Before the Civil War, most Southern white people were as strongly committed to freedom for their kind as to slavery for African Americans. This study views that tragic reality through the lens of eight authors - representatives of a South that seemed, to them, destined for greatness but was, we know, on the brink of destruction. Exceptionally able and ambitious, these men and women won repute among the educated middle classes in the Southwest, South and the nation, even amid sectional tensions. Although they sometimes described liberty in the abstract, more often these authors discussed its practical significance: what it meant for people to make life's important choices freely and to be responsible for the results. They publicly insisted that freedom caused progress, but hidden doubts clouded this optimistic vision. Ultimately, their association with the oppression of slavery dimmed their hopes for human improvement, and fear distorted their responses to the sectional crisis.

Union occupation of parts of the Confederacy during the Civil War forced federal officials to confront questions about the social order that would replace slavery. This volume of Freedom, first published in 1991, presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in the large plantation areas of the Union-occupied Lower South. The documents illustrate the experiences of former slaves as military laborers, as residents of federally sponsored 'contraband camps', as wage laborers on plantations and in towns, and, in some instances, as independent farmers and self-employed workers. Together with the editors' interpretative essays, these documents portray the different understandings of freedom advanced by the many participants in the wartime evolution of free labor - former slaves and free blacks; former slaveholders; Union military officers and officials in Washington; and Northern planters, ministers and teachers. The war sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume documents an important chapter of that contest.

As slavery collapsed during the American Civil War, former slaves struggled to secure their liberty, reconstitute their families, and create the institutions befitting a free people. This volume of Freedom, first published in 1993, presents a documentary history of the emergence of free-labor relations in different settings in the Upper South. At first, most federal officials hoped to mobilize former slaves without either transforming the conflict into a war of liberation or assuming responsibility for the young, the old, or others not suitable for military employment. But as the Union army came to depend upon black workers and as the number of destitute freed people mounted, authorities at all levels grappled with intertwined questions of freedom, labor and welfare. Meanwhile, the former slaves pursued their own objectives, working within the constraints imposed by the war and Union occupation to fashion new lives as free people. The Civil War sealed the fate of slavery only to open a contest over the meaning of freedom. This volume of Freedom documents an important chapter in that contest.

This is a survey of pre-colonial West Africa, written by the internationally respected author and journalist, Basil Davidson. He takes as his starting point his successful textA History of West Africa 1000-1800, but he has reworked his new text specially for a wider international readership. In the process he offers a fascinating introduction to the rich societies and cultures of Africa before the coming of the Europeans.

A pathbreaking consideration of the intertwined critical responses to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, giants of abolitionist literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass represent a crucial strand in nineteenth-century American literature: the struggle for the abolition of slavery. Yet there has been no thoroughgoing discussion of the critical receptionof these two giants of abolitionist literature. Reading Abolition narrates and explores the parallels between Stowe's critical reception and Douglass's. The book begins with Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, considering its initial celebration as a work of genius and conscience, its subsequent dismissal in the early twentieth century as anti-Southern and in the mid-twentieth century as racially stereotypical, and finally its recent recovery as a classic of women's, religious, and political fiction. It also considers the reception of Stowe's other, less well-known novels, non-fictional works, and poetry, and how engaging the full Stowe canon has changed the shape of Stowe studies. The second half of the study deals with the reception of Douglass both as a writer of three autobiographies that helped to define the contours of African American autobiography for later writers and critics and as an extraordinarily eloquent and influential orator and journalist. Reading Abolition shows that Stowe's and Douglass's critical destinies have long been intertwined, with questions about race, gender, nationalism, religion, and thenature of literary and rhetorical genius playing crucial roles in critical considerations of both figures. Brian Yothers is Frances Spatz Leighton Endowed Distinguished Professor and Associate Chair of the Department ofEnglish at the University of Texas at El Paso.

This book examines the social transformation wrought by the abolition of slavery in 1834 in South Africa's Cape Colony. It pays particular attention to the effects of socioeconomic and cultural changes in the way both freed slaves and dominant whites adjusted to the new world. It compares South Africa's relatively peaceful transition from a slave to a non-slave society to the bloody experience of the US South after abolition, analyzing rape hysteria in both places as well as the significance of changing concepts of honor in the Cape. Finally, the book examines the early development of South Africa's particular brand of racism, arguing that abolition, not slavery itself, was a causative factor; although racist attitudes were largely absent while slavery persisted, they grew incrementally but steadily after abolition, driven primarily by whites' need for secure, exploitable labor.

