The larger-than-life image Abraham Lincoln projects across the screen of American history owes much to his role as the Great Emancipator during the Civil War. Yet this noble aspect of Lincoln's identity is precisely the dimension that some historians have cast into doubt. In a vigorous defense of America's sixteenth president, award-winning historian and Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo refutes accusations of Lincoln's racism and political opportunism, while candidly probing the follies of contemporary cynicism and the constraints of today's unexamined faith in the liberating powers of individual autonomy. Redeeming the Great Emancipator enumerates Lincoln's anti-slavery credentials, showing that a deeply held belief in the God-given rights of all people steeled the president in his commitment to emancipation and his hope for racial reconciliation. Emancipation did not achieve complete freedom for American slaves, nor was Lincoln entirely above some of the racial prejudices of his time. Nevertheless, his conscience and moral convictions far outweighed political calculations in ultimately securing freedom for black Americans. Guelzo clarifies the historical record concerning what the Emancipation Proclamation did and did not accomplish. As a policy it was imperfect, but it was far from ineffectual, as some accounts of African American self-emancipation imply. To achieve liberation required interdependence across barriers of race and status. If we fail to recognize our debt to the sacrifices and ingenuity of all the brave men and women of the past, Guelzo says, then we deny a precious part of the American and, indeed, the human community.

First published in September 1992, the book traces the nature and development of the fundamental legal relationships among slaves, masters, and third parties. It shows how the colonial and antebellum Southern judges and legislators accommodated slavery's social relationships into the common law, and how slave law evolved in different states over time in response to social political, economic, and intellectual developments.

The book states that the law of slavery in the US South treated slaves both as people and property. It reconciles this apparent contradiction by demonstrating that slaves were defined in the law as items of human property without any legal rights. When the lawmakers recognized slaves as people, they burdened slaves with added legal duties and disabilities. This epitomized in legal terms slavery's oppressive social relationships. The book also illustrates how cases in which the lawmakers recognized slaves as people legitimized slavery's inhumanity. References in the law to the legal humanity of people held as slaves are shown to be rhetorical devices and cruel ironies that regulated the relative rights of the slaves? owners and other free people that were embodied in people held as slaves. Thus, it is argued that it never makes sense to think of slave legal rights. This was so even when the lawmakers regulated the individual masters? rights to treat their slaves as they wished. These regulations advanced policies that the lawmakers perceived to be in the public interest within the context of a slave society.

In 1846 two slaves, Dred and Harriet Scott, filed petitions for their freedom in the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri. As the first true civil rights case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Dred Scott v. Sandford raised issues that have not been fully resolved despite three amendments to the Constitution and more than a century and a half of litigation. The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law presents original research and the reflections of the nation\u2019s leading scholars who gathered in St. Louis to mark the 150th anniversary of what was arguably the most infamous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision that held that African Americans \u201chad no rights\u201d under the Constitution and that Congress had no authority to alter that galvanized Americans and thrust the issue of race and law to the center of American politics. This collection of essays revisits the history of the case and its aftermath in American life and law. In a final section, the present-day justices of the Missouri Supreme Court offer their reflections on the process of judging and provide perspective on the misdeeds of their nineteenth-century predecessors who denied the Scotts their freedom.

The brutal story of African slavery in the British colonies of the West Indies and North America is told with clarity and compassion in this classic history. James Walvin explores the experiences which bound together slaves from diverse African backgrounds and explains how slavery transformed the tastes and economy of the Western world.

Although written for readers with no prior knowledge of the subject, Walvins's account is based on detailed scholarship, drawing on a body of work from the USA, the West Indies and Britain. All aspects of African slavery up to 1776 are covered; the situation of women, flight and rebellion, disease and death, the conditions on the slave ships, the abolition campaign and much more. The narrative is enlivened and personalised by frequent reference to individual lives.

For this revised edition, the author has incorporated recent scholarly findings and updated the notes and bibliography in order to keep the book current.

This study offers invaluable insight into a much-neglected area of historical research on this nineteenth-century political figure. Previous histories on O'Connell have dealt predominantly with his attempts to secure a repeal of the 1800 Act of Union and on his success in achieving Catholic Emancipation in 1829. In this title Kinealy focuses instead on the neglected issue of O'Connell's contribution to the anti-slavery movement in the United States. She argues that by using his influences over Irish immigrants in the United States, O'Connell negotiated a position of importance in the international debate over the right to freedom. The anti-slavery movement occupied an important place in O'Connell's wider commitment to humanitarian politics. He was both a member of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and Secretary of the Glasgow Anti-Slavery Society and he developed an international reputation as an influential spokesman on the issue.

