy as a potentially unifying force. And U.S. sailors and officers had good reason to laud blackface as a peace maker, for such shows sometimes appeared at moments of imperial crisis within the maritime community. The Perry expedition was in a state of constant tension due to uncertainty over Japanese intentions, while Erskine noted the execution of a blackface show in the midst of a “hostage crisis” at Rewa. Joint laughter at black racial caricatures became an ameliorative tool that allowed peoples at potential odds with one another to temporarily unite in the shared experience of being, in historian David Roediger’s phrase, “Not Black.” Even as sailors disseminated American racial caricatures overseas, they utilized such offensive tropes as the grounds for cooperation with peoples foreign and yet, by right of their ability to find Jim Crow humorous, somehow familiar. Minstrelsy, from the perspective of sailor-performers, at least, became a ritual to construct intercultural solidarities abroad, in the same way some scholars posit that mutual delight among diverse audiences at home produced unity—across lines of ethnicity, religion, and skill—rooted in the “common symbolic language” typifying blackface.

Other observers, meanwhile, commented on the strange effect all of this minstrelsy began to have on peoples overseas. Bayard Taylor, an American traveler who wrote of his globetrotting in 1859, illustrated an interesting scene while in India. Dining with an English gentleman, their meal was interrupted by a Hindu troubadour who began to strum a mandolin for whatever coins the men might spare. But, “to my complete astonishment,” Taylor gasped, the musician “began singing ‘Get out of the way, Ole Dan Tucker!'” Enjoying the Yankee’s surprise, he proceeded to strike up a litany of the era’s most popular minstrel songs, including “‘Oh Susanna!’, ‘Buffalo Gals,’ and other choice Ethiopian melodies, all of which he sang with admirable spirit and correctness.” Further along in his travels, Taylor again spoke of minstrelsy’s global influence: he heard “Spanish boatmen on the isthmus of Panama singing ‘Carry me back to ole Virginny’ and Arab boys in the streets of Alexandria humming ‘Lucy Long.'” And yet, for whatever reason, it was the sound of “the same airs from the lips of a Hindoo” that he had been “hardly prepared” for.

That re-appropriation, however, once again demonstrates the unstable meaning of these minstrel performances: the capacity of audiences abroad to discern what they wished within the show’s song and dance. For even as they blanketed the world, minstrel tunes nominally derisive of nonwhite agency were taken hold of by those very same peoples and repackaged for local use, as worksong, entertainment, or a source of income that preyed on homesick Americans anxious to hear what E.P. Christy saluted as “our native airs.” Clearly, there were peoples around the globe who would dispute the possessive tone of Christy’s comment. Hence the hesitancy with which we must assign any definitive interpretation of minstrelsy’s meaning to overseas audiences. Minstrelsy was immensely complex; contemporary scholars who have examined song lyrics and playbills reveal that it simply cannot be boiled down to the exhibition of exploitative racial imitation. The routines contained many targets and abundant burlesques, all of which changed over time. Not only did the content of blackface performance shift over the course of the antebellum era (with class-based anti-capitalist protest and critiques of elite pretension gradually replaced by more overtly racist representation of black peoples), but so did its aesthetics and target audience.

This in turn begs the question of reception, a notoriously thorny issue even in minstrelsy’s domestic context. What could non-English-speaking observers have gleaned from the shows? Perhaps the Fijians Charles Erskine claimed were “set wild” by Jim Crow saw in the routine nothing more than a variant of the meke dancing indigenous to the islands. Japanese spectators might have projected upon the minstrel performance their own understandings derived from kabuki, given the overlap between theatrical forms that each contained masked actors, slapstick, and song. Due to the scant historical evidence regarding how indigenous viewers perceived sailor minstrels, we may be left with little other than one recent scholar’s scold that to reflexively condemn blackface’s message as racist is to oversimplify. Rather, in explaining the show’s appeal, he urges us not to underestimate the simple “universal human need [for] entertainment” (fig. 6).

