WOMEN AND SLAVERY

Full text

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women and slavery
vol u me two
The Modern Atlantic

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women and slavery
vol u me on e
Africa, the Indian Ocean World,
and the Medieval North Atlantic
vol u me two
The Modern Atlantic
Edited by Gwyn Campbell,
Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller
The editors wish to acknowledge the support of the Institute for Ameri-
can Universities, Avignon, and the Office de Tourisme, Courthézon, in
organizing the conference “Women and Slavery” at which most of the
papers appearing in these volumes were first presented; the discussants
and participants at that conference; and especially Marianne Ackerman
for creating an atmosphere that nurtured discussion and cemented
friendships.

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women and slavery
volume two
The Modern Atlantic
Edited by
Gwyn Campbell
Suzanne Miers
Joseph C. Miller
ohio u n i v e r s i t y pr e s s
at h e n s

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Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
www.ohio.edu/oupress
© 2008 by Ohio University Press
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ ™
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1
Published separately: Women and Slavery, vol. 1, Africa, the Indian Ocean
World, and the Medieval North Atlantic
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women and slavery / edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, Joseph C.
Miller.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8214-1725-6 (hc : v. 1 : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8214-1725-8 (hc : v. 1 : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8214-1726-3 (pbk. : v. 1 : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8214-1726-6 (pbk. : v. 1 : alk. paper)
[etc.]
1. Women slaves—History. 2. Slavery—History. I. Campbell, Gwyn, 1952–
II. Miers, Suzanne. III. Miller, Joseph Calder.
HT861.W66 2007
306.3’6208209—dc22
2007018274

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CONT E N T S
A Tribute to Suzanne Miers
martin a. klein and richard roberts 000
Preface 000
Introduction
Strategies of Women and Constraints of Enslavement in the
Modern Americas
gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller 1
I. The Reproductive Biology of Sugar Slavery
1. Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, ca. 1776–1834
kenneth morgan 000
2. Gloomy Melancholy
Sexual Reproduction among Louisiana Slave Women, 1840–60
richard follett 000
II. Women’s Initiatives under Slavery
3. Can Women Guide and Govern Men?
Gendering Politics among African Catholics in Colonial Brazil
mariza de carvalho soares 000
4. A Particular Kind of Freedom
Black Women, Slavery, Kinship, and Freedom in the
American Southeast
barbara krauthamer 000
5. Enslaved Women and the Law
Paradoxes of Subordination in the Post-Revolutionary Carolinas
laura f. edwards 000
v

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vi contents
III. Rebuilding Lives in the Caribbean: Emancipation and Its Aftermath
6. Pricing Freedom in the French Caribbean
Women, Men, Children, and Redemption from Slavery in the 1840s
bernard moitt 000
7. Slave Women, Family Strategies, and the Transition to
Freedom in Barbados, 1834–41
laurence brown and tara inniss 000
8. Free but Minor
Slave Women, Citizenship, Respectability, and Social Antagonism
in the French Antilles, 1830–90
myriam cottias 000
IV. Representing Women Slaves: Masters’ Fantasies and Memories in Fiction
9. Deviant and Dangerous
Proslavery Representations of Jamaican Slave Women’s Sexuality, ca.
1780–1834
henrice altink 000
10. The Condition of the Mother
The Legacy of Slavery in African American Literature of the
Jim Crow Era
felipe smith 000
V. Historiographical Reflections on Slavery and Women
11. Re-modeling Slavery as If Women Mattered
claire robertson and marsha robinson 000
12. Domiciled and Dominated
Slaving as a History of Women
joseph c. miller 000
Contributors 000
Index 000

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a tribute to suzan n e m i e rs
Martin A. Klein and Richard Roberts
It says a great deal about Suzanne Miers that she edited many of the
chapters in this book, all of which originated as papers presented at a
conference organized to honor her. This book was to be a Festschrift—
but Suzanne seems to gain full satisfaction from working closely with
contributors in refining their ideas and professes no desire to rest on her
laurels and collect honors. At the conference that led to this book,
whose subject she had suggested, she seemed almost embarrassed by the
praise she received, presumably seeing herself as a modest trooper in the
academic trenches.
Suzanne Miers is an American who has spent most of her life else-
where. She was born in 1922 in Luebo, in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, where her father was a mining engineer. She spent most of
her childhood in Belgium and England. She received a BA from the
University of London in 1944 and an MA in 1949. She taught briefly at
Bedford College for Women but, like many academic women of her gen-
eration, put any professional aspirations on hold to marry and have two
children. When she followed her husband, Brigadier R. C. H. Miers, to
Singapore, she taught for three years at the Singapore branch of the Uni-
versity of Malaya (1955–58). She returned to the academic world after
the untimely death of her husband in 1962. In 1969 she received a PhD
from the University of London. That dissertation, published in 1975 as
Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade,1 opened up the subject of slavery
and the slave trade as a theme in international relations and contributed
to the upsurge of interest in African and comparative slavery. She has
contributed significantly to that body of literature ever since, writing
both about slavery in distant places and about the way governments have
struggled with the often embarrassing question of human servitude. Only
in the years when she was completing her dissertation did Sue return
full-time to the United States, teaching several years at the University of
Wisconsin and then spending sixteen years at Ohio University before re-
tiring in 1992.
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viii martin a. klein and richard roberts
Important as Sue’s scholarship has been, her most important contribu-
tion to the field of African history has been as a coeditor of four volumes
on slavery, in two of which we collaborated with her. The most seminal
was the first, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
(1977), which she edited with Igor Kopytoff. Along with Claude Meil-
lassoux’s L’esclavage en Afrique précoloniale (1975), it launched what has
since been one of the most important themes in historical research on
Africa. Particularly important was the provocative eighty-page introduc-
tion, which advanced a powerful argument about the dynamics of incor-
porating slaves into African lineage systems. Not all specialists accepted
Miers and Kopytoff ’s emphasis on integration, but whatever one’s posi-
tion on that point, it stimulated debate not only in African history stud-
ies, but more generally in slave studies, and made the understanding of
slavery a central question for historians of Africa.
Her second collaboration was with Richard Roberts on The End of Slav-
ery in Africa (1988). Central to this volume was the debate about whether
the end of slavery in Africa was a smooth, virtually frictionless process or
whether it ushered in a set of profound social, cultural, and economic
changes. Sue was particularly interested, however, in the condition of
women and child slaves. The model of African slavery as a mechanism of
incorporating outsiders was primarily drawn from virilocal, patrilineal
marriage patterns, where wives were married into their husband’s lin-
eages. Thus, the model of slavery in Miers and Kopytoff was taken to a
large degree from female experiences. In editing The End of Slavery, Sue
demanded that contributors address the specific situation of women and
children slaves. She insisted that women and children had distinct vul-
nerabilities and that applying the gender-unspecific term slave or freed-
man obscured the significant differences between men, women, and chil-
dren as they faced the choices posed by the ambiguous end of slavery. Sue
Miers’s interest in the gender-specific vulnerability of women in slavery,
their agency in their escape from bondage, and her interest in compara-
tive slavery led to her editing, with Maria Jaschok, Women and Chinese
Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape. Her own contribution to that
volume was a study of a Chinese woman who had been sold in Hong Kong
as a mui ts’ai, a servant girl. Sue’s consistent concern with women slaves
connects her early work to this current collection.
During the 1990s she and Martin Klein, together and separately, orga-
nized a series of panels on modern slavery at meetings of the African
Studies Association. The central problem those panels addressed was
why slavery or slavelike conditions had persisted so long in Africa.
Whereas The End of Slavery had principally examined the moment of

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a tribute to suzanne miers
emancipation, the new studies explored why emancipation took so long
and why it followed such uneven courses in different parts of Africa. A
selection of those papers appeared as Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa
(1999). Her own contribution to this volume was an essay on “Slavery
and the Slave Trade as International Issues, 1890–1919.”
Sue’s work as a scholar was never a purely academic concern. It is very
hard for those of us who study slavery to forget that slaves were human
beings, but many historians of slavery see modern forms of slavery as dif-
ferent from traditional forms. In Sue’s case, however, recognition of the
commonalities of experience among those coerced to labor for others led
to an involvement in modern forms of slavery. In 1980 she attended a
meeting of the United Nations Working Group on Slavery. She describes
in the preface of her most recent book, Slavery in the Twentieth Century:
The Evolution of a Global Problem (2003), the “disheartening experience”
of bored experts and officials going through the paces in a ritual that was
like throwing a bone to some of the nongovernmental organizations try-
ing to raise questions about modern forms. It was a ritual encumbered by
the era’s rhetoric of confrontation, East-West around the Cold War and
North-South between the developed and developing worlds. For much
of this meeting, Sue was the only spectator in the room. She was deeply
disturbed and left Geneva determined to write on the politics of anti-
slavery, but in the years since the meeting, the situation changed. A
number of NGOs were successful in raising issues of forced labor, forced
prostitution, debt bondage, child labor, and other abuses, and the Group
of Experts was transformed into the Working Group on Contemporary
Forms of Slavery. Sue Miers was often in the gallery, but also active in
groups like Anti-Slavery International,2 which were raising questions
about modern forms of servitude and kept pressure on international bod-
ies to act against both slavery and the continued trafficking in people.
She was also a trustee of Anti-Slavery International and regularly at-
tended meetings of its management board in London. The result was a
series of articles, some historical, some descriptive, that provided schol-
arly substance to political struggles that are still going on. The end
product of much of this research was her magnum opus, Slavery in the
Twentieth Century, which traces the decline of formal slavery, a process
that ended only in 1970, and the growing struggle to deal with more
modern forms of coerced labor.
The two of us have sometimes disagreed with Sue Miers, starting with
the introduction to Miers and Kopytoff’s Slavery in Africa. But that has not
really affected our relations with Sue. She is a gentle warrior, and a de-
termined one, recognizing that debate and disagreement are the essence

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martin a. klein and richard roberts
x
of academic life and demanding only that disagreement be polite. She
has been a superb collaborator, well organized and with a network of con-
nections. She always knew who was doing what and could be asked to do
an article to fill some need. A generous person herself, she could usually
get contributors to follow through on their commitments with only the
gentlest hectoring. She is a meticulous and careful editor, open to discus-
sion, easy to work with, but often very persistent. She keeps her eye on
the goal and works hard to achieve it. And she gets results. It is hard to
say no to a woman who is both gentle and firm. Both of us have been in-
formed by her research, enriched by our collaboration with her, and en-
livened by her friendship.
notes
1. For publication details of works by Suzanne Miers, see the chronological list of
published works that follows.
2. Anti-Slavery International is the world’s oldest antislavery organization, hav-
ing been founded originally as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1839.
We thank Michael Dottridge for filling us in on Sue Miers’s work with Anti-Slavery
International.
the published works of suzanne miers on slavery
Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade. New York: Africana, 1975.
and Igor Kopytoff, eds. Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977.
and Richard [L.] Roberts, eds. The End of Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1988.
“Humanitarianism at Berlin: Myth or Reality.” In Bismarck, Europe and Africa: The
Berlin Africa Conference 1884–1885 and the Onset of Partition, edited by S. Forster,
W. J. Mommsen, R. Robinson, 333–45. London: Oxford University Press, 1988.
and Michael Crowder. “The Politics of Slavery in Bechuanaland: Power Struggles
and the Plight of the Basarwa in the Bamangwato Reserve 1926–1940.” In The
End of Slavery in Africa, edited by Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, 172–200.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.
“Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in Ethiopia” In Proceedings of the Eighth In-
ternational Conference of Ethiopian Studies, edited by Taddese Beyene, 2:253–66.
Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, 1989.
“Diplomacy versus Humanitarianism: British and Consular Manumission in Hijaz
1921–1936.” Slavery and Abolition 10, no. 3 (1989): 102–28.
Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, eds. Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission,
Servitude, and Escape. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994.
“Mui Tsai through the Eyes of the Victim: Janet Lim’s Story of Bondage and Escape.”
In Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape, edited by

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a tribute to suzanne miers
Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers, 108–21. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 1994.
“Contemporary Forms of Slavery (review essay: [Anti-Slavery International], Sut-
ton, Slavery in Brazil; Anderson, Britain’s Secret Slaves; Sattaur, Child Labour in
Nepal; Smith, Ethnic Groups in Burma).” Slavery and Abolition 17, no. 3 (1996):
238–46.
“Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in Ethiopia.” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 3
(1997): 257–88.
“Slavery and the Slave Trade as International Issues, 1890–1939.” Slavery and Aboli-
tion 19, no. 2 (1998): 16–37.
and Martin Klein. Introduction to “Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa.” Slavery
and Abolition 19, no. 2 (1998): 1–15.
and Martin Klein, eds. “Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa.” Slavery and Abolition
19, no. 2 (1998), special issue. Also published as Slavery and Colonial Rule in
Africa. London; Portland OR: Frank Cass, 1999.
“Contemporary Forms of Slavery.” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue canadienne
d’études africaines 34, no. 3 (2000): 714–47.
“Slavery to Freedom in sub-Saharan Africa: Expectations and Reality.” Slavery and
Abolition 21, no. 2 (2000): 237–64.
“Slavery: A Question of Definition.” In “The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean
Africa and Asia,” edited by Gwyn Campbell, special issue of Slavery and Abolition
24, no. 2 (2003): 1–16. Also as “Slavery: A Question of Definition,” in The Struc-
ture of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, edited by Gwyn Campbell, 1–16.
London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2004.
“Mue Tsaï à travers les yeux d’une victime: Histoire de l’asservissement et de l’éva-
sion de Janet Lim.” Cahiers des anneaux de la mémoire, no. 5 (2003): 15–32. Extract
translated from Women and Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape,
edited by Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 1994.
Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Pattern. Walnut Creek,
CA: Altamira, 2003.
“Slave Rebellion and Resistance in the Aden Protectorate in the Mid-Twentieth
Century.” Slavery and Abolition 25, no. 2 (2004): 80–89.
“Slavery and the Slave Trade in Saudi Arabia and the Arab States on the Persian
Gulf, 1921–63.” In Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia,
edited by Gwyn Campbell, 120–36. London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2005.

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preface
<to come from Joe Miller>
Map to be placed across from introduction
xiii

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campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 1
I N T R O D U C T I O N
STRATEGIES OF WOMEN AND CONSTRAINTS OF
ENSLAVEMENT IN THE MODERN AMERICAS
gwyn campb e l l , s u z a n n e miers, and j o s e p h c . m i l l e r
Slavery studies have until recently focused overwhelmingly on male
slaves. This relative neglect of women, and in particular the lack of ana-
lytically gendered consideration of their prominent presence among the
enslaved, reflects in part the emphasis of scholars on the recent, and best-
known, Atlantic system of slavery, in which some twelve million slaves,
predominantly and most prominently males, were shipped to the mines
and plantations of the Americas. Non-Western systems of slavery, in
which the gender ratio was probably the inverse, as many of the studies
in the companion volume to this one contemplate,1 have until recently
received scant scholarly attention.
However, the literature on women slaves in certain regions of the
globe has grown rapidly over the last decade. A preceding version of this
introduction2 compared females in Western slave systems in a wide vari-
ety of geographical settings ranging from the plantations of the Americas
to the Dutch Cape in southern Africa, the South African Republic, and
British Mauritius. While male slaves outnumbered female slaves on the
commercial plantations characteristic of most of these areas, women ac-
counted for greater proportions of the people enslaved there than is cus-
tomarily acknowledged. The literature has largely analyzed the slave
owner–slave relationship in terms of the dominance of the legally em-
powered “insider” over vulnerable “outsiders” deprived of even basic
human rights, and of owner violence and resulting slave resentment and
sometimes revolt—with consequent brutal owner suppression and slave
suffering.
1

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gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
2
Historians have concentrated on the contradictions inherent in the ex-
periences of the women trapped in these vicious circumstances as moth-
ers and on the dire effects of compulsory labor on themselves and on their
children. In this volume Claire Robertson and Marsha Robinson “re-model
slavery as if women mattered” to extend the concept from the conven-
tional image of bondswomen in cotton fields and in the canebrakes of sugar
plantations in the Caribbean to emphasize enslaved women’s economic
values as workers and to include their physical presence in every other
way, including forced sex as work. Kenneth Morgan details the physiology
of suppressed fertility, inhibited natality, and infant mortality on planta-
tions in Jamaica, and Richard Follett demonstrates the biological stresses
of the harsh labor discipline imposed on the slave women who cultivated
sugar on the plantations of nineteenth-century Louisiana by correlating
abnormal annual cycles of natality with the peak labor demands of the
fall cutting and processing of the cane. Sugar slavery’s distortion of bio-
logical rhythms implies that sugar planters, at least in the highly competi-
tive circumstances of growing cane in the Americas, valued women more
for the work they performed than for the additional children they might
have borne under less strenuous labor.
Other studies in the present volume contribute to recent efforts to de-
mystify the white male (i.e., owners’) intense images of the women they
owned, particularly in the English Americas. These traditional views of
slave mistresses and mothers have—not entirely without contradiction—
categorized slave women there as belonging to one of two broad types,
the scheming “jezebel” or the nurturing “mammy.”
3 Elsewhere in the
Americas, particularly in Brazil but also in French Martinique, as Myriam
Cottias emphasizes, owners and public officials, regarding themselves as
custodians of the welfare of women, slave or free, gendered them as de-
pendents within large patriarchal households. They customarily (albeit
discreetly) included women other than legitimate wives, thereby render-
ing their presence less intensely emotional than for the English and North
Americans.
Discarding American stereotypes of enslaved females as passive vic-
tims brings forward the issue of their agency, their priorities, their strate-
gies. While discussion of the agency of slaves has traditionally focused on
male slaves and their resistance, notably on relatively infrequent inci-
dents of violent revolt, recent literature—including the studies offered
here—has explored the subtler ways in which women have cannily as-
sessed and expertly exploited even situations as theoretically oppressive
as enslavement to create dynamic spaces of their own.

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introduction
processes of enslavement
Violence and coercion have been considered hallmarks of enslavement:
since the eighteenth century, individual liberty became one of the most
cherished human rights, particularly in parts of the Americas, and no one
is assumed to surrender personal autonomy except under compulsion.
Brute violence had been a widely employed strategy of slaving through-
out the histories of every continent in the world, intensely so in Africa in
the recent centuries in which that continent served as a source of the
women and men enslaved in the Americas. Victors in war commonly en-
slaved the wives and daughters of the men they vanquished on fields of
battle. Armed gangs of thugs also kidnapped innocent victims, some-
times from within their own or neighboring societies. Not all kidnap
victims, often girls and women, or war captives, including men, were en-
slaved, as the abductors/ captors often kept and enslaved only those
whom they could not ransom.4
The complex politics of female enslavement in the Americas revolved
primarily around Native American women as the initial brutal con-
frontations between invading Spanish conquistadores and English settlers
in North America settled into the routinized violence of ongoing trade
and the politics of seizing or retaining land all along the settler-native
frontier, from the St. Lawrence south to Tierra del Fuego.5 In this volume,
Barbara Krauthamer reveals the ways in which enslaved African women
in the Carolina Low Country in the eighteenth century exploited these
conflicts to escape the owners of the English rice plantations of the re-
gion. The Africans who replaced the escapees along the Atlantic coasts
of both continents of the New World continued to suffer capture by vio-
lent means, though also in decreasing proportions as commercial relations
with Europeans in Africa stabilized as the eighteenth century wore on, and
as commercial debts, deceit, and corrupted legal systems supplemented
wars in generating captives.
Thus, considering enslavement in a global, rather than “Atlantic” or
American, historical context indicates that many people—often fe-
males—entered slavery through nonviolent means, notably because of
family indebtedness or impoverishment. Joseph Miller’s essay in this vol-
ume emphasizes the growing presence of merchants among the militarists
who seized women by sheer violence from ancient times; indeed, debt
was possibly the commonest cause of enslavement everywhere. Also, fa-
thers, uncles, and other representatives of fundamentally patriarchal
communities tended to try to lessen the problems of feeding the people

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gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
4
for whom they were responsible by disposing of the girls and women who
bore children in numbers they could not support; natural catastrophes,
such as famine, often triggered this defensive strategy of selling girls to
save other relatives.6 Others sought to escape hunger or abuse by offering
themselves to patrons voluntarily, accepting at least initially slavelike con-
ditions of dependency and isolation to survive, although the contributors
to this volume do not directly consider such circumstances or motivations.
However, the majority of those enslaved for indebtedness or because of a
natural catastrophe were probably women and children. Violence was in-
dispensable only in the capture and enslavement of adult males, notably
Africans destined for the Atlantic trade.
conditions of slavery for women
Although male slaves in the Americas suffered because of their slave sta-
tus, as well as the racism and often the individual perverse cruelty of
their owners, it has been contended that black slave women there suf-
fered additionally because they were female.7 In the modern commercial
societies of the Americas, all slaves were legally chattels with no control
over their working conditions, the product of their labors, the condi-
tions in which they lived, or—for women—their sexual and domestic
partners and their children. Both sexes, but particularly women, lived in
constant fear of having their partners and their children sold away from
them. Women were more vulnerable than men both to sexual abuse at
the hands of their predominantly male owners and to separation from
their children, for whom they had primary responsibility, particularly
where positive rates of reproduction generated nuclear and extended
slave families.
In slavery literature, “race” is traditionally described in terms of skin
color—the contrast between the “European” slave-owning white and
the black “African” chattel. The eventually almost comprehensive over-
lap of civic condition—slavery—and personal origin—Africa—in the
English-speaking parts of the Americas has left the two very indistinctly
differentiated, thus prompting this reference to “race” in an essay other-
wise devoted to (women and) slavery. Racial division and this logical
confusion were most evident in the Caribbean and American South,
where large groups of black slaves lived and labored segregated from pre-
dominantly white owners. Speculatively, had only men been imported
and enslaved, they could not have reproduced, and they would not have
generated the same anxieties in English colonies that fecund “jezebels”

5
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introduction
and maternal “mammies” excited. Their very presence was disconcerting
to owners determined to minimize their social and cultural existence. This
racializing “white” reaction to these black Americans living amongst
them but marginalized by enslavement may thus be said to be owing di-
rectly to the enslaved women present and their reproductive capacities.
Elsewhere in the world, patriarchal households had smoothly and dis-
creetly absorbed the majorities of girls and women enslaved. There the
universal patriarchal subordination of all females and their children
needed no supplementary exclusion by arbitrarily “racialized” (and in-
creasingly only ancestral) origin. Cottias’s essay probes the conflicts that
the 1848 French emancipation of slaves in Martinique, incidentally in-
cluding women, created between the public inclusiveness of republican
citizenship and inherited ideals of female domesticity and corresponding
exclusion from public affairs. Felipe Smith explores the distinctively
North American dilemma of the utter and tragic falsity of dichotomized
“race” as it blurred the biologically integrated descent of the citizenry of
the post–Civil War United States, white as well as black, as movingly por-
trayed in the literary production of the daughters of the generation of slave
women freed there in 1863.
But concepts of race varied over time and region throughout the
Americas, according to fluctuations in the numbers, backgrounds, and
identities of slaves and other servile groups, and “free” people. Ira Berlin’s
recent surveys of North American colonial slavery emphasize the diver-
sity of the personal backgrounds of the sailors, hustlers, dockworkers, and
others who clustered together in the taverns of seventeenth-century port
cities.8 In this volume Laura Edwards demonstrates how, in local commu-
nities in the American South as late as the antebellum era, personal
standing and respectability conflicted with growing abstract legal catego-
rization as “black” or “white,” as well as “slave” or “free.”9 Dichotomized
and politicized “race,” as well as slavery, she suggests, developed out of
the necessity to define participatory “citizens” on a still-only-emergent
level of “national” integration. The intensity of this process in the still-
only-formatively united States, her study suggests, explains the uniquely
polarized definition of “race” there and the sensitivity of the “condition
of the mother”—as Smith puts it—in determining which children born
there belonged and which, as slaves, did not. Beyond owners’ economic
interests in the value of the children born, which were also intense but
which do not figure prominently in the novels Smith examines, the still-
fragile (and eminently, and increasingly, false) identity of “Americans”
as white, and dominantly of English descent, was at stake—in spite of

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gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
6
the long-standing intimate relations that Edwards describes in the 1840s
for the grandmothers of these writers of the 1890s.
“Color” might have been used earlier and elsewhere to describe indi-
viduals, among many other references to various personal attributes and
accomplishments, but it did not operate as a blanket political mecha-
nism of exclusion or even of individual condemnation. “Color,” as dis-
tinct from politicized and categorical “race,” operated in this relatively
incidental way in all earlier and less tensely nationalizing contexts, even
elsewhere in the Americas. Attempts by Winthrop Jordan10 and others to
derive North American slavery from Elizabethan English color symbol-
ism founder on their failure to recognize this distinction between per-
sonal attribute and political categorization. The early literature high-
lighted the greatly varied relations between race and slavery throughout
the Americas in spite of the uniform enslavement of Africans but failed
to take account of the influence of varying female abilities to reproduce.
As Miller’s survey of the dynamics of the changes under way suggests,
Brazil’s apparent openness to the “mulatto” (in modern racialized terms11)
children of the women brought there in slavery may have derived from
the ability of slave owners there to replenish labor forces with new
African males, in contrast to the dependence of North American planters
on the reproduction of their enslaved women. Of course, Brazil also
lacked the small, intimate households of male owner, (recognized) wife,
and legitimate children that excluded the unrecognized “black” children
of the master from the family estate. Further, well into the twentieth
century Brazilian society had a less-developed civic sphere from which to
exclude the humble by means of racial categorization. Thus the differing
presences and positions of African women and their North American- or
Brazilian- or Caribbean-born daughters and their varying conditions as
slaves were prominent among the factors determining modern variations
of “race” throughout the hemisphere.
In the Hispanic colonies, the women taken there in slavery arrived ear-
lier in the seventeenth century, were relatively less numerous,12 and were
taken more often into the large households of merchants, ecclesiastics,
and officials. The preponderance of males among the Africans and the
intimacy of the domestic and urban environments in which they lived
together quickly moved the children born to African women, as well as
by other women to African men, into the familiar range there of castas,
varying legally recognized combinations of personal descent from
Africans, Native Americans, Spaniards, Romani (“gypsies”), and others;
these were categories of persons, not politicized racial categories.13 With

7
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introduction
independence in the Spanish mainland colonies in the early nineteenth
century, egalitarian republican ideals overcame the relatively minor po-
litical significance of descent and the small numbers of the enslaved to
end slavery.
In the British and French Caribbean, similarly smaller numbers of
women, and the tendency that Richard Morgan documents here to work
the women enslaved to infertility or even death, similarly diminished sen-
sitivities like those in North America to the “race” of the children that
the favored few among the women enslaved bore to their masters. The
fathers of these locally born children, described as “colored” but not en-
tirely excluded civically, were usually not their owners, who were mostly
absentees settling into comfortable and respectable family life in the
English countryside. Rather, the white fathers were hired managers,
overseers, and other English men of lesser stature in a society that
revered personal connections and patronage as much or more than cate-
gorical civic standing. Only with the simultaneous—and not merely co-
incidentally so—abolition of slavery and democratization of political
participation in the 1830s did “color” become politically sensitized, and
thus racialized. But in these English colonies, “color” coincided also with
“local” (that is, island-born and hence “colonial” in the context of in-
creasingly troubled relations with the metropole), with class (middling,
that is, artisans and merchants), and with culture (relatively Anglicized).
With emancipation and the threatened meaningful enfranchisement of
the more recently arrived Africans, the “colored” children of slave women
contributed to increasingly racialized local civic orders—in differing ways
on different islands—by referring to “color” to distinguish themselves from
the impoverished freed people, and siding with their fathers rather than
with their mothers. In this volume, Henrice Altink delineates the central-
ity of enslaved women to these intricately gendered processes of racializa-
tion. Cottias and Bernard Moitt show how their specific presence played
out in the French islands. Moitt adds emphasis on how women in the
French Antilles who managed to purchase themselves used their freedom
to purchase their children, as distinct from acknowledging the fathers by
that means. That is, they asserted their identities as reproducers. Their fi-
nancial neglect of the unacknowledged fathers may implicitly confirm
their children’s paternal origin among French males, thus citizens of the
Republic in no need whatsoever of being bought out of slavery.
“Race” in all its subtle and thoroughly historical variants may thus be
both distinguished from the “condition of the mother” as a slave and then
related to slavery by emphasizing the presence of women among the

campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 8
gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
8
enslaved. The key variable lies in slave women’s ability, or failure, to re-
produce American-born children. The economic value of the children
was, of course, important, and Robertson and Robinson emphasize this ele-
ment of the calculus as the “labor” component of the worth of women’s
work as slaves. But their enslavement obviated the need to politicize
“race” as a means of controlling their offspring, as suggested by the rela-
tively open acceptance of Afro-Brazilians and the pre-emancipation tol-
eration of “colored” communities in the French Antilles (in French, gens
de couleur) and the British West Indies. The more women who were pre-
sent among the slaves and reproducing, the greater their economic value
and the greater the sensitivity of the societies in which they lived to the
families they raised—all of which intensified the tensions by including
proportions of girls and women half again as large—at least—as the At-
lantic trade delivered African women to American shores. North Amer-
ica was the extreme case.
female agency as slaves
Ungendered slaves, implicitly male, are often portrayed as having only
three options when subjected to the violence and abuses characteristic of
slave-owning societies: submission, flight or revolt—all of them implic-
itly masculine strategies. However, in reality the work and lives of women
as slaves varied considerably more widely than did those of males, as did
their reactions to the differing kinds of exploitation that women and men
suffered. Whereas male slaves in Western systems of slavery were valued
predominantly for their physical strength, and from the mid-seventeenth
century were employed mostly as unskilled manual labor, for the slave
owner female slaves represented assets of greater flexibility and thus more
potential uses—including reproduction.
In large-scale, particularly deeply indebted economic sectors, women
were forced into the same types of heavy labor as men. The conventional
Atlantic model of slavery is constructed around “plantations”—classi-
cally Caribbean sugar, but also rice and tobacco in colonial North Amer-
ica, later cotton in the United States, and also coffee (and also often-
neglected cotton) in Brazil—in which women worked unrelentingly
alongside men. Thus on the Caribbean sugar plantations, as Laurence
Brown and Tara Inniss as well as Morgan detail, adult men and women
comprised the “first” and “second” gangs assigned to hard labor in the
canebrakes.14 However, this system was far from universal, even in the
Americas, and it was significantly differentiated for women and men. In

9
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introduction
eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, as Mariza de Carvalho Soares sug-
gests, as well as elsewhere in Brazil as proposed by Miller, slaves, male and
female, were employed in a wide variety of tasks, often sexually differen-
tiated, some of which involved considerable lack of constraint and the
opportunity for self-enrichment. Women in towns in Brazil and the
Caribbean were especially evident in petty trading.15 Even in parts of the
United States not ordinarily portrayed as open to female initiative, as
Edwards shows for largely rural counties in the antebellum South, bonds-
women subtly and artfully manipulated the personal connections they
had built, even in slavery, beyond the domains of their owners.
Unlike men, female slaves were also valued for their reproductive ca-
pacities, for their nurturing abilities as uniquely female wet-nurses and
maternally experienced nannies, for their more arbitrarily gendered do-
mestic house skills, and for sexual services that only they—as physically
women—could provide for white males. The emotionality of the politi-
cal debates swirling around the acceptable Jamaican “housekeeper,” po-
tentially virtuous (in spite of her “race”)—as distinct from the more
probably guilt-induced image of the scheming “jezebel”—that Altink
traces reveals the extent to which a relationship originating in purely
physical terms between some slave women and lonely masters, unencum-
bered by competing wives, could result in fondness, even respect, on
both sides. This greater variety of often intimate positions available to
women slaves in turn presented them with a potentially wider range of
strategies than the violent few at the disposal of enslaved males. Sex is a
powerful tool, emotionally as well as physically.
Scholars have conventionally focused on revolt as the ungendered
slave reaction to exploitation. This emphasis on violence has heightened
the not fully merited attention given to male slaves, who comprised by
far the largest number of those who planned or executed rebellions, and
who formed large majorities in maroon communities in the Americas.
There are cases of women voluntarily joining such “rebels,” and
Krauthamer analyzes in subtle detail the strategies of enslaved women in
the South Carolina Low Country escaping to the Native American
Creek towns inland from the eighteenth-century southern seaboard that
served as the equivalents to maroon refuges in the Caribbean or in Brazil.
Recent work on the allegedly “African” so-called maroon quilombo of
Palmares in northeastern Brazil (modern Alagoas) has turned up archaeo-
logical evidence—mostly pots, made by women—of a strong Native
American presence, presumably and quite reasonably therefore women,
given the sexual demography of flight.16

campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 10
10 gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
African women in these settlements were relatively scarce, since fe-
male slaves characteristically refrained from fleeing, often to remain on
plantations or in households with their children. The overwhelming ma-
jorities of men in maroon communities therefore sometimes resorted to
stealing the women they desired, for sexual services and for companion-
ship. However, as Robertson and Robinson remind us, the heavy labor
demands placed on women in these encampments was also very likely a
consideration in limiting their interest in fleeing to them to escape slav-
ery. In addition, maroon bands sought sanctuary in remote and generally
inhospitable areas, where the harsh realities of life in forest locations de-
liberately chosen for difficulty of access and therefore in terrain that was
difficult to cultivate may well have acted as a further disincentive to fe-
male flight there. The fieldwork to which they would there be compelled
to dedicate themselves could hardly have seemed more attractive than
the work they performed on English or Portuguese or French plantations.
Krauthamer, in this volume, explores these contradictory considerations
in terms of women who fled Carolina rice fields to the Creeks.
The male maroons were thus left to raid the plantations for food and
supplies in order to survive. Few established a viably independent exis-
tence. Women tended to move more slowly than men and were thus
recaptured more easily. Also, slave owners possibly exercised greater
degrees of surveillance over female slaves, notably in situations where a
pronounced sexual division of slave labor concentrated women within
and around the masters’ households. Thirdly, women with commitments
to children and other enslaved kin or friends seldom considered flight or
revolt a preferred option; in this volume Cottias and Krauthamer accent
this consideration of enslaved women as reproducers.17
Nuanced analyses of slavery recognize that neither revolt nor flight
was the sole or even necessarily the most effective response to slavery.
Some forms of female slave resistance that took advantage of the specific
attributes of women—thus converting potential vulnerabilities to
strengths—are beginning to feature in the literature. In this volume,
Edwards notes the ability of female slaves in the American South to ma-
nipulate rumors about white slave owners in order to damage their repu-
tations in white society and also to undermine an owner’s prosperity by
humiliating themselves to diminish their value as human assets.18
Another form of female resistance that some Caribbeanist scholars have
seen as widespread and often costly to their owners was bondswomen’s
alleged refusal to bear children. However, as both Morgan and Follett
emphasize in this volume, the reasons for the generally low rate of slave

11
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introduction
reproduction in the West Indies were multiple and included a lethal
range of physiological effects of overwork and undernourishment.19 The
physical and emotional stresses of slave life, the unsanitary conditions
imposed on the slaves, and lethal tropical and subtropical disease envi-
ronments where sugar grew profitably all depressed fertility and raised
rates of infant mortality. Where a flourishing and well-financed trade in
new Africans made replacements abundant and cheap, chiefly in the
eighteenth-century Caribbean and in colonial Brazil, slave owners had
little incentive to invest in measures that might promote natality. How-
ever, the rates of female slave reproduction did not improve even when
slave owners imported younger slaves (as in nineteenth-century Brazil) or
improved living conditions and provided primitive health care for slaves
(as in the era of “ameliorization” in the early-nineteenth-century West In-
dies), or where some slave women enjoyed comparatively more comfort-
able—if not leisured—lifestyles (as in Rio de Janeiro), implying that factors
other than physical hardship were at work, including measures adopted
by slave women to reduce conceptions and to induce early abortions.20
In this volume, however, Morgan contextualizes this contention of
political intent in the physiology of reproduction under the brutalities of
Jamaican sugar slavery. He concludes that the sheer physical exhaustion
of forced labor in the canebrakes might have enabled antinatalist strate-
gies, since it reduced fertility to marginal levels susceptible even to crude
abortive and other techniques. Even so, sheer physical depletion proba-
bly was a factor of greater demographic significance than the political
strategies that women slaves might have developed out of their bodily
capacities as females. Follett’s analysis of the uniquely detailed records of
natality on Louisiana sugar estates confirms this argument, since the evi-
dent consistency of seasonal variations in births there with both work
routines and nutrition seems to overwhelm intentional political strategies
that presumably would not have varied throughout the year. We would
observe also that the intricate relations of “production” and “reproduc-
tion” suggested here represent a significant and historicizing advance in
conceptualizing this trope in the literature on women and slavery, as
Robertson and Robinson cite literature that dichotomizes the two as logi-
cally incompatible abstractions. Logically, they may contrast; but histori-
cally, they both are among the multiple factors present in any given time
and place, and in correspondingly varying combinations.
Thus, Follett, Morgan, and other scholars question a simplistic attri-
bution of political intent or of the sheer ability of women slaves to con-
trol their reproductive bodies as significant influences on natality in the

campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 12
12 gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
dangerous disease environments and brutal work regimens of sugar slav-
ery.21 Enslaved women could have curtailed their own reproduction out
of a desire to avoid lives of slavery for their children, but only to limited
degrees. In more instances they may, as women subject to the particular
female burdens of slavery, have wanted simply to avoid the physical and
material costs of bearing children. Or, as Cottias, Brown and Inniss, Smith,
and Miller demonstrate in varying ways, they may have more often
strategized politically in personal terms, not as a collective and categori-
cal statement against slavery, to optimize their individual opportunities
within it. Sexual relations with masters worked, as Altink suggests, at
least for some; however infrequent the opportunities for or low the
chances of success might be, it was an alternative more promising to
women, uniquely as women, than resigning themselves to the ungen-
dered isolation and neglect, if not also violence, of labor in the fields.
Enslaved females developed other tactics to improve their conditions
of living and work.22 Chief among these were matrifocal networks of kin,
forged on both blood and fictive lines, again utilizing their ability to re-
produce to lessen the burdens of forced production. Slave kinship relied
not on single male heads of co-resident nuclear families but rather on a
woman or a number of women. To the extent that owners tended to re-
tain women more than men, clearly because of their potential as repro-
ducers or nurturers, as well as sexual objects, these networks were more
stable than male-centred strategies, since men were more likely than
women to be sold or to escape. These matrifocal networks provided vital
social and emotional support to all slaves. They also pulled in “kin” to as-
sist in a wide variety of self-help measures, from the cultivation of small
garden plots to providing child care for young mothers separated from
their offspring to toil in the fields. Female networks like these may also
have tended to decent burials for their members, privately—unlike men’s
public use of the Catholic Lay Brotherhood of Santo Elesbão and Santa
Efigênia in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.23 It has even been con-
tended that the overall experience of slavery enabled black women to
claim an authority in America that they had lacked in Africa, although
Soares argues that slave women could draw on African precedent for fe-
male authority.24
Some of the early literature crudely ascribed matrifocality among slave
families in the Americas to extensions of central African “matrilineal-
ity.”25 In fact, female-centered households and local networks of quasi
“kin” had no significant precedents in Africa. Matrilineality lodged au-
thority over children primarily in males, the children’s uncles (mother’s

13
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introduction
brothers, hence matri-lineal) rather than in their fathers. The particular
hardships of Western slavery provided ample reason for the women living
together to care for one another and one another’s children, using the
terms of extended kinship from their personal backgrounds—and, for later
generations, from their ancestry—to characterize entirely new and cre-
ative responses to the otherwise isolating conditions in which they lived.
In this volume, Brown and Inniss delineate the multiple dimensions of
these women-centred families and networks in Barbados, as strategies of
women. American slavery denied the formation of a conjugal estate, a
prohibition for which there was no African precedent. Insofar as matri-
lineality displaced authority over children from their fathers by tracing de-
scent exclusively through their mothers, it condemned them to slavery as
property of their owners, and later to exclusion on racial grounds.
The separation of female and male domestic spheres may have been
more significant than “lineality,” matri- or patri-, for women’s strategies
of surviving slavery as mothers. Separate residences for men and women,
even as sexual partners and as parents, made economic sense by deriving
income from two different sources. Emotionally, it lessened the—again
African—heritage of patriarchal authority within the family. Their chil-
dren, thus by implication their capacities as reproducing females, again
figure prominently in the strategies of women peculiar to the highly com-
mercial slavery of plantations in the Americas.
The descent rule of Western slavery—that the children followed the
condition of the mother—also divorced biological fathers, free and white
as well as “black” and slave, from any responsibility for, and often—for
the enslaved—access to, their offspring. The taboo forbidding recogni-
tion of children of masters’ sexual exploitation of their slave women oper-
ated most strongly in English/British colonies. In Jamaica, and presumably
most other islands of the Caribbean, the enslaved partners in conjugal
relationships lived on different plantations and could not share in raising
infants they might have, for reasons of sheer practicality. Sale of a slave,
for financial purposes or as a punishment, or distribution of the estates of
deceased owners, separated mothers from their children less often than it
sent adolescent and adult males off on their own. The pro-natal “amelio-
ration” procedures adopted late in the history of slavery in British
colonies rewarded women as mothers but not men as fathers. Diverse ex-
periences in Africa, most of them in fact strongly patrilineal as well as
patriarchal, could not have significantly contributed to the matrifocal and
female-centered networks that women trapped together in slavery in the
Americas created for themselves.

campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 14
14 gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
They also made these “kinship” systems means of sustaining cultural
resistance to their owners. Within such networks of kinship, women elabo-
rated ritual and belief systems, adapting and integrating elements both from
their homelands and from Europe—notably Christianity, Catholic in
Brazil, as Soares’s paper demonstrates in intricate and intriguing detail.
These shared customs of their own they also expressed in food rituals,
dress and adornment, religion and magic.26 A well-known example is the
female rise to prominence in the candomblé “circles” among slave and
freed women in northeastern Brazil.27
Sometimes the slave-owning society intervened, as in the earlier cen-
turies in colonial Brazil, termed “baroque” by Soares, when the monarch
charged the Catholic Church with channeling slave efforts to transcend
their condition into hierarchical, male-dominated black “brotherhoods.”
Nevertheless, slave women challenged even these enclaves of male
power, as Soares shows in her remarkable history of Victoria “Coura,” an
ex-slave woman in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro.28 Slave women,
she shows, became ironically empowered within slavery and assertive
within their families and communities, slave and freed, in ways that con-
trasted sharply with the conventionally accepted image of female sub-
missiveness and obscurity in the larger slave-owning society.29 Analysis of
“slaves” simply as labor, proprietarial and dominated, cannot reveal the
gendered struggles within slavery any more than it can reveal the sexual
and reproductive strategies of enslaved women to survive within slavery—
itself a female strategy of resisting, as women, the masculinized ideology
of the civic exclusion, hence invisibility. Miller suggests intricate and
varying but very substantive distinctions along these lines between gen-
der and slavery that enabled enslaved women in the Americas to play off
their multiple standings in these plural spheres to their personal advan-
tage, and to the prospective advantage of their children.
Where the slave-owning society intensified civic standing to modern
levels of prominence, female slaves adopted strategies to participate also in
the institutions articulating it. Recent literature has revealed the consid-
erable extent to which slaves, including women, exploited the openness of
the Spanish judicial institutions necessary to create and control colonies to
press their claims against their masters.30 Even in the nineteenth-century
United States, as Edwards reveals, female slaves acted upon the widespread
recognition within local white communities that slaves were simultane-
ously “property” and “people” deserving of respect for socially responsible
behavior. Some even developed ways to influence the practice of local
law in their own favor.31

15
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introduction
Slave women’s involvement in the slave-owning societies in which
they lived, essentially a “fifth-column” strategy, has been caricatured—
no doubt by way of denying the real power of the strategy—as the South-
ern plantation “mammy.” This idealized maternal presence was devoted
to her master’s household, a woman characterized by “rectitude, meek-
ness, loyalty, unselfishness, a profound and sincere faith, devotion to the
point of sacrifice, and a love of the family and children.”32 All these were
qualities of the free, white domestic “wife and mother” developed at the
same time in the broader gendering of the culture of the nineteenth-
century United States.
The ideal domestic slave was a woman who had prior experience of
work within a slave-owning household and came with a recommendation
from her former master. Altink explores the ambiguities of the Jamaican
slave women euphemistically accepted within white society, even at its
higher levels, as “housekeepers.” They raised respectable children of their
fathers, even though they were also slaves by virtue of their mother’s sta-
tus.33 The female slave companion of the master—often derogated as
“concubine,” seldom dignified as “mistress”—was a ubiquitous figure in
the plantation zones of colonial and imperial Brazil, romanticized in ret-
rospect in Gilberto Freyre’s famous sociology of cultural and sexual mis-
cegenation, as Miller accents.34
Some historians have interpreted the quasi-familial bonds forged be-
tween slaves and the members of the slave-owning family as “mammy,”
and also “auntie,” both diminutives of legitimate mothers and aunts,35 as
self-serving collaboration by enslaved women that ignored the greater
political interests of slaves in general. Although they demonstrate a fe-
male slave agency designed to alleviate personal hardships and overcome
the isolation of slavery by creating a pseudo-family life, positions within
the relatively trusting bosom of the master’s family offered these female
slaves endless opportunities to divert and extend the provisions and pro-
tection they received to members of their immediate families, and be-
yond them throughout the less privileged cohorts of slaves.36
Slave women who became the sexual partners or concubines of white
men trod more treacherous personal and ideological terrain. Among
whites, these women fed the caricature of the sensuous young black
“jezebel” who threatened to undermine the family-based moral values of
slave-owning society, and with them the central position of the legiti-
mate wife rendered respectable as “white.”37 Slave women in informal li-
aisons might empower themselves through manipulating the white male,
in some cases to the point that they obtained their freedom and joined

campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 16
16 gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
the slave-owning society themselves. Their freedom gave them opportu-
nities to free their own children, and this pattern appeared frequently in
the coastal cities of colonial Brazil, and also in Barbados as Brown and
Inniss detail in this volume. The issue, as Altink shows, acquired enor-
mous political sensitivity in early-nineteenth-century Jamaica, as the
freed descendants of masters and their slaves threatened to assume local
political power in the unsettled politics of the era of emancipation.38 Ed-
wards shows how one domestic slave, Violet, in an extended white South
Carolina planter family, confronted the son of the master and his wife on
the basis of the highly personal privileges that she had evidently enjoyed
in the household of the father.39
In societies governed by modern commercialized and civic categorical
legal systems, which Edwards insightfully delineates as a creation of the
nineteenth-century Atlantic region, unlike those governed by the Islamic
Sharia or other earlier and much more personalistic seventeenth-century
and earlier eighteenth-century European systems (including those of
England and France), carried to the early colonies in the Hispanic and
Lusophone Americas, the children of a slave woman and slave owner
were not routinely freed if legally acknowledged by their father. Among
the most extraordinary of such “successes” in North America was that of
Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, enslaved in 1806 in Senegal, who was
taken to Florida, where she became the concubine of her owner, Zepha-
niah Kingsley Jr., to whom she eventually bore four children. Kingsley
subsequently married Anna Madgigine Jai, and in 1812, the year after he
emancipated her and their children, she bought a five-acre plantation
and twelve slaves.40 Such successful transitions from the civic exclusion
of slavery to success in the public sphere of a slave society were essen-
tially individual, benefiting the women concerned and the offspring fa-
thered by her owner, leaving the premise of slavery intact. Edwards con-
trasts the personalism of local communities in the antebellum U.S. South,
which could recognize such individuals, even in slavery, with the exclu-
sions defined by national courts as they categorize all slaves as “property”
totally subject to the most brutal manifestations of absolute ownership.41
Finally, the great sensitivity in modern Western cultures to the pres-
ence of female slaves, and again unlike Africa, Asia, and even Europe be-
fore the sixteenth century, also reflects the growing importance of the
nuclear family as a property-owning entity in a commercial culture based
in individualism. Bondswomen acquired their images as dangerously sexu-
ally alluring, if not also fecund, jezebels or as safely postmaternal “mam-
mies” as they and their children, empowered by growing degrees of civic

17
campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 17
introduction
“freedom,” became potential competitors for the interests of the legiti-
mate wife and her family in the master’s estate. Successive New World
regimes thus adapted the ancient Roman rule assigning the civil status of
the child according to the condition of the mother, free or slave, not
only denying the reproductive potential of the “jezebel” but also defini-
tively excluding the master’s offspring of her fantasized sexuality from any
inheritance, except by express, public, and potentially humiliating manu-
mission or testament.
These “legitimist” politics were realized in degrees varying throughout
the slave colonies of the Americas. British North America led the way, fol-
lowing the ability of English women to survive in mid-seventeenth-century
Virginia. In Jamaica, as Altink shows, British-based planting families con-
demned practices that they could not prevent. Brazilians accepted and
even retrospectively celebrated the cultural and human contributions
made by their female slaves.42
manumission, or self-purchase
Of the bondswomen in the Americas who obtained manumissions, rela-
tively few did so through becoming the concubines or acknowledged
companions of free white men of slave-owning households. More numer-
ous were the female slaves, from Brazil to the Caribbean, but not in the
United States, who purchased their freedom by accumulating sufficient
funds to do so, and sometimes that of their children as well. In French
colonies, the move to self-manumission by rachat (redemption, a euphem-
ism for “purchase”) among slave women of mixed European and African
heritages gained momentum in the face of the refusal of white slave own-
ers to acknowledge the children of their sexual liaisons with slave women
by freeing them. The creation of the ideologically humanist French Re-
public had evidently sensitized French slave owners in the Antilles to the
same threats to “legitimist” wives and affines that limited legal—though
not personal, to judge from Edwards’s Carolina legal cases—recognition of
slave mistresses in the United States. Moitt reveals a surprisingly large
number of such women in early-nineteenth-century French Guiana, Mar-
tinique, and Guadeloupe who sought to purchase liberty for themselves
and their children. The French state proved amenable to their strategy,
even subsidizing slave women’s self-redemption; slave owners, whose agree-
ment they had to obtain, and who were considerably less dedicated to ab-
stract human rights, were less accommodating. Female owners of slaves—
themselves not enfranchised, and therefore perhaps more dependent for

campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 18
18 gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
personal standing and material comfort on the other women even more
excluded from the civic realm—proved even more hostile than male mas-
ters to permitting women slaves to buy their freedom.43
Before 1800, and for most slaves for a long time after that, manumis-
sion thus had little to do with civic “freedom.” While slavery endured,
free women did not possess the franchise, even in the most developed
western civic regimes; in their private lives the patriarchal domestic
household prevailed. In North America at least, as several works have re-
cently emphasized, manumission ended slave women’s pervading fears of
separation from kith and kin, through sale.44 It mattered relatively little
to them that it rarely also brought the passport to the autonomy and dig-
nity for which “freedom” came to stand in the minds of male ex-slaves in
the later nineteenth-century United States. The bonds of familial affec-
tion and passionate love severed by racial separation was a tragic heritage
of slavery, as explored by Smith. If the sentiments of women writers in
the Jim Crow era there reflected attitudes they had absorbed from their
enslaved mothers’ generation, “freedom” meant family. Personal or civic
“freedom” for most emancipated women remained curtailed by a white
patriarchal society that envisaged them racially as inferior and wanton
beings who should follow respectable white women in welcoming the
protection of male authority through marriage and limiting their activi-
ties to the domestic and religious spheres.
Former bondswomen resisted such pressures. As Brown and Inniss
point out with reference to Barbados, former slave women fought to
translate “freedom” into a vision of “family life” inspired by the kinship
networks, fictive or biological, forged in slavery.45 Indeed, it was only
through this struggle in the transition to “freedom” that the structure
and dynamics of families created by slaves under slavery in the West In-
dies became visible, in contrast to the American South, where slaves of-
ficially reconstituted families dispersed by the antebellum trade in slaves
though availing themselves of postemancipation legal opportunities. In
both regions emancipation revealed the importance of extended family
networks and non-co-residential male-female partnerships rather than
two-parent nuclear slave households. These broad and flexible “clusters
of households of maternal kin”
46 had become critically important for the
survival of plantation slaves in the British West Indies, at least in the
generation that came of age by the last days of slavery, nearly three
decades after abolition of the trade.
In the “transition” from slavery to freedom—a kind of categorical re-
versal, a civic rebirth, as white abolitionists and former slave owners saw

19
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introduction
it—these female slave networks were to be replaced with nuclear patri-
centric families, reinforced—and controlled—by legalized marriage and
its accompanying paternalist image of the domesticity of all females.
Thus in the French West Indies, abolition rendered freed slave women
subordinate to men as legal “minors” and excluded them from the vote,
one of the primary rights of their newly gained French citizenship. Such
civic subordination came close, in some cases, to a transfer of ownership
rights from former slave owner to husband. Certainly for the assertive
abolitionist state, patriarchal control was a vital means to ensure that
newly freed women conformed to conventional patriarchal and domestic
institutions of domination rather than establish potentially socially and
politically destabilizing alternatives based on maternal-centered house-
holds and nonlegal sexual and marital unions.47 Former slave women’s re-
sistance to state-sponsored patriarchy also fed the fear in white society
that in “free” female society they might sow the seeds of what they con-
sidered to have been the female licentiousness, increasingly racialized,
characteristic of slavery.48
For planters and other owners of enslaved women, the patriarchal nu-
clear family had been a means to form small work units that could be ma-
nipulated to supply their labor cheaply to meet the financial require-
ments of the plantation economy. When formerly slave parents in the
British West Indies resisted government attempts to force their free chil-
dren into “apprenticeship” on the plantations, planters reacted by de-
priving the parents of access to basic resources previously used to support
families, such as garden plots, accommodation, and medical care, in an
attempt to force their children off their parents’ homesteads as the hard-
ships of drought and famine had once, in Africa, compelled parents to
sacrifice their offspring to slave dealers in the hope of saving their lives.49
By examining women as slaves in the Americas, this volume illustrates
the many variations through time and space that slave owners used to
exploit them as females. Women carried enormous weight in the fan-
tasies of power, sexual as well as economic and political, of male masters
from the United States south to the Caribbean and Brazil, driving them
to harass sexually and to abuse physically and mentally the women aban-
doned by the state—though less so by the Catholic Church—to their
“owners.” Moreover, bondswomen were less likely than male slaves to re-
volt against such abuses, or to flee and thus abandon their families and
painfully constructed female networks within their enslavement. How-
ever, the more varied and remunerative occupations of enslaved women,

campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 20
20 gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
compared to their male counterparts, presented them with greater options
to survive, beyond sheer resistance, than the violence to which competi-
tive free male brutality forced enslaved men to resort. These female
strategies of survival, of dignified endurance of humiliation, of preserving
self and progeny, ranged from the forming of matrifocal kinship systems to
ingratiating themselves as domestic “mammies” and working their ways
into their owner’s households as concubines. Tragically, by the Roman
and modern Western rule of inheritance of the slave condition through
women, they thus also risked condemning their children to slavery and
themselves to the further challenges, ardently pursued by their masters’
legitimate wives, of having to purchase freedom for their children, often
at prices greatly inflated by the intense emotionalism of these exchanges.
Some also found ways to undermine the reputation of their owners
through rumor mongering or influencing local legal judgments in favor of
acknowledging their personal presence as women, beyond their civic sta-
tus as slaves.
Female slaves achieved manumission in greater numbers than men be-
fore the general movement to abolish slavery, many through exploiting
their positions as concubines or devoted domestics, not to mention as
mothers—acknowledged or not—of their masters’ children. Some freed
female slaves readily adapted to the rules of “free” Western society, a few
themselves even becoming owners of slaves; perhaps their racially shaky
standing in civic society compelled them to compensate by controlling
others rendered even more vulnerable than themselves, by enslavement.
Once legally freed, women did not acquire the same civic liberty as
their male counterparts, to whom they were generally forced, through
marriage, to submit. However, some—at least in Barbados—strove to re-
sist this renewed exclusion by maintaining matrifocal networks akin to
those that they had forged in slavery. One senses a similar strategy in the
French Islands. In the United States, they seem to have chosen the nu-
clear domestic family as their strategy; or, perhaps, the legal circumstances
in which emancipation left them made husbands the advantageous choice,
if only the lesser of two necessary evils. Ironically, free white women, con-
fined in patriarchal households without that option, focused on securing
their children’s access to their husbands’ wealth, and presumably their
own futures as matriarchs.
Future research on bondswomen in Western and non-Western systems
of slavery will reveal still more about the strategies by which women in
slavery throughout the Americas sought to protect themselves and their
children.50 As this introductory essay has suggested, it will also give more

21
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introduction
information about the distinctive roles of women slaves in intimate rela-
tionships of all sorts—even in the burgeoning Western commercial cul-
ture—and about their advantages as women, despite the growing cate-
gorical exclusion of slaves in Western nation-states that grew out of
slavery, and the subsequent exclusion of both “blacks” and “women” from
direct civic participation. Women’s voluntary associations—“white” and
“black,” religious and secular—thrived in every register throughout the
hemisphere, while a few determined suffragettes took on the political
challenge directly. We hope that the studies in this volume start to
reimagine, to rephrase Robinson and Robertson’s title, women in slavery
and in freedom in ways that overcome the invisibility imposed upon
them by these modern commercial and national ideological worlds.
notes
1. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery,
vol. 1, Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2007), hereafter referred to as the companion volume in this set.
2. “Women in Western Systems of Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 2
(2005), special issue, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller. For
the papers on Mauritius, Cape Town, and the South African Republic included
there as “Western” see the companion volume in this set.
3. Henrice Altink, “Deviant and Dangerous: Proslavery Representations of Ja-
maican Slave Women’s Sexuality, ca. 1780–1834,” in this volume, places these im-
ages at the center of her analysis.
4. See, e.g., Gwyn Campbell, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar,
1750–1895 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 42; “Indian Slaves in
South Africa” (http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/solidarity/indiasa3.html, ac-
cessed 11/03/05); Paul E. Lovejoy, “Internal Markets or an Atlantic-Sahara Divide?
How Women Fit into the Slave Trade of West Africa,” in the companion volume in
this set.
5. Juliana Barr, “From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the
Borderlands,” Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (2005): 19–46; and Brett Rush-
forth, “‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,”
William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2003): 777–808, among others. To date these
studies are primarily confined to North America; the almost certainly comparably
gendered aspect of ongoing enslavement of, and trade with, the natives of Por-
tuguese Brazil has received less extensive attention, with the exception of the fa-
mous bandeirantes of seventeenth-century São Paulo; John Manuel Monteiro, Negros
da terra: Índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo ([São Paulo]: Companhia das
Letras, 1994).
6. See Gwyn Campbell, “Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour in the Indian
Ocean World,” in “The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia,” ed.

campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 22
22 gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
Gwyn Campbell, special issue of Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 2 (2003); Joseph C.
Miller, “The Significance of Drought, Disease, and Famine in the Agriculturally Mar-
ginal Zones of West-Central Africa,” Journal of African History 23, no. 1 (1982): 17–61.
7. Deborah G. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New
York: Norton, 1985).
8. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); shorter version in the
expanded coverage of Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves
(Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2003).
9. Laura F. Edwards, “Enslaved Women and the Law: Paradoxes of Subordination
in the Postrevolutionary Carolinas,” in this volume.
10. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,
1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
11. Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and
the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971).
12. David Eltis, “The Volume and Structure of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A
Reassessment,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): 17–46.
13. Magali Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colo-
nial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003);
Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century México (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
14. Laurence Brown and Tara Inniss, “Slave Women, Family Strategies, and the
Transition to Freedom in Barbados, 1834–1841,” in this volume. The uniformity of
low skill levels was less the case in mines, where African slave labor was often skilled.
15. See, e.g., Mariza de Carvalho Soares, “Can Women Guide or Govern Men?
Gendering Politics among African Catholics in Colonial Brazil,” in this volume.
16. Pedro Paulo A. Funari, “Maroon, Race and Gender: Palmares Material Cul-
ture and Social Relations in a Runaway Settlement,” in Historical Archaeology: Back
from the Edge, ed. Pedro Paulo A. Funari, Siân Jones, and Martin Hall (London:
Routledge, 1999), 308–27.
17. See Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New
World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), for by far the
most sophisticated development of this emphasis.
18. Edwards, “Enslaved Women.”
19. Kenneth Morgan, “Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, ca.
1776–1834,” in this volume.
20. E.g., Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (London:
James Currey, 1990), and “Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in
British Caribbean Slave Societies,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in
the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1996), or Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man:
Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1978); Marietta Morrissey, “Women’s Work, Family Formation, and Reproduction
among Caribbean Slaves,” in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, ed. Hilary
McD. Beckles and Verene Shepherd (New York: Markus Wiener, 1999), 670–82.

23
campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 23
introduction
21. Richard Follett, “Gloomy Melancholy: Sexual Reproduction among Louisi-
ana Slave Women, 1840–60,” in this volume; see also Morgan, “Slave Women and
Reproduction.”
22. See, e.g., Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black
Women’s Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
23. Soares, “Can Women Guide or Govern Men?”
24. Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery; see also Soares, “Can Women Guide or Govern Men?”
25. E.g., Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925
(New York: Pantheon, 1976).
26. Soares, “Can Women Guide or Govern Men?” See also Wendy Wilson Fall,
“Malagasy in Antebellum Maryland and Virginia: Discovering Oral Traditions and
Re-visiting Written Histories,” unpublished presentation, conference on “Slavery,
Unfree Labour and Revolt in Asia and the Indian Ocean Region / L’esclavage, la main-
d’oeuvre forcée et la révolte en Asie et dans les pays riverains de l’Océan indien”
(Colloque international/ International Conference, Avignon, 4–6 October 2001).
27. Maria Inês Côrtes de Oliveira, “The Reconstruction of Ethnicity in Bahia:
The Case of the Nagô in the Nineteenth Century,” 158–80, and João José Reis,
“Ethnic Politics among Africans in Nineteenth-Century Bahia,” 240–64, both in
Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy and
David V. Trotman (London: Continuum, 2003).
28. Soares, “Can Women Guide or Govern Men?”
29. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman; Brown & Inniss, “Slave Family.”
30. Jane Landers, “African-American Women and Their Pursuit of Rights
Through Eighteenth-Century Spanish Texts,” in Haunted Bodies: Gender and South-
ern Texts, ed. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson (Charlottesville: Uni-
versity Press of Virginia, 1997), 56–76; Kathryn Joy McKnight, “The Diabolical
Pacts of Slavery: The Stories of Two Mulatto Slaves before the Inquisition in New
Spain,” Revista de estudios hispánicos 37, no. 4 (2003): 509–36.
31. Edwards, “Enslaved Women.”
32. Bonneville (1900) quoted in Myriam Cottias, “Free but Minor: Slave
Women, Citizenship, Respectability, and Social Antagonism in the French Antilles,
1830–90,” in this volume.
33. Altink, “Deviant and Dangerous.”
34. Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e senzala (Rio de Janeiro: Olympio, 1933); trans-
lated as The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civiliza-
tion, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1946).
35. See, e.g., Edwards, “Enslaved Women.”
36. A point emphasized in the paper by Elizabeth Grzymala Jordan, “It All
Comes Out in the Wash: Engendering Archaeological Interpretations of Slavery,” in
the companion volume in this set, with reference to Engendering African American
Archaeology: A Southern Perspective, ed. Amy Young (Knoxville: University of Ten-
nessee Press, 2004).
37. Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery.
38. Altink, “Deviant and Dangerous.”
39. Edwards, “Enslaved Women.”

campbell2.intro 6/22/07 8:13 AM Page 24
24 gwyn campbell, suzanne miers, and joseph c. miller
40. Daniel L. Schafer, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave,
Plantation Slaveowner (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).
41. Edwards, “Enslaved Women.”
42. But not, apparently, in the sugar parishes of Louisiana, where rapid rates of
economic growth and the maturing Victorian morality of the nineteenth-century
United States kept most women slaves in male-like positions as brute labor, with the
antinatal consequences that Follett details in “Gloomy Melancholy.” Morgan,
“Slave Women and Reproduction,” implicitly focuses on the field slaves and their
strategies of natality rather than the jezebels and mammies.
43. Bernard Moitt, “Pricing Freedom in the French Caribbean: Women, Men,
Children, and Redemption from Slavery in the 1840s,” in this volume.
44. See, e.g., Joseph Miller, “Retention, Re-invention, and Remembering:
Restoring Identities Through Enslavement in Africa and Under Slavery in Brazil,”
in Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slav-
ery, ed. José C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity
Books, 2003), 81–121.
45. Brown and Inniss, “Slave Family.”
46. Christine Barrow, “‘Living in Sin’: Church and Common-Law Union in Bar-
bados,” Journal of Caribbean History 29, no. 2 (1996): 249, quoted in Brown and In-
niss, “Slave Family”; see also Cottias, “Free but Minor.”
47. Cottias, “Free but Minor.”
48. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman; Cottias, “Free but Minor.”
49. Brown and Inniss, “Slave Family.”
50. Children in Slavery, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller
(in preparation).

campbell2.pt1 6/22/07 8:20 AM Page 25
1
The Reproductive Biology
of Sugar Slavery

campbell2.pt1 6/22/07 8:20 AM Page 26

campbell2.pt1 6/22/07 8:20 AM Page 27
1
SLAVE WOMEN AND REPRODUCTION
IN JAMAICA, CA. 1776–1834
kenneth mo r g a n
The problem of creating a self-reproducing population of slaves after the
British Atlantic slave trade ended in 1807 meant that the fecundity of
slave women became central to the viability of plantation slavery in the
British Caribbean. Such women were noticeably less fertile than their
North American sisters. In the second half of the eighteenth century 40
to 50 percent of the slaves on Jamaican sugar estates were females, but
gross reproduction rates did not reflect that relative parity between the
sexes.1 About half the female slave population in the British Caribbean
in the mid-eighteenth century and as many as a third at the time of eman-
cipation remained childless, compared with only 10 percent of slave
women in the United States.2 Before 1807 British Caribbean slave own-
ers regarded buying slaves—rather than breeding them—as a necessary
practice. Planters calculated the costs of purchasing adult and adolescent
Africans as opposed to rearing children themselves and concluded that
This chapter is a slightly revised version of an article published in History 91, no. 302
(April 2006): 231–53. I thank Joseph C. Miller for excellent advice about the shape
and content of the article and an anonymous reader for History, who suggested addi-
tional references. Leigh Morgan provided helpful comments on a draft version. The
usual disclaimer applies. I am grateful to Lord Clarendon for permission to cite doc-
uments from the Clarendon Deposit at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and to the
other archives cited that facilitated my research. The Leverhulme Trust provided
funds to support my attendance at the Fourth Avignon Conference on Slavery and
Forced Labour, University of Avignon, October 2002, where this paper was origi-
nally presented.
27

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28 kenneth morgan
they would not encourage their seasoned women slaves to breed “as
thereby so much work is lost in their attendance upon their infants.”
3
The low priority they gave to breeding slaves before 1807 was ac-
knowledged during the American War of Independence by the attorney
to Hope Plantation, a Jamaican sugar estate, who wrote that a decrease
of slaves was “the case with every Estate in the Island, at least with very
few exceptions; I have never heard but of two, and both those lye in the
interior parts of the country.”
4 After 1807, with the legal end of the
British slave trade, planters faced a necessity to keep up the stock of
slaves by breeding.5 Yet the policy was not successful, because the slave
population declined in all save one of the British Caribbean islands in
6
the years leading up to slave emancipation in 1834.
Both the scattered data available before 1807 and the much fuller statis-
tics from the post-1817 period show that the crisis of reproduction was all
too apparent. Although no imperial censuses document this demographic
problem before the abolition of the British slave trade, occasional lists
for individual plantations, scattered population data for some Caribbean
islands, and statistics on slave imports allow estimation of general trends in
fertility and mortality. Full registration requirements for slaves after 1817
meant, however, that six triennial censuses of the entire British Caribbean
slave population are available for the final two decades of slavery.
Statistics gathered from these sources show the extent of the demo-
graphic problem. Jamaica imported 575,000 African captives in the eigh-
teenth century, but, owing to extensive mortality, this increased the
enslaved population of the island by only around 250,000. Of these
Africans disembarked in Jamaica, at least 60 percent were male because
planters generally purchased healthy adult “saltwater” males in prefer-
ence to African women.7 Between 1807, when these purchases ended,
and 1834 the Jamaican slave population fell by 43,000, a decline of 12
percent. Continuing high mortality, especially among aging African
slaves, contributed significantly to this fall. Although a small percentage
of the decline is attributable to manumissions and runaways, solid demo-
graphic evidence leaves no doubt that breeding failed to maintain the
population of slaves after imports had ended.8
Matthew Gregory (“Monk”) Lewis, the novelist and absentee Jamaican
proprietor, summarized the problem: when visiting his sugar estate in
Westmoreland Parish in 1817, a property with 330 slaves and more
women than men, he noted that “in spite of all indulgences and induce-
ments, not more than twelve or thirteen children have been added an-
nually to the list of births.” He acknowledged, however, that he had lost

29
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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
track of several infants who were not counted as births. In March 1817
he complained that he had only 8 women out of 150 on the “breeding
list.”9 Modern analysis of two Jamaican sugar estates and one livestock
“pen” (i.e., cattle-raising estate) between 1817 and 1832 shows that cre-
ole slave women at the height of their fertility, ages twenty-five to twenty-
nine, bore 112 babies per thousand woman-years, while African women
bore only 64. During the same period the relatively small ratio of 32
births per thousand woman-years was recorded for younger creole slave
women at ages fifteen through nineteen, the first quinquennium after
menarche. The fertility rates for a series of other plantations in Jamaica
from 1754 to 1832 ranged much higher, from 79 to 108 births per thou-
sand woman-years at ages fifteen to forty-four. However, all these ratios
are much lower than peak fertility in modern Jamaica, which yields 299
infants per thousand woman-years at ages twenty to twenty-four.10
Historians have pointed to several possible reasons for these poor re-
productive rates among British West Indian slaves. One line of inter-
pretation emphasizes the debilitating consequences of slavery: the poor
nutritional state of slaves, heavy infant mortality, strenuous working
demands imposed by sugar cultivation, and the brutality of the overseer’s
whip. Dietary deficiencies in protein and calcium, the high incidence of
deaths among infants, the severity of the gang system on plantations, and
the underlying discipline imposed by white estate personnel on slaves are
other essential parts of this explanation. The exact relationships among
these factors, however, are recognized as difficult to determine.11 A sec-
ond line of interpretation emphasizes the agency of slave women in re-
sisting biological reproduction as a political statement against the system
of slavery. This view focuses on strategies deployed to avoid pregnancy
and acts undertaken to curtail pregnancies and unwanted births, such as
abortion and infanticide. In this line of analysis, slave women assume the
major role in determining the predisposition to pregnancy and the fates
of babies over the nine-month gestational cycle and in the first weeks of
life. The emphasis falls on the political resistance of slave women in re-
fusing to enrich their owners by bearing children who would be their prop-
erty.12 A third type of interpretation also places emphasis on slave agency
in reproduction but with no overt political emphasis. The main focus
here is on culture: prolonged lactation practices, which lengthened in-
tervals between pregnancies, and taboos against the resumption of inter-
course for several months after giving birth. These cultural practices, it is
argued, stemmed from the women’s African backgrounds, brought to
Jamaica via the transatlantic slave trade.13

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30 kenneth morgan
Many cultural practices limiting fertility lack convincing evidence,
given the intimate nature of the subject. Thus, for instance, very little is
known about the extent of sexual intercourse among adult slaves or about
the resumption of intercourse by slave women after delivering children.
But it may be useful to review all the potential barriers to reproduction
among British Caribbean slaves, not to distinguish their relative effects
but rather to assess their cumulative consequences for reproduction, par-
ticularly in the context of sugar plantations, and secondarily in relation
to the agency that female slaves may have exercised through their own
reproductive strategies. This chapter attempts such an evaluation for Ja-
maica, the largest and most productive sugar island in the British West
Indies. In particular, it focuses on the difficult material circumstances of
slavery that biologically constrained reproductive rates among Jamaican
female slaves, well beyond the extent to which slave women’s cultural
and political preferences may explain their low fertility.
The source material used in the analysis consists of contemporary ob-
servations by doctors and planters; evidence produced by modern demo-
graphic, economic, social, and cultural historians; and the findings of
modern biologists and students of third world fertility. The contempo-
rary evidence is mainly taken from the writings of white planters, doctors
and estate attorneys that dominate the documentary record on slavery in
British America. Slaves left virtually no direct testimony on the issues
discussed in this essay. Consequently, the views of slave women in Ja-
maica cannot be presented. The planters often had a prejudiced view
toward their slaves, based on their sense of racial superiority and their
economic need to maintain their slave labor force.
The period discussed here, however, was one when slave productivity
and amelioration of the conditions in which slaves lived were both em-
phasized. Planters needed to work slaves hard to keep up output levels on
sugar plantations, the more so after the British slave trade ended in 1808
and problems ensued in breeding slaves from existing stock. But planters
were also under pressure from abolitionists to ameliorate slave working
and living conditions in order to justify the continued existence of slav-
ery. This tension between productivity and its hardships and amelioration
in the interest of reproduction emerges in the writings of planters and
their representatives. Some evidence cited below was written by absen-
tee owners who never visited Jamaica; their views were therefore circum-
scribed by common assumptions and prejudices about the personalities and
behavior of slaves.

