Conference Abstracts

 

 

Friday, October 30

 

Running Away, Seeking Refuge: Enslaved People’s Movement Under Inspection (11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EST)

James McKay (University of Edinburgh) – “Gone towards Carolina”: Refugees from Slavery in Occupied Charleston, 1780-1782

This paper explores the movement of refugees from slavery in the Southern lowcountry between 1778-1782. It assesseshow freedom-seeking people created possibilities for their self- emancipation during the British occupation of Savannah (1778-1782) and Charleston (1780- 1782). It aims to situate refugees’ flight within a broader history of resistance, whereby enslaved people contested enslavers’ conceptions of space and mobility.

The chaos experienced across the lowcountry created opportunities for refugees to seek their freedom. Self-emancipated people transformed the meaning of the landscapes, at once familiar and fluctuating, that they traversed. Enslavers fearedrefugees finding sanctuary within these urban settings, where they might gain a precious, precarious freedom. However,freedom- seeking people navigated a terrain in which British forces attempted to exploit their labor and regulate orrestrict their movement. As a result, not all refugees fled toward the occupied cities. The paper endeavors to recognize the scope and diversity of Black refugees’ wartime movements in the Southern lowcountry.

This paper forms part of my work for my doctoral dissertation, which traces the movement, both voluntary and involuntary, of enslaved and self-emancipated people during the Revolutionary War. My chapters explore refugees’experiences in the South following Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775-1776), with Lord Cornwallis on his march toYorktown (1780- 1781), and in occupied Savannah (1778-1782), Charleston (1780-1782), and New York City (1776-1783). My project highlight refugees’ experiences of siege, occupation, moving with the British army, and evacuation. By foregrounding movement, I assess how refugees navigated sites of sanctuary and sites of containment. I also explore how refugees struggled for survival through a war that coincided with a hemispheric smallpox epidemic.

My work engages with recent scholarship that has argued that refugees from slavery carved out sites of what Damian Alan Pargas described as ‘‘formal, semiformal, and informal freedom.’’ Freedom-seeking people created places of refuge for themselves in the midst of a war within a war. At the same time, they drew on well-trodden pathways, by land and water, to seek their freedom. My work has been profoundly influenced by scholars such Stephanie M. H. Camp and Anthony E. Kaye whose concepts of a ‘‘rival geography’’ and ‘‘slave neighborhoods,’’ respectively, have transformed my project.

This project is in conversation with scholarship which has foregrounded the Black refugee experience in conflicts throughout United States history, especially the Civil War. My dissertation uses a variety of sources to reconstruct these histories, including the testimony of refugees, enslavers’ documents, fugitive slave advertisements, newspapers, Patriotand British military documents, British colonial archives, the records of state legislatures, and the Continental Congress’s debates and correspondence. Inspired by the work of historians of slavery and other refugee crises, I aim to make visible the Black refugee experience by interrogating the archives’ silences.

 

Evan Turiano (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – Fugitive Slaves, Legal Rights, and the First Abolition

The legal history of fugitive slaves in the United States, in one sense, began in 1787. The Northwest Ordinance’s fugitive slave clause provided the foundation of the Constitution’s, which became the basis of interstate law on the rights of accused fugitive slaves and supposed slaveholders. The first national legislation on fugitive slaves, enacted in 1793, built off of the Constitution. Slaveholders gained rights from the Constitution and the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law. If one begins in 1787, that is the whole story. A longer view, however, reveals that 1787 and 1793 were already shrouded in legal and political conflicts over the rights of Black people and the future of slavery, conflicts which limited the proslavery impact of those settlements.

The long fight over the legal rights of African Americans accused of escaping slavery began with the collision of two legal trends. First was the proslavery impulse to sequester Black people away from the traditional levers of legal justice in order to secure a coherent property right over them. This move is evident in colonial American slave law. The second, countervailing trend was the fight for the freedom and rights of Black people through access to those same levers of justice. The Somerset case put the antislavery potential of Black courtroom rights into the public square, and they quickly became a preferred tool of the nascent abolitionist movement.

Both of these trends fueled the American Revolution and the changes to American slavery that followed. As Manisha Sinha, Sarah Gronningsater, and Paul Polgar have recently shown, antislavery advocates in the Northern states worked toward abolition on the premise of refitting the “freedom-making potential of legal rights” argument demonstrated in Somerset. Southern states, in response, passed laws limiting the freedom and movement of Black people and streamlining re-enslavement. That divergence animated Southerners in the summer of 1787, but the protections they ended up with, as Matthew Pinsker has recently shown, left room for Northern states to assert the legal rights of African Americans. These state protections, the “first wave” of American personal liberty laws, came on the heels of Black petitioning and led abolitionist societies like the PAS and the NYMS to reorient their work toward securing counsel for accused fugitives.