 

It might be most fruitful to consider maritime minstrelsy within a much larger universe of performances exchanged between sailors and other peoples around the world. Often unable to speak one another’s languages, groups thrown into sudden contact relied upon song and dance routines as communicative devices. So it was that the same Fijians for whom Charles Erskine and his shipmates “jumped Jim Crow” in turn treated the sailors to a show. Once the guests were seated by their indigenous hosts, “A big muscular native … commenced beating … on the Fiji drum with a small war club [while an] orchestra consisting of a group of maidens began to play some on two joints of bamboo.” And as this was occurring, multiple men identified as chiefs, with “wreaths of natural flowers and vines twined around their turbans…[and] their faces painted in various styles, some wholly vermillion, some half vermillion the other half black,” began to sway in formation. Erskine found the accompanying music “anything but musical”—it “would fail to be appreciated by a Boston audience” his witticism went—but nevertheless thought the show on the whole enormously entertaining, and so with “a loud clapping of the hands … [thus] ended the matinee.” Sailors may have blackened their faces to “speak” with spectators abroad, but this behavior must be set alongside those same spectators coloring themselves “vermillion” (or any other number of colors) in an effort to reciprocate. No doubt the precise meaning of the Fijian “matinee” remained blunted by Erskine’s cultural tone-deafness. This was no different than the undoubtedly confused responses registered among indigenous onlookers witness to minstrel shows. Yet these mutual misunderstanding produced enough of a visual and aural spectacle to entertain each side of the encounter and thus sustain at least limited dialogue over the course of the ships’ visit.

And if what an audience actually absorbed from said entertainment was ambiguous, the motivations and intended message of mariner performers was no less so. The translated playbill distributed by Matthew Perry among Japanese spectators may have promised “songs and dances of plantation blacks of the South,” but this takes on added meaning when one considers the frequency with which white sailors compared their hard lot afloat to that of the slave’s ashore. Given the minstrel’s characteristic application of dark hues to white skin, it seems a delicious double-entendre that mariner Justin Martin, for example, thought it “might be better to be painted black and sold to a southern planter than be doomed to the forecastle of a whale ship.” Maritime minstrelsy, therefore, may have used slave imagery and melodies as part of a systematic critique of nautical life as “like slavery.” The comic display became a clever means to mask reproaches that officers would otherwise have termed “mutinous.”

The jury may remain out regarding the precise meaning of seafarers’ performative proclivities. But at the very least this was, as Bayard Taylor noted, a process with imperial implication. Remarking on Jim Crow’s growing global presence, the traveler declared that “Ethiopian melodies well deserve to be called, as they are in fact, the national airs of America,” seeing as they “follow the American race in all its emigrations, colonizations, and conquests, as certainly as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day.” Journalist J.K. Kennard likewise remarked that for all the time it took Britain to “encircle the world…’Jim Crow’ has put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.” The Boston Post agreed, proclaiming that “the two most popular characters in the world at the present time are Victoria and Jim Crow.” The global significance of an empire-building queen could only be compared to the imaginative empire already erected by American showmen. For while minstrelsy at home was a crucial platform for expansionist rhetoric, the performance of blackface overseas represented also a form of imperialism, a potential colonization of the indigenous mind. It preceded the arrival of significant numbers of African Americans into the wider world, planting the seeds of prejudice in the minds of the show’s curious onlookers, and corrupting the ability of black peoples to control their own global self-presentation. Historian Eric Lott argues that minstrelsy became a field for expropriation, wherein “black people were divested of control over elements of their culture and generally over their own cultural representation.” The same, it seems, was true of their international reputation. Jim Crow would now become a hurdle for African Americans to clear both at home and abroad.

The apparent avidity with which sailors struck up minstrel tunes abroad juxtaposes strangely with then-contemporary political economists celebrating commerce between nations as a cure for all varieties of chauvinism. John Warren’s oration on the subject, for example, lauded “the connections that may be formed by commercial intercourse” as “not only a source of wealth” but also “a reciprocity of kind offices [that] will expand and humanize the heart, soften the spirit of bigotry and superstition, and eradicate those rooted prejudices, that are the jaundice of the mind.” The ameliorative impact of economic interconnection would have been news indeed to white American seamen often engaged with the world on sharply different terms. For all that some people thought commerce a peaceful alternative to empire’s more brutal aspect, as a harbinger of tolerance and connection, it often brought peoples into contact who found such association offensive, and who used the occasion not to preach peace but instruct in intolerance.

Most observers, however, seemed to overlook the means by which minstrelsy made its appearance overseas. Traveling troupes no doubt played their part. But atop the ocean wave stood ready-made minstrel performers prepared to replicate the nation’s most popular form of entertainment for a diverse array of spectators. By blacking up around the globe, young American men brought the baggage of American history to bear upon peoples far removed from the nation’s shores. Minstrel shows were laden with the burden of the country’s past; racism, degradation, misappropriation, all hiding in plain sight between the notes of cheery melodies and plantation “airs.” And so, despite all that would be lost in translation when “Jim Crow” shuffled across the ship’s deck, it seems crucial that American sailors chose to demean black peoples at encounter’s inception, as though that was to be basis enough for future reciprocity. Those appeals, unfortunately, often worked, entangling populations the world over in a racial order Anglo-American in origin but global in implication.