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
production and reproduction
Slaves’ reproduction was inevitably linked closely to their material and
working lives. Harm to the fetus during pregnancy, which can result in
miscarriage or stillbirth, is generally caused by the mother’s nutrition, by
mechanical injury, or by abnormal positions while at work.14 Inadequate
nutrition was the constant predisposing factor in the background of slave
women’s lives in Jamaica. Since severe maternal malnutrition is the lead-
ing cause of stillbirths in third world countries today, it is safe to take
seriously numerous reports of the nutritional deprivations of slavery in
Jamaica as limiting slave mothers’ ability to bear surviving children
through the same mechanisms and thus to similar degrees.
Slaves were fed on a diet of mainly grain, vegetables, and dried fish. On
Jamaica they were required to cultivate their own provisions to feed them-
selves rather than being able to rely on masters’ rations. Imported food-
stuffs sometimes added to the slaves’ diets, but shortages occurred when pe-
riods of war reduced imported dry provisions (wheat, flour, other grains)
from North America, notably during the American War of Indepen-
dence.15 Despite these imported foods, malnutrition was common among
the West Indian slave population. The slave diet was monotonous and de-
ficient in thiamine, calcium, and vitamin A, though quantitative estimates
of rations provided by masters are patchy.16 Robert Dirks’s data suggest
that the average plantation food allowance amounted to 1,500 to 2,000
calories and approximately 45 grams of protein per day.17 Under average
conditions men require roughly 3,200 calories a day and women 2,300,
metabolic rates for women being slower than for men. Under conditions of
exceptionally heavy labor, both male and female workers need at least an
additional 450 calories.18 Thus female slaves in the British Caribbean, let
alone pregnant slaves, received minimally adequate calories at best.
The imbalanced diet weakened women slaves more than men, since
female physiology requires three times more iron, owing to menstruation.
Protein and calcium requirements for pregnant and lactating women are
also higher than for adult males; 30 to 50 percent more thiamine is re-
quired.19 Slaves deficient in thiamine would have been unable to utilize
riboflavin and niacin, which would have upset the metabolism of all the
B vitamins.20 Yet evidence suggests that the all-important protein rations
given to slave families were mostly consumed by men. Traditionally in
West Africa men had taken priority in helpings from the cooking pot.
Similarly, in the Caribbean during the slavery era, men ate most of the
available animal protein.21

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32 kenneth morgan
Contemporary observers saw irregularities in the menstrual cycle as in-
hibiting Caribbean slave women’s reproduction. Although they did not
pinpoint malnutrition as a cause of amenorrhea (abnormal cessation of
the menstrual period), they sometimes related malnutrition to slave
women’s practice of geophagy—“dirt eating.” James Thomson, a doctor
who practiced medicine in Jamaica and the author of a book on the dis-
eases of black people there, wrote in 1820 that “women who indulge [in
dirt eating] soon lose their monthly period.”
22 Dirt eating was general in
British Caribbean slave society: slaves regularly ate cakes of baked clay
(aboo) as a natural, if unconscious, response to nutritional deficiency.
Women, in particular, ate the fine clays, which they could purchase eas-
ily in markets.23 The white elite derided the practice. “Such is the craving
appetite for this abominable custom,” a planter manual stated, “that few,
either children or adults, can be broken of it, when once they begin to
taste and swallow its insidious, slow poison.”
24
It is now known that dirt eating can be beneficial for people suffering
from thiamine deficiency.25 Modern medical findings do not support the
notion that geophagy directly halts menstruation, but it is a response to
deficiencies in iron. Moreover, amenorrhea is generally linked to malnu-
trition. Not only does malnutrition disrupt the regular menstrual cycle, it
can also delay the onset of menarche and hinder postpartum recovery,
thereby limiting further pregnancies.26 Although planters often com-
plained of slave women’s “obstruction of the menses,” they had no aware-
ness of its underlying nutritional causes. Edward Long, the well-known
planter-historian of Jamaica, suggested “their using restringent baths, or
washing themselves in cool water at improper periods” could have re-
sulted in these “obstructions.”
27 Such beliefs have now been relegated to
the realm of old wives’ tales.
The psychological bases for interruptions in the menstrual cycle are
still not fully understood but may also have contributed. Studies carried
out on survivors of concentration camps give some weight to the argu-
ment that emotional stress can halt the menstrual cycle. And yet one
should not push the comparison too far. Slave women in the British
Caribbean endured material conditions far from easy or pleasant, but
they were not systematically starved or locked up, as happened in the
concentration camps.28 That slave women routinely undertook highly
demanding physical labor suggests that their bodies could withstand the
arduous agricultural work of the slave regime—though very likely only at
the expense of halting their menstrual cycles.
Excessive labor also contributed to low slave natality. Most women
slaves on sugar plantations labored in the two main field gangs that under-

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
took the heavy agricultural work. In the British West Indies, women out-
numbered men in the “great gangs,” which carried out the most strenu-
ous tasks of cane holing, planting, and harvesting sugar, all under enor-
mous pressures of time. In a sample of four Caribbean slave societies in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—Barbados, Martinique,
Jamaica, Cuba—the women in the fields outnumbered men. The crude
birth rate remained low in all these islands except Barbados, the one
British West Indian slave society that had a majority of women from the
early eighteenth century onward.29 Between 1801 and 1831 on Meso-
potamia, a sugar estate in Jamaica’s Westmoreland Parish, the 130 slave
women in their prime childbearing years (twenty to twenty-nine) spent
88 percent of their working time in these gangs, mostly the great gang.30
The attorneys for the estate claimed in 1812 that these slaves were not
badly treated or worked hard and that there were “no Negroes in the
parish of Westmoreland more indulged, better fed or better clothed.”
31
But even though the absentee owner of this estate encouraged humane
treatment of his female slaves, they were chronically overworked and
failed to achieve good reproductive rates.32
Cultivating sugar was more physically demanding than working any
other plantation crop, and sugar cultivation and high slave mortality
have been connected on nineteenth-century Louisiana sugar plantations
as well as in their Caribbean counterparts. The same link between sugar
and mortality can also be found in Spanish Cuba and Portuguese Brazil.33
The long hours of standing up and the heavy lifting of sugar cultivation
would have inhibited the ovarian function and procreative fitness of many
slave women.34 The early months of pregnancy are when women are most
susceptible to miscarriage, yet female Jamaican slaves, pregnant or not,
were subject to excessive stooping, carried heavy weights, and toiled
under unceasing compulsion during the crop period. Pregnant women
worked in the cane fields until six weeks before expected delivery.35
Planters were well aware of the risks they imposed on the pregnant
women they owned. In the last decade of slavery in Jamaica, when ter-
mination of imported replacements had turned attention to local natal-
ity, they excused women field workers from the great gang once they made
it known they were pregnant. Four weeks after delivery they were per-
mitted to return to work in the “second gang,” responsible for weeding
and other lighter tasks, so long as they continued to breastfeed.36 Despite
their awareness, planters had earlier found it difficult, or were unwilling,
to excuse pregnant women from severely demanding fieldwork. The links
between overwork and the low rates of reproduction in British West In-
dian slave populations are therefore evident.

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34 kenneth morgan
Reproduction among West Indian slave women was higher among
those assigned to domestic tasks rather than work in the fields. Edward
Long, who owned plantations in Jamaica and lived there for a number of
years, noted in 1774 that “those Negroes breed the best, whose labour is
least, or easiest. Thus the domestic Negroes have more children, in pro-
portion, than those on penns; and the latter, than those who are em-
ployed on sugar-plantations.”
37 In addition, African slave women had
poorer reproductive histories than locally born creoles. Data for Worthy
Park Plantation, in St. Thomas-in-the-Vale Parish, show that by 1834
the creole birth rate had surpassed the death rate, indicating that slaves
on that sugar estate were approaching natural reproductive increase.38 In
the seventy years before 1831 only 49 percent (19 of 39) of the African
women with complete birth histories at the Mesopotamia sugar estate
had recorded live births; they averaged 2.7 children each. On the same
plantation 53 of the 97 creole slave women (55 percent) had babies;
they averaged 3.7 children each.39 Demographic evidence for women
whose age groups had the highest fertility in the British Caribbean as a
whole shows that creoles were everywhere almost half again as fertile as
Africans.40
Severe physical punishment must have also been antagonistic to their
fertility, particularly against the background of the grueling demands
that sugar cultivation placed on women’s bodies.41 White overseers and
black slave drivers showed little accommodation in disciplining preg-
nant women. Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer in Westmoreland Parish,
though a notoriously extreme example, regularly flogged slaves of both
sexes and hired out his pregnant women as field laborers at the full rate of
pay until they were within two or three months of delivery.42 By the turn
of the nineteenth century it had become standard practice to lay preg-
nant women face-down over a hole dug in the ground to receive their
bulging belly and then to flog them on the back.43 Monk Lewis stated
that “white overseers and bookkeepers . . . [kicked] black women in the
belly from one end of Jamaica to the other.”
44 Black drivers, who often
administered floggings, were just as harsh to female slaves as to males.
Until the growing attention to natality during the final years of slavery,
Jamaica’s laws gave no special relief from beating for women, whether
they were pregnant or not.45 Severe beatings could sometimes lead to a
prolapsed uterus. A prolapsed uterus, apart from causing lower abdominal
pain and sometimes urinary incontinence, could result in premature
labor and therefore miscarriage. John Williamson, a doctor who prac-
ticed medicine in Jamaica between 1798 and 1812, recorded in 1817

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
that “prolapses of the uterus or womb . . . in consequence of harsh treat-
ment, are very common in Jamaica.”
46 Given this extensive testimony, it
is unsurprising that numerous abolitionist critiques drew attention to the
cruelty of flogging pregnant slaves.47
Numerous infectious diseases compounded the morbidity among slave
women in Jamaica attributable to malnutrition. Many of these infections
had devastating effects on pregnancies. Syphilis, yaws, and elephantiasis,
complaints common in the Caribbean, all increased the likelihood of
miscarriage or stillbirth. Epidemics of smallpox, measles, and scarlet fever
frequently added to general mortality rates. Dysentery was a major killer
of those weakened by overwork and malnourishment. Diarrheal disease
was more than twice as likely to affect female field hands as female do-
mestics. Slaves sometimes caught colds and fevers through toiling in the
fields in wet clothes. They were rarely issued shoes or stockings and con-
sequently were prone to cuts and bruises on their feet, which could turn
into septic sores or gangrene. Lack of shoes allowed the entrance of chi-
goes into the body, causing elephantiasis, and assisted the entrance of
hookworm, which further depleted slaves’ nutritional status. The inter-
action of malnutrition and infection was far more serious than would be
expected from the combined effect of the two working independently.48
Of course, not all the above diseases or infections were confined to women
of childbearing years; but pregnancy considerably heightened the sever-
ity of diseases and infections to which female slaves were susceptible.
If the poor nutrition among sugar slaves and the diseases it aggravated,
strenuous work demands in the fields, and severe physical punishment
thus all inhibited reproduction among slave women, most planters were
loath to search too closely for causes that would reflect badly on the slave
regime that they enforced. Hence plentiful writings blamed low fertility
on the dress, customs, habitual ignorance, and sexual immorality of the
slaves themselves. They applied the classic slave myth of animallike sex-
ual promiscuity to a stereotyped “black woman.” Her alleged incapacity
for self-regulation justified economic and sexual abuse in the name of
responsible discipline. The nakedness in which masters left their female
slaves also encouraged that inaccurate image of wanton lust. White so-
journers in the Caribbean were unaccustomed to seeing women un-
clothed in public, and they equated their own lascivious reaction to
exposure of the flesh of Afro-Caribbean women with lax sexual mores on
the parts of the women they observed.49
But it was not just slave women’s habits of dress, forced or not, that ex-
cited white racial prejudice; customs were also criticized. The Jamaican

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36 kenneth morgan
committee responsible for the overseeing of slaves reporting to the gov-
ernment’s 1789 inquiry into the slave trade condemned what it presented
as casual mating practices and polygyny among Jamaican slave women.50
The attorney of Mesopotamia plantation attributed the lack of pregnant
slave women there to “their incontinency & their being so much ad-
dicted to polygamy which is scarcely possible to prevent.”
51 The Unitar-
ian minister Thomas Cooper, hired by absentee proprietor Robert Hib-
bert to convert the slaves on Georgia, his plantation in Hanover Parish,
attributed the low birth rate on the estate to the morally degraded condi-
tion of the slaves and, in particular, to promiscuity, prostitution, and the
spread of sexually transmitted diseases, though he also acknowledged hard
work and severe punishment as additional contributing factors.52 The
Bristol absentee slave owner Richard Bright considered that “loose con-
duct” among the slave women on his Jamaican sugar estates had led to
the frequency of miscarriages and stillbirths there. He implied that
promiscuity and disease were common and that recent problems in sus-
taining live births were the result of “disease which had become inveter-
ate in the Constitution and therefore can only be referred to as lamenta-
ble instances of the effects of early moral depravity.”53
In fact, sexually transmitted diseases contributed to the prevailing low
natality of slave women in Jamaica, if only to a limited extent. Syphilis
in the last six months of pregnancy harms the fetus and usually results in
stillbirth. Contemporaries singled out venereal disease as an affliction of
pregnant slave women. Simon Taylor, the wealthiest Jamaican sugar ty-
coon of the eighteenth century, complained in 1789 that venereal dis-
ease was rife at his Golden Grove plantation and blamed these attacks
on the lax mores of black women.54 John Wedderburn, a planter who had
lived in Jamaica for more than a quarter of a century, made the same
point to a committee of the House of Commons in March 1790. Noting
that Jamaican slave women did not breed as well as working women in
Britain, he attributed the cause of their low natality to “promiscuous in-
tercourse between the sexes” that “often occasions venereal complaints,
which frequently destroy the constitution.”
55 Thomson pointed to the
“early and unbound indulgence in venereal pleasure [as] a common cause
of sterility. The parts are left in so morbid a state as to be unfit for im-
pregnation; the uterine and vaginal vessels are distended, and a perpetual
discharge, or flux albus, is the consequence.”56
In spite of these slights to slave women’s morality, observers in fact noted
low incidences of venereal disease among British Caribbean slave popu-
lations, and the West Indian variant of syphilis—often nonvenereal—

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
was less contagious than the strain found in Europe. Dr. Thomas Dancer,
a trained physician who practiced in Jamaica at the end of the eigh-
teenth century, considered that venereal disease found in the Caribbean
was a relatively mild form of the pathogen and difficult to detect.57 Only
0.5 percent of a sample of 2,394 slaves living on the Jamaican estates of
William Beckford and John Tharp were reported as infected with vene-
real disease.58 However, evaluating the validity of these contemporary
comments is difficult because the strain of venereal disease is usually not
mentioned, and therefore the specific effects it might have had on preg-
nant slave women cannot be pinpointed.
These attributions of the alleged promiscuity of slave women to their
racial character and African backgrounds were, of course, inaccurate.
Olaudah Equiano, the famous black writer and abolitionist of the late
eighteenth century, wrote of women in his African homeland that he did
not “remember to have ever heard of an instance of incontinence
amongst them before marriage.”
59 Promiscuity, where it existed, was sex-
ual exploitation of black women by white overseers, managers, and other
plantation personnel, who had sex with the black women whom they
could subject to their demands.60 Since the nuclear family was rather a
precarious institution among slaves in Jamaica, male and female slaves
often found cohabitation difficult, and some stable and exclusive inti-
mate relationships involved travel from one estate to another for slaves
allowed to do so. Such mobility could easily be mistaken by whites for
promiscuity. When the truncated households and infrequency of mat-
ing—owing to limited movements between estates of the partners in sta-
ble relationships—are added to the white male pursuit and sexual viola-
tion of female slaves, the consequences for reproducing slave children
were serious.61
One modern historical hypothesis to explain the poorer reproductive
record of West Indian slaves compared with their North American coun-
terparts argues that these fertility differentials can be explained, at least
in part, “by the differences in the period of child spacing,” and that “the
latter were partially determined by lactation practices.” African women
in the British Caribbean appear to have nursed their children for two
years, sometimes up to three or four years, whereas North American slave
women breastfed their infants no longer than a year. Longer lactation, it
is argued, would have served as a natural means of contraception, either
through the physiological suppression of fertility in the mother by pro-
ducing breast milk or through the social impact of constant nurturing of
infants and consequent unavailability to men. Lactation periods of two,

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38 kenneth morgan
three, or four years have been interpreted as carryovers from traditions in
West African societies.62
How well does this argument fit the evidence? Certainly, planters were
concerned over the lengthy lactation of their female slaves. In 1811 Dr.
David Collins, author of a well-known handbook on the management of
slaves, wrote that “Negroes are universally fond of suckling their chil-
dren for a long time. If you permit them, they will extend it to the third
year.”63 The merchant and planter William Shand, who had interests in
various Jamaican properties, reported in 1832 that “long weaning . . . is
very much against their breeding.”
64 The evidence for the postabolition
nineteenth-century British Caribbean suggests that breastfeeding periods
varied considerably but that the average nursing cycle lasted less than in
earlier, prenatalist, periods—about eighteen months.65 After the end of
slavery the Jamaican population increased largely due to an excess of
births over deaths.66 One can hypothesize that this increase in repro-
duction and reduction in lactation periods occurred because free black
women received better nutrition and endured less demanding work
schedules than when most of them had been tied to the punishing work
regimes of sugar.
Malnutrition increases amenorrhea to three to four years in societies
where nursing and late weaning are common.67 The contraceptive bene-
fit of lactation may last no longer than a year in relatively well fed and
medically sound populations,68 but this modern finding would scarcely
have applied to eighteenth-century Jamaica. Malnourished mothers there
extended lactation because they found it difficult to secure reliable sources
of other food for their infants. The evidence suggests that Caribbean slave
rations contained little protein or fat, and that could have disrupted sev-
eral reproductive functions of slave women, including a delayed age of
menarche, irregular ovulation, and early menopause.69 The precarious
health of women slaves, aggravated by pregnancy, the rigors of child-
birth, lengthy lactation, and early return to fieldwork, left many female
slaves in a constant state of nutritional deprivation. Thomson noted that
the practice of keeping the child on the breast “until, in their own
phraseology, the child can bring its mother a calabash full of water” re-
sults in “numbers [of mothers] which never recover. . . . They fall into a
consumption or emaciated state, in which they linger for a few years.”
70
Postpartum taboos against a mother’s resumption of intercourse during
the period of nursing young children are well attested for numerous soci-
eties around the premodern world. Such taboos protect the health of
both mother and child. In Africa the period of abstinence was often two

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
years.71 Thus Thomas Winterbottom recorded that, on a visit to Sierra
Leone in 1803, a strong prohibition against intercourse during lactation
was believed to protect the child from sickness.72 This means of extend-
ing birth spacing appears to have survived in the Afro-Jamaican popula-
tion. It was particularly effective in preventing the dangers of pregnancy
under slavery soon after a mother gave birth. Africans probably practiced
extended birth spacing more than creoles. Certainly, at Mesopotamia es-
tate the creole women extended their birth intervals to lesser degrees
and had greater fertility than the African women.73 It is likely that birth-
spacing differentials among African and creole slave women in Jamaica
were as much the result of avoiding postpartum intercourse as the result
of prolonged lactation.
African women used certain herbs and infusions for contraceptive
purposes. In addition, plants such as okra and aloe were transported to
the Caribbean, where they were used as abortifacients.74 Contempo-
raries—particularly planters—condemned slave women for widespread
practices of self-abortion as well as for promiscuity. Dr. John Quier, an
experienced doctor based at Worthy Park for fifty-five years, highlighted
abortions, which he felt were “rather frequent amongst them” as the
cause of their “lack of breeding.”
75 Several other contemporary observers
agreed with his diagnosis. The planter-historian Bryan Edwards, a promi-
nent representative of the West India interest, told the Jamaican Coun-
cil and the Jamaican Assembly that slave women in Jamaica “hold
chastity in so little estimation, that barrenness and frequent abortions,
the usual effects of a promiscuous intercourse, are very generally preva-
lent among them.”76 Thomson wrote that “many young females . . .
whenever they find themselves pregnant, endeavour to procure abortion,
by every means in their power, in which they are too often assisted by
the knowery of others.”77 The others unidentified here may have been
the obeahmen, or alleged practitioners of African remedies, sometimes
accused of helping slave women in pursuing this choice.78
Henry Goulbourn, an absentee Jamaican plantation owner, was in-
formed by his manager that the poor levels of fertility on his sugar estate
resulted partly from the ability of pregnant slaves to procure abortions.79
In the 1820s Joseph Foster Barham II, absentee owner of Mesopotamia,
blamed his slave women for their low rate of reproduction and threat-
ened to put any who had abortions or miscarriages into a special jobbing
gang, which would be hired out to perform arduous manual labor. In 1825
he sent two slave women who delivered stillborn children to the work-
house as a punishment; after they returned to fieldwork the following year,

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40 kenneth morgan
one was listed as being “ill disposed” and the other as “evil disposed.”80
Dr. Collins also mentioned the use of drugs and physical violence to the
fetus as methods of effecting abortion and considered that slave women
took these measures when their pregnancies became burdensome.81 A
modern sociologist has cited these contemporary views to suggest that
abortion was widely practiced in Jamaica.82
However, despite the use of such means of limiting fertility, it is doubt-
ful that slave women had significant control over their bodies to combat
the overpowering effects of disease, malnutrition, and brutal overwork.
No testimony from the women themselves either supports or denies their
white masters’ widespread accusations with regard to abortion. Possibly
revealingly, Monk Lewis made no mention of the practice of abortion on
his Jamaican estate. Lewis was particularly interested in the reproduction
of his slaves, and it is unlikely that practices damaging to the fertility he
wanted to promote would have escaped his notice.83 European doctors
tended to attribute the high incidence of abortion to diseases contracted
during pregnancy. During the influenza epidemic in Jamaica in 1802,
Williamson noted that “in pregnant women the disease often brought on
abortion, and many died. . . . [I]n females, thus circumstanced, it was on
every occasion extremely dangerous.”
84
Some modern historians have nonetheless claimed that British West
Indian slave women practiced deliberate abortion as a desperate act of
resistance against their woeful condition of perpetual chattel slavery.
For the same political reason the high rate of infant mortality in the
British Caribbean might have included deaths from maternal infanti-
cide. Slave women would thus deliberately have asserted control over
their reproductive capacities, both in obtaining or inducing self-abortion
and, in particular, in allowing children they could not prevent being
born to die to frustrate the planters’ desire to breed slave children.85
However, it is likely that spontaneous miscarriage (before twenty-eight
weeks of pregnancy) and stillbirths (after twenty-eight weeks), rather
than calculated abortions, were responsible for high rates of fetal loss. In-
deed, what were alleged as self-induced abortions might equally have
been spontaneous miscarriages: on plantations it would have been diffi-
cult to distinguish these two causes of prematurely terminated pregnancy.
On the other hand, botched self-abortions may well have been recorded
or regarded as miscarriages, and spontaneous miscarriage was so com-
mon that it must have enabled abortion to be concealed.86 Thistlewood
laconically recorded many “miscarriages” in his diaries as if they were a
common and expected feature of life in Jamaica.87 Such mortality was

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
sometimes referred to as endogenous death—that is, the result of a mal-
formed fetus.88
A handful of contemporary sources suggest that black female slaves
fought to maintain their roles as mothers despite the trauma and rigors of
slavery. They fought against separation from their children and defended
their rights to suckle them. It was not uncommon for slave women to
adopt other slaves’ children in addition to coping with their own.89 Female
slaves without children lived in lonely, dispiriting circumstances. Slaves on
plantations lived largely isolated lives, cut off from the normal social rela-
tions of free society. Slave women knew that the birth of a child would lead
to an uncertain existence for a slave infant in a context where planters and
other white personnel controlled people as chattel property, eventually di-
vided and bequested to an owner’s heirs. Moreover, slave children would
lose their mother’s culture in living with slaves from many different
African backgrounds; those from cultures that emphasized circumcision
as a mark of responsible adulthood would remain uncircumcised. They
would speak English rather than their mother’s tongue. In these ways the
bodies of mothers and infants were commodified.90 And yet to give birth
to a child was probably the main way in which a female slave could
achieve fulfillment. Moreover, African-born slaves had come from soci-
eties where fertility was regarded as women’s greatest gift. Children were
regarded as the life force through which men and women achieved inte-
gration into the universe. People from such a background viewed kinship
structures as essential parts of inheritance and succession, which accorded
a high status to fertility and opprobrium to barrenness.91 For these vari-
ous reasons, the impulse to care for a child among Jamaican slave women,
despite living in an unpropitious location for parenting, was very strong.
In view of slave women’s evident dedication to their children, how
often would they have aborted their sole prospect for respect as women?
It seems unlikely that the practice would have been as common as their
owners believed. Any woman who attempted self-abortion, especially
younger ones who might not have fully understood the techniques or
risks, was very likely to end up with hemorrhaging, septicemia, and likely
death. It is far more plausible that the prevalence of miscarriage and still-
birth under Jamaican slavery was related to the intensity of the labor
regime imposed on slave women during the sugar harvest.92 The evidence
cannot be determinative either with regard to infanticide as a cause of
death, since infanticide was nearly always a mother’s solitary act of des-
peration. It was extremely difficult to determine whether a dead baby was
stillborn or premature or whether a relatively healthy child had died at

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42 kenneth morgan
the hands of the mother. Jamaican courts regarded infanticide as more
difficult to prove than any other offense brought before them.93
Underregistration of births may exaggerate the bleak pictures of fertil-
ity as calculated from births reported. Significant variation limited the
accuracy of the birth registries; a few masters noted children born dead,
but most recorded slave births only after the child had survived at least a
week, thus concurring—or at least coinciding—with Africa-derived de-
lays among their slaves in embracing hopes for an infant’s survival. In it-
self this hesitation appears to reflect high infant mortality among slaves.94
Most infant deaths occurred soon after birth. Around 80 percent of in-
fant deaths in the eighteenth-century Caribbean occurred in the first two
weeks of life; in the nineteenth century, the proportion was 50 percent.95
The health of babies depended crucially on the nutritional intake and
bodily strength of their mothers. Given the prevalence of physical bru-
tality, malnutrition, and disease, and the fact that most infants died soon
after birth, it is clear that their deaths resulted from prenatal deprivation
rather than from postnatal circumstances leading to deaths among in-
fants born healthy.96 Postnatal tetanus, however, was also a major killer of
slave babies. In 1788 Long estimated that this infection, often incurred
from severing the umbilical cord with unclean instruments, destroyed
about one-third of the young children on his Jamaican plantation.97 An-
other contemporary writer attributed the spread of tetanus to the mid-
wives’ practice not to change the infant’s clothes for the first nine days.98
Tetanus probably accounted for around 20 percent of total slave mortal-
ity in the British Caribbean.99
Data from three sugar estates indicate that many pregnancies either
never reached term or resulted in births of fatally weak infants. At Meso-
potamia between 1762 and 1831 around half the recorded pregnancies
resulted in miscarriages, stillbirths, or the death of infants within a few
days after birth.100 Impressionistic reporting for Amity Hall plantation, in
Vere Parish, suggests that half the pregnancies on this sugar estate also
ended in miscarriage.101 Rose Price’s information on births and miscar-
riages on Worthy Park in May 1795 provides uniquely precise, if limited,
information on the extent of miscarriage. He owned 240 female slaves at
the time, of whom 72.5 percent had reached menopause. Some 37.1 per-
cent of these women had given birth 352 times in all, but live births had
totaled only 275. These numbers indicate one miscarriage for every 4.6
live births, or around 18 percent.102
The slim evidence available on maternal mortality in childbirth sug-
gests that mothers did not commonly die during childbirth or shortly after

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
delivery. The records for Mesopotamia show that three mothers out of
seventy-two (just over 4 percent) died in childbirth.103 Golden Grove sugar
estate, in St. Thomas-in-the-East Parish, had similarly low incidences of
female death in and after childbirth: only four out of fifty-two slave
women (under 8 percent) who died there between 1817 and 1832 are
known to have given birth within three years before their deaths.104
Contemporary writings offered contradictory accounts of the difficul-
ties that slave women, seen as “blacks,” suffered during childbirth. The
veteran planter, Long, exposing his familiarity with racial theories of the
Enlightenment that romanticized “noble savages” by likening them to
“natural” creatures, wrote that “their women are delivered with little or
no labour; they have therefore no more occasion for midwives, than the
female oran-outang, or any other wild animal. A woman brings forth her
child in a quarter of an hour, goes the same day to the sea, and washes
herself.” Yet he also wrote that “childbirth is not so easy here as in
Africa.”
105 In fact, the most frequent cases of maternal mortality in third
world countries today are caused by postpartum hemorrhage. The risk of
severe bleeding is greatly increased when the woman is suffering from
anemia and also when she has had multiple births; maternal death rates
are five times higher in anemic than in nonanemic women.106 Labor for
poorly nourished women can be prolonged by as much as five hours, with
attendant risks for already weakened mother and baby. Malnourishment
also heightens the risk of obstructed labor. In severe cases, when a
woman lacks a good blood supply and her uterus fails to contract prop-
erly, the risks of a difficult birth increase. Weak contractions and lengthy
labor would cause fetal distress and tire the mother, so that stillbirth
would be a significant risk.107
Jamaica’s plantocracy, for all its racial prejudices, obstetric ignorance,
and denials of the lethal effects of overwork and malnourishment, was
vaguely aware of the dangers of childbirth in unsanitary conditions. Con-
cerned with the need to boost the natural increase in the slave popula-
tion, once slave imports came under abolitionist pressures in the 1780s,
planters promoted pro-natalist policies long before an official govern-
ment policy of “amelioration” came into effect in the mid-1820s. In 1789
the Jamaican Assembly offered overseers a bounty of one pound for each
slave child born under their authority who survived until its first birth-
day. The Assembly increased the amount to three pounds in 1792. Yet it
did not specify that overseers should provide sanitary birthing facilities.
In 1792 the Jamaican Assembly also exempted any slave woman who
had six children alive from field labor and relieved her owner of any

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44 kenneth morgan
taxes otherwise owing upon her.108 This legislation recognized that repro-
duction among Jamaican slave women derived as much from successful
delivery and caring for a child during its first year of life as from difficulty
conceiving.
A battle between masters and slaves over the respective benefits of
home delivery and lying-in rooms raged from the late eighteenth century
through to slave emancipation in 1834. A contemporary set of rules and
instructions for overseers on plantations, dated 1 January 1810, encour-
aged pregnant slave women to enter a lying-in house, attended by a mid-
wife. The midwife was to receive ten shillings if the child was living at
the end of the month. The mother was to be furnished with a calico or
linen frock for herself and likewise for her infant. Overseers were charged
to treat slave mothers with tenderness and to provide them with every
comfort.109 Williamson reported in 1817 on the “considerable difficulty
experienced, to persuade female negroes that on approach of labour
pains they would be better accommodated, in every respect, by removing
from their own houses to the lying-in rooms.” If these birthing facilities,
evidently provided by planters, were connected directly to the slave hos-
pital, or “hothouse,” the women raised the “greatest objection.”
110 And
with evident reason, since male and female slaves were seldom separated
in the hothouse, and slaves with communicable diseases were treated im-
mediately alongside women giving birth. In the 1790s ordinances were
enacted for the provision of suitable lying-in wards, and some planters
erected structures separate from the slave hospital for this purpose.111 De-
spite the increased availability of lying-in rooms, women continued
throughout the period of slavery to give birth in their own huts.
Other slave women featured prominently in the care of new mothers
and their infants. Planters commonly designated infirm and elderly
women as hospital and children’s nurses. On John Tharp’s estates in Ja-
maica in 1805 seven women, who ranged between the ages of thirty and
sixty, were listed as midwives, only one of whom was described as being
physically able or healthy.112 On the other hand, planters complained
widely of inadequacies they attributed to these women. Long, among
others, blamed the “unskilfulness and absurd management of the Negro
midwives” for much of the maternal and infant death.113 Some modern
observers have seen the practice of charging older women or young
women in poor health with the responsibility for attending new mothers
as an inadequate way of dealing with their health needs.114 That these
women were often elderly, however, does not necessarily mean that they
lacked ability; they were in fact likely to have gained effective experience

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
in midwifery. That they were sometimes infirm, or weakened by the rig-
ors of their labors, does not imply that they were uncaring or incompe-
tent. Slave nurses were often considerate and patient despite their age or
state of health.115 Since European obstetric knowledge offered little assis-
tance at the time, the care of European doctors cannot have alleviated
the dangers for women. The psychological support provided by slave
midwives must have been a comfort for their patients, even if it did not
save their newborns’ or their own lives.
Among the many causes of low reproduction among Jamaican slave
women, the material circumstances of overwork, dietary deficiencies, and
physical punishment certainly provided a lethal cocktail. Planters during
the early nineteenth century attempted to alleviate the workload for
pregnant women shortly before and after childbirth, but these provisions
left the hardships of sugar slavery unrelieved during the early months of
pregnancy when the dangers of miscarriage are greatest. By the time
Britain abolished its slave trade in 1808, any improvements in Jamaican
slaves’ diets were probably mitigated by increased demands on their work
routines as planters sought to maximize the productivity of the labor
forces they already owned. It was not until the mid-1820s, when the Ja-
maican Assembly, in spite of its early manifest concern with overseer
brutality, partially adopted the government’s policy of amelioration, that
natality was officially encouraged.116
The harsh material circumstances and brutal treatment of slave
women in Jamaica are clearly enough established to account fully for the
limited biological reproduction in the island’s slave population—or
throughout most of the British Caribbean. It is unnecessary to turn to so-
cial and cultural factors deriving from Africa to explain low rates of re-
production under Jamaican slavery. Planters’ accusations of promiscuity
were based on evident prejudice and consequent misreadings of slave
couples they had prevented from living in the same households, whether
on the same or sometimes on different estates. Irregularities in the men-
strual cycle, notably those attributable to psychological stress, though
difficult to document, may be presumed. Extended lactation and taboos
against postpartum intercourse may have contributed to wide child spac-
ing, but they may equally have represented desperate measures to protect
malnourished infants and themselves under the deprivations of slavery.
Stillbirths and miscarriages occurred frequently, but malnutrition and
mistreatment are much more likely as causes than self-abortion or infan-
ticide. Venereal disease—which planters often linked to immorality and

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46 kenneth morgan
the low fertility they attributed to it—in fact had a low incidence and a
relatively mild pathology in the Caribbean. Planter attempts to improve
delivery conditions for slave mothers with lying-in rooms seem infre-
quent and ineffective, but midwives may well have been more caring than
planters realized.
Whether self-abortion, abstinence, or infanticide were political strate-
gies against enslavement pursued by slave women in Jamaica cannot be
verified from surviving evidence. Even if some slave women abused
themselves for such reasons, their strategies are unlikely to have con-
tributed significantly to the observable low rates of natality and repro-
duction from many other causes. So many documented material and epi-
demiological factors contributed to the low reproductive performance of
Jamaican slave women that self-induced abortion or abstinence are un-
likely to have contributed significantly. Thus, until knowledge improves
about the ways in which Jamaican slave women controlled their own fer-
tility, it remains tendentious to suggest that they opposed breeding as a
form of political resistance to the injustices of their enslavement, as some
historians have suggested.117 One historian has written unequivocally
about the “resolve among slave women not to bring children into a world
of harsh labour.”118 Another has dubbed the supposed refusal of Jamaican
slave women to reproduce a “gynecological revolt.”
119 Another has specu-
lated, more cautiously, that “many [slave] women may have taken steps
to avoid conception” and that slave motherhood was restricted by “the
potential impulse women may have felt to interrupt . . . obscene calcula-
tions” made by planters in treating slave mothers as commodities.120 Less
cautious statements can also be found: slave women, realizing the
planters’ need after 1807 to reproduce the slave population, “sought to
free their previously enchained wombs, refusing to bear children who
would, themselves, be enslaved.”
121 Low rates of reproduction are not evi-
dence for slave women’s own agency, political or not.
It is less difficult to accept that slave women might have limited their
reproduction to lessen the burdens of slavery on themselves through lim-
ited mating practices with their partners. Yet it is no less likely that most
slave women sought to confirm themselves as females in a brutally un-
gendered regime of labor and discipline through their unique ability to
reproduce. The choices available to slave women are especially pertinent
when one considers the implications of planters’ or overseers’ rapes of
black women. In such circumstances, such women had the option of ei-
ther cherishing the resulting child either as a bridge to white society
through the “free colored” status recognized in Jamaica or terminating

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
the pregnancy out of resentment, disgust, and hatred. The sexual act could
therefore serve as a strategic opportunity for betterment for their off-
spring or represent a hated intrusion into Jamaican slave women’s selves.
Pregnancy was thus both a severe physical vulnerability under the duress
of Jamaican slavery and a potential strategy of personal affirmations of
several sorts.
Without direct testimony of any sort on the matter from the women
themselves, both arguments remain difficult to evaluate conclusively.
What is clear, however, is that the primary reproductive challenges for
slaves in Jamaica stemmed from the dietary inadequacies and hard labor
of slavery, which compounded epidemiological and whatever social, cul-
tural, and political factors may have motivated female slaves in Jamaica
concerning their own reproductive capabilities. No one—not European
medical doctors, not prejudiced planters, and certainly not enslaved
women—had enough control over reproductive biology to overcome the
lethal effects of slavery itself.
notes
1. David Beck Ryden, “Producing a Peculiar Commodity: Jamaican Sugar Pro-
duction, Slave Life, and Planter Profits on the Eve of Abolition, 1750–1807” (PhD
diss., University of Minnesota, 1999), 31.
2. J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery: The Process of Amelioration, 1750–1834
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 179.
3. William Beckford, Remarks upon the Situation of the Negroes in Jamaica (Lon-
don: printed for T. and J. Egerton, 1788), 24–25.
4. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, Edward East to Anna
Eliza, Duchess of Chandos, 23 September 1778, Stowe Collection, Brydges Corre-
spondence, STB box 25: Jamaican estates. A similar phrase appears in National Li-
brary of Jamaica, Kingston, Edward East to Roger Hope Elletson, 23 September
1778, Robert Hope Elletson letterbook (1773–80).
5. Gilbert Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica in 1808–1809–1810 (London:
printed for J. Stockdale, 1811), 12.
6. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 74–75. The exception was Barbados,
which experienced an absolute increase in its slave population between 1807 and
1834.
7. Richard B. Sheridan, “The Slave Trade to Jamaica, 1702–1808,” in Trade,
Government and Society: Caribbean History, 1700–1920, ed. B. W. Higman (Kingston:
Heinemann, 1983), 3.
8. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 417–18.
9. Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, 1815–17, ed. Mona
Wilson (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1929), 268, 314–15, 321; Kenneth F.

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48 kenneth morgan
Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 133. Lewis’s sugar estate had more women than the norm in Jamaica.
There must be some doubt about how accurately Lewis estimated these figures. If
one-sixth of the 330 were reproductive females, then 13 infants out of 55 gives about
25 percent surviving births per year. If infant mortality is estimated at 50 percent,
these women were giving birth every other year. This would yield about 50 pregnan-
cies, 25 births, and 13 surviving children. If one assumes, taking the second calcula-
tion, that one-third of the 150 women on the “breeding list” were of reproductive
age and had births every other year and pregnancies twice that again, on an annual
basis 8 out of 50 at a given moment would produce 16 pregnancies in a year, which
seems low compared with the figure just derived. My thanks to Joseph C. Miller for
help with this note.
10. B. W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 154; B. W. Higman, Montpelier, Jamaica:
A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912 (Kingston: Press, Uni-
versity of the West Indies, 1998), 39; Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 138–39.
11. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 347–78; Ward, British West
Indian Slavery, 167–84.
12. Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (London: James
Currey, 1990), 137, 139–42, 147–49; Stella Dadzie, “Searching for the Invisible
Woman: Slavery and Resistance in Jamaica,” Race and Class 32 (1990): 21–38; and
studies by Orlando Patterson, Selwyn H. H. Carrington, Jennifer L. Morgan, and
Verene A Shepherd, cited in nn. 117–21, below. Note that Patterson provides no
contemporary evidence to support his argument about slaves’ refusal to reproduce.
13. Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fertility Differentials between
Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies: A Note on Lactation Prac-
tices and Their Possible Implications,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 35
(1978): 357–74; Jerome S. Handler and Robert S. Corruccini, “Weaning among
West Indian Slaves: Historical and Bioanthropological Evidence from Barbados,”
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 43 (1986): 111–17.
14. Cicely D. Williams, Naomi Baumslag, and Derrick B. Jelliffe, Mother and
Child Health (London: Oxford University Press, 1984), 61; D. B. Jelliffe, Child Nutri-
tion in Developing Countries: A Handbook for Fieldworkers (Washington, DC: U.S. Of-
fice of the War on Hunger, 1969), 14.
15. Richard B. Sheridan, “The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West In-
dies during and after the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd se-
ries, 33 (1976): 615–41.
16. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 284–85; Higman, Slave Populations of the
British Caribbean, 205, 212, 217, 237.
17. Robert Dirks, “Resource Fluctuations and Competitive Transformation in
West Indian Slave Societies,” in Extinction and Survival in Human Populations, ed.
Charles D. Laughlin and Ivan A. Brady (New York: Columbia University Press,
1978), 146.
18. Lucius Nicholls, Tropical Nutrition and Dietetics, 4th ed. (London: Baillière,
Tindell and Cox, 1961), 310.

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
19. Williams, Baumslag, and Jelliffe, Mother and Child Health, 70, 77.
20. Kiple, Caribbean Slave, 80–85.
21. Ibid., 81.
22. James Thomson, A Treatise on the Diseases of Negroes as they occur in the island
of Jamaica with Observations on the Country Remedies (Jamaica, 1820), 45.
23. Robert Dirks, The Black Saturnalia: Conflict and Its Ritual Expression on British
West Indian Slave Plantations (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1987), 87.
24. Thomas Roughley, The Jamaica Planter’s Guide; or, A System for Planting and
Managing a Sugar Estate, or Other Plantations in That Island, and throughout the British
West Indies in General (London, 1823), 118.
25. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 295–97.
26. Williams, Baumslag, and Jelliffe, Mother and Child Health, 47, 67.
27. Edward Long, A History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 2:436.
28. The link between concentration camps and slave plantations has been sug-
gested by Bush, Slave Women, 137–39, and, more circumspectly, by Michael Craton,
Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1978), 97–98, 410n20.
29. Marietta Morrissey, “Women’s Work, Family Formation, and Reproduction
among Caribbean Slaves,” in Caribbean Slave Society and Economy: A Student Reader,
ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (London: James Currey, 1991), 283.
30. Richard S. Dunn, “Sugar Production and Slave Women in Jamaica,” in Culti-
vation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin
and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia., 1993), 62.
31. James Colquhoun Grant and J. R. Webb to Joseph Foster Barham, 19 October
1812, Barham Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Clarendon MSS, Dep. C.358.
32. Richard B. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of
Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), 233–34; Richard S. Dunn, “A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at
Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799 to 1828,” William and
Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 34 (1977): 59–64.
33. Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Soci-
eties and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105 (2000):
1534–75; Russell R. Menard and Stuart B. Schwartz, “Was There a Plantation De-
mographic Regime in the Americas?” in The Peopling of the Americas, 4 vols. (Pro-
ceedings, Vera Cruz, 1992) (Liège, Belgium: International Union for the Scientific
Study of Population, 1992), 1:51–66.
34. Lyliane Rosetta, “Female Reproductive Dysfunction and Intense Physical
Training,” Oxford Review of Reproductive Biology 15 (1993): 113–41.
35. Barbara Bush, “Towards Emancipation: Women and Coercive Labour
Regimes in the British West Indian Colonies, 1790–1838,” Slavery and Abolition 5
(1984): 225–26.
36. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 206–7.
37. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:437. Long’s mention of “penns” referred to cattle-
raising estates, often in the western part of the island, where men managed the ani-
mals and the women present had less arduous duties.

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50 kenneth morgan
38. Craton, Invisible Man, 97.
39. Dunn, “Sugar Production,” 66.
40. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 398.
41. Rhoda E. Reddock, “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Per-
spective,” Latin American Perspectives 12 (1985): 67–68.
42. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 156.
43. Sheila Lambert, ed., House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, 145 vols. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1975), 82: 77, 20.
44. Quoted in Barbara Bush, “Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in
British Caribbean Slave Societies,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in
the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1996), 197.
45. Ibid.
46. John Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations Relative to the West
India Islands, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Smellie, 1817), 2:205; Sheridan, Doctors and
Slaves, 36.
47. Henrice Altink, “‘An Outrage on All Decency’: Abolitionist Reactions to
Flogging Jamaican Slave Women, 1780–1834,” Slavery and Abolition 23 (2002): 113.
48. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 312; Kiple, Caribbean Slave,
89–103; D. B. Jelliffe, “Interactions between Nutrition and Infection,” in Child
Health in the Tropics: A Practical Handbook for Medical and Para-medical Personnel, ed.
Jelliffe, 3rd ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), 265. Elephantiasis usually refers to
lymphatic filiariasis, which is caused not by chigoes but by nematodes whose vectors
are generally mosquitoes.
49. Bush, Slave Women, 12, 14.
50. Bush, “Hard Labor,” 202.
51. J. R. Webb to Joseph Foster Barham, 16 June 1809, Bodleian Library, Claren-
don MSS, Dep. C.358, Barham Papers.
52. Thomas Cooper, Facts illustrative of the Condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica
with Notes in an Appendix (London: J. Hatchard, 1824), 10.
53. Richard Bright to Edward Smith, 27 October 1821, 4 May 1827, University
of Melbourne Archives, Richard Bright letterbooks 7, 18, Bright family papers,
boxes 27, 29.
54. Betty Wood and Roy Clayton, “Jamaica’s Struggle for a Self-Perpetuating
Slave Population: Demographic, Social and Religious Changes on Golden Grove
Plantation, 1812–1832,” Journal of Caribbean Studies 6 (1988): 290.
55. Lambert, House of Commons, 72:82.
56. Thomson, Diseases of Negroes, 111.
57. Thomas Dancer, MD, The Medical Assistant; or, Jamaica Practice of Physic: De-
signed chiefly for the use of Families and Plantations (Kingston: Alexander Aikman,
1801), 212–13.
58. Klein and Engerman, “Fertility Differentials,” 366; Ryden, “Peculiar Com-
modity,” 38.
59. The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, ed. Paul Edwards
(London: Longman, 1989), 8.

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slave women and reproduction in jamaica
60. For an extreme example of a sexually active white overseer, see Trevor Burnard,
“The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer,” in Sex and
Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York, 1998), 163–89; Burnard,
Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican
World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Shepherd, “Gender
and Representation,” 706.
61. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 182–83.
62. Klein and Engerman, “Fertility Differentials,” 358, 368; Handler and Corruc-
cini, “Weaning,” 111–17; Lucille Mathurin, “The Arrivals of Black Women,” Ja-
maica Journal 9 (1975): 4.
63. [David Collins], Practical Rules for the Management and Medical treatment of
Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (London: printed by J. Barfield for Vernor and Hood,
1803), 146.
64. Quoted in Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 353. Shand’s de-
finition of “long weaning” was sixteen to eighteen months.
65. Ibid., 353–54.
66. George W. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1957), 42, 44.
67. Alan S. McNeily, P. W. Howie, and Anna Glasier, “Lactation and the Return
of Ovulation,” in Natural Human Fertility: Social and Biological Determinants, ed.
Peter Diggory, Malcolm Potts, and Sue Teper, proceedings of the twenty-third an-
nual symposium of the Eugenics Society, London, 1986 (London: Macmillan, in as-
sociation with the society, 1988), 102–17.
68. Anrudh Jain, J. C. Hsu, Ronald Freedman, and M. C. Chang, “Demographic
Aspects of Lactation and Postpartum Amenorrhea,” Demography 7 (1970): 255–71.
Other demographers consider that variations in the age of weaning, between ten and
twenty months, can affect fertility considerably. See R. J. Lesthaege and H. J. Page,
“The Post-partum Non-susceptible Period: Development and Application of Model
Schedules,” Population Studies 34 (1980): 143–69.
69. Kiple, Caribbean Slave, 76–119.
70. Thomson, Diseases of Negroes, 117.
71. Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 116–18; Bush, “Hard Labor,” 202.
72. Thomas Winterbottom, An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbour-
hood of Sierra Leone, 2 vols. (London, 1803), 2:218.
73. Dunn, “Sugar Production,” 66; Dirks, Black Saturnalia, 111; Kiple, Caribbean
Slave, 110.
74. Morgan, Laboring Women, 114.
75. Report of the Jamaica House of Assembly on the slave issue, 20 November
1788, PRO, CO 137/88, app. C.
76. Bryan Edwards, A Speech delivered at a free Conference between the Honourable
the Council and Assembly of Jamaica, held the 19th November, 1789, on the subject of
Mr. Wilberforce’s propositions in the House of Commons, concerning the slave-trade
(Kingston, 1789), 46. Similar remarks were made by the planters Gilbert Francklyn
and George Wedderburn: see Parliamentary Papers, 1790–91, Report from the Select

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52 kenneth morgan
Committee of the House of Commons on the Slave Trade, in Lambert, House of Com-
mons, 71:88, 72:374.
77. Thomson, Diseases of Negroes, 111.
78. The best studies of obeahmen deal with their presence in Barbados, though
they were also part of black society in Jamaica. See Jerome S. Handler, “Slave
Medicine and Obeah in Barbados, circa 1650 to 1834,” New West Indian
Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 74 (2000): 57–90; Handler and Kenneth M. Bilby,
“On the Early Use and Origin of the Term ‘Obeah’ in Barbados and the Anglophone
Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 22 (2001): 87–100.
79. Thomas Samson to Henry Goulburn, 1 April 1806, Surrey History Centre,
Woking, Goulburn Collection, 304/J/1/10 (6).
80. Dunn, “Sugar Production,” 56.
81. Collins, Practical Rules, 134.
82. Orlando Patterson, Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Develop-
ment and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (London: MacGibbon and
Kee, 1967), 106–7.
83. Ibid., 108.
84. Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations, 2:208.
85. Bush, Slave Women, 137–42, 147–49; Bush, “Hard Labor,” 205–6, 209–10.
86. Dirks, Black Saturnalia, 105.
87. Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86
(London: Macmillan, 1989), 68, 125, 145, 186, 210, 240, 279, 286, 288–89.
88. Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American
Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 143.
89. Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 169.
90. Morgan, Laboring Women, 108, 115, 121–22, 129, 200.
91. Mathurin, “Arrivals of Black Women,” 5.
92. Dunn, “Sugar Production,” 68.
93. Jonathan Dalby, Crime and Punishment in Jamaica: A Quantitative Analysis of
the Assize Court Records, 1756–1856 (Kingston: Social History Project, Dept. of His-
tory, University of the West Indies, 2000), 42–43.
94. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 26; Higman, Slave Popula-
tion and Economy, 48–49.
95. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 130.
96. For a more detailed discussion, see Kenneth Morgan, “The Struggle For Sur-
vival: Slave Infant Mortality in the British Caribbean,” paper presented at the 5th
Avignon conference on Slavery and Forced Labour, May 2004.
97. PRO, Pitt Papers, 30/8/155, 40, cited in Michael Craton, James Walvin, and
David Wright, eds., Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Black Slaves and the British
Empire: A Thematic Documentary (London: Longman, 1976), 102.
98. Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica, 29.
99. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 209.
100. Dunn, “Sugar Production,” 66.
101. Thomas Samson to Henry Goulburn, 28 April 1813, 11 August 1815, Surrey
History Centre, Goulburn Collection, III/3H.

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102. Craton, Invisible Man, 87.
103. Dunn, “Sugar Production,” 66.
104. Wood and Clayton, “Jamaica’s Struggle,” 303.
105. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:380, 436.
106. Williams, Baumslag, and Jelliffe, Mother and Child Health, 61, 70.
107. Kiple, Caribbean Slave, 85, 91, 133.
108. PRO, CO 139/147, act no. 819.
109. Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica, 110–11.
110. Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations, 2:202, 205.
111. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 273–76.
112. Ibid., 92–93.
113. Long, History of Jamaica, 2:436.
114. See, for example, Lucille Mathurin Mair, “A Historical Study of Women in
Jamaica from 1655 to1844” (PhD diss., University of the West Indies, 1974), 320.
115. Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 226.
116. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 188; William A. Green, British Slave
Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment 1830–1865 (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1976), 103, 105.
117. Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 112. The same ideology has been claimed for
the antebellum southern United States and is embedded in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
118. Selwyn H. H. Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave
Trade, 1775–1810 (Gainesville: University of Press of Florida, 2002), 197. A similar
comment appears on p. 201.
119. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1982), 133. See also Dadzie, “Invisible Woman,” 27.
120. Morgan, Laboring Women, 114, 200.
121. Shepherd, “‘Petticoat Rebellion’? The Black Woman’s Body and Voice in
the Struggles for Freedom in Colonial Jamaica,” in In the Shadow of the Plantation:
Caribbean History and Legacy, ed. Alvin O. Thompson (Kingston: Ian Randle,
2002), 24.

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2
GLOOMY MELANCHOLY
Sexual Reproduction among Louisiana Slave Women, 1840–60
richard follett
Mincing few words on the evils of slavery in the sugar mills of Louisiana,
George William Featherstonhaugh described the slaveholding plantoc-
racy as “white men with liberty and equality in their mouths,” driving
African Americans “to perish, [there] where the duration for a sugar mill
hand does not exceed seven years.” The hellish nature of sugar work con-
demned those in the cane fields to “the lower circle in Dante’s Hell of
Horrors,” where the slave—Francis Kemble Butler observed—seemed
“to have reached the climax of infernal punishment.” Ex-slave Frederick
Douglass concurred, noting that Louisiana’s grisly reputation as a “life of
living death” instilled terror and trepidation within the African Ameri-
can community. Those unfortunate enough to be sold there “cried out
with one voice as though the heavens and earth were coming together,”
former bondsman Jacob Stroyer remembered, for “Louisiana was consid-
ered by the slaves as a place of slaughter.”1
Louisiana’s reputation as that “old debble Lousy-Anna” haunted the
slave community. Along the Mississippi, its tributaries, and bayous in
This chapter was originally presented at the Avignon Conference on Slavery and
Forced Labour, “Women in Slavery—In Honour of Suzanne Miers,” 16–18 October
2002. A much longer version was published as “Heat, Sex, and Sugar: Childbearing
in the Slave Quarters,” Journal of Family History 67, no. 4 (2003): 510–39. The JFH
has kindly given permission to republish the article in this condensed and altered
format. The author wishes to acknowledge the generous assistance of Joseph Miller
in editing and amending this article.
54

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sexual reproduction among louisiana slave women
southern portions of the state, enslaved African Americans toiled on in-
dustrial-scale plantations where cane farming and sugar production ad-
vanced at punishing rhythms. Located on the northern fringe of the
Caribbean sugar producing belt, Louisiana’s sporadically icy climate
compelled planters to set the pace of cutting and processing the canes at
a lethal pace, before the first killing frosts descended in November or
December. Facing acute ecological risks and a volatile Gulf climate,
planters ordered their harvest crews, including most of the women they
owned, into the fields in mid-October or early November. For the fol-
lowing six to ten weeks, these agricultural factories operated around the
clock as enslaved women and men worked feverishly to cut and crush the
crop. Fourteen- and sixteen-hour shifts taxed physical reserves and con-
tributed to grisly levels of mortality. Thomas Hamilton testified to the
human wastage of the cane fields when he concluded that sugar cultiva-
tion “was only carried on at an appalling sacrifice of life.” During the an-
nual harvest or grinding season, Hamilton observed, “the fatigue is so
great that nothing but the severest application of the lash can stimulate
the human frame to endure it.” Fully cognizant that planters impelled
their slaves to work at a ferocious pace, Claude Robin added that the
slaves awoke long before dawn and toiled late into the night before fi-
nally returning to their quarters. The exhausting discipline of the sugar
world, Robin deduced, checked slave fertility and elicited atrocious rates
of demographic decrease. “The gloomy melancholy of these unfortunate
people,” the Frenchman concluded, was entirely understandable, for on a
plantation of twenty slaves, deaths surpassed live births by such a degree
that within two decades the slave force had mostly perished.2
Louisiana slavery’s morbid history was unique in the American South.
In the tobacco and cotton districts, the slave population grew swiftly, but
in the cane world, the decennial natural growth rate for the 1850s may
have been as low as 6 or 7 percent, a figure only one-fourth the Southern
mean and similar to that of the dwindling populations of the West Indies.
And also like the Caribbean, Louisiana’s appalling demographic record de-
rived from the specific labor requirements of producing sugar, the dearth
of women, and high rates of infant mortality. Those few bondswomen
who had the misfortune of being sold to Louisiana’s cane world experi-
enced low fertility rates, gave birth to correspondingly few children, and
suffered high maternal and infant mortality. Female slaves, in particular,
suffered under the sugar barons’ regime as heavy physical labor and inade-
quate nutrition, particularly a diet deficient in protein, led to abnormally
low rates of conception, depressed libido, and provoked miscarriages.3

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56 richard follett
Recent scholarship has frequently underscored the agency of slave
women, particularly in regard to their capacity to undermine the slave-
holders’ narrow definition of them as physical and reproductive labor.
Despite the enormous burdens that enslavement imposed on them, such
scholars argue, bondswomen challenged the misogynist assumptions that
underpinned plantation slavery and practiced, historian Barbara Bush
contends, “psychological contraception.” By consciously avoiding preg-
nancy or through gynecological resistance, black women reclaimed their
own bodies, frustrated the planters’ pro-natalist policies, and in turn de-
fied white male constructions of their sexuality. Whether swallowing
abortifacients such as calomel and turpentine or chewing on natural con-
traceptives like cotton roots or okra, slave women wove contraception
and miscarriages through the dark fabric of slave oppositional culture.
Enslaved women who resisted the planters’ untrammeled sexual aggres-
sion in these ways were undoubtedly lionized by fellow bondswomen as
gritty survivors, but few of those in the sugar country were able to over-
come the destructive ecological and nutritional factors of the sugar regime.
Ultimately, the structural demands of Louisiana’s slaveholding order de-
fined the capacity of slave women to conceive and deliver their offspring.
The marked seasonality of pregnancy and childbirth on the plantations
stands as testimony to the distorting intensity of Louisiana sugar.4
The impact of labor processes on the fertility of slave women has long
received scholarly attention. William Taylor reported to the British House
of Commons in 1832 that the decrease in the slave population was “ma-
terially affected by the nature of the employment” on the Jamaican cane
estates. While some scholars of the American South, notably Michael
Tadman, have addressed the overall negative effect of sugar cultivation
and Louisiana slaveholders’ predilection for male workers on slave fertil-
ity (using live births as a proxy), this chapter examines the specific physi-
ological mechanisms affecting the slave women subject to the harsh regi-
men of sugar. In the Louisiana cane districts, inadequate diet, excessive
workloads, climate, and hormonal imbalances all seriously compromised
fecundity (the biological capacity for reproduction).5
reproductive physiology under assault
As physiologists indicate, heavy physical work undermines reproductive
fitness, specifically ovarian function, and thus limits success in procreation.
Intensely fit female ballerinas, athletes, and military recruits frequently
experience delayed menarche, irregular menstrual cycles, and amenor-

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sexual reproduction among louisiana slave women
rhea (cessation of menstruation). Although farm labor hardly qualifies as
vigorous athletic training, research conducted among rural Nepali women
indicates that seasonal increases in heavy physical work also suppress
progesterone levels and limit ovarian function. To assess reproductive
readiness, physiologists commonly measure levels of progesterone. The
ovary secretes this hormone in the two weeks after ovulation, and it is
the subsequent decrease in production of progesterone that allows men-
struation. Higher levels of progesterone during this “luteal phase” indicate
that women have ovulated and are in a fertile state. During the Nepalese
monsoon, when women labored on agricultural tasks for more than eight
hours per day, they lost weight and their progesterone levels dropped,
indicating a reduction in fecundity derived from the combination of
extreme labor and related weight loss. Parallel studies on Polish agricul-
tural workers underscore that physical exertion, even among well-fed
women, reduces progesterone levels and suppresses ovarian function.
While exercise-induced weight loss clearly reduced progesterone levels in
Nepal among marginally nourished women, the Polish evidence strongly
indicates that energy expenditure alone can induce seasonal troughs in
the reproductive fitness of well-fed females.6
Although the antebellum sugar lords measured the physical strength
of their human property by varying indices, they of course left no proges-
terone samples for consideration by historians. In their plantation regis-
ters, however, they recorded live births and thus provided the modern
observer with a proxy to consider the ovarian function and rates of con-
ception in the slave community that might have produced the infants
born. By relying on these birth dates as the principal data, we can infer
the seasonality of conceptions that had resulted in the recorded successful
births, although this procedure cannot track the seasonality of miscar-
riages or abortions, be they spontaneous or induced by the bondswoman.
Figure 2.1 summarizes recorded births by months and presents the esti-
mated months of conception of 1,223 slave women on ten Louisiana
sugar plantations. The data derive principally from the 1840s and 1850s,
a period during which Louisiana’s sugar industry rapidly industrialized,
producing one of the most oppressive labor regimes in the slave states.
Births include all infants reported as born on an estate (including those
who would die as babies).
The solid line charting imputed conceptions precedes the index of
recorded births by nine months. Its sharp rise in the harvest months of
November and December indicates a surprising seasonal peak in repro-
ductive success at the very time when labor proved most draining for

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58 richard follett
Figure 2.1. Slave birth and conception data for Louisiana sugar plantations.
men and women alike. The November spike in conceptions, for instance,
contrasted sharply with the below-average numbers of conceptions for
seven months across the year and numbers hovering at or just above the
average for three additional months. This concentration of conceptions
at the height of the exhausting season of sugar making defies explanation
in terms of the known ability of physical exertion to suppress fertility. If
the cited research on the deleterious impact of stressful physical work on
ovarian function is pertinent, then November and December should ex-
hibit the lowest indices of successful fertilization. The inverse, however,
turns out to have been the case!7
food and fecundity in the cane world
In a parallel study of birth seasonality on the rice plantations of the
Georgia and South Carolina Low Country, Cheryll Ann Cody concludes
that one-third of the children born there (twice the average rate) were
conceived from December to January. At first glance, this pattern
matched that of Louisiana, but the marked seasonality in Low-Country
conceptions mirrored the lull in labor demands on rice estates. During
the winter months slaves enjoyed more leisure time, were less exposed to
the risk of malaria, and accordingly enjoyed better health and had addi-
tional opportunities for family life.
The same winter decline in subtropical fevers held true in the Louisiana
sugar country, but conceptions there did not show the same correlation
with seasonal availability of free time and relief from heavy physical ex-

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sexual reproduction among louisiana slave women
ertion. If they had, conceptions might have risen in the summer months
during the lay-by period, when the sugar canes required minimal atten-
tion. Despite changing workloads, however, the lay-by hardly proved to
be a period of peak reproductive success. By contrast, successful repro-
ductive behavior peaked in the late autumn harvest months and then
collapsed during the late winter and early spring periods. Slave women
on the sugar estates accordingly experienced a bimodal annual variation
in their reproductive lives; whether they had sexual intercourse frequently
or not, bondswomen would surely have noted that birth dates tended to
cluster and that many among them were at similar stages of pregnancy.
To be sure, exogenous factors such as climate and disease shaped birth
seasonality, but it is the relation between diet and workload that ulti-
mately explains the seasonal peaks and troughs in slave births, at least in
Louisiana.8
Life—including nutrition—on antebellum plantations marched to
the burdensome beat of the agricultural calendar; as such, Louisiana
slaves toiled incessantly to plant, cultivate, and harvest the canes before
finally manufacturing sugar. It was a grueling labor cycle that peaked in
the annual harvest but continued almost unchecked throughout the
year. In the first instance, the danger of frost damage impelled planters to
cut and process their matured canes at double-quick time. Second, the
introduction of steam-powered sugar milling in the 1840s imposed a re-
lentless tempo on harvest work as slaves labored at feverish speed to sup-
ply the powered mills with freshly cut canes. These two harvest-specific
pressures conspired to form a punishing labor regime. To encourage the
slaves to toil the long hours required in act in the planters’ interest,
slaveholders threatened their bondspeople with whips but also supplied
them with multiple incentives. These inducements took the shape of
cash payments, Christmas bonuses, enhanced leisure time at other points
in the year, postharvest festivities, and above all food.
These concessions were, of course, self-serving. In return for a little
cash or extra food, the slaveholders gained labor stability, and the extra
rations doled out at harvest ensured that the slave crews began their
shifts with full bellies and the energy to work long hours. Such incentives,
however, lasted only as long as the harvest. Following a brief respite over
Christmas, when the planter normally supplied the slaves with adequate
food to celebrate at least one postharvest or vacation meal, the slaves re-
turned to work to seed the canes and tend the shoots. Until mechaniza-
tion, planting cane required prolonged backbreaking work that gave way
to less burdensome labor only in the spring, when slaves hoed and

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60 richard follett
chopped away weeds that grew among the sprouting canes. By the mid-
summer lay-by, the cane shoots were robust enough to survive without
constant attention. Labor, however, seldom slowed as planters redirected
their work crews elsewhere; other crops were harvested, buildings and
farm equipment needed maintenance, and the vast quantity of cordage
required as fuel for the steam-powered sugar mills was cut from woods in
the backswamps.9
The pace of work during the nine-month cultivation season never
matched the intensity of the harvest, and slaveholders found a weekly ra-
tion of corn and pork sufficient to sustain their slaves’ efforts. Slaves
sometimes added to their miserly ration with food they cultivated on
their garden plots or fished, trapped, or even purchased, but their diet was
barely adequate for the workload. By contrast, during the harvest, they
were provided with additional rations and molasses that in all probability
matched or surpassed the energy requirements for sugar work, even dur-
ing the grinding season. That energy and associated weight gain proved
critical in shaping the slaves’ annual reproductive calendar. The frequency
with which slaves had sex during the harvest is impossible to quantify,
but we can deduce that whatever the level of coital activity, it was suffi-
cient to lead to a high number of successful births nine months later.
Slaves, almost assuredly, took the opportunity of the postharvest “holi-
day” to spend leisure time with their families, but the seasonal rise in Au-
gust and September births is too great to ascribe to a single week of free
time (almost always the Christmas week), although it unquestionably
played a role in shaping the birth calendar on many estates. Rather, it
was the enhanced caloric consumption during the harvest, combined
with a set of additional environmental factors, that ultimately explains
the seasonal peak in conceptions. Conversely, the withdrawal of the ad-
ditional rations (without a commensurate decline in labor extracted) ex-
plains the dip in conceptions through the spring and summer. The expe-
rience of slave women in Louisiana’s cane world appears to have been
similar to the !Kung San of Botswana, a similarly rural and seminourished
people, whose seasonal crest in births followed peak body weight by nine
months, indicating that food availability directly enhanced reproductive
fitness and that nutritional stress during other parts of the year impaired
their capacity to bear children. The improved diet and associated weight
gain during the harvest months similarly provided Louisiana bondswomen
with adequate calories and body weight to conceive successfully. By con-
trast, at other times of the year, nutritional stress reduced the fecundity
of Louisiana’s slave women.10

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sexual reproduction among louisiana slave women
background nutritional deficits
Although food supply varied from estate to estate, the slave diet during
these routine parts of the agricultural year averaged 1 to 1.5 pecks of corn
and 3.5 to 4 pounds of pork per week per hand (approximately 9 liters of
corn and 1.4 kilograms of meat). This monotonous diet barely sufficed as
raw caloric intake but woefully lacked nutritional balance. Although
some slaves may have improved their own diet from their gardens, plan-
tation records consistently indicate that they also frequently sold their
produce for specie or supplies at the estate commissary. “Enterprising and
intelligent” planters occasionally increased rations of pork, corn, mo-
lasses, yams, and other vegetables to ensure that field hands would “keep
healthy and strong.” As agricultural journalist Solon Robinson observed,
these enhanced rations expressed raw self-interest. On his visit to
Thomas Pugh’s Madewood Plantation, Robinson informed his readers in
the American Agriculturist that working hands drew weekly rations at the
top of the general range—1.5 pecks of corn, 5.25 pounds of mess pork,
and vegetables. Pugh’s modest generosity, however, had a hollow ring, for
the improved rations accompanied his introduction of a steam-powered
mill that sharply upped the pace of labor in the cane fields. Toiling to
supply the railroad that brought the freshly cut canes to the mill and the
conveyor belts that whisked them into the sugarhouse, slaves at Made-
wood evidently needed every ounce of energy they could obtain to keep
up with the incessant pace of modern sugar processing technology. Other
slaves, however, proved less well nourished, receiving daily rations of
only half a pound of pork, a quantity close to the standard slave al-
lowance. Indeed, as one Louisiana physician noted, “the diet of Negroes
on most plantations being mostly salt pork, corn bread, and molasses—
rarely eating fresh meat and vegetables—a condition of the system is
thus produced closely allied to scurvy.”11
calorie deprivation and energy supply
By providing such limited food, estate mangers barely satisfied their slaves’
caloric requirements for strenuous labor. The World Health Organiza-
tion estimates that a male engaged in heavy work for eight hours burns
3,490 calories per day. The basic daily slave ration amounted to 4,056
calories and should have met or exceeded this standard. But Richard
Sutch has calculated that an average adult male weighing 65 kilograms
(143 pounds) who slept nine hours per day, who rested for an additional

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62 richard follett
three hours, and who expended two hours in eating, dressing, and other
light personal activity would have burned 1,200 calories without work-
ing at all. The remaining 2,856 calories in the standard slave ration
would have been expended in labor at a rate of 4.8 calories per minute.
By using the Christensen system of energy expenditure, Sutch maintains
that slaves would have exceeded the caloric value of the standard ration
by working only “lightly.” Where planters ordered heavier work or longer
hours on laborious tasks such as ridging, digging, plowing, and preparing
the land for cultivation, they had to resort to compulsion to maintain
prescribed work speeds, while their slaves experienced fatigue and weight
loss as they depleted their energy stores.12
During the arduous cane-planting season, African Americans required
approximately 3,500 to 4,000 calories to perform their field duties. To
meet their total energy budgets, however, slaves needed to consume up
to 5,000 calories per day. Although some slaves almost certainly ob-
tained more than the basic ration, most African Americans consumed, at
best, only the minimum food required for their work and, at worst, some
20 to 40 percent less than they required to maintain weight and energy.
The fact that the vital and high-energy-consuming “prime field hands”
in the sugar country were younger, slightly taller, and perhaps “sturdier”
than slaves in other regions would have further exacerbated the inade-
quacies of the standard ration, especially for those in the final stages of
adolescence.13
This dietary shortfall, when combined with the heavy physical exertion
required of sugar work, proved particularly deleterious for slave women.
Above all, it triggered weight loss and associated decline in fecundity.
Research conducted among contemporary Lese women in rural Zaire
complements the data from Nepal, Poland, and Botswana to suggest that
ovarian function for marginally nourished females appears to be compro-
mised by even modest loss of weight. Significantly for Louisiana slave
women, modern research shows that ovarian dysfunction occurs most
noticeably in the month following weight loss. The nutritional depriva-
tion that female slaves experienced during the planting season further
suppressed the rate of conceptions in February and March.14
Since the low rates of conception during the spring planting season
reflect how physically taxing African Americans found their lives on
Louisiana’s sugar plantations, it appears anomalous that the harvest, with
its even longer hours and much more physically punishing workload,
should have produced the highest rates of conception. Workdays were
much longer, and the work more intense, during October, November, and

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sexual reproduction among louisiana slave women
Table 2.1. Daily work and calorie expenditure
work expenditure 14-hour shifts 16-hour shifts
4.5 kcal/minute 4,500 kcal 4,900 kcal
5.45 kcal/minute 5,300 kcal 5,800 kcal
6.175 kcal/minute 5,900 kcal 6,500 kcal
6.9 kcal/minute 6,500 kcal 7,200 kcal
December than at other times of the year, as the bondspeople cut and
processed the cane at breakneck speed in twelve- to sixteen-hour shifts.
The slaves then expended enormous quantities of energy that far out-
stripped their caloric intake from their standard ration. Considering the
number of hours, collective stress, and exhaustion of this work in the hot
and sticky sugar mill, it appears realistic to assume that slaves expended
between 5,000 and 6,500 calories per twenty-four hours for working,
resting, and sleeping. Table 2.1 charts the potential energy expenditure
for fourteen- and sixteen-hour shifts across a range of assumed rates of
caloric expenditure, including associated sleeping and relaxing over the
daily and nightly cycle.15
sirop and the fueling of normal menstrual cycles
Planters fueled the increased energy expenditure required for harvest
work by increasing rations, as Thomas Pugh evidenced, and by distribut-
ing extra provisions of either molasses or “sirop” (molten sugar dissolved
in water) to the cane workers. Those who worked in the sugarhouse,
milling the canes and producing the granulated sugar, additionally re-
ceived a plentiful supply of coffee and hot molasses as well. Doling out
these sweet and sticky by-products of the production process cost the
planters little and proved particularly appealing and energizing to the
slaves. As Joseph Ingraham noted, the slaves “revive and become robust
and healthy” upon consuming liquid sugar or molasses. The caloric high
of the sugar harvest received signal attention as physicians urged that “it
is only . . . at the rolling season when the operatives on sugar estates
are observed to become fat and healthy.” Explaining these “fattening
qualities” of sugar, Dr. Samuel Cartwright recorded that they emerged
most markedly among boiling house workers, who enjoyed ready access
to the hot cane juice or sirop. Freshly milled liquid sugar (in its molten

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64 richard follett
state, prior to final granulation), Cartwright maintained, proved rich in
calories, while vapors inhaled from the sugar clarifiers possessed singular
medicinal features that eased consumptive, catarrhal, bronchial, and
dyspeptic infirmities. The most emaciated individuals, Cartwright pro-
pounded in the New Orleans-based De Bow’s Review, would “soon re-
cover their health and get fat” after an extended spell in the sugarhouse.
Even the New York periodical Plow cited Cartwright’s research, clarify-
ing the palpable incongruity that slaves appeared “healthy” despite work-
ing eighteen hours per day on the harvest.16
Bondspeople who freely drank sirop or consumed semimolten mo-
lasses experienced marked increases in caloric intake, as carbohydrate-
rich sugar provides considerable energy from relatively small doses. One
gram of high-grade sugar provides 3.85 kilocalories of energy; conse-
quently, slaves who consumed thirty grams (about one ounce—approxi-
mately the same amount of sugar as in one medium-size sixteen-ounce
bottle of commercially available sports drink) of dissolved sugar most
probably gained approximately 115 calories. Like today’s athletes who
guzzle sugar-rich drinks, African Americans on Louisiana’s sugar planta-
tions fueled their energy expenditures by consuming a carbohydrate-rich
diet throughout the day. On the job those cumulative grams of sugar de-
livered a concentrated energy jolt that fueled muscle expenditure through-
out the work shift. And by rotating slaves through a revolving system of
shift work, planters assured that all hands gained frequent access to the
molten sirop.17
While planters and contemporaries could not have calculated calories
to workload, their concerns with production and profit focused their at-
tention on sucrose’s intensely energizing effect during the grinding sea-
son. Some slaveholders remained miserly in their weekly allowances, but
most acted on their association of strength and productivity with diet.
Sketching overseers’ duties, the reform-minded Thomas Affleck warned
that sickness often derived from negligent slave management, including
inappropriate or poorly cooked food. Preventative maintenance required
an ample and varied diet of “wholesome well-cooked food” supplied “at
regular hours.” Although the slaves’ quarters never quite resembled a bar-
rack complex, the factory compound on most Louisiana sugar estates in-
cluded compact housing where the planter could maintain a watchful
eye over his laborers’ every move and every ration consumed.
Centralized canteen-style preparation of food further ensured that the
planter could regiment the slaves’ diet as workloads peaked, while addi-
tionally saving hours that could be reallocated to producing sugar. Albert

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sexual reproduction among louisiana slave women
Patterson, who grew up in Plaquemines Parish, attested to centralized
meal services in at least one instance when he recalled a cook who man-
aged a large kitchen on the estate where he had grown up and prepared
meals for the slaves while they worked. On other estates, planters con-
solidated cooking operations prior to the cane-crushing season, while
others prepared for the impending drudgery of the harvest by directing
the elderly and infirm to cook for the hands. Although these planters fo-
cused on the potential gain in field labor from centralizing food prepara-
tion, their time-thrifty management also ensured that the work gangs
began each shift nutritionally prepared for its draining demands.18
Like most midcentury Americans, sugar masters did not understand
that these provisions were inadequate in terms of the minerals and vita-
mins necessary for a nutritious diet, but by introducing sirop and mo-
lasses, they at least temporarily boosted the calories available. Beyond the
immediate contribution of the sucrose-supplemented slave diet to pro-
duction that concerned the planters, the increased calories also raised
the bondspeople’s fertility. We have seen that not only does malnutrition
reduce female fecundity but also that starvation and poor diet delay
menarche and that even a relatively small associated weight loss of 10 to
15 percent of normal weight (for height) prompts amenorrhea. Accord-
ingly, Louisiana slaves who gulped sirop or consumed extra rations during
the harvest season almost certainly attained their caloric requirements
while additionally gaining “easily mobilized energy” indispensable for the
maintenance of normal menstrual cycles. Given that seasonal changes in
food supply correlate with reproductive success, it is highly probable that
the slaveholder’s dietary supplements provided the bondswomen with
adequate calories and weight gain (relative to other parts of the year) to
conceive successfully. By contrast, at other times of the year when the
diet proved marginal, at best, and slave women very likely lost weight
(despite lower workloads), nutritional stress reduced their fecundity to
the low summer levels observed in figure one. The evidence thus leads to
the overwhelming conclusion that inadequate food and poor nutrition,
when combined with heavy labor duties, compromised fertility through-
out the year and that harvest-season peaks in food supply overcame the
even more intense workloads of those months to spur episodic reproduc-
tive success.19
Slaves toiling on Jamaica’s cane estates would have easily understood
the hunger of the enslaved population in Louisiana. As historian Ken-
neth Kiple indicates, malnutrition in the West Indian cane islands simi-
larly suppressed growth rates throughout the region and in all probability

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66 richard follett
led to abnormally high numbers of stillbirths. But Jamaican planters, like
their Louisiana neighbors, also gave their slaves unrestricted access to
cane juice during the grinding season and similarly prided themselves on
the momentarily healthy and cheerful appearance of their bondspeople.
Yet, as John Masterson Waddell observed, their smiles derived merely
from full bellies. “Ere the season closed,” the Presbyterian missionary
continued, “they began to suffer, were fagged and sickly, from excessive
toil and want of food.” Waddell’s concerns with nutritional deprivation
rang true throughout the sugar-producing Caribbean, including Louisiana,
where they combined with environmental factors, disease, and the in-
tense workload to produce dismal records of low fertility, impaired fecun-
dity, and erratic capacity to conceive.20
environmental and epidemiological considerations
Although nutrition levels proved critical in shaping the slaves’ procreative
lives, seasonal oscillation in birth patterns was not unique to the slave
experience in the premodern world. In fact, the nutritionally driven win-
ter peak in slave conceptions actually reinforced the physiological ten-
dency among tropical peoples toward reproductive seasonality. As many
physiologists contend, environmental and nutritional factors commonly
influence annual rhythms in human reproduction. Conspicuously, ambi-
ent temperature, the availability of food, daylight, and the prevalence of
disease alter the neurological clock that calculates the optimal time of
the year to become pregnant or deliver offspring. In the upper, cooler lati-
tudes, this cycle ensures that the summer months tend to be the prime
periods of reproductive activity, while in the warmer lower latitudes,
conceptions peak in the winter.
Traces of these seasonal rhythms in conception and ovulation remain
today but are significantly less pronounced than in the nineteenth cen-
tury or before. In subtropical southern Louisiana, these environmental
factors continued to affect birth seasonality until the widespread diffu-
sion of air-conditioning in the 1960s. Not only did heat and humidity
obviously suppress copulation rates during the sultry summer months,
but the stifling local climate also led to suppressed production of ova, de-
creased testosterone levels, lowered sperm counts and reduced motility,
and increased ratios of immature and defective sperm. Indeed, as little as
a five-degree (F) increase in the mean August temperature prompts a de-
cline of 10 percent in conceptions.21

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sexual reproduction among louisiana slave women
While summer heat compromised both male and female fecundity, the
marked cooling of temperature in late October and November through
southern parts of Louisiana reinforced the tendency toward a midwinter
crest in conceptions. In all probability, this drop in temperatures (13 per-
cent from October to November) increased reproductive activity even
among fatigued and heat-drained slaves who had just endured six months
of muggy and oppressive night heat in rude wooden shacks. Around their
dismal huts lolled pigs, poultry, and dogs, all adding their feces to the
human waste and stagnant pools that surrounded the cabins. Within the
cabins, the primary living, cooking, and sleeping environment, ambient
temperatures probably far exceeded open-air maximums during the
lengthy summer, while providing only modest refuge from January
chills. When combined with oppressive heat and sapping humidity,
these spartan facilities almost certainly limited reproductive activity
during the summer.22
Disease further limited slaves’ fecundity and fertility everywhere in the
Caribbean and the American South. Few bondspeople, however, lived in
epidemiological environments more challenging than those residing in
the Louisiana sugar country. The hot and swampy cane fields proved per-
fect breeding grounds for disease and, above all, for the malaria-carrying
mosquito. African Americans possessed limited inherited immunity from
falciparum malaria, but parasitical mutations ensured that the large num-
ber of slaves imported to the sugar region from Virginia and Maryland
faced unfamiliar and virulent strains. Cholera struck periodically with
still greater morbidity and mortality, as did yellow fever. African Ameri-
cans debilitated by these diseases succumbed easily to hookworm and
other diarrhea-inducing infestations of parasites that multiplied in the
stagnant pools in which slaves washed and from which they drew water
to cook and drink. No part of the year was infection free, though May
through September proved especially unhealthy as tropical diseases spread
among exhausted adult laborers and the newborn.
All premodern humans adapted to these seasonal epidemiological
dangers by conceiving during relatively narrow “breeding seasons.”
Often triggered by greater availability of food in the fall harvest season,
lower temperatures after the heat of summer, or reduced risk of disease
during cooler nights, these “seasons” reflect generations, indeed centuries,
of spontaneously preferred late-summer delivery dates. The prevalence
of summer infections in both West Africa and in the U.S. South in all
probability enhanced the slaves’ tendency toward winter conceptions and

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68 richard follett
term deliveries when temperatures began to drop later in the year and
when disease proved less threatening.23
miscarriage and early pregnancy loss
Naturally weakened by the sugar masters’ regime, slave women quite pos-
sibly also experienced greater fetal loss than those residing in the cotton
South. Measuring the effect of workplace exhaustion or nutritional stress
on the frequency of miscarriages or spontaneous abortions proves ex-
tremely difficult, but it seems highly probable that the sugar masters’
labor regime took its toll in miscarriages following the harvest and plant-
ing seasons. Most research on spontaneous abortions indicates that be-
tween 14 and 43 percent of all conceptions result in an early miscarriage
that usually materializes as a late or heavy menstrual period. Even among
contemporary healthy women who seek to become pregnant, 31 percent
of all conceptions fail. How often this happened to a Louisiana slave
woman remains her secret, but some tangential evidence suggests that
bondswomen in the sugar country suffered in all likelihood from luteal
phase progesterone deficiency (LPD).
Since heavy physical labor suppresses the secretion of progesterone
and reduces fecundity, a number of related conditions might explain fetal
loss among Louisiana slaves. Progesterone deficiency, for instance, en-
sures that the womb is unsupportive for the successful implantation and
sustained growth of the fertilized egg and it furthermore triggers a series
of physiological responses that harms the endometrial environment within
the uterus and makes it less able to react to pregnancy-related hormones.
Undernourishment and vitamin deficiency further compromise ovarian
function and contribute significantly to the frequency of miscarriages.
Given the seasonal demands of workloads throughout the year, Louisiana
slave women, in all probability, experienced LPD and endured pregnancy
loss throughout the year, although most particularly during the winter
and spring months. Women who additionally contracted summer diseases
or “fevers” were also more likely to miscarry, ensuring that miscarriage re-
mained a persistent feature of life throughout the sugar country. Infec-
tion, for instance, harms the placenta and compromises its ability to
transmit nutrients to the fetus. Malaria is especially culpable, although
fever-inducing infections are recognized as a common cause of early mis-
carriage and late fetal wastage. The disastrous combination of maternal
overwork and undernourishment left a grim birthright for those children
that were born into slavery; maternal malnutrition compromises the

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child’s immune system during fetal growth, stillbirths are more frequent,
and overworked and underfed mothers deliver offspring at least two hun-
dred grams lighter than those of less active mothers. Workplace fatigue,
moreover, slows fetal growth and the perpetual stooping and stretching
involved with farming sugar cane reduces blood supply to the placenta.
Neither planters nor slaves, of course, recognized these unintentional
side effects of sugar production, but the labor order wrought a frightening
toll among those alive and those yet to be born.24
Elsewhere in the U.S. South, family life protected enough slaves from
the savage excesses of their masters’ drive for profits that slave popula-
tions grew. But along the swampy bayous of the lower Mississippi Valley,
the prospects for slave reproduction and thus children were profoundly
compromised by the intense demands of mechanized sugar production
that slaveholders introduced in the antebellum years. Unquestionably,
environmental factors shaped the slaves’ natural proclivity toward win-
ter conceptions. The more significant for the seasonal variation, how-
ever, was the momentary surge in calories relative to energy expenditure
that free consumption of sirop gave them during the harvest. The anoma-
lous peak in harvest-time conceptions derived from Louisiana’s planta-
tion elite satiating the slaves’ energy budget during the harvest but fail-
ing to do so at other key points in the agricultural cycle. Slave women
thus faced the cruellest imposition on their dignity of all, for the over-
whelming power of the sugar regime left an enduring inheritance at al-
most every stage of conception, pregnancy, and childbearing. Whether
from reduced ovulation, hormonal imbalances, weight loss, or sheer ex-
haustion, sugar production in Louisiana materially harmed the slave
woman’s body. The sugar regime thus bequeathed an appalling legacy of
human suffering. Little wonder then, that the enslaved called it “old deb-
ble Lousy Anna.”
notes
1. George William Featherstonhaugh, Excursion through the Slave States, 2 vols.
(London: J. Murray, 1844), 1:120; Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a
Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, ed. John A. Scott (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1984), 122; Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford:
Park, 1881), 173; Jacob Stroyer, My Life in the South (Salem, MA: Salem Observer
Book and Job Print, 1885), 42–43.
2. John S. Kendall, “New Orleans’ Peculiar Institution,” Louisiana Historical
Quarterly 23, no. 1 (1940): 1; Claude C. Robin, Voyage to Louisiana, 1803–1805,
trans. Stuart O. Landry (New Orleans: Pelican, 1966), 240.