In a sweeping account, Atlantic Wars explores how warfare shaped the experiences of the peoples living in the watershed of the Atlantic Ocean between the late Middle Ages and the Age of Revolution. At the beginning of that period, combat within Europe secured for the early colonial powers the resources and political stability they needed to venture across the sea. By the early nineteenth century, descendants of the Europeans had achieved military supremacy on land but revolutionaries had challenged the norms of Atlantic warfare. Nearly everywhere they went, imperial soldiers, missionaries, colonial settlers, and traveling merchants sought local allies, and consequently they often incorporated themselves into African and indigenous North and South American diplomatic, military, and commercial networks. The newcomers and the peoples they encountered struggled to understand each other, find common interests, and exploit the opportunities that arose with the expansion of transatlantic commerce. Conflicts arose as a consequence of ongoing cultural misunderstandings and differing conceptions of justice and the appropriate use of force. In many theaters of combat profits could be made by exploiting political instability. Indigenous and colonial communities felt vulnerable in these circumstances, and many believed that they had to engage in aggressive military action-or, at a minimum, issue dramatic threats-in order to survive. Examining the contours of European dominance, this work emphasizes its contingent nature and geographical limitations, the persistence of conflict and its inescapable impact on non-combatants' lives. Addressing warfare at sea, warfare on land, and transatlantic warfare, Atlantic Wars covers the Atlantic world from the Vikings in the north, through the North American coastline and Caribbean, to South America and Africa. By incorporating the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Africans, and indigenous Americans into one synthetic work, Geoffrey Plank underscores how the formative experience of combat brought together widely separated people in a common history.

In Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition, Justin Buckley Dyer provides a succinct account of the development of American antislavery constitutionalism in the years preceding the Civil War. Within the context of recent revisionist scholarship, Dyer argues that the theoretical foundations of American constitutionalism - which he identifies with principles of natural law - were antagonistic to slavery. Still, the continued existence of slavery in the nineteenth century created a tension between practice and principle. In a series of case studies, Dyer reconstructs the constitutional arguments of prominent antislavery thinkers such as John Quincy Adams, John McLean, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, who collectively sought to overcome the legacy of slavery by emphasizing the natural law foundations of American constitutionalism. What emerges is a convoluted understanding of American constitutional development that challenges traditional narratives of linear progress while highlighting the centrality of natural law to America's greatest constitutional crisis.

The study of slavery in the Americas generally assumes a basic racial hierarchy: Africans or those of African descent are usually the slaves, and white people usually the slaveholders. In this unique interdisciplinary work of historical archaeology, anthropologist Katherine Hayes draws on years of fieldwork on Shelter Island's Sylvester Manor to demonstrate how racial identity was constructed and lived before plantation slavery was racialized by the legal codification of races. Using the historic Sylvester Manor Plantation site turned archaeological dig as a case study, Hayes draws on artifacts and extensive archival material to present a rare picture of northern slavery on one of the North's first plantations. The Manor was built in the mid-17th century by British settler Nathaniel Sylvester, whose family owned Shelter Island until the early 18th century and whose descendants still reside in the Manor House. There, as Hayes demonstrates, white settlers, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans worked side by side. While each group played distinct roles on the Manor and in the larger plantation economy of which Shelter Island was part, their close collaboration and cohabitation was essential for the Sylvester family's economic and political power in the Atlantic Northeast. Through the lens of social memory and forgetting, this study addresses the significance of Sylvester Manor's plantation history to American attitudes about diversity, Indian land politics, slavery and Jim Crow, in tension with idealized visions of white colonial community.

Conventional wisdom tells us that marriage was illegal for African Americans during the antebellum era, and that if people married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is an impression that imbues beliefs about black families to this day. But it's a perception primarily based on documents produced by abolitionists, the state, or other partisans. It doesn't tell the whole story.
Drawing on a trove of less well-known sources including family histories, folk stories, memoirs, sermons, and especially the fascinating writings from the Afro-Protestant Press, 'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part offers a radically different perspective on antebellum love and family life.
Frances Smith Foster applies the knowledge she's developed over a lifetime of reading and thinking. Advocating both the potency of skepticism and the importance of story-telling, her book shows the way toward a more genuine, more affirmative understanding of African American romance, both then and now.