Further Reading

A sampling of the work related to blackface minstrelsy would include William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana, Ill., 1999); W.T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge, 1997); and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993).

The most comprehensive account of the Perry expedition, offering both the American and Japanese perspectives, is Peter Booth Wiley, Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (New York, 1990).

There are several good studies of nineteenth-century American maritime history. They include Margaret Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830-1870 (New York, 1995); W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Paul Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia, 2004); and Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven, Conn., 2005).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

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Brian Rouleau is assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. He is completing a book on nineteenth-century intercultural encounters between American sailors and peoples overseas.

On July 8, 1797, Abraham Johnstone, a free black man born into slavery in Delaware, was executed in Woodbury, New Jersey, for the crime of murder. If you asked him, though, he was innocent. And if you were present at his execution or at his public address to Woodbury’s people of color on July 2, he would have told you so, whether or not you were wondering.

This untidy text, printed in Philadelphia in 1797 and titled The Address of Abraham Johnstone, a Black Man, Who Was Hanged at Woodbury, in the County of Glocester, and State of New Jersey, on Saturday the the [sic] 8th day of July Last; To the People of Colour. To Which is Added His Dying Confession or Declaration. Also, a Copy of a Letter to His Wife, Written the Day Previous to His Execution, is as much a valuable account of the shape of anti-blackness in Johnstone’s moment as it is a testament to Johnstone’s particular views, delusions, and shortcomings. Its untidiness stems in part from the fact that it is actually a compilation of three short documents: Johnstone’s address, advertised in the publisher’s preface as a “wholesome admonition, together with some general observations on the present situation of those of his colour”; his dying confession, in which he confesses almost nothing and instead names those who supplied false testimony against him; and, most curiously, a farewell letter to his wife, Sarah, written when she declined a final opportunity to visit him in jail.

Considered discretely, these documents take forms that will be recognizable to those who study the archives of the African diaspora in North America. Sentimental reformist oration, fugitive confession, and the personal epistle are all represented in this text. But the apposition of these genres, especially in light of Johnstone’s possibly wrongful conviction and turbulent private life, transforms each of them in revealing ways. In his address, for example, Johnstone advises his brethren to earn freedom and the provision of rights by adopting “a just, upright, sober, honest and diligently industrious, manner of life and purity of morals to improve that favourable disposition [toward blacks, among liberal whites], and if possible ripen it in to esteem for ye all.” With this admonition, Johnson insists upon an eighteenth-century version of what we might now recognize as a politics of respectability. Our understanding of his insistence cannot help but be warped, however, by an overwhelming sense, present in the dying confession, that a long record of such behavior did not protect Johnstone. His recollection of his movements in and out of slavery, fugitivity, employment, and precarity depict hard, steady work as both a necessary condition on his freedom and a practice that is, paradoxically, least accessible to him when he is a “free” laborer. Under the light of this contradiction, Johnstone’s proud memories of a life of hard work appear out of step with the allegations of perjury that follow them—allegations, interlaced with professions of forgiveness for those who testified against him, that feel heavy with anger, shame, and desperation.

Triangulated with this story of the law’s inequity, and with the address’s motivating phantasm of respectability, is the letter’s contribution: a glimpse at Johnstone’s troubled, and at times troubling, relationship with his wife. It might never be known why Sarah decided not to visit her husband before his execution, but the letter indicates that Johnstone had some idea. Loath to admit any culpability for the death of Tom, the “Guinea Negro” he was convicted of killing, Johnstone readily admits to and begs Sarah’s “pardon for all the transgressions I have committed […] against our marriage bed during the time we have been united.” Parallel with this admission, and indeed overwhelming it, are what amount to repeated postmortem efforts to control his wife’s body, in the form of exhortations to “shun and by all means avoid frolic[k]ing and all it’s [sic] attending evil concomitants.” Johnstone’s own adultery and his expression of what we now recognize as a sexist double standard certainly qualify his emphasis on moral respectability—a qualification that is already somewhat legible in his use of the gendered “brethren” to address his people. But how should this contradiction inform our understanding of his unjust treatment before the law? Or his self-presentation as a hard-working and, ultimately, sympathetic figure who earned his emancipation? Or, for that matter, his earnest sense that his earthly persecution resembled that of Christ, whose “life was taken away by false swearing (Alas! so is mine)”?