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70 richard follett
3. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old
South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 68; Tadman, “The Demo-
graphic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the
Americas,” American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1534, 1554; Robert W.
Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York:
Norton, 1989), 123–26. On the Caribbean, see Barry W. Higman, Slave Populations
of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984), 375; Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 124; Michael Craton, “Hobbesian or
Panglossian? The Two Extremes of Slave Conditions in the British Caribbean, 1783
to 1834,” William and Mary Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1978): 347; Richard B. Sheridan,
Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West In-
dies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 225–28. On physi-
cal activity and reproduction, see David C. Cumming, Garry D. Wheeler, and Vicki
J. Harber, “Physical Activity, Nutrition, and Reproduction,” Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences, no. 709 (1994): 57–60.
4. On contraception, see Liese M. Perrin, “Resisting Reproduction: Reconsider-
ing Slave Contraception in the Old South,” Journal of American Studies 35 (2001):
255–74; Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave
Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 176–77; Bar-
bara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press. 1990), 138. On women who rejected the planters’ attempts to con-
trol their lives, see Brenda Stevenson, “Gender Conventions, Ideals, and Identity
among Antebellum Virginia Slave Women,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and
Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1996), 169–90; Barbara Bush, “‘The Family Tree Is
Not Cut’: Women and Cultural Resistance in Slave Family Life in the British
Caribbean,” in In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American His-
tory, ed. Gary Y. Okihiro (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986),
119–22; Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women: Thoughts
on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14 (1989): 912–20. While not underestimat-
ing the significance of resistance, Jennifer L. Morgan has recently cautioned histori-
ans to avoid romanticizing women who practiced birth control. Morgan, Laboring
Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 114.
5. Cheryll Ann Cody, “Cycles of Work and Childbearing: Seasonality in Women’s
Lives on Low Country Plantations,” in Gaspar and Hine, More than Chattel, 61–78;
Taylor, quoted in Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, 242; Tadman, “Demographic Cost of
Sugar,” 1534–75. For other approaches to work and pregnancy, see John Campbell,
“Work, Pregnancy, and Infant Mortality among Southern Slaves,” Journal of Interdis-
ciplinary History 14 (1984): 793–812; Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New
World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press,
1989), 119–43; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the
Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), ch. 1. On fer-
tility and fecundity, see James W. Wood, “Maternal Nutrition and Reproduction:

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Why Demographers and Physiologists Disagree about a Fundamental Relationship,”
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, no. 709 (1994): 109. This relationship is
not to be confused with the fertility ratio—the ratio of children to women.
6. Lyliane Rosetta, “Female Reproductive Dysfunction and Intense Physical
Training,” Oxford Review of Reproductive Biology 15 (1993): 113–41; David C. Cum-
ming, “The Effects of Exercise and Nutrition on the Menstrual Cycle,” in Biomedical
and Demographic Determinants of Reproduction, ed. Ronald Gray, with Henri Leridon
and Alfred Spira (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 132–56; C. Panter Brick, D. S.
Lostein, and T. Ellison, “Seasonality of Reproductive Function and Weight Loss in
Rural Nepali Women,” Human Reproduction 8 (1993): 684–90; G. Jasie´
nska and T.
Ellison, “Physical Work Causes Suppression of Ovarian Function in Women,” Pro-
ceedings of the Royal Society of London B 265 (1998): 1847–51.
7. Although gestation varies significantly due to premature and late deliveries,
most obstetricians use the nine-month or 270-day rule as their best working average.
See Campbell, “Work, Pregnancy,” 798. Slave birth data are drawn from Vital Reg-
ister, 1832–62, Samuel McCutchon and James McCutchon (and Family) Papers,
Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Hill Memorial Library,
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (hereafter cited as LSU); “Register of
Births among W. J. Palfrey’s Negroes, commenced August 1843,” Palfrey (William
J.) and Family Papers, LSU; vol. 17., List of Negroes on Waterloo Plantation 1848,
1852, and Southdown Plantation, 1852, William J. Minor and Family Papers, LSU;
“A Memorandum of the Births of Negro Children,” Record Book, 1817–52, Klein-
peter (Joseph) and Family Papers, LSU; vol. 9, “List of Mothers, Births, and De-
ceased,” DeClouet (Alexandre) Papers, LSU. Anonymous Planters Ledger, LSU;
Aime (Valcour) Slave Records, Louisiana State Museum, New Orleans; White
(Maunsell) Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Manuscripts Department, Li-
brary of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
8. Cody, “Life and Labor,” 69.
9. On the nature of slavery in the antebellum sugar country, see Richard Follett,
The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country:
The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753–1950 (Lexington: University of Ken-
tucky Press, 1953); John Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to
Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2001), 9–32; Roderick A. McDonald, The Economy and Material
Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana
History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).
10. L. A. Van der Walt, E. N. Wilmsen, and T. Jenkins, “Unusual Sex Hormone
Patterns among Desert-Dwelling Hunter-Gatherers,” Journal of Clinical Endocrinol-
ogy and Metabolism 16 (1978): 658–63; Paul W. Leslie and Peggy H. Fry, “Extreme
Seasonality of Births among Nomadic Turkana Pastoralists,” American Journal of
Physical Anthropology 79 (1989): 103–15.
11. Solon Robinson, “Agricultural Tour South and West, No. 4,” American Agri-
culturist 8 (April 1849): 118; “Agricultural Tour South and West, No. 9,” American
Agriculturist 8 (September 1849): 283; “Agricultural Tour South and West, No. 10,”

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72 richard follett
American Agriculturist 9 (October 1849): 315; “Agricultural Tour South and West,
No. 11,” American Agriculturist 10 (November 1849): 337; V. Alton Moody, Slavery
on Louisiana Sugar Plantations (1924; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1976), 77; Fred-
erick L. Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1904), 343, 350, 363; J. Carlyle Sitterson, “The William J. Minor Plantations:
A Study in Ante-Bellum Absentee Ownership,” Journal of Southern History 9, no. 1
(1943): 66.
12. Energy and Protein Requirements, World Health Organization Technical Re-
port Series, no. 724 (Geneva: WHO, 1985), 77; Richard Sutch, “The Care and
Feeding of Slaves,” in Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative His-
tory of American Negro Slavery, ed. Paul A. David et al. (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1976), 265–67; Kimberly A. Hammond and Jared Diamond, “Maximal
Sustained Energy Budgets in Humans and Animals,” Nature 386 (1997): 457. On
the Christensen system, see J. V. G. A. Durnin and R. Passmore, Energy, Work, and
Leisure (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1967), esp. ch. 4. On adaptation
to underfeeding, see J. S. Garrow, “Energy Balance and Weight Regulation,” in
Human Nutrition and Dietetics, ed. Garrow and W. P. T. James, 9th ed. (Edinburgh:
Churchill Livingstone, 1993), 141–42.
13. Tadman, Speculators, 65; Richard H. Steckel, “A Peculiar Population: The
Nutrition, Health, and Mortality of American Slaves from Childhood to Maturity,”
Journal of Economic History 46 (1986): 721–26.
14. On ovarian function, see Peter T. Ellison, Nadine R. Peacock, and Catherine
Lager, “Ecology and Ovarian Function among the Lese Women of the Ituri Forest,
Zaire,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 78 (1989): 519–26; Catherine
Lager and Peter T. Ellison, “Effect of Moderate Weight Loss on Ovarian Function
Assessed by Salivary Progesterone Measurements,” American Journal of Human Biol-
ogy 2 (1990): 303–12.
15. For fourteen-hour shifts, assume slaves slept for seven hours and rested for
three additional hours (712.2 kcal); for sixteen-hour shifts, assume slaves slept for six
hours and rested for two additional hours (562.8 kcal). These estimates most proba-
bly underrecord extrawork activities, as cane cutters probably expended 9.8
kcal/minute, gathering canes and loading them onto wagons required from 5.5 to 6.8
kcal/minute, while labor in the sugar mill probably varied from moderate to heavy in
Christensen’s energy classification. See Durnin and Passmore, Energy, Work, 31, 39,
72, 62, 75.
16. Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States, 317; Joseph H. Ingraham, The Southwest by a
Yankee, 2 vols. (New York, 1835), 1:240; De Bow’s Review 13 (December 1852):
598–99; Plow 1 (November 1852): 352.
17. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
(London: Penguin, 1985), 191; Judith E. Brown, The Science of Human Nutrition
(San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990), ch. 5.
18. Thomas Affleck, The Sugar Plantation Record and Account Book. No. 2 (New
Orleans: B. M. Norman, 1854); interview with Albert Patterson (22 May 1940), WPA
Ex-Slave Narrative Papers, LSU; Frogmoor Plantation Diary 1857, Turnbull-Bowman-
Lyons Family Papers, LSU; Oaklands Plantation Document 1859, McCutchon

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(Samuel D.) Papers, LSU; “Rules and Regulations on Governing Southdown and
Hollywood Plantations,” vol. 34, Plantation Diary 1861–68, William J. Minor and
Family Papers, LSU.
19. Rose E. Frisch and J. W. McArthur, “Menstrual Cycles: Fatness as a Determi-
nant of Minimum Weight for Height Necessary for the Maintenance and Onset,”
Science 185 (1974): 949–51; Rose E. Frisch, “Body Fat, Puberty, and Fertility,” Bio-
logical Reviews 59 (1984): 161–88; Michelle P. Warren, “Effects of Undernutrition on
Reproductive Function in the Human,” Endocrine Reviews 4 (1983): 363–77; Lager
and Ellison, “Effect of Moderate Weight Loss,” 303–12. On decreased energy intake
and reproduction, see Rose E. Frisch, “Nutrition, Fatness and Fertility: The Effect of
Food Intake on Reproductive Ability,” in Nutrition and Human Reproduction, ed. W.
Henry Mosley (New York: Plenum Press, 1978), 99. Also, see Zena Stein and
Mervyn Susser, “Fertility, Fecundity, Famine: Food Rations in the Dutch Famine
1944/5 Have a Causal Relation to Fertility, and Probably to Fecundity,” Human Biol-
ogy 47 (1975): 131–54.
20. Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984), 113–15; Reverend Hope Masterton Waddell,
Twenty-Nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa: A Review of Missionary Work
and Adventure (1863; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1970), quoted in Sheridan, Doc-
tors and Slaves, 153. In offering sirop, planters mirrored the long-standing Caribbean
precedent of offering grog or rum to stimulate workers in the sugarhouse. David
Barry Gaspar, “Sugar Cultivation and Slave Life in Antigua before 1800,” in Culti-
vation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin
and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 108. For
comparisons with Tobago and Berbice birth seasonality, see B. W. Higman, Slave
Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1984), 364, 686.
21. On environmental factors, see Till Roenneberg and Jürgen Aschoff, “Annual
Rhythms of Human Reproduction: I. Biology, Sociology or Both?” Journal of Biologi-
cal Rhythms 5 (1990): 195–216; Thomas A. Wehr, “Photoperiodism in Humans and
Other Primates: Evidence and Implications,” Journal of Biological Rhythms 16 (2001):
348–64; F. H. Bronson, “Seasonal Variation in Human Reproduction: Environmen-
tal Factors,” Quarterly Review of Biology 70 (1995): 141–64; Brian K. Follett, “The
Environment and Reproduction,” in Reproduction in Mammals, book 4, Reproductive
Fitness, ed. C. R. Austin and R. V. Short, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1984), 103–32; F. Hoffmann and D. Kawiani, “Seasonal Variations in the
Birth Rate and Conception Rate within the Last 200 Years,” Geburtshilfe und Frauen-
heilkunde (Stuttgart) 36 (1976): 780–85; A. Lerchl, M. Simoni, and E. Nieschlag,
“Changes in Seasonality of Birth Rates in Germany from 1951 to 1990,” Naturwis-
senschaften 80 (1993): 516–18. On sperm levels, see David A. Lam and Jeffrey A.
Miron, “Global Patterns of Seasonal Variation in Human Fertility,” Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences, no. 709 (1994): 9–28; R. J. Levine, B. L. Bordson, R. M.
Mathew, M. H. Brown, J. M. Stanley, and T. B. Starr, “Deterioration of Semen Qual-
ity during Summer in New Orleans,” Fertility and Sterility 49 (1988): 900–907; R. J.
Levine, “Male Factors Contributing to the Seasonality of Human Reproduction,”

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Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, no. 709 (1994): 29–45; Grace M. Cen-
tola and Shirley Eberly, “Seasonal Variations and Age-Related Changes in Human
Sperm Count, Motility, Motion Parameters, Morphology, and White Blood Cell
Concentration,” Fertility and Sterility 72 (1999): 803–8. On U.S. reproductive sea-
sonality, see D. A. Sevier, “Trend and Variation in the Seasonality of U.S. Fertility,
1947 to 1946,” Demography 22 (1985): 89–99; Sevier, “Seasonality of Fertility: New
Evidence,” Population and Environment 10 (1989): 245–57. On temperature, see
David A. Lam and Jeffrey A. Miron, “The Effect of Temperature on Human Fertil-
ity,” Demography 33 (1996): 294; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
tion, Monthly Normals of Temperature, Precipitation, and Heating and Cooling Degree
Days 1951–80, Louisiana, Climatography of the United States, no. 81 (Asheville,
NC: National Climatic Center, 1982); Louisiana State University in New Orleans,
Statistical Abstract of Louisiana 1994 (New Orleans, 1994), 3–7.
22. Solon Robinson, Solon Robinson, Pioneer and Agriculturist: Selected Writings,
ed. Herbert Anthony Kellar, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1936),
172, 180; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, ed. Eugene H.
Berwanger (New York: Knopf, 1988), 176; John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big
House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1993), 191.
23. On disease, see Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia Himmelsteib King, Another Di-
mension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1981), 23, 50–58, 151; K. David Patterson, “Disease Environments of
the Antebellum South,” in Science and Medicine in the Old South, ed. Ronald L.
Numbers and Todd L. Savitt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989),
152–65; Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks
in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 49–82. On breed-
ing seasons, see J. Gyllenborg, N. E. Skakkebæk, N. C. Nielson, N. Keiding, and A.
Giwercman, “Secular and Seasonal Changes in Semen Quality among Young Dan-
ish Men: A Statistical Analysis of Semen Samples from 1927 Donor Candidates dur-
ing 1977–1995,” International Journal of Andrology 22 (1999): 34.
24. Joe Leigh Simpson and Sandra Carson, “Biological Causes of Foetal Loss,” in
Gray, Leridon, and Spira, Biomedical and Demographic Determinants, 308; A. J.
Wilcox et al., “Incidence of Early Loss of Pregnancy,” New England Journal of Medi-
cine 319 (1988): 189–94; J. Neela and L. Raman, “The Relationship between Mater-
nal Nutritional Status and Spontaneous Abortion,” National Medical Journal of India
10 (1997): 15–16; Michael A. DeLuca and Paul W. Leslie, “Variation in Risk of
Pregnancy Loss,” in The Anthropology of Pregnancy Loss: Comparative Studies in Mis-
carriage, Stillbirth, and Neonatal Death, ed. Rosanne Cecil (Oxford: Berg, 1996),
113–30; C. R. Weinberg et al., “Is There a Seasonal Pattern in Risk of Early Preg-
nancy Loss?” Epidemiology 5 (1994): 484–89; Donna D. Baird et al., “The Relation-
ship between Reduced Fecundability and Subsequent Foetal Loss,” in Gray, Leridon,
and Spira, Biomedical and Demographic Determinants, 335; Maxine Weinstein and
Marya Stark, “Behavioral and Biological Determinants of Fecundability,” Annals of
the New York Academy of Sciences, no. 709 (1994): 134. If the corpus luteum cannot
secrete adequate progesterone to sustain the embryo until the placenta becomes self-

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sustaining (approximately five weeks after conception), the pregnancy will fail. On
maternal overwork, undernutrition, and infant survival, see N. Tafari, R. L. Naeye,
and A. Gobezie, “Effects of Maternal Undernutrition and Heavy Physical Work dur-
ing Pregnancy on Birth Weight,” British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 87
(1980): 222–26; Aaron Lechtig et al., “Evidence of Maternal Nutrition on Infant
Mortality,” in Mosley, Nutrition and Human Reproduction, 147–74; Sophie Moore et
al., “Season of Birth Predicts Mortality in Rural Gambia,” Nature 388 (1997): 434.

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2
Women’s Initiatives under Slavery

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3
CAN WOMEN GUIDE AND GOVERN MEN?
Gendering Politics among African Catholics in Colonial Brazil
mariza de c a r va l h o s o ar e s
During the colonial period throughout the Americas, males had all the
power. One infrequently considered issue is the gendered bias of male
control of writing. It is thus important to keep in mind that the history of
slavery relies on documents written, or in some other way produced, by
men. Thus we may presume that these sources exhibit a male point of
view, especially in the ways that they describe women.1 Even taking ac-
count of this male approach, available data offer a plethora of informa-
tion about female slaves and gender.2 The struggle of the African slave
woman I am writing about emerges from colonial documents like these
in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.
Her Christian name was Victoria. She probably disembarked from
Africa, in slavery, in Rio de Janeiro and went to the gold-mining region
in Minas Gerais around 1741. In 1742 she was baptized Victoria Coura.3
Father Leão Sá recorded the sacrament and described her as a twenty-
five-year-old woman, short, with no diseases or physical disabilities, and
bearing on her face the marks of her country, the country of Coura (terra
de Coura) in Mina Coast (Costa da Mina), West Africa.4
Research for this chapter was supported by the Ministério da Educação-CAPES, Brazil,
and by the Harriet Tubman Resource Centre on the African Diaspora, York Univer-
sity, Toronto. A first draft was presented at the Tubman Centre. I am grateful to Ola
Tunji Ojo and Paul Lovejoy, who have given me valuable suggestions. I am also grate-
ful to Joseph Miller for his support while I was writing the present version. The chap-
ter has emerged from ongoing research and is still under revision at many points.
79

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80 mariza de carvalho soares
At that time Coura slaves were already well known in the interior
mountainous region of the mines, where they had begun arriving as early
as the 1720s. Pierre Verger mentions the presence of couranos in the Por-
tuguese fort at Ouidah on the Slave Coast of western Africa in 1743,
while describing problems involving the fort’s director, João Basílio.5
One or two years before, Victoria could have been sent to Brazil from
Ouidah, Jaquem, or another port along the coast. I argue that those peo-
ple called couranos by the Portuguese came from very far inland.6
In that same period the Portuguese/Brazilian documentation men-
tions African slaves called coura (Koura?), cobu (Kabou, Kobu?), chamba
(Chamba, Tchamba?), maki (Mahi), sabaru (Savalu), agolin (Agonli),
cabrerá (Kabré?), daça (Dassa), and iono (Oyo).7 These are eighteenth-
century names related to places north of the principal slave-selling
polity of the time, Dahomey.8 These locations trace a slave route run-
ning directly south to the littoral from a well-defined region in the inte-
rior. South of those places, in the Mahi country, are Savalu and Dassa,
the latter a Yoruba village. From there, crossing Dahomey or going
around it, one could reach Ouidah or any other Atlantic port. In addi-
tion, consolidation of the Dahomey polity during these decades dis-
placed the violence of conquest of the littoral in the 1720s north into
the interior.
Different authors mention those places as sources of slaves at that
time. Parrinder describes the Yoruba migration reaching Dassa and
Savé, and from there, up to Bassila, the limit between Yoruba and the
Kotokoli (or Cotocoli) languages. North of Bassila, close to the sources
of the Mono River, he locates a village called Aledjo, a Yoruba term for
stranger.9 Robert Cornevin refers to Aledjo as Aledjo Koura—that is,
“Koura foreigners,” presumably eligible for capture and sale. According
to him, when the Kotokoli came from Gourma they crossed Aledjo
Koura in their way to Soudou, Koumandé, and Aledjo Kadara, in present-
day Togo. He also mentions a route from Djougou to Savalu10 and iden-
tifies Kabou as an important local slave market.11 N. L. Gayibor shows
Aledjo, Kabou, and Tchamba on a map tracing the routes of the kola
trade during the nineteenth century: Aledjo Koura and Kabou are both
along the route from Zaria to Salaga, and Tchamba is connected to that
route.12
The most precise information about those groups and how they could
have reached the coast come from Paul Lovejoy’s book about the Hausa
caravans of kola in the region. There he mentions the “Malais” on the
coast in the early eighteenth century arguing that “almost certainly

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(they) were Wangara traders from the northern centres.” Although he
does not mention Koura or Kabou, he points to the slave trade in their
region: “‘Thiamba,’ ‘Chamba,’ and ‘Kotokoli’ were shipped to the Ameri-
cas as early as the 1750s. All came from the Dedaure region, which Mus-
lims usually referred to as ‘Kotokoli.’ The use of the term indicated that
Gonja, Dagbon, and perhaps Dahomey were raiding the area for slaves,
but a trade centre could also have been located there.”13
As these descriptions demonstrate, the problem is not confirming the
presence of a slave trade route but rather the chronology of the trade
between this remote hinterland and the coast. Robin Law, quoting Des
Marchais, mentions Muslims trading in the littoral as early as 1704, but
we don’t know how important the route may have been at the time.14
Based on Brazilian ecclesiastical documents, I argue this slave route was
in regular use at least since the 1720s, perhaps earlier, and actually its use
could have decreased later in the eighteenth century.
After the 1750s, Coura slaves were no longer arriving in Brazil, but
many Coura were clearly very well settled in Minas Gerais and Rio de
Janeiro. Victoria Coura was one of them, and for now it is enough to
suggest that she may have come among those taken around 1741 from
the vicinity of Aledjo Koura. Sometime after 1742 Victoria moved to
Rio de Janeiro, where in 1755 she purchased her freedom for 180,000
réis. In 1759 she married Ignácio Gonçalves do Monte, known simply as
Monte. Victoria’s letter of manumission attested that she changed her
name to Victoria Correa Campos, a name she evidently took from her first
master, Domingos Correa Campos. In her husband’s will she was called
Victoria Correa da Conceição, invoking the name of the parish of Our
Lady of Conception, where she had been baptized.15 Monte was from
Mahi, another of the countries neighboring Dahomey to the north.16 He
had arrived in Rio de Janeiro around 1741. The Mahi arrived in Brazil at
least from the 1720s until the end of the eighteenth century.17 He spent
his years of slavery, and later his freedom until he died (in 1783), work-
ing in Rio de Janeiro as a barber. Victoria survived him and was declared
by him in his will to be its executor and Monte’s only heir.18
In Brazil, Mahi and Coura—presumably not unlike other Africans—
made simultaneous use of both their African backgrounds and of the
new circumstances they faced under slavery in Brazil, organizing them-
selves around new identities that combined the African country (terra)
they had come from and the Brazilian nation (nação) in which they
were classified, as in all the Americas, as slaves (or former slaves). Na-
tions often referred to the major transatlantic trade routes that had

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82 mariza de carvalho soares
brought the enslaved to America.19 Slaves from Bight of Benin used to
have a strong and effective social identity as Mina in both Rio de Janeiro
and Minas Gerais.20 Referencing both (but not using either to subdi-
vide the other), they refined such identities as “Mina-Mahi nation,”
“Mina-Coura nation,” or just “Mahi nation” and “Coura nation.” Thus,
within these nations they drew on their differing countries of back-
ground in Africa to contest the internal politics inevitable in so large a
collectivity.
Monte (Mahi) and Victoria (Coura) were among these Mina people
living in Rio de Janeiro. Victoria and Monte would not be different from
many other obscure slave couples in Brazil if they had not been who
they were in African terms. Monte declared himself to be a grandchild
of Victoria’s father: “my wife is my consanguine relative in the third de-
gree, being the daughter of my grandfather [Eseú] Agoa; well known as a
king, he was among the heathen people from that coast in the kingdom
of May, or Maqui.”21
Though Victoria was Coura and Monte was Mahi, they had a father or
grandfather in common. Such a relationship could have stemmed from a
series of Mahi-Coura marriage exchanges extending over at least two gen-
erations, or they could also refer to a broader classificatory genealogical
calculus characteristic of African systems of kinship. What is important
here is that this claim pointed to exchanges of women, some possibly
through slaving, between Mahi and Coura peoples in Africa, specified as
earlier than the 1720s, the supposed date of Victoria’s birth. Victoria’s fa-
ther, whom Monte called Agoa, had the same name (or title, or perhaps
a name changed to a title) as the founder of the Mahi people remem-
bered in the twentieth century, whom Robert Cornevin mentioned as
Agoua-Guédé.22 We do not know the exact relationship between Monte’s
grandfather and the later remembered Agoua-Guédé, but the name
Agoa is obviously somehow related to his Mahi ancestry. Monte wrote
his will in 1763—two decades before he passed away (1783)—at the very
moment of his prime, one year after he was elected king of the Mahi in
Rio de Janeiro (1762), having Victoria for his “queen.”
Understanding the events of Victoria’s life and career in Brazil demands
some prior explanation of how people from the Mina coast played their
roles in eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, where Mina was a minor but
strong local identity amid a majority of Angola and other west-central
African nations. However, Mina people were the majority of those who
paid for their own letters of freedom23 and the majority of those who
wrote their own wills.24

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black brotherhoods for mina coast people in rio de janeiro
Eighteenth-century Brazil was a hierarchical society, often called baroque,
where the main goal of everyone, including slaves, was to reach upper po-
sitions within its elaborate systems of ranking.25 Some Mina people
quickly understood that enslavement did not necessarily last for long and
was not the same for all the enslaved. They also realized that however
they might climb social ladders by converting from heathen to Christian,
assimilating from a boçal (new, unacculturated slave) to a Portuguese-
speaking, perhaps Christian, ladino slave, or advancing in civil status from
slave to freedman, they would remain in the lowest rank of society, which
contained all those who had ever been a slave at any time in their lives.
Catholic lay brotherhoods in Brazil offered spaces for sociability to those
who belonged to them, while simultaneously reinforcing the colonial hi-
erarchical society. The number of brotherhoods to which one affiliated,
the contributions one made to each of them, and the positions one attained
in their hierarchies were public demonstrations of personal prestige and
power. Africans slaves took advantage of being accepted in those broth-
erhoods and made them one of the most important colonial institutions
where they could recover relational senses of themselves, which their en-
slavement in Africa had destroyed, and organize within slavery.26
Since at least the sixteenth century in Portugal, black people had dedi-
cated themselves to Catholic saints and had elected kings and queens
within brotherhoods consisting of slaves and former slaves.27 In Rio de
Janeiro the Black Brotherhood of the Rosary (Nossa Senhora do Rosário)
dated at least from the seventeenth century. It allowed any black person
to affiliate, but its governing council was composed exclusively of the
majority Africans from Angola and Kongo, and by Brazil-born crioulos.28
The increasing production of gold from the mines in Minas Gerais dur-
ing the first decades of the eighteenth century brought enormous wealth
to the city of Rio de Janeiro. Even slaves benefited from its opportunities,
increasing the number and the pomp of their brotherhoods.
To afford membership in a brotherhood was also the best way to inte-
grate oneself in a network that would guarantee mutual care and benefits
for the living and prevent abandonment and dishonor of dying alone and
unremembered. Masters who did not want to pay for the requisites of
Catholic burials threw the bodies of many slaves who died in swamps
or left them on beaches for the tide to wash away. Others were buried
for free, with the necessary Catholic sacraments but without honor, in
collective graves. Catholic burial had numerous and expensive rites that

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included the proper attire (at least a white sheet), payment for a priest to
bless the cadaver, and two slaves to carry the body on their shoulders in a
hammock to the church or cemetery, as well as masses and candles. If
there were penance to be paid or belongings to be distributed, it was re-
quired to hire someone to draft a will.
Women were more successful than men in achieving respectable stand-
ing through decent burials. In a sample of registered burials between
1724 and 1736, of 499 black people interred in Rio de Janeiro, 251 were
women, 248 men. Of the women, 44 (17.5 percent) were from the Mina
coast people as were 35 (13.5 percent) of the men.29 Considering that
most slaves arriving through the slave trade were male, the slight pre-
ponderance of decent female burials must indicate women’s superior op-
portunities of earning and saving money to pay for these interments.
Note, however, that only a very small percentage of Africans, most of
them freed, could afford Catholic burials. Further, those who achieved
this small measure of respectability probably were among an elite in the
black brotherhoods, perhaps overlapping with similarly elevated rank-
ings in their African backgrounds.
The baroque Catholic Church, and particularly the associated lay
brotherhoods, actively recruited new slaves. Victoria, at the time of her
husband’s death in 1783, was probably a very different person than she
had been in 1742, when she first tasted the blessed salt of baptism. The
brotherhoods created spaces for group organizations and even reinforced
ethnic reelaboration with direct connections to the slaves’ African pasts.
But despite the congruences in tone between some African and Catholic
hierarchies, such radical redefinition of self did not always happen, or did
not happen always in the same way.
In Brazil slaves who came from around the Bight of Benin identified
themselves by names of well-known kingdoms in the region, like Allada
and Dahomey. They also identified themselves as coming from “coun-
tries” like Mahi and Coura. Unlike Allada and Dahomey, the two large
and highly militarized polities, Mahi people were not centralized, and
so they had no kings.30 Dahomey, Oyo, and Mahi waged wars through-
out the eighteenth century and later; but they also traded, allied, and in-
termarried with one another. Beyond sharing political traditions of ori-
gin, those neighbors’ close ongoing relationships created strong links
within a broadly shared social and cultural background. The people
taken from the region to Rio de Janeiro drew on these shared backgrounds
in their everyday lives under slavery, perhaps even overcoming initial
strong animosities.

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the female presence within brotherhoods
After Victoria’s husband passed away in 1783, she became involved in a
conflict within the black brotherhood of which she had been a member
for more than twenty years. This dispute suggests intriguing outlines of
the way in which multicultured Africans appropriated their African
background to resolve conflicts generated by the more competitive dif-
ferentiation of baroque Brazil.
The conflict involved Victoria and Francisco Alves de Souza, her de-
ceased husband’s Mahi successor as king, or regent, of the black Brother-
hood of Santo Elesbão and Santa Efigênia.31 Freed Africans in Rio had
created the brotherhood in 1740. Unlike white brotherhoods—where
women took part only as wives, daughters, or widows of male members—
black brotherhoods, while also primarily male institutions, allowed
women to participate directly, perhaps drawing on some African sense of
gender complementarity. In the Brotherhood of Santo Elesbão women
could affiliate, but an exclusionary regulation allowed them to elect their
own council, with the same number of judges as the male council but with-
out the privilege of electing the major judges of the brotherhood. For this
limited participation female councillors were nonetheless required to pay
the same membership and initiation fees as men.32
Since the founding of the Brotherhood of Saint Elesbão, its Mina mem-
bers had organized a Mina congregation within it, thus distinguishing
themselves from the members from Cape Verde, São Tomé Island, and
Mozambique. Following the hoary Portuguese tradition for black broth-
erhoods, they elected kings and queens. In 1748 the Mina king was Pedro
Costa, and his successor was Clemente Proença, both probably Dahome-
ans.33 Victoria and Monte were both members of this Mina congregation
when Monte came into strong conflict with Clemente Proença. In 1762
Monte broke away to create a separate Mahi congregation, with himself
as king. Other subgroups from the Mina congregation joined him in this
new grouping. The listed composition of the Mahi congregation thus of-
fers a diagram of the Mahi country in Africa and the surrounding eth-
nopolitical landscape, including members from Agonli, Dassa, Za, and
Savalu.34 Despite Victoria’s prominence within the Mahi congregation,
her Coura background was never mentioned by Souza or Cordeiro.
From the membership lists and other information we have about the
councils in other black brotherhoods, we know that high-status mem-
bers normally occupied a series of different official positions over time.35
Since both colonial society in Brazil and the Gbe- and Yoruba-speaking

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86 mariza de carvalho soares
peoples of Africa were hierarchical societies, their kings and queens were
probably chosen from among the high-ranking people of the brother-
hood, at least some of whom could also have been distinguished in their
countries and kingdoms in Africa. Such an explicit claim to royal ances-
try in Africa is revealed in Monte’s will.
In 1764 the Brotherhood of Saint Elesbão received final approval for
five additional chapters for their bylaws, from the royal council in Portu-
gal that regulated religious bodies throughout the empire, the Mesa de
Consciência e Ordens, allowing them to create a requested Empire of
Saint Elesbão. The “empire” (like a royal court within a realm) was a hi-
erarchical organization within the brotherhood, headed by an emperor
or empress and a court of up to seven kings, who might or might not also
have queens.36 The inauguration of the new empire was probably a Da-
homean strategy to manage the internal struggle for power and positions
carried on by the minor congregations within the brotherhood, the Mahi
grouping among them. The inauguration of those kings, together with
the emperor, would allow Dahomeans to elect the emperor and leave the
others to elect only kings of lower rank, which would keep power under
Dahomean control.37
a struggle for succession
Monte’s death in 1783 promoted a struggle in both Mahi and Mina con-
gregations. Victoria did not submit to Francisco Alves de Souza, and par-
ticularly did not submit to his new queen. She decided to fight and keep
her existing position as queen of the deceased Monte. Her persistence
brought on a long and disruptive conflict within the brotherhood. The
conflict generated the documentation upon which this chapter is based.38
Francisco Alves de Souza, known as Souza in his lifetime—also a Mahi
man and Monte’s former regent and designated successor—reported
these events, which lasted from 1783 to 1788, in two documents written
after he had been enthroned but while he was still involved in the dis-
pute. The first is a long report written in 1786 as a formal classical dia-
logue and including the draft of a bylaw for a Mahi congregation devoted
to the souls of deceased Mahi; the second document is a formal proposal
addressed to D. Maria I, queen of Portugal (and Brazil), for a statute au-
thorizing a new Mahi devotional congregation dedicated to Our Lady of
Remedies (Nossa Senhora dos Remédios), dated 1788. The second docu-
ment is signed by Souza, Gonçalo Cordeiro (secretary of the Mahi con-
gregation), and other members.39

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According to the dialogue (the earlier document), the issue of Monte’s
succession had split the Mahi congregation. Souza himself headed one
faction and Victoria the other. They were fighting over Victoria’s refusal
to transfer the congregation’s treasury chest to the new queen, Souza’s wife,
Rita Sebastiana. The chest contained the group’s monetary assets, and it
was a major symbol of prestige and power within the group. The dialogue
(1786) did not mention the chest, but the proposal of 1788 gave the
queen the privilege of keeping the congregation’s treasury in her home,
though not permission to make personal use of it. Only the three male
councillors, each of whom kept one of its three keys, could open the
chest. Unlike the brotherhoods, which the bishopric regulated, congre-
gations did not need to account formally for their funds to any external
authority. Subject only to these internal fiduciary standards, congrega-
tions were perfect open environments within which to compete.
Since the bylaws of the Brotherhood of Saint Elesbão allowed the
election of kings and queens but did not state the qualifications for those
offices, the dispute over the titles could have resulted either from the
claimed African royal ancestries of the contenders or from their elevated
personal positions in the hierarchy of the brotherhood (and, in the case
of queens, from being consorts of royal husbands), or from combining
any or all of these qualifications in different measures. But while Monte
had declared his royal ancestry, his successor, Souza, repeatedly rejected
recognition as king. He agreed to accept the title and the crown only after
a long debate about hierarchical positions, and against his wishes. Al-
though Souza refused the crown of king of the Mahi, Victoria dreamed of
the crown of empress of the Mina Coast, a more elevated rank than she
had ever claimed during her royal husband’s life. Souza’s common ances-
try might explain why he so insistently rejected the title of king for him-
self, arguing that regent was “the proper name for what we do.”
40
Though the initial dialogue provides a good deal of information about
the dispute, it remains tantalizingly silent about many important points.
Written in an unexpectedly literary style, it should be read carefully to
identify the specific circumstances coded in its heated rhetoric. The
document is a dialogue between the voices of Francisco Alves de Souza
himself and the congregation’s secretary, Gonçalo Cordeiro, also a Mahi
man.41 Following the precise model of classical dialogues, Souza and
Cordeiro play the roles of master and disciple. Souza’s followers, also pre-
sent in the dialogue, utter a few short sentences. They are all men and
designated by their Christian names, and some by their titles in the Gbe
and Yoruba languages. Victoria is referred to extensively as the head of

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88 mariza de carvalho soares
the opposing faction but is never given a voice, and not even a name.
Souza calls her the widow, perhaps suggesting that her claims to royalty
actually derived only from the standing of her deceased husband. In his
portion of the dialogue Souza admits she had some male support within
the brotherhood. That support allowed her not only to campaign for the
position of Mahi queen but also to mount her challenge to become the
empress of the Mina Coast within the Mina congregation, where she was
supposed to have allies.42
Souza’s report thus reveals that Monte’s absence had created a huge
crisis not only within the Mahi congregation but also throughout the
brotherhood. He also lets one know, between the lines, that he and Vic-
toria had exchanged mutual accusations. This personal confrontation
highlights the fact that the conflict crossed ethnic boundaries, both
aligning and opposing individuals and local factions: “She forced people
to put a crown on her head, saying she was the queen in such a subtle
way that, surprised by her attitude, people flew away in the same day
because not only those from the Mahi nation were there, but every-
one, those from the Mina coast and other nations.”43 The complexity of
the conflict shows that individuals were not encapsulated within rigid
“ethnic” collectivities; rather, they moved among these distinctions,
organizing personal networks that might not take either country (terra)
or nation (nação) as the prime condition connecting people or separat-
ing them.44
Victoria and Souza fought one another for at least five years (1783–88),
perhaps longer. Their conflict extended beyond the brotherhood, reveal-
ing not only the local dispute but also links between these African peo-
ple of low position and high-ranking representatives of the Portuguese
crown in Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon. Souza’s allies, against his will, de-
nounced Victoria to the Colonial High Court (Tribunal da Relação) in
Rio de Janeiro for stealing the chest of the congregation. Once they lost
the appeal of the denouncement, Victoria turned against them again.
She obtained a copy of the decision of the high court against Souza and
took it to the viceroy of Brazil, at the time D. Luiz de Vasconcellos. Vic-
toria and her companions convinced the viceroy to support her position
in the dispute. Souza was called before the viceroy to explain his per-
spectives on the case.45 With no higher local authority to whom he could
appeal, Souza turned then to the queen of Portugal herself, Maria I, in
1788. The last available information about Victoria is this appeal, which
was reviewed by the royal bureaucracy in Lisbon, reaching the elevated
Overseas Council (Conselho Ultramarino).46

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the gendered aspects of the dispute
Souza appealed to the Portuguese legal system to force Victoria to give
the congregation’s treasury chest to his own wife, Rita Sebastiana. In the
papers detailing the dispute, Rita remains a shadowy figure, no more than
a name, with no participation or reported attitudes. If she had her own
female allies, as she probably did, they never came onto the scene. The
conflict developed directly and personally between Victoria and Souza.
The imbroglio that Victoria provoked represented a challenge to male
power within the Mahi congregation, and also within the brotherhood.
Souza and his followers had to respond to Victoria’s determination to
govern them herself, without a male partner to control her. In sum, could
there be a queen without a king? According to Cordeiro, secretary of the
Mahi congregation and disciple in the dialogue, “the widow should take
care of her home and of the soul of her husband because women cannot
govern men.” Apparently inverting positions, Souza, although the mas-
ter in the dialogue, asked Cordeiro why not. The secretary-disciple an-
swered that women did not govern men in any other brotherhood, adding
that they could be members of the councils, but only for their financial
contributions, and emphasizing that this standing did not allow them to
rule, since special skills (which he calls male capacity) were necessary to
do so.47
Interpreting this claim as an argument for male superiority, rather
than simply sex-defined complementary forms of participation, Cordeiro
associated men with capacity (strength) and women with lack of capacity
(weakness). The dialogue thus related men to positive values and women
to negative ones in a gendered way. This female lack was then extended
to those who supported the queen in her struggle for independent power.
Finally, the dialogue introduced another female character, with the aim
of demonstrating the inherent inferiority of women: the Virgin Mary, the
queen of heaven. Cordeiro argued that even Jesus’ mother never gov-
erned the Church. As God’s designated vicar on earth, Peter, a man, had
done so.48 If Jesus had not chosen his mother as heir, why should the
Mahi congregation accept Victoria’s claim to such a succession?
Those events took place around 1786, when Maria I, formally queen
of Portugal since the death of her father, José I, in 1777, became effectively
responsible for governing. She had married her father’s brother, who
succeeded him as regent, and when her husband died she finally reigned
in her own right. Unlike the Virgin Mary, who never governed human-
ity, Maria I was charged with the secular government of the Portuguese

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90 mariza de carvalho soares
empire. Her accession in 1786 took place in the very same year in which
Victoria was defending her position as the queen of the Mahi congrega-
tion after the death of her husband, Monte.49 Thus in 1788, when Souza
addressed a petition to the queen of Portugal, those Catholic Mahi con-
gregants had two queens over them: one of them queen in the Christ-
ian heaven and the other in Portugal. One could argue about the Holy
Mother’s weakness before the challenge of governing all humanity but
no longer about the Portuguese queen’s capacity to govern her Atlantic
empire. They also had two African queens among them, Victoria as
claimant to her husband’s position and Rita Sebastiana as consort of the
existing regent, Souza. Souza and his supporters urgently needed an argu-
ment to displace the first in favor of the second.
In the dialogue, the argument that finally prevented Victoria from
governing the Mahi was centered not on her qualifications as a queen
but rather on her behavior as a woman, her highly un-Christian practices
of “abuse” and “superstition,” powers apparently inherent in her female
person: “She made someone put a crown on her head, saying she was the
queen. . . . And tell me, is this, or is it not, abuse and superstition?” Souza
also mentioned a Bahian crioulo who had been living in Victoria’s home
since her husband had passed away. By speaking of abuse and supersti-
tion, Souza subtly accused Victoria of witchcraft, making use of arguments
that could find support both from Christian and African perspectives,
since witchcraft was considered dangerous by both. He finally blamed the
Bahian crioulo for Victoria’s improper assertiveness. By mentioning him,
Souza returned politics to the control of a male (even if an unqualified out-
sider), relegating Victoria and all women to secondary roles in politics.50
Souza’s first act as king of the Mahi congregation was to prepare by-
laws. Chapter 3 of the 1788 draft states: “All those who want to affiliate
with the congregation (excluding the blacks from Angola) will be tested
51
by the secretary and by the agau, that is, the general procurator, to
check whether those black men or black women employ abuses and hea-
then practices or superstition. If it is found or heard that they do, they
will not be allowed admittance.”52 The pairing of accusations of immoral
attitudes and the practice of witchcraft was reason enough for Victoria
not to be accepted as a Catholic queen or even named as a direct con-
tributor to the dialogue, since—according to the rules of the classical di-
alogue—those lacking moral or other honorable qualities cannot speak
or even have their names mentioned.
In sum, Souza’s argument is that women could not govern because of
inherent moral deficiency and a lack of manly independence. For attempt-

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gendering politics among african catholics in colonial brazil
ing to violate this norm, Victoria should be punished, and also dishon-
ored, held up as an example to all other women who might dare to sub-
vert the congregational gender hierarchy. This assertion meant that even
those women who were rich and contributed significant financial support
to the congregation should not aspire to power within the institution but
rather submit to the power of men.
perspectives on power within the mahi congregation
The exiled Africans in Rio de Janeiro routinely elected kings and queens
within their Catholic brotherhoods. However, in contrast to almost all
royal dynasties, they could not transmit their authority to their children,
who were considered creole (crioulos) and thus disqualified from being
African. This contrast between Africans and creoles was one of the rea-
sons why Africans enslaved in Rio developed strong generational co-
horts that were evident in many ways, including the strength of the idea
of country (terra), referring to the place they had come from.
These “country” cohorts also claimed, or were given, distinguishing
characteristics or even powers. Coura women in Brazil were reputed to be
powerful and dangerous—perhaps “witches” in Catholic terms—and
people recognized for the strong links of their powers to religious prac-
tices in their homelands. Souza gives no details about Victoria’s alleged
practices of witchcraft. But other documents from Minas Gerais, where
Victoria had lived for about fifteen years, mention a Josepha Coura, an
African woman who lived near the gold mines of Paracatu at the same
time that Victoria was still in Vila Rica. Josepha dedicated her life to
honoring the “God of her country” (o Deus de sua terra) with chants and
blood. According to denunciations against her, she practiced a kind of
dance (i.e., a festival) in which she spoke in the Coura language and
made sacrifices over a clay doll that she venerated.53 Unfortunately, we
have no information about worship among people in or around Aledjo-
Koura in the eighteenth century.
In Africa, Dahomey, Oyo, and Mahi exchanged women among them-
selves. Dahomean kings took foreign wives, even foreign kpojito, the
women in the powerful position of “wives of the leopard” (roughly,
mothers of the king). The kpojito of Tegbesu—the Dahomey ruler (r.
1732–74)—was Hwangile, an Aja woman, widow of his father, Agaja.
Tegbesu himself had at least two Mahi wives. One of them was a favorite,
who used to take care of his treasury.54 The other wife was Chai, who came
to be the kpojito of his son Kpengla.55 Since Tegbesu reigned to 1774 and

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92 mariza de carvalho soares
Kpengla from then to 1789, by the time Mahi in the Mina congregation
in Rio were carrying on these struggles (1762–88) involving the Mahi
and the Dahomean members of the brotherhood, the Dahomean king in
Africa had a Mahi wife. The numerous competing wives of the leopard at
the Dahomean court made use of witchcraft to attempt to ensure their
prospects. To be a “mother” or a “sister” of a Dahomean king was a pass-
port to power, reason enough for them to fight to determine or, at least,
to influence the succession of male kings.56 Dahomean traditions were
the core of existing Gbe-speaking people in the brotherhood, since they
controlled its major (Mina) congregation, and so Dahomean royal prac-
tices framed Souza’s petition and statute, even though he was a Mahi.
The documents do not mention the possibility that Victoria might
have been sponsoring a male candidate against Souza, just as the Da-
homey queen mothers did, but unspecified members of the brotherhood
had “crowned” her, and Dahomeans—as the majority of its members—
probably were among them. Beyond her political power, she probably also
had funds to finance her project. We do not know her occupation or per-
sonal wealth, but forty years earlier she had already been able to purchase
her freedom for 180,000 réis. In Portuguese legal terms, which she had evi-
dently been careful to take into account, in Monte’s will—which she had
drafted—she was also his heir, and during the four years since he had
passed away she could already have taken possession of her inheritance.57
ethnicity and gender in africa and in america
Victoria’s male support seems to have involved at least two other mem-
bers of the brotherhood: António do Couto Suzano and José dos Santos
Martins. No information about the first has come to light, but the second
came from the Mina coast and, like Monte, was also a barber by profes-
sion, and a wealthy and powerful man.58 Together with Victoria, they
were the executors of Monte’s will. Souza never mentioned them in the
dialogue, nor did their names come out in any document related to the
Mahi congregation. Their invisibility in the dispute may represent another
name avoidance, beyond its obscuring Victoria’s identity, or they may
not have acted within the brotherhood in their capacities as representa-
tives of Brazilian political alliances or African ethnic identities. Monte
did not always act in an ethnic capacity either. He mentioned neither
the Mahi nor the Mina congregations in his will, only the brotherhood.
The limited public embrace of ethnicity can be inferred from some pecu-
liar phrasing. Monte says that he came from the Mina coast, although he

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gendering politics among african catholics in colonial brazil
referred to his Mahi “grandfather.” Souza is the one who reinforced
Monte’s Mahi identity by calling him a true Mahi. Finally, perhaps be-
cause Victoria was Coura and not Mahi, both Monte and Souza say only
that she is Mina.
The conflict between Souza and Victoria brings out different uses that
the competitors made of ethnic issues, which demonstrates that African
identities remained strong in their minds but, just as in their homelands,
they could invoke them or not, depending on the situation and the ad-
vantages they perceived for themselves. This strategic, flexible, and usu-
ally political and competitive ability to build networks and to invoke dif-
ferent collective identities extended African ethnic strategies into the
challenging circumstances of slavery in Brazil.
Souza and Victoria revealed two different attitudes and political uses
of ethnicity in their dispute. Souza reinforced Mahi identity, defending
rigid ethnic parameters for the organizational politics of the Mahi con-
gregation. He thus necessarily persecuted Victoria for witchcraft, both as
betrayal of the communal solidarity vital in Africa and as Catholic sin, a
serious accusation at a time when the Inquisition was still alive in their
minds. His attachment to the Mahi ethnic background had, as a corollary,
the fact that, even presenting his case in male Christian terms (perhaps
from the European Enlightenment), he also believed in the effectiveness
of African female witchcraft and feared Victoria. Thus the conventions
of the dialogue enabled Souza to denounce her politically without risking
a direct mention of personal powers he could not control.
On the other side, Victoria and her allies followed a cross-ethnic strat-
egy allying with other members of the brotherhood, even non-Mina
members, like those from Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Mozambique, as
one can assume by the sentence above: “not only those of the Mahi na-
tion were there, but everyone, those from Mina coast and other nations.”
Although she did not rely on normative ethnicity, she made use of sub-
versive and secretive—hence extremely powerful—capacities attributed
to the wives of the leopard in particular (Mina-Fon), and which—al-
though I speculate—may have extended to other Mina queens in the
brotherhood (Mina-Mahi or Mina-Coura). Victoria, even if from Coura
proper, could have borrowed this attitude from the Mahi and Dahomean
people with whom she had spent most, perhaps all, of her life.59
Souza and Victoria were also deploying Portuguese Catholic terms of
gendered legitimacy in their contest for political positions in the con-
gregation and brotherhood. In the emergently modern world of late-
eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro—even if Brazil remained largely a

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94 mariza de carvalho soares
status-based society—men should rule, while women should support.
Victoria seems also to have drawn on an African pluralistic model of
complementary empowerments inspired by the important roles women
had in Dahomey and maybe also among other Gbe people. Souza tran-
scended his uses of Mahi culture and religion by not only adopting the
worship of Catholic saints but also embracing new ideas of the Enlight-
enment circulating in late-eighteenth-century Brazil that gave women
“naturally” lower positions than men.60
Souza’s appropriation of emerging modern standards of gender was
certainly a result of the opportunities he had created for himself in Brazil.
He was not a freed slave of the usual sort. I could never identify his mas-
ter or people with whom he might have worked. But he was somehow
connected to Enlightened religious (Jesuit) and lay elites of Rio de
Janeiro.61 Those would be the people from whom he could have learned
Catholic doctrine, geography, mathematics, and even some Latin, on
which he drew to formulate his case as a formal dialogue. Given his evi-
dent lack of royal allies in African terms, his educated position in Por-
tuguese terms allowed his allies to make him king of the Mahi congrega-
tion, the proper person to represent them to a changing and unfamiliar
modern culture.
Since Victoria and Souza had important positions in the Mina con-
gregation at least from the 1750s, they must have been tied to each other
for about forty years. In terms of politics Souza adopted the course of re-
inforcing an ethnic (both African countries and Brazilian nations)
framework for politics, but at the same time fighting witchcraft, and
ethnic concepts of power among women, in modern enlightened terms.
Victoria did not rely strongly on ethnicity, allying people from different
ethnic backgrounds. She also managed female witchcraft and a sense of
politics, making use of multiplistic African practices of differentiated and
combining powers. These contrasting, but also complementing, strate-
gies in Victoria’s and Souza’s struggle over the assets of the Brotherhood
of Saint Elesbão thus open an avenue to understand how Africans in
Brazil acted under slavery as individuals and as groups. It also shows how
comprehension of the ways in which at least one African woman played
her role in so complex a situation in Brazil can help us understand the
complexity of slaves’ uses of a sort of ethnicity that emerges from a strong
representation of the African past. Moreover, this case study shows how
slaves used elements from their pasts to deal with radical novelty, both
their removal from Africa to America and the changes flowing from the
European Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century in Brazil.

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gendering politics among african catholics in colonial brazil
Souza introduced the emergent enlightened notions of competitive
gender, and its exclusionary consequences for them as women, into the
politics of the brotherhood as a way of marginalizing an obviously power-
ful female presence in its still multiplistic politics (thus both African and
baroque Catholic Portuguese). The struggle between Victoria and Souza,
whatever its legal outcome for the specific contestants—which further
research may yet reveal—marked the emergent and enveloping gendered
effects of the European Enlightenment, even among African slaves in
Rio de Janeiro.
notes
1. I follow here the classical work of Joan Wallach Scott, who considers gender in
the field of power relationships. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
2. On women in West Africa, the chapter relies on Edna Bay’s essential work
Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Char-
lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). On the colonial situation, it relies on
my own previous work. See Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Devotos da cor: Identidade ét-
nica, religiosidade e escravidão no Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Civiliza-
ção Brasileira, 2000).
3. According to Portuguese law (Ordenações Filipinas, 1603), masters were re-
quired to baptize their slaves in the six months following their arrivals from Africa.
See Silvia Hunold Lara, org., Ordenações filipinas, Livro V (São Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 1999), 99, 309. During the baptismal ceremony slaves received Christian
names followed by their nations that corresponded to their large region of origin
(Mina, Angola, Mozambique) or to more specific countries (Mahi, Coura, and oth-
ers). Thus the names Victoria Coura and Ignácio Mina.
4. Banco de Dados da Freguesia do Pilar, Minas Gerais, ID 103340; Patrícia Porto
de Oliveira, “Batismo de escravos adultos e o parentesco espiritual nas Minas sete-
centistas,” X Seminário sobre a Economia Mineira (Minas Gerais: n.p., n.d), 11.
5. Verger refers to coiranos and couranos. For coiranos, see page 204 and footnote
106, page 209; for couranos, footnote 30, page 207. It is not clear whether he consid-
ers the two to constitute a single group. Verger transcribes João Basílio’s letter: “E se
seguio pretender o mesmo Cabo [the Dahomean agau] que se lhe entregassem huns
negros Couranos inimigos do Rey Daumê, que se dizia estarem na dita fortaleza
(Ouidah)” (1743); Pierre Verger, Fluxo e refluxo do tráfico de escravos entre o golfo do
Benin e a Bahia de Todos os Santos dos séculos XVIII a XIX, 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Editora
Corrupio, 1987).
6. Although my research is still in progress, I believe that during the first half of
the eighteenth century, probably between the 1720s and the 1740s, a great number
of slaves from the northern interior of that region were sold to Portuguese and
Brazilian buyers of slaves, who were offering gold along the coast to both European
and African traders. For a more detailed analysis see: Mariza de Carvalho Soares,

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96 mariza de carvalho soares
“Indícios para o traçado das rotas terrestres de escravos na Baía do Benim, século
XVIII,” in Rotas Atlânticas da Diáspora Africana: da Baía do Benim ao Rio de Janeiro,
org. Mariza de Carvalho Soares (Niteroi, EDUFF, forthcoming 2007).
7. For the mentioned places, words in italic correspond to African countries in
Brazilian colonial documents; words inside parentheses correspond to African places
in historical works and modern geography.
8. I thoroughly searched the coastal literature for mentions of the Coura. Robin
Law never mentioned Coura as a place or as a people. Law, The Slave Coast of West
Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1991). About those people in Rio de Janeiro and Minas
Gerais, see Mariza de Carvalho Soares, “A ‘nação’ que se tem e a ‘terra’ de onde se
vem,” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos 26, no. 2 (2004): 303–30.
9. G. Parrinder, “Yoruba-Speaking Peoples in Dahomey,” Africa: Journal of the In-
ternational African Institute 17, no. 2 (1947), 122–23. On àlejò as a term for stranger,
see A Dictionary of the Yoruba Language, part 2, Yoruba-English (London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1975).
10. See Robert Cornevin, Histoire du Dahomey (Paris: Éditions Berger-Levrault,
1962), 16–17, 63.
11. Robert Cornevin, Histoire du Togo (Paris: Editions Berger-Levrault, 1962), 37.
12. N. L. Gayibor, Histoire des Togolais, vol. 1, Des origines à 1884 (Lomé: Presses
de l’Université du Bénin, 1997), 282, 287, 291.
13. Paul Lovejoy, Caravans of Kola: The Hausa Kola Trade, 1700–1900 (Zaria:
Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1980), 34–36.
14. Law, Slave Coast, 188.
15. All the names and other important information concerning Victoria men-
tioned in this chapter were registered along with the legal proceedings necessary to
obtain the authorization of the bishopric for Monte’s and Victoria’s marriage in the
Catholic Church, as usual. Arquivo da Cúria Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro (here-
after ACM/RJ), Habilitações Matrimoniais, Ignácio Gonçalves do Monte.
16. On Mahi in Africa, see J. A. M. A. R. Bergé. “Étude sur le pays Mahi.” Bulletin
du Comité d’Études Historiques et Scientifiques de 1’A O F II (1928); Cornevin, Histoire
du Dahomey; I. A. Akinjogbin, Dahomey and Its Neighbours, 1708–1818 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1967); Jessie Gaston Mulira, “A History of the Mahi
Peoples from 1774–1920” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1984).
17. Beyond my personal research on Mahi and Coura, I am grateful to Fernanda
Pinheiro and Moacir Maia, who shared their research about Coura and Mahi in
Minas Gerais. Since then both have finished their master’s dissertations. Pinheiro,
“Confrades do Rosário: Sociabilidade e identidade étnica em Mariana Minas Gerais
(1745–1820)” (master’s diss., PPGH/UFF, Niterói, 2006); Maia, “‘Quem tem
padrinho não morre pagão’: As relações de compadrio e apadrinhamento de escravos
numa vila colonial (Mariana, 1715–1750)” (master’s diss., PPGH/UFF, Niterói,
2006).
18. “Regra ou estatuto por modo de um diálogo onde, se dá notícia das Caridades
e Sufragações das Almas que usam os pretos Minas, com seus Nacionais no Estado do
Brazil, especialmente no Rio de Janeiro, por onde se hão de regerem e governarem

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gendering politics among african catholics in colonial brazil
fora de todo o abuzo gentílico e supersticioso; composto por Francisco Alves de
Souza preto e natural do Reino de Makim, um dos mais excelentes e potentados
daquela oriunda Costa da Mina,” Biblioteca Nacional/RJ (hereafter BN/RJ); testa-
mento de Ignácio Gonçalves do Monte: Livro de Óbitos e Testamentos da Freguesia
do Santíssimo Sacramento, 1776–1784, ACM/RJ, fols. 442v–444.
19. On the slave trade in the Bight of Benin—in Portuguese records, Costa da
Mina (Mina coast)—in the first half of the eighteenth century, see Patrick Man-
ning’s classic “The Slave Trade in the Bight of Benin, 1640–1890,” in The Uncom-
mon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry A.
Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn (London: Academic Press, 1979), 125–29. For up-
dated numbers, see David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, and David Richardson, “A
participação dos países da Europa e das Américas no tráfico transatlântico de es-
cravos: Novas evidências,” Afro-Ásia 24 (2000): 9–50.
20. Soares, “A nação que se tem.”
21. Testamento de Ignácio Monte, ACM/RJ.
22. Cornevin, Histoire du Dahomey, 140–42.
23. Mina people were the majority of those who paid for their letters of manu-
mission (cartas de alforria). Manolo Florentino, “Alforrias e etnicidade no Rio de
Janeiro oitocentista: Notas de pesquisa,” Topoi 5 (2002): 9–40.
24. Sheila de Castro Faria, “Sinhás pretas, damas mercadoras”: As pretas minas nas
cidades do Rio de Janeiro e de São João del Rey (1700–1850) (Tese de Professor Titular,
Departamento de História da Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2004).
25. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Prestige, Power and Piety in Colonial Brazil: The
Third Orders of Salvador,” Hispanic American Historical Review 69 (1989): 66–70.
26. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1982).
27. A. C. de C. M. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Por-
tugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
28. The statute passed in 1759 finally allowed the election of Africans from
Mina Coast to the Council. For a collection of statutes, including this one, see
http://www.historia.uff.br/labhoi. For Portuguese brotherhoods, see Didier Lahon, “Es-
clavage et confréries noires au Portugal durant 1’Ancien Régime (1441–1830),” 2
vols. (doctoral thesis, L’EHESS, 2001).
29. For further information see Soares, Devotos da cor, ch. 4.
30. The apparent contradiction between the fact that Mahi had no kings and
that Monte’s grandfather was called a king probably reflects Monte’s search for a Por-
tuguese word to define the high prestige and strong power of his ancestor.
31. The Carmelite friars spread the worship of these two saints during the eigh-
teenth century. Saint Elesbão had been a prince in Abyssinia, and Saint Efigênia a
princess in Nubia. Both converted and became members of the Carmelite order,
which was first created in 1740, and finished building their chapel in 1754.
32. Arquivo da Irmandade de Santo Elesbão e Santa Efigênia/RJ (AISESE/RJ),
Compromisso da Irmandade de Santo Elesbão e Santa Efigênia, 1740–1767.
33. Unfortunately, Souza does not make it clear who the Dahomeans he men-
tioned might have been, whether the prestigious Fon from Dahomey itself or people

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98 mariza de carvalho soares
of unknown background from the area of the polity. But considering the high posi-
tion of a king who controlled the Mina congregation and the brotherhood, I strongly
suspect they were Fon.
34. Sabaru (Savalu) was a Gbe village inside Mahi land; Dassa was a Yoruba vil-
lage also inside Mahi land; Agolin (Agonli) was a Gbe village; Za was a Gbe village
west of the Zou River. I have no information if they were only villages or if any of
them was a walled town.
35. See Pinheiro, “Confrades do Rosário.”
36. AISESE/RJ, Compromisso da Irmandade de Santo Elesbão e Santa Efigênia,
“Acrescentamento,” chs. 1–5.
37. I argue that this is a Dahomean strategy because, based on Souza’s descrip-
tion, the Dahomeans were the most powerful group in the Mina congregation and
thus controlled the council and dictated the rules. The fact that the empire was able,
but not required, to elect queens might be considered a challenge to women who I
suspect forced their own presence through yet another set of elections and offices.
38. The possibility of electing unmarried kings and queens was recently described
among Coura people in Minas Gerais, at the same period. Pinheiro, “Confrades do
Rosário.”
39. BN/RJ, “Regra ou estatuto”; Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon (AHU),
“Estatuto da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Remédio, 1788.”
40. BN/RJ, “Regra ou estatuto,” fol. 23.
41. Gonçalo Cordeiro was baptized in 1750, in Rio de Janeiro. Like Monte he was
a barber. ACM/RJ, Habilitações Matrimoniais, Gonçalo Cordeiro.
42. BN/RJ, “Regra ou estatuto” fol. 43
43. BN/RJ, “Regra ou estatuto” fol. 13.
44. On ethnic boundaries, see Fredrick Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The
Social Organization of Culture Difference, ed. Barth (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget;
London: Allen and Unwin, 1969); Paul E. Lovejoy, “Identity and the Mirage of Eth-
nicity: Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua’s Journey in the Americas,” in African Re-Gen-
esis: Confronting Social Issues in the Diaspora, ed. Jay B. Haviser and Kevin C. Mac-
Donald (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006).
45. BN/RJ, “Regra ou estatuto” fol. 43.
46. AHU, “Estatuto da Irmandade.” According to A. J. R. Russell-Wood, these
appeals of individuals on the behalf of collectivities “revealed the role of the
monarch as arbitrator between conflicting interests of corporate groups in the
colony” and “constituted tacit recognition of the discrimination inherent to the ju-
diciary.” Russell-Wood, “‘Acts of Grace’: Portuguese Monarchs and Their Subjects
of African Descent in Eighteenth-Century Brazil,” Journal of Latin American Studies
32 (2000): 307–32.
47. BN/RJ, “Regra ou estatuto,” fols. 14–15.
48. Ibid., fol. 39.
49. D. Maria I governed Portugal until 1792, when she was declared insane, and
her son became the regent D. João, the future D. João VI. She died in Brazil in 1816.
A. H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1976), 424.

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50. BN/RJ, “Regra ou estatuto,” fol. 13.
51. In the Mahi congregation, the agau was a distinguished member of royal
court. In Dahomey agau is the title of one of the military commanders of the Da-
homean army. The modern word is gau. Law, Slave Coast, 271.
52. BN/RJ, “Regra ou estatutos” fol. 31.
53. Infomation about Josepha can be found in Luiz Mott, “Acotundá: Raízes sete-
centistas do sincretismo religioso afro-brasileiro,” in Mott, Escravidão, homosexuali-
dade e demonologia (São Paulo: Ícone Editora, 1998).
54. It is important to highlight that the Mahi queen’s custom of keeping the
chest in her home was perhaps related to this Dahomean practice. See Bay, Wives of
the Leopard, 83.
55. Ibid., 152.
56. On royal women, particularly about king’s mothers, wives, and sisters, see
Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 51–56, 71–80.
57. The wills show that brotherhoods usually received a considerable part of the
estates of their deceased members. Widowers and widows inherited their partners’
belongings. Single women seldom transferred their estates to other women, even to
their female slaves. Faria, “Sinhás pretas.” Nevertheless, it is not clear whether these
women actually received their due, since executors were always men and sus-
pected of draining the estates they handled—if not for themselves, then for the
brotherhood. Victoria’s struggle to keep the chest also represented an ordinary fe-
male challenge.
58. When he died in 1800 his estate inventory listed eleven slaves, not all in
health, who were assigned a total value of 934,000 réis. Arquivo Nacional/RJ, In-
ventário de José dos Santos Martins.
59. Victoria could never pretend to be a wife of the leopard. She never gave
Monte a child, and even if she had, he would have been crioulo, not Mahi.
60. The Enciclopédie (35 volumes, edited by d’Alambert and Diderot in 1772)
highlights the domestic position of women. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile and other
eighteenth- century novels refer to motherhood as the most important female activ-
ity. Rousseau, Emílio; ou, da educação (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1995). See also
Elisabeth Badinter, Émile, Émilie: L’ambition feminine au XVIII siècle (Paris: Flammar-
ion, 1983).
61. On Jesuits, see Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus
in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540–1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996). On the effects of the Enlightenment in Rio de Janeiro, see Afonso Carlos
Marques do Santos, No rascunho da nação: Inconfidência no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de
Janeiro: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, 1992).