All of this—a new antislavery legal project colliding with a rapidly consolidating southern slave law, papered over weakly by the Constitution—set up the fight over the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law. In the House, southerners rolled out a bill that demonstrated the proslavery agenda on fugitive slaves: northern officials would be required to participate in renditions and the burden of proof would be slim and nebulous. Their bill never made it to a vote. The Senate then produced a bill that offered, in the context of the debates that preceded it, significant protections of Black legal rights. Their bill, which became the 1793 law, required rendition proceedings in northern courts and limited the self-enforcing right of recaption claimed by slaveholders. Abolitionists mostly reacted to the new law with suspicion, and historians have followed. The proslavery utility of the law, after all, is clear. But the antislavery fight for the courtroom rights of accused fugitive slaves was not extinguished in 1793; rather, it made a mark on federal legislation and secured a venue for the escalating that fight in the coming decades.

 

Anna O. Law (CUNY Brooklyn College) – The Migration and Importation Clause’s Scope: Defining the Freedom of Movement at the Founding

In the US Constitution of 1787, slavery created a very distinctive American federalism in which the institution circumscribed the assigning of authority and power between the national government and its subnational units. This paper analyzes how concessions to slavery achieved via strategic omissions in the text of the 1787 Constitution had political effects of their own. The House floor debates about the Alien Friends Act of 1798 provide insight into the ways that eighteenth-century politics interacted with the ambiguous text and structure of the Constitution and how these assigned which level of government should retain control over deportation, an arrangement that lasted until the late nineteenth century.

Passed on June 25, 1798 and designed to sunset in December 1799, the act gave the President the power to deport any alien based on mere suspicion and “without hearing or evidence” if the President believed the alien to be dangerous to the United States and its government. But the Federalists were concerned not so much about alien enemies as about alien friends’, specifically the Irish, in domestic party politics. Federalists considered the Alien Enemies Act limited because it would not activate until either the United States declared war or another nation declared war on the United States. The Federalists crafted the Alien Friends Act, which would give the President power to imprison and remove all aliens, even in peacetime.

Democratic-Republicans attacked the Alien Friends Act on federalism grounds asserting the it unconstitutionally enlarged presidential power over aliens. Discussion of constitutionality of the Alien Friends Act lasted only two days, June 20-21, 1798, during which legislators examined a range of possibly relevant clauses in the Constitution. Robert Goodloe Harper (Federalist-MD) remarked that both the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists treated the Constitution as “a rich field into which all parties sent their troops to forage.” That anyone had to “forage” for textual support on the question of whether migration controls were assigned to the national government, the states and localities, or both; instead of pointing to an obvious constitutional authorization, is an indication of the contested basis of federal migration controls.

Absent clear constitutional text to support a presidential deportation power, the floor debates over the Alien Friends Act centered on the ambiguity of the migration and importation clause. Everyone knew it pertained to slavery, but did it also affect voluntary European migrants? The Federalists exploited the indeterminacy of the scope of that clause to fan concern in southern states that a presidential power to deport also meant that the national government could deport slaves, and planted concern in northeastern states about the federal government’s ability to ban or restrict free European migration. Gallatin galvanized the northeast migration- receiving states when he suggested that a presidential power to deport aliens would disproportionately affect them. The bill passed handily in the Senate with the Federalist advantage in the chamber, but it was much closer in the House. The vote reflected a sectional split, explained in part, by the unease over the migration and importation clause.

 

 

Oceans Away and the Town Down the Road: Movement and Trade in the Wider Atlantic World (1:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. EST) 

Yiyun Huang (The University of Tennessee, Knoxville) – John Adams and China: Globalizing Early America

In the 1750s and 60s, John Adams was an avid tea lover who often drank this hot beverage with friends or family members. He especially appreciated the medical benefits associated with tea. In a 1757 diary entry, he wrote that he suffered from heartburn nearly every afternoon and “nothing but large potions of tea” could extinguish it. How did Adams know that Chinese tea cured heartburn? Why did he believe that nothing else was as effective? My research examines the ways medical ideas associated with tea transferred across the world during the eighteenth century.

John Adams and other colonial intellectuals like him could take advantage of a vibrant global exchange of printed texts. College libraries, bookstores, and colonial library companies contributed to the dispersion of Chinese knowledge in North America. They provided Adams with access to three bodies of knowledge about Chinese tea’s medicinal properties. First, he could access Jesuit texts such as the one compiled by Jean Baptiste Du Halde. This work included a lengthy section about tea’s physiological effects and tea-based recipes. This section was translated from Chinese physician Li Shizhen’s elaborate description of tea’s medicinal properties and practical usages.