To move toward answering these questions about Abraham Johnstone would be to shed light on questions that have continued relevance in early American studies and in our political present—questions about the untidy and often contradictory historical entanglements of criminality, respectability, in/justice, sympathy, and freedom. Indeed, to engage critically with Johnstone’s contingent worldview, made visible by this text’s rich navigation of his public and private lives, is to begin taking seriously the story of a person whose lot was to live through, but never work through, such entanglements.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3 (Spring, 2017).

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Ajay Kumar Batra (@_ajaykb) is a PhD student in English at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on race, political economy, and life writing in the nineteenth-century U.S. and Circum-Caribbean, with a special emphasis on the literatures of the African diaspora.

The question of what might have transpired should the Confederacy have triumphed during the Civil War has been and remains one of the most common exercises in American historical fantasy. And, as director Kevin Willmott proves in this amusing and scathing “documentary,” the question endures for good reason.

Clearly inspired/frustrated by Ken Burns’s ubiquitous (and romanticized) PBS series The Civil War, Willmott sets himself an ambitious agenda—to claim slavery as the essential story of the Civil War, to mock the American fascination with historical documentary, and to remind the viewer that American racism has proved to be an enduring phenomenon. Little wonder, then, that the movie opens with a line from George Bernard Shaw: “If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.” To Willmott’s credit, the film is funny. Presented as a faux British documentary about the Confederate States of America deemed too “controversial” to show to the American public until now, the film presents the Confederacy as the victors of the Civil War and reimagines subsequent historical events in that light. There is also a loose plot about the influence of the fictional Virginia political dynasty of the Fauntroys, whose scions—John Ambrose Fauntroy I-V (no doubt a winking reference to Little Lord Fauntleroy)—are depicted as the arch-defenders of American slavery. But with the exception of the film’s conclusion, the plot operates as an afterthought to the chief purpose of the work, which is to explore the intertwined legacy of the Civil War, American racism, and the institution of slavery.

Targeting an audience well-versed in history, the movie’s main gag is to present many famil iar touchstones of American history and culture as if seen in a mirror. Instead of crushing defeat, the Confederacy, thanks to timely British and French intervention, routed the Union army at Gettysburg and forced Ulysses S. Grant to surrender to Robert E. Lee, thus preserving the institution of American slavery for all eternity. Although these recurring counterfactual jokes become repetitive and predictable, they are for the most part quite clever. Gone with the Wind is replaced by A Northern Wind; I Married a Communist becomes I Married an Abolitionist; and The Blue and the Gray naturally transposes to The Gray and Blue. Seeing “CSA” on the side of rockets launching into space and the Confederate battle flag planted on the moon does get silly. But there is valuable insight in these parodies, which reveal core truths about American history that often go unnoticed in popular culture. The most penetrating bit of inversion comes from the treatment of Abraham Lincoln, who replaces the downtrodden Davis as the symbol of ultimate defeat. According to the movie, following the Confederate capture of Washington, D.C., Lincoln fled toward Canada, disguised not as a woman but in blackface, only to be apprehended. The arrest becomes the keynote scene in D.W. Griffith’s 1915 classic movie, The Hunt for Dishonest Abe (replacing, of course, Birth of a Nation). Although eventually released from prison despite his conviction for war crimes, in bitter exile in Canada, where he died in 1905, Lincoln admits late in life that Union defeat was the result of his and the North’s using the issue of race as a cudgel against the South, but never being sincerely committed to true freedom for African Americans. How untrue is this statement in reality? The irony here is that the northern commitment to racial equality proved tenuous at best. This moment is satire in its highest form—pointing out that in the end the Union and Confederacy were both beholden to racist ideologies, and that they shared more in common than we often care to admit.

Not all the humor works as well as the section on Lincoln, as the momentum of the story drags during the creation of a “Tropical Empire” in South America, and with the retelling of the Confederacy’s strong relationship with Adolf Hitler. By the time the viewer arrives in the recent past, jokes about the Slave Shopping Network are likely to be shrugged off. Perhaps sensing this, Willmott wisely uses another tactic to keep the audience engaged. Interspersed throughout the film are commercial interludes for products ranging from Confederate Family Insurance to the drug Contrari—a pill to break the will of resistant slaves. While many of these advertisements are fictional, there are several actual products that were commonly sold in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. The point is clear—that the prevalence of American racism remains so powerful that the line between the absurd and the real can be difficult to perceive.