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4
A PARTICULAR KIND OF FREEDOM
Black Women, Slavery, Kinship, and Freedom in the American Southeast
barbara kr aut h a m e r
Enslaved women in the English colonies of southeastern North America
in the second half of the eighteenth century frequently responded to the
psychic and corporeal ravages of plantation discipline by running away.
The majority of these women sought to ameliorate their bondage in
short-term respites and so ran off to visit relatives enslaved on nearby
plantations, returning eventually to their masters. But other enslaved
women fled with little or no intention of returning. Most of these women
who sought permanent escape hid out in the anonymity of the bustling
port cities of Savannah or Charleston, where they could find employment
with either white or free black employers and disappear in the highly mo-
bile and often transitory black population of urban slaves and free black
workers and sailors.1 With approximately one thousand black people liv-
ing in Savannah and over six thousand in Charleston in the early 1770s,
networks of old friends and newly acquired allies offered assistance to
women such as Darque, or Darchus, whose face bore the markings of her
West African origins and who ran away with her infant child to Savan-
nah, where her master presumed she had taken refuge with her “many ac-
quaintances in and about town.” Other women relied on the marketabil-
ity of their skills in urban settings: Betty fled to Charleston, where she
could “hire herself out at needle-work, being an exceeding good seam-
stress,” and Hannah survived there by “selling cakes” in the markets.2
A smaller number of these women fugitives, however, ventured even
farther. Severing all ties not only to their families but also to the familiar
100

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 101
surroundings of the highly commercial plantation environment, they fol-
lowed rivers and well-worn trade paths inland to present-day western
Georgia and northern Florida, then the territory of the Creek Indians.
There they sought refuge in the clusters of Creek towns along the Chat-
tahoochee, Coosa, and Tallapoosa Rivers and found a particular kind of
freedom from chattel slavery. The Creeks often chose to incorporate
these women through marriage and adoption into the extended family
networks that made up their individual towns and the Creek society as a
whole. As members of Creek kin groups and communities, fugitive
women gained powerful allies who protected them from capture and
reenslavement by their former masters or colonial authorities.
In the Creek towns that harbored these runaway women, the emanci-
patory potential of family incorporation—created through adoption,
marriage, and, by extension, childbearing—stood in stark contrast to the
brutal denials of black women’s personal and reproductive lives under
chattel slavery. Such prospects made Creek settlements an attractive and
feasible destination for enslaved African and African American women
in Georgia and South Carolina.3 The possibility of transcending enslave-
ment through family incorporation in Creek society bears a resemblance
to the patterns of liberating servile women in eighteenth-century kin-based
societies in West Africa. Paul Lovejoy explains in his comprehensive
study of slavery in Africa that wealthy men on the Gold Coast, for ex-
ample, took slave women as wives, valuing their labor and childbearing
capacities as vital sources of wealth. Women and the children born to
these unions gained legal freedom, though they remained subordinate to
the husband-father and former master. The passage of time and subse-
quent generations of intermarriage eventually shrouded the slave origins
of their descendants.4
Given the apparent similarities between the Creek and West African
contexts, one might be tempted to juxtapose the two and frame a com-
parison of the ways in which kinship shaped hierarchical social relations,
especially the modes of both enslaving and emancipating women by draw-
ing on the extensive scholarly debates about the meanings and weight of
kinship in African systems of captivity and enslavement.5 Yet, whether
kinship and slavery stood as distant points on a continuum or as funda-
mental antitheses, a comparison of the rules—kinship—that governed
interactions reveals very little about individuals’ daily lives and the ways
in which people interpreted, dismissed, or altered formal standards at
any given moment and over long stretches of time. An emphasis on the
necessary connections between the subordination of women and social

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102 barbara krauthamer
reproduction in West African slave societies, including the avenues to
liberation through marriage, highlights the benefits that accrued to
household heads but neglects a gendered analysis of social relations and
eclipses the complexity of women’s roles and the circumstances that
prompted women to accept or challenge their positions.
African-born women enslaved in the colonial Southeast drew on a
wide range of memories and knowledge when recalling their pasts and
imagining futures beyond the confines of chattel slavery. If enslaved
women in the Low Country gleaned the similarities between Creek and
African patterns of transforming nonkin into kin, so, too, would they
have drawn on their nuanced understandings of African female auton-
omy and well-regarded economic and social roles and their growing aware-
ness of the venerated economic, social, and spiritual positions Creek
women held in their own communities. Captives from West-Central
Africa comprised nearly 40 percent of the Africans enslaved in the
Americas and accounted for nearly half the enslaved population in South
Carolina in the 1730s. The ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity of
peoples from the Congo basin defies broad generalizations about women’s
roles beyond identifying the widespread importance of women’s techni-
cal expertise in using the hoe as the primary work tool and the centrality
of women’s agricultural labor to local trade and subsistence. Women from
the Bight of Biafra, another region that contributed significantly to the
North American enslaved population, also had a wealth of experiences
that informed their understandings of women’s prominent and powerful
roles in kin-based societies. In Olaudah Equiano’s famous account of his
capture in Africa and enslavement in the Americas, he writes of Igbo
women warriors, fighting to defend his village against slave raiders. Igbo
women also controlled local trade relations and retained the money they
earned in commercial transactions.
Women’s capacity for exercising autonomy and occupying esteemed
positions as producers and providers of services, material goods, and so-
cial connections in West African kin-based societies is encapsulated in
their multivalent roles in public markets. As the principal vendors, as
well as producers, of foodstuffs, women oversaw the terms of trade and
were remunerated for their produce. In the decidedly female arena of
the public market, women dominated social as well as economic interac-
tions. A European observer in the late seventeenth century noted that
women’s voices filled the air as they preserved history and memory by
telling stories to “young people and children [who] listen to such dis-
course with avid ears and absorb it in their hearts.”6 African women’s

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nuanced understandings of female autonomy and women’s well-regarded
economic and social roles endured the transatlantic voyage and informed
their responses to enslavement, including their decisions to run away.
For African women and their American-born daughters enslaved in the
eighteenth-century Low Country, the comparison between West African
and Creek societies would have been a personal one that considered the
possibilities for remaking their lives under more familiar and favorable
conditions than those of colonial South Carolina and Georgia.
Enslavement in the Americas rested on legal and social fictions that
black people were property, not persons. Following the principles set forth
in the seventeenth-century slave codes of Barbados and Virginia, early-
eighteenth-century South Carolina lawmakers established slavery as the
lifelong and heritable condition of persons of African descent, passed
from mother to child. At mid-century, when Georgia’s planter-politicians
legalized chattel slavery, they modeled their slave code on the laws of
South Carolina. Law and custom sanctioned the brutal appropriation of
marriage and childbirth by stripping enslaved persons of the common
law protections extended to free married adults and parents. This denial
of slaves’ humanity served the interests of slaveholders and the develop-
ing plantation economy by transforming the intimacies of slaves’ lives
into economic events.7
The unions and family relations that sustained couples and communi-
ties within slavery also highlighted their vulnerability in the countless
moments when they lost loved ones to sale, bequest, or plantation disci-
pline. For fugitive women hoping to navigate the gradual process of
achieving full inclusion in Creek communities through adoption and mar-
riage, the experience undoubtedly entailed discord and loss.8 Enslaved
women who distanced themselves from both their masters and fellow
slaves by running away to Creek towns sometimes found relief there from
the bone-crushing labor of plantation monoculture. However, the per-
manent refuge from slavery they achieved by securing adoption and thus
socially sanctioned positions in the networks of Creek kin groups was a
separate matter that entailed long-term negotiation between runaway
women and their hosts and created correspondingly permanent places for
them to remain.
Creek hosts sought the social and political gains they might derive from
runaway women’s work and children, but harboring runaway women also
promised other, nonmaterial benefits to Creek communities. Concerned
about the rapid geopolitical expansion of colonial plantation society,
surely Creeks appreciated their potential of retaining fugitive slaves to

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disrupt colonists’ ventures. The fictive and biological kinship ties forged
between fugitive women and their Creek hosts promised liberation from
chattel slavery, but these intimate relationships nonetheless remained
critical sites of contestation for black women in the colonial Southeast
and yielded personal dignity, the personal form of freedom relevant to
their lives.
women, gender, and slavery
Studies of slave fugitives in the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century
Southeast have frequently noted their contacts with Native Americans,
but they have focused narrowly on the men who fled. Scholars have de-
voted much attention, for example, to the insurgent martial solidarity
forged between male fugitives and Indian men, who identified each other
as allies in the complex webs of alliance and enmity, measured in crucial
trade and military partnerships that grew out of colonial geopolitics as
the British, French, and Spanish empires vied with one other for territo-
rial and economic dominance in the region.9 Historian Jane Landers ex-
plains that it was the “repeated crosscurrents of raids and migrations
across the Southeast” that “acquainted” black and Indian people with
the imperial rivalry between the English and Spanish.10 Informed about
Spain’s policy of granting sanctuary to runaway slaves from British settle-
ments, fugitives made good use of Spanish Florida’s native allies. Semi-
noles and others often harbored and assisted runaways as they made their
ways from British plantations to St. Augustine.
Slaves’ escapes to Florida posed multiple problems for South Carolina
slaveholders and authorities alike. The economic drain of the property
and labor lost to slave flight was compounded by slaveholders’ concerns
that successful fugitives not only would inspire others to flee but also might
take up arms in the ongoing Spanish and Indian attacks against the
British. These were not idle fears, as rebellious slave men seized many op-
portunities to fight Carolina slaveholders by taking part in Indian insur-
rections against the colony. In 1715, for example, enslaved men joined
Yamasee Indians in war against the English, and during the same period
the Spanish forces in Florida gladly deployed fugitive slave men as com-
batants in their raids on Carolina plantations.11
Black women are not wholly absent from the scholarship on black-
Indian interactions in the colonial Southeast, but their contacts and
sustained relations with southeastern native peoples have not been focal
points in these studies. Nor have the gendered conditions of women’s

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enslavement been integral to discussions of women fugitives’ strategies
for remaking their lives by connecting with nearby Indian peoples.
This chapter examines runaway slave women’s flight to hospitable
Creek communities and their efforts to find permanent liberation from
chattel slavery by negotiating labor and marriage relations with Creek
kin groups. Tracing runaways’ paths to the Creeks is a difficult endeavor,
as the sources do not yield this history graciously. Still, it is possible to
discern the ways in which enslaved women learned about, fled to, and
remained among Creek communities in the eighteenth century. Focus-
ing on both the gendered conditions of enslavement in the colonies and
the gendered dynamics of labor, subordination, and kin incorporation in
Creek towns not only illuminates an overlooked area of contact between
Africans, African Americans, and American Indians but also suggests
new ways of thinking about enslaved women’s conceptions of slavery and
freedom.
Enslaved women’s labor, as historians such as Jennifer Morgan have
shown, was central to the business of large-scale plantation monoculture
and the cultivation of such cash crops as rice, indigo, and cotton. By the
eighteenth century Anglo-American slaveholders had reconfigured Eng-
lish gendered meanings of work to legitimate casting enslaved black
women and girls ideologically and discursively as “workers,” a category
previously reserved only for men.12 Carolina rice planters relied heavily
on the skills and knowledge of producing of the grain among African
women, especially those from the Senegambia region, and calculated
profits in terms of both the commodity crops and the children that en-
slaved women produced. The resulting routinized exploitation of African
and African American women’s specialized skills and manual labor sup-
ported the rapid multiplication of South Carolina’s annual rice exports
from under half a million pounds in 1700 to over sixty million pounds by
the time of the American Revolution.13
Enslaved women’s work on the Carolina rice plantations, as in sugar
and tobacco fields elsewhere, entailed their use of the hoe to prepare the
ground for planting and to weed the growing crops. This relentless back-
breaking toil later prompted one antebellum observer to describe them
later as “hoeing machine[s].” The most onerous labor associated with
rice cultivation, however, was not the cultivation of crops but the
pounding of the harvested grains by hand with a mortar and ten-pound
pestle. Working at a grueling pace through both day and night, women
processed the rice kernels by repeatedly lifting the pestle up and slam-
ming it forcefully down to remove the hulls, work that required both

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physical endurance and careful attention to the rhythm and force of the
pounding to avoid breaking the hulled grains. Enslaved women re-
sponded to the arduous work regimes during the growing season by run-
ning away temporarily to escape the summertime tasks of hoeing and
weeding. Later in the year, after the harvest, incidents of vandalism in-
creased, and the barns housing newly harvested rice were burned as the
enslaved determined to disrupt the heightened work regimes “required to
process millions of pounds of rice by hand.”14
Through the latter half of the eighteenth century, profit-hungry
Carolina rice planters eagerly moved south onto lands in Georgia be-
yond the Savannah River. By 1750 the trustees of the Georgia colony
had lifted earlier restrictions on landholding, as well as a 1735 ban on
importing slaves. These expansive development strategies, coupled with
subsequent land cessions from the Creeks and with Britain’s 1763 acqui-
sition of Florida from the Spanish, opened Florida to Anglo-American
settlement and added over five million acres to Georgia as well.15 Much
of this newly gained territory was ill suited for rice production but instead
supported a mix of hunting, agriculture, and livestock-raising prospects
that attracted white settlers from the upper South, the West Indies, and
South Carolina.16
White newcomers in Georgia purchased and imported enslaved peo-
ple from South Carolina and the West Indies, and within a decade they
also began buying slaves directly from the West African coast. Charleston
remained the largest importer of enslaved Africans in the North Ameri-
can colonies in the eighteenth century, and over half the enslaved popu-
lation brought into Georgia between 1751 and 1773 was African born.
As the numbers of planters and small-scale white farmers expanded, the
enslaved population in the Southeast grew rapidly, increasing from about
five hundred in Georgia in 1751 to nearly fifteen thousand by 1773. On
the eve of the American Revolution, South Carolina’s black majority
population totaled over eighty thousand.17
This spatial and human expansion of colonial settlement and chattel
slavery pushed beyond the periphery of the Creeks’ territory, allowing
blacks and Creeks to encounter each other more often and placing ever
greater strains on the diplomatic ties between Creeks and their aggres-
sive Anglo-American neighbors. Creeks complained vociferously about
the destruction that colonists’ cattle wrought on their hunting grounds,
and colonial officials worried about the Creeks’ ability to erode their
slaveholdings by harboring fugitives or, up to 1763, giving them safe pas-
sage to Florida.18 Hoping to block the steady flow of runaway slaves from

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 107
colonial plantations to these nearby Indian settlements in Florida and
Georgia, English authorities sought to enlist their Indian diplomatic al-
lies also as slave catchers.
Colonial officials routinely inserted specific provisions for the capture
and return of slave fugitives in their treaties with their native neighbors.
In the early summer of 1767, for example, John Stuart, the British super-
intendent of Southern Indian Affairs, met with the Creeks to negotiate
trade relations, which necessarily encompassed a discussion of fugitive
slaves. Determined to prevent the Indians’ territory from becoming an
“asylum for Negroes,” Stuart insisted that Creeks return the runaways
among them to the colonists.19 Subsequent agreements between South
Carolina authorities and Creeks reiterated the demand that the Indians
surrender any “Negroes harbored in Creek Country.”
20 Southeastern In-
dians interested in safeguarding their trade and diplomatic ties with the
British may not have voiced their reluctance to turn over fugitives, but
their continuing willingness to harbor runaways spoke volumes. Al-
though colonial officials repeatedly encouraged Creeks to capture and re-
deem fugitives, these attempts to control not the enslaved but rather
those who might assist them did little to mitigate enslaved women’s de-
termination to head for Creek settlements.
The conventional understanding of women’s responses to enslave-
ment, based on evidence pointing to its infrequency, has diverted atten-
tion from the women who fled. Overall, fewer enslaved women than men
ran away. One explanation for this disparity holds that the gendered di-
vision of labor on large plantations may have contributed to the lower
rates of women’s flight. Work assignments took more enslaved men be-
yond the plantation confines than women and allowed the men to learn
about local routes leading away from their masters and enslavement.
Enslaved women, of course, hid out nearby or sought refuge with rela-
tives on neighboring plantations or farms rather than attempting to es-
cape slavery forever. Virtually all the historiography that considers women
runaways attributes this tendency toward truancy rather than outright
escape to women’s reluctance to sever the emotional ties that linked
family members, especially mothers to their children.21
Framing enslaved motherhood as a constraint against escape, how-
ever, diverts attention from enslavement’s violent negations of mater-
nity. Recurrent instances of women’s successful flight, with or without
their children, defy the reduction of enslaved women to what Jennifer
Morgan has described as the mythic image of “selfless women working
endless hours to support their children—mamas with expansive hearts

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and bosoms and a ferocious protectiveness.”
22 Though one cannot ignore
the paramount importance of family ties in the lives of the enslaved, ma-
ternal desires to care for offspring did not stifle all women’s impulses to
flee the physically and psychically overwhelming hardships of planta-
tion labor.
Between 1763 and 1790, almost one-third of the advertisements for
runaways in Georgia newspapers announced escapes of enslaved women,
and the majority of those 273 runaway women fled without children.
Only 33 women (12 percent) were reported as having run away with chil-
dren; 5 women (less than 2 percent) were said to have fled while preg-
nant, and another 15 escaped (5.5 percent) with both husbands and chil-
dren. Thus just under 20 percent of the women who ran away during
these three decades in Georgia fled with children.23 In South Carolina
women who ran away with children made up an equally small proportion
of the escapees, represented by fewer than one-fourth of the runaway ad-
vertisements placed in newspapers from the 1730s through 1790.
For the enslaved women in the colonial Southeast, the experiences
and expectations of parenting were informed as much by the shattering
violence and dislocations of their enslavement and the appropriation of
their children as the property of others as by maternal bonds of affection.
Both surely factored into women’s decisions about when, where, and with
whom they would escape.24 Yet the written record does not tell us whether
the majority of fugitive women fleeing without children in these adver-
tisements reflected generally low birth rates among slaves or a determi-
nation to quit onerous work routines at the expense of parental ties.
Women without children may have favored flight over obtaining emo-
tional and physical relief by cultivating family relations with other
slaves. Women recently arrived from Africa, separated from families in
their homelands by capture, and too new in the Americas to have formed
connections among the enslaved would presumably have tended to fall
within this last category.
Enslaved women in the late-eighteenth-century Southeast lived in
communities that grew more from arrivals of such new and isolated
Africans transported from either the West Indies or West Africa than
from natural increase. Whether from the devastating physical toll of rice
labor on women’s reproductive health and on infant survival, low pro-
portions of women among the enslaved, or the enslaved women’s in-
tentional use of contraceptives and abortifacients, low rates of natural
increase among the enslaved in Georgia and South Carolina persisted
into the late eighteenth century.25 Over half the West-Central Africans—

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 109
who made up nearly 70 percent of the enslaved population in South
Carolina by 1739—had been in the colony for less than a decade.26
Depressed birth rates in conjunction with high infant mortality rates
meant that between 1755 and 1777 the average number of (surviving)
children born per enslaved women in Georgia was less than one. Ac-
cording to historian Betty Wood’s survey of the inventories of colonial
Georgia plantations, 43 percent of enslaved couples who lived together
either had no children or had been separated from their offspring by sale
or dispersal of the estates of deceased owners.27 Consideration of these
low rates of reproduction and the significant presence of newly arrived
and deracinated African women shifts the emphasis in interpreting these
data away from gross generalizations about the emotional constraints on
women’s flight toward the specific hardships and isolation of their lives—
their intense labor and limited abilities to form families—that made
flight to the Creeks both possible and desirable.
the practicalities of flight
Either unencumbered by the burdens of childcare or for other reasons
not explained by the historical record, the enslaved women who fled to
the settlements of the Creeks ran away either on their own or with only
male companions. In the spring of 1769, for example, Sarah, an African-
born woman in South Carolina “with her country marks down each side
of her face” and filed teeth, ran off with an enslaved boatman named
York. Perhaps relying on York’s navigational skills to facilitate their es-
cape along the Low-Country waterways, the fugitives made their way to
Georgia, where they were “taken up by the Creek Indians.”28 In the au-
tumn of the same year, an enslaved Georgia couple, Harry and Cassan-
dra, ran away from their master and were believed to have gone to “the
Indian nation, or to Mobile” along the Gulf coast of West Florida, where
Cassandra’s family lived. The shrinking territorial distance between
white Georgians and the Creeks made slaves’ escapes to the Creeks as
feasible as running off to family or to nearby urban centers.
Despite Creeks’ treaty agreements to pursue and return fugitives, white
slaveholders and colonial officials remained dubious that they would re-
gain possession of runaway slaves who reached them. The lieutenant
governor of Florida observed in 1771, “It has been a practice for a good
while past for negroes to run away from their masters and get into the In-
dian towns from whence it proved very difficult and troublesome to get
them back.”29 Late in 1769 white men captured a fugitive African-born

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110 barbara krauthamer
man in the Creek territory some twelve months after he had run away
from his master in Pensacola. During his time among the Creeks, he
had learned to speak Muskogee and, speaking in the Creeks’ language,
reported to his captors that his work had mainly entailed gathering
firewood for an Indian man, a stark improvement on enslaved men’s
labor for British masters in Florida, which included clearing swamps,
building roads, and toiling in rice fields.30 Slaveholders paid steep prices
even when they succeeded in retrieving runaways; though they regained
their property, they also brought back a person who had acquired criti-
cal knowledge about the location, language, and lifeways of the Indian
settlements.
Information about potential Indian allies and the routes between
white plantations and Indian settlements pulsed through the streams of
communication that linked enslaved people across the Low Country and
kept them abreast of important events and potential destinations for
flight throughout the Southeast.31 Enslaved women who ran away from
their Anglo-American masters and headed toward the Creek settlements
chose this path because they had an informed awareness of the nearby
Indian populations. Early in the eighteenth century, slaveholders had
owned both Indians and Africans, who lived and labored side by side.
The broad array of racial terminology that Anglo slaveholders used to
describe people of African and Indian ancestry in the early eighteenth
century attests to the extensive and longstanding intimate connections
between the two groups. Subsequent generations of enslaved Africans
and African Americans likely gained information about nearby Indian
peoples from these fellow bondspeople. When a woman named Mary, de-
scribed by her South Carolina master as “mulatto or mustee,” ran away in
1771, she fled with the assistance of her “Indian” mother, who lived on a
nearby plantation.32
Personal relationships like these, however, were only one strand of
wider webs linking Africans and Indians in the Southeast. Enslaved
women would have gained critical information about the Creeks’ loca-
tions as well as their social relations and antipathy for brutal domination
at the core of chattel slavery simply by listening attentively to conversa-
tions among their masters. British trade relations with Creeks also
brought a number of enslaved African men into commercial contact
with Creeks. English traders living in Creek towns ignored colonial pro-
hibitions against keeping slaves at their stores, and enslaved men owned
by these merchants and others connected to the Anglo-Indian trade
worked as packhorsemen and boatmen. In those they capacities became

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 111
well acquainted with the locations and languages of Creek towns.33 As
this particular group of enslaved men moved between Creek towns and
white communities filled with enslaved people watching for every oppor-
tunity to escape, they carried with them information about Creeks that
proved highly useful to enslaved women plotting their escapes.
finding places
Runaways from the colonies made their way to the Creek towns clus-
tered along the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola Rivers in
Georgia and the Florida panhandle. Some fled to the towns situated in
present-day Alabama on the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers, some two
hundred miles to the west. Drawing on this geographic dispersal, early
British observers distinguished between two principal groups of Creeks,
the “Upper Creeks” living on the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers and their
tributaries and the “Lower Creeks” closer to the Low Country in the
Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola watersheds.34
Runaway slave women who reached these Creek towns found them-
selves in communities composed of hierarchical networks of extended
kin groups, or clans. Elaborate rules governed interpersonal relationships
and political, economic, and ceremonial responsibilities within and
among particular kin groups. Both biological relations and the linguistic
idioms of kinship delineated intricate relations of obligation and reci-
procity linking Creek townspeople to one another within local commu-
nities and also among geographically dispersed towns. Creeks, like other
southeastern Indian peoples, viewed outsiders who lacked places in these
networks of social, political, and ceremonial relations, such as fugitive
slaves, as little more than “dunghill fowl,” beings who commanded no
respect and were easily disregarded.
At the same time, however, Creek conceptions and practices of kin-
ship had long allowed for inclusion of such outsiders through formal ritu-
als of adoption and marriage that placed the foreigners under the Creeks’
control and transformed them into kin who counted.35 Before and after
Europeans’ arrival in the Creeks’ world, adoption and marriage of women
and children captured in wars provided spiritual and physical compensa-
tion for losses in these conflicts. In the eighteenth century, marriages of
Creek women from powerful clans to British traders not only conferred
kinship upon these foreign men but also, and more important from the
Creeks’ point of view, secured a community’s access to the trade goods
they could offer. Creeks cemented trade and diplomatic ties also among

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112 barbara krauthamer
their own towns by performing gift-exchange ceremonies that linked the
contracting parties to each other as kin and bound them to promote one
another’s political and economic interests. In the latter half of the eigh-
teenth century, as Creeks were increasingly drawn into the complex
networks of trade and diplomacy that connected Euro-Americans and
Indians, their flexible conceptions of kinship served as a crucial mode of
governing relationships with their enslaved African neighbors as well.36
Africans and African Americans entered Creek settlements in a vari-
ety of roles. Some came as fugitive slaves, others as slaves owned by
British traders, and others still as slaves acquired by Creeks. Across the
towns dispersed throughout the Creeks’ territories, responses to Africans
and African Americans varied with individual and local community in-
terests confronting the territorial and political expansion of colonial
plantation society. While some Creeks waded into the market economy
by taking up commercial agriculture and purchasing African slaves as
laborers, others chafed at the dominance and coercive power exercised
by colonial planters and politicians and remained skeptical of embracing
Euro-American institutions and practices.37 For Creeks who acquired
slaves, however, the old ways did not disappear immediately, and their
practices of slaveholding did not simply imitate Euro-American ones.
In the 1770s Philadelphia naturalist William Bartram wrote of his
travels through the Southeast and pointed to the complexity of Creeks’
slaveholding and to their interactions with black women within the
framework of their relations of kin. On the subject of slavery, Bartram
noted that the Yamasee captives held as slaves by a Creek chief were
permitted to marry Creeks, and their children were considered full and
equal members in the society.38 The Creeks, like other southeastern In-
dian peoples, had long dealt with war captives in gendered ways: they
tortured and executed men while retaining women and children as ser-
vants until their transformation into kin. Bartram’s descriptions of the
Creek towns he visited in the 1770s also reveal the presence of black
women as slaves and also as potential kin in Creek families.
Bartram’s writings can be read to chart Creeks’ changing practices of
slaveholding as they moved from retaining Indian captives to acquiring
black people as slaves.39 Bartram focused his attention on Creek ownership
of black people as slaves because he hoped to persuade Anglo-Americans
of Creeks’ potential for conforming to “our modes of civil society,” espe-
cially men’s ownership of private property and participation in the market
economy.40 When reading Bartram and other English descriptions of the
complex relations taking shape between Native Americans and African

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 113
Americans, it is important to remember that the meaning of the term
slave is contextual and not easily transposed from the Anglo-American to
the Creek context. Rather than clearly documenting the extension of
chattel slavery, and thus in Bartram’s estimation “civil society,” into
Creek country, his observations reveal the fluidity of Creek patterns of
subordination and thus suggest the ways in which fugitive women may
have navigated the path from outsider to kin among the Creeks.
In one instance Bartram described an encounter with a man named
Boatswain (also known as James Lawson), the son of a British trader and
a Creek woman. Boatswain received the northern traveler into his home,
located outside the Lower Creek town of Hitchiti, along the Chatta-
hoochee River, and the men enjoyed “excellent Coffee served up in
China Dishes by young Negro Slaves.” After feasting on corn cakes, bar-
becued venison, and assorted sweets, Bartram took stock of Boatswain’s
agricultural endeavors, approvingly noting that he had close to one hun-
dred acres of fertile land fenced and under cultivation. Those responsible
for planting and tending the crops were “his own private family, which
consists of about Thirty People, among which were about 15 Negroes.”
Boatswain thus blended labor acquired through purchase of black women
and perhaps the acquisition of fugitives with Creek obligations of family
to staff a small but profitable plantation on the margins of the region’s
growing commercial economy.41
Bartram looked with approbation at the composition and organization
of Boatswain’s household, as it demonstrated not only Creek capacity for
commercial pursuits but a Creek man’s ability to assume command of
Creek and black women’s labor. Anglo-American observers usually
viewed Creeks’ gendered division of labor, matrilineal family order, and
willingness to absorb Africans and African Americans into their families
as backward and unstable. Bartram, by contrast, saw promise in the
gendered and racialized hierarchy of Boatswain’s household, implicitly
likening it to the ideal southeastern, colonial planter’s household in
which a constellation of dependents—wife, children, other relatives, ser-
vants, and slaves—were subject to capacious, patriarchal authority.42 The
perceived similarities between Boatswain’s household and that of colo-
nial planters, and even yeomen, however, were largely superficial.
Unlike in the southeastern colonies, the women of African descent in
Boatswain’s household were not wholly confined by lifelong enslave-
ment. Their subordination or dependency was temporary and not inex-
tricably linked to skin color, even though by the mid- to late eighteenth
century, Creeks had become well acquainted with their Euro-American

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114 barbara krauthamer
neighbors’ categories of racial classification. Creeks and other southeast-
ern Indian peoples responded to European racial categories by drawing
on indigenous color symbolism. The Creeks, for example, understood red
as the powerful opposite of white and thus began referring to themselves
as red people as a response to Anglo-Americans’ self-identification as
whites, not as a description of skin tone. Yet, Creeks often lumped people
of African descent in the same categories they used to identify Anglo-
Americans, thus marking both primarily as outsiders. Although a small
cadre of Creek slaveholders increasingly adopted the Anglo-American
equation of blackness with enslavement in the final decades of the eigh-
teenth century, that trend was neither immediate nor universal across
Creek country.43
Even through the early years of the nineteenth century, many Creeks
continued to identify themselves and others as insiders and outsiders, dif-
ferentiated by kinship and personal relationships, and “cared little
whether strangers were black or white.”
44 Thus, Boatswain’s “family”
consisted of female biological relatives and other women in his clan, in-
cluding those of African descent, who were linked to each other and to
Boatswain through Creek understandings of the hierarchical relations of
kinship rather than Euro-American conceptions of a permanently,
racially stratified household. According to Bartram, several of the black
women in Boatswain’s family “were married to Indians and enjoy equal
privileges with the Indians, but they are slaves until they marry, when
they become Indians, or Free Citizens.”
45 The complex workings of fam-
ily ties instead of appearance or African ancestry determined their status,
identity, and future prospects in Boatswain’s family and the larger Creek
community.
While Bartram identified the women of African descent in Boatswain’s
family as slaves, his descriptions of the kin-oriented route from enslave-
ment to freedom suggests that these runaway women might also have fol-
lowed this trajectory to permanent liberation from their Anglo masters.
Bartram’s attentiveness to the “slaves” among the Creeks may also be
somewhat deceptive, as many African Americans in Creek country were
likely to have been runaways. Creeks, as colonial slaveholders knew too
well, routinely “sequestered” these fugitives, refusing to return them to
their masters. Outside observers, paying little attention to the dynamics
of social relations in Creek communities, viewed these relationships as
those of masters and slaves. In the 1790s, for example, U.S. Indian agent
Benjamin Hawkins noted with dismay that Sophia Durant, a Creek
woman, did not press her slaves to produce ample, marketable crops.

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 115
However, he failed to recognize that some of her “slaves” were married
to members of her clan and at least one was, in fact, a free black person
under her protection.46
Although increased intermarriages of Creek women with white men
added a patrilineal element to the ways Creeks mapped kin ties in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most Creeks continued
to trace descent through male relatives in the female line, that is, from a
mother’s brother (maternal uncle) to her children (as nephews and
nieces). By this matrilineal calculus, black women incorporated into
Creek kinship groups as subordinates to Creek women and men became
eligible for marriage, ensuring their children’s lineage and thus positions
in clans and towns. Theda Perdue’s study of a Cherokee Deer Clan fam-
ily’s adoption of a black woman named Molly in the 1770s makes clear
that while southern Indians’ ideas about race, property, and slavery were
shifting in the late eighteenth century toward an acceptance of Euro-
American categories of racial distinction and the ownership of black
people as chattel slaves, many native people continued to acknowledge
and abide by the primacy of matrilineal kinship.47
Yet it would be romantic to imagine that relations of kinship and the
transformative power of incorporation proceeded without tension and
conflict. Like captive Indian women before them, black women would
have performed agricultural work, acquiring the skills that Creeks ex-
pected of women. By learning the labor patterns of Creek women and
men, outsider women gained more than technical knowledge: they be-
came familiar with the dispersal of power between women and men in
Creek clans and towns and the respect given gendered labor.48 African
and African American women in Creek country owed their labor to
their host families and, despite the absence of grueling work regimes,
nonetheless had little choice about the work they performed.
Did Creek women expect outsider and subordinate women to bear the
responsibility for the more onerous and monotonous chores? Similarly,
who selected Creek marriage partners for these newly arrived women? The
friction, such as negotiations over the daily allocation of work or the selec-
tion of a marriage partner, as well as the affection that developed between
black women subordinates and their Creek hosts, are not readily apparent
in Bartram’s writings on life in Creek towns, but they must have been cen-
tral to black women’s experiences of incorporation into Creek society.
Remaining aware of such tensions, however, reminds us of the chal-
lenges and choices runaway women faced when they fled to Creek settle-
ments. Definitions of inclusion in Creek society, which entailed clear

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116 barbara krauthamer
constraints on autonomy and required outsiders’ initial subordinate sta-
tus and compulsory labor, bore little resemblance to liberal conceptions
of civic belonging as “freedom” taking shape in late-eighteenth-century
Anglo-America but nonetheless provided more stability than planta-
tion slavery and thus security against the threat of reenslavement in the
colonies.
commercialization in the nineteenth century
The American Revolution and the repeated transfers of control over
Florida back and forth between the British and Spanish created an un-
stable geopolitical climate in the Southeast, in which black people there
found new opportunities, some of them closer to home, to protect them-
selves from the multiple modes of violence at the heart of plantation
agriculture. During the war, slaves took advantage of the chaos to run
away in numbers large enough that one historian has called their flight “a
type of slave revolt.” British commanders, usually less interested in black
liberation than in destroying American patriots’ property and economy,
nonetheless spurred slaves’ flight and offered freedom to those men who
served the British forces. In the southeast, the ranks of British forces
were comprised of whites, Indian men, and blacks, and their raids on
Southern plantations facilitated other slaves’ flight and the opening new
routes out of chattel slavery and into southern Indians’ territories.49
One slaveholder in the aftermath of the war, in 1783, placed an ad for
the capture of a family of five runaways who had fled four years earlier.
The group had retreated from Savannah with Indians just days before the
British besieged the city.50 Slaves’ frequent flight during and after the war
suggests that, despite some Creeks’ growing interest in acquiring black
slaves as chattel and participating in the expanding commercial econ-
omy of the region, others continued to offer refuge to runaways. In 1786,
for example, a large group of runaways—consisting of Juba and her hus-
band, Isaac; Phebe and her husband, Pate; Quahobe and her husband,
Battes; Sue, her husband, Ned, and their two young children—fled West
Florida for Creek territory to the north.51
As Low-Country planters pushed into Georgia’s backcountry in the
wake of the revolution, the rivers and streams that had formed the core
of the Creek territory became major arteries linking new inland cotton
plantations to markets on the coast. Facing accompanying pressure from
the federal and state governments, Creek leaders, many of whom had dis-
tanced themselves from the older models of power sharing and negotia-

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 117
tion to participate in slave-based commercial agriculture, ceded commu-
nal hunting grounds vital to most Creeks’ subsistence. In 1802 they gave
up the central Georgia land between the Oconee and Ocmulgee rivers;
in 1821 they ceded land further west up to the Flint River; and in 1826
they relinquished claims as far west as the Chattahoochee River, which
now marks Georgia’s western boundary.52 The loss of so much territory,
coupled with a poor harvest in 1804 and subsequent shortages of food,
exacerbated divisions within Creek towns and fueled Creeks’ discontent
with land-hungry white Georgians.53 As the newcomers pushed to seize
more land from southeastern Indians, they also pushed to import more
slaves before the Constitution’s 1808 ban on the transatlantic slave trade
took effect. Between 1804 and 1807 they brought some forty thousand
Africans into Charleston alone. During the following years, an equally
brutal domestic slave trade would channel hundreds of thousands of
African American slaves from the upper South to the bone-crushing
labor of the cotton plantations that grew up as planters pushed westward
onto Indians’ lands.
The interests of many Creeks and runaway slaves thus converged, at
least to the degree that members of both groups were searching for ways
to escape the hardships wrought by this expansion of commercial planta-
tion agriculture in the early nineteenth century. In 1802 an East Florida
planter complained that two of his slave men had run off to the Indians.
In addition, he reported, “an Indian Negro” had stolen a slave woman
and her child. The woman, moreover, had given birth to another child
since she had left her master’s plantation.54
Neither Creeks nor runaway slave women left accounts of these inter-
actions, but documents generated by slaveholders attempting to regain
ownership of fugitive women provide clear evidence of the significant
extent to which Creeks incorporated black women and their children
into their society. In 1796, for example, a slaveholder from Liberty
County, Georgia, claimed that a “party of Indians” had “inveigled” a
slave couple, Adam and Fanny, away from his plantation and taken them
to a Creek village. While Adam was soon killed, Fanny continued to re-
side in the town. By 1822 she reportedly had eighteen children and
grandchildren.55 Fanny clearly had been incorporated into a Creek kin-
ship network, where she had married, borne children, and was living
peacefully. Her integration into the Creek nation—specifically her mar-
riage and reproductive success—attracted the jealous attention of her
master, who sought compensation from the state not only for the two
slaves he had lost but also for the value of Fanny’s Creek offspring, thus

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118 barbara krauthamer
creating the record revealing her circumstances. Slaveholders’ capa-
cious understanding of their patriarchal rights of ownership over black
women’s bodies allowed them to bequeath unborn children and even, as
in this case, to insist on claiming children born far beyond their planta-
tion confines.56
Creeks, intent on safeguarding their political and territorial auton-
omy, took a dim view of slaveholders’ arguments that the children born
to fugitive slave women in Creek towns were rightful property of the
masters whom slave mothers had fled. Creeks not only refused to surren-
der fugitive women or their children but also articulated the distinct un-
derstandings of descent and identity that lay behind their refusal. In May
1793 the overseer of William Smith’s plantation, also in Liberty County,
Georgia, noticed that slaves who should have been working in the rice
fields were “running in every direction,” and he saw Indians leading
them away. Seven men and six women had escaped from the plantation:
some were eventually retrieved, but several remained with the Creeks. In
1821, when Smith filed suit with the state for compensation for these
losses, he indicated that one of the fugitive women, Mary, had had four
children who were living among the Creeks. Smith had been unable to
gain possession of the children, in spite of his evident close monitoring of
their lives, complaining that “the Indians kept them because they were
born upon their hands.”57
The Creeks’ insistence on keeping Mary’s offspring suggests that she
had been woven into their social fabric, despite her initial outsider sta-
tus, to the extent that she and her progeny were granted the protection
afforded to members of the community. When Creeks recognized Mary’s
children by Creek men as members of their community, they furthermore
made clear their rejection of American slavery’s oddly parallel definition
of descent exclusively through the mother. They also conveyed their
utter unconcern with the corresponding American polarized categories
of race, in which even a slight taint of African (maternal) ancestry ex-
cluded a person from the privileged and paternal status of white.
Creeks continued to accept fugitive slaves into their settlements at least
through the early nineteenth century. Some historians have contended
that the absence of commercial agriculture among Creeks allowed them
to continue their older patterns of retaining fugitive women and other
slaves as captives but not as property.58 Yet such a formulation suggests
that Creeks thought only in terms of economic practices rather than with
ideas and values about belonging. Even as prominent Creeks adapted

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 119
their ideas about property to commercialization and grew prosperous
with individual ownership, including black people as chattel, these ten-
dencies developed unevenly across time and place. In the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, black people’s status varied widely
throughout the Creeks’ territory, according to richer and poorer Creeks’
disparate views and practices of race, kinship, and slavery. Like other
southern Indians, Creeks did not immediately or entirely jettison older
patterns of kinship and incorporation but continued to rely on clans to
give shape and meaning to their social relations even as they simultane-
ously adopted newer modes of governance, property ownership, and so-
cial hierarchy.
The intimacy between Creeks and black women alarmed and infuri-
ated white Southern slaveholders well into the antebellum era. When
they looked at the fugitive slaves who gained freedom from chattel slav-
ery in Creek towns, and even at the black slaves whom some Creeks
claimed as property, American slaveholders did not see the complex and
changing dynamics of kinship and slavery. Instead they saw Creeks as a
chaotic, and therefore dangerous, alternative to the theoretically rigid
racial and social order that they sought through enslavement. American
chattel slavery rested on the abject racial and sexual degradation of
African and African American women. The negation of blacks’ civic
standing through denial of rights as persons extended to whites required
the continual policing of boundaries of race. Slaveholders personally and
arbitrarily controlled black women’s bodies, their physical labor, sexual
services, and reproductive potential.59
When Anglo-American slaveholders looked at the Creeks’ towns,
however, they witnessed black women possessing their own bodies, mov-
ing freely within the conventions of kin and other relationships and re-
taining control of much of what they produced. They saw that many
Creeks recognized black women’s offspring as legitimate children rather
than only as added value to their estates, which contradicted all the ex-
clusionary principles of race and property informing the foundations of
chattel slavery.
Nothing revealed more clearly whites’ failure to understand the alter-
native forms of freedom that fugitive slave women found among the
Creeks than the writings of the men directed by the federal government
to take a census of the Creeks in 1832. As pressures built to remove
Creeks from the Southeast to the still-undeveloped trans-Mississippi
West, the census takers went from town to town throughout Creek terri-
tory, recording the names of household heads and tallying the number

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120 barbara krauthamer
of men and women in each family, including slaves. At every turn the
census takers encountered households that defied the civil and racial
scheme of categorization that they brought to their task. They found
households in which black women headed families; black women identi-
fied, in white terms, as slaves who named free Indian men as husbands;
and free men and women who appeared black to the census takers but
who labeled themselves Indian. In the end, among the 22,664 people
counted in Creek territory, the census enumerated approximately nine
hundred black slaves and fourteen free black families, nine of which
were headed by women. In one entry, a woman householder named Juba
claimed her black husband as one of her five “slaves,” recalling the 1786
runaways from West Florida.60 All the black women family heads in the
census claimed black slaves as members of their households, and some
indicated that the people counted as slaves in the terms of the federal
census were husbands and children in Creek categories of kinship.
African and African American women in the Creeks’ territory, like
the Creeks who adopted and incorporated them, had their own under-
standings of what it meant to be enslaved or free. For the African women
and their American-born daughters who sought refuge from chattel slav-
ery in the Creek territory in the mid-eighteenth century, the clan-based,
matrilineal organization of the Creek world offered freedom of a certain
kind—recognized standing in networks of kin and affines—not available
in the southern port cities, where they had arrived alone and routinely
were isolated again and again through loss of mates and children and
other relatives. When recently enslaved women entered Creek towns,
they found secure places in communities comparable to those they had
left behind in Africa. These women, former slaves, did not somehow
recreate their African pasts. Rather, these fugitive women would have
found Creek patterns of liberation through protection by responsible pa-
trons—in social as well as gender roles, family structure, and division of
labor—not to have been entirely alien or unsatisfying.
In slavery to English planters, women knew all too well that child-
bearing and other hard-won ties they might build were vulnerable to
their masters’ ability to destroy them at will through labor demands or
sale. By the early to mid-nineteenth century, their American-born
daughters were products of the ties of kinship that slave families had
nonetheless managed to create, even under the duress of Low-Country
plantation slavery. The slave women who ran away to the Creek terri-
tory, either on their own or with loved ones, had good reason to recog-
nize that inclusion in Creeks’ family and kin relations afforded them a

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 121
secure refuge from bondage to commercially driven planters, the possibil-
ity of enduring families and other connections. Meanings of family or kin
relations shaped Creeks’ inclinations to retain the fugitive women who
arrived in their villages, and the potential security of this particular sort
of freedom informed enslaved women’s choices to endure the risks of
running away. Examining enslaved women’s flight from chattel slavery to
incorporation in Creek communities suggests the intertwined meanings
of family and freedom in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-
century Southeast, not only for the enslaved but also for the planters
who held them in bondage and for the Creeks who offered them refuge.
notes
1. It is well established among historians of African American slavery that urban
settings, especially port cities, beckoned runaways, offering access to employment,
contact with other black people, and the possibility of continuing their escape by
sea. The First African Baptist Church, founded in Savannah by George Liele, a free
black ordained minister, offered runaways a secure hiding place under the floor-
boards in its basement. For descriptions of runaway slaves in Savannah in the early
nineteenth century, see Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in
Lowcountry Georgia, 1750–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001),
13–15, 118–20. On black Baptists, see Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey
to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), especially 188–90, 319.
Peter Wood writes that in the early eighteenth century “Charleston harbor became
a common locale for runaways.” Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South
Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Norton, 1996), ch. 9.
South Carolina slaveholders sometimes suspected free blacks in Charleston of hiring
runaway slaves. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-
Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998), 494–97. For discussions of the public markets in Savannah and Charleston,
see Betty Wood, Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Low-
country Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), ch. 4; Olaudah
Equiano writes at length about his time in Charleston and Savannah in 1765 and
1766, not long before he purchased his freedom. Working on a slave ship that regu-
larly made calls in the two southeastern port cities, Equiano hired black men to
assist him on the docks and socialized with other slaves in Savannah. Equiano, The
Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin
Books, 1995), 128–30, 133–40.
2. Lathan Windley, comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History
from the 1730s to 1790, 4 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), vol. 4, Georgia,
37; vol. 3, South Carolina, 110, 192; Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The
Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 170–71.

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122 barbara krauthamer
3. Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and
Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Theda Perdue, “Clan and
Court: Another Look at the Early Cherokee Republic,” American Indian Quarterly 24
(2000): 562–69.
4. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa 2nd
ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12–15, 120–23.
5. The debate regarding kinship and slavery is framed by the work of Suzanne
Miers and Igor Kopytoff that argues for considering slavery as a continuum of kinship
and Claude Meillassoux’s position that slavery exists as the direct opposition of kin-
ship. James Brooks’s study of captivity, slavery, and kinship in the American south-
west adds a new dimension to this debate by suggesting the possibilities of considering
slavery and kinship as interrelated and constitutive. Kin incorporation, he argues,
makes subsequent denials of incorporation historically and analytically salient. Miers
and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); Meillassoux, The Anthropology of
Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Bor-
derlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), esp. ch. 1. For a
feminist-studies response to some of these issues, see Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in
Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of
Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210.
6. Wilhelm Johann Muller, “Wilhelm Johann Muller’s Description of the Fetu
Country, 1662–69,” in German Sources for West African History, 1599–1669, ed.
Adam Jones (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982), 154.
7. Margaret Burnham, “An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and Family Law,”
Law and Inequality 5 (1987): 203.
8. In their work on the dynamics of kinship and slavery in East Africa, Justin
Willis and Suzanne Miers caution against “the bland implication of a static world of
equality and harmony” when considering the ways in which “outsiders of all kinds”
might be incorporated into a kin-based society. Willis and Miers, “Becoming a Child
of the House: Incorporation, Authority and Resistance in Giryama Society,” Journal
of African History 38, no. 3 (1997): 480.
9. See, for example, Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English
Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002);
Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian
Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993); Ken-
neth Wiggins Porter, The Negro on the American Frontier (New York: Arno, 1971);
Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of
the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch.
12; Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy:
The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1992); J. Leitch Wright Jr., Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Re-
generation of the Muscogulge People (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986);
Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1999), ch. 2.

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 123
10. Landers, Black Society, 24.
11. Jane Landers’s works provide wonderfully detailed accounts of both the impe-
rial rivalry between Spain and Britain as it played out in the Southeast and the com-
plex and shifting relations between blacks, Indians, and Spanish authorities in
Florida. Black women are central to Landers’s discussion of black life in Spanish
Florida, but their interactions with Indians are not the subject of her inquiry. Lan-
ders, Black Society, esp. ch. 1. In their efforts to foster antipathy between the en-
slaved and Indians, colonial officials also armed enslaved men to fight against Indi-
ans. Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), 310–14; James H. Merrell, “The Racial Education of
the Catawba Indians,” Journal of Southern History 50 (August 1984): 363–84; Martha
Condray Searcy, “The Introduction of African Slavery into the Creek Indian Na-
tion,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 66 (1981): 21–32; William S. Willis, “Divide and
Rule: Red, White, and Black in the Southeast,” Journal of Negro History 48 (1963):
157–76. For a discussion of British attempts to retrieve runaways from the Chero-
kees, see Miles, Ties That Bind.
12. Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World
Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), ch. 5.
13. For studies of rice production in colonial South Carolina, see Judith Carney,
Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001); Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the
Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1981).
14. Carney, Black Rice, ch. 4, quote from 120.
15. Joshua Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 98.
16. Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1984), 92–93.
17. Ibid., 98–99; P. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, ch. 1; Julia Floyd Smith, Slavery
and Rice Culture in Low Country Georgia 1750–1860 (Knoxville: University of Ten-
nessee Press, 1985), ch. 2; Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History
of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of
Washington, 1930–35), vol. 4, The Border Colonies and the Southern Colonies.
18. The spread of cattle through the region threatened to destroy the local
ecosystem on the Creeks’ shrinking hunting lands. Cattle both trampled the grasses
that fed the indigenous game and drove them off, compromising the availability of
food and also diminishing the source of the deerskins that were central to the south-
ern Indians’ exchange economy with colonial traders. On the deerskin trade, see
Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with
Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993); Saunt,
New Order; Piker, Okfuskee. On the deerskin trade and other southern Indian peo-
ples, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the
Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Usner,
Indians, Settlers; Usner, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and
Economic Histories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

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124 barbara krauthamer
19. John Stuart, quoted in Miles, Ties That Bind, 32.
20. Quoted in Daniel E. Meaders, “South Carolina Fugitives,” Journal of Negro
History 60 (1975): 305.
21. Stephanie Camp, “‘I Could Not Stay There’: Enslaved Women, Truancy and
the Geography of Everyday Forms of Resistance in the Antebellum Plantation
South,” Slavery and Abolition 23 (2002): 1–20; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a
Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1999). On
market women, see Olwell, Masters, Slaves, ch. 4.
22. J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 113.
23. Windley, Georgia.
24. For a comprehensive and insightful discussion of the intricate connections
between enslaved women’s reproductive lives and chattel slavery, see J. Morgan, La-
boring Women; Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial
North Carolina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); White, Ar’n’t I A Woman?
25. Carney, Black Rice; B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, ch. 6; Smith, Slavery
and Rice Culture; J. Morgan, Laboring Women, ch. 4.
26. For a discussion of African population trends in North America see Michael
A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in
the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,
1998), ch. 6.
27. B. Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 106; Betty C. Wood, “Some Aspects of
Female Resistance to Chattel Slavery in Low Country Georgia, 1763–1815,” Histori-
cal Journal 30 (1987): 609; P. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, ch. 1. Jennifer Morgan sur-
veyed the inventories of South Carolina plantations in 1742 and found that the
number of women without children was greater than that with children. J. Morgan,
Laboring Women, 141. For a comparison of birth rates for black and white women,
see P. Wood, Black Majority, 162.
28. Windley, Georgia, 36
29. Quoted in Saunt, New Order, 53.
30. Quoted in Robin F. A. Fabel, The Economy of British West Florida, 1763–1783
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 28–29. See also Larry Eugene
Rivers, Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2000), ch. 1.
31. Julius Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communica-
tion in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1987); Peter
Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Common-
ers, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); Jef-
frey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997); Landers, Black Society.
32. Windley, South Carolina, 670. Jack D. Forbes, “The Manipulation of Race,
Caste and Identity: Classifying Afroamericans, Native Americans and Red-Black
People,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 17 (1990): 1–51.
33. William McDowell, ed., Documents Relating to Indian Affairs, May 21, 1750 to
August 7, 1754 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1958), 88; South-
Carolina and American General Gazette, 14–21 January 1771, in Windley, South

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 125
Carolina, 436; South-Carolina Gazette, 23 October 1752, 9 August 1768, in Windley,
South Carolina, 115, 637. On traders using black boatmen, see P. Wood, Black Major-
ity, 114–15, 123–24.
34. Braund, Deerskins and Duffel; Gallay, Indian Slave Trade.
35. Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), chs. 1, 2; Kathryn Holland
Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” Journal of Southern History 57
(1991): 601–4; Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
36. John Reed Swanton, Social Organization and Social Usages of the Indians of the
Creek Confederacy (1928; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970); Robert
Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2003), 109–11; Charles C. Jones, Historical Sketch of Tomo-
Chi-Chi, Mico of the Yamacraws (1868; repr., Millwood: Kraus Reprint, 1975), 45. An
extensive body of scholarship examines the ways in which southern Indian peoples
defined and mobilized kin relations to navigate their economic and political dealings
with each other and with European colonists in the eighteenth-century Southeast.
37. Claudio Saunt, “‘The English Has Now a Mind to Make Slaves of Them All’:
Creeks, Seminoles, and the Problem of Slavery,” American Indian Quarterly 22 (Win-
ter 1998): 157–80.
38. William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and
West Florida, the Cherokee Country, The Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or
Creek Confederacy and the Country of the Chactaws (Philadelphia, 1791); reprinted in
Bartram, Travels and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1996), 166. For
a comprehensive discussion of Indian captivity and the changing practices of slavery
among southern Indians, see Perdue, Slavery and Evolution.
39. Perdue, Slavery and Evolution.
40. William Bartram, Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians (1789;
reprint, New York, 1853), reprinted in William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians,
ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund and Gregory A. Waselkov (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1995), 158.
41. Bartram, Creek and Cherokee Indians, 186. Claudio Saunt discusses Boatswain
as an example of the growing number of wealthy mestizos among the Creeks. Saunt
also notes that Boatswain acquired slaves not as private property but in transactions
that followed older patterns of reciprocity between powerful men and their subordi-
nates; in one instance, Boatswain received a slave as a “gift” from Indians in ex-
change for items such as liquor, textiles, and ammunition. Saunt, New Order, 55–57.
42. For a discussion of the position of Anglo-American women in colonial house-
holds and patriarchal authority, see Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches,
and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), ch. 4; Paula Baker, “The Domestication
of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Histori-
cal Review 89, no. 2 (1984): 620–47; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect
and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

campbell2.pt2 6/22/07 8:30 AM Page 126
126 barbara krauthamer
Press, 1980); Kerber, “The Paradox of Women’s Citizenship in the Early Republic:
The Case of Martin v. Massachusetts, 1805,” American Historical Review 97, no. 3
(1992): 349–78. For a discussion of Anglo-American patriarchal authority that con-
siders interactions between colonists, Native Americans, and African Americans,
see Fischer, Suspect Relations; Carole Shammas, “Anglo-American Household Gov-
ernment in Comparative Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1995):
104–44.
43. Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,” American Historical Review
102 (1997): 625–44; Willis, “Divide and Rule”; William G. McLoughlin, “Red Indi-
ans, Black Slavery and White Racism: America’s Slaveholding Indians,” American
Quarterly 26 (1974): 366–83; Merrell, “Racial Education.”
44. Saunt, New Order, 116.
45. Bartram, Creek and Cherokee Indians, 187.
46. John Moultrie, quoted in Saunt, New Order, 53; Benjamin Hawkins, Letters,
Journals, and Writings of Benjamin Hawkins, ed. C. L. Grant (Savannah: Beehive
Press, 1980); Saunt, New Order, 121.
47. Perdue, “Clan and Court,” 567.
48. Braund, “Creek Indians, Blacks,” 602–3; Theda Perdue, “Women, Men and
American Indian Policy: The Cherokee Response to ‘Civilization,” in Negotiators of
Change: Historical Perspectives of Native American Women, ed. Nancy Shoemaker
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 90–114.
49. Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 81; Wright, Creeks and Seminoles,
89–93.
50. Gazette of the State of Georgia, 15 May 1783, in Windley, Georgia, 105.
51. Georgia State Gazette, 21 October 1786, in Windley, Georgia, 182.
52. Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation
South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1992).
53. Saunt, New Order, ch. 9.
54. Quoted in ibid., 210. For a similar account of Indians stealing slaves from
Georgia planters and then marrying the captive women, see Joseph Le Conte, The
Autobiography of Joseph Le Conte, ed. William Dallam Armes (New York: D. Apple-
ton, 1903), 19–21.
55. Affidavit of John A. Cuthbert, 8 August 1835, in Indian Depredations,
1787–1825: Original Claims, ed. J. E. Hays, 5 vols. (Atlanta: Georgia Department of
Archives and History), vol. 2, pt. 1, 17.
56. Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women offers an elegant and pathbreaking analy-
sis of enslaved black women’s labor and reproduction in seventeenth-century Barba-
dos and South Carolina.
57. Affidavit of William Smith, 4 June 1821, in Hays, Indian Depredations, vol. 2,
pt. 2, 628. Thanks to Claudio Saunt for bringing these cases to my attention.
58. Littlefield, Africans and Creeks, 44.
59. Burnham, “Impossible Marriage”; Peter Bardaglio, “‘Shamefull Matches’: The
Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the South before 1900,” in Sex, Love,

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a particular kind of freedom in the american southeast 127
Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York:
New York University Press, 1999), 112–40.
60. Parsons and Thomas J. Abbott, Census of Creek Indians Taken by Parsons and
Abbott, microfilm publication T-275 (Washington, DC: National Archives, 1963);
B. S. Parsons to Lewis Cass, 7 September 1832, in J. H. Jonston, “Documentary
Evidence of the Relations of Negroes and Indians,” Journal of Negro History 14
(1929): 37.

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5
ENSLAVED WOMEN AND THE LAW
Paradoxes of Subordination in the Postrevolutionary Carolinas
laura f. edwa r d s
In the spring of 1829, John Mann fired a gun at Lydia as she was running
away from him. Both lived in eastern North Carolina, near Edenton, a
once thriving plantation district, then in decline. Lydia was a slave, hired
to John Mann by her owner, Elizabeth Jones. Mann was a white man,
with the wherewithal to hire a slave but not to purchase one. Mann never
denied shooting Lydia. To the contrary, he asserted his legal right to do
so. Her disobedience, he claimed, had required discipline, even to the
point of death. The North Carolina State Supreme Court later affirmed
and amplified Mann’s position. “The power of the master must be ab-
solute,” wrote Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin, “to render the submission of
the slave perfect.”1
The outcome of State v. Mann, though, had been different in Chowan
County. Local officials there doubted the legality of John Mann’s actions
enough to prosecute him on criminal charges of assault. A jury validated
those concerns and convicted him.2 Of course U.S. appellate courts in
this period routinely overturned lower-court decisions, just as they do now.
In that sense, the discrepancy between the two decisions—with Ruffin’s
endorsement of all masters’ absolute rights of property in their slaves and
the local jury’s recognition of the particular slave, Lydia, as both a person
and a woman—is not particularly noteworthy. Yet the difference between
I thank Jacquelyn Hall, Priscilla Wald, Adrienne Davis, Anne Allison, Maureen
Quilligan, Gunther Peck, and Dylan Penningroth for their readings of this piece.
Special thanks go to Joe Miller for his incredibly engaged and insightful editing.
128

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 129
the two outcomes in this case, at this particular historical moment, does
revise the existing interpretative emphasis on enslaved women’s exclu-
sion from the emerging legal order in the postrevolutionary United States.
Specifically, the two outcomes of State v. Mann express fundamentally
different conceptions of the polity, one that included Lydia and one that
did not. At the center of Ruffin’s decision was a distinct conception of
the state, with sharply delineated boundaries of inclusion and exclusion,
consonant with federal political principles, particularly the protection of
individual property rights. In Mann, Ruffin fit slavery into those national
guarantees, based in gender and in race, which made free white men the
paradigmatic citizens of the new republic. Ruffin uprooted John Mann
from context, extrapolating from him to everyone within the abstract
legal category of master—that is, men with property rights in slaves.
That allowed Ruffin to make this one man’s rights representative of the
rights of everyone in that privileged legal category: each had the same
bundle of rights that were distributed universally and uniformly to every-
one designated master.
Ruffin’s decision also affected the legal status of other groups. The ex-
tension of master’s rights ate into those of all slaves, represented through
Lydia, who were left with a much smaller bundle at their disposal. By im-
plication, the decision also inhibited white women in the category of
wives, since Ruffin’s conflation of property rights and authority over per-
sons further removed the legal powers of master from them. Because the
state was bound to protect rights, their distribution directly differenti-
ated the abilities of the people in the categories he created to mobilize
the law on their behalf: people with rights, like John Mann, could make
claims in law, while people without rights, like Lydia, could not. It was
no coincidence that Ruffin focused his decision on the legal status of
Mann, not on Lydia’s physical injuries. To the extent that Ruffin acknowl-
edged Lydia at all, it was to urge more vigilant oversight of slavery by
community members, outside the formal mechanisms of law as Ruffin en-
visioned them. Lydia’s plight had no place within the abstract legal cate-
gories he laid out in his decision.
In that recommendation of community oversight, however, Ruffin
acknowledged another important institutional dimension of law at this
time, namely the legal dynamics—both formal and informal—outside
the appellate court. Although Ruffin drew a sharp line between abstract
law and the engaged members of a local community, like Edenton, the
distinction was not as apparent in the actual operation of local courts.
At the time, most legal business was conducted in local courts below the

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130 laura f. edwards
appellate level—which included magistrates’ courts that held prelimi-
nary hearings and tried minor matters as well as district courts that held
jury trials and heard serious felonies. Unlike the abstract realm of the
appellate court, these local venues were firmly rooted within specific
communities of real people. In the latter, both the legal process and its
underlying logic blurred the line between the people of the community
and legal principles. Cases hinged on direct knowledge of the partici-
pants, and decisions were reached through face-to-face interactions. The
process took this form because the legal system dispersed authority over
law widely, made legal claims contextual, and defined a just outcome in
terms of the implications for the specific people involved rather than the
protection of abstract legal rights.
In Edenton, for instance, Lydia was a slave, but not an abstract slave.
She was not even just a slave. Similarly, John Mann was a specific free
white man, not an abstract representative of all those in that group. In
fact, his conviction suggests that jurors did not think him a particularly
good representative of white men at all. In that sense, John Mann’s con-
viction was exceptional. But it was not an exception to the practice of
law in local courts, which routinely acknowledged not just slaves’ hu-
manity but also their identities as women and men. That was because the
identities were relational, formed through connections with others in
the community. Lydia was a particular enslaved woman, who belonged to
a particular person and who had relationships with others in the com-
munity also. Where those relationships tied Lydia into the community,
John Mann’s relationships did not. He was a poor white man whose bad
reputation effectively isolated him as a person who did not fulfill his role
within the intricate social networks that formed the local community. As
such, when the local court found John Mann guilty, they found a par-
ticular man guilty. The outcomes of this and other similar cases did not
alter slaves’ legal position or undermine the rights of white men. That
was because such cases were based on slaves’ position as subjects whose
social connections still positioned them as marginalized members of
hierarchically ranked communities. Of course, localized law could just
as easily sanction the most inhumane violence against slaves. That kind
of consistency, however, was not the point, since the operative logic
characterized each case as a discrete event, the outcome of which did not
necessarily affect other cases.
These two conceptions of the state—one in which law was an abstrac-
tion and the other in which the rule of law was realized through concrete
relations within the community—coexisted in the postrevolutionary

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 131
South. Although historians of slavery usually turn to appellate decisions,
like State v. Mann, as definitive expressions of “the law,” they represented
only one strand of the emerging legal order. The localized legal culture
represented in the handling of Mann in Edenton formed a historically
important, although historiographically neglected, element in the pattern.
This chapter explores the dynamics in this localized legal culture, focus-
ing particularly on bondswomen in North Carolina and South Carolina.3
The system was highly gendered, but in ways that acknowledged the
places of enslaved women and other marginalized people. Through their
marginalization, all these people were connected to the community and,
by extension, to law. No similar connection existed at the appellate level,
where universal categories based in gender, race, and property did not—
and could not—acknowledge enslaved women’s presence without under-
mining the law’s privileging of adult, free, white males, as it operated in
that arena. In focusing on enslaved women’s connection to the state, this
chapter intends to complicate and deepen our understanding of the prac-
tices of living with slavery in the postrevolutionary U.S. South, without
minimizing the oppression of the slave system. The point is that inequal-
ity is maintained through different practices in different contexts, with
profound implications for what people can do and how they can do it.
At this particular historical juncture, the slave South’s local legal sys-
tems were simultaneously oppressive and inclusive—the hierarchies of
local communities also provided the means of potential inclusion, a situa-
tion that contrasted sharply with the oppression of slavery as an abstract
institution, rendered in categorical terms as it was emerging in this pe-
riod at the appellate level. As a result, enslaved women had a direct rela-
tionship to the law within the communities where they lived, a position
that enabled them to shape local legal processes, without experiencing
liberation.
an informal legal heritage moving toward national law
Enslaved women do not occupy center stage when it comes to scholar-
ship on slave law in the United States. Historians have tended to focus
on the formal, civic exclusion of all slaves as appellate decisions and
statutes defined it, contrasting that situation with the principles of politi-
cal inclusion emergent—at least in political rhetoric and constitutional
theory—throughout the rest of the nation. One result is that the schol-
arship has focused on the law’s effect on slaves, rather than slaves’ effect
on law. Recently, historians have taken up the latter issue, considering

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132 laura f. edwards
slaves’ imprint on market transactions and civil cases, matters in which
slaves were legally positioned solely as property and, therefore, most cir-
cumscribed, at least in theory. Yet, even as these analyses brilliantly re-
veal how slaves shaped those dynamics, the conclusions still tend to
characterize their influence as indirect, and necessarily so owing to their
formal exclusion from law.4 Slave law itself forms another barrier in ana-
lyzing the relationship of enslaved women, as women, to law. That body
of law, as defined in statutes and appellate decisions, made no distinction
between men and women, a gender blindness that has reinforced the his-
toriographical tendency to have male slaves stand in for all slaves in
scholarship on slave law. The effects are evident in the work on enslaved
women in North America, where historians have done a remarkable job
uncovering the legal constraints imposed on these women as well as the
details of their work, the meaningful relationships in their lives, and
their resistance to individual masters—as other papers in this volume in-
dicate. The work nonetheless defines bondswomen’s lives in terms of
productive and reproductive labor within the social realm of individual
plantations, rather than as subjects of legal or political history.5
Running through these historiographical issues is the persistent power
of historical narratives that conflate inequality with civic exclusion and
that associate the effective exercise of guaranteed civil and political
rights with personal agency and social progress. Recent work has begun
to shift from those paradigms.6 Yet much of the literature still rests on the
assumption that slavery was the primary source of civic exclusion in
South, perpetuating regional forms of inequality at odds with national
principles of inclusive equality. That emphasis on legal disability, al-
though often unacknowledged, shapes historical narratives in profound,
if unintended ways. Above all, it tends to cast enslaved men and women
as outsiders to law and the state, bound by something akin to historio-
graphical chains, immobilized by historians’ obsession with the denial of
civil status. These narratives of civic exclusion do have great analytical
value in their ability to highlight the problematic position of slaves
within a functioning liberal order and modern nation-state—one based
on universal principles of contract, property rights, and individualism,
upheld by a centralized, but democratic, government that protected per-
sonal rights and thus encouraged individual initiative. Yet because the
point of comparison is the position of free people within a modern na-
tion-state, these narratives also obscure slaves’ active roles in times and
places where the government institutions and liberal ideology usually as-
sociated with that state form were not fully realized, or necessary.