Our Number One name in popular history is back with an explosive new paperback, a sensational new cover look and a 'fiction' style marketing campaign that will strike gold in summer 2005 This is the forgotten story of the million white Europeans, snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa to be sold to the highest bidder. Ignored by their own governments, and forced to endure the harshest of conditions, very few lived to tell the tale. Using the firsthand testimony of a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow, Giles Milton vividly reconstructs a disturbing, little known chapter of history. Pellow was bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco who was constructing an imperial pleasure palace of enormous scale and grandeur, built entirely by Christian slave labour. As his personal slave, he would witness first-hand the barbaric splendour of he imperial court, as well as experience the daily terror of a cruel regime. Gripping, immaculately researched, and brilliantly realised, WHITE GOLD reveals an explosive chapter of popular history, told with all the pace and verve of one of our finest historians.

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, slave and portraiture as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. The essays in this volume address this apparent paradox of slave portraits from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. They probe the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and explore their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery."

Abolitionism is not only a strategy or a set of demands, aimed at the reduction (or suppression) of custody, it is also a perspective, a philosophy, an approach which challenges conventional definitions of crime. This book examines the origin, philosophy and achievements of abolitionism and reviews the literature on penal abolitionism from the 1960s to the 1980s.
By collecting and discussing the key abolitionist arguments, the author critically analyzes the views expressed by its leading proponents; Nils Christie, Louk Hulsman, Thomas Mathiesen and Herman Bianchi, examining in particular how their views took shape, their philosophical foundations, and the social and political context of abolitionist ideas and perspectives. Policies, such as the virtual abolition of custody for young offenders in Italy, are presented and the area of informal justice is also addressed, with an overview of mediation and compensation practices, and an assessment of the degree of their effectiveness and desirability.
Through assessment of these achievements and experiments of specific abolitionist ideas, the author attempts to identify the legacy of abolitionism from a European perspective, while bringing into focus more recent contributions concerning the study of terrorism and war.

West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba seeks to explain how a series of historical events that occurred in West Africa from the mid-1790s - including Afonja's rebellion, the Owu wars, the Fulani-led jihad, and the migrations to Egbaland - had an impact upon life in cities and plantations in western Cuba and Bahia. Manuel Barcia examines the extent to which a series of African-led plots and armed movements that took place in western Cuba and Bahia between 1807 and 1844 were the result - or a continuation - of events that had occurred in and around the Yoruba and Hausa kingdoms in the same period. Why did these two geographical areas serve as the theatre for the uprising of the Nagos, the Lucumis, and other West African men and women? The answer, Barcia argues, relates to the fact that plantation economies supported by unusually large numbers of African-born slaves from the same - or close - geographical and ethnic heritage, transformed the rural and urban landscape in western Cuba and Bahia. To understand why these two areas followed such similar social patterns it is essential to look across the Atlantic - it is not enough to repeat the significance of the African background of Bahian and Cuban slaves. By establishing connections between people and events, with a special emphasis on their warfare experiences, Barcia presents a coherent narrative which spans more than three decades and opens a wealth of archival research for future study.

They worked Virginia's tobacco fields, South Carolina's rice marshes, and the Black Belt's cotton plantations. Wherever they lived, enslaved people found their lives indelibly shaped by the Southern environment. By day, they plucked worms and insects from the crops, trod barefoot in the mud as they hoed rice fields, and endured the sun and humidity as they planted and harvested the fields. By night, they clandestinely took to the woods and swamps to trap opossums and turtles, to visit relatives living on adjacent plantations, and at times to escape slave patrols and escape to freedom. Scars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce. They saw the landscape as disposable, relocating to more fertile prospects once they had leached the soils and cut down the forests. On the leading edge of the frontier, slavery laid waste to fragile ecosystems, draining swamps, clearing forests to plant crops and fuel steamships, and introducing devastating invasive species. On its trailing edge, slavery left eroded hillsides, rivers clogged with sterile soil, and the extinction of native species. While environmental destruction fueled slavery's expansion, no environment could long survive intensive slave labor. The scars manifested themselves in different ways, but the land too fell victim to the slave owner's lash. Although typically treated separately, slavery and the environment naturally intersect in complex and powerful ways, leaving lasting effects from the period of emancipation through modern-day reckonings with racial justice.

Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. This book explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical changes demanded by industrialization and rapid social change in Britain. Abolition posed problems to which colonial expansion provided the answer, intimately linking the end of slavery to systematic colonization and Indigenous dispossession. By defining slavery in the Caribbean as the opposite of freedom, a lasting impact of abolition was to relegate other forms of oppression to lesser status, or to deny them. Through the shared concerns of abolitionists, slave-owners, and colonizers, a plastic ideology of 'free labour' was embedded within post-emancipation imperialist geopolitics, justifying the proliferation of new forms of unfree labour and defining new racial categories. The celebration of abolition has overshadowed post-emancipation continuities and transformations of slavery that continue to shape the modern world.