This history of African slavery from the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries examines how indigenous African slavery developed within an international context. Paul E. Lovejoy discusses the medieval Islamic slave trade and the Atlantic trade as well as the enslavement process and the marketing of slaves. He considers the impact of European abolition and assesses slavery's role in African history. The book corrects the accepted interpretation that African slavery was mild and resulted in the slaves' assimilation. Instead, slaves were used extensively in production, although the exploitation methods and the relationships to world markets differed from those in the Americas. Nevertheless, slavery in Africa, like slavery in the Americas, developed from its position on the periphery of capitalist Europe. This new edition revises all statistical material on the slave trade demography and incorporates recent research and an updated bibliography.

The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colony in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Within a few years, the slave insurgents forced the French administrators of the colony to emancipate them, a decision ratified by revolutionary Paris in 1794. This victory was a stunning challenge to the order of master/slave relations throughout the Americas, including the southern United States, reinforcing the most fervent hopes of slaves and the worst fears of masters. But, peace eluded Saint-Domingue as British and Spanish forces attacked the colony. A charismatic ex-slave named Toussaint Louverture came to France's aid, raising armies of others like himself and defeating the invaders. Ultimately Napoleon, fearing the enormous political power of Toussaint, sent a massive mission to crush him and subjugate the ex-slaves. After many battles, a decisive victory over the French secured the birth of Haiti and the permanent abolition of slavery from the land. The independence of Haiti reshaped the Atlantic world by leading to the French sale of Louisiana to the United States and the expansion of the Cuban sugar economy. Laurent Dubois weaves the stories of slaves, free people of African descent, wealthy whites, and French administrators into an unforgettable tale of insurrection, war, heroism, and victory. He establishes the Haitian Revolution as a foundational moment in the history of democracy and human rights.

The Cornish-born traveller and writer James Silk Buckingham (1786 1855) campaigned energetically for social reform while a Member of Parliament during the 1830s. He later spent four years in the United States, and in 1839 travelled across the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama to observe at first hand the inhumane treatment of slaves in a system that showed 'reckless indifference to human life'. Originally published in 1842, and dedicated to Prince Albert, this two-volume work documents Buckingham's findings and argues that the USA should follow Britain's example in abolishing slavery. Within the framework of a travel narrative recording climate, geography, flora and fauna, Buckingham describes the use of slaves in industries as diverse as gold mining, cotton manufacturing, railways, canals, and agriculture. He highlights the social and political issues surrounding free labour, and relations between the slaves and their employers. Volume 1 includes descriptions of Charleston, Augusta, and New Orleans.

The Cornish-born traveller and writer James Silk Buckingham (1786 1855) campaigned energetically for social reform while a Member of Parliament during the 1830s. He later spent four years in the United States, and in 1839 travelled across the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama to observe at first hand the inhumane treatment of slaves in a system that showed 'reckless indifference to human life'. Originally published in 1842, and dedicated to Prince Albert, this two-volume work documents Buckingham's findings and argues that the USA should follow Britain's example in abolishing slavery. Within the framework of a travel narrative recording climate, geography, flora and fauna, Buckingham describes the use of slaves in industries as diverse as gold mining, cotton manufacturing, railways, canals, and agriculture. He highlights the social and political issues surrounding free labour, and relations between the slaves and their employers. Volume 2 focuses mainly on Georgia and Virginia.

Characterizing Olaudah Equiano's eighteenth-century narrative of his life as a type of "scriptural story" that connects the Bible with identity formation, Vincent L. Wimbush's White Men's Magic probes not only how the Bible and its reading played a crucial role in the first colonial contacts between black and white persons in the North Atlantic but also the process and meaning of what he terms "scripturalization." By this term, Wimbush means a social-psychological-political discursive structure or "semiosphere" that creates a reality and organizes a society in terms of relations and communications. Because it is based on the particularities of Equiano's narrative, Wimbush's theoretical work is not only grounded but inductive, and shows that scripturalization is bigger than either the historical or the literary Equiano. Scripturalization was not invented by Equiano, he says, but it is not quite the same after Equiano.