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 133
The postrevolutionary South did not meet the conditions associated
with a modern nation-state. Although other historians have made that
observation, they have done so in the context of debates about southern
exceptionalism, in which the region’s ideological commitment to slavery
explains both the underdevelopment of state institutions and slaves’
civic exclusion. This chapter uncouples slavery and the modern state, to
push beyond narratives that focus on slavery’s exclusions. It places the
dynamics of slavery in a different context—a region in the throes of
profound political transition and enmeshed in conflicts over how law
and government should work.7 Although these questions of state forma-
tion may seem far removed from enslaved women, they are not. In fact,
they are essential in both complicating narratives about slavery and un-
derstanding enslaved women’s relationship to law and the developing
state. When the postrevolutionary slave South is considered from this
perspective, it is clear that slavery was not the only source of inequality
either in that region or in the nation as a whole. Nor was it slavery per se
that excluded enslaved women from law or the community.
The principles now associated with modern nation-states were very
distant from law in the postrevolutionary Carolinas. After separating
from Britain, legislatures in North Carolina and South Carolina restruc-
tured their state governments to locate basic institutions and authority
over them in local communities. Law played a crucial role in govern-
ment in the South and elsewhere in that form, as recent scholarship in
legal history has noted. It was not only a popular, participatory forum
where people worked through community conflicts but also the primary
arena for dealing with a range of public issues that were later moved to
other parts of state government—from community policing and poor
relief to public health and economic regulation.8 In the Carolinas the
law’s basic institutional structures were heavily tilted toward local con-
trol, despite institutional changes that were slowly solidifying the state’s
purview over their authority.9
The content of law was also localized, in the sense that local juris-
dictions had considerable discretion in defining its meaning in any given
matter. Like most states, North Carolina and South Carolina entered the
postrevolutionary period without an inclusive collection of the statutes.
That relative incoherence at the state level speaks volumes about the
ad hoc and highly personal nature of law at the time. Although reform-
ers spearheaded efforts to collect and to coordinate their statutes soon
after the Revolution, with the intent of turning them into a coherent
body of law representative of the state, the results failed to achieve they,

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134 laura f. edwards
because existing statutes had never been intended for that purpose. In
the broad areas left uncovered, legislators invoked common law—in the
open-ended sense that combined case law and local custom. But that did
not provide uniform answers either, since common law was an unstable
set of inconsistent, often conflicting principles the inherent ambiguities
of which were magnified in practice by a decentralized legal structure
that allowed for multiple interpretations in their application.10
Within this localized system, central legal concepts that historians
usually track only in legislative halls and high judicial chambers contin-
ued to be interpreted locally, reflecting the dynamics of local communi-
ties. Many different interpretations could and did flourish in this legal
system without compromising its integrity—in the most basic sense of its
functionality. The situation frustrated reform-minded critics, who hoped
to rebuild their states around principles now associated with a modern
nation-state. These critics, Thomas Ruffin included, were part of a na-
tional network of lawyers who worked to systematize law and govern-
ment throughout the new republic. They saw law in scientific terms, as
an internally consistent set of universally applicable principles. They also
tended to support the centralization of legal authority to ensure unifor-
mity in the law’s content and application, although many still believed
that the system should allow room for local outcomes that might achieve
justice in particular circumstances, even if at the expense of those rules.
They defended their proposals with singular zeal and bombastic rhetoric,
based in a decidedly Whiggish perspective that characterized the ad hoc
and highly personalized nature of community-based law as outdated
relics of receding, illogical, and unenlightened times—a mere prologue
in the progressive journey that led inevitably to a more perfect union,
defined by their vision of abstract and categorical law.11
These reformers have had a greater effect on the historiography than
they did on law in their own states at the time. Accepting the reformers’
criticisms, historians once routinely portrayed law and the legal process
in the slave South as dysfunctional, backward, or both. Although sub-
sequent scholarship has rehabilitated the integrity of the region’s legal
system, elements of the reformers’ recidivist vision still shape the histori-
ography. In particular, historians tend to base their research on the as-
sumption that southern legislatures and appellate courts defined a uni-
tary law for “the state,” just as reformers said they should. They tend to
see the localized legal system as an outdated holdover from the past, in-
stead of a recent creation, based in Revolutionary ideology, allowing for
the local discretion over law promised in English tradition but unjustly

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 135
denied by imperial authorities. They also accept the pejorative bifurcation
of law and custom that reformers asserted, in their efforts to distinguish
undependable local outcomes from their vision of the law as uniform and
controlling.
Most of all, historians have lost sight of the influence of people on
law and government in this period, although recent work is recapturing
those dynamics.12 The essence of both was people, in a very literal sense.
These people were not “the people” of an abstract civic order composed
of legally categorized individuals, some of them accorded full civil and
political rights, protected by the state at the expense of others. Rather,
the process and content of law depended on the concrete circumstances
of actual people’s lives. This personalism did not make localized law
more responsive or humane, let alone just, for the local process was no
more democratic in its dynamics nor egalitarian in its outcomes than the
complex and evanescent social rankings that ordered local communities.
People mattered because the localized legal system of the Carolinas re-
quired them to be there physically: where the appellate courts favored by
reformers made decisions based on legal abstractions, without even the
presence of those involved, local courts could not operate without people.
Those people included enslaved women.
law at work in the community
Rooted in specific communities, localized law reflected both the intricate
hierarchies of community life and the fluid social dynamics that compli-
cated those hierarchies. The inclusion of enslaved women within these
networks meant that they, too, found their ways into local legal practices.
At this level of the system, State v. Mann was a typical criminal case, be-
cause it crystallized complex webs of ongoing human interaction in one
dramatic moment. Most local court cases began long before conflicts
reached a legal official, let alone a courtroom. Immediately following an
incident, the parties directly and indirectly involved began weighing its
legality informally. Magistrates’ hearings, the first institutional level of
the legal system, blended those informal deliberations with formal law.
Magistrates conducted their business in houses, yards, stores, and tav-
erns, where their proceedings took on the flavor of neighborhood gather-
ings. What people said, though, carried formal legal significance: they
formed the basis through which magistrates resolved most minor con-
frontations and determined how conflicts would acquire broader and
more serious overtones in the formal legal system.13

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136 laura f. edwards
Magistrates had a great deal of discretion in determining whether dis-
putes would be formally denominated legal or not. The magistrate who
heard the complaint against John Mann, for instance, could have sent
everyone home and done nothing at all. He could have facilitated a settle-
ment outside of court. He could have encouraged Elizabeth Jones, Lydia’s
owner, to pursue a civil suit to obtain damages for property loss. He could
have issued a peace warrant against John Mann, labeling his actions as a
potential, yet unrealized, public offense. John Mann then would have se-
cured bond for his good behavior but would not have incurred any crimi-
nal penalty unless he broke the peace thereafter. In this particular case,
though, the magistrate pressed criminal charges, which turned Lydia’s in-
jury into a serious offense against the public order and moved the evalua-
tion of John Mann’s actions to the next level of the legal system.14
Given the several options and the ambiguous nature of the offense,
criminal charges were not an obvious course of action. As in so many
other cases, the magistrate’s determination reflected his direct knowledge
of the specific people involved. Those details do not always appear in the
documents, although they were clearly in play just beneath the surface,
subtly shaping the official record. In Lydia’s case, for instance, her owner,
Elizabeth Jones, may have insisted on prosecution, and the magistrate
may have agreed out of personal regard for her. The seriousness of Lydia’s
injuries, although the case documents do not describe them, may have
buttressed Jones’s demands. The fact that both Lydia and her owner
were women may have shaped the magistrates’ evaluation. It also may
have been details about John Mann that swayed him. He might have
considered any man capable of shooting at an unarmed female—slave or
not—to be despicable enough to deserve criminal prosecution. Or, given
John Mann’s reputation as a rabble rouser, prone to drink and violence,
the magistrate may have deemed him undeserving of the leeway he
might have given more respectable white men in similar circumstances.15
In making such decisions, magistrates relied heavily on the people
who came to hearings and who gave information, a term that applied to
both physical evidence and verbal testimony. Informants’ identities,
which in turn depended on their relationships within the community,
were as important as the information they gave. Above all, information
was expected to be subjective, and it was valued for that reason. For in-
stance, the subjective meanings attached to information invalidated
charges in a rape case from up-country South Carolina. Tried about the
same time as State v. Mann, this case ended very differently, even though
it involved a white woman, Lucretia Campbell, who accused a slave

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 137
named Sam of rape. In addition to testimony, the magistrate and jury
considered the state of the defendant’s clothing. But they never saw the
clothes in question. It was what people said about them that mattered,
with some claiming they were “smutted” with signs of sexual activity and
others insisting they were not. Informants mixed descriptions of the
physical evidence with their assessments of Sam and Lucretia Campbell:
they “saw” the clothes differently because of their own relationships to
the people who had worn them.16
Magistrates evaluated information through the character of the infor-
mant. The notion of character was closely related to honor or credit, terms
that were often used interchangeably. Character reflected other indices of
status, such as gender, race, or property ownership that defined a person’s
position within the community. As such, white men with property were
thought to be inherently more credible than anyone without property, or
any woman or anyone of African descent. Beyond that, credible white
men’s information—opinions, really—literally created truth. What they
said could validate or invalidate a charge, elevating their versions of events
over others. Those dynamics regularly brought in information from people
who had no direct knowledge of the actual crime, as in Sam’s trial. His
owner called two white men to testify to Sam’s good character, even though
they knew nothing of the incident in question, pitting them against the
less credible Lucretia Campbell and turning the tables on a situation where
her words would otherwise trump those of an enslaved man.17
In the context of local communities, the close relationship between
personal character and this kind of socially determined truth did not auto-
matically validate the information of all white men or exclude the infor-
mation of every slave, free black, or white woman. So, too, in localized
legal culture. There, generic status marked only the potential of character.
For that potential to acquire specific meaning, individuals had to demon-
strate the associated attributes and others had to acknowledge them—
character had to be lived through a person’s relationships with others. The
importance of social witnessing was why it was so common to include tes-
timony about the reputations of all parties involved in a case. Such back-
ground was believed necessary for evaluating accounts, a practice that sug-
gests how contextual and multivalent both character and the truth were:
because the facts of the case did not exist apart from contexts, personal
knowledge of people was essential in evaluating whatever they said had
happened.18 It was thus possible that certain slaves could have greater
standing to establish truth than particular whites, in some circumstances.
In effect, that is what the two white men who testified on behalf of Sam

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138 laura f. edwards
did. In establishing his good character, they gave credibility to his claim
to innocence over the accusation of a white woman whose poverty and
dubious reputation made her word complementarily questionable.
Some slaves also gave information to magistrates and testified in
court, on occasion even in cases involving whites. More commonly,
though, slaves’ information came into institutional legal forums through
the mouths of whites, in a dynamic analogous to the one Ariela Gross
describes in civil cases, in which whites used slaves’ bodies and actions as
evidence.19 In criminal matters, slaves’ words regularly appeared in court,
because the credibility of the original information did not matter as long
as a credible person presented it. That was how Sam’s wife came to play a
decisive role at her husband’s rape trial, although she was never sworn in
and was never even identified by name. Other white men related facts at-
tributed to her: that Sam’s clothes were unsoiled and that he had been
with her all night. Even if they made up what they attributed to her,
their own reputations ensured that these men could make an enslaved
woman’s words believable to the other propertied white males.20
The process mirrored social hierarchies, rooted in slavery and gender,
which allowed white male household heads to appropriate the words of
slaves and other dependents just as they claimed labor and property. It also
reproduced the ambivalent social conditions of slavery, in which white
owners demanded slaves’ subordination to the point of negating their indi-
viduality in some regards while expecting slaves to act independently in
others. In criminal matters involving slaves, it was clear that neither slave
owners nor other whites knew much about slaves’ daily activities. That left
slaves as the only ones who could provide evidence, even when the inci-
dent happened to involve a white person—as in Lucretia Campbell’s case.
All that created obvious difficulties for slaves when they became enmeshed
in criminal matters, where formal law positioned them as extensions of
their masters: although they were the ones with information, whites could
not attain it directly. The ambiguity of the slaves’ very imminent presence
but their civic absence in formal categories of law also created difficulties
for owners, who had significant financial and social capital invested in their
slaves. A trial and conviction entailed financial losses. As recent scholar-
ship also has pointed out, masters had their own reputations and identities
tied up in their slaves. A slaves’ trial exposed the owner to public scrutiny,
which could compromise his reputation.21 Obviously, then, what whites at-
tributed to slaves did not necessarily reflect what slaves would have said,
had they been able to say it themselves. It is nonetheless significant that
whites attached value to information attributed to slaves, depending on

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 139
the repute of the attributor. A white person needed to validate a slave’s
information. But that white person also needed that slave to be a source.
All these legal dynamics were about white men and their reputations.
However, the fact that words acquired credibility simply because credible
whites spoke them also created possibilities for slaves to influence legal
deliberations. Cases in which whites prosecuted slaves for slander are
suggestive.22 In law, slaves’ words were not supposed to be given credit. In
practice, they mattered a great deal, because rumors made their way
through the community and acquired credibility along the way. As
people heard gossip and passed it along, the source became increasingly
obscure and increasingly irrelevant. Therein lay the power for slaves, for
their words acquired credibility as they went in the ears and out the
mouths of white people. That happened so easily and often that rumors
had acknowledged standing in local legal proceedings as common re-
ports—information about a person that was widely acknowledged to be
true, even though substantive proof was lacking.
This ebb and flow—a cultural process of creating consensus from con-
flict—informed all legal deliberations at the local level. The information
produced and conducted through community networks was inseparable
from the information that people brought to magistrates’ hearings and
that thus became legal evidence and testimony. The dynamics that
turned reported circumstances into common reports also drew enslaved
women into the legal process, even when they could not participate in
formal legal institutions. That was how Sylva, who lived near Camden,
South Carolina, managed to implicate her overseer in her own death in
1822. The conflict began when Sylva intervened to protect her son from
their overseer’s lash, and the overseer turned on her instead. Within
minutes, Sylva’s master had heard about the incident and called the
overseer to explain himself. The only way he could have found out so
quickly was through Sylva or another slave who witnessed the event. Al-
though the overseer managed to justify his actions at that initial en-
counter, the interview opened up more general suspicions about him.
Gossip spread all the more rapidly because three white men, who hap-
pened to be visiting Sylva’s master at the time, witnessed the accusa-
tions and the overseer’s response. Sylva, whose health declined after the
whipping, kept the rumors alive. She made the seriousness of her injuries
known, emphasizing the connection between her illness and the whip-
ping. Her complaints were loud enough and frequent enough to reach
beyond her plantation and into the neighborhood, where they became
common report by the time of her death.23

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140 laura f. edwards
At the inquest the overseer confessed immediately and voluntarily to
Sylva’s death. At that point, he had little choice. As his statement indi-
cates, reports of the incident, from Sylva’s perspective, had already circu-
lated so widely that he could not deny what he had done. The jurors at
the inquest accepted his responsibility for Sylva’s death without ques-
tion. All that may have been because neither the overseer nor the coro-
ner’s jury expected any legal penalty to result from the decision: a coroner’s
jury could find a person responsible for a death without attaching crimi-
nal charges, and that is what happened in this case. Even so, the outcome
was not ideal for the overseer. The verdict established that he had killed
a slave, hardly a ringing recommendation in his line of work and one
that left him liable for civil charges. Beyond that, the process opened
him to public scrutiny and, ultimately, public condemnation. That, too,
was evident in the outcome of the case.
Local hierarchies, structured by gender and property, shaped the deci-
sion. For one, the result reflected credible white men’s power to make de-
cisions about others. If the jurors—all propertied and white, of recognized
social standing—thought it had been Sylva, and not the overseer, who
acted inappropriately, the verdict would have been different. Her death
would have been laid to “misfortune,” as the deaths of so many other
slaves were. Yet the jurors used their authority to discipline the overseer
in an act that demonstrates both the contingency and contextuality of
gender-based authority: while all white men could have it, not all actually
exercised it to the same degree. In this instance, then, the same hierar-
chies that subordinated enslaved women as a group made this one
bondswoman, Sylva, visible and influential. It was not just his property-
lessness that worked against the overseer. Nor was it just Sylva’s attach-
ment to a prominent, wealthy white man that determined the outcome.
Instead, it was also a complicated convergence of the overseer’s reputa-
tion and Sylva’s efforts, within a very specific, local context. As discus-
sions about the event circulated, community sentiment coalesced around
Sylva’s version of events, not the overseer’s. That version then became
the one validated in law. Had Sylva not worked to publicize her version
of the incident, the outcome would have been different.
enslaved women and the legal principles of localized law
The outcomes of cases form no particularly logical pattern outside the
highly localized dynamics and rankings of the communities in which
they were tried. By contrast, the legal process that guided the adjudica-

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 141
tion of these cases did follow well-defined legal principles. Those prin-
ciples, however, were not articulated in statutes and appellate cases.
They were based in the traditions of common law, echoed in the pages
of justices’ manuals and other legal materials that built on those tradi-
tions, and expressed in the dynamics of the local legal process itself.
Both statute and case law, for instance, were either silent or unclear
about the status of violence against slaves. Local officials nonetheless
proceeded with criminal charges in such instances by drawing on com-
mon-law rules, outlined clearly in justices’ manuals, that gave all subjects
a recognized presence in law and a direct connection to the state. The
rubric was highly gendered, subordinating all subjects to a sovereign,
public body in the same way that slaves and other domestic dependents
were subordinated to their male heads of household. The metaphori-
cal public body was represented first through the king of England and
then, after the Revolution, “the people,” through the agency of the
state—although what form that state should take was still in question in
this period. Violence against subjects became crimes only when the ef-
fects reached beyond the individual victim’s body to disrupt the body of
that metaphorical public and its “peace,” an open-ended legal term
that expressed the notion of mutual trust that was so central in this
understanding of the public order. Clear-cut instances of murder, rape,
and mayhem placed the perpetrators beyond the pale of community trust
and were, by definition, criminal acts. But not all acts of violence rose to
that level of collective threat. For it was the disruption to the peace and
not the injury to the private individual that distinguished criminal mat-
ters. Other incidents were either dismissed or dealt with in law as civil
cases, a categorization that confined the issues only to the affected in-
dividuals. Although tried in legal arenas that were public, civil cases
were classified as “private” matters in law, in contrast to the “public”
legal dimension of criminal cases.24 It fell to local magistrates to deter-
mine when violence breached the peace, disrupted the public body of
the state, and became a crime against all the people. In Lydia’s case, the
magistrate thought the implications of John Mann’s actions had ramifi-
cations for the community that reached beyond her owner and could not
thus be rectified through a civil suit. That decision was tied to his evalua-
tion of incident, based on what he knew about Lydia and John Mann.
Not all violence against slaves represented a threat to the peace; this in-
cident did because of those involved. John Mann had to answer to the
larger public as well. Lydia and her injuries thus became legally visible as
a public wrong.

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142 laura f. edwards
This logic gave priority to the peace of the public body—or state—
over any individual, regardless of legal status. As such, it allowed for vio-
lence against slaves and other domestic dependents to enter the courts as
crimes. Beyond that, this legal logic recognized slaves and other domestic
dependents as members of the peace and subjects of the state—a status
they shared with free white men. For instance, free white men were sub-
jects, even though they had recognized rights as individuals. So were
white women and children, even though they did not have the full array
of rights and were subjected as domestic dependents within the house-
holds of their husbands and fathers. And slaves were subjects as well, al-
though their rights were even more limited and their legal subordination
to their masters took on the most repressive forms.25 Yet, despite their dif-
ferent degrees of marginalization, all subjects were members of the peace
and answered to the laws of the state. That meant even masters and hus-
bands were subject to the state through the mechanisms of law. Nor did
free white men’s property rights in aspects of their slaves’, wives’, and
children’s lives imply authority over them to the exclusion of external
legal oversight. Not only were all subjects responsible to the state, but
the state also acquired a basic responsibility for them and their protec-
tion, even in the absence of individual rights. That logic allowed vio-
lence against slaves that offended the state’s interest in public order to
enter the courts as crimes against the people and the peace of the state, if
not against the slaves themselves.
In fact, subjects acquired a recognized presence within the state
through their positions of marginalization. Slaves’ standing, then, had
multiple dimensions. They were subject to their masters, in ways that all
but eliminated their agency in formal law. That same status, however,
also established their position as subjects of the state and thus made
them subject to state jurisdiction—a direct connection between slaves
and the peace of the state mediated through law, although not based in
their position as legally recognized individuals who claimed rights in
their own names or who occupied positions of equality with others in the
polity. Consequently, officials could legally separate slaves from their
masters and acknowledge slaves’ places within local public orders on a
case-by-case basis, without extending individual rights or other elements
of civil status to slaves as a group. Those legal multiplicities of slaves’ sta-
tus converged to draw unique boundaries around each case. Local offi-
cials could affirm one slave’s interests and limit those of one white man
without turning that circumstantial assessment into a statement about
all slaves and all white men in all like conditions. That is what happened

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 143
in Lydia’s case at the superior court. Recognizing Lydia’s injuries as re-
sulting from a crime did not alter her legal status or that of any other
slave. Similarly, convicting John Mann did not predict the court’s treat-
ment of other white people who assaulted other slaves.26
Yet, even though Lydia and other slaves could not claim categorical
rights in their own names, they could move out from under the legal
purview of their masters and acquire a more direct, if momentary, rela-
tionship to the state as subjects. The outcome in Lydia’s case in the
Chowan County court thus achieved the intent of common-law pro-
ceedings: acknowledging slaves as subjects, within the broader goal of
capturing—or creating—the consensus of the community. Of course,
Lydia’s injuries were not the basis of the crime. It was the public body—
the state—that had been violated through the violence her body experi-
enced. That legal logic nonetheless rendered enslaved women’s assaults
legally visible and linked them to the peace of the state.
and the women
Both the practice and the logic of the localism of law meant that en-
slaved women mattered in it. Their attempts to define acceptable behav-
ior, personally, in terms of what others did to them and of what they
themselves could do had strong resonance within the system, on at least
two levels. In the narrow sense, they shaped specific legal matters. But,
given an institutional context that rooted so much authority over law in
local areas, enslaved women’s efforts acquired broader legal meanings as
well. In those cases where enslaved women acquired a public presence
and forced the state to respond to them, their ideas found their way into
the content of law as well, because the law’s content was not defined
solely in appellate decisions and statutes. Those dynamics, then, can cast
court cases involving enslaved women in a light that threw long shadows
across the legal system.
Take, for instance, the case of Violet, an up-country South Carolina
slave accused of assaulting a white woman.27 The details of the case come
through the Burgesses, the white family in whose household Violet was
working and who had every reason to portray her actions as anomalous.
According to the Burgesses, the incident began when Polly Burgess, the
mistress, ordered Violet to stop what she was doing and perform another
task instead. Violet ignored her. Polly then threatened to strike Violet if
she did not obey. Violet “came at” Polly. In response, Polly tried to strike
Violet with an axe handle. But Violet hit Polly, jolting the improvised

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144 laura f. edwards
weapon from her hands and knocking her to the floor. Polly’s daughters
then came to the rescue, helping her to her feet. Violet struck her down
again. That brought Polly’s husband, Thomas, into the fray, although he
did not fare much better. According to the Burgesses, Violet put up such
a fight that it took Thomas, Polly, and all their daughters to subdue her.
Even that was not entirely successful. After Thomas tied her up and
struck her ten blows with a whip, Violet untied her bonds, left the house,
and stayed away for several days. Thomas Burgess filed assault charges
soon thereafter.
Yet Violet’s actions seem reckless only when the Burgesses’ account
and the outcome in a formal legal forum is elevated over Violet’s version
and the community context, which lurk just beneath the surface of the
Burgesses’ carefully constructed account. As that context suggests, Violet
had every reason to believe that she could limit the authority of Thomas
Burgess’s family and even censor their treatment of her. She was actually
the property of John Burgess, Thomas Burgess’s father, who had recently
loaned Violet to his son and daughter-in-law. John, Thomas, and Violet
all seem to have understood the transfer as a limited one, moving her
place of residence and giving Thomas temporary use of her labor, with-
out granting him the authority of her master. The court proceedings,
which treated Thomas as an injured third party and not as Violet’s mas-
ter, conform to that presumption. So do the participants’ actions.
The Burgesses’ description suggests that their own response to Violet
in fact was measured, based in the recognition that they had limited au-
thority over her. That would explain why Thomas, his wife, and daugh-
ters had so much trouble subduing her. That also would explain why she
escaped so easily afterward. Even more telling, however, is that after
Thomas whipped her, he went to his father to ask permission to con-
tinue punishment. His father refused either to let his son punish Violet
further or to punish her himself, although the records do not reveal why.
So Thomas, utterly unable to resolve a domestic matter within the fam-
ily, followed the only remaining course, filing legal charges against Vio-
let. That solution did result in her punishment, but it came at a cost:
Thomas Burgess had to air the details of the incident in public, which
exposed both his dependence on his father and his impotence in govern-
ing his own household.
More than that, Thomas Burgess did not have a clear-cut case, given
the context. If Violet had transgressed accepted social practices, so had
Thomas and Polly—perhaps more than Violet, although in different
ways. That John Burgess refused to discipline Violet or allow his son to

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 145
do so speaks volumes on this score. So does the testimony of Thomas’s
family. As one of the Burgess daughters later described it, Violet had
“generally done as she pleased” when she had lived with John Burgess.
She could have meant it as an accusation, not unlike her mother’s state-
ment that Violet “thought she was an eaqual [sic].” But the daughter’s
words likely contained a grain of truth as well. It could be possible that
these comments were freighted with sexual overtones. If Violet had an
intimate relationship with the father, John Burgess, that might explain
his support for her. On the other hand, if Violet had a sexual relationship
with the son, Thomas Burgess, that might explain his wife’s resentment,
Thomas’s muddled response, and his father’s refusal to engage in the re-
sulting mess.
Or it could be that Violet’s ties were gendered in another way. As a
slave with a long-standing relationship with the Burgess family, she may
have established intimate—if conflicted—ties to the Burgesses through
all the domestic services that enslaved women so often provided to the
families of their white masters. Those kinds of intimacies could have
complicated the conflict’s dynamics just as easily as explicitly sexual
ones. The evidence, unfortunately, remains tantalizingly silent on these
issues. What the evidence does establish is that Violet had done very
much as she pleased a great deal of the time. She seems to have expected
that she would exercise considerable discretion over the labor she per-
formed, hiring out her own time and doing specified tasks for her master
when and as she saw fit. She seems also to have expected to come and go
freely. None of this would be unusual, particularly in the South Carolina
up-country where Violet lived.28
The fight that landed Violet in court was not the first confrontation
between her and members of Thomas Burgess’s family. After moving to
their farm, she had continued to act on privileges she had exercised in
John Burgess’s household. The son’s family had tried to change that,
leading to conflict on several occasions. Yet Violet remained resolute, for
good reason. Since Thomas and Polly Burgess were not her owners, they
did not necessarily have the authority to institute such major changes in
her life. Only John Burgess did—if Violet recognized it in anyone at all.
Reading the Burgesses’ testimony through the lens of personal patronage
and family patriarchy in operation within the community context, it is
easy to see the fight from an angle from which Violet appears less as the
unpredictable and invincible aggressor and more as a stubborn woman
who felt justified in her actions and who expected others to support her,
because of who she was—a particular bondswoman with a particular

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146 laura f. edwards
history in a particular family. In fact, the outcome would have been dif-
ferent had Thomas Burgess accepted his father’s refusal to punish Violet
further. Violet evidently did not guess that Thomas Burgess would defy
his father’s wishes, question his custom, and try to mobilize another ver-
sion of law to trump family authority.
Violet’s presence was apparent in the institutional arena of the court,
even though she could not appear there to recount her version of events.
The proceedings began with a statutory ultimatum: “Violet a negro slave
the property of John Burgess is put upon her trial for inflicting a grievous
wound on a white person, Mrs. Polly Burgess, the commission of which is
a capital offence punishable by death, Acts of 1844 and 34”—the latter a
somewhat mystifying statutory reference that serves to underscore the
localized nature of law.29 The local court nonetheless interpreted the
statutes creatively, emphasizing the seriousness of the wounds Violet had
inflicted. The entire tone of the proceeding also suggests the presence
of doubts about the propriety of the Burgesses’ conduct. That Violet had
struck Polly Burgess was not enough. Every member of the Burgess fam-
ily who testified carefully justified the use of force. They claimed that it
was Violet who was out of control—wildly out of control. They, by con-
trast, were the hapless victims of Violet’s unprovoked, vicious, and life-
threatening attack. They barely survived, even though they outnum-
bered Violet and had a gun. But how believable was that?
The trial transcript suggests that the Burgesses’ version was not, in
fact, very believable. Violet nonetheless struck a white woman, and the
jurors would not sanction that, even if they did not agree completely
with the Burgesses’ actions. She was found guilty and sentenced to fifty
lashes. Violet clearly overplayed her hand and thereby experienced a
tragic loss with definitive, lifelong consequences. To the extent that the
court exercised restraint in punishment, it was probably as much to pre-
serve John Burgess’s property as to censure Thomas Burgess or to support
Violet. Nonetheless, that misjudgment does not erase Violet’s palpable
presence in shaping the case or the context of recognized family respon-
sibility that led her to think that she could play a hand in the first place.
The results for the larger legal principles, moreover, are even less certain.
The verdict did not necessarily indicate a vindication of the Burgesses’
irresponsible approach to slaveholding, the defeat of those customary
rights that Violet sought to preserve, or a victory for law as defined in op-
position to custom. That the Burgesses had to go to such violent lengths
to assert their will over Violet and that Violet went to equally violent
lengths to defend her actions suggest the opposite.

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 147
state law versus men—and women
Violet and Lydia have a great deal in common. In some ways, they both
conformed to the image of slaves as property conveyed in Thomas Ruf-
fin’s rendering of State v. Mann. Violet, like Lydia, can appear as a vic-
timized woman who fled personal oppression, since she was unable to
evade it, let alone challenge it directly. Both women’s victimization was
then legitimized in public law. Yet, while injured, Violet was neither
silent nor passive. There is no reason to believe that Lydia was any dif-
ferent, even though the court records provide no evidence that she de-
fended herself aggressively, as Violet did. The handling of Lydia’s case as
a public, criminal matter and its outcome favorable to her in the local
court strongly suggest that her version of events did have influence, even
if they came into the court through her mistress or another white person.
Although neither Violet’s nor Lydia’s case resulted in stunning legal
victories for enslaved women, they tell us a great deal about these
women’s expectations of the legal process. They acted as if they thought
they were included within the legal system, to the extent that they could
influence the localized dynamics that permeated the process. Given the
decentralized structure of the legal system, those expectations had solid
basis in fact. Enslaved women and men played key roles in defining of-
fenses against them as crimes and in holding white people responsible for
those acts, even though they could not use law directly, as whites could.
Above all, enslaved women pushed legal officials and other whites to treat
them not just as particular individuals who were women—not as the ab-
stractions of property or even slaves. In Lydia’s case, the local court agreed,
labeling what Mann did as criminal assault against a woman thus recog-
nized as a member of the public order. It was only after the case was re-
moved to the appellate court that John Mann won. It was only at this
level of formal law that Lydia became a paradigmatic slave, silent and
without agency in a formative era of national law.
Two very different constructions of patriarchy shaped the two outcomes
in State v. Mann. At the appellate level, the authority of patriarchs de-
rived from their abstract rights, which they possessed as individuals in iso-
lation from connections to either their dependents or their communities:
all white men could claim patriarchal authority, regardless of who they
were, how they conducted themselves, and what others thought of them.
In fact, acknowledging differences among white men would undermine the
logic of law and governance, making rights contingent and undermining
the most basic national political principles. Similarly, acknowledging

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148 laura f. edwards
that slaves had a connection to categorical law of this sort might imply
that they had individual rights like those idealized and attributed exclu-
sively to white men.
By contrast, at the local level patriarchy always had particular male
faces within law. More than that, patriarchy required the presence of
other people to have any meaning at all. Not only was white men’s patri-
archal authority based in concrete ties to their dependents, they also ac-
quired standing in the community through their handling of those rela-
tions. Other whites had to see and acknowledge a master’s authority for it
to have social currency and to translate into status. Those dynamics, in
turn, bring new meaning to concepts that have become almost axiomatic
in the scholarship on the postrevolutionary slave South, namely pater-
nalism and the implied reciprocity in the master-slave relationship. It
was not just that masters owed food, clothing, and protection in return
for slaves’ labor and loyalty. What slaves did and what happened to them
reflected back on their masters, either enhancing or detracting from their
master’s social standing. Similarly, masters’ reputations extended back to
their slaves, allowing slaves to use those strengths and weaknesses to
their own benefit.
Scholars also have noted this mutual, profoundly lopsided dependence
in other contexts. But in the specific context of the post-Revolutionary
South it had particularly profound implications for slaves’ relationship to
law and the state. In a system where the basic structures of governance
were still so localized, slaves were connected to law because they were
connected to their masters and, through them, to the local community.
Within this system, slaves were subordinate, but not just as pieces of
property under their masters’ control. Rather, because slaves’ humanity
was required to demonstrate their masters’ authority and establish their
standing, it had to be acknowledged. As a result, slaves also had faces, as
particular men and women.
Enslaved women could thus claim a place in law, as women. Yet that
place was the result of gendered connections created through a particular
form of patriarchal power that also denied enslaved women individuality
and independence in law, precisely because they were both slaves and
women. That kind of womanhood would acquire new, problematic di-
mensions as southern states developed along national legal principles, fo-
cusing on rights as individual possessions and on categorical abstractions.
Such a system separated patriarchs from context—and from the people,
including enslaved women, who gave their authority meaning. It thus
reduced the personal responsibility that local community standing had

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 149
imposed on them. The importance of gender to state structures and the
fact of bondswomen’s subordination in law did not change. But the re-
sults profoundly altered the logic and dynamics of inequality, not only
rendering enslaved women invisible in law and within the state but also
erasing a past in which their presence had been not only possible but also
necessary.
notes
Abbreviations
NCDAH North Carolina Department of Archives and History
SCDAH South Carolina Department of Archives and History
1. State v. Mann, 13 N.C. 263 (1829).
2. State v. Mann, no. 1870, Supreme Court Original Cases; State v. Mann, 1829,
Slave Records, Chowan County; both in North Carolina Department of Archives
and History (hereafter, NCDAH).
3. Although the chapter focuses on only a few cases, it draws on extensive runs of
local court records (totaling about five thousand cases) as well as statutes, appellate
decisions, other government documents, newspapers, and manuscript collections
from North Carolina and South Carolina, 1787–1840. The local court records are
from Kershaw District, Anderson/Pendleton District, and Spartanburg District,
South Carolina Department of Archives and History (hereafter, SCDAH); Orange
County, Granville County, and Chowan County, NCDAH.
4. Ariela Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern
Courtroom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Walter Johnson, Soul by
Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
5. The classic work is Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the
Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985).
6. See, for example, Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles
in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, Belknap Press, 2003).
7. The analysis draws on work that questions the centrality and inevitability of
the nation-state’s development. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Re-
flections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Etienne Bal-
ibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Balibar and Immanuel Waller-
stein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. (of Balibar) by Chris Tyler
(London: Verso, 1991), 86–106. The analysis also owes a debt to scholarship em-
phasizing the gendered nature of state building: see, for example, Bonnie Smith, The
Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1998).
8. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

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150 laura f. edwards
9. William J. Adams, “Evolution of Law in North Carolina,” North Carolina Law
Review 2 (1923–24): 133–45; Walter Parker Stacy, “Brief Review of the Supreme
Court of North Carolina,” North Carolina Law Review 4 (1925–26): 115–17; Donald
Senese, “Building the Pyramid: The Growth and Development of the State Courts
System of Antebellum South Carolina, 1800–1860,” South Carolina Law Review 24
(1972): 357–89. See also Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in
World History: 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
10. Efforts to collect and coordinate statutes were distinct from later codification
movements, which involved a more comprehensive approach to overhauling the
law. The specific dynamics emerge from legislative debates, as covered in state news-
papers; see, in particular, the Raleigh Register, the North Carolina Gazette, and the
Charleston Courier. See also Charles M. Cook, The American Codification Movement:
A Study of Antebellum Legal Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981).
11. These assumptions pepper the introductions to statute collections and legal
treatises, all of which were written by reformers.
12. See: Gross, Double Character; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighbor-
hood: Sex and Families across the Gender Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Dianne Miller Sommerville, Rape and
Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004).
13. These patterns emerge from the local court records and conform to proce-
dures in justices’ manuals. See John Haywood, The Duty and Office of Justices of Peace
. . . According to the Laws of the State of North Carolina, 2nd ed., rev. and corr.
(Raleigh: printed by William Boylan, 1808); John Faucheraud Grimké, The South-
Carolina Justice of Peace (Philadelphia: printed by R. Aitken and Son, 1788).
14. Haywood, Duty and Office of Justices of Peace; Grimké, South-Carolina Justice
of Peace.
15. Other cases from Chowan County suggest that John Mann’s reputation was bad.
16. State v. Sam, 1830, case 50, reel 2916, Court of Magistrates and Freeholders,
Trial Papers, Anderson/Pendleton District, SCDAH. An “information” was one of
the ways to establish a criminal charge in British law. See Arthur P. Scott, Criminal
Law in Colonial Virginia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), 72–75. In
practice, in the postrevolutionary Carolinas, information seems to have acquired a
broader definition, encompassing all the evidence given at the investigatory hearing.
17. State v. Sam, 1830. Also see Barbara Shapiro, “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” and
“Probable Cause”: Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
18. Dylan Penningroth, notes similar practices in former slaves’ property claims
and finds African cultural echoes in them; but such practices were pervasive among
western Europeans as well. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American
Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2003)
19. Gross, Double Character, 122–52.
20. State v. Sam, 1830.
21. Gross, Double Character, 98–121, 122–52; Johnson, Soul by Soul.

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enslaved women and the law in the postrevolutionary carolinas 151
22. Such cases appeared frequently in the South Carolina slave court records,
1787–1850.
23. Inquest on negro Sylva, 1822, Court of General Sessions, Coroner’s Inquisi-
tions, Kershaw District, SCDAH.
24. The logic is apparent in justices’ manuals, the one kind of legal source justices
and other legal officials were most likely to have; those manuals were based in long-
standing common-law practices.
25. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a
Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” Signs 19 (1994): 309–36. Recent work in
women’s history uses the concept of dependency to highlight connections among
power relationships based in race, class, and gender.
26. In the court term that John Mann was convicted, Joseph McKiel (who served
on Mann’s jury) was acquitted for assaulting another slave: State v. Joseph McKiel,
1829, Criminal Action Papers; State v. Joseph McKiel, October 1829, Minute
Docket, Superior Court, 1828–38; both Chowan County, NCDAH. McKiel was in
the general assembly, a justice of the peace, and a militia colonel. Edenton Gazette,
27 January 1829.
27. State v. Violet, 1854, case 160, reel 2921, Trial Records, Magistrates and Free-
holders Court, Spartanburg District, SCDAH. Further information and quotes in
this section come from this source.
28. It was a 1740 statute that applied the death penalty to slaves who “grievously
wound, maim or bruise any white person.” See Thomas Cooper and David J. Mc-
Cord, eds., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 10 vols. (Columbia: printed by A.
S. Johnston, 1840), 7:405.
29. The court records establish these patterns. See also Ira Berlin and Philip D.
Morgan, eds., Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (Lon-
don: Frank Cass, 1991); Loren Schweninger, “The Underside of Slavery: The Inter-
nal Economy, Self-Hire, and Quasi-Freedom in Virginia, 1780–1865,” Slavery and
Abolition 12, no. 1 (1991): 1–22.

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3
Rebuilding Lives in the Caribbean
Emancipation and Its Aftermath

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6
PRICING FREEDOM IN THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN
Women, Men, Children, and Redemption in the 1840s
bernard mo i t t
In the nineteenth century, more than in previous times, enslaved people
in the French Caribbean—primarily women who, along with children,
were the major beneficiaries of manumission throughout slavery—freed
themselves through rachat (redemption), by buying back their freedom
from slave owners for a fixed sum. They were encouraged to do so by the
enactment of new laws and state initiatives that made redemption more
attainable than before. Not all slave owners accepted rachat. Indeed,
most were hostile to redemption, the end result of which was usually the
loss of valuable slave labor. Thus, the number of enslaved persons, female
and male, who acquired freedom through rachat was statistically small, as
was the number of formerly enslaved persons compared to the total popu-
lation enslaved in the French colonies. However, neither the hostility nor
the reluctance of slave owners deterred enslaved people from pursuing
this path to liberation, and their demands for redemption remained high
until the end of slavery, in 1848.
This essay explores rachat mainly among enslaved women in Mar-
tinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana. Redemption was an important
means of self-liberation for enslaved women and their kin—mostly their
own children. Enslaved women of all ages, principally women of mixed
African and European descent—including those in Martinique, Guade-
loupe, and French Guiana—engaged in redemption as an antislavery act.
This chapter builds on Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles,
1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
155

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156 bernard moitt
Though different from other antislavery acts such as armed resistance,
acts of poisoning aimed at destroying slave owners, their slaves and ani-
mals, and marronnage, or slave flight, the practice of rachat demonstrates
that women and men still resisted slavery in the same manner “as well as
in ways which gender and differential allocation of tasks made possible.”1
Although the study of rachat is worthy of scholarly pursuit, scholars
have largely ignored the phenomenon. That neglect is baffling because
French authorities in the Caribbean were preoccupied with regulations
governing manumission throughout slavery. Even so, the number of en-
slaved persons who redeemed themselves through self-purchase was lim-
ited, and the small numbers may have a bearing on research interest. Apart
from the works of Victor Schoelcher and Josette Fallope, there is little
else on self-purchase. In a recent essay on gender and emancipation in
the French Caribbean, Sue Peabody examines the paths to freedom that
enslaved took but gives scant attention to self-purchase.2 An exploration
of rachat or redemption can provide important glimpses into a dimen-
sion of slavery—the struggle for freedom—and enhance our understand-
ing of the multidimensional nature of manumission.
slave laws and manumission
Redemption was one of many ways in which people enslaved in the
French Caribbean acquired freedom. Thus, this phenomenon can best be
examined and understood if it is analyzed in the context of manumission.
In the French Caribbean many enslaved people took matters into their
own hands by engaging in marronnage, by litigating, or by seizing free-
dom collectively by force, as in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) in the 1790s.
Other individuals gained liberty as a result of bequests, by performing
meritorious acts, or by serving in the local militia for a prescribed period.
Still others, mostly women, secured freedom through marriages to free
persons—a rare occurrence—and through informal conjugal relations
with white males. Indeed, conjugal relations were behind most of the de
facto manumissions (libre de savane or libre de fait) that slave owners
granted mostly to mixed-race enslaved women and their mixed-race
children, as I have shown elsewhere. As such manumissions were given
without the authority of the state, the libres de fait lacked legal and ap-
propriate documents attesting to free status. These modes of manumis-
sion remained virtually unchanged during slavery.3 To be sure, there were
variations in law from colony to colony due to the enactment of local or-
dinances. Royal ordinances normally applied to all the French colonies,

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pricing freedom in the french caribbean 157
but political events in the colonies sometimes thwarted their local effects.
Also, it goes without saying that legislation had different impacts on male
and female slaves, as we shall see.
Before the promulgation in 1685 of the Code Noir (lit., black code)—
a French code governing slavery—the rules governing manumission had
not been firmly established in law. Therefore, the granting of freedom
had been somewhat arbitrary and usually left up to slave owners, who fa-
vored mixed-race women and their children. This tendency remained a
contentious issue in slave society. Indeed, French authorities attempted
to circumvent the problem of their status by prohibiting miscegenation,
particularly between white males and black females. At the same time,
they enacted ordinances aimed at creating strict boundaries between
slave and free, taken roughly as equivalent to white and colored. After
1685 the French administration adopted an increasingly stringent policy
limiting the granting of manumission.4
The Code Noir established, for the first time, clear guidelines on manu-
mission. Under article 55, slave owners twenty years of age or older could
free their slaves without giving reasons or seeking consent from their par-
ents. Under article 9 manumission was also possible in cases where male
slave owners had one or more children by slave concubines. If such a slave
owner was unmarried, he was required to marry his concubine in the
Catholic Church, by this act freeing her and her progeny. But the state
could not compel slave owners to marry their slave concubines. Under
the Code Noir a slave family could gain liberty if a slave owner contra-
vened article 47, which prohibited the break up of a slave family if all its
members were the property of the same owner and the children were
under fourteen years of age. The Code Noir notwithstanding, metropoli-
tan and local amendments aimed at reducing the number of mixed-race
individuals in society, while limiting their civil and political rights, were
restrictive and curbed manumission.5 In particular, enslaved women and
their mixed-race children, who were viewed as illegitimate products of
concubinage, became the focus of the amendments and the motivation
for legal reform.6
Throughout the eighteenth century, French authorities, both in France
and the colonies, were preoccupied with manumission, particularly with
regard to the legitimacy of acts of freedom. The number and tone of the
amendments that were introduced after 1685 is proof of this. In a royal
ordinance of 1713 that applied to the French colonies, Governor Ray-
mond Balthazar Phélypeaux of Martinique ruled that all slave owners had
to obtain written permission from the authorities whenever they wished

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158 bernard moitt
to free their slaves. His primary concern was that enslaved people were
paying their owners to set them free unofficially. In a comment aimed
principally at women, Governor Phélypeaux had mentioned a few years
earlier that some enslaved people engaged in any activity, however infa-
mous, to obtain manumission—a possible reference to prostitution on
the part of enslaved black women. He continued, “We must put a halt to
this overly free method of manumitting slaves by introducing an ordi-
nance that will henceforth prohibit any colonist from freeing male or fe-
male slaves . . . without the permission of the Governor General or the
Intendant, who must first examine the reasons for manumission. If they
determine that the reasons are justified, they will register the manumission
with the [Superior] Council; if they find the reasons to be unacceptable,
they will reject them, and the slave will not be granted freedom.”
7
French authorities were determined to control manumission as much
as possible. What constituted a legitimate demand was theirs to decide.
But the constant renewal of measures over the eighteenth century and
beyond shows that it was difficult to guarantee enforcement. In 1736, for
example, a royal ordinance that applied to all the French colonies, rein-
forced previous measures and carried the severe penalty of confiscation
and sale of slaves, with proceeds going to the crown.8 At the same time,
members of the clergy were forbidden to baptize children of women of
color as if they were free, unless there was proof of free status.9 In an or-
dinance of 1786 in Martinique, these measures were renewed at a time
when enslaved people apparently went before priests to have their chil-
dren baptized as free. As a corrective measure, the ordinance called for
compliance with the ordinances of 1713 and 1736. A legitimate baptism
required that priests verify that the mothers of black and mixed-race
children who came before them had been baptized and had obtained
freedom through administrative acts. Further, verification had to be pro-
vided in writing from the governor or intendant and recorded in bap-
tismal registers. The rule pertaining to verification also applied to no-
taries, who could not legitimize any act of liberty without abiding by it.
Contravention of this particular measure carried a penalty of one thou-
sand livres d’amende—a cash penalty—and suspension of the notary’s li-
cense for a year.10
Although the number of enslaved people who acquired freedom con-
tinued to increase in spite of these measures, they were not significant
until after 1830, when the pace of manumissions picked up. Two causes
are worth highlighting by way of explanation. First, a new administration
in France, the July Monarchy of 1830, pushed to some degree by a

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pricing freedom in the french caribbean 159
stronger antislavery movement, was more willing to confront slavery
head-on. Second, the plantation economies of the French Caribbean be-
came more integrated into the global economy and declined as a result of
increased competition in the sugar market.11 During the 1830s the colo-
nial economies of the French Caribbean were in crisis, much as had been
the British Caribbean colonies from the late eighteenth century. Add to
those external stresses increased restlessness among the enslaved popula-
tions, which resulted in a serious revolt in Martinique in February 1831.
On this occasion the enslaved staged a general insurrection, seeking to
torch and pillage the town of Saint Pierre and massacre its white inhabi-
tants. Armed with cutlasses, the slaves terrified the planter class, who drew
comparisons to the slave insurrection of 1791 in Saint Domingue that
had ended slavery there twelve years hence.12 Consequently, the viability
of the French slave economies came into question. The result was an at-
tempt to ameliorate slavery. Almost immediately, discriminatory statutes
to which the gens de couleur (free people of color) had been subjected
since the eighteenth century—including measures that prohibited them
from purchasing arms and practicing professions such as medicine and
surgery—were withdrawn.
French authorities then turned to the enslaved population. Under a
royal ordinance of 1 March 1831, they dropped the fee for individual lib-
erty patents (certifications of freedom), which cost as much as three
thousand French francs. This measure facilitated manumission for en-
slaved people who wanted to purchase their freedom but had limited ac-
cess to cash. The 1831 ordinance was followed by a royal decree of 12
July 1832 that permitted all categories of enslaved people not covered by
previous legislation to bid for freedom through sponsorship by a patron,
usually a slave owner.13
rachat
The Code Noir made no mention of self-manumission by rachat, but
neither did it prohibit self-purchase. Self-redemption was therefore pos-
sible at the discretion of slave owners, and it remained so until the last
years of slavery. Major changes came in the 1840s. In 1840, the Commis-
sion de Broglie, headed by the Duke of Broglie, submitted two reports on
amelioration commissioned by the French administration. The reports
recommended gradual rather than immediate emancipation. The minis-
ter of the navy and colonies in Paris, Baron de Mackau, took advantage
of the Broglie commission to expand the parameters of freedom. Under

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160 bernard moitt
the Mackau Law of 18 July 1845, enslaved people were permitted to
legally possess cash and to purchase their freedom and that of their par-
ents, grandparents, spouses, and children, as long as slave owners and the
enslaved could agree on an acceptable price. Such transactions consti-
tuted a “cordial redemption” (rachat amiable) in which the enslaved per-
son often paid the slave owner by installments. If no such agreement was
possible, a commission composed of judicial officials of the Royal Court
(Cour Royale) in each colony fixed the price. This procedure was called a
contentious redemption (rachat forcé). However, under a royal ordinance
of 23 October 1845, slave owners and others had a period of six months
to contest the commission’s price by filing a complaint with the state
treasury. In any case, an enslaved person redeemed contentiously had to
work for a free person for a period of five years and abide by restrictive
conditions bordering on indentureship. But there were, in theory at
least, safeguards against abuse.14
French sources indicate that the average price fixed by the colonial
commission was about 1,200 francs. One, a document in the archives of
Martinique that gives no information about the author or date of publi-
cation, notes that a member of the Conseil Colonial of Martinique com-
plained (during a sitting of 5 June 1846) that the colonial commission
was not acting in the interest of slave owners because slaves were being
priced below 1,200 francs. But the procureur général, the chief legal ad-
ministrator in the French colonies, stated that the price of freedom set by
the commission in Martinique and Guadeloupe from 1836 to 1846 was
usually higher than that of cordial redemptions.15 According to Josette
Fallope, 1,200 francs—the price set by the commission in Guadeloupe—
was well over the 900-franc value of a mature adult enslaved person, es-
pecially at a time when the prices of enslaved people were declining due
to economic downturn in the French colonies and the pending abolition
of slavery.16 In a similar vein, the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher
accused the commission of being overly generous in setting prices higher
than slave owners expected.17 No systematic guidelines were used to de-
termine prices, but price data show that sex, age, and profession were im-
portant variables. Indeed, enslaved Africans engaged in professions that
slave owners deemed most valuable, such as those practiced by young
skilled males, were highly priced. Thus sugar boilers, slave drivers of the
first field gang, artisans (all of whom were males), in addition to women
cooks, housekeepers, and those engaged in health care, were especially val-
ued. By the 1840s the slave population in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and
French Guiana was highly creolized, but slaves with professions were always

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pricing freedom in the french caribbean 161
valued, as Karol Weaver demonstrates in her recent book on enslaved
women healers in Saint Domingue during the eighteenth century.18
In 1847, the sixty-two-year-old sugar boiler, Oreste, owned by the
woman Amédée Maillet of François, Martinique, paid the commission
1,900 francs for his redemption—a high price in view of his advanced
age. But the slave woman, Joséphine, redeemed her two-year-old son
from Maillet for only 300 francs. The commission pegged a thirty-year-
old slave driver, Laurent, at 2,500 francs; a thirty-one-year-old mason,
Désir, at 2,000 francs; a thirty-six-year-old carpenter, Elydée, at 2,400
francs; and a forty-year-old cook, Etienne at 2,000 francs. Women—in-
cluding the Countess De Grenonville of François, who may well have
been reluctant to let Etienne go—owned all the enslaved in this transac-
tion except for Désir.19
Those who worked in the fields were at the bottom of the occupa-
tional hierarchy among the enslaved, but some still paid substantial
prices for their redemption. Such was the case of the thirty-three-year-
old African-born Melchior, who purchased his freedom in 1848 from his
owner, Brono-Charlery Pousset of Trinité, Martinique, for 1,500 francs.20
Melchior used his own funds, a remarkable achievement, given that he
must have arrived in Martinique after 1815, when French slave traders
resumed trafficking illegally in slaves.
Other transactions show that the sixty-one-year-old field woman, Soli-
tude, owned by Pierre Lagodïere of Lamentin, Martinique, deposited 500
francs with the commission. Born in the United States, the woman
Clarise, a fifty-four-year-old housekeeper in Saint Pierre, bought freedom
from her owner, Barlama, for only 300 francs. But the commission fixed
the price of redemption for forty-year-old Laurencine, an enslaved fe-
male servant of the woman Dathy Morestin of Saint Pierre, at 1,600
francs. These examples, along with a list of other enslaved people whose
prices the Martinique commission fixed and published in May 1847,
show that males generally paid more for their freedom than did females.
Often, the commission priced women and their children as a single unit,
but they were still priced lower than men.
These high prices for rachat baffled Victor Schoelcher, who took the
commission to task for its “handiwork,” which he believed discouraged
enslaved people from self-redemption. Drawing upon examples from
French Guiana, he argued that the commission’s valuation of redemp-
tion was excessive and arbitrary. There, the commission estimated a fifty-
nine-year-old woman, Clérence, at 1,100 francs; the seventy-eight-year-
old Mélanie, at 150 francs; and a sixteen-year-old female at 1,700 francs.

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162 bernard moitt
Schoelcher also pointed out that “Urbain, a poor leper who was inca-
pable of rendering service to his female owner, and whose mother wished
to deliver him from slavery, was estimated at 600 francs!”21
Schoelcher may not have been aware that personal relationships be-
tween the enslaved and the slaveholding class resulted in private deals
and lower prices, particularly in the case of females. In March 1848, Eu-
phanie, a twenty-six-year-old mixed-race female domestic from Saint
Pierre, obtained her freedom from her male owner, Seraphin-Fédéric
Sainte-Rose, for 432 francs, a low price for a female of her youth.22 Simi-
larly, in January 1848, Théoline, an eighteen-year-old mixed-race
woman, aided by Joseph Martialis, paid a modest 775 francs to obtain
freedom for herself and her four-month-old son, Georges, from Louis
Laurent, a baker in Saint Pierre.23 In some cases, the terms of the rachat
involving slave women were not made public. So no figure was attached
to the 1848 advertisement announcing that Louisia, a thirty-five-year-
old mixed-race enslaved woman, had purchased freedom from Adolphe
Zinzo, a butcher in Saint Pierre.24
As general abolition approached, the French parliament (Chambre
des Députés) voted 400,000 francs to accelerate the manumission
process through grants to slave petitioners. This aid, which amounted to
between 100 francs and 700 francs per enslaved person depending on the
age and profession of the enslaved, was intended to supplement redemp-
tion fees. Martinique received 122,000 francs, which partially covered
the redemptions of 284 enslaved people, of whom 100 were field hands,
76 domestic slaves, and 108 people of diverse professions. Of the 284
enslaved people, only 62 (22 percent) were males; 87 (31 percent) were
females, and 135 (48 percent) were children.25 Aside from the evident
bias toward women and children, the grant was intended to assist “nec-
essary cases.” For example, 217 of the 284 enslaved people (76 percent)
were judged according to criteria of conduct, morality, industry and
labor. Indeed, enslaved people had to provide the privy council (Conseil
Privé) in each of the colonies with a letter from a parish priest attesting
to good conduct. Forty-five enslaved people were assisted because they
fell under the category “marriage, family unification and legitimization
of children.” Interestingly, although mistreatment of enslaved people
was rampant, only two of them were aided because of abuse by owners.
Thus there is merit to Fallope’s contention that there was strategic par-
tiality in the granting of state aid, in that it went mostly to enslaved
people who, once freed, would be inclined to marry and remain as field
workers.26

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pricing freedom in the french caribbean 163
In Guadeloupe 462 enslaved persons, of whom 137 (30 percent) were
males, 169 (37 percent) females, and 156 (34 percent) children, bene-
fited from the colony’s subsidy of 149,000 francs. The enslaved contributed
92,523 francs toward their own redemption. French Guiana’s share of the
funds amounted to 23,000 francs, and the enslaved there contributed
13,988 francs. The remainder of the funds—106,000 francs—went to the
French colony of Bourbon (now Réunion) in the western Indian Ocean,
where enslaved people contributed 65,915 francs. These statistics show
that state aid, however meager, enabled more women than men to obtain
manumission through rachat. The significance of children, who accounted
for the highest percentages in all three groups, can hardly be overlooked.
Nor can the fact that some women obtained redemption along with
27
more than one child, a common occurrence from 1845.
Even in the absence of state aid, enslaved people still gathered the
necessary funds to assure their rachat. How did they do this? The means
by which enslaved people acquired cash in slave society remains largely
unexplored. It is widely known that enslaved women were the ones who
cultivated most of the slave gardens on land allotted by the planters.
They sold some of the produce from their gardens at markets—usually
held on Sundays in the French Caribbean, although the Code Noir for-
bade work on that day. Both Hilary Beckles and Barbara Bush have ex-
plored the role of women in independent cultivation and in the internal
market economy of the British Caribbean. With reference to Jamaica
and Barbados, Beckles argues that “slaves fought for the right to be legiti-
mate, autonomous economic agents, as this was the only way to preserve
aspects of the commercial heritage they had brought to the New World.”
Furthermore, “it was the slave women, African-born and Creole, who,
from the beginning, dominated numerically the huckstering business in
Barbados. They stamped their mark so indelibly upon this activity that it
is associated with them even today.”28
As in Barbados, enslaved women in the French Caribbean were also
associated with employment in taverns, which provided resources that
they used to purchase their freedom. The story of the La Palu sisters of
Martinique is a good example of how such women accumulated re-
sources: “While decrying slaveowners whose relations with slave women
resulted in illicit manumission, the colonial administration became en-
tangled in its own web when a liaison between the Intendant Vaucresson
and the black slave woman Babet became a public scandal in Martinique
in Martinique in the period 1711–13. Babet was one of three sisters called
the La Palu sisters, after the name of the family who once owned them.

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164 bernard moitt
In Saint-Pierre, the sisters ran a successful tavern and lucrative retail en-
terprise with merchandise obtained from buccaneers.”29
In spite of their wealth, the La Palu sisters were not able to secure
Babet’s freedom. There are, however, other examples of the means by
which slaves acquired cash. Seamstresses in Martinique, in particular, did
a lucrative business practicing their craft on the plantations. In Saint
Domingue, enslaved women kept chicken coops, which allowed them to
sell eggs and chickens in the colony. Among the libres de fait, who were
mainly women, there were those who operated far from the confines of
the plantation, both in urban and rural areas, as petty traders, selling
everything from pacotille (scavenged trash) to women’s makeup. Others
engaged in task work on plantations. Their activities allowed them to
gain cash, part of which they shared with their owners as a condition of
their semifree status. Some women gained such resources through prosti-
tution. They rented rooms in Saint Pierre in Martinique, but the authori-
ties soon caught on, and introduced a series of regulations from 1765
aimed at cracking down on unlicensed bars and taverns and owners who
permitted their slaves “to wander about on their own or to rent dwellings
on the pretext of carrying on a business or other activities.”30
Fallope has cited French archival sources that hint at administrative
skepticism about slave resources. Administrators did not think that the
amount of money the slaves put toward their redemption matched their
level of savings. In a letter to the minister of the navy and colonies in
April 1847, the governor of Guadeloupe wrote, “Most often, blacks in
slavery conceal the amount of money they have amassed and obstinately
refuse to divulge the level of their savings. It is not unusual to see nonfree
persons who possess slaves and employ them to their own benefit. Others
practice lucrative professions and, in so doing, gain much more money
than the sum they are required to pay their masters.”31
Slaves could not own other slaves, but there are cases in slave society
where enslaved women, in particular, occupied positions within the
plantation household that allowed them to exploit the labor of other
slaves in much they same ways as slave owners did. Such was the case of
Old Doll, a slave woman on the Newton plantation in Barbados in the
eighteenth century. Beckles states that “from the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury to the closing years of slavery one family of slave women, Old Doll,
her three daughters and her niece, dominated the housekeeping occupa-
tion on the estate. . . . They rejected arduous manual labour and social-
ized with free white persons, both black and white.”32 Indeed, “Old Doll’s
family not only had access to slave attendants, but they also ‘owned’
slaves who waited on them.”33

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pricing freedom in the french caribbean 165
Given the conditions of slavery, it is reasonable to assume that it took
time and ingenuity to accumulate resources. The long-term commitment
to freeing themselves may explain why a significant number of the re-
demptions in the French Caribbean involved mature slaves and not the
young. Also, enslaved women were in better positions to accumulate re-
sources, as their owners granted them more passes to leave the planta-
tions than they did to men. Women, more so than men, were also en-
gaged in occupations that allowed them to accumulate cash.
Between 1845 and 1846 fifteen enslaved persons out of a total of 205
in Guadeloupe and fourteen out of 295 in Martinique paid for their
rachat without support from government. In Guiana, six enslaved per-
sons benefited from state aid, while twenty-six bought their own freedom.
As in rachat with state aid, gender distinctions could be observed. Pro-
portionally more women than men engaged in this type of rachat, no
doubt because they sought a greater prospect of freeing their children in
the process or soon after they procured freedom for themselves. But there
were other women, mostly elderly, who may have had children but who
could redeem only themselves. In March 1847, Marianne, a fifty-three-
year-old merchant formerly owned by the widow Fonclair Lapeyre of
Saint Pierre, visited the colonial treasury to deposit the price set by the
commission—1,100 francs. That same year, the forty-year-old woman,
Laurencine, owned by the woman Dathy Morestin, also of Saint Pierre,
deposited 1,600 francs at the colonial treasury to buy freedom for herself
and her two children, Eugène and Roselie. Other redemptions in 1847
included a sixty-one-year-old field hand, Solitude, owned by Pierre
Lagodière of Lamentin, Martinique, who paid 500 francs, and Jeannine,
a fifty-nine-year-old domestic of widow Anquetil de Braincourt of Saint
Pierre, who purchased her freedom for 600 francs. In February 1848, just
months before emancipation, the commission fixed the price of redemp-
tion for Eléonide (Labrune) and her one-year-old son, Philippe (Forès),
both owned by Sylvanie (Marie-Claire) of Fort-Royal, Martinique, at
1,000 francs. Eléonide deposited 600 francs, and the state put up the re-
maining 400 francs. As Philippe was omitted from a previous declaration
of liberty, the procureur général freed him by a special decree issued on 2
34
February 1848.
The fact that the colonial commission had to settle so many disputes
over rachat suggests that slave owners and enslaved people clashed over
prices. After 1845, contentious, as opposed to cordial, redemption was
the norm, most of the latter being between enslaved males and male
slave owners. It seems curious that the fifty-six-year-old black domestic en-
slaved woman, Sainte-Rose, of Basse-Pointe, Martinique, made a point

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166 bernard moitt
of counting out loud the 300 francs she gave to her owner, Rose-Adéle
Jeannot, in what was listed as a cordial redemption.35 A close examina-
tion of rachat in Martinique, where more data are accessible, reveals that
women slave owners were less likely than men to settle amicably with
enslaved women over redemption. In this regard, as in others, they had
no special consideration for women in bondage.
Using 1846 as a benchmark, the French administration sought to
demonstrate that rachat had succeeded in inducing the enslaved to com-
pensate their owners for their freedom. To do so, it compared statistics in
1846 with those of the previous five years (1841–45). As table 6.1 indi-
cates, 1,010 enslaved people were manumitted in Martinique in 1846.
From 1839 to 1845, the annual average number of enslaved persons manu-
mitted was 749. The corresponding figures for Guadeloupe and French
Guiana were 577 and 70 respectively. Thus, for Martinique, the adminis-
tration boasted that in 1846, there were 261 more manumissions than
the annual averages for the years 1841–45. Likewise, there were 577 and
107 more manumissions in Guadeloupe and French Guiana, respectively.
This emphasis on the growing numbers of redemptions masked the real-
ity that Martinique’s 1,010 manumissions in 1846 represented only 0.4
percent of the island’s total slave population of 275,339. Besides, most of
the manumissions counted were still the result of legislation introduced
in 1832.36 That the number of manumissions in 1847 fell by 25.5 percent
from 1846 indicates a pattern of slight surges following the introduction
of new legislation (as in 1832 and 1845) but no dramatic and sustained
increases. Interestingly, Baron de Mackau, author of the Mackau Law, also
Table 6.1. Manumissions in the French Caribbean, 1846
french
martinique guadeloupe guiana
Voluntary (1832 law)
Rachat amiable (cordial redemption) 637 978 135
Voluntary (1839 law) 78 7 0
Slaves in France 0 80 10
Rachat forcé (contentious redemption),
with state aid 281 34 26
Rachat forcé, without state aid 14 16 6
Totals 1,010 1,115 177
Source: Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 2001), 170.

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pricing freedom in the french caribbean 167
reported a strong rachat demand in early 1847, especially from Mar-
tinique, where more than 1,000 individuals had signed up with the
commission. De Mackau rightly took this relatively large number to be
an indication that “all those slaves are in possession of either all or a part
of the funds for their redemption.”37
From beginning to end, then, manumission was limited. In a royal or-
dinance of 12 October 1847, King Louis Philippe authorized the manu-
mission of 218 urban and rural enslaved persons—the majority of them
women—of whom 36 were from Martinique, 41 from Guadeloupe, 119
from French Guiana, and 22 from Bourbon. This decree was less an act
of benevolence than a matter of necessity. In 1847, Baron de Mackau
explained that several landed properties on these islands had come into
the hands of the colonial state through repossessions, and with them,
their enslaved labor forces, mostly field hands. As these acquisitions had
virtually coincided with the 1845 legislation on rachat, the state could
hardly stand back from its own policy of negotiating manumissions for
any who requested them. De Mackau expressed concern about the
prospect of crime amongst those thus emancipated and its impact on
planters, but he noted that the first batch of 126 had been freed in 1846
without incident.38
The data on redemption in the French Caribbean in the 1830s and 1840s
indicate that enslaved women opted for freedom irrespective of their ma-
terial and social conditions. They also suggest that women were willing
to enlist the help of French authorities, if necessary, when a transaction
involving rachat went awry. Such was the case of Annoncine of Guade-
loupe, who was freed in 1833, under the terms of the will and last testa-
ment of her owner, Madame Avril. On 12 March 1847, Annoncine wrote
to the minister of the navy and colonies in Paris complaining that under
article 47 of the Code Noir, her four prepubescent children should have
been freed along with herself but had not been. She cited the celebrated
Virginie Affair of 1844, in which the formerly enslaved Guadeloupean
woman Virginie won a judgment in the French Supreme Court, which
had ruled that minors could not be alienated from their mothers, under
article 47 of the Code Noir.39
In this suit, Annoncine explained that she had purchased one of her
children, Alfred, but her attempts to purchase Exilie and Fontenelle—
a twenty-six-year-old daughter and seven-year-old grandson—were
thwarted by their owner, Madame Roujol, a widow in Basse-Terre. Rou-
jol had set the price of the rachat at 1,800 francs. Annoncine struggled
to find that sum but managed to come up with only 1,300 francs and

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168 bernard moitt
turned to the state for the remaining 500 francs. Attorney General
Bayle-Mouillard of Guadeloupe turned down her request on the grounds
that Exilie was a bad egg (mauvais sujet). Madame Roujol, along with the
merchant firm Stedmann et Compagnie of Basse-Terre, claimed that the
1,300 francs that Annoncine had deposited with a notary in Basse-Terre
represented money for merchandise extended on credit to Exilie, in ef-
fect a commercial loan. Annoncine then claimed that the attorney gen-
eral had in effect condemned her daughter, who had no desire to ac-
knowledge a debt she alleged was fictitious, to perpetual servitude. She
reminded the minister of the navy and colonies that her daughter had
launched legal proceedings against her accusers to clear her name and
that the Royal Court of Guadeloupe had ruled that the charge against
her had no merit.40 Indeed, it is unlikely that Exilie, as an enslaved
woman, would have been allowed to accumulate such a debt on her own
account. It seems obvious that Madame Roujol did not wish to free her
captives.
But why had Annoncine originally attempted to purchase her children’s
freedom rather than go to the courts directly on the basis of article 47, on
which she subsequently rested her case? She could not have done so in
1833, but in 1847 she could have profited from the precedent-setting
Virginie case of 1844. It seems almost certain that for enslaved people,
rachat yielded quicker results than litigation. However, they turned to
the courts when it suited them. So it is no wonder that when Annoncine
failed to gain freedom for her children through rachat, she asked the
minister to use the Virginie case as a precedent, so that her children
could be declared legally free. As in the Virginie case, the Supreme Court
of Guadeloupe (Cour de Cassation) upheld article 47, but legal battles
were often long, and outcomes were never certain.41
The Martinican woman Marie Sainte Platon is one of the few en-
slaved women who struggled to free her husband as well as her children
and herself. Her case also reveals her strong, resilient character. In 1840,
Marie Sainte, aged forty-six years, purchased her freedom from the own-
ers of the plantation Casse-Cou for 1,000 francs. She and her common-
law husband, François, with whom she shared thirteen children and
grandchildren, had been enslaved there since birth. She was duly pro-
vided with her freedom papers. The drama began when Marie Sainte and
François legitimized their union in the Catholic Church, after they had
properly sought and received permission from Desvergers de Chambray,
one of several co-owners of the plantation and the representative who
had authorized Marie Sainte’s rachat.

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pricing freedom in the french caribbean 169
None of the other co-owners of Casse-Cou objected to the marriage,
but one of them, Madame de la Pommeraye, opposed Marie Sainte’s bid
to free her husband, children, and grandchildren. Under the terms of an
ordinance of 11 June 1839, an enslaved person who contracted marriage
with a free person attained outright and legal freedom, as did the chil-
dren they had had previous to the marriage. In any case, three of their
children, Marie Luce, age sixteen; Hedwige, fourteen; and Anatole, ten
should have been freed under article 47 but had been separated from
Marie Sainte upon her rachat. On the basis of these decrees, Marie
Sainte brought her case before the lower court (tribunal de première in-
stance) of Saint Pierre. On 26 May 1846, Judge Maynier of that court
ruled in her favor and freed all the parties. But that decision was not the
end, for Madame de la Pommeraye and five other co-owners appealed
the case, which eventually went to the Royal Court, which declared the
marriage null and void.
Marie Sainte then took her case to the Supreme Court, which in 1847
ruled in her favor—five years after she had first brought her case. The
Supreme Court chided the Royal Court for hearing a case brought by a
minority of the co-owners, who, by their absence, had signaled their
agreement with the initial judgment. The Court went on at length about
the marriage of Marie Sainte and François, which suggests that opposi-
tion to their freedom hinged on its legitimacy. However, the Court
deemed the marriage valid under the Code Noir, which permitted the
marriage of enslaved people with their owners’ consent, holding that
Desvergers de Chambry, who alone had actually given permission for
the marriage to go ahead, had acted behalf of the other co-owners. The
marriage could not be annulled, either for lack of proper consent or for
failure to observe formalities. The law of 11 June 1839 guaranteed manu-
mission of a legitimately married enslaved couple and their children,
whether or not they were prepubescent. Therefore, the Court affirmed
that the application of article 47 was superfluous in this case.42
The picture of enslaved women and redemption that emerges from
the legal records of the French Caribbean shows that enslaved people,
principally mixed-race women as in previous times, manifested a strong
desire for freedom through rachat and other means, even on the eve of
emancipation in 1848. Women had some advantages over men in acquir-
ing freedom through self-purchase, but these advantages were not always
evident. The pursuit of rachat required ingenuity and the will and courage
to stand on one’s own against the odds. That women sometimes seized
the opportunity to use the law—a tool designed primarily to oppress

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170 bernard moitt
them—to gain redemption, must certainly mean that they saw the law as
a means of turning the tables on their oppressors. Freedom from bondage
at a price was desirable and worth fighting for, even when slavery was on
its last legs.
notes
Abbreviations
ANC Archives Nationales, Colonies
ANSOM Archives Nationales de France, Section Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence
JOM Journal Officiel de la Martinique
1. Moitt, Women and Slavery, 125.
2. Sue Peabody, “Négresse, Mulâtresse, Citoyenne: Gender and Emancipation in
the French Caribbean, 1650–1848,” in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic
World, ed. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
3. See Bernard Moitt, “In the Shadow of the Plantation: Women of Color and
the Libres de Fait of Martinique and Guadeloupe, 1685–1848,” in Beyond Bondage:
Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark
Hine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 37–59.
4. Ivan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: Le jeu de critère ethnique dans un ordre juridique
esclavagiste, vol. 1, L’Affranchi dans les possessions françaises de la Caraïbe: 1635–1833
(Paris: Dalloz, 1967), 22–27.
5. Le Code Noir ; ou, receuil des règlements rendus jusqu’à présent (Paris: Prault,
1767; reprint, Basse-Terre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1980), 33–34, 51, 55.
6. See Pierre Baude, L’affranchissement des esclaves aux Antilles Françaises: Princi-
palement à la Martinique du début de la colonisation à 1848 (Fort-de-France: Imprimerie du
gouvernement, 1948), 19–23; Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Françaises,
XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Basse-Terre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974), 377.
7. ANC, 8A 18, F18, 3 June 1711.
8. ANSOM, Fonds Généralités, carton 666, dossier 2845, 12 July 1832.
9. Pierre Dessales, Les annales du conseil souverain de la Martinique, 2 vols. (1786;
reprint, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 1:374–75.
10. “Ordonnance de MM. les Général et Intendant concernant les soi-disant libres
de les libertés non-registrées,” 10 September 1789, in M. Durand-Molard, Code le la
Martinique, 5 vols. (St. Pierre: Impr. de J.-B. Thounens, fils, 1807–14), 4:157. In the
eighteenth century, the colonial livre was worth about twelve sols; one sol was worth
about twelve deniers (about twelve U.S. cents). See Moitt, Women and Slavery, 178n29.
11. See Josette Fallope, Esclaves et Citoyens: Les noirs à la Guadeloupe au XIXe siè-
cle dans les processus de résistance et d’intégration,1802–1910 (Basse-Terre: Société
d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1992), 247–49; Dale Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of
Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), 53–75; Christian Schnakenbourg, Histoire de 1’industrie su-
crière en Guadeloupe aux XIXe et XXe siècles, vol. 1, La crise du système esclavagiste
(1835–1847) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1980), 124–36.
12. See Moitt, Women and Slavery, 131.

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pricing freedom in the french caribbean 171
13. Victor Schoelcher, Des colonies françaises: Abolition immédiate de l’esclavage
(1842; reprint, Basse-Terre: Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1976), 305.
14. ANSOM, Fonds Généralités, carton 40, dossier 316; “Rapports, débats, corre-
spondances diverses concernant les lois des 18 et 19 juillet, 1845” (Paris, 18 July
1845); JOM, 26 May 1847, 1; 9 February 1848, 1.
15. Archives Départmentales de la Martinique, “L’affranchissement des esclaves
aux Antilles françaises.”
16. Fallope, Esclaves, 292.
17. Victor Schoelcher, Histoire de 1’esclavage pendant les deux dernières années, 2
vols. (1847; reprint, Pointe-à-Pitre: Emile Désormeaux, 1973), 2:19–26.
18. Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-
Century Saint Domingue (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
19. See “Compte rendu des lois des 18 et 19 juillet, 1845, sur le régime des es-
claves, la création d’établissements agricoles par le travail libre,” JOM, 26 May 1847,
1. See also JOM, 12 May 1847, 1; 15 May 1847, 1 ; 26 May 1847, 1; Fallope, Es-
claves, 292; Schoelcher, Histoire de 1’esclavage, 2:19–26.
20. JOM, 6 May 1848, 1.
21. Schoelcher, Histoire de 1’esclavage, 2:19.
22. JOM, 6 May 1848, 1.
23. JOM, 23 February 1848, 3.
24. JOM, 12 February 1848, 1.
25. Here and below, percentages do not total 100 due to rounding.
26. ANSOM, Fonds Généralités, carton 40, dossier 316 (19 July 1845); JOM, 26
May 1847, 2; Fallope, Esclaves, 293.
27. JOM, 26 May 1847, 2; Fallope, Esclaves, 293.
28. Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in
Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 73; Barbara Bush,
Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 46–50.
29. Moitt, Women and Slavery, 153.
30. Moitt, “Shadow of the Plantation,” 55.
31. ANSOM, Fonds Généralités, carton 163, dossier 1327, cited in Fallope, Es-
claves, 293n155.
32. Beckles, Natural Rebels, 65–66.
33. Hilary Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society
(Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1999), 132.
34. JOM, 6 March 1847, 2; 14 April 1847, 1; 9 February 1848, 1; Fallope, Es-
claves, 293; Baude, Affranchissement, 96.
35. JOM, 19 June 1847, 2.
36. See Moitt, Women and Slavery, 151–72.
37. JOM, 26 May 1847, 1; Tomich, Slavery, 83.
38. JOM, 26 May 1847, 3.
39. See Moitt, Women and Slavery, 163–66.
40. Schoelcher, Histoire de 1’esclavage, 2:128–29.
41. Ibid., 2:129.
42. ANSOM, Fonds Généralités, carton 372, dossier 2197 (1848), 4–16.