Although the film does effectively elicit laughs and outrage, its overall impact is less than the sum of its parts. The low-budget origins and look of the movie date the effort—although anyone familiar with documentaries might argue that this only enhances its credibility. And at almost an hour and a half it runs a bit long to be of use in most college classrooms, where ideas such as these could spark worthwhile discussion. But the biggest concern ironically derives from the strength of Willmott’s understanding of the nature of American racism as perhaps the central theme of all our history, North and South. Though his use of satire about the topic of slavery is often perceptive and sometimes funny, who will want to laugh alongside him? One suspects that the only people watching CSA are already in agreement. This is to say that a more nuanced presentation—one that acknowledges that in many ways, and at least for many years, the South did win the Civil War when it came to the subject of race, largely because racism was never a purely southern phenomenon—would make for a more enduring film. Though the racial consequences of the Union’s victory were long in coming, given the persistence of institutional racism throughout Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and the continuing struggle for racial equality, the less believable satire of the second half of the movie reveals that the momentous first steps of these effects would be impossible without—and irreversible with—the Union’s victory. As a clever novelty act, CSA is a success, but it turns out that there are limitations to any genre, whether parody or documentary, and that no matter how enticing historical fantasy may be, it rarely matches our appetite, and our need, for the real thing.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 13.4.5 (September, 2013).

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Benjamin Cloyd is an instructor of history and the Honors Program director at Hinds Community College in Raymond, Mississippi. He is the author of Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (2010).

By age twelve, Anna Green Winslow knew what it meant to suffer for beauty. The year was 1772, the place Boston. In April, Winslow expressed in her diary an appetite for the “tasty head Dress” she spied on a fashion doll, reproduced from a recent London print. One month later, she had her own head dressed in a similar fashion. The “famous roll” she wore was composed of “red cow tail, horsehair, and a little human hair . . . all carded together and twisted up.” She noted with delight that, with the “roll” perched atop her young head, she measured a full inch longer from the roots of her hair up to the tip of the style than from her forehead down to her chin. But Winslow’s pleasure at her appearance was tempered by the fact that the style made her head “itch and ach and burn like anything.” No wonder–such rolls often weighed almost a pound. Adding insult to injury, one of her disapproving aunts said the roll ought to be made smaller, while the other drolly rejoined that it “ought not to be made at all.” To appease them (for she often read her journal entries aloud) Winslow penned the following, which reads like a maxim plucked directly from a conduct manual: “Nothing renders a young person more amiable than virtue and modesty without the help of fals hair, red cow tail or D____ (the barber).”

The tugs of filial duty and fashionability, Winslow found, were powerful and often contradictory. Such was the tension between high fashion and feminine propriety in the eighteenth century, between expressions of status dependent on the mode and its proponents, and those based on inherent “taste.” The hairstyle Winslow donned had not yet reached its height; in fact, the high roll was just beginning its ascent. Chronicling the rise and fall of the fashion takes us from the courts of France to the printshops of London and finally to the streets of Philadelphia in 1778, where all that the high roll represented in a new nation at war with an old empire was brought quite literally to a head.

“Fashionable” hairstyles for women began their vertical climb in the late 1760s, and with them rose the ire of social critics. Editorials appearing in London periodicals immediately decried the large headdresses that English ladies were all too eager to copy from their French counterparts. Yet other printed essays and treatises described in detail the latest hair fashions from France and how to achieve them with the assistance of a hairdresser, or friseur. These instructions, coupled with the presence of hairdressers hailing from England and France, helped speed the spread of the high roll to colonial cities. Like most styles in fashion in England, the high roll was quickly adopted by elite women in the colonies.

The outcry against it proved equally swift and sharp. In 1767 the author of a letter to the editor of the New York Journal bemoaned the fashion that led women to double the size of their heads with the use of pomatum, artificial pads, and hair procured from corpses. But most distressing of all, the writer claimed, the “frizzled” style resembled the “shock head of a Negro.” The insult was twofold, for the so-described “shock head”–the combing and bunching of hair high over the forehead–was a style worn by African American men, free and enslaved. Not only did the writer deploy a racial category to mock women’s appearance, he also questioned the femininity of those who chose to sport the new fashion.

Despite such searing criticism, into the 1770s the roll grew in popularity as well as height among colonial women who considered themselves fashionable but also tasteful. Philadelphia belle Sarah Eve, educated and genteel, wore her hair high, complaining in 1772 that the social kissing practiced by Edward Shippen “disorders one’s high Roll.” It took some time for a hairdresser to create such a style, so having it “disordered” was of no small inconvenience. Women might have their heads labored over for hours on end. The amount of time involved in achieving the elaborate look meant that wearing a high roll signified high social status in two ways: not only did it replicate a style worn at court and by female members of the beau monde in England, but a woman needed plenty of spare time in order to have it constructed. The image of the big-haired, consumer woman of leisure, sitting for hours in the service of her own vanity, flew in the face of an ideal that featured the modest, domestic, and productive colonial woman virtuously spinning cloth to support recently ended boycotts of English goods.