Entangled Otherness explores the dynamics of cross-dressing and gender performance in contemporary francophone Caribbean cultures through a range of visual and textual media. Original in its comparative focus on the islands of Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe and their diasporic communities in France, this study reveals how opaque strategies of crossing, mimicry and masquerade have enabled resistance to the racialised, gendered and patriarchal classifications of bodies that characterized Enlightenment thought during the French transatlantic slave trade. It engages with archival texts of pre-revolutionary Haiti to offer a historical understanding of current constructions of Caribbean gender most influenced by French colonial legacies. The author argues that cross-dressing, as a form of 'self-fabrication', complicates inherently entangled colonial binaries of identity and resists France's paternalistic gaze. The book's multidisciplinary approach to gender analysis weaves a dialogue between cross-cultural voices garnered from textual and historical analysis, ethnographic interviews and theoretical insight to foreground the continued need to decolonize Eurocentric readings of gender identity in the francophone and creolophone islands, and the Caribbean region more generally. Works of art, film, photography, carnival, performance, and dress, including depictions of fluid identities in the binary-resistant Afro-Creole religion of Vodou, are examined using contemporary performance, gender and social theory from within the region. Entangled Otherness thus makes a unique and timely contribution to the growing body of knowledge and debate in the areas of gender, sexuality and the body in Caribbean Studies.

Frederick Douglass (c.1818-1895) was born into slavery but escaped in 1838, quickly becoming involved in the abolitionist movement. Following publication in 1845 of this autobiography he risked recognition and recapture by his owner, and so fled the United States. This reissue is of the Dublin edition of 1845, with a preface by Douglass explaining his reasons for his journey to Britain. Opening with a touching explanation of how he doesn't know his birthday, Douglass describes his early life and the growing awareness of the injustices he suffered. The beatings he witnessed and received himself are described in painful detail. Later, Douglass highlights the hypocrisy of the 'slaveholding religion of this land', condemning it as 'the grossest of libels'. The eloquence of the writing, with an immediacy and honesty found shocking at the time, make this an invaluable first-hand record of one of humanity's most shameful acts.

Capitalizing on the rich historical record of late antiquity, and employing sophisticated methodologies from social and economic history, this book reinterprets the end of Roman slavery. Kyle Harper challenges traditional interpretations of a transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, arguing instead that a deep divide runs through 'late antiquity', separating the Roman slave system from its early medieval successors. In the process, he covers the economic, social and institutional dimensions of ancient slavery and presents the most comprehensive analytical treatment of a pre-modern slave system now available. By scouring the late antique record, he has uncovered a wealth of new material, providing fresh insights into the ancient slave system, including slavery's role in agriculture and textile production, its relation to sexual exploitation, and the dynamics of social honor. By demonstrating the vitality of slavery into the later Roman empire, the author shows that Christianity triumphed amidst a genuine slave society.

Sir Samuel White Baker (1821 1893) was a traveller and explorer. This two-volume work of 1874 is his account of a military expedition under Ismail Pasha (Ismail the Magnificent, 1830 1895), Khedive of Egypt, to suppress the slave-trade of central Africa between 1869 and 1873. Having found Egyptian citizens exploiting the population of the lawless central lands, Ismail determined to colonize and modernize the Nile basin (now southern Egypt and Sudan). He appointed Baker governor-general and major-general in the Ottoman army. Illustrated with over 50 plates and maps, and with Baker's lively observations of the country and of the society he was trying to reform, this book is a wonderful record of a lost world, and of an important stage in late Ottoman military expansion. The first volume starts with preparations for the voyage and ends with Baker having established stability in Gondokoro and about to march further south.

Sir Samuel White Baker (1821 1893) was a traveller and explorer. This two-volume work of 1874 is his account of a military expedition under Ismail Pasha (Ismail the Magnificent, 1830 1895), Khedive of Egypt, to suppress the slave-trade of central Africa between 1869 and 1873. Having found Egyptian citizens exploiting the population of the lawless central lands, Ismail determined to colonize and modernize the Nile basin (now southern Egypt and Sudan). He appointed Baker governor-general and major-general in the Ottoman army. Illustrated with over 50 plates and maps, and with Baker's lively observations of the country and of the society he was trying to reform, this book is a wonderful record of a lost world, and of an important stage in late Ottoman military expansion. In the second volume Baker continues the story of his mixed military successes in the south, and assesses his achievements in Africa.

Russian rural history has long been based on a 'Peasant Myth', originating with nineteenth-century Romantics and still accepted by many historians today. In this book, Tracy Dennison shows how Russian society looked from below, and finds nothing like the collective, redistributive and market-averse behaviour often attributed to Russian peasants. On the contrary, the Russian rural population was as integrated into regional and even national markets as many of its west European counterparts. Serfdom was a loose garment that enabled different landlords to shape economic institutions, especially property rights, in widely diverse ways. Highly coercive and backward regimes on some landlords' estates existed side-by-side with surprisingly liberal approximations to a rule of law. This book paints a vivid and colourful picture of the everyday reality of rural Russia before the 1861 abolition of serfdom.