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7
SLAVE WOMEN, FAMILY STRATEGIES, AND THE
TRANSITION TO FREEDOM IN BARBADOS,
1834–41
laurence brow n a n d tara inniss
Between 1807 and 1834, Barbados was the only sugar colony of the
British Caribbean in which an expanding plantation economy coexisted
with a naturally increasing slave population. The resulting demographic
structure of the island’s slave population of creoles, their work regimes and
the pro-natalist measures of individual planters fueled rising birth rates
during the 1820s.1 However, this apparently mutually reinforcing relation-
ship between reproduction and economic production was transformed
with the abolition of slavery, as the women who made up the majority of
the enslaved workforce in Barbados faced new coercive pressures result-
ing in intense labor conflict and a dramatic surge in infant mortality. The
white elite of Barbados constructed this latter crisis as caused by the fail-
ings of black motherhood, but these debates over the ill-effects of eman-
cipation on former slaves also provide fresh evidence of the family strate-
gies that slave women used to negotiate freedom.2
Three-quarters of the slave population of Barbados in 1834 lived con-
centrated within sugar plantations, although the island’s low-lying land-
scape and extensive road network enabled them considerable mobility.3
Interactions between slaves on different estates could occur during periods
The authors thank the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill) for a research grant
that funded this research. They are also grateful to Christine Barrow, Gwyn Camp-
bell, Joseph Miller, and the participants at the Fourth Avignon Conference on Slav-
ery and Forced Labour who offered valuable comments and encouragement.
172

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family strategies and the transition to freedom in barbados 173
of labor when enslaved women and men were hired out individually or
placed in jobbing gangs to supply extra labor elsewhere. More often, in
the hours after work slaves would seek company and relationships with
those on neighboring estates. On the Codrington plantations it was re-
ported that “the Negroes are in the habit of leaving the estate on those
Saturdays, and visiting and wandering about the country, and often not
returning till monday [sic] morning in time for work.”4 Such complaints
were common in the decades before emancipation, as on the Seawell es-
tate, whose manager encouraged intermarriage among slaves within the
plantation, “as it hinders them from running out of the Estate at night,
which they do sometimes, to a great distance to visit each other.”5 En-
slaved women often took partners from another estate, and such “visit-
ing” remote relationships could characterize the majority of families
within an individual plantation.6
While visiting relationships were conditioned by the possibilities of
slave mobility that existed within Barbados, the increasing creolization
of slaves on the island had fueled the development of extended family
units during the eighteenth century. As a visitor to the island, Frederick
W. Bayley described how in the 1820s, “The houses appropriated to the
negroes are built in a cluster, families reside together.”7 Family units were
not only concentrated in single dwellings but also located in adjacent
households focused around “yards.” It was these “clusters of households
of maternal kin” that provided enslaved women with extended support
networks of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters together with fathers,
uncles, brothers, and sons—all within the plantation.8
With emancipation in 1834, the visiting relationships and family
yards established by women and men during slavery in Barbados faced in-
tense coercive pressures. Only Antigua enacted the immediate abolition
of slavery; Britain’s other West Indian colonies adopted a transitional pe-
riod of “apprenticeship,” in which children under six were freed but the
majority of the enslaved population remained bound to their owners as
apprentices for four to six years.9 In Barbados, this meant that 14,047
children, or 17 percent of the island’s enslaved population, were liber-
ated (see fig. 7.1).10 The creation of families divided between freed and
still-enslaved understandably provoked an atmosphere of conflict and
hostility, rather than one of peaceful evolution to a new free society.
The period of apprenticeship was also marked by an intensification of
coercion as planters sought to extract the maximum labor return from
their former chattels before they were fully liberated. Planters across the
region revoked customary rights and entitlements that slaves had estab-

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174 laurence brown and tara inniss
Figure 7.1. Slave population of Barbados in 1834. Source: W. K. Marshall, ed.,
The Colthurst Journal, 237
lished to provision grounds, accommodations, and family care. Even such
pronatalist policies as reduced work regimes or increased food allowances
for pregnant mothers, developed in the early 1800s as part of attempts at
amelioration, were directly reversed.11 All these measures heavily affected
enslaved women, who faced intensifying coercive pressure to continue
offering not only their own labor in the cane fields, but also that of their
children. As a result, apprenticeship in the British West Indies may per-
haps best be seen as a prolonged battle between planters seeking to main-
tain or reconstruct the slave family as a production unit for their estates
and apprentices with their own visions of freedom and family stability.
Planters and managers divided their work force according to the diffi-
culty of labor that needed to be performed. Able-bodied adult men and
women, organized into the first and second gangs, usually performed the
hardest plantation tasks such as cane holing and dunging. As soon as
children were deemed able to work (usually at age four or five), they en-
tered the third gang, commonly referred to as the hog-meat gang or pot
gang, moving into the second gang as they grew older and stronger. The
1834 emancipation of children under the age of six resulted in severe
strains on slave families as planters attempted to maintain their third gangs

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family strategies and the transition to freedom in barbados 175
of child labor.12 Reports by stipendiary magistrates from across the British
West Indies repeatedly testify to parents’ refusals to apprentice their chil-
dren on the plantations.13 In Barbados, police magistrates stressed the
“decided aversion” of families to any continuation of estate labor by their
children, as parents preferred to “keep them at home for their own pur-
pose.”14 Faced with such opposition, and unable to use force to retain
child labor in their fields, planters resorted to more indirect means of co-
ercion. Plantation owners in the Americas had long concentrated food
allocations to working slaves, a practice that resulted in widespread child
malnutrition. Thus, as free children in Barbados ceased plantation labor,
they were increasingly denied access to estate resources.15
British abolitionists Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, who visited
Barbados at the end of December 1836, reported,
The free children are much neglected. After 1834 many of the
planters turned them off the estates, provoked by the disap-
pointment of their expectation that the parents would consent
to apprentice them; an expectation which was baffled by the
perseverance of the mothers, acting under the advice of the
Governor, Sir Lionel Smith. This extreme measure against the
free children, was happily not persevered in; but cases have re-
cently occurred, where it has again been resorted to. On the
estates of a once humane resident proprietor, the children are
taken care of in the estates’ nurseries as before; but in the vast
majority of instances, they are neglected. . . . The mortality
amongst them has been very great since 1834. The boon of
freedom granted, as if in mockery to their helpless infants, has
proved a source of misery and bitter persecution to the negro
mothers.16
Sturge and Harvey thus stressed the degree to which planters in Barbados
denied access to food, medical care, clothing, and education to those
children who failed to work on the estates.17
While younger children therefore depended for survival on the
strained resources of their families, their older siblings continued to labor
on the plantations as apprentices. In January 1838, for example, children
still represented nearly a fifth of the recorded working population at the
Drax Hall estate.18 With the end of apprenticeship there was a second
withdrawal of child labor, although not as absolute as the reports of
stipendiary magistrates portrayed it. While other officials decried the

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176 laurence brown and tara inniss
absence of children laboring on the estates, Joseph Evelyn, the police
magistrate for Christ Church, noted at the end of 1839, “I am happy to
say that the labourers are beginning to feel the necessity of rearing up
their children in habits of industry.”19 Control over access to such basic
necessities as food and shelter replaced the legal constraints of slavery as
new tools of coercion for those who wanted to restrict the emancipated
population—both adults and children—to plantation production.
That British abolitionists seeking the end of apprenticeship publicized
the plight of the free children is not surprising, given their earlier focus
on the family unit in demonstrating the damaging impact of slavery.20
Their moral critique of Atlantic slavery as corrupting family life resulted
in abolitionists conceiving of emancipation in terms of liberating women
from estate labor and transferring them into the private sphere of domes-
ticity.21 They therefore welcomed the postemancipation flight from the
fields by women as a form of natural retreat into the home, where they
would be supported by their husbands’ labor. However, such a vision of
gender relations was distant from the experiences of enslaved women and
was almost impossible to achieve under the economic and social con-
straints of postemancipation society.
For emancipated Barbadian women, the intensification of estate labor
under apprenticeship continued well into the era of legal freedom. In the
decades before emancipation, the Barbados plantocracy had often
claimed that the island’s increasing population was a product of their
benevolent paternalistic management and amelioration polices.22 How-
ever, they displayed little of either of these qualities during apprentice-
ship. The plantation records of Drax Hall in Barbados reveal that in 1836
almost a fifth of the female apprentices working on the estate were preg-
nant.23 All these women were listed as field laborers, including Mary Bel-
lah, who despite her pregnancy had been hired from an outside contractor
to work in the first gang. While contemporaries would later emphasize
the extent to which women withdrew from plantation production after
1838, immediately after emancipation many Barbadian women found
that continuing field labor was one of their few options to provide for
their families.24
The necessity of providing labor at subsistence wages to maintain resi-
dence on the plantation had a powerful impact on black family strate-
gies, that resulted in gendered labor patterns in which females toiled in
the fields to avoid eviction from homes or provision grounds while their
male partners sought wage labor off the estates.25 However, planters in
Barbados were much more successful in making estate labor a condition

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family strategies and the transition to freedom in barbados 177
for continued residence on estate land after emancipation than their
neighbors in the Windward Islands.26 The police magistrate for St. John
noted that, though children had been almost wholly removed from agri-
cultural work, “It rarely occurs however that the Women withdraw
themselves from field labour, but on the contrary are more regular as at-
tached Estate Labourers—The Husband generally roves about or lives on
a different Estate.”27
Both coresidential family yards and visiting relationships came under
increasing strain in 1838 and 1839, when a wave of evictions swept over
Barbadian estates as planters sought to retain their control of labor rela-
tions. Henry Pilgrim, police magistrate for St. John reported, “I have
never been called upon to investigate complaints on account of the undue
occupation of houses by Labourers; the planters having generally them-
selves dislodged such occupants.”28 However, these ejectments, like prose-
cutions for such offences as trespass and vagrancy, provide a means for
mapping family relationships established during slavery that reached be-
yond plantation boundaries.29
In one case, Nanny Sue, with her three-year-old child and three-month-
old child, were ejected from the Locus Hall estate because she was physi-
cally unable to cut or load cane.30 She was the third generation of her
family born and raised on the plantation. Evicted from the home that
had been built by her deceased husband, she also lost the allotment of
land that she had planted in potatoes. At Niels plantation, a woman “far
advanced in pregnancy” also lost her house (built partly from savings)
and the half an acre of land she rented from the estate.31 After her evic-
tion, she sought refuge with an uncle on the same estate, who already
had her children staying with him. As a result, he was also ejected from
the plantation. Brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and grandparents resident
on the same estate could thus draw on the familial strength formed under
slavery. However, common residence on the same estate also left such
families more exposed to postemancipation pressures such as eviction.
Another case of ejectment that reveals the strength of extended fam-
ily connections was heard before the Barbados Court of Appeal. It in-
volved Molly Cuffs and her sister Queen, both of whom had resided on
the Vaucluse estate. Queen had spent three weeks off the estate visiting
her husband in St. James, claiming that she remained with him for that
extended period because she was sick. While Queen was absent, Molly’s
home was repeatedly searched by the estate bookkeeper, who accused her
of “habouring” her missing sister.32 When Queen returned to the estate,
she and her child were ejected from her sister’s house. Queen’s eviction

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178 laurence brown and tara inniss
shows why some couples maintained relationships beyond the borders of
the plantation after emancipation. As during slavery, it was possible for
women and men to gain a measure of autonomy in their lives through
choosing partners or maintaining connections with kin living elsewhere.
The continuation of this family strategy shows perhaps how little the so-
cial and economic constraints of estate life had changed with freedom.
At the same time that the Liberal, a local radical newspaper, was pub-
lishing these accounts of evictions in the immediate wake of slavery it
was also reporting on the considerable food shortages affecting Barbados.
These concerns over food supply resulted in an islandwide survey by the
police magistrates, which generally acknowledged that there were fewer
agricultural provisions available in 1839 than during slavery.33 The mag-
istrates tended to blame poor weather conditions and the refusal by la-
borers to work or to buy provisions as the main causes of the shortage.
However, their reports showed that there were more profound causes.
In the final months of 1838, with the uncertainties of emancipation,
most estates had concentrated on planting sugarcane and had cut back
considerably on growing ground provisions to feed their workforce.34
This important shift in production was as much a rejection of older pre-
tensions to paternalism as was the revocation of customary slave rights to
housing and land. While J. R. Ward has argued that figures showing ris-
ing importation of foods in postemancipation Barbados reflect improving
consumption and living standards for ex-apprentices;35 local newspapers
and stipendiary magistrates describe a very different situation. For most
black families the period between 1834 and 1841 was marked by a pro-
longed crisis over access to ground provisions and other basic necessities.
That contemporaries saw a direct correlation between supplying food
and controlling labor is reflected in comments such as those made by mag-
istrate Henry Pilgrim about St. John at the end of 1839: “The Labourers
of this district, for the last twelve months, in consequence of the price of
food having remained at a standard beyond the price it bore during the
apprenticeship, and immediately subsequent have given a more continu-
ous labour than heretofore, and are generally working willingly.”36 The
following year in St. Andrew, magistrate James Bascom wrote, “I think
the relation of employer and laborer would be considerably improved
and be rendered more permanent, if the laborers located for continuous
service received an allowance of food from the employer each day that
they labor, the experiment has been tried by some and works successfully;
it is true that the laborers generally refused it when first emancipated,
subsequent experience and the scarcity of 1839 has produced a different

38
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family strategies and the transition to freedom in barbados 179
impression with many.”37 Ultimately, it was the absence rather than the
supply of food that became the mechanism for regulating the postemanci-
pation labor market. In densely populated Barbados the impact of the de-
crease in cultivation of basic food crops on the estates was exacerbated by
a three-year drought that followed the end of apprenticeship in 1838.
The extent to which postemancipation conflicts over labor relations
were also conflicts over familial relationships is perhaps most clearly ex-
pressed in the debate that developed in Barbados in 1841 over child mor-
tality. As Robert Schomburgk reported,
In the year 1841, 596 cases in an aggregate of 1000 were deaths
of children between the first and tenth year. This number struck
me as so astonishing, that I made inquiries whether it was to be
ascribed to an epidemic, but I was assured by several of the clergy
that no epidemic raged that year, and that it could only be as-
cribed to the neglect of their offspring by mothers among the
lower classes. In the year 1841, emigration from Barbados to
Guiana and Trinidad had reached its height; some mothers left
their children with relations who perhaps did not take much
care of them; but much more numerous instances occurred where
the father of the child emigrated and left the burden of the child
to the mother, who, thus, abandoned to her own resources, had
not the means of providing for its sustenance or attending to its
necessities.39
In this passage, “neglect” by the mother or “abandonment” by father
were the prime cause of the spectacularly high numbers of infant and
child deaths in postemancipation Barbados. However, while Schom-
burgk’s comments accurately expressed the pejorative perspective of the
local white elite, they leave silent the context of planter policies that
generated this vision of the unstable and unreliable black family.
In mid-June 1841 the governor of Barbados, Sir Evan Murray MacGre-
gor, died in office. Within a fortnight he was replaced by the lieutenant
governor of Tobago, Major-General Henry Darling, who was far more
sympathetic than his predecessor to the local planters’ attempts to limit
working-class emigration from Barbados to the cane fields of Trinidad
and British Guiana.40 In the years immediately following emancipation,
the high wages on offer in these southern territories during crop time at-
tracted several thousand Barbadian migrants and stirred fears of a labor
shortage among the Barbadian elite.41 As a result, Darling requested the

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180 laurence brown and tara inniss
archdeacon of Barbados, Thomas Parry, to investigate the reported rise
in infant mortality since emancipation. In early 1836, Parry had publicly
campaigned against the mortality caused by estate ejection of children
during apprenticeship, but five years later the island’s elite were arguing
that such deaths were caused by parental abandonment.42
Relying on parish burial records, Parry’s report showed that the total
of deaths was three times higher over the summer of 1841 (541 burials)
than for the preceding three summers (which averaged 185 burials).43 In
laying the archdeacon’s report before the Barbados House of Assembly,
Darling directly linked this mortality with emigrating workers’ abandon-
ment of their families, adding that he expected “the Legislature will not
hesitate to provide by suitable enactment against a continuation of the
evils to the community.”44 Not surprisingly, given the assembly’s concern
with limiting the flow of laborers from Barbados, its members quickly
passed a law obliging intending emigrants to prove that their family
would be supported properly during their absence.
While similar legislation against emigration was also enacted across
the Leeward Islands (also experiencing considerable labor emigration),
in Barbados the explicit justification in alleged abandonment for such a
law was dubious at best.45 Darling’s arguments when presenting Parry’s re-
port were based on a highly selective reading of the text. Archdeacon
Parry had in fact reported that parish clergy blamed the severe mortality
of 1841 on five main causes:
1. The prevalence of epidemics though not violence, such as
Whooping Cough, Dysentery, and Low Fever, combieed [sic] with
2. Want of adequate care, arising sometimes from ignorance,
sometimes from necessity, and occasionally it is feared, from less
worthy motives, and [lack of ] suitable nourishment arising from
the distress consequent upon the long drought which prevailed
from October 1840 to September 1841, causing great scarcity
and dearth of provisions.
3. Want of regular and timely Medical Assistance, arising from
negligence, or from inability to meet the expenses combined with
unwillingness to accept of the aid proffered by directors of Estates.
4. Want of attention in administering the Medicines, when
prescribed, or giving Medicine without proper advice.
5. Emigration of Fathers, throwing the whole burden of sup-
porting the children upon the Mother, and obliging them to leave

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family strategies and the transition to freedom in barbados 181
their children unattended in order to work for their support (This
is alleged only from hearsay, not from actual observation).46
Darling, in attributing infant mortality exclusively to parental deser-
tion, relied on the fifth point of the report alone, even though Parry had
qualified it as based only on rumor. The acting governor glossed over far
more substantial causes of mortality, especially the severe food shortages
and lack of medical care, which in the wake of slavery were fundamental
and deleterious to working-class life. Darling stated, “it may not perhaps be
within the means of the Legislature to provide a remedy” to such causes,
presumably because they were assumed to be “natural” and not a product of
planter actions reinforced by the assembly’s own coercive legislation.47
As Parry recognized, parishes where child mortality soared so dramati-
cally during the summer of 1841 were also those most plagued by food
shortages (see fig. 7.2). The severe drought of 1840 and 1841 had its
strongest impact on the parishes of St. Phillip, Christ Church, St. John
and St. Joseph, where it caused near famine conditions for the laboring
poor. It was deprivation due to drought, not emigration, that fueled the
dramatic escalation of child deaths in these parishes. Richard Steckel’s
argument that infant mortality “is particularly sensitive to conditions in
the first and last trimesters” of pregnancy may also explain this high mor-
tality.48 For Barbadian women coming to term in the summer of 1841,
their whole pregnancy would have been affected by the protracted food
shortages. Malnutrition also had a severe impact on the health of Bar-
badian children, especially given their greater nutritional requirements
than adults.49 Almost two years before the drought of 1841, W. S. Austin,
the police magistrate for St. Joseph, reported that in several parishes
on the island a “considerable and undue mortality among children, and
Figure 7.2. Recorded child burials for the period July to September, 1838–841.
Source: Barbados Archives, House of Assembly Minutes, 1841

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182 laurence brown and tara inniss
especially younger ones, has occurred, which no reigning epidemic has oc-
casioned.”50 Austin’s testimony highlights that the specter of child mor-
tality was not a product of 1841 events but had been emerging steadily in
the wake of emancipation.
The “astonishing” child mortality of 1841 was not a temporary crisis,
though it was certainly worsened by the extreme drought of that sum-
mer, nor was it simply a result of the two waves of plantation evictions
that occurred after August 1834 (of young children) and August 1838 (of
adults).51 Rather it was the product of seven years of labor conflict, in
which planters attempted to counter the specter of black independence
by using their ex-slave’s needs for family subsistence and shelter as means
to force them to provide field labor. While arguing that the high death
rates for black children were caused by parental abandonment, Barba-
dian authorities remained silent about the extent to which local planters
and the colonial state had undermined black families. Amid the many
social tensions after emancipation, children became one of the main ca-
sualties of an island agricultural economy focused on export markets
rather than on feeding its own population. While individual emigrating
parents may have abandoned children in the early 1840s, the most sig-
nificant factor elevating infant and child mortality was the rapid revoca-
tion of planter paternalism after the abolition of slavery in 1834, in
which customary allowances of accommodation, provisions, and health
care were reversed and made conditional on estate labor. As a result,
legal freedom was accompanied by a radical decline in living conditions
that pushed many Afro-Barbadian families to the edge of subsistence.
Planter attempts to recast labor relations at emancipation were rein-
forced by the colonial state’s attempts to dictate the social mores of black
laborers. Concerned with plantation output and the drain on the labor
supply, and reluctant to recognize their role in pushing families toward
starvation, colonial officials attacked mothers and fathers for neglecting
their children. Legal freedom transformed the debate over the relation-
ship between production, reproduction, and paternalism that had domi-
nated abolitionist politics, and had resulted in planters using pro-natalist
52
allowances to legitimize slavery before 1834. During the decade that
followed abolition, women faced ever increasing material pressures to re-
main in field labor, and the toll this took on their own bodies and their
children’s lives was identified by the new paternalist state as originating
from black moral failings rather than the new political economy of eman-
cipation. The transition to freedom in Barbados was therefore marked by
intense physical hardship, in which the extended family strategies and

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family strategies and the transition to freedom in barbados 183
relationships developed among households and across estates during
slavery were both tested and reinforced. In these circumstances, women
emerged as the brokers of freedom—charged with responsibility not only
for uniting families after emancipation but also for protecting and sus-
taining them against the planter and state coercion that followed.
notes
1. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Kingston:
University of the West Indies Press, 1995), 75, 311, 374–75.
2. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925
(New York: Vintage Books, 1976).
3. Higman, Slave Populations, 50.
4. Regulations of the Society for the Treatment and Religious Instruction of
Slaves, 1829, USPG C/WIN/BAR 5 C/COD/70, Rhodes House, Oxford.
5. List of and Report on the Negroes at Seawells, 1796, Newton Estate Papers MS
523/ 292, University of London Library.
6. Higman, Slave Populations, 369. Visiting relationships could also be created by
the separation of families through sale.
7. F. W. Bayley, Four Years’ Residence in the West Indies (London: William Kidd,
1830), 369–70.
8. Christine Barrow, “‘Living in Sin’: Church and Common-Law Union in Bar-
bados,” Journal of Caribbean History 29, no. 2 (1996): 249.
9. For an account of attempts at family reunification in Antigua in 1834, see
Keithlyn B. Smith and Fernando C. Smith, eds. To Shoot Hard Labour: The Life and
Times of Samuel Smith, an Antiguan Workingman, 1877–1982 (Scarborough: Edan’s
Publishers, 1986), 29.
10. John Bowen Colthurst, The Colthurst Journal: Journal of a Special Magistrate in
the Islands of Barbados and St. Vincent, July 1835–September 1838, ed. W. K. Marshall
(New York: KTO, 1977), 237.
11. Bridget Brereton, “Family Strategies, Gender, and the Shift to Wage Labour in
the British Caribbean,” in The Colonial Caribbean in Transition, ed. Bridget Brereton
and Kevin Yelvington (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1999), 79–81.
12. Henry Drax, “Instructions for the Management of Drax-Hall, and the Irish-
Hope Plantations: To Archibald Johnson by Henry Drax Esq,” in A Treatise upon
Husbandry or Planting, ed. William Belgrove (Boston: printed by D. Fowle, 1755),
65; William Dickson, Letters on Slavery (1789; reprint, Westport: Negro University
Press, 1970), 12; Richard S. Dunn, “A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life at Meso-
potamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799 to 1828,” William and Mary
Quarterly 34, no. 1 (1977): 47.
13. Brereton, “Family Strategies,” 81–82.
14. Brathwaite to Russell, attached Police Magistrates Reports, 1 October–31 De-
cember 1839 for St James & St Michael, Colonial Office, National Archives, Lon-
don (hereafter, CO), 28/140, 17 June 1841.

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184 laurence brown and tara inniss
15. Richard H. Steckel, “A Peculiar Population: The Nutrition, Health, and
Mortality of American Slaves from Childhood to Maturity,” Journal of Economic His-
tory 46, no. 3 (1986): 733–34; Tara Inniss, “From Slavery to Freedom: Children’s
Health in Barbados, 1823–1838,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 2 (2006): 251–60.
16. Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837: Being the Journal
of a Visit to Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica, St Lucia, Barbados and Jamaica (London:
Hamilton Adams, 1838), 132–33.
17. Ibid, 135.
18. Drax Hall Increase and Decrease Book, 1 January 1836, Drax Hall Day Books
1836–1838, Z9/1/2, Barbados National Archives, Bridgetown.
19. Brathwaite to Russell, 17 June 1841, attached Police Magistrates Reports, 1
October–31 December 1839 CO 28/140; emphasis in original.
20. Higman, Slave Populations, 303–7; Barbara Bush, “Hard Labour: Women,
Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies,” History Workshop
Journal 36 (1993): 5.
21. Brereton, “Family Strategies,” 102–4.
22. The claimed success of such “breeding” policies in the exceptional population
growth of Barbados needs to be evaluated in a much broader environmental, biological,
and economic context that includes analysis of changes in infant mortality as well as
the range of other factors affecting fertility. Higman, Slave Populations, 348–52, 375–77.
23. Drax Hall Increase and Decrease Book, 1 January 1836.
24. Brereton, “Family Strategies,” 83.
25. Ibid., 98–99.
26. Bentley Gibbs, “The Establishment of the Tenantry System in Barbados,” in
Emancipation II: Aspects of the Post-slavery Experience in Barbados, ed. Woodville
Marshall (Bridgetown: National Cultural Foundation/Department of History, Uni-
versity of the West Indies, 1987): 23–45.
27. Grey to Stanley, 3 October 1842, attached Police Magistrates Reports, CO
28/144.
28. Brathwaite to Russell, 17 June 1841, attached Police Magistrates Reports, 1
October–31 December 1839, CO 28/140.
29. Sturge and Harvey, West Indies, 148.
30. Liberal (Bridgetown), 20 March 1839, 3.
31. Liberal, 29 June 1839, 2.
32. Liberal, 13 March 1839, 3.
33. Liberal, 20 April 1839, 1–2.
34. Brathwaite to Russell, 17 June 1841, attached Police Magistrates Reports, 1
October–31 December 1839, Reports for St John, St Joseph, St Andrew, Speight-
stown and Holetown, CO 28/140.
35. J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 244–48.
36. Brathwaite to Russell, 17 June 1841, attached Police Magistrates Reports, 1
October–31 December 1839, CO 28/140.
37. Brathwaite to Russell, 17 June 1841, attached Police Magistrates Reports, 1
July–30 September 1840, CO 28/140.

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family strategies and the transition to freedom in barbados 185
38. Grey to Stanley, 3 October 1842, attached Police Magistrates Reports for
Christ Church, CO 28/144.
39. Robert H. Schomburgk, The History of Barbados (1848; reprint, London:
Frank Cass, 1971), 75–76.
40. Ibid, 491; Darling to Russell, 30 June 1841, CO 28/140.
41. Dawn Marshall, “Migration within the Eastern Caribbean, 1835–1980,”
paper presented at the Conference on Cultural Contacts and Migration in the
Caribbean Barbados, April 1984, 7–14; George Roberts, “Emigration from Barba-
dos,” Social and Economic Studies 4 (1955): 3.
42. Hilary McD. Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to
Nation-State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 97.
43. Schomburgk, History of Barbados, 491.
44. House of Assembly Minutes, 6 December 1841, Barbados National Archives, 72.
45. Bonham Richardson, Caribbean Migrants: Environment and Human Survival on
St. Kitts and Nevis (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 81–82.
46. House of Assembly Minutes, 6 December 1841, Barbados National Archives, 73.
47. Ibid, 72.
48. Richard H. Steckel, “A Dreadful Childhood: The Excess Mortality of Ameri-
can Slaves,” in The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People, ed.
Kenneth F. Kiple (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 207.
49. M. Behar, “Disturbances of Nutrition: ‘Protein-Calorie Malnutrition,’” in
Diseases of Children in the Subtropics and Tropics, ed. D. B. Jelliffe (London: Edward
Arnold, 1970), 161.
50. Brathwaite to Russell, 17 June 1841, attached Police Magistrates Reports, 1
October–31 December 1839, CO 28/140.
51. Melanie Newton, “‘New Ideas of Correctness’: Gender, Amelioration and
Emancipation in Barbados, 1810s–50s,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 3 (2000): 121–24.
52. B. W. Higman, “Slavery and the Development of Demographic Theory in the
Age of the Industrial Revolution,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, ed. James
Walvin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 164–94.

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8
FREE BUT MINOR
Slave Women, Citizenship, Respectability, and Social Antagonism
in the French Antilles, 1830–90
myriam cot t i a s
One of the first measures proclaimed by the Second Republic on 25 Feb-
ruary 1848 in Paris was to abolish slavery in the French colonies. The
initial decision was made final on 4 March, and the law enforcing its ap-
plication was ready on 27 April. Within two months, slavery was to be
abolished in the French colonies. Except for its terseness, nothing was
surprising about this measure . News of the emancipation had been cir-
culating for months among the populations of the French colonies, terri-
fying some and giving others cause to rejoice. In the feverish atmosphere
of the towns of the islands, it was becoming obvious that the government
had delayed too long in applying the decree. Impatience gained the
upper hand among the enslaved and bloody uprisings exploded. Under
pressure from the slaves’ workshops in Prêcheur and Saint Pierre in Mar-
tinique, the governor, Claude Rostoland, decided to apply the decree as
of 23 May before the official arrival of republican commissaire-général Per-
rinon.1 From then on, the distinction between free people and slaves had
no further formal effect. The French colonies contained neither “free nor
slaves but [only] citizens.”2
The republicans thus gave political and social equality, full citizenship,3
the right to salaried work, access to land, education, and respectability, as
defined by the criteria of the period, to the newly liberated slaves, who
numbered 87,752 persons in Guadeloupe, 19,375 in Guyana, and 72,859
in Martinique. The most significant aspect of this event from the point of
Translated by Gwyn Campbell.
186

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 187
view of the age-old colonizing nations was without a doubt that emanci-
pation concurrently and immediately established universal suffrage in
the French colonies. In 1848, in fact, in a movement of “social inclusion”
(Pierre Rosanvallon’s term for it4) the right to vote was unconditionally
granted to all men above the age of twenty-one. Freedom and social
equality were key words of the French Second Republic, but this same
principle had an important impact on gender relations, for it also gave
women only a subordinate legal status. Under the new civil legislation,
forged at the heart of the French state and based on the Napoleonic Code,
women became minors. They were, for example, excluded from the vote,
one of the primary rights of a citizen. The spirit of the law thus constituted
a distinct status based not on civil standing (slave versus free) but on
gender. Whereas in slave owning societies, men and women could, from
an economic standpoint, be interchangeable,5 under the new legal and
ideological order, women became chattels under the authority of men.
From the July Monarchy period (1830–48) to the Second (1848–70)
and Third (1870–1914) Republics, in the ideological framework con-
cerning marriage and women there was no break in the extent to which
the republican political organization relegated women to the periphery
of social movements. The impact of this ideology, combined with free-
dom, consolidated the inner oppositions in the French Antilles based on
social and color status. According to their social and color status, some
women became able to fight for respectability and others were stigma-
tized by the French creole term poto mitan.6 How did a political system
based on nominal equality create such social antagonisms?
the patriarchal context of liberty versus long-standing
opposition to marriage
If the granting of civil liberties seemed to have constituted a major turn-
ing point in a debate that had raged without resolution since the end of
the eighteenth century,7 there was nevertheless a certain continuity in
terms of the moral content of liberty between Philanthropist Monarchy
and Republic. In 1848 the French Republic, which wished to forge a new
and unified political community, imposed conditions on the granting of
citizenship specified first under the July Monarchy. Since 1828 politi-
cians, Christians,8 and philanthropists had debated what precisely liberty
should entail for the slaves in the French West Indies. For them, it was
essential to direct and structure a population created as part of the new
society of a unified state. The moral content of the status of a republican

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188 myriam cottias
citizen was paradoxically inherited from the philanthropic monarchy.
Since 1828 the abolitionists who were preparing for emancipation legis-
lated over colonial societies. They did not know whether emancipation
should be gradually introduced, accompanied by the patronage of the
former slaves, as when prisoners or workers in France were freed, or
whether it should be introduced abruptly and immediately.
In the context of the general moralization of French society, the wel-
fare state (l’état providence) took on the job of resocializing all margin-
alized outcasts, including workers, prisoners, and slaves. Slavery then
became a social evil that must be remedied.9 The same evils were stigma-
tized: loose morality, vagabondage, vice, sexual unions outside marriage.
The same rules are applied. The same men (Victor de Broglie, François
Guizot)10 debated these problems, and the results took the same form on
both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In 1832 legislation outlawed branding
prisoners and subjecting them to humiliating punishments and amputa-
tions. A year later, on 30 April 1833, the punishment of slaves by muti-
lation and branding was also outlawed. When liberty was at issue, pris-
oners and workers as well as slaves were patroned, that is, assigned to
sponsors—a kind of parole.11 Moreover, the same models were employed
to structure, organize, and correct these populations by distancing them
from vice. At the center of this system was the “family,” considered the
highest guarantee of virtue by moralists of the nineteenth century. The
family was attributed a rehabilitative function, curing social evils, and a
normative function, enabling society to find its unity.12 In the abolition-
ists’ discourse the individual was supposedly able to be treated through
applying mechanical rules and simple causal relationships, such as those
linking the repression of deviance, the organization of work, and marriage.
The path toward so-called full citizenship was traced along these lines.13
At that time, the family that “offered a necessary base, a minimum
support for the maintenance of social order” was a patriarchal one.14 Male
power was held to be the remedy for all social pathologies. From this
viewpoint, slaves constituted a population that, like prisoners, the men-
tally ill, and notably the working class, should be subjected to the meth-
ods for social improvement being tested by the social-scientific commu-
nity of the era. Slaves, like all social “deviants,” should be brought into
the curative context of families organized and led by men—simultane-
ously husbands to wives and fathers to children.
In order to validate fully the notions of republicanism and citizenship,
the concept of the (patriarchal) family as the basic institution of society
was, from the time of the French Revolution, allied to two other con-

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 189
cepts, those of work and property.15 For instance, in 1832 the Society for
Christian Morality (Société de la Morale Chrétienne) established a
“committee for the redemption of black female slaves in French
colonies” in order to give them “the advantages enjoyed by citizens,”
namely the right to freely acquire property and marry.16 Some years later,
in order to calm a West Indian slave population feverishly awaiting lib-
erty under the soon-to-be-declared decree of general emancipation, the
rules governing citizenship were expanded. The main principles of these
changes were included in the declaration issued to plantation slaves on
31 March 1848, two months before the emancipation measure, by Hus-
son, a Martinique creole and “interior director” (home secretary) in the
provisional government. The declaration illustrates the main values at-
tributed to “freedom”:
When you wish to demonstrate your joy, cry out:
LONG LIVE WORK!
LONG LIVE MARRIAGE!
Liberty, guaranteed by the goodness of former slave owners, was thereby
nothing more than the synthesis of work (for men) and marriage (for
women).17
Marriage was presented as a core aspect of citizenship; it was the foun-
dation of the family, it made work possible and efficient, and it stabilized
property. However, the fundamental relationship between marriage and
family posited by abolitionists posed a major problem for slaves. In slave
communities, the absence of family, or at least the lack of a family struc-
tured around a male and officially registered through an act of marriage,
for abolitionists formed one of the basic reasons to criticize the slave sys-
tem. The humanism they developed was founded on a very Eurocentric
view of society and mankind. According to abolitionists, the “licentious-
ness of the slave population” reflected “the absence of marriage” and thus
the absence of social regulations. It was vital that they first tackle the
question of marriage for the slaves to be freed. Furthermore, marriage
should be celebrated in civil rather than religious fashion in order to
extract the former slaves from the arbitrary power of their masters and
so permit them access to citizenship. As the Naval Ministry declared
in 1836: “There are very few slave couples that have been united reli-
giously, and these are the only unions to which one could apply the term

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190 myriam cottias
marriage.”18 Civil marriage long remained the primary focus of abolition-
ists, who consistently offered lengthy arguments to demonstrate that it
was necessary in order to ensure male authority, and thus social order.
They held that marriage in slave communities was nonexistent because
women slaves became prostitutes or were raped by slave owners: “Please
explain why a Negro slave should marry when his wife could be raped
and when paternal power becomes the slave owner’s prerogative.”19 In
such arguments, the victim was always portrayed as the male slave, as
abolitionists had no consideration for women’s experiences of rape; in
some cases, it was obvious to them that women had agreed to sex. It was
the man who suffered from the power of the slave owner, who—in taking
his wife—had mocked him: “I must again testify that many Negroes,
pressured by their priest to marry, would reply: ‘I’m not so stupid, for my
master would take my wife the day following the marriage.’”20 And an-
other source asks, “Moreover, why would the slaves themselves not re-
treat from the thought of marriage? What would marriage be for them
while they remained slaves? In other words, what is a woman who be-
longs to her master rather than to her husband? And in what state are
children over whom the authority of the father is subject to the whims of
the planter, who is their owner?”21
According to the abolitionists, the male slave could not exercise au-
thority over his wife and children, because he was not their owner.22
They backed such arguments with examples of enlightened slave owners
who introduced firm rules of female conduct that made female slaves re-
sponsible to male heads of families. For instance, it was reported that an
“intelligent man,” the owner of a plantation, took measures to enforce
“law and order.” He “decided first that Negro females belonged to their
menfolk” and that “from that moment no female slave would be touched
on the plantation other than by slaves. He himself gave the example and
maintained it with the utmost rigor among the free men on the planta-
tion.”23 Security and prosperity were based on such authority.
The male slave was a victim of a slave system that, in failing to recog-
nize his true position as a “man,” permitted a dissolution of moral codes24
that affected men as much as women. As Victor Schoelcher, the leading
abolitionist in France, asserted, “Let us remember that Negroes [women]
rarely get legally married for the simple reason that marriage would im-
pede the licentiousness habitual to them, or more precisely because, de-
prived of all knowledge of social principles, incapable of raising their
slave mentality to conceive of such a moral aim, they instinctively resort
to concubinage as the most natural condition.”
25 A later report imposed

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 191
republican stereotypes on a black population in order to characterize
slave men: “The black is sensual, lax, idle; he doesn’t wish to go to the
trouble of finding a wife who suits him; in his private life, he finds it dif-
ficult to submit to rules. If in his work he is a slave, in his tastes, fancies,
and desires he wants to be free and independent. He wishes to live in a
state of nature, and marriage is generally for him a responsibility and
source of worry from which he liberates himself in not submitting to his
master’s control.”26
Therefore, in the reorganization of colonial societies around ideals of
civic responsibility the abolitionists and republicans assumed the task of
reestablishing masculine power through founding nuclear families that
they considered to be the universally acknowledged fundamental unit of
civic society. To this end, the government of King Louis-Philippe I in
1839 voted the sum of 650,000 francs for the Fund for Moral Improve-
ment (Fonds de Moralisation) for the moral instruction and protection of
slaves. The “moral improvement” of slaves should be achieved thanks to
“the growth in the number of clergy, primary school teachers, and public
magistrates.”27 The church, public education, and the law should guaran-
tee for the state that its policy in this regard be successfully executed. A
royal edict concerning the moral and religious education and continued
supervision of slaves was proclaimed on 5 January 1840.28 This decree, of a
monarchy allied with the church, envisaged monthly visits to plantations
by the clergy and special catechism lessons at least once a week. These
conditions were reiterated in the so-called Mackau Law of 18 July 1845,
which made morning and evening prayers obligatory for slaves, as well as
religious instruction once during the week as well as on Sundays and holi-
days. It also established an educational scheme for slaves aged between
eight and fourteen years under the direction of Catholic brothers and
nuns. The reiteration of these measures reflected the probably minimal
extent to which they had been applied in practice. For instance, whereas
the Colonial Council of Martinique claimed that the Mackau Law “had
been achieved unassisted” because “the true philanthropy of settlers had
since time immemorial been responsible for implementing such mea-
sures,”29 on-the-spot witnesses reported that the application of the law in
reality was limited. It was noted that from 1840 the money earmarked for
the religious education of slaves was transferred into general church
funds. Thus, in 1841, the minister for the colonies “complained that these
funds had been channeled into the education of the white classes.”30
Despite the chaos arising from attempts to apply the Mackau Law, and
white settlers’ resistance to it, after 1848 abolitionists adhered to the

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192 myriam cottias
centrality of religion, marriage, and the patriarchal family in the recon-
struction of slave society and its transformation to liberty throughout the
nineteenth century. In the eyes of Martinique’s legislators, the power
of newly emancipated males had to be consolidated, and their women-
folk had to be convinced of the necessity of that need! The newly eman-
cipated population would thus be focused around a patriarchal family
over which the male, as envisaged in the 1805 civil code for colonies,
would dominate.
A ruling on slave marriages, proposed in 1846 but never applied, re-
flected the concern of the era over promoting the moral education of
slaves and the ideological framework envisaged for emancipation. In the
proposed text, the male slave would become superior to the woman, who
was described as a “perpetual minor” living under his authority. Within
marriage she lost all rights over her possessions and her children, because
“the father exercised the exclusive rights of paternal authority” and
could “bring actions both to disclaim paternity and contest the legiti-
macy of an infant slave.”31
From 1848 the civil code was applied to all citizens in the colonies
and its “sound principles” spread by parish priests (for they accorded with
the teachings of the church), by colonial governors when visiting the
plantations, and generally by all colonial administrators. On 20 June
1850, Councillor Garnier reported in his diary a case that provoked him.
To make the point that men should assume personal moral responsibility
in this postabolitionist society, and with no indications other than the
following sentences, Garnier gave the example of a son accused of hit-
ting his mother. He also condemned women of color. In May 1848 he
wrote, “These poor women of color have attitudes, expressions that
would wake desires in an old man the most cooled by years.” In June
1850 he implicitly put blame on Antillean women at the same time as he
recalled the moral frame of emancipation:
We had to judge a son accused of having hit his mother. There
were no witnesses present. The son’s reputation is very good,
that of the mother very bad. He was acquitted. Judge B delivered
to this young man an exhortation that lessened the bad effect
that the acquittal might produce: “The court was saddened that
you willingly hit your mother. However, your favorable record
and your modest comportment during these sad proceedings were
the determining factors in your acquittal. Never forget that a
son should respect and protect his mother in all circumstances.

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 193
Don’t lose sight of the fact that it was your illicit relations
with Rosélia that have led you to this sad state of affairs. Leave
the irregularity, uncertainty, and disappointments of concubi-
nage in the past and in the shameful practices of slavery. With
liberty, the child of security and good habits, and in assuming
the status of French citizen, aspire to the dignity of marriage, a
civil contract that the Christian religion has elevated to the
rank of a sacrament.”32
In the nineteenth-century institution of marriage in the West, the
male was the mediator between women and children on the one hand
and the state on the other. The woman was confined to the private
sphere, whereas the male concentrated on the public sphere. With the
establishment of the republic, this same division of responsibilities was
very rapidly imposed on the newly enfranchised. Immediately following
emancipation, electoral lists, on which only males were registered, were
established in order to prepare for municipal elections and voting for the
Constituent Assembly. “Universal” suffrage33 excluded women, who under
slavery had been employed in a variety of ways and had participated di-
rectly in the public sphere.34 For example, in 1842 the list of women be-
tween the ages of fourteen and sixteen to be enfranchised showed that 88
percent were engaged in public, commercial activities such as dressmak-
ing (22 percent), farming (26 percent), domestic service, and laundering.
At the Lamentin estate, a similar female public presence was evident: 38
percent of the women freed between 1833 and 1848 were dressmakers,
16.5 percent agricultural workers, and 16 percent tradeswomen.35 Such
economic independence, even within the coercive framework of slavery,
gave women the means to negotiate their relations with men, or at least
to create a “free space”—even a tiny one—that they could control. Their
resistance to marriage, in addition to other, older forms of such resis-
tance, could have emanated from this relative autonomy.
From the seventeenth century onward, observers had noted the “an-
tipathy” slaves had shown toward the Christian institution of marriage.36
Besides the fact that this formalization of individual male-female unions
had no meaning for slaves, because it did not correspond with alliances
established between families or with the exchange of goods (“For slaves,
marriage did not imply joint ownership: The interests of each [partner]
were entirely distinct”37), or even with a particular type of protection of-
fered by the slave owner, it encountered very real feminine resistance, as
recorded in documents from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

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194 myriam cottias
In fact, the reasons for slaves’ resistance to marriage given in the sev-
enteenth century were repeated during the nineteenth century. In 1682,
Father Mongin had sought
the reasons for their [the Negroes’] refusal [to marry], something
that certainly had nothing to do with a dowry, for they possessed
absolutely nothing in the world. Both [men and women] protested
that they had other relations, ones that marriage would not force
them to abandon. The male says that the woman that I want to
give him is a “hen”: she claims, to the contrary, that he is cruel
and too lazy to collect and sell goods in order for them to earn
their daily bread. Many protest that they still have no hut, nor
the means to celebrate the wedding festivities, that neither comes
from the same area nor is of the same age, and many other pre-
texts of a similar nature that I have much difficulty in rebutting.38
In the 1840s, in addition to slave owners raising objections to the
marriage of slaves from different plantations, many female slaves also ob-
jected to marriage. One “Negress” claimed that “marriage made men too
despotic,” while in concubinage “women dominated men whom they
found more generous,”39 and while “marriage was fine for whites, should
they marry and be beaten by their husbands it would be impossible for
them to leave their spouses.”40 For female slaves, it appeared that their
ability to be autonomous (inasmuch as their enslavement permitted) and
to escape from the constraint of male power was primary. There was thus
female resistance to unions in which “the Negro took a wife only so that
she might serve him; he considered her to be his house-servant; often
they fought; [and] marriage did not prevent the husband from having
concubines—and his example was followed by the wife.”41 Moreover, the
laws proclaimed at the time of the general emancipation in 1848 in no
way modified most women ex-slaves’ skeptical opinions about marriage,
although they may have convinced some others.
the fight for respectability, or relations between newly
emancipated and long-liberated ex-slaves
Following the abolition of slavery, some ex-slaves had their very reserved
opinions of marriage confirmed. The conventions established by the civil
marriage ceremony of the new republic and application of relevant por-
tions of the civil code (code civil, or Napoleonic Code) responded to the

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 195
aspirations of only a portion of the population. For the remainder, the
benefits accruing from marriage, such as ownership of property, did not
interest newly enfranchised women. In fact, pro-marriage campaigns
conducted at the time of the abolition of slavery, and the application in
1851 of the law of 10 December 1850, attempted to promote marriages
among the poor, legitimize those children formerly considered illegiti-
mate, and return illegitimate children who had been placed in institu-
tions to their mothers.42 These measures encouraged a rise in the nuptial
rate to around 10.6 per thousand on Martinique and 11.7 per thousand
on Guadeloupe between 1845 and 1854. Who married in this period?
What is the social profile of these women and men? Were they newly
freed persons? To answer these questions, we must study the enfran-
chised, a polymorphous group whose composition varied over time.
In fact, throughout the colonial epoch, a growing group of slaves—
mostly females—gained their freedom either through a proper process of
enfranchisement or through the ratification of manumission.43 From
1660 to 1722, this group grew from 1.2 percent to 18.6 percent of the
“free” Martinique population, rising further to 40 percent by 1802 and to
80 percent by 1845. From the seventeenth century to 1831, approxi-
mately 60 percent of these affranchis were women. Despite bon ordre leg-
islation methodically passed at the close of the eighteenth century to
prevent the preferential enfranchisement of women as a cover for “im-
moral” master-slave relations, and a rise in the enfranchisement tax for
female slaves from six hundred livres in 1745 to two thousand livres in
1775, women remained a numerically significant element among the
groupe des libres (ex-slaves).
This female majority among the free was reinforced everywhere after
1830, due to pressure from the antislavery movement. In fact, after inter-
minable debates in Paris between 1832 and 1845 over whether the
emancipation of slaves should take place gradually or rapidly, three main
laws were enacted that facilitated the registration of certain enfranchised
groups to begin a reorganization of colonial societies. Each law permitted
a new group to emerge and become part of the libres de couleur (free col-
ored).44 For that reason, this category increased annually by an average of
24.6 percent on Martinique and 15 percent on Guadeloupe during the
period 1832–45. The stability of the colonist class in Martinique created
more opportunities for slaves, especially women, to purchase their own
freedom.
As a result, with the first main law on emancipation—the Edict of 12
July 1832, which recommended that “in the colonies, no administrative

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196 myriam cottias
tax will be levied on enfranchisements”—40 percent of those libres de fait
between 1832 and 1836 on Martinique and Guadeloupe were women.
They had routinely been manumitted for a long time by their masters,
but because of the administrative tax they were not registered as free
people. Because libre de fait was a status gained mainly by women who
lived many years with their masters, statistics show that they were not
young. In the Martinican small village of Trois-Îlets, the average age was
forty-three years.45 Moreover, taken together with their children, for
Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, they constituted 75.6 per-
cent of the ex-slaves who gained de fait (de facto) or patronné liberty.46
The second royal edict, of 11 June 1839, established de droit (de jure)47
enfranchisements. This law affected slaves who intended to marry, sole
legatees, children of a slave mother by her master, and slaves closely re-
lated to their owners (e.g., parents who were slaves of their children,
slaves who were siblings of their master, etc.). Of this new group, female
adults accounted for 67 percent on Martinique (with an average age of
thirty, according to Bulletin officiel de la Martinique), 55 percent on
Guadeloupe, and 70 percent in French Guiana. In these three colonies,
80 percent of those liberated in 1839 were women and children.
By contrast, the third and last law before general emancipation of
1848, the Mackau Law of 18 July 1845, gave slaves the possibility of re-
deeming themselves at prices mutually agreed upon by the slaves and
masters or, if no accord was reached, at a price established by a colonial
commission established with four hundred thousand francs from Louis-
Philippe’s government to finance this operation. Of the ex-slaves enfran-
chised under this law, women comprised 56 percent on Martinique, 68
percent on Guadeloupe, and 72 percent in French Guiana.
These laws thus progressively integrated women into the free colored
group during the nineteenth century, though the reasons for their en-
franchisements changed through time. The profiles of the women freed
in each successive stage were different. The first group of the women en-
franchised were older and gained manumission after a long time. The
next two groups to be freed were younger and had proportionally fewer
children. Given these differences, we might ask if the different means of
achieving liberty produced different forms of conjugal relations. Also, did
there exist distinct conjugal strategies associated with particular forms of
enfranchisement? And at least, did the different manumission laws serve
to further stratify society?
A longitudinal study of women freed during the nineteenth century at
Trois-Îlets48 shows how only a part of the “unions” were legitimized through

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 197
the civil ceremony of marriage.49 Trois-Îlets was a village in southwestern
Martinique associated with the cultivation of sugarcane and with pottery
making. In 1837 the village had 1,368 inhabitants, 32 percent of whom
were “free.” Following the application of the new laws on enfranchise-
ment, this population grew profoundly. From 1831 to 1848 a third of the
population under the age of fourteen, 81 percent of people over the age
of sixty, and 44 percent of the women between the ages of fourteen and
sixty were newly freed.
Before analyzing marriages of the newly emancipated of Trois-Îlets, it
is necessary to define the concept of marriage with further precision. In
fact, it was not the ceremony of marriage that signified the start of male-
female unions occurring during the woman’s child-bearing years but
rather the birth of children. Beginning the analysis with the birth of the
first child shows how marriage took place in a women’s life cycle accord-
ing to the date and type of emancipation. Although on a general level,
only a minority of the newly emancipated women chose to marry, the
proportions varied depending on their type of liberty. Approximately 25
percent of women liberated before 1832 married subsequently, eleven
years after the birth of their first child. Twenty-one percent of women
freed between 1832 and 1848 married twenty-one years after the birth of
their first child. Of the first group, 59 percent were single mothers,
slightly less than the corresponding 68 percent in the second group. Sev-
enteen percent of the first group had their children recognized by the fa-
ther, as against 11 percent of the second group. In addition, the two
groups adopted different matrimonial strategies.
In effect, women gaining their freedom before 1832 overwhelmingly
practiced a sort of “homogamy” by marrying men also freed before
1832. Likewise, in their turn, their children avoided marrying newly
freed ex-slaves. On 6 July 1840, Félicité Robertine, a free mulatto whose
father was a landowner, married Arnaud Joseph Balaire, a free mulatto
whose father was also a landowner. Until 1841 all marriages at Trois-Îlets
united long-liberated ex-slaves, except for the marriage on 22 November
1831, three months after the emancipation of her partner, of the capresse
(lit., someone considered 25 percent black) Cécile, formerly owned by
Thomas Montout.
Those emancipated between 1832 and 1839 started to enter marital
unions only after 1841. Nancy, a dressmaker aged forty-four years, freed
on 13 January 1834, on 19 March 1841, married Ambroise Boye, a fish-
erman aged forty-two years, who had been enfranchised on 4 June 1833.
On 18 May 1841, Camille Lauret, sixty-two, who had been emancipated

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198 myriam cottias
on 28 January 1840 and had no stated occupation, married fifty-four-
year-old Célestin, a master wheelwright who had gained his liberty on 24
December 1833. Another social category of newly freed ex-slaves was
emerging. From 1841 to 1846, 83 percent of marriages at Trois-Îlets were
between members of this group. Official marriage ceremonies had to wait
until both parties had been liberated, as reflected in the high average
ages of those marrying (47.5 years for women, 59.6 for men).
Following general emancipation, a tendency toward restratification
thus developed. While a distinct division existed between long-freed
slaves (those emancipated before 1832) and the newly emancipated from
1832 to 1846, the dividing line between the two groups shifted with time
to distinguish those liberated before and after 1848 (the Emancipated of
’48). All women liberated in the general emancipation measure of 1848
married men similarly liberated in that year, whereas those liberated be-
fore 1848 married others who had gained their freedom previously. The
same trend toward consolidation of groups defined by the timing of their
freedom appears in the documentation of legal recognition of paternity.
Fathers freed before 1848 tended to recognize paternity of children born
to women who gained their liberty also before 1848. This tendency is
confirmed throughout Martinique, where of 421 marriages between ex-
slave couples that occurred in 1858, only 129 (31 percent) were between
“newly emancipated” and long-freed ex-slaves.50 A distinct social divi-
sion between earlier—and later—enfranchised ex-slaves was beginning
to emerge.
If a division developed among those who had access to marriage, there
was also a rupture between freed women in positions to uphold the ideol-
ogy of marriage and citizenship and other women definitively excluded
from such respectability because they lived in a state of concubinage. At
Trois-Îlets on Martinique during the nineteenth century, of women who
gave birth outside marriage, 68 percent remained unmarried, forming
matrifocal households. This high percentage of unmarried mothers re-
flected the overall trend as noted in censuses that reveal the numbers of
those “excluded” from marriage. The nuptial rate for the newly freed on
Martinique increased from 1.9 percent to 10.6 percent between 1835–44
and 1845–54 (when the rate for Guadeloupe was 11.7), only to fall to 4.9
on Martinique and 5.4 on Guadeloupe by 1855–66, and further still by
1877–81 to 3.4 on Martinique and 3.2 on Guadeloupe.51 After the deci-
sions to marry by those who were in a position to do so under the eman-
cipation measure of 1848 (accounting for 65 percent of marriages be-
tween 1849 and 1863), few couples registered their unions from the

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 199
1860s. Throughout the nineteenth century the proportion of “natural”
births (to use the terminology of the time) to legitimate ones was very
stable. From 1845 to 1865 natural births accounted for approximately 61
percent of all infants born on Martinique and Guadeloupe.52 That pro-
portion grew later in the century due to the economic crisis of the 1880s
and to industrialization, peaking at 70 percent in 188553 and consolidat-
ing and stressing the different social attitudes and divisions within
French colonial societies in the Caribbean that the republican model of
equality did not reverse.
On the other hand, from the ranks of those emancipated before 1848
emerged an element of the “colored” population able, through marriage
and other means, to adhere to the strict criteria necessary to become
“good citizens” specified by the Republic of 1848. By adhering totally to
these themes, the republican islanders on Martinique completely con-
fused the issue of the legitimacy of unions with their political legitimacy.
The adoption of this ideology was total and something of a caricature.
For example, in the Saint-Pierre newspaper, Les Colonies, birth an-
nouncements took on a highly specific form: the names of legitimate chil-
dren were published along with the total number of natural children,
born outside marriage, who represented the majority of live births!54 For
them, citizenship and family were indivisible concepts.55 Leading repub-
licans tried to recognize the development of an ideology of respectability
within this group,56 in which marriage played a central role. The women
of this group could accept the status of minors because valued re-
spectability that up to then had been the monopoly of “whites” counter-
balanced this relative disability. Thus, “while practicing the love of God
and the honest things,”
57 the elite among the women of color reinvested
in the public sphere. Women of the colored elite reentered the public
sphere demonstrating “honesty” and the “love of God.” Rather than
protest noisily in the streets, as had the newly emancipated females,58
they worked to improve moral conditions through sociétés de bienfaisance
(charities) and sociétés mutuelles (societies of solidarity), in which they
promoted maternal and family values.
The first voluntary sociétés de bienfaisance developed on Martinique
from 1882, with the aim of alleviating human suffering and misery and
working toward the birth of a new era of progress. Two distinctly female
sociétés de bienfaisance followed quickly, both in 1899; the Union of
the Ladies of Prêcheur59 (Union des Dames du Prêcheur) and the Asso-
ciation of the Ladies of Charity (Association des Dames de la Charité)
at Sainte-Marie. Later, in 1901, the Ladies’ Saint-Louis (Saint-Louis des

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200 myriam cottias
Dames ) and the Female Provident Society (Prévoyance des Femmes) at
Fort-de-France. In 1893 the Ladies’ Sisterhood (Fraternité des Dames)
was founded at Saint-Pierre, followed by the Working Women’s Union
(Union des Ouvrières), and a few years later by the Ladies Improvement
Society (Progrès des Dames) and the Association of the Ladies of Char-
ity (Association des Dames de la Charité). The aim of all was to safe-
guard the physical and moral health of their members and of members’
families through helping children in distress, visiting the sick, delivering
mutual aid vouchers, and paying a portion of the medical expenses of the
underprivileged.60 Subscriptions (about two francs a month for active
members and three francs for honorary members) enabled these associa-
tions to assume responsibility for the cost of medical visits and medicines
for its members; one hundred francs was also allotted toward the funeral
costs of family members, and between fifty and two hundred francs to
households with newborn babies.
In the eyes of the “man of color” Césaire Philémon, vice president of
the Federation of Mutual Aid Societies, these early associations had
constituted “the first female emancipation movements.”61 But what was
described as a positive action and as participation of the women in the
public sphere had other consequences for the social standing of the
members. Endorsing this model, the colored elite stigmatized those who
failed to adopt the values laid down for structuring society. At the end of
the nineteenth century this group—mainly composed of women—began
to be described as pathological. Through the republican prism, the
stigma was put on these unmarried women, not only by administrators,
governors, and colonists but also by the local colored elite. A dual move-
ment of aversion and attraction developed.
On the one hand, the aversion and the tendency to reject those who
failed or did not conform to normative values can be explained in part by
the need of the colored elite to erase some of their own family histories,
in which “illegitimacy” played a role. For them, this past must be forgot-
ten because to do so was a condition of consolidating their success and
fulfilling the promise of their social recognition.62
On the other hand, but not in a contradictory way, gradually, the model
of the courageous mother was established, a woman facing life alone and
managing both economic and domestic affairs (e.g., child care). Such a
model was emphasized strongly, while the colored elite defined the “tem-
poral destiny” of their daughters as a “mission of law, love, and charity.”63
In this dual movement, the image of the “courageous mother” was
magnified, as in “La glaneuse,” a poem written in 1900 with a lyricism

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 201
reminiscent of Zola’s description of working-class life: “What could she
do? Her child should have woken. Had she not counted on the sap of the
plant to calm this infant who was biting his pillow, pale with hunger,
seething with anger against his absent mother? ”64 Later writers from the
colored elite also portrayed the figure of the “courageous mother,” ex-
plaining her in terms of slavery: “Also, her chief qualities are rectitude,
meekness, loyalty, unselfishness, a profound and sincere faith, devotion
to the point of sacrifice, and a love of the family and of children. She sub-
jects herself to the harshest of work and exerts herself to the utmost so
that certain life rituals, such as baptism and the first communion of the
child that she often raises alone—a reflection of a ‘free union,’ the fruit of
slavery which was widely practiced in the country until a few years ago
and which has sadly left many unfortunate women with four, five, and
sometimes six children to raise.”65
She was also condemned by, and isolated in, her poverty. This is
shown, for example, in 1945 by the women of the Feminine Group
(Rassemblement Féminin), who declared it the “social obligation” of
well-off women to “first throw off old prejudices and lazy habits in order
to better understand [women of a] social milieu different from theirs” and
to establish charitable works (l’œuvre des layettes) for “less evolved fellow
citizens,” above all for married women.66 Women not officially married
had to be recommended by both spiritual and lay authorities.67 Yet were
the elite in French colonies really unaware that the unmarried state,
rather than constituting a social anomaly,68 or reflecting conjugal insta-
bility,69 highlighted the difficulty of erasing age-old antagonisms?
The discourse of the republicans of 1848 on the family and marriage pre-
sented only inadequate change from that of the preceding July Monar-
chy. It joined, on the contrary, a wider perspective that exceeded the
borders of France and its colonies. In the nineteenth century, as in the
twentieth, the whole Western world credited marriage and the family
with an organizational function of society: these two institutions define
status, identity, and rights, as well as nationality, filiation, and inheri-
tance of possessions.70 The application of this ideology in the colonial
and postabolitionist era nevertheless received particular declensions. In-
deed, the republican French national project cancelled the racial ques-
tion under the excuse of universalism,71 while slave societies had rested
on this division. It is not a question here of building a strict contrast be-
tween metropolis and colony, because the interactions between these
two political entities—including on the racial question—were constant,

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202 myriam cottias
as Fred Cooper and Ann Stoler have shown.72 It is rather a question of
showing the sexual effects of the republican emancipation in the French
Antilles. Emancipation put equality at the heart of all social processes
while practicing the political disparity of gender and the stigmatization.
With the application of the Napoleonic Code to the whole colonial pop-
ulation, the “natural” children born out of wedlock, for example, who
enjoyed legal equality with legitimate children since 1793, are character-
ized as bastards, illegitimate children, without rights. The line of civil ex-
clusion built around moral notions was repositioned in 1848. Marriage
produced full citizenship—that is, citizenship aligned with the moral val-
ues promulgated by the metropolis. In these conditions, even with un-
derestimated rights, only the women of the elite of color were able to at-
tain the republican ideal. They also practiced what Lucette Valensi calls
a “therapy of forgetting.”73 Indeed, through the period of slavery, the sex-
uality of the women slaves and of free women of color produced a dis-
course on their immorality, their lasciviousness, their consensual and ac-
tive prostitution.74 The colonial power—that is, the law that prevented
their marriage with “white” men, or the practices of the colonists that
did not favor unions within the slave population—discredited them. On
the contrary, the abolition of slavery allowed the women of the social
elite to buy back their honor. This “respectability” had to counter the
stigmas of their history. Nevertheless, it surreptitiously reconstructed
lines of social and racial exclusion. By adhering to the Western moral
model prescribed by the metropolis, the elite of color, and particularly
the women of this group, assumed the cultural idioms of the dominant.75
Without taking into account the agency of the poorest women, the
speech and the practices of the feminine elites established them as other.
In a continuous effort to be recognized as full citizens (men and women)
by the former class of the dominant, the elites of color agreed to disqual-
ify all the poor classes and, in particular, poor women and the mothers of
children born out of wedlock.
Borrowing a sociological concept used recently to analyze the contem-
porary phenomenon of suburbs in France,76 we can say that using mar-
riage as a differentiating factor (différentialiste), ethnicized poorer women,
that is, relegated them to total otherness: their identity was rooted in the
slave past, without possibility of exceeding their subordinate status. In
discourses, these “pathological” women, poto mitan, were excluded from
the social competition around the citizenship that the republic had in-
troduced into the French colonies and that was going to structure their
history until the law of départementalisation of 194677 and beyond.

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 203
notes
1. Likewise, the decree took effect on 27 May 1848 in Guadeloupe and, according
to the official calendar, on 10 June 1848, in Guyana.
2. Governor of Martinique, 23 May 1848.
3. Reciprocally, any Frenchman convicted of “possessing, purchasing, or selling
slaves” lost his French citizenship. See decree of 27 April 1848, art. 8.
4. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France,
Paris: Gallimard, 2001.
5. Arlette Gautier, Les sœurs de solitude: La condition féminine dans aux Antilles, du
XVIIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Editions Caribéennes, 1985); Bernard Moitt, Women
and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2001); Sue Peabody, “Négresse, Mulâtresse, Citoyenne: Gender and Emancipa-
tion in the French Caribbean, 1650–1848,” in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the
Atlantic World, ed. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005), 56–78.
6. Christiane Veauvy and Laura Pisano, Paroles oubliées: Les femmes et la construc-
tion de l’Etat-nation en France et en Italie, 1789–1860 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997), 1.
Poto mitan (std. Fr., le pilier du milieu, “the pillar of the place”) designates a woman on
her own with children, sustaining her own home.
7. On 4 February 1794, the National Convention declared, “Slavery is abolished
in all colonies; in consequence, it is decreed that all men, without distinction of
color, resident in the colonies, are [henceforth] French citizens and enjoy all the
rights guaranteed under the Constitution.” See Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade, Annie Rey-
Goldzeiguer, and Jacques Thobie, eds., Histoire de la France coloniale (Paris: Armand
Colin, 1991), 402. Nevertheless, this decree applied only to Guadeloupe and French
Guiana, as, with the blessing of its settlers, Martinique came under British rule.
8. For the religious history of the French West Indies, see Philippe Delisle, Renouveau
missionnaire et société esclavagiste: La Martinique, 1815–1848 (Paris: Publisud, 1997).
9. The economic variable is certainly part of this development, as shown by re-
searchers such as Robin Blackburn in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988).
10. Alexandre Moreau de Jonnès (1778–1870) can be added to the list, for he
wrote on slavery as well as on poverty and delinquency in laborers. Moreau de Jon-
nès, Recherches statistiques sur l’esclavage colonial et sur les moyens de le supprimer
(Paris: Impr. de Bourgogne et Martinet, 1842).
11. See the Penal Code of 1810 on liberated criminals.
12. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard,
1975), 300–301; Patricia O’Brien, Correction ou châtiment: Histoire des prisons en France
au XIXe siècle, trans. Myriam Cottias (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988).
13. See Myriam Cottias, “De la moralisation des esclaves à la citoyenneté dans les
Antilles françaises (Martinique, Guadeloupe),” in Mujer y familia en América Latina,
siglos XVIII–XX, ed. Susana Menéndez and Barbara Potthast (Málaga: Asociación
de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas Europeos, 1996), 135–52.
14. Jacques Donzelot, La police des familles (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 87.

campbell2.pt3 6/22/07 8:36 AM Page 204
204 myriam cottias
15. The preamble to the Constitution of 4 November 1848 (art. 4, sec. 2) notes
that “Family, Work, and Property form the basis of the French Republic.”
16. Société de la Morale Chrétienne, The Committee for the Redemption of Female
Negro Slaves in the French Colonies (Paris: Société de la Morale Chrétienne, 1832), 2.
17. Pierre Dessalles notes in his journal that the title of the text “written in Creole
and in French” publicizing the freedom of slaves received more attention than its
content. Dessalles, La vie d’un colon à la Martinique au XIXè siècle: Journal, 1848–1856
(Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1984), 29; see also Richard Burton, La famille coloniale:
La Martinique et la mère patrie, 1789-1992 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996).
18. Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies, États de population, de cultures et de
commerce relatifs aux colonies française (Paris: Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies,
1836), 61.
19. “Tableau de la situation actuelle des esclaves dans les colonies françaises
d’après les dernières publications officielles,” L’abolitionniste français, January–Febru-
ary 1844, 44.
20. “Rapport du procureur du Roi de Fort-Royal (octobre 1842),” in Ministère de
la Marine et des Colonies, Exposé général des résultats du patronage des esclaves dans les
colonies françaises (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1844), 574.
21. Martyrologe colonial: Tableau de l’esclavage aux colonies françaises (Paris: Pagn-
erre, 1848), 19.
22. Interestingly, between 1830 and 1848, some French female authors used anti-
slavery rhetoric in their denunciation of the situation of women. See, for example,
Jenny Derouin, Profession de foi (Paris: by author, 1832); Claire Demar, Appel d’une
femme au peuple pour l’affranchissement de la femme (Paris: by author, 1832). In anglo-
phone countries, protestant feminists commonly compared their fight for liberty with
that of slaves: See Jean Baubénot, “De la femme protestante,” in Histoire des femmes en
Occident, ed. George Duby and Michelle Perrot, 4 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1991), 1:206–7.
23. Ministère de la Marine, Exposé général, 575.
24. See Myriam Cottias, “La séduction coloniale: Damnation et stratégies: Les
Antilles, XVIIe–XIXe siècle,” in Séduction et sociétés, ed. Cécile Dauphin and Ar-
lette Farge (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 125–39.
25. Victor Schoelcher, De l’esclavage des noirs et de la législation coloniale (Paris:
Pagnerre, 1833), 47.
26. Ministère de la Marine, Exposé général, 571.
27. Bulletin officiel de la Martinique, 1846, 107.
28. “Ordonnance du Roi sur l’instruction morale et religieuse et pour le patronage
des esclaves,” Bulletin officiel de la Martinique, 1840.
29. Colonial Council of Martinique, session of 19 May 1846.
30. “Tableau de la situation actuelle des esclaves,” 42.
31. Ministère des Colonies, Proposition de loi sur le mariage des esclaves (Paris: Min-
istère des Colonies, 1846), title 2, ch. 3, arts. 20, 28.
32.Alphonse Garnier, Journal du Conseiller Garnier à la Martinique et à la Guade-
loupe, 1848–1855, ed. Gabriel Debien (Fort-de-France: Société d’Histoire de la Mar-
tinique, 1969), 233.
33. See Gilbert Pago, Les femmes et la liquidation du système esclavagiste à la Mar-
tinique à 1848–1852 (Fort-de-France: Ibis Rouge Éditions, 1998), ch. 3.

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citizenship, respectability, and social antagonism in the french antilles 205
34. Moitt, Women and Slavery.
35. “Tableau des affranchissements,” Bulletin officiel de la Martinique, 1833–48.
36. See Jacques Bouton, Relation de l’établissement des Français depuis l’an 1635 en
l’île de la Martinique, l’une des Antilles de l’Amérique: Des mœurs des sauvages, de la sit-
uation et des autres singularités de l’île (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1650).
37. Ministère de la Marine, Exposé général, 584.
38. Marcel Châtillon, “Copie de la lettre du P. Jean Mongin, missionnaire de
l’Amérique à une personne de condition du Languedoc écrite de l’île de Saint-
Christophe au mois de mai 1682,” Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe
61–62 (1984): 90.
39. “Rapport du procureur du Roi de Marie-Galante,” in Ministère de la Marine,
Exposé général, 579.
40. Ministère de la Marine, Exposé général, 580.
41. Ibid., 585.
42. Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, Les femmes, le travail et la famille (Paris: Rivages,
1987), 121.
43. Jacques Adélaïde-Merlande, Histoire générale des Antilles et de la Guyane
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994).
44. See Jacques Adélaïde-Merlande, “Problèmatique d’une histoire de l’esclavage
urbain–Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique (1815–1848),” Bulletin de la Société d’His-
toire de la Guadeloupe 65–66 (1985): 10–32.
45. “Tableaux des affranchissements,” Bulletin officiel de la Martinique, 1832–36.
46. In other words, those who gained manumission but whose masters refused or
were unable to pay the affranchisement tax.
47. De droit in this case means that no opposition to freedom could exist because the
king and the administration decided which situations automatically provided freedom.
48. See Myriam Cottias, “Trois-Ilets de la Martinique au XIXe siècle: Essai d’é-
tude d’une marginalité démographique,” Population 4–5 (1985): 675–98.
49. Under the republican regime, civil marriage took priority over religious mar-
riage and was the one recognized by the state.
50. Notices statistiques (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1859).
51. The nuptial index used is the number of marriages in relation to the adult
population (14–60 years of age), multiplied by 1,000. For Martinican slaves the
index was 0.9 per thousand in 1839 and 1.1 per thousand in 1847.
52. Including, before 1848, the birth of slave and “free” children.
53. “État civil du 9 au 18 septembre 1885,” La défense coloniale, 20 September
1884, 4.
54. The theme of legitimacy was dealt with in the newspaper on a regular basis.
For example, it published Paul Rouget’s novel La faute de Jeanne in two installments.
55. Burton, Famille coloniale.
56. See, for example, Delisle, Renouveau missionnaire, 271.
57. Société des Femmes Schoelchériennes de Fort-de-France, in Victor Schoelcher,
La vérité aux ouvriers et cultivateurs de la Martinique suivie de rapports, décrets, arrêtés,
projets de lois et d’arrêtés concernant l’abolition immédiate de l’esclavage (Paris: Pagnerre,
1849; reprint, Lausanne: Editions du Ponant, 1985).
58. Dessalles, Vie d’un colon, 42, 81.

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206 myriam cottias
59. Prêcheur is an area of Martinique.
60. See Myriam Cottias and Annie Fitte-Duval, “Femmes, famille et politique
dans les Antilles françaises de 1828 à nos jours,” Caribbean Studies 28, no. 1 (1995):
75–100.
61. Césaire Philémon, La Société, la solidarité et le mouvement mutualiste à la Mar-
tinique (Fort-de-France: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1941).
62. , “L’oubli du passé ‘contre la ‘citoyenneté’: Troc et ressentiment à la Mar-
tinique (1848–1946),” in 1946–1996: Cinquante ans de départementalisation outre
mer, ed. Fred Constant and Justin Daniel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 293–313.
63. Vincent Allègre, “speech,” La défense coloniale, 9 august 1884, 4.
64. Quoted by Césaire Philémon, Galeries martiniquaises (Paris: Exposition Colo-
niale Internationale, 1931), 250.
65. André Delaunay-Belleville, Choses et gens de la Martinique (Paris: Debresse,
1963), 188, 190; emphasis added.
66. Anon., La femme dans la cité (Fort-de-France: Le Rassemblement Féminin,
1945), 3.
67. Ibid., 3.
68. For an anthropological view of this, see, for example, Stéphanie Mulot, “Je
suis le père, je suis la mère” (PhD diss., Paris, EHESS, 2000).
69. See Christine Chivallon, Espace et identité à la Martinique (Paris: CNRS,
1998).
70. André Burguière, Histoire de la famille (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994). For more
recent views, see Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2004), 17; Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and
the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 2005); Nancy Cott, Public Vows, A History of Marriage and the
Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
71. It would be more precise to say that French universalism had implicit racial
overtones associating the French nation with the color white. See Myriam Cottias,
“Le silence de la nation: Les ‘vieilles colonies’ comme lieu de définition des dogmes
républicains,” Outre-mers 90 (2003): 338–39.
72. Frederick Cooper, Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cul-
tures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
73. Lucette Valensi, Fables de la mémoire: La glorieuse bataille des trois rois (Paris:
Seuil, 1992).
74. Cottias, “Séduction coloniale.”
75. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate
in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 23.
76. Abdelmalek Sayad, L’immigration, ou, les paradoxes de l’altérité (Brussels: De
Broeck, 1991); Jacqueline Costa-Lescoux, “L’ethnicisation du lien social dans les
banlieues françaises,” Revue européenne des migrations internationales 17, no. 2 (2005):
123–38.
77. In 1946 Guadeloupe, Guyane, Martinique, and Réunion became French dé-
partements and thus no longer were French colonies. The same laws were supposed to
be applied in the islands as they were in continental France.