Adams would also learn about tea’s health benefits through general medical texts which were popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Written by such prominent physicians as Thomas Sydenham and George Cheyne, these texts illustrated tea’s health benefits and the diseases it could alleviate. Cheyne elaborated on the different medicinal properties related to Bohea and green teas. He referenced the accounts of European who had traveled to the East Indies, such as the Scottish naturalist James Cuninghame.

Additionally, Adams would have consulted tea treatises written by British or continental European authors who sought to situate Chinese ideas of tea’s medicinal properties in a Galenic theoretical framework. Stay-at-home physicians such as Thomas Short conducted experimentations to ascertain if tea really had the health benefits as claimed by the European travelers who had first-hand experience with tea. Some of these armchair scholars confirmed that tea did have medicinal effects. Others contended that tea was detrimental to the Europeans because they had different constitutions. Together, these sources of information broadened Adams’ world.  

 

Tim Betz (Lehigh University) – “We Demand Flamingos”: Contextualizing Collecting in the Spanish Empire

In 1776, Pedro Franco Dávila, a naturalist and the first curator of the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural, oversaw the publication of an edict from the Crown. The law dictated that anyone living within the Spanish Empire should send curious animal, vegetal, mineral, and anthropological materials from their territories to Madrid for housing in the new Royal Cabinet. On its face, the law was both a guide for collection and a statement that the world was the Crown’s to collect and display.

The Real Gabinete and its contents were a visual manifestation of the power of the monarch, Charles III, and of the Spanish Crown. In founding the Royal Cabinet, the monarch established himself as the rightful ruler over his empire as part of a long history of imperial control through display that had begun with the Reconquista. Likewise, Franco Dávila, who donated his personal collection to form the backbone of the Real Gabinete, used the edict and the Cabinet as a springboard to power. Like many Creole naturalists who were his contemporaries, Franco Dávila used science and the Enlightenment as a tool for self-fashioning to enter the upper echelons of power and influence. This presentation, then, explores the ways in which the monarchy and the Cabinet’s first director used the materials that had come from throughout the Spanish Empire as a tool for the establishment of power, both personal and imperial.

 

Katie Labor (University of Maryland – College Park) – Private Homes, Publick Houses: Travelers and Domestic Privacy in 18th Century America

My presentation is based on my chapter in progress for my dissertation, which looks at domestic privacy and travelers over the long eighteenth century. In this chapter, I look at what delineates a private home from a ‘publick house’; a place specifically designated for the hosting of travelers and other strangers. Drawing from over a hundred traveler accounts, what I have discovered is that for both homeowners and travelers, the boundary between domestic privacy and public housing was often blurred or even non-existent, especially in the Backcountry and other rural areas in the colonies. As this is still very much a work in progress, feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

Islands of Creations: The Caribbean In Early America (3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. EST)

Nicholas Crawford (Washington University in St. Louis) – Petitioning Slavery: Legal Marronage in the British Caribbean, 1816-1823

Historians of British Caribbean slavery have generally dismissed the significance of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial “amelioration” laws promising protections and benefits for enslaved people such as adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Rather, historians have carefully reconstructed the ways in which enslaved people informally negotiated and fought with masters over customary rights and obligations such as increased ration allowances and time for subsistence cultivation from the beginning of the period of slavery in Jamaica and other British possessions. While several recent studies have examined slaves’ petitioning before legal officials in a handful of British-controlled colonies with pre-existing foreign legal regimes, historians have tended to locate the political activism of slaves in Britain’s Caribbean colonies along a spectrum of everyday and extraordinary acts of resistance ranging from work stoppages to large-scale armed rebellions.

Acts of resistance large and small certainly merit our attention; in many cases, runaways, revolts, and “conspiracy scares” provide some of our only glimpses into the fragmentary lives of enslaved actors in the colonial archive.  Yet reading the more prosaic and mundane correspondence of colonial governors and other authorities can reveal instances of everyday opposition to the material conditions of enslavement that made its way into the official record. This chapter explores enslaved legal activism over provisioning before a variety of legal and Crown authorities in Dominica and Grenada—illuminating slaves’ struggles against the slaveholders, managers, drivers, and doctors who drove the coercion of famished gangs. Enslaved people’s legal activism challenged planters’ authority in the form of what could be termed legal marronage—a range of practices centered on running away from plantations and toward local officials for the purpose of lodging official complaints of mistreatment. Yet, colonial legal systems severely circumscribed the ability of enslaved petitioners to achieve favorable outcomes through the enactment of formal legal protest. Legal authorities and governors placed high demands on the enslaved in terms of burden-of-proof for malnourishment, inadequate rationing, and other forms of mistreatment. Further, slaves had to be careful in how they lodged complaints with officials: those that were deemed were groundless could be met with corporal punishment—or, by ordering that complainants back to their estates, where they could expect private punishment for seeking public redress.