Furthermore, obtaining a high roll required women to spend time more or less alone with hairdressers, men often of European origin and questionable lineage. Charges of unbridled appetite and inappropriate sexual encounters with their coiffeurs served as another means of discrediting women who sported high rolls. Underlying this preoccupation were anxieties over relationships between men and women of different social ranks, and potential dependency of women with means on men without. It was the strange fate of hairdressers and other purveyors of fashion to produce markers of high status within a social hierarchy that assigned them low rank. Yet these men nevertheless claimed more than a little power and authority. In 1776 the Lady’s Magazine lamented that “powdered and embroidered” hairdressers could be seen stepping in and out of coaches all over London. One peruke maker from New York attracted female clients with promises of performing the “true method of making the deservedly celebrated hollow toupees or tates,” which he claimed were “held in such high estimation that few ladies would choose to be without them.” Every woman would wear one if she could afford to do so, the notice implied. The advertisement at once legitimated the style itself (“deservedly celebrated”) and questioned the taste–and the financial wherewithal–of those who did not don it.

Bolstered by such come-ons to counter the moralizing naysayers, the high roll persisted, as hair fashions became even larger and more fantastical with the ascension of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the French throne in 1774. The queen added plumes to her already high head, a fashion imitated in England and the colonies. Incorporation of feathers caused the “towers” to reach over two feet in height. Although that same year the newly formed Continental Congress passed a resolution against extravagant attire, mourning dress in particular, proscribing a feminine hairstyle would have invested it with far too much power, elevating the high roll from the status of “frivolous” fashion to that of political problem. Lampooning and satire, then, remained the chief weapons marshaled to defeat the style in the court of public opinion. A poem in the Pennsylvania Evening Post in June of 1775 mocked the “preposterous fashion of the ladies wearing high plumes of feathers in their heads.” The problem, according to the piece, was that plumes too closely resembled military headdresses, and therefore “martializ’d,”–read, masculinized–the women who wore them.

This was not the first time gender-bending heads had come under attack. Generally, the trend in men’s hair from the 1760s was toward a more “natural” look, while women’s headdresses were noticeably artificial. However, one widely satirized element of the male “macaroni” fashion of the early 1770s was a large wig that supported a comparatively tiny cap. The style resembled women’s headdresses also in vogue, and macaronis were constantly castigated as effeminate. Whether macaroni wigs or women’s plumes, any fashion that disrupted increasingly fixed understandings of “masculine” and “feminine” was suspect. The Lady’s Magazine called the wearing of false hair “inconsistent with that delicacy which is, or ought to be, characteristic of the fair sex,” and recommended that women set “an example of modesty and virtue to their inferiors, rather than a towering head.” Prescriptive literature urged the avoidance of extremes in appearance as well as behavior for men and women alike. Balance and restraint had become elements of good taste that signified membership among the virtuous “middling sort.”

Yet the same Lady’s Magazine that condemned extreme versions of the high roll included in July of 1777 a plate of the “last new Ladies head-dress a la Zodiaque,” which contained replicas of the moon, stars, and all twelve astrological signs. The illustration was not a lampoon. The accompanying text read, “[W]e are glad to have it in our power to furnish our readers with the . . . newest head dresses.” A variety of ornaments decorated women’s heads in the mid-1770s, rendering high rolls all the more extravagant. One “lady of fashion” reported to the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1776 that some hairstyles spotted in London reached over a yard in height, including lengths of colored gauze, feathers, and, to top it all off, an entire artificial salad complete with carrots and radishes. Yet another high roll was bedecked with a miniature sow and six suckling pigs. It seems unlikely that many women actually wore replicas of animals and vegetables in their hair. What is more probable is that some editors mockingly featured these extreme examples in order to counter fashion periodicals and shame women into rejecting the style altogether.