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4
Representing Women Slaves
Masters’ Fantasies and Memories in Fiction

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campbell2.pt4 6/22/07 8:37 AM Page 209
9
DEVIANT AND DANGEROUS
Proslavery Representations of Jamaican Slave Women’s Sexuality,
ca. 1780–1834
henrice al t i n k
Slave women’s sexuality has long attracted the attention of historians.
American historians first researched this field in the late 1960s, most
notably Winthrop Jordan in his seminal work White over Black.1 In the
1980s American feminist scholars provided evidence that slave women’s
sexual relations with white men were primarily based on force to do away
with the myth presented by planters and their supporters that bondswomen
were scheming jezebels and took readily to the prostitution of their bod-
ies.2 Using, among others, Foucault’s argument that the “deployment of
sexuality . . . engenders a continual extension of areas and forms of con-
trol,” they argued that the sexual exploitation of bondswomen was as
much a means of control as the whip and that it made female bondage
worse than male bondage.3
Scholars of slavery started to research the sexuality of Caribbean slave
women only from the late 1980s. They initially focused also on sexual
coercion and bondswomen’s resistance against it.4 It was difficult for them,
however, to debunk the myth that slave women were sexually promiscu-
ous because scholars lacked primary sources in which (ex)slave women
described their sexual abuse. Nevertheless, they succeeded in providing
an alternative account of the sexuality of female slaves by comparing
proslavery remarks about the sexuality of bondswomen with abolitionist
A different version of this article was published as “Forbidden Fruit: Pro-Slavery At-
titudes towards Enslaved Women’s Sexuality and Interracial Sex,” Journal of
Caribbean History 39, no. 2 (2005): 201–35.
209

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210 henrice altink
accounts and anthropological data. More recently they have, like some of
their North American counterparts, started to pay attention to the mean-
ings that these contemporary observers attached to slave women’s sexual-
ity. Several scholars have addressed the stereotype of the scheming jezebel
in late-eighteenth-century proslavery writings and have begun to explore
abolitionist counterconstructions of bondswomen’s sexuality.5
This chapter expands on these sound beginnings by examining repre-
sentations of the sexuality of female slaves in a wide range of materials,
including literary sources, that Jamaican planters and metropolitan de-
6
fenders of slavery produced between 1780 and 1834. These authors fo-
cused on bondswomen’s sexuality not only because it was inextricably
connected, in very practical terms, to one of the main threats to the via-
bility of the plantation system—the failure of the slave population to pro-
duce naturally—but also because its moral overtones featured promi-
nently in abolitionist attacks on the slave system. As purity was considered
priceless for females in the metropolitan society of the day, the sexual abuse
of female slaves was an excellent means for abolitionists to demonstrate
that slavery reduced people—particularly women—to a less than human
condition and that it also corrupted slaveholders because it seduced
them from living up to the metropolitan norm of masculine restraint.
Slave men’s sexuality did not feature as extensively as slave women’s
in proslavery writings because it constituted less of a threat to the social
order. The paucity of white women in Jamaica meant that slave men sat-
isfied their sexual needs first and foremost with the females enslaved with
them.7 Bondswomen, on the other hand, had both voluntary and invol-
untary sex with white men, which resulted in colored offspring. As large
numbers of these colored slaves grew up and were set free, many white is-
landers regarded slave women’s interracial sexual relations as threatening
their superior status in society. It is no surprise, then, that the proslavery
construction of female slaves as sexually deviant drew especially on bonds-
women’s relationships with white men.
the sexually deviant slave woman
English ideas about sexuality in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries confined permissible sex to the married procreative couple but
differentiated the inherent sexualities of males and females.8 It had been
assumed that men had strong sexual desires that were beyond their con-
trol, but after the turn of the century men were increasingly urged to con-
trol and ration these passions within increasingly circumscribed avenues.9

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proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 211
The norm of female sexuality changed even more. For centuries, women
had been regarded as the lascivious sex; lust originated with them, and
men were merely victims of their wanton sexual power. To make possible
the Victorian domestic ideology that located women firmly in the home
and defined them as devoted wives and mothers, women were urged to
control their sexual urges both before and after marriage. Gradually, fe-
male chastity came to be seen as an inner virtue rather than a discipline
imposed by men. It was asserted that women did not have an innate sex
drive and that their sexual feelings were invoked only in marriage through
love. By the early nineteenth century, the ideal of the naturally passion-
less woman was firmly established.10
Proslavery writers simultaneously constructed bondswomen as the
threatening deviants from this model of inherent female sexual passivity
in their discussion of slave women’s acknowledged sexual relations with
white and slave men. First, they argued that female slaves began sexual
activities at an early age. Second, they claimed that they changed part-
ners frequently as they continued. Third, they believed that they pre-
ferred more than one partner at the same time.11 The argument that lent
most support to the construction of the sexually deviant bondswomen,
however, was that they eagerly prostituted their bodies. The overseer in
the proslavery novel Marly (1828), for instance, expresses his surprise at
the readiness with which slave women offered themselves or their daugh-
ters to him.12
Two theories were put forward to explain why bondswomen deviated
from the norm of restrained female sexuality. The first, adhered to pri-
marily by those who resided on the island (hereafter, Jamaican writers),
was that female slaves were naturally promiscuous.13 The second theory,
which was advanced less often, attributed their lack of sexual purity to
various external pressures. Resident Anthony Davis, for instance,
blamed it on nonconformist missionaries, the most prominent symbols
of humanitarianism and abolition, on the island. In 1832 he alleged that
a missionary in Spanish Town had urged slave women in his congrega-
tion to raise money to build a chapel in New Zealand by “the prostitu-
tion of their bodies.”14 Only a few defenders of slavery acknowledged that
the brutalities of slavery might have contributed to bondswomen’s
promiscuity. Former plantation bookkeeper J. B. Moreton expressed this
possibility in his guide to prospective estate personnel, entitled West
India Customs and Manners (1793): “I say if the most virtuous woman
now in England had been tutored like blacks, a slave in like manner, she
would be as lascivious and as common as any; and again, I say if blacks

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were tutored from their infancy in England, they would be as virtuous as
white women.”15
Considering these two diametrically opposed theories of deviance as
innate and acquired, it is not surprising that the proslavery debate about
the sexuality of women slaves contained competing representations of
bonded females as both property and as human beings: the scheming black
jezebel that is the immoral and evil temptress, and the potentially virtuous
female slave. These two representations of slave women’s sexuality both
characterize them in terms of their sexual relations with white men.
First, short-term relations were initiated by a black or, as was more com-
mon, a colored16 bondswoman, who was generally referred to as a prosti-
tute. It was argued that she started the relationship solely to obtain ma-
terial favors and that she did everything possible to hurt her white
partner immediately after he gave her money or gifts. These damaging
interracial liaisons contrasted with the long-term relationships initiated
by white men with the consent of the slave woman, who was referred to
as a housekeeper. Like the prostitute, the housekeeper’s innate appetite
for material goods was provided as the main reason why she entered such
a relationship.17
The percentage of colored slaves provides a rough-and-ready indicator
of the prevalence of these two types of interracial sexual relations on the
island. In 1817, there were about 30,000 whites in Jamaica and 300,000
slaves, including 36,000 coloreds.18 A population of 24,000 adult white
men, then, leads to a colored slave (presumably descendant)/white adult
male (presumed paternity) ratio of 1.5. Compare this ratio to the North
American mainland at the same time, which had a white population of 8
million and a slave population of 1.5 million, including 150,000 coloreds.
An adult white male population of about 2.8 million means that there
were only on average 0.05 colored slaves per one white male.19 Thus,
even at this rough estimate, the incidence of mixed offspring per avail-
able white father in Jamaica was thirty times that in North America.
While all proslavery writers presented both the prostitute and the
housekeeper as scheming jezebels, they regarded the domestic arrange-
ment as more of a threat to Jamaican society than casual liaisons. They
raised four objections against housekeeper relationships. First, they
threatened the social order because they led to “spurious offspring.”20 By
this characterization they meant that owners set a large percentage of
colored slaves free in recognition of their white paternity or special and
personal services and that these free coloreds upset the delicate balance
of power on the island, which—as the ending of slavery as the prime

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proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 213
civic distinction loomed—was increasingly based on skin color. During
slavery, the highest rungs of the social ladder belonged exclusively to the
small number of white islanders. The large numbers of blacks—enslaved
and free—were at the bottom of the ladder, while those of mixed parent-
age occupied a middle rank, even though many of these had gained eco-
nomic positions similar to or even exceeding those of the whites.21
Second, spurious offspring posed a threat to the productivity of the es-
tates, as colored slaves were generally exempted from heavy labor in the
fields and employed around the main house.22 Third, slave housekeepers
endangered the stability of the estates because they managed to obtain
“complete ascendancy and sway” over their white men and, as Moreton
argued, became “intolerably insolent to subordinate white men.”23 This
objection should be seen in light of the tendency of Jamaican slavehold-
ers to bequeath property and wealth to their free colored offspring. The
legitimate sons and daughters and other relatives of these men generally
argued that the slave mistress had persuaded the deceased to include his
colored offspring in his will and hence was to blame for their own limited
inheritances.24
From the 1820s, Jamaican writers ceased to focus on the slave prosti-
tute and presented her housekeeper counterpart less as a scheming jezebel
than as a potentially virtuous woman, albeit one in slavery. This accom-
modating shift was a direct response to abolitionist attacks on the loose
sexual mores of white Jamaican men. From the mid-1820s, abolitionists
contended that all interracial sexual relations were the result of male
force and—by extension—the moral depravity of white men in Jamaica.
To demonstrate the planters’ and the estate officers’ deviation from the
metropolitan norm of male sexual restraint, they not only emphasized
that these men gratified their sex drives outside such legitimate channels
as marriage, but also that married slave women ranked as high among their
victims as unmarried female slaves. For them, the sanctity of marriage
was so great as to extend even to unions among slaves.
Several Jamaican writers pointed out that no force was involved, as
slave women were keen to become housekeepers because of the material
and immaterial benefits bestowed upon them, and that the bondswomen
who engaged in sex with white men were young and single.2 5 Their
strongest argument in favor of such housekeeper relations, however, was
that they mirrored the monogamous, stable, and affectionate relation-
ships of English middle-class men and women. One local resident, for ex-
ample, argued that housekeepers were “faithful and attached, and, in
hours of sickness, evidenced all the kindness and affection of wives.”26 To

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214 henrice altink
emphasize that love rather than lust underpinned housekeeper relations,
Anthony Davis mentioned that most estate officers did their utmost to
have their housekeepers accompany them to new places of employ-
ment.27 Thus in the late 1820s and early 1830s, some proslavery writers
argued that both slave women and white Jamaican men lived up to, rather
than deviated from, the metropolitan norms of sexual restraint and do-
mestic fidelity.
The greater prominence of the potentially virtuous bondswoman in the
proslavery discussion about interracial sexual relations by the mid-1820s
accompanied a stronger denunciation of more casual sexual relations be-
tween the races. This discourse focused on the socially and politically
destabilizing effects that the offspring of interracial unions had in a soci-
ety increasingly polarized in terms of “race” and called upon slave women
and white men not to cross the color line to satisfy their sexual desires.
Cynric Williams, a visitor to Jamaica, urged for instance that white es-
tate officers should bring “a wife from England” and that female slaves
should marry “black men rather than commit adultery with white ones.”
28
The stronger denunciation of interracial sex was a direct response to
the growth of the free population after abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
This potentially politically challenging population consisted largely of
colored people, as colored slaves, more often than ones regarded as black,
were allowed to purchase their freedom or were manumitted after their
master’s death in recognition of paternity or special services. Between
1810 and 1830 the number of free men and women increased from 7.3 to
10.6 percent of the total population of the island.29 This growth in num-
bers was accompanied by increased public assertiveness: from 1815 freed-
men held regular meetings in Kingston and petitioned the House of As-
sembly (the Jamaica legislature) to extend their social and political rights.
These political initiatives reached a climax in 1830 with the establish-
ment of the first freedman newspaper, The Watchman, which became the
major organ to attack the racial discrimination on the island.30
The growing and increasingly visible free population threatened not
only the social but also the economic status of the white islanders, espe-
cially that of the nonslaveholders, as freedmen were usually highly skilled
and thus competed with white tradesmen. Several proslavery writers sug-
gested that a legal ban on sex between white men and bondswomen
would go some way toward containing the threat posed by the growing
free population. Other writers argued, however, that such a ban would do
little to stop the growth of the existing freed population, as existing slave
law stipulated that anyone four or more generations removed from black

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proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 215
ancestors was free.31 They advocated instead endogamy within each of
the six “castes” that made up Jamaican society: white, mulatto (white and
black), mustee (white and quadroon), quadroon (white and mulatto),
sambo (mulatto and black), and black.32
Endogamy was most clearly advocated in the anonymously pub-
lished novel Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), probably written by Cynric
Williams.33 The highly pejorative representations of slave women in this
novel demonstrate not only that black female bodies were simultane-
ously despised and desired but also the extent to which the proslavery de-
bate about female slaves’ sexuality wove race, sex, and gender together.
The novel’s main character is Roland, a white missionary. While he tries
to incite the slaves of a plantation to plan a rebellion and establish a
black king, he falls in love with Joanna, the white daughter of the plan-
tation owner. Roland’s assistant, Sebastian, a free mulatto man, is in love
with Joanna’s personal servant, a quadroon bondswoman called Michal.
Michal, however, has set her heart on the missionary, Roland, thus trans-
gressing the established racial boundaries.
It is especially the inset story of the mulatto Sebastian’s futile attempts
to court the quadroon Michal that conveys the novel’s message not to blur
the color line. Sebastian realizes, shortly after his first meeting with Michal,
that because of his skin color his hopes to win this slave woman’s heart
are in vain: “Quadroon damsels do not look for beauty in the youth of
their own colour; their first ideas of admiration or love are devoted to the
genuine white breed, either native or imported, to which they are them-
selves indebted, as they think, for the charms of their own persons, and
all the favour they find in the eyes of those who sigh for their affections.”34
The author presents Michal’s sexuality as an ardent deviation from
the metropolitan norm of female sexual restraint mainly by comparing
her with her virtuous white mistress, Joanna. Whereas Joanna does not
even entertain Roland’s advances, Michal actively tries to woo him so as
to become his housekeeper. Like earlier proslavery writers, the author pre-
sents this manipulative move as devoid of the love that respectable En-
glish middle-class girls were supposed to entertain toward their suitors: “this
young girl is in love with some white gentleman—for they always aspire:
ambition goes hand in hand with love.”35 This representation of Michal as
an immoral temptress coexists, however, with descriptions of her physi-
cal appearance as similar to white women, which the Westminster Review
described as “not displeasing”:36 “Her skin was nearly as white as that of
any European, of a clear and animated hue, the roses glowing upon her
cheeks— . . . and her forehead was shaded by some of the prettiest brown

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curls that ever graced the brows of a Quadroon damsel . . . the long black
eyelashes which like portcullises, guarded those portals of her heart, or
mind, or genius, . . . had been designed by nature with such attention to
symmetry, and to what we have learned from our ancestors to consider
beautiful.”37
Arguably the author eroticized Michal in order to ease his guilt of being
sexually attracted to a colored woman. Colored women, especially the
most light skinned, were far more sexually desirable than black women
to white men, not only because they were seen as more aesthetically
pleasing but also because they were considered more refined, as they were
generally employed around the house rather than in the field. As a result
of the growth of the freed population and the shift in the metropolitan
norm of male sexuality toward containment (if not restraint), sexual at-
traction to colored bondswomen had become a less acceptable desire by
the mid-1820s. The author could thus give vent to his sexual fantasies
about light-skinned female slaves by providing elaborate accounts of their
beauty.
It is, however, also possible to read the author’s eroticization of Michal
as a means through which he expressed his anxieties about the fragile sta-
tus of white Jamaicans. Quadroon women posed far more of a threat to
Jamaica’s social structure than other colored women, first because they
were so similar to white women in appearance that they could easily pass
among strangers as white, and second because the offspring of their rela-
tions with white men were four generations removed from their black
ancestors and hence legally became members of the troublesome popula-
tion of free coloreds.
The discussion in Hamel of slave women’s sexualities supports Patricia
Mohammed’s contention that by the early part of the nineteenth century
“black women’s centrality in production and reproduction may have
very well been shared or superseded by [that of ] mulatto women.”
38 In
this novel, black women feature only secondarily in the account of
Roland’s attempt to stir some slaves up into rebellion—averted by the
obeah man Hamel—and representations of them compare unfavorably
to those of the more fully delineated colored women slaves. Not only
does the author omit references to black women’s physical appearance,
he also rarely gives them names and refers to them mainly in derogatory
terms: “The missionary was no sooner left alone with the black dame than
the latter asked him if he was hungry or thirsty, and offered him all she
had to offer in the shape of refreshments. ‘Black woman,’ said he, ‘mistress
Hamel, or by what other name shall I address you? Negress! sister in the

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proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 217
spirit! . . . Tell me mistress—mammy, I should say—are you the only wife
of Hamel?’”39
Thus while black bondswomen in the novel, like their colored counter-
parts, are presented as dangers to the social order, their danger is not linked
to their sexuality but rather to their submissiveness to black men; they
docilely obey their male partners’ orders to help overthrow the plantation
regime. In fact, the allusion to polygyny in the last line of the quote seems
to suggest that the author regarded black men’s sexuality as a greater threat
to plantation society than black women’s. Early proslavery verse and fic-
tion lends further support to the idea that by the mid-1820s proslavery
writers had come to displace their main fears more on to colored than
black slave women. This literature presents the sexuality of both black
and colored bondswomen as a deviation from the metropolitan norm of
virtuous restraint. The song “Me Know No Law, Me Know No Sin,”
which is included in Moreton’s guide, demonstrates the lack of sexual re-
straint attributed in the late eighteenth century to black slave women:
Altho’ a slave me is born and bred,
my skin is black, not yellow:
I often sold my maidenhead
To many handsome fellow.
40
The treatment of the sexuality of bondswomen in Hamel, the Obeah
Man, suggests, then, that by the 1820s proslavery writers did not just
contrast slaves, regardless of color, to English middle-class men and
women but also distinguished behaviors among the defined degrees of
race in Jamaica. They attributed to each racial category a set of internal
characteristics, such as intelligence or laziness, as well as sexuality for fe-
males. These were used together with visible signs, such as skin color and
hair texture, to rank the castes in a hierarchy. In other words, by the
1820s skin color had become the primary signifier of human difference
for white Jamaicans, and sexuality the defining characteristic of women.41
Although these two images of bondswomen, the scheming jezebel and
the potentially virtuous woman, jostled for power in the proslavery de-
bate about interracial sex, fears of the former became more prominent in
the 1820s and dominated the debate throughout the period. Considering
the immediate threats to the socioeconomic standing of Jamaican writ-
ers—first in the form of the abolition of the slave trade and later in the
increase in the free population—it is unsurprising that these writers were
more likely to present the negative image of the scheming jezebel than

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218 henrice altink
were their metropolitan counterparts. The latter resorted more often to
the potentially virtuous woman, not only because they were influenced
more than Jamaican writers by the metropolitan discourses on feminine
virtue and masculine sexual restraint but also because they hoped to de-
fend the institution of slavery against abolitionist attacks by appealing to
the slaves’ virtuous potential. Metropolitan writers were convinced that
grand-scale amelioration of the slaves’ condition was the best solution to
save the plantation economy. White islanders, on the other hand, were
of the opinion that the survival of Jamaica’s plantations required not an
extension but rather further limitations of the slaves’ autonomy through
coercive restraint and physical punishment. The image of the scheming
jezebel lent itself, of course, much better to the justification of this pro-
ject than did the passive potentially virtuous woman.
The two images of slave women’s sexuality served a variety of pur-
poses. These images first had to express and thereby control the major
fears that troubled the authors—including declining output of sugar and
the growth of the freed population—which were exacerbated by the abo-
litionist attacks on the slave trade and slavery. Proslavery writings on the
sexuality of bondswomen thus support the argument advanced by various
scholars that times of social upheaval and instability, such as wars and
large-scale immigration, witness an excessive public concern about sex-
ual morality, especially that of women.42 Before 1770 planters and others
whose interests were closely tied up with then relatively prosperous Ja-
maican plantations had not expressed concern about the sexuality of
female slaves. While the majority glossed over this issue, some presented
slave women’s sexuality as a positive rather than a negative feature. One
such was Isaac Teale, whose 1765 poem “Sable Venus” described bonded
females as sensual creatures.
Sonya O. Rose, who has examined strong denunciations of women’s
sexual morality in various historical instances, has concluded that dis-
courses about the sexual morality of women intensify “when establishing
unity of identity has become especially important to a community.”
43 Her
argument also seems to explain why the proslavery debate after 1770 ex-
panded to incorporate bondswomen’s sexuality. The development of or-
ganized abolition forced the diverse group of proslavery writers to assume
a degree of unity to avert legal action that could undermine their social
and economic standing. Jamaican and metropolitan writers appealed to
the sexuality of slave women because of the broader political culture in
which they were engaged but developed it contrastingly according to the
two political contexts, West Indian and English, in which they lived.

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proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 219
attempts to contain the sexual danger
Another important function of the two images of slave women’s sexual-
ity was of course to justify interracial sex at a time when race became a
defining feature of Englishness. Sexual relations across African and Euro-
pean backgrounds were a common and accepted feature of Jamaican so-
ciety. By presenting the bondswoman as a scheming jezebel, white men
on the island could deny responsibility for their casual relations with
slave women. Such a woman was inherently wanton and lured innocent
white men in order to fulfill her insatiable sexual appetite. On the other
hand, the potentially virtuous female slave was used in the 1820s and
1830s to justify the widespread practice of housekeeper relationships on
the island. White islanders used these two images not only to justify their
interracial sexual encounters to the outside world but also to themselves.
As Trevor Burnard has shown in his study of the Jamaican slaveholder
Thomas Thistlewood, interracial sexual relations were more often forced
than consensual.44 In order to avoid regarding their sexual violation of
bondswomen as a sin or as evidence of less than civilized instincts, white
men must have told themselves that slave women were not human be-
ings but lustful savages indestructible under their assaults. The two im-
ages, then, were to a large extent shaped by real interracial sexual rela-
tions. The background of widespread interracial sex on the island poses
the question whether the increased prominence of the potentially virtu-
ous woman in the 1820s in the debate about female slaves’ sexuality ex-
pressed less permissive attitudes toward this heritage on the part of white
men on the island.
Principled proposals to control the sexual behavior of bonded females
were advanced especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, when the abolitionist debate peaked. They aimed to encour-
age monogamous sexual relations among slaves and discourage cross-
plantation unions. In 1831, James Simpson, a manager of several planta-
tions owned by absentee planters, declared that both objectives could
best be achieved by “locking up and securing the female sex from all in-
tercourse with the male sex at night.”
45 His proposal was clearly based on
the idea that slave women were naturally promiscuous. Another sugges-
tion was to offer female slaves a reward, such as a small sum of money or
a furnished cabin, upon formal marriage, that is, a marriage solemnized
by an Anglican minister.46 It was not the representation of the scheming
jezebel or the potentially virtuous companion that underlay this pro-
posal, however, but rather that of a maternal but practical jezebel—that

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220 henrice altink
is, a bondswoman who would remain sexually pure but only if she was
generously compensated for the exchange of her trade in sexual favors for
a responsible life of raising children.
Several proslavery writers felt that these schemes to make slave
women cohabit with slave men from their own estates would succeed
only if accompanied by measures to curtail the intrusive and disruptive
sexual practices of white estate officers. One strategy proposed toward
this end, which clearly built on the metropolitan idea that marriage do-
mesticated men’s sexual passions, was to employ only married white men
as estate officers. However, this would have significantly increased a
planter’s expenses, as he had to build houses and other facilities to ac-
commodate the wives and children of married employees and had to pay
family wages. As the profit margin on sugar, by far Jamaica’s most impor-
tant export commodity, dropped between 1763 and 1782 from 8.9 to 3
percent, it is no surprise that it had become common practice by the late
eighteenth century to employ only single men on estates.47 Planter and
historian Edward Long, who advocated the employment of married men
as early as 1774, acknowledged that this method to reduce interracial re-
lationships depended on making the few white, single women on the is-
land “more agreeable companions, more frugal, trusty and faithful friends”
than such dangerous bondswomen as the “housekeeper.”48 The scheming
jezebel who underlay Long’s proposal also supported planter James Adair’s
suggestion to prevent slave women from offering sexual favors to whites
under threat of severe punishment.49
Moreton, on the other hand, supported his proposal to curb interracial
sex with a representation of female slaves otherwise found only in aboli-
tionist discourse, namely that of the innocent victim. He proposed to
protect bonded women’s “virtue and chastity” through a law that would
fine white men, mainly hired estate officers, for having sex with them.50
Long, Adair, and Moreton, then, all illustrated yet another form of dis-
placement in proslavery writings about slave women’s sexuality, namely
shifting uncontrolled male sexuality away from virtuous planters on to
immoral white estate officers.
It is surprising that so few of these proposals were adopted by individ-
ual planters and also that they were not debated extensively in the as-
sembly. Planters were reluctant to adopt marriage reward schemes for
their slaves primarily because they perceived formal slave marriage as a
threat to their control over their labor forces; formal slave marriage was
a contract and thereby gave slaves a legal identity other than exclusive
obedience to a single owner, while the promise of husband and wife to

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proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 221
protect and obey threatened further to divide the slaves’ loyalty.51 The
planters’ apparent reluctance to act legally to combat interracial sex made
Jamaican slave society stand out from the slave societies on the North
American mainland.52
By the early eighteenth century practically all the colonies in North
America had adopted laws that discouraged sexual relations between
whites and blacks. Virginia was the first to do so. In 1662 it made “forni-
cation with a negro man or woman” a crime punishable by a fine. Thirty
years later, it issued a law that made interracial marriage illegal by ban-
ishing the white partner from the colony.53 This sequence of legislation
was supported by social practice. Kirsten Fischer’s recent examination of
slander suits in North Carolina indicates, for instance, that local gossip
about casual sexual relations with bondswomen could severely compro-
mise a white man’s sexual reputation.54
The majority of the white Jamaican population, by contrast, did not
frown on white men, married or single, who had casual or long-term sex-
ual relations with female slaves. For instance, in 1823 former resident
John Stewart remarked that “every unmarried man, of every class, has his
black or brown mistress, with whom he lives openly” and that “his white
female friends and relations think it no breach of decorum to visit his
house.”55 Moreover, the assembly never banned interracial marriage nor
did it, unlike the North American colonies and some other Caribbean is-
lands, adopt laws that fined white men for having sex with slave women.
The only act inhibiting interracial sexual relations passed by the assembly
was the death sentence for the rape of bondswomen, introduced in 1826.
This measure was a radical prohibition, as no other New World slave so-
ciety of the time had legal codes that made the rape of slave women a
crime.56 Not a single white man ever appeared in court under the terms of
this act, but this judicial silence should not be seen as an indication that
it succeeded in discouraging interracial sex. Rather the absence of com-
plaints reflects the complicated and intimidating process that the act im-
posed on slave women to have a white man convicted under its terms.
Whites accused of abusing slaves in other ways were usually acquitted in
colonial courts, and the responsibility imposed on the complainant also
exposed the violated female slave to the risk of corporal punishment by
local justices if her allegations were not proven.
The 1826 rape act was not a response to calls to criminalize interracial
sex in order to limit the growth of the freed population but rather a de-
vice to please the abolitionists and the government at home. In May
1823, as a result of abolitionist campaigning, the House of Commons in

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222 henrice altink
London had adopted a set of resolutions intended to ameliorate the con-
dition of slaves in the West Indies in preparation for abolition. These in-
cluded a proposal to admit slave testimony in courts of law, a program
to encourage religious instruction and marriage, and a ban on flogging
females.57 The assembly declined when asked in November 1823 to enact
these proposals for local implementation, because it saw them as a step
toward imminent emancipation.58 Instead it passed the 1826 rape act to
convince the London government that Jamaican planters were willing
to improve the condition of the slaves and thus ward off future interfer-
ence in their affairs. The act simultaneously was meant to deny the abo-
litionist emphasis on the planters’ inhumane conduct toward their slave
women.
The relaxed attitude of the Jamaican planting class toward interracial
sex becomes even more puzzling given the threats to their socioeconomic
status, which their North American counterparts did not experience and
which were exacerbated by interracial sex. Two reasons seem to explain
why planters did not actively try, either in the assembly or on their plan-
tations, to curb interracial sex. Studies on the regulation of interracial
sex in colonial North America have shown that the criminalization of in-
terracial sex was strongly linked to a leveling of sex ratios among the white
population. For example, in 1625 there were four white men to every
white woman in Virginia. In 1662, when the colony passed its ban on in-
terracial marriage, men made up only 60 percent of the total white popu-
lation.59 The balancing of sex ratios among whites was accompanied by a
rise in the social and familial status of white women, which enabled a wife
to keep any liaisons between her husband and black slaves out of public
notice and allowed her to refuse to accept possible offspring of these dis-
creet, or hidden, unions.60
Throughout the period under discussion, there were about four men to
every one white woman in Jamaica.61 This low ratio of white women pro-
vided, along with the significant (40 percent and more) numbers of fe-
males among the huge slave majorities, the demographic opportunity for
interracial unions. It also worked against the development of cultural
mores against interracial sex, a task deemed most suitable for women be-
cause of their supposed moral superiority, and left most white men on
the island without one of the most powerful cultural constraints on their
alleged powerful sexual energy: marriage. Recent studies of white Ja-
maican society during slavery have shown that while their metropolitan
counterparts increasingly began to control their sexual passions, many
white Jamaican men continued to adhere to the interlinked ideas that it

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proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 223
was essential to release the male libido in unrestrained relations with the
other sex, because it was a powerful and otherwise potentially destruc-
tive natural force, and that sexual prowess was the main test of man-
hood.62 This increasingly anachronistic faith in their own animality com-
bined with the paucity of white women largely explains why the planters
in the Jamaican assembly did not legislate against their own sexual li-
aisons with bondswomen.
A second and more important reason for the planters’ disinclination
to tackle interracial sex is that it brought short-term economic benefits
to their estates. First, it enabled them to increase their labor force at no
extra cost through the offspring of their own or their employees’ sexual
unions with slave women, because children took the enslaved status of
the mother. After 1807 this economic consideration became an impor-
tant reason for not acting against interracial sex. Second, tolerating
white estate officers’ sexual liberties with female slaves could serve as a
means to keep them on the estate at a time when white employees were
in short supply.63 Third, interracial sex helped planters control their labor
forces, since forced interracial sex, even more than flogging, demon-
strated to bondswomen that the planter’s power (and that of his officers)
was absolute. Consensual sex with housekeepers, on the other hand, en-
hanced the stability of the estates as the jobs, clothing, housing, and
other gifts bestowed on these women and their colored children set them
apart from the rest of the slave community and thus enlarged the divi-
sions within the slave community.
The proslavery debate about slave women’s sexuality did not much affect
sexual practices between white Jamaican men and bondswomen. Most
white men did not internalize the idea that gained prominence in the
1820s that female slaves could be as virtuous as white women, and they
continued to force bonded women into having sex with them. The
yawning gap between word and deed suggests that we should read the
local residents’ discussion about slave women’s sexuality, like that of the
metropolitan writers, as a displacement of other political and cultural
concerns. The ongoing discussion served first to allay residents’ fears
about the failure of the slave regime due to a growing free population,
abolitionist attacks on their slave management and masculinity, declin-
ing profits, and, as suggested in Hamel, potential slave revolt. Second, it
served to shift responsibility for these political, social, and economic
threats away from residents themselves. It is possible that for some local
planters, writing about female slaves’ sexuality served as a substitute for

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224 henrice altink
real sex with bondswomen and thus as a means to live up to the metro-
politan norm of male sexual restraint in deed, if not in fantasy. For most
resident planters, however, sex with the women they enslaved remained
a more important means to displace their fears about the future of their
enterprises than writing about it.
It can be argued that sex with bondswomen also served as a form of
displacement for white estate officers. Considering that many men at the
time continued to regard sexual prowess as a key marker of masculinity,
these local whites, whom the planters dismissed as lesser men, may have
had forced sex with slave women to counteract this demeaning treatment.
The proslavery writers’ displacement of fear, blame, and aggression thus
functioned at multiple, powerful levels, each of which served to overcome
a sense of threatened masculinity at slave women’s expense. That they
singled out female slaves for this purpose is not surprising, as it is often an
available, vulnerable person with noticeable differences who is chosen as
the object of displaced fears and aggression.64 Moreover, because of their
gender, and assumptions about female docility, slave women were re-
garded as less likely than slave men to resist abuse.
Considering the multiple purposes served by the scheming jezebel, it is
no surprise that this image did not subside with the appearance of the po-
tentially virtuous slave woman in the 1820s. These contradictory images
of bondswomen coexisted in proslavery discourse throughout the 1820s
and early 1830s because proslavery writers had different ideas about how
to avert abolitionist attacks and were also located in different political
settings. Although Jamaican writers resorted more to the scheming jezebel
and metropolitan writers more to the potentially virtuous woman, it
needs to be stressed that some writers, including Moreton and Cynric
Williams, relied on both, sometimes even within the space of one work.
This ambivalence illustrates most clearly the contradictory nature of
proslavery discourse.
However, not only was proslavery discourse on the island changing,
complex, and contradictory but it engaged with broader metropolitan
discourses on gender, race, and sexuality. Proslavery writers used the dis-
course of white female sexual restraint as the yardstick against which
they contrasted slave women’s sexual aggressiveness. Both extremes of
the proslavery representations of female slaves’ sexuality, jezebel and the
virtuous housekeeper, however, also helped shape the metropolitan dis-
course on sexuality. The construction of the naturally passionless white
woman in the late eighteenth century was made possible by displacing
female sexual aggression to women defined as other. As Sander Gilman

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proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 225
has shown, by the turn of the century not only the white prostitute but
also the scheming black jezebel served this purpose.65
The two images helped furthermore to vitalize the metropolitan dis-
course on race by sexualizing it; that is, they helped make sexual deviance
one of the key characteristics defining the inferiority of people of African
descent. These two complementing processes—the racialization of sex
and the sexualization of race—have not yet relinquished the power they
gained then over British and North American fantasies of domination,
sexual or—it may be suggested—military. Various studies have pointed
out, for instance, that black women in Africa and the diaspora are still
regarded as naturally promiscuous and immoral and as a result suffer rape
and other forms of sexual abuse by both white and black men.66 Accounts
of the spread of HIV in Africa, furthermore, link sexual excess and racial
inferiority in the minds of contemporary politicians, journalists, and even
scientists as firmly as they did in the minds of the proslavery writers.67
Although proslavery representations of bondswomen’s sexuality shaped
metropolitan discourses on gender, race, and sex in profound and lasting
ways, even more intense were the overwhelmingly negative effects they
exerted on Jamaican slave women, the convenient objects of the male
fantasies that formed the modern world. The sexual abuse that under-
pinned these representations, however, led not only slave women but
also slave men to perceive the planters’ power as absolute. The sexual
abuse of female slaves was thus critical to the maintenance of slavery it-
self, while bonded women’s misrepresented sexuality was a specific fe-
male extension of modern slavery’s pervasive misrepresentation of human
beings as property.
notes
1. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,
1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
2. See, for instance, Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1981); Deborah G. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plan-
tation South (New York: Norton, 1985).
3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 106.
4. See Rhoda E. Reddock, “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist
Perspective,” Latin American Perspectives 12, no. 1 (1985): 63–80; Hilary McD.
Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (Lon-
don: Zed Books, 1989); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838
(London: James Currey, 1990); Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World:
Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

campbell2.pt4 6/22/07 8:37 AM Page 226
226 henrice altink
5. See Hilary McD. Beckles, “Female Enslavement and Gender Ideologies in the
Caribbean,” in Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (London: Con-
tinuum, 2000), 163–82; Verene A. Shepherd, “Gender and Representation in Euro-
pean Accounts of Pre-emancipation Jamaica,” in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic
World: A Student Reader, ed. Verene A. Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles (Lon-
don, James Currey, 2000), 702–12; Barbara Bush, “‘Sable Venus,’ ‘She Devil’ or
‘Drudge’?: British Slavery and the ‘Fabulous Fiction’ of Black Women’s Identities, c.
1650–1838,” Women’s History Review 9, no. 4 (2000): 761–89.
The representation of slave women as scheming jezebels was not confined to
North America and the anglophone Caribbean. See, for instance, John Garrigus,
“Race, Gender, and Virtue in Haiti’s Failed Foundational Fiction: La Mulâtre
comme il y a Peu de Blanches,” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed.
Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 73–94.
Today, the scheming jezebel is one of the main dominant white interpretations of
black female sexuality. On the impact of this image on the sexual lives of black
women, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), ch. 4.
6. Metropolitan defenders of slavery included plantation owners, merchants, for-
mer estate officers, and also men and women who had no direct interest in the plan-
tations but were convinced that Britain’s prosperity depended on slavery.
7. Although not abundant, there is evidence that slave men had sexual relations
with white women, especially lower-class white women. See, for instance, Trevor
Burnard, “‘A Matron in Rank, a Prostitute in Manners’: The Manning Divorce of
1741 and Class, Race and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” in Working Slav-
ery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora,
ed. Verene A. Shepherd (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2002), 133–52.
8. On this new norm of sexuality, see Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The
Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1993).
9. Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1997), 100, 108; John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in
Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 45–46.
10. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 325–47, 366–73;
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the En-
glish Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1992), 401–3.
11. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the
West Indies, 2 vols. (London, 1793), 1:80.
12. Anon., Marly; or, a Planter’s Life in Jamaica (Glasgow, 1828), 133.
13. See, for instance, Jesse Foot, Observations Principally upon the Speech of Mr.
Wilberforce . . . (London, 1805), 96; [J. Stewart], An Account of Jamaica, and Its In-
habitants . . . (London, 1808), 276.
14. [Anthony Davis], The West Indies (London, 1832), 26.
15. J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (London, 1793), 160. For simi-
lar remarks, see Hector McNeill, Observations on the Treatment of Negroes in the Island
of Jamaica (London, 1788), 41; Maria, Lady Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica

campbell2.pt4 6/22/07 8:37 AM Page 227
proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 227
One Hundred Years Ago Reprinted from a Journal kept by Maria, Lady Nugent, from
1801 to 1815, ed. Frank Cundall (London: Published for the Institute of Jamaica by
Adam & C. Black, 1907), 118.
16. The term colored refers here not only to offspring of black-white unions but to
all mixed offspring.
17. Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, kept during a resi-
dence in the island of Jamaica (London, 1834), 78; Moreton, West India Customs, 77;
McNeill, Treatment of Negroes, 41; Nugent, Journal, 40.
18. Barry W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 139–53: Higman, Slave Populations
of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984), 147–48.
19. This calculation is based on the assumption of a 50/50 sex ratio and a 30/70
child/adult ratio in the white population. Figures for the white and slave populations
are from 1820. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The
Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 132; Joe William
Trotter Jr., The African American Experience, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
2001), app. 13. The fertile female slave/white adult male ratio also supports the idea
of a higher incidence of interracial sex in Jamaica than on the North American
mainland. In Jamaica there were 3.6 fertile slave women to one white adult male,
whereas in North America there were only 0.19.
20. See, for instance, [Stewart], Jamaica and Its Inhabitants, 200.
21. Gad Heuman, “The Social Structure of the Slave Societies in the
Caribbean,” in The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, vol. 3 of General History of the
Caribbean, ed. Franklin W. Knight (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 138–68.
22. Nugent, Journal, 118; McNeil, Treatment of Negroes, 42; [Stewart], Jamaica
and Its Inhabitants, 200.
23. Ibid.; Moreton, West India Customs, 77.
24. See Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Col-
oreds in Jamaica 1792–1865 (Oxford: Clio, 1981), 6, 28; Christer Petley, “Boundaries
of Rule, Ties of Dependency: Jamaican Planters, Local Society and the Metropole,
1800–1834” (PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2003), ch. 7; Trevor Burnard, Mas-
tery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican
World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), ch. 7.
25. See, for example, James McQueen, The West India Colonies: The Calumnies
and Misrepresentations Circulated against Them by the Edinburgh Review (London,
1824), 230–33; Alexander Barclay, A Practical View of the Present State of Slavery in
the West Indies (London, 1827), 100
26. A Resident, Sketches and Recollections of the West Indies (London, 1828), 231.
27. [Davis], The West Indies, 70.
28. Cynric Williams, Tour through the Island of Jamaica from the Western to the East-
ern End in 1823 (London, 1827), 56, 310.
29. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 380–84.
30. Heuman, Between Black and White, chs. 2–3; Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow
of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 424–26.

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228 henrice altink
31. The law was enacted in 1733. Higman, Slave Populations of the British
Caribbean, 147.
32. Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 167.
33. Westminster Review, April 1827, 445.
34. Hamel, the Obeah Man, 2 vols. (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827), 1:77.
35. Ibid., 193; emphasis added.
36. Westminster Review, April 1827, 460.
37. Hamel, 195–96.
38. Patricia Mohammed, “‘But Most of All Mi Love Me Browning’: The Emer-
gence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as Desired,”
Feminist Review 65 (2000): 43.
39. Hamel, 83–88; emphasis added.
40. Moreton, West India Customs, 154.
41. The proslavery writers’ six-caste hierarchy was one of several attempts at the
time to theorize the differences between human beings based on visible and invisible
signs. As Roxann Wheeler has shown, many metropolitan men and women contin-
ued to rank human beings on the basis of older criteria, such as Christianity, civility
and rank. Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-
Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). By
the mid-nineteenth century, however, these older theories were no longer in use and
theories that explained human variety in terms of race drew increasingly upon sci-
ence to explain and justify race hierarchies. It could be argued that the growth of the
free coloreds in the 1820s sped up the process in white Jamaican society of regarding
skin color as the most important marker of racial identity.
42. See, for example, Karen Binhammer, “The Sex Panic of the 1790s,” Journal of
the History of Sexuality 6, no. 3 (1996): 409–34.
43. Sonya O. Rose, “Cultural Analysis and Moral Discourses: Episodes, Continu-
ities, and Transformations,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study
of Culture and Society, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999), 217–38.
44. The planter kept a diary for thirty-seven years in which he recorded 3,852
acts of sexual intercourse with 138 slave women. A significant number of these acts
were forced and served as punishment. See Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, 156–60.
45. As mentioned in his statement before the 1832 Select Committee on the Ex-
tinction of Slavery. Parliamentary Papers (hereafter, PP), 1831–32, vol. 20, 393.
46. See, for example, James M. Adair, Unanswerable Arguments against the Aboli-
tion of the Slave Trade (London: 1790), 161. Nonconformist marriages exceeded for-
mal marriages in number but, as in the mother country at the time, were not legally
recognized.
47. John R. Ward, “The Profitability of Sugar Planting in the British West Indies,
1650–1834,” Economic History Review 31, no. 2 (1978): 197–213.
48. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (London, 1774), 330.
49. Adair, Unanswerable Arguments, 161.
50. Moreton, West India Customs, 155.

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proslavery representations of jamaican slave women’s sexuality 229
51. See Henrice Altink, Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery
and Abolition, 1780-1838 (New York: Routledge, 2007), ch. 4.
52. For a good overview of the regulation of interracial sex in colonial America,
see A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Barbara Kopytoff, “Racial Purity and Interracial
Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia,” Georgetown Law Journal 77,
no. 6 (1989): 1967–2029.
53. Paul Finkelman, “Crimes of Love, Misdemeanors of Passion: The Regulation
of Race and Sex in the Colonial South,” in The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early
South, ed. Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 127–31. The Virginia laws criminalized both sexual relations between
whites and blacks and those between whites and Native Americans. These laws, like
those in other colonies, aimed primarily at preventing the sexual pollution of white
women.
54. Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North
Carolina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 149–55. For similar accounts see
Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color
Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003);
Laura F. Edwards, “Enslaved Women and the Law: Paradoxes of Subordination in
the Post-revolutionary Carolinas,” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 305–26
(reprinted, slightly edited, in this volume).
55. J. Stewart, A View of the Past and Present State of the Island of Jamaica (Edin-
burgh, 1823), 173.
56. In some societies, such as Brazil, sexual abuse could be invoked in claims for
manumission. Slave women in these societies, then, had some means of legal redress
in case of abuse. See, for instance, Keila Grinberg, “Freedom Suits and Civil Law in
Brazil and the United States,” Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 2 (2001): 55–82; Alejan-
dro de la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate
Revisited,” Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (2004): 339–70.
57. Blackburn, Overthrow, 422.
58. PP 1824, vol. 24, 427, 452.
59. Finkelman, “Crimes of Love,” 127–31.
60. See, for example, Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Re-
lations in Brazil and the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 238–39.
61. This estimate of the white sex ratio is based on parish records from the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and provided to me by Christer Petley.
62. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, ch. 3; Petley, “Boundaries of Rule,” ch. 7. Recent
studies on early modern masculinity have argued that sexual control of women was
key to manhood. See, for example, Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in
Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
63. The estate Worthy Park, for example, employed a total of eighty-five officers
between 1783 and 1796. Since there were usually between five and ten whites on an
estate at any one time, this suggests a very rapid turnover. Heuman, “Social Struc-
ture,” 154.
64. For a good introduction to displacement theories, see Tom Douglas, Scape-
goats: Transferring Blame (London: Routledge, 1995). Their role in the reproduction

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230 henrice altink
of the slave labor force and the growth of the freed colored population—two major
fears of the proslavery writers—explains of course also why proslavery writers singled
out slave women rather than slave men. This chapter, then, supports the thesis in
Hilary McD. Beckles’s Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society
(Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1999) that slave women were central to the dis-
courses on slavery and abolition in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
65. Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and
Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
66. See, for example, Davis, Women, Race; Barbara Bush, “History, Memory,
Myth? Reconstructing the History (or Histories) of Black Women in the African Di-
aspora,” in Images of African and Caribbean Women: Migration, Displacement, Dias-
pora, ed. S. Newell (Stirling, Scotland: Centre of Commonwealth Studies, Univer-
sity of Stirling, 1996), 3–28.
67. See, for example, David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in
Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1996), ch. 5.

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10
THE CONDITION OF THE MOTHER
The Legacy of Slavery in African American Literature
of the Jim Crow Era
felipe smi t h
A public discourse about the dangers of “hidden blackness” influenced
much of the legislation that reduced African Americans to second-class
citizenship within a few decades after emancipation. The existence of
many individuals thus defined as being of mixed race, but who were physi-
cally indistinguishable from relatives defined as white, caused many to
feel that the future of America as a “white” Western nation was threat-
ened if enough of these suspected hidden hybrids could evade the barri-
ers of race then being erected and pass as white. According to Joel
Williamson, when the rates of mulattoes among both slave and free
nonwhite populations began to mushroom just before the Civil War, the
convention that any traceable amount of black blood made the individ-
ual “all black” developed among whites distrustful of the allegiance and
good intentions of “racially mixed” people.1 From the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury on, pioneers in the pseudosciences of essentialized racial difference
also began to warn that intermarriage would destroy the very fabric of
American civilization.2
A new definition of race, the so-called one-drop rule, thus crept into
common usage and challenged the efficacy of existing laws that classified
individuals’ race according to a maximum fraction of black blood allow-
able to be considered as white. As early as 1865, but accelerating through-
out the former slave states, beginning in the first decade of the twentieth
century, this one-drop definition of race became encoded into restrictions
on interracial contact of any sort in public accommodations, in educa-
tional opportunity, in voting privileges, and particularly through interra-
cial marriage.3 The aim was to quarantine African Americans so as not to
“pollute” the public and private spheres where pure “white” Americans
conducted their lives.4
231

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232 felipe smith
That the very presence of African Americans was potentially pollut-
ing was the manifest message of this late-nineteenth-century race hyste-
ria. Consider the hyperbolic language of this anecdote about the tragic
discovery made by two Virginia newlyweds: “At the end of a year a boy
child is born to them, but, horror of horrors, it is found to be as black as
coal, and with hair as kinky as the veriest young Congo that a negress of
that race ever gave birth to in Africa. . . . [H]er first child was simply a re-
version to the black ancestry on her maternal side, and had inherited the
Ethiopian characters, and among them the black skin and kinky hair.”5
What drove this obsession with the unseen single drop of black blood
was fear of a reversion in some succeeding generation to an atavistic, pri-
mordial African phenotype antithetical to the aesthetic ideals and intel-
lectual requirements of the modern, industrialized democracy that white
Americans saw themselves becoming. According to Thomas Dixon Jr.,
author of the racist novels on which the Ku Klux Klan propaganda film
Birth of a Nation was based, “One drop of negro blood makes a negro. It
kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of in-
tellect, and lights the fires of brutal passions. The beginning of negro
equality as a vital fact is the beginning of the end of this nation’s life.
There is enough negro blood here to make mulatto the whole Republic.”6
Dixon’s language pointed horrifically to full citizenship for African
Americans as the beginning of the causal chain that would end with the
destruction of America. Dixon and others, despite advocating Jim Crow
quarantine statutes based on one-drop definitions of racial caste status as
a first step in the removal of African Americans from national life, felt
that utter extermination or at least expulsion would ultimately become
necessary to save the republic from the otherwise fatal consequences of
its broad promises of rights and freedoms.7
Beyond the obvious aversion to the African blood flowing in the veins
of the American body politic, note that in the example of the Virginia
couple quoted above, the source of racial pollution is the mother. This
focus on the maternal sources of the stain of blackness harks back to the
beginnings of racial classifications in the colonies, where definitions of
slavery and race as maternally inherited had set the newlyweds’ dilemma
in motion. Maternal descent trumped paternity as a source of identity, and
for slaves alone, as absolutely as the polluted African blood thus con-
veyed disabled the offspring. In the aftermath of slavery, many states and
localities enacted laws using race to define differential access to citizen-
ship privileges and public spaces (e.g., public conveyances and accommo-
dations, commercial and entertainment venues, religious and educational

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the condition of the mother in african american literature 233
institutions) and giving the force of law to previously informal rules of so-
cial preference toward white citizens. This system, familiarly referred to
as Jim Crow segregation, reinscribed an inferior social status for recently
freed citizens of African descent that, at its worst, replicated slavery’s
forced labor and physical violence, and, at its least intrusive, circum-
scribed their freedom of movement.8 Through Jim Crow segregation, the
language and logic of the earliest attempts to define slave status through
the “condition of the mother” survived into the era of freedom—indeed
thrived tragically. Thus, Jim Crow discrimination represented a de facto
return to a hereditary caste system based in slavery’s racial coding of the
populace. In the face of overwhelming white popular support for this
movement and its attendant race mythology, African American writers
Pauline E. Hopkins and Charles W. Chesnutt constructed thoughtful fic-
tions examining the social consequences of racial identity (including the
denial of citizenship rights and entitlements) conferred by matrilineal
descent for African Americans.
Hopkins and Chesnutt dramatized and criticized public panic about the
polluting effects of “one drop of black blood” as the “return” of an origi-
nal African (slave) mother to reclaim her unsuspecting progeny into Jim
Crow’s confinement, virtually a return to slavery itself in the exclusion
and isolation that it brought. These African American writers invoked
this motif of the inopportune return to the despised racial caste identity
of the mother to explore the tragedies of the ethical crises of African
Americans coming to terms with racial and national identities often de-
picted as being in conflict. Central to their narratives were the dilemmas
of biracial African Americans, many of whom by education and occupa-
tion belonged to the relatively comfortable group that W. E. B. Du Bois
described as the talented tenth, and who experienced overwhelming
temptation to withdraw from affiliation with darker counterparts in-
creasingly reduced to the “natal alienation” and the “social death” of
slavery that Jim Crow’s designers had intended.9
Hopkins and Chesnutt and writers like them transformed the trope of
the African mother’s return from condemnation to a despised social sta-
tus into a moment of unambiguous embrace of black identity, racial
pride, and race agency on the parts of previously ambivalent mulatto he-
roes and heroines. They thus inaugurated one of the earliest tropes of
modern African American literature: affirmation of pride in an imposed
identity designed to shame African Americans as heirs to slavery. In the
process they transformed the very meaning of slavery from a badge of
dishonor, which disqualified African Americans from full participation

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234 felipe smith
in the national society, into certification of the virtues that had enabled
group survival through the centuries of slavery’s “social death” and that
would subsequently affirm and strengthen the generations of African
Americans to come.
the condition of the mother
The background as to why mothers figured crucially in scenes in which
racially ambiguous individuals were unmasked as “black” goes back to the
earliest slave statutes in Virginia. In 1662, the Virginia colony enacted a
statute of partus sequitur ventrem to address the difficulty of assigning
places to the offspring of unions between black and white, already well
on the road to being taken presumptively as slave and free, in a rigidify-
ing and increasingly complex society: “Whereas some doubts have ar-
risen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro should be
slave or ffree, . . . all children borne in this country shal be held bond or
free only according to the condition of the mother.”10 According to Joel
Williamson, the Virginia assembly in 1662 “wrenched itself away from
the English rule that the child followed the status of its father” in an at-
tempt to clarify the social identity of the growing number of mixed-race
children in the colony through enslavement.11
The full import of exclusion eternally over the generations that this
partus sequitur ventrem language established comes through in a review
of the earliest stages in the definition of slavery in the North American
colonies. For example, in 1652, William Whittington had sold to John
Pott “one Negro girle named Jowan; aged about Ten yeares and with her
Issue and produce duringe her (or either of them) for their Life tyme. And their
Successors forever.”12 These chilling lines stipulated with ominous finality
female reproductivity as both a contractual commodity and a legal basis
for proprietary claims to the future fecundity of all offspring of the female
slave child until the exhaustion of the maternal line. Ownership of the
black womb enabled the Virginia colonials to freeze the condition of the
mother into a permanent and utterly unambiguous racial space: all black
wombs were forever collapsed into one primordial mother, passing her
original enslavement on in perpetuity, without regard to the status of the
fathers of their children. White men were correspondingly forever relieved
of acknowledging or caring for their now legally black progeny.
One famous contributor to the ignoble Virginia tradition of stalking the
descent lines of African American women was Thomas Jefferson, who
worried about the dangers of emancipation and subsequent racial inter-

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the condition of the mother in african american literature 235
marriage on the grounds that black women were physically repulsive
even to black men and that African women had mated with apes.13 An-
other in that line of Virginia scholar-aristocrats, an influential post–Civil
War historian of Southern race relations, Philip Alexander Bruce, used
his family’s huge Virginia plantation as a laboratory for observing what
he described as the “evolutionary regression” of emancipated blacks. Ac-
cording to Bruce, the new opportunities promised by emancipation had
not lessened the probability of black regression into savagery; emancipa-
tion had made their prospects worse by removing the former slaves from
the “civilizing” influences of slavery. Bruce felt that degeneration was
particularly true of black women, who, he claimed, were dramatically re-
gressing in physical character since the end of slavery due to their de-
creasing sexual contact with white men. “Into this class, all the females
of the race are slowly merging, which fact, when fully accomplished, will
produce an unpleasing appearance and temper that will be universal.”14
What was scandalous in all the pseudoscientific race theory that
shaped national laws for more than a century is the way that scholar-
racists like Jefferson and Bruce based their radical schemes of expulsion
or enslavement of African Americans on aesthetic and moral disparage-
ment of black women’s bodies. Discounting the question of Jefferson’s re-
lationship with Sally Hemings, both Jefferson and Bruce as historians of
Virginia had to have known (and therefore had to have suppressed the
information) that their own state’s laws regulating the condition of the
mother were irrefutable evidence that there had never been a time in
American history when African women had been too hideous to attract
the amorous attentions of white men.
If one drop of black blood could spawn an “atavistic, regressive, pure
African” offspring, then neither the womb of the original black slave
mother, the source of that one drop, nor the social identity associated
with it, could ever be escaped. The “atavistic” child was the essence of
that original slave mother, prone to unending and innumerable returns
to reclaim mixed-race individuals into the descent line reaching back to
“mother” Africa, the material manifestation of the legal fiction that
blacks were unfit for civilization. Marital unions involving any racial hy-
brid were thus haunted by the aesthetic and moral stigma of an “original
African slave mother,” lurking like a biological time bomb in the mythi-
cal and inescapable one drop. Black writers like Hopkins and Chesnutt,
in keeping with their intervention into this late-nineteenth-century dis-
course of race, and consistent with the developing literature of America’s
otherwise multiethnic melting pot, sought to recast the racial hybrid from

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236 felipe smith
Dixon’s image of the diseased American body politic into a model of a
utopian comprehensively ethnically inclusive future.
the mother’s return in charles chesnutt
The African American woman’s experience during and after slavery
caught the imagination of black authors of both genders in the 1890s.
Already, slave narratives like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl (written as Linda Brent, 1861) and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind
the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in The White House
(1868), and novels like William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s
Daughter (1853) (based loosely on rumors of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity
of slave children) and Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life
of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North (1859) had educated
earlier generations about the dilemmas of women in slavery and the pre-
carious nature of emancipated life for freed women. By the turn of the
century, black authors had tapped into late Victorian angst about women’s
social condition and, encouraged by the growth of an educated African
American middle class in the North, had begun to reflect the concerns of
the women’s movements battling the moral, social, and educational lega-
cies of slavery. Nearly forty years after Brown’s Clotel had dramatized the
tragic fate of a slave-born daughter of President Jefferson, imprisoned in
a slave pen symbolically positioned between the Capitol and the White
House,15 Frances E. Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) refashioned the
“tragic mulatta” heroine from victim of social injustice to social activist.
Harper depicted the educated freed woman as missionary teacher in the
American South, as indeed many graduates of the newly created colleges
and normal school for the education of African Americans had become.16
Harper gave added emphasis to the ideal of racial uplift by making Iola’s
choice of a black identity an entirely voluntary one achieved through
the sacrifice of the greater social rewards her white appearance afforded.
Charles W. Chesnutt’s stories and novels of the “color line” continued
this trend of probing the drama of slavery’s tangled genealogies in an era
increasingly paranoid about establishing clear racial boundaries. Born in
1858 of free persons of color from North Carolina, both of whose grand-
mothers were of mixed race, and whose grandfathers were probably white,
Chesnutt fantasized as an adolescent about identifying as white but opted
instead to live as African American. He worked in postwar North Caro-
lina in his twenties as the principal of the State Colored Normal School
in Fayetteville but later settled in Cleveland, Ohio, establishing himself

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the condition of the mother in african american literature 237
as a stenographer and as a local-colorist author of some repute.17 In his
1899 story “Her Virginia Mammy,” Chesnutt uses a black mother figure
to illustrate the stigma of African descent in color-line politics. Faced with
a decision about whether or not to marry the suggestively named John
Winthrop (who of course can trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower),
Clara Hohlfelder withholds her consent until she can ascertain that her
status as “Miss Nobody, from Nowhere” will do no harm to John’s ele-
vated social standing. The “Virginia mammy” who returns into Clara’s
life at this crucial moment of anticipating progeny of her own and who
provides the links to Clara’s past is, of course, her real mother, though
Clara’s adoption by a German immigrant couple has secured for Clara
herself a respectable place in the white world.
The mammy, who calls herself Mrs. Harper, gambles that she can set-
tle Clara’s nagging doubts about her worthiness to marry Winthrop by
speaking out as an authority on Clara’s respectable background, without
revealing Clara’s maternal African descent. She assures Clara of the so-
cial acceptability of her white relations (they turn out to have been a
landed Virginia clan known as the Staffords), while withholding infor-
mation about the slave condition of her mother, Mary Fairfax, saying only
that Mary “belonged to one of the first families of Virginia [FFV], and in
her veins flowed some of the best blood of the Old Dominion.”18 When
Clara attempts to tell her intended that her fears of some disreputable
past that might becloud her matrimonial happiness have proved un-
founded, John sees what she cannot—that the woman she calls her Vir-
ginia mammy is in fact her biological mother. What Clara takes as a sign
of her elevation to John’s social plane—her FFV mammy now more than
a match for his Mayflower antecedents—John sees more accurately as her
profound social liability. Amazingly, Mrs. Harper wordlessly appeals to
John not to tell Clara, pleading that it is ultimately Clara and not he
who has to be protected from the taint of blackness.
John, aware that Clara’s fear of a “dark” family secret that would dis-
qualify her to be his wife is an actuality, must make a decision about how
matrimony with a woman of African and slave descent would affect him-
self and his heirs. Having already rather whimsically boasted that as a
sign of his love, he would marry Clara even if she were colored, like her
dance students, John makes good on his declaration, agreeing to bestow
the Winthrop name upon Clara as a protection against her and society’s
paranoid obsession with racial ancestry. John’s indifference to the stigma
of the black slave mother as a potential complication of his children’s
future reveals, ironically, his “true” aristocrat’s self-assurance, a gesture

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238 felipe smith
mirroring Clara’s father, who had stood firm against his family out of love
for Clara’s African American mother. As a tangible link to the slave past,
Mrs. Harper disguises the condition of the mother behind the eu-
phemistic signifier mammy, implicitly reminding white Southerners that
even their claims to the social elite derived from their relation to a black
mother figure, perhaps also their own black mothers. The story finally
turns on the necessity of Clara’s being kept ignorant of her mother’s racial
origin in order to preserve her happiness, since we are given every assur-
ance that Clara would never have consciously disavowed her true racial
heritage for personal advancement.
In an 1898 short story, “The Wife of His Youth,” Chesnutt crosses the
racial divide to tell of a “Blue Vein” society of racially mixed but white-
appearing African Americans in “Groveland” (Cleveland), whose “cus-
todian of standards” and “preserver of . . . traditions,” “Mr. Ryder,” comes
face to face with a ghost of the past on the night he plans to announce
his engagement to Molly Dixon, an attractive young light-complected
widow. “Ryder” has changed his name from Sam Taylor and has shed a
Southern rural past for a new life in the Northern city, where he becomes
the spokesman for the near-white social group determined to preserve its
store of Caucasian genetic traits against the day when whites will inter-
marry with them freely. Ryder’s summation of the choices of affiliation
facing the Blue Veins certifies that they understand clearly that the newly
fashionable one-drop theory of race was aimed at reducing what had
been an ambiguous classificatory system into a rigid binarism: “Our fate
lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black. The
one doesn’t want us yet, but may take us in time. The other would wel-
come us, but it would be for us a backward step. . . . [W]e must do the best
we can for ourselves and those who are to follow us. Self-preservation is
the first law of nature.”19 In order to preserve the advantage of their white
racial features in a land that openly reviled bodies with a single drop of
black blood, the Blue Veins have tacitly agreed to exclude any dark-
skinned people, who would make more likely the feared “backward step”
to the original African phenotype. Thus, Ryder’s betrothal to the fair-
skinned Molly solemnizes Blue Vein endogamy as attempted exorcism of
the condition of the mother.
The ghost from the past who arrives to disturb the engagement banquet
is ’Liza Jane, the woman who had been Ryder’s common-law slave wife in
his former incarnation as Sam Taylor, though Sam himself had never
been a slave. When ’Liza Jane appears at the door of the house of her
long-departed Sam, on the very day of Ryder’s betrothal party, she does

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the condition of the mother in african american literature 239
not recognize Ryder as the man in the picture that she has carried with her
for twenty-five years. Even Ryder must examine his face in a mirror to
determine if any trace of Sam Taylor remains. Ryder must decide whether
to reveal himself to this “wife of his youth” or to ward her off as the
toothless black hag that his pretensions have made of her: “she seemed
quite old; for her face was crossed and re-crossed with a hundred wrin-
kles, and around the edges of her bonnet could be seen protruding a tuft
of short gray wool. . . . And she was very black,—so black that her tooth-
less gums, revealed when she opened her mouth to speak, were not red,
but blue. She looked like a bit of the old plantation life, summoned up
from the past by the wave of a magician’s wand.”20
To emphasize the spectral quality of ’Liza, Chesnutt makes her a “blue
gum,” a “regressive type” credited with the power to poison anyone she
bites, as Ryder’s affected blue veins have poisoned his relationship with
the woman he had once known in her most intimate capacities.21 As
Werner Sollors has pointed out, ’Liza seems more a “mother (or even
grandmother) figure”
22 than a spouse for the more youthful-appearing
Ryder, who in fact had been younger than ’Liza at the time of their
marriage. The collapsing of time through the generations effected by the
condition of the mother could not be clearer. ’Liza’s motherliness reflects
more than just her embodiment of the past. It also signals the condition
of the mother repackaged via the one-drop rule that threatens all the
Blue Veins with entrapment in the state-defined racial caste system.
Ryder publicly acknowledges ’Liza as the wife of his youth, a choice in
favor of ethical obligation to the past, and to himself, over social “mobil-
ity and upward drift” toward an imagined future.23 Ryder does the “right
thing” in renouncing his current youthful fiancée for the old hag, who,
despite her devotion, has no legal claim to Ryder. Principle and self-
affirmation thus triumph over the rule of unjust law. Ryder’s voluntary em-
brace of the condition of the mother, for a woman not even the mother of
progeny of his, seems on the surface to be a blow to the self-preservationist
agenda of the Blue Veins against the ancient claims of the blue gums. But
Ryder’s act also owes something to the fact that ’Liza was the one who had
saved him from being sold into slavery unlawfully. ’Liza thus returns to
bring the enslavement that she averted in his past through facilitating his
escape, shackling him to the “backward step” of low-caste affiliation.
There is something funereal in Ryder’s manner as he introduces ’Liza
as his wife, because by renouncing the younger, whiter bride for ’Liza,
he has resigned himself to the extinction of his own lineage in her with-
ered womb, against all his instincts for self-preservation. Yet Ryder’s

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240 felipe smith
renunciation of the fair Molly suggests that his intention to marry her after
decades of bachelorhood may have been more the result of an ideological
obligation to “preserve” his Caucasian features by mating with a woman
“whiter than he, and better educated”24 than a sign of any deep affection
for his intended bride. In making Ryder’s choice a decision to “preserve”
an ideal of honest self-affirmation less self-interested than mulatto eu-
genics, and one endorsed by the assembled Blue Vein community in con-
trasting and guiltily deceptive “white” terms, Chesnutt argues for public
certification of the slave mother’s virtues, by means of which the “race” has
persevered as such, beyond slavery, as the necessary gesture demanded of
African American leadership in an era that witnesses the public demo-
nization of African descent.
By contrast, Chesnutt’s 1900 novel The House behind the Cedars pre-
sents yet another male faced with the dilemma of embracing or rejecting
the stigma of slavery in the body of a woman. In a morality tale that ends
tragically for the offspring of slavery’s genetic entanglements, the well-
born white suitor George Tryon, unlike John Winthrop, fails to live up to
his boast that he would love Rena Walden even if she were mixed race,
like the mulatto servant girl Mimy. When Tryon eventually learns of
Rena’s African ancestry, “love . . . [gave] place to astonishment and hor-
ror.”25 His imagination spurred on by a newspaper article that assured its
readers of the latest scientific proof that “the smallest trace of Negro blood
would inevitably drag down the superior race,” Tryon suffers a nightmare
vision revealing Rena’s “true” nature: “In all her fair young beauty she
stood before him, and then by some hellish magic she was slowly trans-
formed into a hideous black hag. With agonized eyes he watched her
beautiful tresses become mere wisps of coarse wool, wrapped around with
dingy cotton strings; he saw her clear eyes grow bloodshot, her ivory teeth
turn into unwholesome fangs.”26 Poisoned by the lurid images of the one
drop transforming Rena into the original slave mother, Tryon abandons
her to a fate that predictably ends in death. For Chesnutt, the onus for
righting slavery’s wrongs to women is on men, both white and African
American, as each racial allegory forces on them an individual test of the
heart over the prejudices of the popular imagination, the only cure for the
stigma and outcast status of slavery’s maternal line.
the mother’s return in   
Pauline E. Hopkins made no less a substantial contribution than Ches-
nutt to the literary challenge to the ghost of slavery past (and Jim Crow

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the condition of the mother in african american literature 241
present) haunting the African American maternal line. A Northern-
born writer from a prominent family of both clergymen and musical per-
formers, Hopkins had come of age in postwar Boston, an important cross-
roads of New England intellectualism and African American social
activism. As a playwright and later a fiction writer, Hopkins reflected the
inspiration of her childhood encounters with icons of midcentury aboli-
tionism, William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass, and a broad com-
munity devoted to women’s uplift.27 Hopkins’s novel Hagar’s Daughter28
stages key scenes of racial unmasking as imagined confrontations with
the condition of the mother debased by slavery. Hopkins draws on the
biblical figure Hagar as the archetypal slave mother—Abraham’s concu-
bine through whom the legitimate Hebrew nation cannot be accom-
plished.29 Setting much of her story in Washington, D.C., accents the na-
tional import of the discovery of hidden blackness in three prominent
socialites of the nation’s capital. In the novel’s first section, which takes
place on the eve of the Civil War, the ne’er-do-well St. Clair Enson, son
of a prominent family of Maryland planters, returns to the home of his
older brother, Ellis Enson, accompanied by a slave trader named Walker.
They come armed with the information that Hagar, Ellis’s young wife
and the adopted daughter of the deceased owners of the Sargeant planta-
tion immediately adjacent to the Enson estate, unknown even to herself,
has black ancestry and is in fact a slave. Because Walker has papers prov-
ing his legal ownership of Hagar, he forces Ellis to pay for his own wife’s
freedom. Yet it is not until Walker raises his further legal claim to Ellis
and Hagar’s daughter that Ellis understands the full meaning of slavery
defined through the mother.
“As for the pickaninny—”
“What!” thundered Ellis, “the child, too?”
“In course,” [sic]) replied Walker, . . . “the child follows
the condition of the mother, so I scoop the pile.”30
Ellis’s introduction to the true meaning of slavery, despite his lifelong
association with a large plantation with many slaves, arises out of this
recognition of the alienating intent of the rule of the condition of the
mother with reference to the two people whom he thinks of as his near-
est kin. Ellis’s paternity is entirely irrelevant to legal possession of mother
and child because the trader Walker’s titular claim to Hagar’s womb su-
persedes Ellis’s marital (and also quasiproprietary) rights as her husband.

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242 felipe smith
After a long night of anguish, Ellis decides he will give up everything for
his wife, intending to remarry Hagar and to resettle with her in Europe to
escape the racism peculiar to the United States. Before he can put that
plan into action, however, Hagar has to grapple with the meaning of the
condition of the mother to her own mother, to herself as daughter of a slave,
as mother to her child, and to her own image of herself: “Could it be true,
or was it but a hideous nightmare from which she would soon awake? Her
mother a slave! She wondered that the very thought did not strike her
dead. With shrinking horror she contemplated the black abyss into
which the day’s events had hurled her. . . . Her name gone, her pride of
birth shattered at one blow! Was she, indeed, a descendant of naked
black savages of the horrible African jungles? . . . Her education, beauty,
refinement, what did they profit her now?”31 When Hagar sees her slave
maid, Marthy, for the first time after this revelation, her response is to
scrutinize anxiously the girl’s “black skin, crinkled hair, flat nose and pro-
truding lips” as if looking into a mirror. When she does eventually see her
own face in a mirror, Hagar’s response is to smash the glass, now that the
visage of the naked savage of the jungle lurks behind the image of the
white woman she had thought herself to be. Hagar, to whom slavery had
always seemed just, takes immediate recourse in manic self-repudiation
to deny the denigration that she experiences.
Later in the novel, after a lapse of twenty years during which Ellis,
Hagar, and the child Jewel have become separated and reunited by vari-
ous plot contrivances, Hagar’s true identity is revealed again to a Wash-
ington social world that Jewel has reentered under a different identity,
passing as Hagar’s stepdaughter. Cuthbert Sumner, Jewel’s wealthy aristo-
cratic husband, offspring of the New England abolitionists, feels sympa-
thy for Hagar’s polluting maternal ancestry but is determined to separate
Jewel from her “stepmother” before public suspicion of the matrilineal
chain can call Jewel’s ancestry into question. Cuthbert confronts Ellis
Enson, back from the “dead” over his decision to remarry Hagar twenty
years later, to return with her to Enson Hall, and to acknowledge her pub-
licly as his wife. In the conversation between abolitionist-descended
Sumner and Enson, the reformed Southern aristocrat and former slave-
holder, Hopkins locates the source of white paranoia over intermarriage
in the indelible condition inherited from the African mother, as Cuth-
bert protests, “‘But my dear Enson, you do not countenance such a—
such a—well—terrible action as a wholesale union between whites and
blacks? Think of it, my dear man! Think of our refinement and intelli-
gence linked to such black bestiality!’”32

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the condition of the mother in african american literature 243
When Ellis reminds Cuthbert of his own prior infatuation with Au-
relia Walker, the quadroon daughter of the former slave trader Walker,
Cuthbert reacts predictably, unaware of the discovery in store for him
about his own wife, Jewel: ‘“I think that the knowledge of [Aurelia’s] ori-
gin would kill all desire in me,” replied Sumner. “The mere thought of
the grinning, toothless black hag that was her foreparent would forever
rise between us.’”33 Jewel’s subsequent discovery that she is Hagar’s daugh-
ter, not her stepdaughter, by the condition of her mother links her to the
original black hag of Cuthbert’s imagination and sets in motion a crisis
for the young couple that repeats her parents’ experience with the ulti-
mate divisiveness that the one-drop rule added to the disabling condi-
tion of the mother. Hopkins’s novel ironically contrasts the Southern
aristocrat’s ability to transcend his antebellum racial prejudices and re-
deem his beloved from the stigma of slavery with the racial mythology to
which the postemancipation Northerner, Cuthbert, falls prey. He cannot
clearly see Jewel as an individual, only as a specter of the original slave
mother, and abandons her to a tragic early death.
For Hopkins, then, the outcast status of African Americans after the
Civil War is in some ways more pernicious, having become a national
mania, rather than a sectional peculiarity. Like Chesnutt, Hopkins
would later shift the question of how to address the lingering stigma of
slavery to the personal decisions of African Americans themselves.
redemption in the mother’s return
In a short story that shadows Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth,” Pauline
Hopkins similarly made the mulatto male’s decision to return to the
black mother figure a testament to the slave mother’s successful transmis-
sion of the transracial human virtues of selflessness and fidelity. In “The
Test of Manhood” (1902), at age eighteen Mark Myers deserts his mother,
“who could not be mistaken for a white woman,” leaving the South to
pass in the North as white.34 He becomes the fabled poor boy who makes
good, earning money in real estate and rising in his employer’s law firm
after five years of apprenticeship, though he is periodically troubled by
thoughts of his mother, who, like ’Liza Jane, has ventured to the North in
search of him. As the red-turbaned Aunt Cloty, she eventually becomes
the pet social rehabilitation project of Katherine Brown, the daughter
of Mark’s unsuspecting white employer and the woman he loves. On
Christmas Eve, Katherine inadvertently effects a reunion of mother and
son when Mark goes to visit her at her home with the intent of proposing

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244 felipe smith
a marriage that would seal his transition to white society and secure the
futures of his eventual children. In the act of announcing his engage-
ment to Katherine, Mark encounters Aunt Cloty, who unthinkingly
unmasks him by claiming him as her son. The effect of this revelation is
devastating: “Mark stood as if carved in stone, in an instant he saw his
life in ruins, Katherine lost to him, chaos about the social fabric of his
life.”35 But defiantly, he embraces his mother, formally renouncing any
claims to marriage with Katherine and the life of material ease that was
to have been his future for the chaos and ruin of black life in the Jim
Crow South to which he must return.
Hopkins’s Christmas story, with its black ghost of slavery past, locates
in an ironic epiphany of madonna and child the inevitability of the re-
turn of the condition of the mother as an ethical crisis for African Ameri-
cans. Mark’s physical whiteness bespeaks Aunt Cloty’s dalliance with, or
victimization by, a white man, and so Mark’s acknowledgment of “Aunt
Cloty” connotes his symbolic acceptance of responsibility for the stigma
of the sexual transgression that produced his marketable racial ambigu-
ity. His dilemma is that his dream of social ascent must come to terms
with the shame of concubinage that grew out of slavery’s colonization of
the black female womb and produced him. Mark must bridge the “gulf he
saw yawning between them” in their social stations by a voluntary return
to the mother.36 Unlike Mr. Ryder, another “white” recalled to his mater-
nal blackness, Mark’s return to the black mother here redeems the so-
cially debased condition of the mother without terminating the maternal
descent line, since nothing prevents his future marriage to an African
American woman. But like Ryder, Mark’s embrace of an unequivocal
African American social identity reclaims an intended truant back into
the struggle for race advancement.
Yet Pauline Hopkins clearly wanted to move beyond the notion that
the slave mother’s rehabilitation from slavery’s injustices required a male
champion. For her, refiguring the shame of slavery conveyed through the
black mother could be better accomplished by redefining Africa itself,
making the black mother the repository of an African spirituality of clas-
sical proportions. In her first novel, Contending Forces (1900), Hopkins
had been dubious about any cultural carryovers from Africans on the con-
tinent to African Americans, with the anxious exception of conjuration
at which she scoffed as a lingering African barbarism.37 But in Of One
Blood,38 Hopkins revised her previous doubt about residual African spiri-
tual power to make it a striking means of valorizing the image of African
motherhood. In this speculative fiction of the “lost civilization” genre,

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the condition of the mother in african american literature 245
the surviving populace of the ancient African kingdom of Meroe, a center
of mystical practices and older than Ethiopia itself, hides in the under-
ground city of Telassar, awaiting the return of a redeemer king descended
from their long-lost ruling clan. The novel’s hero, an African American
with extrasensory powers named Reuel Briggs, has been passing in Amer-
ica for white and is in pursuit of a medical degree at Harvard. But he finds
himself compelled by faltering financial circumstances to accept a posi-
tion in an archaeological expedition, where he digs deep into hidden
pasts that will lead him to this lost African city and to a recovery of his
familial heritage. Reuel reacts to the discovery of his origins with a reflec-
tion on the folklore about his heritage and the maternal origins of previ-
ously unexplained extrasensory powers, and a birthmark: “It was a tradi-
tion among those who knew him in childhood that he was descended
from a race of African kings. He remembered his mother well. From her
he had inherited his mysticism and his occult powers. The nature of the
mystic within him was, then, but a dreamlike devotion to the spirit that
had swayed his ancestors; it was the shadow of Ethiopia’s power.”39
The physical birthmark he possesses eventually reveals him as the re-
deemer king of Meroe, but more important is the spiritual mark of Africa
that has sensitized Reuel to the supernatural. In his medical research,
Reuel has been obsessed with “what might be termed ‘absurdities’ of su-
pernatural phenomena or mysticism.”40 His interest in psychic phenom-
ena becomes focused on the strange case of Dianthe Lusk, a featured
soloist of the celebrated black Fisk Jubilee Singers, who appears to Reuel
in a vision before he ever actually sees her on stage in the flesh. When
the actual Dianthe turns up in the hospital where Reuel is training, stiff-
ened to a catatonic condition after a train derailment, Reuel calls on a
power that he has “stumbled upon” in his quest to understand the para-
normal, “the reanimation of the body after seeming death.”41
In her trancelike state, Dianthe speaks of mystical powers of her own:
“I see much clearly, much dimly, of the powers and influences behind the
Veil, and yet I cannot name them. Some time the full power will be
mine; and mine shall be thine.”42 Her cryptic utterances, a prophecy that
only her restoration to her true self will fully empower Reuel, leads Reuel
to describe her condition as a “dual mesmeric trance.”43 The dual sources
of enchantment in Dianthe’s life are clearly inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois’s
metaphorical construct of a “double-consciousness” effected by the so-
cially constructed “veil of race.” Du Bois described this essential conflict
of postemancipation African Americans as an internalized, distorted
self-image absorbed from Jim Crow America (“a world that looks on with

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246 felipe smith
amused contempt and pity”44) that obscures self-awareness and acceptance
of that self.
The resolution of Dianthe’s paradoxical and ironic comatose double
consciousness, which Reuel sensationally achieves, will involve a com-
plex return of the condition of the mother through Dianthe’s zombielike
psychic enslavement. The primary source of the psychic bondage of Di-
anthe’s unconscious consciousness is her legacy from the slavemaster-
scientist Aubrey Livingston, who haunts her family’s past. Livingston, a
deceased slave owner, was the father of the second Aubrey Livingston,
currently Reuel’s Harvard schoolmate, confidant, secret antagonist, and
(predictably, given the genre) also the brother of Reuel and Dianthe as
well. Hopkins’s complex gloss of Du Boisian double consciousness in-
volves two sources of mesmerism, however: one perverse, deriving from
the necromancy of the unholy race science of the slaveholder-father, the
other benevolent, from the maternal line of African spiritual power.
Thus Reuel, Dianthe, and the second Aubrey, antagonist and un-
known brother, share the positive and negative spiritual potentials of
both parents, The young Aubrey, drawn more toward the malignant sci-
ence of the father than to the benign influence of the mother he never
knew and desiring the spotlight for himself after Reuel’s celebrated re-
animation of Dianthe, relates at a social event how his father would en-
tertain his party guests by placing a young slave girl named Mira into a
trance, making her perform tricks and render prophecies. Thus, Di-
anthe’s trancelike condition, attributed to despised “mother” Africa, is
actually also a legacy inherited from the sorcery of consummately re-
spectable white father.
The slave girl Mira of Aubrey’s story is in fact the mother of Dianthe,
Reuel, and Aubrey. It is Mira, descendant of the ruling dynasty at Meroe,
who provides the countervailing spiritual resources to the still potent
mesmeric influence of the slavemaster Aubrey Livingston. Mira’s compli-
cated legacy includes as well Dianthe’s visible African descent, the fam-
ily’s experience of slavery in America, and their origin in African royalty.
Mira enters the story in the form of a second, inner “voice” that haunts
Dianthe’s singing, invoking the racial trope of “bondage in Egypt” as a
lived familial experience. The vehicle of this revelation is the Old Tes-
tament–derived African American spiritual “Go Down Moses,” which
Dianthe sings one evening after Reuel has departed on the archeological
expedition to Africa that will eventually lead him to the hidden city of
Telassar. Mira’s voice is detectable within Dianthe’s as she sings in “a
weird contralto, veiled as it were, rising and falling upon every wave of

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the condition of the mother in african american literature 247
the great soprano, and reaching the ear as from some strange distance.
The singer sang on, . . . the echo following it.”45
The external agent of Dianthe’s discovery of her personal past is her
maternal grandmother, Aunt Hannah, a woman previously unknown to
her but “the most noted ‘voodoo’ doctor or witch in the country.” Aunt
Hannah reveals that the power by which Mira shadows Dianthe’s voice
and life is the legacy of their family’s consecration to the ancient Egypt-
ian god Osiris. Her quest to reconnect the missing pieces of family
knowledge lost during the shattering experience of slavery parallels
Reuel’s African expedition, but with an important distinction. Even
though Reuel fulfills the role of the adventurer-hero who discovers his
royal lineage and ascends to his destined throne, significantly Dianthe
does not need to travel to discover her identity, the bad and the good of
it. Rather, she needs only to reconnect with her maternal line, extending
from royalty through American slavery into the hopeful present.
But after suffering sexual abuse from young Aubrey during Reuel’s ab-
sence in Africa, Dianthe dies, another victim of slavery’s lingering legacy
of exploiting black womanhood. To some extent, even the three siblings’
incestuous triangle (Reuel and Dianthe marry before his departure on his
expedition but do not consummate the relationship) had dual origins in
dynastic antiquity and in the still prevalent concubinage of African
American women in the South into the twentieth century. On her
deathbed, Dianthe addresses Aunt Hannah as Mother and relates to her
a prophetic vision of ancient African continuities: ‘“A very golden cloud
is printed with the fleecy words of glory: ‘I will return.’”
46 The significance
of this return, Hopkins suggests, is the eventual revelation of Africa’s
primacy in world civilization, a revision of racist doctrines that based
transatlantic slavery, the one-drop paranoia, and the entire racial caste
system on the lie that Africans were incapable of achieving civilization
and were inherently incompatible with it. The mystical mother’s return
therefore is simultaneously the African spirit’s triumph over the slave-
master’s enchantments; a dramatic refiguration of the doctrine of the
condition of the mother, reversing its humiliating reimposition of slave
status on the mother’s descendants, and a reclamation of the slave
mother’s children for a unifying ideal of Africa as redemptive mother of
all world civilization.
Hopkins’s and Chesnutt’s allegories of elective and involuntary racial
classification within and across the color line of Progressive Era America
assessed the colonial slave statutes’ self-perpetuating, ineradicable legacy

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248 felipe smith
of social caste formation through the condition of the mother. They
highlighted the personal ethical dilemmas of caring and attachment de-
riving from imposed caste identity. The virulent race consciousness fac-
ing the black talented tenth no doubt at some level included themselves
and their own decisions to affirm their own African heritages from
Africa. They sought to provide a basis for proud elective affiliation with
Africa as African Americans by deconstructing, and thus revealing the
utterly false premises of the Jim Crow doctrine of unproblematically
“separate origins, separate destinies.” In focusing on the tangled genealo-
gies growing out of the long history of the intimacy of the relationships
of slavery that the condition-of-the-mother statutes had created, they
made the point that caste distinctions based on race are absurd. “No man
can draw the dividing line between the two races, for they are both of
one blood!”47
Their generation of African American writers thus paved the way for
the more celebrated Harlem Renaissance through their committed articu-
lation of the meaning of slavery as validation of African American wor-
thiness for full participation in the social and political life of an other-
wise claimed white America. Each seized the received history of racial
mixing under, and as a central result of, slavery as an opportunity to chal-
lenge the Progressive Era’s unexamined nostalgia for the antebellum
South as a time of physical as well as legal separation, and to rehabilitate
the slave mother as a figure of redemptive race consciousness and a po-
tential source also of national racial reconciliation.
notes
1. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American
South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 32. Note: The
shifting designations of racial identity require judicious qualification, as populations
became reclassified by statute or by common usage. Understanding that race is a sci-
entifically discredited system of biological classification, I will continue to use terms
such as “race,” “black,” “white,” “mixed,” “mulatto,” and so on as appropriate to the
historical circumstances, sometimes within quotes to indicate particularly ironic, ar-
bitrary, or implausible applications, but most often not.
2. See, for example, George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays
in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 49–51.
3. Pauli Murray, ed., States’ Laws on Race and Color (Cincinnati: Women’s Divi-
sion of Christian Service, Board of Missions and Church Extension, Methodist
Church, 1951, 21, 39, 90, 173, 237, 356, 428, 443–34, 462. See also Virginia R.
Domínguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 26–36.