Moreover, instances of legal activism on the part of the enslaved had a much greater impact in the aggregate than historians have noticed. Enslaved people’s protests laid the foundation for the metropolitan oversight of colonial legal systems that was launched initially with Parliament’s 1823 resolutions on “amelioration” and gradual emancipation. From Dominica to Grenada and other colonies large and small, enslaved people rendered colonial legal systems into legible channels of imperial reform through the enactment of formal petitions before local officials and through informal acts of protest on estates—even in the face of extreme personal risk.

 

Geneva Smith (Princeton University) – Accounting for Slave Courts

This talk presents my initial findings from research work in Jamaica earlier this year. The broader article asks: how does our understanding of eighteenth-century Jamaican society change when we account for slave courts? Analyzing vestry accounts as slave court records shows this jurisdiction’s strict adherence to procedure, revealing these courts as sites not merely for the haphazard punishment of enslaved peoples but for the careful regulation of private property. If the state was to intervene in the master-slave relationship, it had to be procedurally sound and legitimated through English courts. Compensation, and the colonial state’s involvement in financing slave courts, helped link fungibility with race, reinforce master’s property rights, and shaped how maroons and free people of color framed their demands for rights upon colonial assemblies. This paper intentionally grounds itself in local sources, making it the first to integrate all of Jamaica’s remaining eighteenth century slave court records and treat them as a serious object of study. My engagement with Jamaica as an archive as well as a geographic space shows how slave court procedures reflected many of the social tensions and trends identified by historians of slavery and the archival possibilities when one moves away from London and towards Spanish Town. 

 

Kimberly Takahata (Columbia University) – Indigenous Refusal and Natural History in Suriname

This paper asks how we can detect and center Indigenous life in our approach to settler natural histories in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. As a way of answering this question, I will analyze John Gabriel Stedman’s 1796 Narrative of five years’ expedition against the revolted negroes of Surinam, a sprawling and widely popular text by a newly-appointed captain with the Dutch military tasked with commanding a brigade against Afro-Caribbean maroons. Written by an author concerned with his contribution to natural history and at a moment when the genre was completing its consolidation in methods and citations, Stedman’s Narrative provides a productive opportunity to question the conditions of observation and recording that form the basis of the genre at large. I will examine two moments in the text. The first is Stedman’s initial description of the Indigenous communities of the region, whose arrival at Paramaribo affords Stedman the chance to conclude the first book of his narrative with a general description of their appearance and customs. However, I argue that rather than demonstrating Stedman’s ability as a novel natural historian, this moment reveals the limits of Stedman’s knowledge, as much of his description is copied from other sources and elides real Indigenous persons with depictions from Europeans who never set foot in the region. Yet this seeming failure opens an analytic possibility in which Indigenous persons refuse to acquiesce to the settler gaze. Turning to a second moment from Narrative where Stedman grapples with the death of an officer and includes a rare footnote to manage the shock of discovering the man’s remains, I track such refusal formally through the manuscript and published edition of the text. While Stedman considers the possibility of Indigenous and maroon attacks, his ultimate failure to say for sure indicates the limits of his abilities. However, I also argue that this non-answer opens the possibilities of Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean life—Stedman’s silence does not and cannot limit how they move through the region and, quite simply, live their lives. Rather than centering Indigenous life through legibility and stability, I understand these gaps and silences as continuing to shape texts of the long eighteenth century, in which the anxiety about what he does not know structures Stedman’s Narrative as much as what he does include. Contextualizing this text within a network of trial testimonies, maps, and reports, I show how Indigenous life determines the form of settler texts by their absence as much as by their presence, prompting us to read anew the interactions between communities of the eighteenth-century Caribbean.

 

Elise A. Mitchell (New York University) – Freedom in the Flesh: Smallpox Inoculation and Embodied Kinship in the Atlantic World

Historians have long acknowledged that enslaved West Africans brought their inoculation practices to the Americas and informed Europeans about their practices. The existing historiography has tended to focus on documenting evidence of West Africans’ familiarity with inoculation and analyzing Europeans’ perceptions of West African medical knowledge. This paper pursues a different set of questions by examining the social and cultural significance of smallpox inoculation people of African descent in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. In conversation with historians of African Atlantic medicine and Atlantic slavery and kinship, this paper will discuss how Afro-descended men and women pursued inoculations for themselves and their children, contested European medical practitioners, and articulated gendered notions of embodied kinship. Enslaved and free people of West African descent sought the freedom to choose how, when, and by whom they and their children were inoculated, with the hope that inoculation would free them from the physical, psychological, and spiritual perils of smallpox.