Since publication of The Black Loyalist Directory in 1996, the primary component, The Book of Negroes, has become one of the most-cited of American Revolutionary primary sources. This new edition salutes The Book of Negroes by using the original title of this famous accounting of Black freedom. On the surface, The Book of Negroes is a laconic, ledger-style enumeration of 3,000 self-emancipated and free Blacks who departed as part of the British evacuation of Loyalists from New York City in the summer and fall of 1783 for Nova Scotia, England, Germany, and other parts of the world. Created under orders from Sir Guy Carleton (Lord Dorchester), Commander-in-Chief of British forces in North America, to placate an angry George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army (USA), who regarded the Black Loyalists as fugitive slaves, The Book of Negroes is, as Alan Gilbert has observed, a "roll of honor."

Over more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women's proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery. Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian specializing in the history of the African Diaspora, African Muslims, the slave trade and slavery. She is the author of Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 2013) and Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, and the editor of Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies.

For hundreds of years, the biblical story of the Curse of Ham was marshalled as a justification of serfdom, slavery and human bondage. According to the myth, having seen his father Noah naked, Ham's is cursed to have his descendants be forever slaves. In this new book the Curse of Ham is explored in its Reformation context, revealing how it became the cornerstone of the Christian defence of slavery and the slave trade for the next four hundred years. It shows how broader medieval interpretations of the story became marginalized in the early modern period as writers such as Annius of Viterbo and George Best began to weave the legend of Ham into their own books, expanding and adding to the legend in ways that established a firm connection between Ham, Africa, slavery and race. For although in the original biblical text Ham himself is not cursed and race is never mentioned, these writers helped develop the story of Ham into an ideological and theological defence for African slavery, at the precise time that the Transatlantic Slave Trade began to establish itself as a major part of the European economy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Skilfully weaving together elements of theology, literature and history, this book provides a fascinating insight into the ways that issues of religion, economics and race could collide in the Reformation world. It will prove essential reading, not only for those with an interest in early modern history, but for anyone wishing to try to comprehend the origins of arguments used to justify slavery and segregation right up to the 1960s.

Bringing together scholarly essays and helpfully annotated primary documents, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution collects not only the best recent scholarship on the subject, but also showcases the primary texts written by African Americans about the Haitian Revolution. Rather than being about the revolution itself, this collection attempts to show how the events in Haiti served to galvanize African Americans to think about themselves and to act in accordance with their beliefs, and contributes to the study of African Americans in the wider Atlantic World.

Bringing together scholarly essays and helpfully annotated primary documents, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution collects not only the best recent scholarship on the subject, but also showcases the primary texts written by African Americans about the Haitian Revolution. Rather than being about the revolution itself, this collection attempts to show how the events in Haiti served to galvanize African Americans to think about themselves and to act in accordance with their beliefs, and contributes to the study of African Americans in the wider Atlantic World.

Between 1492 and 1820, about two-thirds of the people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were Africans. With the exception of the Spanish, all the European empires settled more Africans in the New World than they did Europeans. The vast majority of these enslaved men and women worked on plantations, and their labor was the foundation for the expansion of the Atlantic economy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Until relatively recently, comparatively little attention was paid to the perspectives, daily experiences, hopes, and especially the political ideas of the enslaved who played such a central role in the making of the Atlantic world. Over the past decades, however, huge strides have been made in the study of the history of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world. This collection brings together some of the key contributions to this growing body of scholarship, showing a range of methodological approaches, that can be used to understand and reconstruct the lives of these enslaved people.

Free Soil in the Atlantic World examines the principle that slaves who crossed particular territorial frontiers- from European medieval cities to the Atlantic nation states of the nineteenth century- achieved their freedom. Based upon legislation and judicial cases, each essay considers the legal origins of Free Soil and the context in which it was invoked: medieval England, Toulouse and medieval France, early modern France and the Mediterranean, the Netherlands, eighteenth-century Portugal, nineteenth-century Angola, nineteenth-century Spain and Cuba, and the Brazilian-Paraguay borderlands. On the one hand, Free Soil policies were deployed by weaker polities to attract worker-settlers; however, by the eighteenth century, Free Soil was increasingly invoked by European imperial centres to distinguish colonial regimes based in slavery from the privileges and liberties associated with the metropole. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.

Explores the social composition of the Jamaican slaveholding class during the era of the British campaign to end slavery, looking at their efforts to maintain control over local society and considering how their economic, cultural and military dependency on the colonial metropole meant that they were unable to avert the ending of British slavery.

