Hey to Your Mama N'em

Charlestown, Virginia, 1835 (located in present-day West Virginia)

Library of Congress, American Memory

Lucy, ca.1845. Copyprint of daguerreotype. Courtesy of Mason County Museum, Maysville, Kentucky [via the Library of Congress]

Lucy Cottrell was born the daughter of Dorothea (Dolly) Cottrell, a house servant at Monticello. After Thomas Jefferson’s death in 1826, Lucy was sold at auction and became the property of George Blaetterman, a professor at the University of Virginia. After Blaetterman’s death (ca. 1850), Dolly and Lucy went to Kentucky with the professor’s widow, who freed them five years later.

In this image, Lucy Cottrell is holding Charlotte, Blaetterman’s foster son’s daughter.

soulbrotherv2:

Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Gender and American Culture) by Stephanie M. H. Camp

Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition.

Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp’s insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties (“frolics”) become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts.

The culture of opposition created by enslaved women’s acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.

Slave auction block and auctioneer’s stand at Green Hill Plantation in Campbell County, Virginia. Photograph from the Historic American Building Susrvey, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Date unknown.

Green Hill was developed by Samuel Pannill, who purchased an initial six hundred acres in 1797. By his death in 1864, Pannill had increased his holdings to nearly 5,000 acres and 244 slaves.

The slave deck of the bark “Wildfire,” brought into Key West on April 30, 1860

The Wildfire carried 510 captives on this voyage from Africa, near the Congo River, to slave markets in the United States. The ship was not filled to its capacity of 1000. Although importing slaves to the United States was prohibited by law in 1808, the slave trade continued for many years. 

The Wildfire was intercepted by an American steamer and brought to port at Key West. The African captives were eventually freed. Charges were brought against the captain and crew of the Wildfire, but they were found not guilty, despite being caught red-handed.

Illustration in Harper’s Weekly, June 2, 1860

Library of Congress

“A woman with Iron Horns and Bells on, to keep her from running away”

Source: Moses Roper, A narrative of the adventures and escape of Moses Roper from American slavery (London, 1837)

As shown on http://www.slaveryimages.org, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.

Map: the triangular trade route from New England to West Africa to the Caribbean then back to New England.

In the 17th century, New England, especially Rhode Island and Massachusetts, became a center for rum production. The distillers used Caribbean sugar and molasses to make the rum. So this was the trade route that began in earnest in the early 18th century: American ships traveled from New England to West Africa, where they traded rum for kidnapped African people. The ships bearing enslaved Africans would then travel to the Caribbean. The Africans were traded for sugar and molasses. They became forced labor on the islands’ sugar plantations. And so it went until the mid-1800s. Profits from the slave trade enabled a wealthy merchant class to emerge in the North, and helped fund other thriving industries, along with cultural and educational institutions (slave merchant benefactors poured money into Ivy League colleges).

The notion that slavery in the United States was an institution peculiar to and benefiting only the antebellum South is a myth.

Iron mask, collar, leg shackles and spurs used to restrict slaves

Illustration in The Penitential Tyrant by Thomas Branagan. New-York: Printed by Samuel Wood, no. 362, Pearl Street, 1807.

Library of Congress

From 1769 to 1820, the DeWolf family of Rhode Island transported more than 10,000 Africans into slavery. The family received dispensation from Thomas Jefferson to continue trading slaves after slave trafficking was outlawed in 1807. Years later, a group of ten DeWolf descendants decided to retrace the transatlantic slave route and document the journey on film.

I haven’t seen Traces of the Trade yet (my brother said it was one of the most fascinating films he’s ever seen), but I plan to watch it this week. If you’ve seen it, I’d love to read your comments.

After a long struggle by leaders of the Puerto Rican abolitionist movement, on March 22, 1873, the Spanish National Assembly finally abolished slavery in Puerto Rico. The owners were compensated with 35 million pesetas per slave, and slaves were required to continue working for three more years.

Photo: Former slaves in Puerto Rico, 1898

Library of Congress, Hispanic Division