 

Saturday, October 31

 

Building Values and Ideals: Culture in the Early Americas (11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST)

Lindsay Keiter (Penn State Altoona) – “From the ‘Matrimonial Lottery’ to the ‘Marriage Market’”

This paper analyzes the widespread comparison of marriage to a lottery in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century newspapers. While social historians persuasively demonstrate that ideals of marriage become more companionate and romantic in this period, legal historians document the continued subordination of women via coverture, whereby husbands assumed control over his bride’s property upon marriage. Fiction generally punished avarice in courtship while resolving this tension in the protagonist’s favor. Advice writers assured readers that they could exert control over their fate through the right choice of mate. Looking at newspaper articles reveals that Americans recognized the limitations of these messages. The idea of marriage as a lottery – a chance for gain controlled by fate – reflects doubts about the ability of most people to achieve the ideal.

I argue that the concept of the matrimonial lottery reflects these doubts in two ways. First, satirical lottery proposals and other items reinforced the centrality of money to marriage, either by emphasizing the financial value of the “prizes” or through tropes of playing the lottery to win enough money to marry. Despite prescriptive writings condemning marriage for money, middling and affluent readers considered happiness and poverty incompatible. Satirical lotteries played on this idea by emphasizing by making the “great prizes” monetary, or by seeking to increase the appeal of less attractive women with proportionally larger dowries. A few managers of real lotteries played up the need for money to get married in their advertising, explicitly tying wealth to marriage to happiness.

Second, the idea of long odds for happiness in marriage, as for a prize in the lottery, reflects an undercurrent of fatalism and even pessimism. While personal choice and emotional satisfaction in marriage were increasingly valorized, numerous articles suggested that chance – being matched by the spin of a lottery wheel – was as effective at securing happiness a choice. I argue this indicates an undercurrent of anxiety about companionate marriage. The ideal posited that rational discernment and personal choice would lead to unions of compatible partners, with the promise of emotional fulfillment if one chose correctly. Parental tyranny and greed, on the other hand, generated misery. But the persistence of the idea that marriage was a gamble suggests that contemporaries doubted that the promises of prescriptive literature and fiction.

Indeed, a recurrent strain of pessimism circulated publicly and privately. Some writers emphasized that in marriage, as in lotteries, there were more “blanks” than prizes. As such, far more people were destined to be unhappy in marriage, despite its increasing centrality to middle-class emotional life. While in part drawing on older humorous traditions disparaging marriage, the changing context suggests that many readers into the nineteenth century believed that marital happiness was ultimately out of their hands – and likely out of their reach.

 

Janine Yorimoto Boldt (American Philosophical Society) – The Portrait of “Conotocaurious;” or, George Washington Reconsidered

In 1772, Charles Willson Peale visited Mount Vernon and painted the very first portrait of George Washington. This paper suggests that we view this portrait as an image of “Conotocaurious,” a man with settler colonial ambitions that shaped national history. During the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), as an officer in the militia, Washington called himself “Conotocaurious,” a Seneca name translated as “Town Taker” or “Devourer of Villages,” and which was given to him during the conflict by Tanachrison, a Seneca leader. Washington was a land surveyor and land speculator, whose interests in western land were connected to his military service in the Ohio River Valley. His desire for Indigenous territory is reflected in his support for land companies, transportation improvement projects, and the violence he perpetrated against Indigenous communities during the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, and his presidency, which set a precedent for U.S.-Indigenous relations.

During the 1770s, when Peale painted Washington, the artist was actively constructing an American iconography as he traveled through the colonies. In this portrait, Washington wears his militia uniform from the Seven Years’ War, recalling the global imperial conflict. In the distance is a rocky landscape representing the Ohio River Valley. A waterfall evokes the falls of the Potomac River, located near Mount Vernon, and a gateway to the Ohio River Valley – or what Washington referred to as the “channel of…a rising Empire.” But whose empire? Colonists and imperial officials argued over the future of this territory following the Seven Years’ War. Tension over land was a key reason that Virginians like Washington came to resent the British Empire, as imperial restrictions on western settlement to appease Indigenous nations conflicted with colonial ambitions. These issues of land and imperial resistance were on Washington’s mind when he sat for Peale. Together, the two men chose to represent Washington in an outfit and setting that emphasized his desire for Indigenous territory, and was a source of his growing anger towards the British Empire. Portable tipis visible in the portrait’s landscape suggest that Indigenous communities will relocate to make room for settlers, and gesture towards the trans-Mississippi West. When we view the portrait as an image of “Conotocaurious,” the town destroyer eager to overtake Indigenous territory, the painting offers a narrative of Indigenous dispossession central to the growing American resistance movement and emerging national identity.