Africa's modern history is replete with different forms of encounters and conflicts. From the fifteenth century when millions of Africans were forcefully taken away as slaves during the infamous Atlantic slave trade; to the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century where European countries conquered and subsequently balkanized Africa and shared the continent to European powers; and to the postcolonial era where many African leaders have maintained several instruments of exploitation, the continent has seen different forms of encounters, exploitations and oppressions. These encounters and exploitations have equally been met with resistance in different forms and at different times. The mode of Africa's encounters with the rest of the world have in several ways, shaped and continue to shape the continent's social, political and economic development trajectories. Essays in this volume have addressed different aspects of these phases of encounters and resistance by Africa and the African Diaspora. While the volume document different phases of oppression and conflict, it also contains some accounts of Africa's resistance to external and internal oppressions and exploitations. From the physical guerilla resistance of the Mau Mau group against British colonial exploitation in Kenya and its aftermath, to efforts of the Kayble group to preserve their language and culture in modern Algeria; and from the innovative ways in which the Tuareg are using guitar and music as forms of expression and resistance, to the modern ways in which contemporary African immigrants in North America are coping with oppressive structures and racism, the chapters in this volume have examined different phases of oppressions and suppressions of Africa and its people, as well as acts of resistance put up by Africans.

This unique collection of twelve essays by internationally known scholars deals with the important, but underexplored, topic of the transatlantic linkages between western Africa and Brazil during the era of the slave trade (c. 1600-1850). Brazil received more enslaved Africans (approximately 4.5 million) than any other part of the Americas--ten times as many as North America, and more than all of the Caribbean and North America combined. The forced shipment of millions of Africans to the Americas, where their enslavement became the basis of intense exploitation, profoundly influenced the development of the American societies that used slaves, the African societies from which the victims originated, and the European nations centrally involved in colonizing the Americas. Transatlantic slavery and the forces that produced its formal abolition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were clearly vital in helping to define the identities of both black and white people, and in shaping European colonialism and imperialism. These factors have left legacies of racism and division with important social consequences. Divided into three major parts, the collection focuses in the first section on the Portuguese-Brazilian slave trade. The second section examines the impact of western Africans on the making of colonial and postindependence Brazil. The final section explores the effects of Brazil and Afro-Brazilians on western Africa. This important volume of cutting-edge research and analysis makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of slavery in the Americas.

The collective significance of the themes that are explored in Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa bridge the Atlantic and thereby provide insights into historical debates that address the ways in which parts of Africa fitted into the modern world that emerged in the Atlantic basin. The study explores the conceptual problems of studying slavery in Africa and the broader Atlantic world from a perspective that focuses on Africa and the historical context that accounts for this influence. Paul Lovejoy focuses on the parameters of the enforced migration of enslaved Africans, including the impact on civilian populations in Africa, constraints on migration, and the importance of women and children in the movement of people who were enslaved. The prevalence of slavery in Africa and the transformations of social and political formations of societies and political structures during the era of trans-Atlantic migration inform the book's research. The analysis places Africa, specifically western Africa, at the center of historical change, not on the frontier or periphery of western Europe or the Americas, and provides a global perspective that reconsiders historical reconstruction of the Atlantic world that challenges the distortions of Eurocentrism and national histories. Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa will be of interest to scholars and students of colonial history, African history, Diaspora Studies, the Black Atlantic and the history of slavery.

This volume draws together richly textured and deeply empirical accounts of rice and how its cultivation in the Carolina low country stitch together a globe that maps colonial economies, displacement, and the creative solutions of enslaved people conscripted to cultivate its grain. If sugar fueled the economic hegemony of North Europe in the 18th and 19th century, rice fed it. Nowhere has this story been a more integral part of the landscape than Low Country of the coasts of Georgia, South and North Carolina. Rice played a key role in the expansion of slavery in the Carolinas during the 18th century as West African captives were enslaved, in part for their expertise in growing rice. Contributors to this volume explore the varied genealogies of rice cultivation in the Low Country through archaeological, anthropological, and historical research. This multi-sited volume draws on case studies from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and South Carolina, the Caribbean and India to both compare and connect these disparate regions. Through these studies the reader will learn how the rice cultivation knowledge of untold numbers of captive Africans contributed to the development of the Carolinas and by extension, the United States and Europe. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and-at times-white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race-as well as on the role of religion in racial shift-in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Human trafficking, and the related problems of organised crime and prostitution, has become a serious problem for post-Soviet countries since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Human trafficking has a major impact on the countries of origin, the destination countries and the countries of transit, and is a concern for those studying population and migration, economics, politics, international relations and security studies. This book examines human trafficking from post-Soviet countries, exploring the full extent of the problem and discussing countermeasures, both local and at the global level, and considering the problem in all its aspects. It focuses in particular on the experiences of the Baltic Sea region, setting out the nature of organised crime and the full range of threats against society.