"[Kaplan] tells this story with precision and eloquence." -Seattle Times"An eye-opening biography from a trusted source on the topic." -Kirkus Review"Elegantly written and thoroughly researched." -Publishers WeeklyThe acclaimed biographer, with a thought-provoking exploration of how Abraham Lincoln's and John Quincy Adams' experiences with slavery and race shaped their differing viewpoints, provides both perceptive insights into these two great presidents and a revealing perspective on race relations in modern America.Lincoln, who in afterlife became mythologized as the Great Emancipator, was shaped by the values of the white America into which he was born. While he viewed slavery as a moral crime abhorrent to American principles, he disapproved of anti-slavery activists. Until the last year of his life, he advocated "voluntary deportation," concerned that free blacks in a white society would result in centuries of conflict. In 1861, he had reluctantly taken the nation to war to save it. While this devastating struggle would preserve the Union, it would also abolish slavery-creating the biracial democracy Lincoln feared. John Quincy Adams, forty years earlier, was convinced that only a civil war would end slavery and preserve the Union. An antislavery activist, he had concluded that a multiracial America was inevitable. Lincoln and the Abolitionists, a frank look at Lincoln, "warts and all," provides an in-depth look at how these two presidents came to see the issues of slavery and race, and how that understanding shaped their perspectives. In a far-reaching historical narrative, Fred Kaplan offers a nuanced appreciation of both these great men and the events that have characterized race relations in America for more than a century-a legacy that continues to haunt us all. The book has a colorful supporting cast from the relatively obscure Dorcas Allen, Moses Parsons, Violet Parsons, Theophilus Parsons, Phoebe Adams, John King, Charles Fenton Mercer, Phillip Doddridge, David Walker, Usher F. Linder, and H. Ford Douglas to Elijah Lovejoy, Francis Scott Key, William Channing, Wendell Phillips, and Rufus King. The cast includes Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's first vice president, and James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, the two presidents on either side of Lincoln. And it includes Abigail Adams, John Adams, Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and Frederick Douglass, who hold honored places in the American historical memory.The subject of this book is slavery and racism, the paradox of Lincoln, our greatest president, as an antislavery moralist who believed in an exclusively white America; and Adams, our most brilliant statesman, as an antislavery activist who had no doubt that the United States would become a multiracial nation. It is as much about the present as the past.

Henry Nelson Coleridge (1798 1843) was plagued with spinal problems and rheumatism throughout his life. The purpose of his six-month voyage around the Caribbean, although ostensibly for his health, was also a futile attempt to prevent his marriage to his beloved cousin Sara. Coleridge's thinly disguised references to Sara punctuate this light-hearted memoir, originally published anonymously in 1826. Coleridge compares and contrasts twelve different islands. Towns, villages, monuments, architecture, churches and plantations are described as he roams the islands freely, visits acquaintances and enjoys the natural history. Throughout his journey Coleridge observes all races on the islands. He gives an account of the Caribbean plantations, commenting on the situation of the plantation slaves and pondering the opportunities available to emancipate them without affecting the plantations' productivity. He also highlights cases where slaves are well treated by plantation owners.

Moncure Conway (1832 1907) was born on his family's plantation in Virginia, but became a committed abolitionist soon after he left college. He joined abolitionist rallies and moved from Methodism to the Unitarian ministry, eventually becoming a freethinker. Conway became increasingly isolated from his family as a result of his abolitionist activism, his marriage to an abolitionist, and the resettling of a group of his father's escaped slaves in Ohio during the civil war. This book was published in 1865, soon after he settled in Britain, where he lived for over 30 years, became a supporter of women's suffrage, and networked with intellectuals including Dickens, Carlyle, Lyell and Darwin. His description of the injustices of slavery, including the slave trading in the southern plantations that triggered the secession of southern states and the civil war, is set in the context of his personal experiences and his evolving ethical views.

This book, first published in 1897, examines two important factors in the growth of Liverpool as a major port: privateering and the slave trade. It incorporates a large amount of primary source material, including extracts from letters and newspaper reports. Privateeering developed as Britain became a global maritime power through merchant shipping and exploration, privateers being ships and individuals authorised by the government through Letters of Marque to attack and capture foreign ships for profit. Williams recounts the exploits of several notorious privateers sailing from Liverpool, and describes how the industry functioned and flourished during the French revolution, the Seven Years' War and the American wars. He provides much practical detail, including how best to capture ships while causing them minimal damage. The second part of his book is still regarded as a classic history of the Liverpool slave trade, and clearly reveals the author's anti-imperialist views.