This brief look at Peale’s George Washington (1772) is part of a larger book project that investigates how colonial Virginians mobilized portraiture to engage in imperial and colonial politics and construct social relationships. It pays attention to the impact that enslaved people and Indigenous Americans had on visual culture to unsettle traditional narratives about colonial American portraiture and its audiences.

 

Lauren Michalak (University of Maryland – College Park) – Looking Towards London: The Gordon Riots as Reaffirmation of the Patriot Cause

This paper looks at how a week long riot in 1780 London reverberated across the Atlantic during the height of the American War of Independence.  Particularly, this paper argues that American Patriot-inclined attention to this riot, its causes and the British government’s response, helped to cement commitment to the political ideology of American independence.  In newspaper records from throughout the United States, Patriot printers extensively covered the riot and the response to it, including the trial of the man accused of fomenting the riot, Lord George Gordon. Patriot politicians and leaders similarly discussed and drew comparisons and meaning from the news of the riots. The interest in a domestic incident in London demonstrates that the separation of the American and British public was not achieved at the outbreak of war or with the signing of the Declaration, but was a process that spanned the duration of the war.    

 

Emily Gowen (Boston University) – Steady Sellers and Common Readers in the 19th Century U.S.

This presentation will explore the relationship between the rise of mass print, the trans-Atlantic history of the novel, and the problem of social inequality in the United States. By tracing the circulation and reception histories of European “steady sellers” in the antebellum United States, Gowen demonstrates that the mechanisms of mass-market dissemination changed the meaning of these works in diverse and unpredictable ways and in turn opened them up for reinterpretation by those reading from the margins of American society. 

 

 

Imagined Difference: Race in the Atlantic World (1:30 p.m – 3:30 p.m. EST)

Aston Gonzalez (Salisbury University) – The Science and Creativity of Revolutionary Black Genius

Scholars know well how African Americans and their allies transformed Revolutionary Era rhetoric to critique the plight of free and enslaved Black people. During this period, luminaries on both sides of the Atlantic strategically deployed the concept of “black genius” to counter scientific racism, pro-slavery arguments, and the oppression of Black people. Black authors, scientists, and artists served as models for this distinction. Free black people and their allies drew from, and repurposed, the established classical frameworks of genius. In doing so, they called on the public to challenge crystallizing theories of Blackness.

 

Sophie Hess (University of Maryland – College Park) – Hollow Ground: Alienation and Environment in Benjamin Banneker’s Maryland 

This talk presents a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, a broader case study of industrialization, environment, and intimacy in Maryland’s Patapsco Valley. Rich with fertile soil, forests, rivers, and ore, this area became a highly coveted landscape in the mid-eighteenth century. A heterogeneous population including slave-owning planters, Quaker industrialists, and free Black farmers all held stake in the environmental resources of the area. My research investigates how these people navigated the natural environment that they sought to harness, both through resource extraction processes like farming, iron forging, and grist mill production and through processes of scientific inquiry such as astronomy, botany, and land surveying. I also investigate the intimate relationships these people had to one another, focusing on experiences such as kinship, sex, patronage, and exploitation. 

This talk will focus on the experiences of one resident of the Patapsco Valley, the astronomer and abolitionist Benjamin Banneker. Born in 1731, Banneker lived all seventy-five years of his life in the area, and witnessed its transformation from a rural outpost to a prominent mill town. Described by Manisha Sinha as “one of the most noted Black men in the early Republic,” Banneker was prolific in his lifetime, publishing four almanacs and an influential epistolary correspondence with then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. While historians have studied Banneker’s role in the history of abolition, and, to some extent, his identity as a scientist, little to no attention has been given to Banneker’s broader experiences of his natural world. This is particularly significant given that Banneker lived for most of his life as a farmer, and so much of his surviving writing and documentation focuses on his experiences cultivating the environment. Banneker was one of many land-owning Black farmers in the area, though by the end of his life he had sold his property to a prominent Quaker family.

Banneker’s experiences, seen primarily through his own writing in his almanacs and scientific journal, offer unique insight into the environmental history of the Mid-Atlantic. Most critically, they illustrate some of the ways that free Black farmers experienced and responded to early industrialization. Through Banneker, we can see the threat that industrialization posed to Black environmental autonomy and the ways farming could act as resistance. This discussion will consider both Banneker’s writing as well as his experiences of property ownership as they pertain to race and the environment in the industrializing Atlantic world. 