 

The “stuff” that cropped up in women’s headdresses found satiric expression during the early stages of the American Revolution. Soon after war broke out, London printshops retaliated, employing images of the high roll in order to mock upstart colonials. Prints such as Bunker’s Hill, or America’s Head Dress, show British troops trudging up the side of a high roll toward their stronghold opposite the American army’s “hill.” The image likened the colonial cause and military effort to the elaborate hairstyle: hollow, artificial, and short-lived. Another print entitled Miss Carolina Sullivan, one of the obstinate daughters of America, depicts an unattractive woman sporting a towering head of hair replete with tents, flags, cannons, and even a replica of a hanged man, mocking Americans’ ridiculous pretensions of refinement as well as independence. Such prints altered and yet extended European images of the feathered Indian maiden that allegorically represented a feminized, dependent America. Yet they also took aim at the hairstyle itself–and at its English devotees. Did English women wish to look like the absurd, provincial Carolina Sullivan?

 

On the American side of the Atlantic, supporters of the patriot cause and “Tory” women alike found uses for the high roll. In 1777, after two hard-fought battles, British General William Howe’s army captured Philadelphia, and would occupy the city for eight months. It was a time of want–high prices for food, fuel, and goods–and of deep patriot dismay over the fallen city and the uncertain loyalties of its Quaker residents. In the midst of the occupation, an engraving entitled The Wishing Females suggested what at least some American men feared and loathed–that high status women of Philadelphia directed romantic interest toward and threw social weight behind the occupying army. The image depicts two women in high rolls gazing longingly out their parlor window at British officers and regulars. One smiles knowingly as she peers through a looking glass, closely inspecting the troops in the field. The other dreamily contemplates the men, chin on hand. They appear to be sexual predators, ready to leap from the interior, domestic space to cavort lasciviously in the external realm of military men.

 

Patriot suspicions of “alliances” between Philadelphia ladies and British soldiers were further confirmed by the Meschianza, an elaborate fete staged in May of 1778 to honor the departing British army. Many “belles” participated, each attended by a British officer or “knight” who competed in medieval-style jousting tournaments in her honor and for her affection. Hannah Griffitts poetically cast the Meschianza as a “shameful scene of dissipation, the Death of sense and reputation,” regretting that “ladies joined the frantic show.” Major John André orchestrated much of the event, down to circulating a sketch of how he wanted the women’s hair and dress to appear. It seemed to some that Philadelphia’s ladies were taking fashion advice from a British officer, molding their very persons to his desires and specifications. Josiah Bartlett, delegate to the Continental Congress from New Hampshire, supported this opinion, as well as the message of The Wishing Females, in a letter to his wife composed in the summer of 1778. He wrote that when Congress arrived back in Philadelphia, “they found the Tory ladies who tarried with the Regulars wearing the most enormous high head Dresses after the manner of the Mistresses and Whores of the British officers.”

When high-haired women dared to appear in public on July 4, 1778, Independence Day, the high roll took on a starring role in street theater against the backdrop of a city rife with social and political tension. Although descriptions of the incident vary slightly from account to account, the discrepancies help to demonstrate the episode’s import. In the words of Josiah Bartlett, “some Gentlemen purchased the most Extravagant high head dress that could be got and Dressed an old Negro Wench with it.” The woman was then “paraded around the city by the mob,” making “a shocking appearance to the no small mortification of the Tories and Diversion of the other citizens.” Delegate Samuel Holton, however, supposed the woman to be a “strumpet,” employing a sexual epithet but no racial designation. Thomas Bradford, some fifty years later, remembered the figure not as a woman at all, but a man–adding yet another layer to this world-turned-upside-down. In terms of the performance’s intended messages, all recollections could be considered symbolically correct. At the expense of a single victim, the episode mocked all women who wore high rolls, casting them as politically disloyal, black, unchaste, masculine, and of low status, completely inverting the wealth and feminine beauty that women who wore high rolls felt the style signified. Yet it was also designed to humiliate loyalist men by attacking the characters of women associated with them. According to Bartlett, “gentlemen” who could afford to purchase such a headdress perpetrated the incident, matching the extravagant and effete display of the Meschianza with their own rough and ribald show. In doing so, they proclaimed that dependence on the vagaries of feminine, Old World fashion and luxury would not be allowed to undermine what they hoped was an enduring American project.

People are often inclined to mock and regard as abhorrent what feels dangerously similar or close, producing difference and distance through satire. For the “gentlemen” who initiated the Independence Day scene, high-rolled women embodied anxieties about their own vanity, dependence, and the ways in which hierarchies of status and gender would operate in a country untethered from its colonial moorings, and in a colony suddenly become a masculinely democratic state. A coda to the apparently final movement in the high roll symphony reveals that the style did not die an unnatural death at the hands of a Philadelphia mob. One year later a series of editorials in the U.S. Magazine debated the propriety and attractiveness of women’s headdresses, and in 1781 visiting French minister Abbé Robin noted the outréhigh hair worn by the American women he met.