 

Mairin Odle (University of Alabama) – “Cruell and fantasticall inventions”: English Ideas of Body Modification in the Atlantic World

In 1653, John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis heatedly denounced all “Cruell and fantasticall inventions of men, practised upon their Bodies, in a supposed way of bravery”. Practices from scarification to nose piercings, tattoos to teeth filing were all rejected as “corporall Apostasy” even as they were meticulously described and organized by body part. Bulwer’s encyclopedic and yet intensely critical reaction may have been unusual, but early modern English fascination with foreign bodies—and the practices that marked them as such—was widespread. How were such modifications evaluated and interpreted, and what were the bounds of early modern English willingness to adopt the practices of other societies? Who was willing to undergo these alterations of appearance, and under what circumstances? There is evidence that English travelers and colonists were occasionally willing to take on the tattoos of Native American communities—but what about the scarification found in many west African societies? How might pre-existing notions of cultural difference and hierarchy have shaped English opinion, and how might events such as the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade have in turn rewritten the interpretations assigned to human bodies? This paper will consider travel accounts, captivity narratives, and slaveholders’ records, among other sources, to explore when sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers approached markings with reluctance, and when with revulsion. The presumed ‘meanings’ of body modifications and the relative acceptability of transferring those marks to English bodies illuminates how boundaries were defined, maintained, and sometimes transgressed.

 

A Religious Nation: Faith and Government in Early America (3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. EST)

 

Timothy Grieve-Carlson (Rice University) – The Subtle Domination of the Soul: Quaker Governance and the Origins of the Carceral State

Benjamin Rush is not generally remembered as a cruel or tyrannical individual. He is certainly rarely remembered as a theorist of terror, or as an architect of systems of “misery,” “horror,” or the domination of the souls of human beings. The contemporary reader might be forgiven, then, for recoiling from Rush’s thought in the following passage from his 1787 essay An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals and Upon Society. Rush writes: “Let a large house, of a construction agreeable to its design, be erected in a remote part of the state…Let its doors be of iron; and let the grating, occasioned by opening and shutting them, be encreased by an echo from a neighboring mountain, that shall extend and continue a sound that shall deeply pierce the soul.” As Rush goes on, the horrors of his vision multiply: “Let all the officers of the house be strictly forbidden to discover any signs of mirth, or even levity, in the presence of the criminals. To encrease the horror of this abode of discipline and misery, let it be called by some name that shall import its design.”

Benjamin Rush is not describing a nightmare, or the setting of a Charles Brockden Brown novel.  In Rush’s Quaker understanding, criminal reform was a process which had to operate on the inner life of the penitent. Public executions, torture, dungeons, these were the relicts of the tyrant monarchs of Old World. Rush’s nascent Republic would pride itself on a more humane, democratic, indeed, a more “Enlightened” approach to the reform of the criminal. Rather than the sword or the spike piercing the criminal’s flesh, Quaker principles of nonviolence would lead to the development of an array of technologies designed to, in Rush’s very words, develop horrible “abodes of discipline and misery,” designed to “deeply pierce the soul” of the criminal.

This paper represents an early stage of a project, and perhaps at a stage where it is less a project than a question: to what extent did radical Protestant, and particularly Quaker, religious beliefs shape the origins of the American carceral system? This question was provoked, perhaps predictably, by a reading of Michel Foucault’s 1975 opus Discipline and Punish, in which early Pennsylvania sources are marshalled repeatedly in his analysis of the emergence of the modern carceral state. Foucault describes a few of these practices: “the Pennsylvanian regime” and “the Philadelphia model,” in which “constant supervision” and “compulsory work” serve to economically and morally reinsert the delinquent into the fabric of society. In this essay, I suggest that Quaker attempts to reconcile nonviolent religious principles and the establishment and maintenance of a civil society in Lenape territory led to a series of practices and technologies of what might be called the subtle domination of the soul, practices and technologies which have since blossomed into the modern carceral state.

 

Rebecca Brenner Graham (American University) – Saturday Observers and the Sunday Mail Controversy of the Early Republic

While Sundayists campaigned to enforce their Sunday observance on everyone else, Seventh-day Christians and Jewish Americans continued to observe Sabbath on Saturdays. Policymakers considered these Saturday Sabbath groups politically useful enough to mention repeatedly in their letters and speeches but not actually significant enough to build meaningful dialogues. But many Saturday observers carefully followed the Sunday debates because they sought to protect their right to observe their Sabbath.

Jewish Americans vocally opposed Sunday closing laws but rarely mentioned Sunday mail explicitly. Among these Jewish thinkers were religious leader Isaac Leeser and Philadelphia socialite Rebecca Gratz. Their relative silence on the topic of Sunday mail likely stemmed from their limited sociopolitical capital: they could not afford to oppose a policy that was not an immediate threat. Although the Sunday mail controversy invoked a sense of urgency, Sunday mail had not actually ended yet, whereas local Sunday closing laws actively discriminated against them.

In contrast to Jewish Saturday observers, Seventh-day Christians argued vehemently against all Sunday laws including the Sundayists’ proposed termination of Sunday mail. The Seventh-day Baptists opposed American Sunday laws as early as 1789, and Seventh-day Adventists joined them when they became a new Seventh-day Christian sect in 1863. Although they were both vocal about causes on which they agreed, Seventh-day Christians and Jewish Americans really did not ally with each other to the extent that was possible because Seventh-day Christians socially outranked their Jewish counterparts. 

“Saturday Observers and the Sunday Mail Controversy of the Early Republic” helps to bridge the gap between Jewish scholarship and early American religious historiography. Jewish scholarship has historically comprised a thriving field of its own. Through the mid-twentieth century, it emerged from rabbinates similarly to how Christian scholars trained in ministries. As academic scholarship increasingly split from faith-based training, Jewish studies remained a separate academic community, while Christian historiography integrated with early American studies. In American history, culture, and academic societies, the term “religious” has too often equaled “Christian,” and consequently the term “Sabbath” has equaled “Sunday.” Historians of the early American republic include a subfield of religious historiography, including recent books illuminating different areas of American life through their intersections with religion: capitalism, democracy, slavery, or in my case, federal institutions, specifically the Post Office.

A recent monograph, Jews on the Frontier by Shari Rabin, laid significant groundwork in bridging the gap between these excellent studies of early American religious history with Jewish studies. For example, her claim that Jewish migrants exploited the power of whiteness to move westward and to assimilate contributes to both Jewish history and scholarly understanding of whiteness in the early U.S. Rabin interprets Jewish Americans not as an inconsequential minority, but as historically significant agents. I contend that only through the perspectives of religious minorities can scholars understand the long history of the Sunday mail controversy because Saturday observers’ continued engagement with the ongoing threat of Sunday reform drags the Sunday mail controversy beyond the early national period, into the antebellum years, and through the Civil War.

 

Matthew Fischer (University of Maryland – College Park) – Reclaiming the Past: Slave Names and the Development of Afro-Christian Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

In 1739 Magdalena and her fellow enslaved Moravian Brethren found themselves in a quandary. A group of more than two dozen Danish sugar planters petitioned the governor of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies (present-day Virgin Islands) to end the mission and deport its adherents, claiming that religious service planted the seeds of discontent and rebellion. Magdalena, her son Mingo, and four other Afro-Moravian men and women penned a response on behalf of more than six hundred members of their religious community, at the time of one of the largest biracial congregations in the New World. Addressed to the Queen of Denmark, Sophia Magdalena, the letter is one of the earliest surviving texts written by an enslaved person in the Americas.

Apart from the immediate context of her struggle on behalf of the Moravians, Magdalena’s letter provides a glimpse into the power of religion and slave literacy as instruments for social organizing and political activism among enslaved and free people of color. Born in the West African kingdom of Popo in the late seventeenth century, she was captured as a young child in the late 1690s, transported to the Caribbean, and sold to a Dutch sugar planter who named her “Marotta.” Following her baptism and conversion to Moravianism in 1737, she adopted the Christian name “Magdalena.” Fluent in both her native West African language and Dutch Creole, Magdalena herself became a missionary before assuming the rank of church elder, a leadership position that allowed her to translate Moravianism into an Afro-Caribbean context.

Because the vast majority of enslaved people could not write and were thus unable to leave written evidence, most scholarship on slave names has focused on secular naming acts. Scholars have demonstrated how the act of naming often marked the entry of African captives into New World slave societies, for example, either denoting the sale of enslaved people from one owner to another or signifying a change in status from slave to free person. Most often, such measures were aimed at drawing boundaries between enslaved and free populations and asserting racial dominance.

The approach adopted in this paper is slightly different. It looks at opportunities for naming and renaming through baptism, and the extent to which these rites allowed people of African descent—enslaved and free—to reclaim a degree of autonomy and self-expression. What do slave names reveal about the process of identity formation? What can they tell us about the meaning of conversion and cultural change more broadly? While opportunities for social status and spiritual leadership were limited in this era, some Africans found in Christianity ways to negotiate the consequences of enslavement and address the spiritual and temporal concerns that plantation slavery engendered—often by fusing Christian doctrine with their own spiritual rituals, traditions, and beliefs. This way, church membership not only provided alternate pathways forsocial and political activism. Crucially, it also opened spaces for affirming black humanity and establishing kinship ties that many enslaved were formally denied.