Today as in the eighteenth century, big hair still carries a certain charge, whether Angela Davis’s Afro or Ivana Trump’s blond helmet. If you doubt that ideas about gender, class, and politics can be sprayed atop a female head, remember the film Working Girl, in which the protagonist lops off her teased Staten Island locks with the declaration, “If you want to be taken seriously, you need serious hair.” People adorn themselves to meet the approval of particular audiences, wearing styles that other viewers may not appreciate, might even mock or reprove. While today’s fashionistas and mesclun-crunching Bobos may disdain big hair, plenty of women continue to wear it, secure in their own taste. Yet for every modern-day Anna Green Winslow pleased with her appearance, there exists a stern aunt or angry crowd poised to attack the very symbols of that pride. The meanings of hairstyles are as myriad and mutable as the identities of individuals who don and gaze upon them, giving fashion an internal logic in the truest sense.

 

Further Reading:

Primary material for this essay was taken from Alice Morse Earle, ed., Diary of Anna Green Winslow, A Boston School Girl of 1771; Eva Eve Jones, ed., “Extracts from the Journal of Miss Sarah Eve,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 5 (1881) 19-36; John Fanning Watson’s scrapbook, compiled in 1823 as he researched Annals of Philadelphia, and bound issues of the Lady’s Magazine, which began publication in London in 1770, all in the collections of the Library Company of Philadelphia; the New York Gazette and the Pennsylvania Gazette; and Letters of the Delegates to the Continental Congress, Library of Congress CD ROM edition.

The introduction to Ingrid Banks’s Hair Matters: Beauty, Power and Black Women’s Consciousness (New York, 2000), a sociological study of the politics of women’s hair in African American communities, deftly reviews international scholarship and theories on hair and hairstyles from Sigmund Freud’s 1922 essay “Medusa’s Hair” to Off With Her Head: The Denial of Women’s Identity in Myth, Religion and Culture, Howard Eilberg Schwartz and Wendy Doniger, eds., (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). Grant McCracken’s Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self (Toronto, 1995) is a lively riff on the power of hair in the late twentieth century. Descriptions of French and British women’s hairstyles in the 1770s are most easily found in histories of eighteenth-century costume, notably Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715-1789 (New York, 1984) and Dress and Morality (New York, 1986), both by Aileen Ribeiro, as well as Madeleine Delpierre’s, Dress in France in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1997). Catherine Howey’s unpublished paper “Feats of Man or Freaks of Nature? or; Hairstyles for Women in the 1770s,” reviews the sentiments of English social critics and fashionable women in debates over high hair.

Among a wealth of fine scholarship that considers the intersection of gender, status, fashion, and consumption in eighteenth-century England see Erin Mackie, Market á la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore, 1997); Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley, 1996); Amanda Vickery, “Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and Her Possessions, 1751-81” in Consumption and the World of Goods, John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., (London, 1993); and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992). Charlotte Sussman’s Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833 (Stanford, Calif., 2000) adds a focus on the rhetoric of race and the consequences of colonialism. For a discussion of hairdressers that has shaped my interpretation see Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, 1998).

Karin Calvert’s essay “The Function of Fashion in the Eighteenth Century” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, Cary Carson, et al, eds. (Charlottesville, Va., 1994) supplies an important analysis of the role of fashion in expressions of social status in early American society, while David S. Shields’s Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997) assesses the place of gender in the construction a polite and fashionable beau monde. For descriptions of African American hairstyles of the period see Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” The Journal of Southern History 61 (1995): 45-76. John Fanning Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1830) contains early nineteenth-century recollections of men’s and women’s Revolutionary-era hairstyles and attire, as well as an account of the Meschianza.

On the cultural significance and politicization of goods and their consumption during the period of the American Revolution, see T.H. Breen, “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century” also in Of Consuming Interests, and Barbara Clark Smith, “Social Visions of the American Resistance Movement” in The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds. (Charlottesville, Va., 1996). For the role of white women in colonial boycotts of British imports see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980) and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston, 1980). Karin A. Wulf’s introduction to Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, Catherine LaCourreye Blecki and Karin A. Wulf, eds. (University Park, Pa., 1997) provides a good description of Philadelphia society during the war years, particularly while occupied by the British army.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.1 (October, 2001).

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Kate Haulman is a doctoral candidate in history at Cornell University, where she is completing a dissertation on the politics of fashion in eighteenth-century Philadelphia and New York City.