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the condition of the mother in african american literature 249
4. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 464–65.
5. Robert W. Shufeldt, The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization (Boston: R.
G. Badger, 1907), 95–96.
6. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden,
1865–1900 (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902), 242.
7. John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority,
1859–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 210.
8. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 224–58.
9. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in
Non-Periodical Literature Edited by Others, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY:
Kraus-Thomson, 1982), 17–29. See also Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death:
A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 13.
10. Michael J. Cassity, Legacy of Fear: American Race Relations to 1900 (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1985), 22.
11. Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States
(New York: Free Press, 1980), 8.
12. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,
1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 75; emphasis
added.
13. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785; reprint, New York:
Harper and Row, 1964), 133. See also Jordan, White over Black, 229.
14. Philip Alexander Bruce, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman: Observations on
His Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1889), 84.
15. William Edward Farrison, introduction to Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter:
A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, by William Wells Brown (New York:
Citadel Press, 1969), 7–11.
16. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983),
99–109.
17. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 61–70.
18. Charles W. Chesnutt, Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. William L.
Andrews (New York: Penguin, 1992), 127–28, emphasis added.
19. Ibid., 105.
20. Ibid., 106–7.
21. Newbell Niles Puckett, Popular Beliefs and Superstitions: A Compendium of
American Folklore from the Ohio Collection of Newbell Niles Puckett, ed. Wayland D.
Hand, Anna Casetta, Sondra B. Thiederman, 3 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981),
1:401.
22. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 159
23. Ibid., 160.
24. Chesnutt, Collected Stories, 104.
25. Charles W. Chesnutt, The House behind the Cedars (New York: Collier, 1969),
127.
26. Ibid., 133.

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250 felipe smith
27. Hanna Wallinger, Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Athens: Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 2005), 19–29.
28. Serialized in Colored American Magazine, 1901–2.
29. Genesis, chs. 16, 21.
30. See Pauline Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter, in The Magazine Novels of Pauline
Hopkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 55–56.
31. Ibid., 57.
32. Ibid., 270.
33. Ibid., 271.
34. Pauline Hopkins, “The Test of Manhood,” in Colored American Magazine, De-
cember 1902, 115.
35. Ibid., 119.
36. Ibid., 115.
37. Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North
and South (1900; reprint, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 198.
38. Serialized in Colored American Magazine, 1902–3.
39. Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood, in Magazine Novels, 558.
40. Ibid., 442; emphasis in original.
41. Ibid., 464.
42. Ibid., 475.
43. Ibid., 471; emphasis in original.
44. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York: Bantam,
1989), 3.
45. Hopkins, Of One Blood, 502.
46. Ibid., 613.
47. Ibid., 607.

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5
Historiographical Reflections on
Slavery and Women

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11
RE-MODELING SLAVERY AS IF WOMEN MATTERED
claire rob e r t s o n a n d m arsha robins o n
For some time within the ever-expanding field of historical studies of slav-
ery, many scholars have understood that women slaves often outnumbered
men. Most slaves in the contemporary world are women. Although most of
the world’s slaves were and are women they have been invisible or nearly so
in much scholarly discourse on slavery. Scholars of slavery across several
continents have noted this absence and have urged systematic inclusion.1
In this chapter we will examine the roots of this invisibility in an eclec-
tic sample of influential works on slavery from recent decades and show
how inclusion of women and gender is transforming scholarly models of
slavery. We draw on studies from around the world that offer gendered
analyses from feminist theory and women’s history, in particular bringing
insights from studies of the Americas into dialogue with those from other
continents. Our goal is not simply to add women to the mixture in order
to achieve mainstream status but rather “to offer a new geometry which
locates the female experience within the pivot rather than on the tan-
gent.”2 Making women’s experiences the fulcrum of the field puts into
question certain conventional models. Thus our aim is to use gender as an
analytical tool to re-model slavery in ways that reflect women’s distinctive
experiences as slaves and participation as slave owners and slave users.
gendering slavery studies
As Monique Deveaux has stated that “in many societies, men’s freedom
(privilege, etc.) is contingent upon women’s unfreedom.”3 Gender is thus
253

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254 claire robertson and marsha robinson
deeply implicated in most systems of unfree labor, since any privileges or
higher status accruing to slaves went to men, even when most of the un-
free were women. Women’s history has shown the value of gendering his-
torical analysis, which means, according to Joan Scott, acknowledging
that “relations between the sexes are a primary aspect of social organiza-
tion . . . , that the terms of male and female identities are in large part
culturally determined . . . , and that differences between the sexes consti-
tute and are constituted by hierarchical social structures.”4 Slavery, as
David Brion Davis noted, is a central institution in history, and we would
add that it remains so to the present day.5 The unfree labor of women in
particular has been, and still is, a fundamental characteristic of many so-
cieties. For Gerda Lerner, the slavery of women in antiquity provided, in
fact, the model for enslaving men.6
Insights gained from women’s history and feminist theory have none-
theless been rare in slavery studies. While historians of women maintain
that history is solipsistic without the inclusion of women and gender in
every aspect, there has been a pervasive tendency to leave gender analy-
sis to those doing women’s history. Indeed, the number of articles focus-
ing on women or gender in the journal Slavery and Abolition increased
only from 7.1 percent in the 1980s to 7.9 percent between 1990 and
2002. Similarly, fewer than 1 percent of the entries in the most compre-
hensive bibliography of slavery in 1980 focused on women or gender,
while in 2002 that number had risen to only 4.4 percent.7 For every study
that included women or gender, at least ten others did not. Here we have
highlighted works notable for their inclusion of women and/or gender
(even if sometimes tangentially), while critiquing others that do not, al-
though they may be otherwise highly valued. We are not insisting that
every scholar focus exclusively on women and/or gender, but—with Joan
Scott—we believe that the inclusion of women and gender analysis en-
riches any history.
reasons for the invisibility of women
and gender in slavery studies
The causes of the widespread omission of women and gender from most
works on slavery vary, going beyond the default suggestions that there has
been a paucity of women scholars in slavery studies or that men some-
times run into difficulties when they try to interview women as sources.
More important has been the assumption that women’s history is trivial,
an attitude noted some years ago by Patricia van der Spuy and Bridget

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 255
Brereton in the historical literatures on slavery in the Cape Colony
(South Africa) and the Caribbean respectively.8 Mary Helen Washing-
ton noted somewhat earlier a double layering of patriarchal neglect re-
garding U.S. slave narratives written by women, wherein not only had
scholars ignored women but the narratives of male ex-slaves also dimin-
ished or omitted reference to women’s roles. Frederick Douglass, for in-
stance, wrote as if his escape was solitary, when he could not have suc-
ceeded without the help of a free black woman. Washington noted that
women, who were less likely to be literate, had written only 12 percent of
the then known narratives and concluded, “the life of the male slave has
come to be representative even though the female experience in slavery
was sometimes radically different.”9
Another reason little attention was paid to women and gender for so
long in the slavery literature is that males predominated in much of the
Atlantic slave trade. Anglo-American chattel slavery in the Americas
dominated slavery discourse. Scholars assumed that New World planta-
tion owners preferred males for heavy agricultural labor and that Euro-
American demand determined the heavily male sex ratio in the trade.10
However, the fact that more men than women were exported to the
Americas was due as much to Africans’ preferences for retaining women
as to Americans’ preferences for men as workers. American slave popula-
tions did not reach parity in the sex ratio until the time of the Revolu-
tion in the British North American colonies, and in the Caribbean
sometimes not until after emancipation in the 1830s. Thus, the assump-
tion that most slaves in the Americas were male was correct for much of
the history of African slavery there. Also, while women and children
predominated among enslaved Native Americans, scholars have not al-
ways made them principal subjects of analysis.11
G. Ugo Nwokeji has ably shown that this sexual imbalance in the
maritime trade requires gendered analysis of the origins of the trade in
Africa. Almost half the deportees from the Bight of Biafra from 1650 to
1700 were women, an unusually high ratio for the transatlantic trade.
Work roles in Africa generally determined who was exported, he argues,
and since men there did more agricultural work than elsewhere, they
were less likely to be sold. However, the number of women exported from
the Bight diminished later because male Aro traders preferred to retain
slave women for their own use.12
Women have also been omitted from historical scrutiny because the
slavery literature has focused on more formal, public forms of slavery,
where more male slaves were involved. Thus, North American–style

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256 claire robertson and marsha robinson
chattel slavery was best documented and most visible, whereas pervasive
female slavery within the privacy of large households elsewhere around
the world remained much less well documented. Further, the tendency to
mask enslavement of women by designating them with kinship terms or
claiming employed servant status for them rather than “possession” in a
legal sense makes it difficult to tease their presence from sources accept-
ing of these terms. In colonial India, northern Nigeria, and elsewhere,
the British assured the male leaders of newly colonized peoples that their
abolition of slavery would not affect domestic “servants.” Even though
both sexes were eligible for manumission, since women were normally
under male control it was more difficult for women to leave their owners
unless they were accompanied by a male partner. British men, ostensibly
committed to liberating slaves as part of the “civilizing” mission, none-
theless traded submission to colonial rule by colonized local men for al-
lowing them to retain control over free and enslaved women.13
models of slavery
This essay examines conventional models of slavery in light of their util-
ity for analyzing women as slaves, slave-owners and slave users, in three
sections, each dealing with a particular prominent aspect of these mod-
els: first, women’s particular status and rights (or lack of same) among
slaves; second, the work that women do or did as slaves; and finally, issues
regarding identity, agency and construction of ideals of citizenship as
they affected women slaves, based on their degrees of alienation or as-
similation, ethnicity, race, work, religion, sexuality and gender. Emphasiz-
ing these three axes allows us to analyze conventional models of slavery
to account for their omission of gender and women within a historio-
graphical framework, and also to illustrate the insights added by gender-
ing the analysis of slavery.
Status and Rights of Women Slaves
Many early studies focused on the legal status as property and denial of
the rights of citizenship to (implicitly male) slaves. The definitions of
slavery used prioritized civic alienation and the limited degrees of assimi-
lation that enslaved men could attain. Other definitions of slavery de-
fined slaves’ exclusion socially by their kinlessness. Orlando Patterson
assumed that slavery entailed natal alienation and “social death.”14 Fur-
ther insights came from Africa and Asia. Suzanne Miers, Igor Kopytoff,
and James Watson stressed that types of slavery could be arrayed along a

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 257
continuum from extreme natal alienation and total absence of rights, as
in North American chattel slavery, to slavery as a means of assimilating
outsiders into societies. Asian and African societies accorded them places
and rights, as with male slaves designated as heirs to family estates in im-
perial China, and in many African and Native American examples.15
One of the first approaches to considering women’s status as slaves in
particular came with Gerda Lerner’s hypothesis that slavery in the an-
cient world might first have been practiced on women before being ex-
tended to a deprived status for men. Her model of slavery prioritized the
enslavement of women as the “cultural invention of slavery,” [which]
“rested as much on the elaboration of symbols of the subordination of
women as it did on the actual conquest of women.”16
At the same time Angela Davis in Women, Race and Class in 1983
contested the invisibility of women in U.S. slave families as described by
major writers on U.S. slavery in the early 1970s: Eugene Genovese, John
Blassingame, and Herbert Gutman. She focused on the economic value
of slave women’s work, the sexual abuse of enslaved women, and punish-
ments for women that were equal to men’s. She also raised issues of iden-
tity for women slaves; the dominant white ideology as it affected slave
women; housework as an area of autonomy for them; their resistance to
slavery; and how slave women’s roles affected white women abolitionists’
views.17 Davis, along with Jacqueline Jones and Deborah Gray White,
thus laid the basis for a research agenda concerning women and slavery
that went beyond the negative emphasis on exclusion characteristic of
the status or rights approach.18
This agenda was absorbed only slowly into the general literature. In
1991 Orlando Patterson in Freedom in the Making of Western Culture devel-
oped Lerner’s insight by showing that Greek and Roman ideas of civic
rights, or freedom, were rooted in the prior experience of slavery, including
that of women. “Women played a decisive role in the Western social in-
vention of personal freedom. I now find it extraordinary that this fact had
not been previously established [sic]. What is more, women continued to
play a critical role in the history of this element of freedom, continuously
reconstructing a distinctively feminine version of the value after men had
embraced and refigured it in its now more familiar negative form.”19
In 1997 Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery revisited
much of the terrain covered previously by David Brion Davis, who in
Slavery and Human Progress (1984) had pointed out the coincidence be-
tween chattel slavery and the expansion of capitalism, which he framed as
“progress.” Blackburn recast Davis’s progress into “modernism” and, widen-

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258 claire robertson and marsha robinson
ing the range of associations of modern slavery in the Americas, linked it
also to instrumental rationality, nationalism, and the nation-state’s
racialized perceptions of identity, administrative bureaucracies and mod-
ern tax systems, and communications, consumerism, individualism, and
self-awareness.20 These insights of Davis, Blackburn, and Patterson have
been enriched and reanchored to women’s history by those of the feminist
theorist Linda Alcoff, who noted that ideas of freedom, selfhood, empow-
erment, reason, and truth are constituted also through concepts of sexual
difference.21
In the usual U.S. chattel slavery model, slaves’ legal inability to own
property has been a defining element of their utter lack of rights. How-
ever, in some societies slaves had the right to own property of their own,
to the point that some, although they had the means to free themselves,
preferred to buy slaves instead. In Mexican southwestern North America
and in many African societies, for instance, enslaved women could own
slaves.22 Even within North American chattel slavery, some slaves accu-
mulated personal property and manumitted themselves through self-
purchase rather than by running away or awaiting the owner’s generosity.
Indeed, slaves owning property can be termed client-chattel slavery be-
cause, even though their legal status denied them rights to their own per-
sons, their de facto condition sometimes included limited customary
rights like those of clients within a patron-client system, meaning that
they exercised a fair degree of autonomy in terms of such factors as their
place of residence and disposal of their earnings. Such slaves owed their
owners a portion of their wages and often lived apart from them. Although
this clientlike status applied more often to male slaves with skills to sell
than to women, women could also purchase their freedom with their prof-
its from growing and marketing produce, or by working as cooks, seam-
stresses, weavers, or hawkers, as noted by Ira Berlin for the Chesapeake
area of Virginia and Robert Olwell for Charleston market traders.23
Work on women enslaved in Spanish American colonial territories has
been particularly important in challenging the notion of the inherent
propertylessness of slave women. Christine Hünefeldt’s Paying the Price of
Freedom documented the “myriad and diverse mechanisms that slaves
created in anticipation of freedom and despite the resistance of slave-
holders” in colonial Lima, Peru. These mechanisms primarily involved
women slaves. Less valued for unskilled hacienda manual labor, they
were allowed to move to town and initiate the eventual manumission of
their families, using wages and profits from trade and aided by Spanish
laws that allowed slaves to force owners to set a value on them and free

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 259
them if they could raise the sum contracted. Hünefeldt’s analysis of
women’s roles in enslaved families avoids stereotyping women as either
victims or as matriarchs.24
Sandra Lauderdale Graham in House and Street: The Domestic World of
Servants and Masters in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro pointed out nu-
anced degrees of acknowledged rights of Brazilian slaves and refused to
draw a sharp distinction between free and enslaved female domestic ser-
vants. All could earn wages, were subjected to the same authority of male
and female exploiters of their labor, and were treated similarly. They also
created social networks transcending their differing civic standings and
developed other female strategies to aid self-manumission, like those noted
by Hünefeldt. Legal redress for sexual impositions or extreme physical abuse
was possible; servants, enslaved or not, could even testify in court. Gra-
ham’s study thus reveals another Latin American context where slavery
merged into clientship, a phenomenon enabled for women, in particular,
by a heritage of Spanish legal forms granting them certain rights not
common in the British tradition.25 Jane Landers’s Black Society in Spanish
Florida, and Larry Rivers’s Slavery in Florida explore the similarly varied
statuses of enslaved and free black women from the Spanish colony from
the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.26 By highlighting the
agency of individual women slaves in particular, such studies demon-
strate the superficiality of definitions of slavery based primarily on no-
tions of absolute status or rights.
The borderlands between Mexico and the American Southwest dis-
played dynamics useful for gendering slavery studies. James Brooks’s
Captives and Cousins stresses that Spanish enslavement of Native Ameri-
can women in far northern Mexico in the nineteenth century furthered
their assimilation. Brooks alludes to the slavery continuum regarding so-
cial assimilation identified by Miers and Kopytoff in documenting a wide
variety of servile statuses among Spanish captives held by Native Ameri-
cans. One of his most valuable theoretical contributions is to point out
that servile statuses were not singular; bondspersons could, at the same
time, inhabit more than one position on the continuum. However, Brooks
overemphasizes the similarities between Native American and Spanish
forms of slavery by underplaying the extreme brutality of gang rape in-
flicted on Native American women by Spanish settler men in the process
of enslaving them; Native Americans seem to have inflicted no compa-
rable trauma on the Spanish settler women they captured.27
In West African communities debtors often transferred people to
creditors as “pawns,” that is, as human pledges or collateral for debts they

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260 claire robertson and marsha robinson
owed; the pawn’s work paid the interest on the debt. Women and girls
were, of course, more useful for this purpose than men because of their
productive and reproductive (domestic) labor; hence young females
formed the great majority of people pawned. Commonly, a female pawn
would eventually marry a male member of the creditor’s family. Omission
of the bridewealth expected by the debtor’s family canceled the debt.
Pawnship was also a frequent method by which women ended up en-
slaved when creditors did not respect legal differences between the status
of pawnship, a limited form of indentured labor for a defined term, and
slavery, or labor for an indefinite term.
Gender roles severely impacted British emancipation of slaves in
early-twentieth-century northern Nigeria, as documented by Ibrahim Ju-
mare in the Sokoto caliphate. A 1901 British ordinance allowed all
slaves to redeem themselves, but males were more likely than women to
be able to take advantage of this opportunity by presenting themselves to
the colonial officials charged with documenting these claims. Women
slaves more often were trapped within domestic households by converg-
ing Islamic sharia and British notions of domesticity. If such women had
escaped, they would have left behind their children fathered by a free
man. Female slavery ended only in 1936, when the British finally offi-
cially outlawed slavery.28
The legal status of the children of slave women was a key element in
every system of slavery. Whether those children were free and equal, or
free but lower in status than children of two free parents, or born into
full enslavement as in the United States, they posed problems not only
for women attempting to escape slavery, who faced great difficulties in
taking them along, but also for owners’ lineages and families with regard
to maintaining clear boundaries between slave and free. In Islamic sys-
tems from the eighth-century Abbasid era on, as described by Ehud
Toledano and Judith Tucker, a slave woman who bore her master or one
of his free relatives a son, in particular, was supposed to be manumitted
on the death of her master and was often freed earlier. Women whose
masters married them were also freed and might become members of the
ruling elite, with accompanying dowries. Women in these cases left the
status of slave for that of wife, and motherhood could be a means for so-
cial mobility.29
Uncovering the history of women, including those in slavery, has now
become a preoccupation of some scholars of classical Greece and Rome.
Whereas K. R. Bradley’s work on Roman families and slavery barely men-
tioned women, Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves

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pioneered a sharp focus on women.30 In the collection of essays edited by
Sandra R. Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan, Women and Slaves in Greco-
Roman Culture: Differential Equations, the framing query regards the cor-
relation of, or disjunction between, the status of woman or wife and that
of slave. Such work not only problematizes issues of status and rights but
also examines symbiotic relationships between slave and free women.31
One of the most important contributions of the literature on status or
rights for women and slavery has been the suggestion that the servitude
of women sheds light on other forms of legal subordination. If Lerner
posited that women’s slavery in the ancient world was a model for slavery
in the modern Western world, Susan Mosher Stuard saw medieval
women’s “domestic” slavery, unhindered by laws, also as a precursor for
plantation slavery in the Americas. For women more than for men, gra-
dations of servitude are relevant; the statuses of free, freed, pawned, in-
dentured, junior wife, concubine, maidservant, “free” worker, client, and
chattel slave shaded into each other and/or represented different stages
within a woman’s assimilation and maturation, or both.
The servitude of women also sheds much light on the complex hierar-
chy of kin and nonkin relations within households. As Nell Painter
pointed out, “hierarchy by no means precludes attachment.” Although
some white women in the United States had authority over black slaves,
their own unquestioning obedience to white men served as a model for
the subservience of slaves. “Ideals and practices of servitude, family and
religion [were] linked in this cultural system.”
32 Slave, freed, and free
women must be included in our analysis, since slaves were or are not iso-
lates, and all persons are affected by, and in turn affect, women’s overall
status in a society. More studies on relationships among free, freed, and
slave women are needed, especially outside of the Americas.
Finally, the omission of gender analysis hinders problematizing the
status or rights of female workers in modern global industries, who may
become slaves through lack of skills and/or other opportunities, trickery,
sale by their parents, kidnapping, and so forth, may become slaves. They
are locked behind factory doors or worksite fences and subjected to
health-damaging, numbingly repetitive processes, and demanding pro-
duction quotas in situations where unionization and strikes are prohib-
ited by the police. These women workers’ fertility is controlled through
mandatory use of contraceptives and through abortions. Kevin Bales has
called their status slavery.33 Curiously, however, he did not gender his
analysis, nor did Elaine Pearson in a special issue of the New Internation-
alist entitled “The Burden of Slavery, although all her specific examples

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262 claire robertson and marsha robinson
were women.34 Clearly we need a gendered history both to analyze this
phenomenon and formulate means of abolishing such oppression.
The Work of Women and Slaves
The second aspect or axis of slavery under consideration here is enslaved
women’s work, including sex work. The chief problems in many scholarly
writings on this subject involve, on the one hand, its invisibility or trivi-
alizing its value, and on the other, assuming that women slaves were
wanted mainly for sex or concubinage, which sex was not viewed as being
work but as their exclusive use.
Historiographically, the strongest focus on work, though not on
women, has come from those influenced by Marxist models emphasizing
labor as constituting social value. In the 1960s Walter Rodney traced the
origins of slavery in Africa to the influence of capitalism through the Eu-
ropean Atlantic slave trade.35 In contrast, in 1987 Robert Miles in Capi-
talism and Unfree Labor: Anomaly or Necessity? made slavery a necessary
part of precapitalist modes of production.36 The strength of Miles’s Marx-
ist analysis, focused on Caribbean slavery, lies in his adding racism to the
materialist category of exploitive relations of production, but his mark-
ing of chattel slavery as an aspect of primitive accumulation, because it is
or was unpaid and therefore not contributory to capital formation in a
strict Marxist sense, consigns much of women’s work in any political
economy—even modern capitalism—to a precapitalist limbo. Despite
their diverging emphases, both of these slavery models in Marxist theory
omitted gender analysis and women.
Beginning in the 1970s feminist theorists, including Angela Davis
and others, revised Marxism accordingly. They broadened the definition
of women slaves’ work and emphasized its value by theorizing that the
unpaid labor of both free and enslaved women in many contexts, particu-
larly domestic ones, increases the surplus value, or profitability, of men’s
paid labor while slave labor increases capitalist profits for both genders.37
This profitability is one explanation for why slavery in its contemporary
forms became increasingly prevalent in the twentieth century. Contem-
porary slavery results from high population densities within subordinated
economies made possible by an international trade in food products and
by the endless profit seeking of multinational corporations. Going into
the twenty-first century, most of the world’s slaves are women or girls, as
they have been historically.38
Beyond historical North American and Caribbean slavery, where the
majority of enslaved males performed the least skilled, most menial labor,

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 263
in other systems higher proportions of enslaved men performed skilled
labor, filled key military roles and could have substantial political and/or
bureaucratic power, as in North Africa, China, and elsewhere.39 Enslaved
women, however, were usually confined to low-level jobs, which could
nonetheless be skilled. Susan Mosher Stuard’s study of medieval Euro-
pean slavery filled a gap in the literature between Roman and American
plantation slaveries by showing continuing “domestic” slavery for
women; many women slaves on rural estates were used in textile produc-
tion in gynaecea, female-staffed factories.40 Eurocentric notions of women
have ignored or undervalued the worth of women’s productive labor,
slave and free. Jennifer Morgan sees this phenomenon as a twentieth-
century historiographical artifact not shared by New World slave owners
in the seventeenth century, who valued women highly as laborers and
exploited their labor accordingly.41 The pervasive assumption that all
women’s work was (valueless) housework is evident in U.S. nineteenth-
century abolitionist use of the trope of female domesticity. Some aboli-
tionists objected that slavery forced women to do work unsuited to their
tender natures, as did Marx to women working in mines.42
Robertson and Klein, influenced by Claude Meillassoux,43 highlighted
work as a key factor women’s enslavement in Africa. They recognized
the predominance of women among the people enslaved in Africa, in
contrast to the male majorities sold into the Atlantic trade, and argued
that women slaves were kept in Africa more than men because:
1. Women were in demand as slaves primarily for their repro-
ductive and productive labor (both domestic and agricultural),
and only secondarily for their biological reproductive functions;
2. The demand for women slaves was linked closely to the
high labor value of free women, whose labor slave women usu-
ally replaced or enabled, and who often were the primary users,
supervisors and owners of women slaves;
3. The demand for women slaves hinged secondarily on their
utility for expanding the numbers of people within kinship systems;
4. Free women’s social structural and economic vulnerability
made them more likely to be enslaved than free men;
5. And finally, colonial-era emancipation of slaves favored
men because: women slaves were more likely to have been

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264 claire robertson and marsha robinson
assimilated within their owners’ lineages; women slaves had
more difficulty than men in acquiring the money needed to
achieve self-emancipation; and especially because free and
slave women were more likely to be involved in labor-intensive
unskilled occupations than men, while colonialism drew more
men off into skilled and/or wage labor.44
Free women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trading towns
along the West African coast had well-established rights to own and con-
trol property independently of men. Accordingly, some particularly suc-
cessful women traders, far from being victims, themselves dealt in slaves.
More commonly, free women owners and users of slaves controlled much
of the labor in systems where most of the slaves were women and some-
times were able to improve their situations economically and socially by
doing so.45 Elsewhere, when most free women were arguably property
themselves, elite women often profited directly from the labor of slaves
who performed tasks they otherwise would have had to do themselves;
in some cases women increased production of textiles and other wares by
using female “factory” slave labor. Thus, the labor value of women slaves
could be a key factor in supporting elite status for free women, who, be-
cause of systemic disabilities in acquiring capital and hiring labor for wages,
depended more on slave labor than men did, and undoubtedly rooted their
identities in ideas of superiority connected to avoidance of menial labor.
Another assumption that militated against analyzing slave women as
workers is the premise that slave women’s sexual functions are not work;
this we have called the harem assumption. Joseph Miller’s Way of Death,
for example, followed the common practice of including women slaves in
eighteenth-century Angola primarily as reproductive pawns for wealthy
men. Despite widespread evidence showing that slave women’s fertility
was substantially lower than free women’s and the inability of slave
women to produce legitimate heirs, Miller claimed that “harems of wives”
(he did not distinguish between slave and free wives) were forced to bear
more children than other free women. Women’s prominence in agricul-
tural labor in Africa, since Europeans began describing African labor sys-
tems in the fifteenth century, is attributed to increased (male) slavery
caused by the Atlantic slave trade, whereas the usual dominantly female
farming systems seem to have made women’s labor more highly valued
and men more readily exportable.46
The harem assumption focus on women as reproducers has sometimes
made invisible the significant range of productive labor performed within

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 265
Islamic harems, as described by Leslie Peirce and Fatema Mernissi.47 In
spite of the importance of women’s labor, their use as concubines is often
assumed to explain the predominance of women in the slave trades to
Muslim areas of Africa and beyond. Paul Lovejoy in Transformations in
Slavery argued that prices for women slaves in the Sokoto caliphate were
generally higher than for men because they were in demand as concu-
bines. He also noted that birth rates among enslaved women were low,
leaving us to conclude that enslaved African women were sex workers
who must have used abortifacients or had high rates of sterility due to
STDs. However, Lovejoy acknowledged that women were also the prin-
cipal agricultural workers in the Sokoto caliphate, which undoubtedly
enhanced their value.48 Patrick Manning, who attempted to grapple with
the situation of women slaves at a time when most did not, nonetheless
also assumed that harems were only about sex rather than considering
that one reason most harem women bore fewer children than other
women was that their primary duties did not include sex work.49 What
work might enslaved women have performed in harems? Mohammed
Ennaji pays specific attention to the training of slaves, including women,
to do jobs beyond characteristic domestic work, such as chefs, musicians,
and storekeepers in nineteenth-century Morocco.50
European women’s narratives of enslavement in North Africa at the
time of the Barbary Wars in the early nineteenth century also implicitly
challenge the sexual emphasis in the harem assumption. Abolitionists
wishing to whip up fervor against this “white slavery” sought usefully
sensational narratives of harem owners’ rapes of white women, only to be
disappointed when they found tales of menial drudgery and pressure to
convert to Islam. Paul Baepler assumed that “a female captive in an
Algerian seraglio . . . would be forced to recount her rape” and was skep-
tical about the lack of sex work in two white female captivity narratives.
Similarly, in the North American Southwest, Brooks expected sexual as-
sault to be a prominent part of Spanish women’s narratives of captivity
among Native Americans and accepted that the captives’ denials of rape
might have been true, but only “given the stigma attached to cross-racial
rape.”51 He thus leaves in place the general impression of enslavement of
women as primarily sexual in aim.
Graham’s study of domestic servants’ work in Rio de Janeiro has per-
haps the most detailed look at the high economic value of enslaved
women’s labor.52 Judith Carney also questioned the assumption that slave
women’s work was valueless, based on the assumption that it was largely
unskilled. She pointed out that “African-born slaves provided crucial

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266 claire robertson and marsha robinson
expertise in the rice cultivation system” in South Carolina. Mainly
women did the dehusking of the rice by hand, but eventually, with expo-
nential growth in demand for their product, this task was degendered
and men were trained to perform it.53
In many African and Asian slave systems the value of the labor of girls
and women slaves was highest for the free women who owned and used
them, since that labor replaced free women’s labor and/or expanded its
profitability. Edna Bay has demonstrated that women in slavery in the
kingdom of Dahomey were involved in a whole range of occupations,
from farmers and miners to soldiers, advisors to kings, queens, and queen
mothers.54 The overweening importance of women’s agricultural work in
Africa suggests that the Muslim ideal of secluding free women might have
heightened demand for women slaves, who did not have the same status
constraints that prevented free women from working outside the home.
Overstressing the sexual functions of women slaves also produces an
exclusive emphasis on rape and/or slave breeding. Abolitionist tracts in
the United States sometimes stressed bondswomen’s sexual vulnerability,
while contemporary cinematic representations of slavery are notable for
this emphasis. Sankofa, Amistad, and Beloved all present slavery for
women as primarily a problem of lack of control over their sexuality and
biological reproduction. The sexual violence entailed in some forms of
slavery is undoubtedly one of its most abhorrent aspects. It is also useful,
however, to move beyond disgust to evaluate how sexuality impacted
slave women’s work. Some slave women’s sexual services were routinized
as prostitution, while some bondswomen might have viewed less orga-
nized sex as work. Various slave women’s narratives, such as the one by
Harriet Jacobs, indicate the prevalence of sexual harassment and rape as
a prominent aspect of domestic servitude.55 However, systems in which
owners controlled the bodies of their slaves closely were often also sys-
tems in which systematic maltreatment and lack of provision for chil-
drearing vitiated any systematic efforts at slave breeding. Indeed, in the
United States and elsewhere, routine whipping and other physical abuse
of pregnant bondswomen in connection with their agricultural or do-
mestic work suggest that that work was more valuable to their owners
than their utility as breeders.
The high value of slave women’s work, as well as its invisibility as do-
mestic labor, also explains why slavery for women often was abolished
well after the emancipation of men, de facto or de jure, as we have seen.
Gendered labor demands also have contributed to the present resurgence
of slavery for women. In general, then, modeling slave women’s work,

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 267
especially beyond the Americas, needs to include many forms of production
located within, as well as outside of, households, as well as sexual services.
Identity, Agency, and the Construction of Ideals of Citizenship
The third axis of slavery, social identity, especially as it connects to agency,
has roots going back to Hegel and more recently has come to promi-
nence in academic studies, following a strand introduced by Orlando
Patterson with regard to male slaves. Slaves’ social identity is often based
by scholars on their degrees of agency and assimilation to specific societal
ideals of citizenship. From slaves’ own perspectives, they may find other
identities based on ethnicity, race, work, and/or religion. Gender is also
important for identity but much less documented for slaves outside of the
United States.56 However, in West Africa Sandra Greene made excellent
use of oral history stretching back to the seventeenth century to develop
a sensitive appreciation of identities among the Anlo-Ewe of the Gold
Coast as related to outsider-insider status and to slave heritage.57
Ideas of freedom related to slaves’ efforts at emancipation also might
have played a strong role in identity formation.58 The identities of slaves
and their owners were related, since they were often mutually constructed.
What this dialectical process means is that, like eighteenth-century En-
lightenment men who constructed their identities as primary and women’s
identities as “other,” slave owners might have seen slaves as “other,” but
slaves and owners alike both constructed oppositional identities. Notions
of citizenship have been negatively affected, so far as women are con-
cerned, by the assumption heavily influenced by male thought of the En-
lightenment that premised full citizenship on masculinity; men were seen
as the only fully human, rights-bearing individuals, as opposed to women,
their adjuncts.
Linking this section to the preceding one on work, Hegel pointed out
that slaves’ (and other workers’) subjectivities are mediated through their
labor in creating new objects as expressions of self, as well as through the
slaves’ recognition of their shared relationship to the master.59 Ira Berlin
and Phillip Morgan drew on these intellectual roots to emphasize how
slaves’ identities could be influenced by their assessment of their work.
Slavery was first and foremost an institution of coerced labor . . .
work was both Adam’s curse—unrelenting toil from which they
derived but few benefits—and a source of personal satisfaction
and political self-assertion. The act of creation, which even
onerous and exploitative work entailed, allowed slaves to affirm

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268 claire robertson and marsha robinson
the humanity that chattel bondage denied. By making something
where once there was nothing, slaves discredited the masters’
shibboleth that they were simply property, countered the daily
humiliations which undermined their self-esteem, and laid claim
to the fruits of their labor for themselves and their posterity.60
In fact, the first gendering of identity of slaves by scholars focused on
slave men, who were “emasculated” when forced to do “women’s work”
and deprived of control over women. Two assumptions are evident here:
first, that all women were controlled by men, and second, that property
status for the slave entailed complete loss of the rights and honor that
constitute identity.61 Angela Davis again led the way to shift the focus of
scholarly discussion to the construction of identities of women slaves.
She looked particularly at areas of work where women slaves in the
United States had a certain autonomy as a possible source of pride, and
hence identity, for them. Robertson found a sense of identity in U.S.
women’s ex-slave narratives preeminently rooted in performance of pub-
lic, as opposed to domestic, work, even to the point of their constructing
motherhood in terms of that labor.62 In Africa women—slave and free—
produced food to feed their families and sell in markets, along with other
goods manufactured at home. Men wanted wives who were good work-
ers; indeed, male material prosperity was largely based on the number of
wives men could secure to increase the goods and children under his
control, and children in turn became labor and pawns for making al-
liances with other men through arranged marriages.
Slave women’s identities are also strongly related to their degree of
agency, which is a core element in historical treatments of slavery in estab-
lishing their status as actors.63 Pervasive in many studies of slavery is the as-
sumption that women, enslaved or free, lacked agency. Hence they may be
referred to as only pawns (literally or figuratively) within a system.64 Treat-
ing women in these passive terms goes back, among other roots, to the
structural analyses characteristic of the anthropological studies of society
in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, Claude Lévi-Strauss made incest
taboos within “kin” groups of related males and their exchanges of women
among themselves the fundamental building blocks of society.65 If women’s
agency was a casualty of this exclusive emphasis on male initiative, so was
that of men in some societies who were or are comparably “exchanged”
through female authority and matrilocality. The assumed passivity of
women was an extension to other parts of the world of early modern and
nineteenth-century European laws that confined full rights of citizenship

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to men and made most women effectively the property of males. An un-
stated social Darwinist assumption prevailed that all history consists of the
unfolding of male superiority and power in various guises of patriarchy,
within which women are invariably seen as disempowered.
The intertwined statuses of slave and free women in many slave sys-
tems requires closer consideration of the agency of free women as well.
Although a growing literature regarding the Americas has taken into
account the agency of free white women as slave users and owners,66 a
paucity of literature elsewhere leaves interactions between women of
slave and free statuses in obscurity. An exception is Margaret Strobel’s
pioneering study of slave and slave-owning female-dominated households
among Swahili women in Mombasa.67 However, when Peter Haenger
mined Basel Mission archives from the mid-nineteenth-century Gold
Coast, where women predominated both as slaves and as slave users, he
was more interested in the Basel missionaries’ impact than in a gendered
analysis of their interactions.68
If women had agency as owners of slaves, so also—though to varying
degrees—did women as slaves. Rosalind Petcheskey noted that “slave cul-
ture, in rebellion against the laws of property, generated an ethic and
practice of bodily self-determination.”69 A large and long-running litera-
ture on the resistance of slaves has included women in the last twenty
years or so. Much of it concerns the United States, but two exemplary
treatments of women resisters in the Caribbean, following Lucille Math-
urin Mair’s pioneering study, are Hilary Beckles’s Natural Rebels: A Social
History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados and Bernard Moitt’s Women
and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848.70 Beckles especially pointed
out the success of self-emancipation efforts of some slaves and their ac-
tivism in abolition movements.71
In three collections of articles focusing on emancipation of slaves in
Africa and Asia, only five out of thirty-four articles differentiated the dy-
namics of women slaves’ emancipation from men’s.72 Those five attrib-
uted obstacles to women’s emancipation to their vulnerability within kin-
ship systems. Owners often claimed falsely that their slave women were
“wives,” whose attempts to escape their husbands’ control required foil-
ing; colonial administrators normally accepted that argument. However,
in German East Africa many women slaves, used largely for agricultural
labor and thus not remotely presentable to colonial officials as “wives,”
tried to escape or claimed their freedom under German law.73
The search for slave women’s agency can be distorted by the premise—
what we term the seduction assumption—of the slave woman as temptress,

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which sexualized women’s strategies for gaining personal freedom. Ennaji
presented manumission for slave women as a general result of bearing
children to the master or owner under Qur’anic provisions.74 Hünefeldt
stated that Peruvian women slaves in nineteenth-century Lima used li-
aisons with masters as a way to gain manumission, but her examples sug-
gest that this strategy often failed to free themselves, although it could
succeed in freeing their children by their owner.75 Even in New Orleans,
the most racially open U.S. context, the exchange of sexual services for
freedom for one’s children did not often succeed, since slave women’s
children took the status of their mother, and free fathers routinely denied
their paternity due to its potential for disrupting the legitimate house-
hold.76 The premise of the slave woman as seductress must also be used
with care lest it distract attention in some systems from the routine sex-
ual abuse of women by blaming the victim. Landers recounts the story
of Juana, which has all the emotive power of Toni Morrison’s novel
Beloved. Juana killed her two children when her cruel owner sold her away
from them and then survived her trial for murder by using mechanisms
available within Spanish law.77
The life histories that women slaves themselves recounted show their
struggles, resistance, ambitions, and interiority as, by writing, they de-
clared their status as active subjects, not just passive objects.78 Many of
the best studies of women and slavery focus on these narratives, which
demonstrate strong desires for freedom.79 Freedom is a central theme in
the narratives of East and Central African women slaves analyzed by
Marcia Wright. Wright’s account of Bwanikwa, for instance, illustrates
the importance of manumission in Bwanikwa’s life due to her recogni-
tion that full assimilation depended on free status. She experienced none
of the assimilation of women slaves emphasized elsewhere in the litera-
ture on slavery in Africa.80
Scholars of slavery who, like Orlando Patterson, have defined slavery
as entailing a loss of honor for slaves, omit consideration of women. Free
women in systems that valued male honor were usually bearers of male
honor, effectively possessed by men but not themselves possessors of it.
Slave women were merely symbols of male honor, which entailed male
enforcement of female virginity or virtue for free wives but for slave
women meant vulnerability to rape. Ramón Gutiérrez pointed to the op-
positional construction of honor in the Hispanic Southwest. “The
[Spanish] aristocracy found in a slave’s infamy the meaning of their own
honor.” He went on to note that “the maintenance of virtue among aris-
tocratic females was possible only because Indian and genizaro [slave]

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 271
women could be forced or persuaded to offer sexual service . . . women
were pawns in the honor system.”81
Cultural influences, intersections, interstices, and diffusion are the
foci of a growing scholarly literature on the Atlantic diaspora, stressing
identity issues in terms of self-claimed cultures—that is, Africans’ adap-
tations of their backgrounds in new environments of enslavement in the
Americas—rather than in terms of race; the latter is arguably a white-
imposed construct. However, this literature has paid scant attention to
women’s particular, gendered roles in the process of transmitting cultures
from Africa. Within feminist thinking one strand emphasizes women’s
distinctive qualities and accomplishments as sources of female identity.
Thus, some have emphasized the notion of a pan-female culture includ-
ing all women, slaves as well as free, that is complementary or opposed to
men’s and to some degree sex segregated. Carol Eastman explored what
she called the “gender-based dual nature” of Kenyan Swahili culture, in
which “the fusion of African and Arab cultural influences . . . repre-
sents the differential and dichotomous influence[s] of men and women.”
Women in this case belonged to a distinct African “female sub-culture”
descended from slave women from the interior, while men inherited
Arabized influences from their fathers. Assimilation there, contrary to
Margaret Strobel’s observations in the same region, meant the cultural
influence of slave women on free persons, both male and female, rather
than vice versa.82
Discussion of slave and free women in coastal West Africa, daughters
of European trader-fathers and African women with local kin connec-
tions, has focused on their agency as mediators between interior cultures
and those of the Atlantic and Europe.83 Mulatto women slaves in the
Americas, often sexually used or abused by whites, occupied similarly
liminal spaces and negotiated their liminality in various ways. For in-
stance, in the francophone Caribbean such women slaves had consider-
able flexibility to negotiate advantages from sexual liaisons with their
owners, though anglophones were more inflexibly racist and tolerated
fewer opportunities for negotiation from the margins.84 Brooks stressed
the many mediating functions performed by enslaved women across cul-
tural divides in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the South-
west, which created a single regionally integrated culture rather than
dual ethnically divided ones.85
Intersectionality is an influential black feminist concept pertaining to
identity among oppressed groups, so that to live as black, female, and les-
bian, for instance, in the United States is to inhabit an intersection of

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272 claire robertson and marsha robinson
statuses that do not merely add the disadvantages of each but rather mul-
tiply them.86 Jennifer Morgan in Laboring Women utilized the complex
manifestations and connections of intersectionality in focusing on slave
women’s biological reproductive functions and centering “the lives of en-
slaved women in the colonial period . . . not simply [as] an exercise of in-
clusion but [as] a foundational methodology.” In doing so Morgan ana-
lyzed how slavery changed the meaning and experiences of reproduction
for slave women.87 Hünefeldt also considered “how conceptions of integra-
tion and identity may or may not appear” along gradations of servitude.88
Within the framework we propose here, the status and identity axes of
slavery intersect in kinship, since kinship links establish identity cate-
gories as well as rights. When slave women were assimilated into lineages,
as in some African societies, their situation blurred the boundary between
free and slave women, often to the detriment of freeborn women, by em-
phasizing uncertainties linked to kin status in aspects of women’s identi-
ties. Brooks did not see the Southwestern slave trade as disastrous for its
female victims but rather as an opportunity for captives who had “the
ability to embrace the complex politics and social networks of which it
[the trade] was composed.”89 At the other end of the slavery continuum,
women snatched into the slave trade from among the Mang’anja of Cen-
tral Africa experienced catastrophic losses of security and identity, as
documented by Elias Mandala in Work and Control in a Peasant Economy.
Onaiwu Ogbomo in When Men and Women Mattered examined gender
relations within a society subjected to slave raids, the Owan of Nigeria.90
Pamela Scully pointed out that slaves, slave owners, and English abo-
litionists at the Cape in South Africa all conceptualized the meanings of
slavery and freedom partly through the language of family and gender re-
lations, and that this language in turn shaped access to freedom during
and after slavery. These different groups connected gender to discourses
of race and class to define the postemancipation era as a struggle over the
meanings of femininity and masculinity. Therefore, slave emancipation
was as much a “story of culture and identity [as] of the emergence of free
wage labor.”91 Thomas Holt emphasized the construction of freedom in
Jamaica as entailing “gendered spheres of activity and authority,” hard-
working republican citizenship for men and housewifery for women,
while Frederick Cooper pointed out that African emancipation also
“posed a problem of power and gender relations.”92
For women in slavery, then, studies from the Americas and Africa have
shown that agency was closely tied to notions of identity, which in turn
has linkages to ideas about ethnicity, race, work, gender, and sexuality.

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 273
All these played into notions of citizenship. We need more work explor-
ing these issues in all contexts, including other regions, religion, and
male sexuality, in particular.
Research on slavery can be strengthened by more systematic attention to
women and gender, especially outside the Americas, as well as to class,
race, sexuality, and other fundamental factors influencing slavery. Jen-
nifer Morgan put it very well: “When we invoke race and gender as
critical analytic categories, we set in motion radical changes. The way
we understand the configuration of power, the individual and collective
meaning attached to events, the construction of communities, the
rhythms of cultural encounter and transformation, the very terms of
change, are all transformed . . . if one dismantles the assumptions about
antecedents.”93 Our theoretical historiography of gender, women, and
slavery here has unpacked a number of problematic assumptions regard-
ing three aspects of slavery as it concerns women. In dealing with the
first axis of slavery regarding rights and status of women slaves, we found
that analyses have suffered from the normalization of the male slave and
the omission of women slaves. Similarly, the tendency to universalize
definitions of slavery that focus on rights and status sometimes perpe-
trated distortions along gendered lines. Some definitions helped mask
the history of pervasive “domestic” slavery for women, but its recovery,
however difficult, is all the more urgent since slavery helps to explain
many contemporary forms of unfree labor. In addition, gendered studies
have supported Kopytoff and Miers’s idea of a continuum of statuses and
rights across slavery systems, especially as regards women, for whom slav-
ery and freedom were or are related and relative notions, always subject
to renegotiation in a myriad of ways.
Regarding the work axis there have been strong tendencies to under-
value slave and free women’s labor and to conflate that work with slave
women’s presumed status as concubines, which we have termed the
harem assumption. Both tendencies make women’s work invisible, while
not counting sex work as work. If women now often complain of a dou-
ble day doing both their employers’ and their own household work,
women slaves often suffered superexploitation that included a quadruple
workload. Under U.S. chattel slavery women did: fieldwork from sunup
to sundown; spinning in the evenings to meet quotas; sex work; cooking,
gardening, laundry, and childcare for their owners; and domestic labor
for their families.94 Work therefore was and is at least as defining an ele-
ment in slavery for women as it was and is for men, an aspect of slavery

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274 claire robertson and marsha robinson
not confined to the Americas. It also greatly affected emancipation of slave
women, which often came more slowly for women than men because of
their differential assimilation into the workforce and into families.
Lastly, gendering the analysis of citizenship, agency, and identity is
vital in order to understand the implications of slavery for free, freed, and
slave women. “Universal” categories that exclude women have also done
a great disservice in this area. Gendered analysis, for instance, yields new
perspectives on enslaved women’s narratives but could be applied also to
men’s narratives. The impact of dominant discourses regarding appropri-
ate behavior for men seems to be that we have relatively little that
speaks to their sexuality. Homosexual rape, for instance, is a taboo sub-
ject both for scholars and in narratives, which may mandate strategic but
careful attention to their silences. What if, instead of assuming the na-
ture of the psychological impact of castration on slave eunuchs, we ex-
plored it instead? In addition, if harems were theoretically about compul-
sory heterosexuality, we might also want to look at them in terms of male
and female homosociality.
How identity and citizenship are constructed and gendered is a topic
with recognized contemporary salience but has largely been ignored with
regard to women in slavery. Women, slave and free, have often been as-
sumed to be universal victims and lack agency, that vital part of identity,
while they have been excluded not only from having the rights of citi-
zens but also from notions of ideal citizenship.
This re-modeling of women and slavery is intended to be neither es-
sentializing nor definitive but rather to open up new ways of discussing
both. If there is a consistent aspect of slavery in various societies it was
that it constantly changed its forms and functions, obligations and rights,
slaves’ productive and reproductive work, and processes of identity for-
mation, sexuality, agency, and the construction of ideals of citizenship.
Even within any one slave’s life her experiences of slavery could change,
since, as Kopytoff and Miers posited, slavery is a process rather than a
fixed status.95
In the end it is clear that only a holistic gendered analysis of slavery
can help us understand the past and improve the future, both to illumi-
nate slavery historically and eliminate slavery as a multifaceted contem-
porary phenomenon. Joan Scott noted that historians need “analysis not
only of the relationship between male and female experience in the past
but also of the connection between past history and current historical
practice.”96 Slavery is a contemporary issue; trafficking in women takes
place from the Philippines through the United States to eastern Europe,

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 275
from India to China, and from Mauretania to Sudan. Some forms of slav-
ery apply only or mostly to women or endure because mostly women are
victimized by them.97 The world capitalist economy has revised slavery to
meet its demands for profits. We can understand the persistence of the
traffic in women and children only if we re-model our history, as elo-
quently urged by Chatterjee: “ What is needed is not so much a history from
below, but a history from within, a history of exile from natalities and the
recovery of belonging, a history in which nothing was too ephemeral and
no grain of sand—the annas and pice of a slave-girl’s peculium [small
savings], or the petty fines paid by a slave-concubine—too tiny to make
up the bedrock of a colonial empire.”98 We can do better in both our
analyses and practices, which should not obscure but elucidate that which
is still vital within the world community. Incorporating women’s and
gender history into our analyses of servitude is both a scholarly and an
ethical necessity.
notes
1. Patricia van der Spuy, “Gender and Slavery: Towards a Feminist Revision,”
South Africa Historical Journal 25 (1991): 184–95; Bridget Brereton, “Searching for
the Invisible Woman,” Slavery and Abolition 13, no. 2 (1992): 86–96. Jennifer L.
Morgan, Laboring Women Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 5, notes that after the 1980s there
were only four monographs on women and New World slavery.
2. Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in
Barbados (London: Zed, 1989), 5.
3. Monique Deveaux, “Feminism and Empowerment: A Critical Reading of Fou-
cault,” in Feminist Approaches to Theory and Methodology, ed. Sharlene Hesse-Biber,
Christina Gilmartin, and Robin Lydenberg (New York: Oxford University Press,
1999), 247.
4. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), 25.
5. David Brion Davis, “Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives,” American
Historical Review 105, no. 2 (2000): 452–66.
6. Gerda Lerner, “Women and Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition 4, 3 (1983): 174–77.
7. Joseph C. Miller and Daniel H. Borus, “Slavery: A Supplementary Teaching Bib-
liography,” Slavery and Abolition 1, no. 1 (1980): 65–110; Joseph C. Miller and
Thomas E. Ridenhour, “Annual Bibliographical Supplement (2001),” Slavery and
Abolition 23, no. 3 (2002): 167–317. Works deemed to be focused on women and/or
gender either had titles with those terms in them or concerned topics that by neces-
sity focused on women or girls (family did not qualify as such a category since it is
possible to analyze families without prioritizing women or girls).
8. Van der Spuy, “Gender and Slavery”; Brereton, “Invisible Woman.”

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276 claire robertson and marsha robinson
9. Mary Helen Washington, “Meditations on History: The Slave Woman’s Voice,”
in Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960, ed. Washington (New
York: Doubleday, 1987), 3–5.
10. Well over half the bibliographical entries for 2001 in Slavery and Abolition
concern chattel slavery in the Americas. A review of the numbers arguments can be
found in David Northrup, ed., The Atlantic Slave Trade, rev. ed. (Lexington, MA: D.
C. Heath, 2000), whose first edition not only omits female authors but also fails to
mention any sources on women and slavery in its recommendations for further read-
ing. Gender analysis is also largely absent from a five-hundred-page recent reader on
slavery edited by Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette, Slav-
ery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
11. Alan Gallay in The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the
American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), waits until
pages 311–12 to say that the trade overwhelmingly included women and children.
See also Margaret Newell, “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England,
1670–1720,” paper presented at Ohio State University Early Modern History Semi-
nar (November 2001), and James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship
and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 2002).
12. G. Ugo Nwokeji, “African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic,”
William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2001): http://www.historycooperative.org/
journals/wm/58.1/nwokeji.html.
13. Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–2; Ibrahim M. Jumare, “The Late Treatment of
Slavery in Sokoto: Background and Consequences of the 1936 Proclamation,” Inter-
national Journal of African Historical Studies 27, no. 2 (1994): 303–22; Elizabeth
Thompson, Colonial Citizens Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in
French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
14. H. J. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1900), 3–4; Moses I. Finley, Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (New York: Pen-
guin, 1981), 97–98; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1982), 38.
15. Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, introduction to Slavery in Africa: Historical
and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Miers and Kopytoff (Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, 1977); James L. Watson, “Transactions in People: The Chinese Market
in Slaves, Servants and Heirs,” in Asian and African Systems of Slavery, ed. Watson
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 223–50.
16. Lerner, “Women and Slavery,” 174–77.
17. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 2–29.
18. Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South
(New York: Norton, 1985); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black
Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
19. Patterson is referring to the efforts of upper-class free Roman women to estab-
lish their legal autonomy. By extension, this argument would root mid-nineteenth-
century U.S. slave women’s notions of freedom in the simultaneous dominantly

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 277
white women’s rights movement, whereas just the opposite was true. The women’s
rights movement came out of the abolition movement, which supports Patterson’s
thesis. Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York:
Basic Books, 1991), xiii–xiv, 250–55.
20. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the
Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 4–5; David Brion Davis, Slavery and
Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 14, ch. 5.
21. Linda Martin Alcoff, “Feminist Theory and Social Science: New Knowl-
edges, New Epistemologies,” in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and
Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan (London: Routledge, 1996), 13–27.
22. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, “Women’s Importance in African
Slave Systems,” in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Robertson and Klein (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 6, 15; Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 268.
23. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1988), 136–37,
157; Robert Olwell, “‘Loose, Idle and Disorderly’: Slave Women in the Eighteenth-
Century Charleston Marketplace,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in
the Americas, ed. D. Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996), 97–110.
24. Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s
Slaves, 1800–1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 5, 32–45, 80–81,
95–96, 205–6.
25. Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants
and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 4, 11, 62, 21, 80–82, 104–5, 109, 141n7. For women’s status in North
American Spanish law, see Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African
Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: Norton, 1998); Q. Taylor
and Shirley Ann Moore, eds., African American Women Confront the West,
1600–2000 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
26. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1999), ch. 6; Larry E. Rivers, Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000).
27. Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 5–6, 30–31, 34n54, 180; Ramón A. Gutiérrez,
When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New
Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 181–83.
28. Jumare, “Late Treatment.”
29. Ehud Toledano, “Slave Dealers, Women, Pregnancy and Abortion: The Story
of a Circassian Slave-Girl in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cairo,” Slavery and Abolition
2, no. 1 (1981): 53–68; Judith Tucker, “Gender and Islamic History,” in Islamic and
European Expansion: The Forging of a Global Order, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1993), 48.
30. K. R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Con-
trol, Latonium Revue d’Etudes Latines, vol. 185 (Brussels: Latomus, 1984); Bradley,
Slavery and Society at Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Sarah B.
Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York: Schocken, 1975). See

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278 claire robertson and marsha robinson
also Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt: From Alexander to Cleopatra (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1990); Pomeroy, Spartan Women (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002). With the notable exception of David Wiles, the classicist
contributors to Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour, ed. Leonie Archer (New
York: Routledge, 1988) ignored women and gender.
31. S. R. Joshel and S. Murnaghan, Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture:
Differential Equations (London: Routledge, 1998), 1–21. Walter Scheidel makes a
thoughtful effort to uncover the hidden history of rural working-class women in an-
cient Greece and Rome. Scheidel, “The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome:
Rural Labour and Women’s Life in the Ancient World,” Greece and Rome 52, no. 2
(1995): 202–17; Greece and Rome 53, no. 1 (1996): 1–10. See also Barbara McManus,
Classics and Feminism Gendering the Classics (New York: Twayne, 1997), 18–19,
58–59.
32. Nell Irvin Painter, “Slavery and Soul Murder,” in Black on White: Black Writ-
ers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David R. Roediger (New York: Schocken,
1992), 328–30.
33. Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
34. Elaine Pearson, “Trapped in the Traffic,” New Internationalist 337 (2001): 25,
28–29. National Geographic’s special issue on contemporary slavery (September
2003) relied primarily on Bales. Similarly, the fact that most of the crimes that are
the subject of late-night reality TV shows are against women goes unquestioned and
unanalyzed.
35. Walter Rodney, “African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression on
the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Journal of
African History 7, no. 3 (1966): 431–43; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Williams, History of the
People of Trinidad and Tobago (New York: Praeger, 1964), 83–85.
36. Robert Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour: Anomaly or Necessity? (London:
Tavistock, 1987), 178, 222.
37. Claire Robertson and Iris Berger, introduction to Women and Class in Africa,
ed. Robertson and Berger (New York: Africana, 1986); Rosemary Hennessy and
Chrys Ingraham, eds., Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference, and Women’s
Lives (New York: Routledge, 1997).
38. Bales, Disposable People.
39. Patterson, Slavery; John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in
the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
40. Susan Mosher Stuard, “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slav-
ery,” Past and Present 149 (1995): 3–48.
41. J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 146ff.
42. A. Davis, Women, Race, 11.
43. Claude Meillassoux, introduction to The Development of Indigenous Trade and
Markets in West Africa, ed. Meillassoux, studies presented and discussed at the Tenth
International African Seminar at Fourah Bay College, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1969
(London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3–48; English translation, 49–86; Meillas-

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 279
soux, ed., L’esclavage en Afrique précoloniale (Paris: Maspéro, 1975); “Rôle de
l’esclavage dans l’histoire de l’Afrique occidentale,” Anthropologie et sociétés 2, no. 1
(1978): 117–48, translated as “The Role of Slavery in the Economic and Social His-
tory of Sahelo-Sudanic Africa,” in Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave
Trade on African Societies, ed. Joseph E. Inikori (London: Hutchinson, 1981), 74–99.
44. Robertson and Klein, “Women’s Importance.”
45. Ibid., 3–25, sec. 4.
46. Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade,
1730–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 101–2, 135–36. Elsewhere
Miller demonstrates further thinking about the issues involved in analyzing women
and slavery. For slave fertility rates in similar contexts, see John Thornton, “Sexual
Demography: The Impact of the Slave Trade on Family Structure”; Robert Harms,
“Sustaining the System: Trading Towns along the Middle Zaire”; Marcia Wright,
“Bwanikwa: Consciousness and Protest among Slave Women in Central Africa,
1886–1911,” all in Robertson and Klein, Women and Slavery, 48, 95–110, 246–67.
47. Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Em-
pire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Fatema Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass:
Tales of a Harem Girlhood (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994). Using concubi-
nage as an exclusive explanation for contemporary slavery for women, Jan Hogen-
dorn illustrates the concubine assumption in “Abolition and Anti-Slavery,” in A
Historical Guide to World Slavery, ed. Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5. See also Varsha Joshi, Polygamy and
Purdah: Women and Society among Rajputs (Jaipur: Rawat, 1995).
48. Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in African Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 6, 9, 12, 126, 133. See also Love-
joy, “Concubinage and the Status of Women Slaves in Early Colonial Northern
Nigeria,” Journal of African History 29, no. 2 (1988): 245–66. Lovejoy has recently
paid more attention to the situation of slave women in the Americas.
49. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African
Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 116; Edna G. Bay,
Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Char-
lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).
50. Mohammed Ennaji, Serving the Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth-
Century Morocco, trans. Seth Graebner (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 11–13, 28.
51. Paul Baepler, White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary
Captivity Narratives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 11; Brooks, Cap-
tives and Cousins, 290.
52. Graham, House and Street, 30ff.
53. Judith Carney, “Rice Milling, Gender and Slave Labour in Colonial South
Carolina,” Past and Present 153 (1996): 108–34.
54. Edna G. Bay, “Servitude and Worldly Success in the Palace of Dahomey,” in
Robertson and Klein, Women and Slavery; Bay, Wives, 340–67. See also Robertson
and Klein, “Women’s Importance,” 9–10. An earlier effort that broached some of
these issues was Boniface Obichere, “Women and Slavery in the Kingdom of Da-
homey,” Revue d’histoire d’outre-mer 66 (1978): 5–20.

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280 claire robertson and marsha robinson
55. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean F. Yellin (1861;
reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
ed., Classic Slave Narratives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); William R.
Andrews, ed., Six Women’s Slave Narratives (New York: Oxford University Press,
1988); Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, ed. Gates (New York: Warner,
2002); Thelma Jennings, “‘Us Colored Women Had to Go through a Plenty’: Sexual
Exploitation of African-American Slave Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no.
3 (1990): 15–74; Steven E. Brown, “Sexuality and the Slave Community,” Phylon 42
(1984): 1–10; Diana E. Axelsen, “Women as Victims of Medical Experimentation: J.
Marion Sims’ Surgery on Slave Women, 1845–1850,” Sage 2, no. 2 (1985): 10–13.
56. For North American sexuality related to slavery, see Catherine Clinton and
Michele Gillespie, The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1997); Anthony Parent and Susan Brown Wallace, “Child-
hood and Sexual Identity under Slavery,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3
(1992–93): 363–401; Maria Diedrich, “‘My Love Is Black as Yours Is Fair’: Premari-
tal Love and Sexuality in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Phylon 47, no. 3 (1986):
238–47.
57. Sandra E. Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave
Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996).
58. Claire Robertson, “Claiming Freedom: Abolition and Identity in St. Lucian
History,” Journal of Caribbean History 34, no. 1–2 (2000): 89–129.
59. Hegel, as interpreted by Alcoff, “Feminist Theory,” 24.
60. Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, introduction to Cultivation and Culture: Labor
and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Berlin and Morgan (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1993), 1.
61. Patterson, Slavery; Blassingame, Slave Community.
62. “Slave and Freed Women, Work and Identity,” Slave Routes: The Long
Memory Conference, UNESCO/Institute of African-American Affairs/Smithson-
ian/Schomburg Library Conference, New York University, October, 1999; Robert-
son, “Femmes esclaves et femmes libres: travail et identité de l’Afrique à l’Amérique,”
Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire 5 (2003): 123–46.
63. Scott, Gender, 18–20.
64. The common reference to “women in slavery,” as opposed to “women and
slavery,” considers women as victims of slave systems rather than as participants at
all levels, with varying statuses and degrees of agency.
65. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Penguin, 1966).
66. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South
(New York: Pantheon, 1982) pioneered this literature, notably furthered by Eliza-
beth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the
Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Marli F.
Weiner, Plantation Women in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1997).
67. Margaret Strobel, “Slavery and Reproductive Labor in Mombasa,” in Robert-
son and Klein, Women and Slavery, 111–29; see also Strobel, Muslim Women in
Mombasa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 281
68. Peter Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Towards an Under-
standing of Social Bondage in West Africa, ed. J. J. Shaffer and Paul Lovejoy, trans.
Christina Handford (Basel: P. Schlettwein, 2000).
69. Rosalind Pollack Petcheskey, “The Body as Property: A Feminist Re-vision,”
in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye
Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 397.
70. Lucille Mathurin Mair, The Rebel Woman in the British West Indies during Slav-
ery (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1975); Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels; Bernard
Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2001).
71. Hilary Beckles, “Caribbean Anti-Slavery: The Self-Liberation Ethos of En-
slaved Blacks,” Journal of Caribbean History 22 (1988): 1–19.
72. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Martin A. Klein, ed., Breaking the Chains:
Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Suzanne Miers and Martin Klein, eds., Slavery and Colo-
nial Rule in Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1999). The authors in Miers and Klein’s and
Miers and Roberts’s collections were specifically requested to include women in the
analyses. Suzanne Miers, pers. comm., 3 December 2003. Because Kwabena Opare-
Akurang ignored gender, he could not explain the failure to enforce the 1874 Gold
Coast ordinance abolishing slavery. Opare-Akurang, in Miers and Klein, Slavery and
Colonial Rule, 149–66. For a corrective, see Claire C. Robertson, “Post-Proclamation
Slavery,” in Robertson and Klein, Women and Slavery, 220–45.
73. Jan-Georg Deutsch, “The ‘Freeing’ of Slaves in German East Africa: The Sta-
tistical Record, 1890–1914,” in Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa, ed. Miers and
Klein, 109–32.
74. Ennaji, Serving the Master, 35.
75. Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 130–40.
76. Judith Schafer, “Open and Notorious Concubinage: The Emancipation of
Slave Mistresses by Will and the Supreme Court in Antebellum Louisiana,”
Louisiana History 28 (1987): 165–82.
77. Toni Morrison, Beloved: A Novel (New York: Plume, 1998); Landers, Black
Society, 187.
78. Jacobs, Incidents; Mary Prince, “History” in Classic Slave Narratives; Hannah
Crafts, Bondwoman’s Narrative.
79. Maria Jaschok, “Chinese ‘Slave’ Girls in Yunnan-Fu: Saving (Chinese)
Womanhood and (Western) Souls, 1930–1991” and other articles in Women and
Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude, and Escape, ed. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne
Miers (London: Zed, 1994); Toledano, “Slave Dealers.”
80. Marcia Wright, “Bwanikwa”; Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life-
Stories from East/Central Africa (New York: Lilian Barber, 1993).
81. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, 153, 190, 208–10, 214–15, 221.
82. Carol M. Eastman, “Women, Slaves and Foreigners: African Cultural Influ-
ences and Group Processes in the Formation of Northern Swahili Coastal Society,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 1 (1988): 1–2, 20; Eastman,

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282 claire robertson and marsha robinson
“Waungwana na Wanawake: Muslim Ethnicity and Sexual Segregation in Coastal
Kenya,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 5, no. 2 (1984):
97–112; Strobel, Muslim Women.
83. George E. Brooks, “A Nhara of the Guinea-Birsau Region”; Bruce L. Mouser,
“Women Slavers of Guinea-Conakry”; and Carol P. MacCormack, “Slaves, Slave
Owners, and Slave Dealers,” in Robertson and Klein, Women and Slavery, 271–339.
See also Hilary Jones, “History and Memory: Unraveling the Past in Saint Louis,
Senegal,” paper presented at Seventh Midwest African Studies Conference, Ann
Arbor, March 2002.
84. Moitt, Women and Slavery, 9, 59, 176; C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Tous-
saint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963), 37–44.
Both works, however, are tinged with the harem assumption. Literary criticism also
addresses identity issues; see A. James Arnold, “From the Problematic Maroon to a
Woman-Centered Creole Project in the Literature of the French West Indies,” in
Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged
Identities, ed. Doris Y. Kadish (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 164–75.
85. Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 101–3.
86. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our
Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Alex Bontemps, The
Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2001); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-
Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998); Kristin Mann and Edna G. Bay, ed., Rethinking the African Diaspora: The
Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (London: Frank Cass,
2001). For a classic explanation of intersectionality see Kimberle Crenshaw, “De-
marginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-
discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” in Feminist Legal
Theory, ed. Katherine T. Bartlett and Rosanne Kennedy (Boulder: Westview, 1991),
57–80.
87. J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 10–11.
88. Hünefeldt, Paying the Price, 213–14.
89. Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 103.
90. Elias Mandala, Work and Control in a Peasant Economy (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1990), ch. 2; Onaiwu Ogbomo, When Men and Women Mattered:
A History of Gender Relations among the Owan of Nigeria (Rochester, NY: University
of Rochester Press, 1997).
91. Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in
the Rural Western Cape, South Africa (New York: Heinemann, 1997), 15, 176.
92. Thomas C. Holt, “The Essence of the Contract The Articulation of Race,
Gender and Political Economy in British Emancipation Policy, 1838–1866,” in Be-
yond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies,
ed. Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 2000), 45–46; Frederick Cooper, “Conditions Analo-

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re-modeling slavery as if women mattered 283
gous to Slavery Imperialism and Free Labor Ideology in Africa” in Cooper, Holt, and
Scott, Beyond Slavery, 127.
93. J. Morgan, Laboring Women, 196.
94. Claire C. Robertson, “Africa into the Americas? Slavery and Women, the
Family, and the Gender Division of Labor,” in Gaspar and Hine, More than Chattel,
22–24.
95. Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery; Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery, 26.
96. Scott, Gender, 31.
97. Shrine slavery in Ghana and slave prostitution, for instance. Brian S. Woods,
“The Slave Girls of Ghana,” New York Law School Journal of Human Rights 17, no. 2
(2001): 875–81.
98. Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery, 239.

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12
DOMICILED AND DOMINATED
Slaving as a History of Women
joseph c. m i l l e r
Women in recent years are becoming a principal and long overdue focus
of slave studies, as the field has grown beyond its original focus on en-
slaved men in the modern Americas and the ancient Mediterranean.
Other parts of the world, previously little known or entirely misappre-
hended, are beginning to reveal starkly novel, in fact apparently quite
anomalous, qualities. Not least among them is that before the develop-
ment of plantation economies in the Americas, with their familiar mod-
ern stereotype of slaves as males toiling in mines and plantation fields,
slaving had primarily involved females.
The majorities of African men taken across the Atlantic and concen-
trated in large disciplined protoindustrial workforces in the Americas un-
dermined the viability earlier and elsewhere of what had been a strategy
of recruiting girls and women, isolating them as outsiders dispersed
within many, sometimes large, private households. There they were val-
ued, as slaves, not as productive labor in a commercial sense but rather
for their sheer presence and in some cases also for their progeny. The
anomalous male majorities in the modern Americas gave slavery a new,
public, institutionalized quality that left the women among the enslaved
with an anomalous, often notoriously prurient significance as sexual ob-
jects as restrictive mores and politicized gender emerged in the wake of
European Enlightenment humanism and the development of modern
civic societies.
Associating women with early practices of slaving is not a new idea, of
course. Greek phalanxes and Roman legions razing cities, raping women,
284

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 285
and killing enemy warriors are a cliché so trite that the human conse-
quences for, and of, the women seized are all but reduced to caricature.
This exaggerated image in turn conveys overtones of “manly men” (in
fact usually boys) just doing the wild things that boys will do, particularly
when they are unleashed in uniformed armed gangs far from home, hyped
by the exhilaration of violence and victory, if not also by more substan-
tive stimulants. These Hollywood visions have thus not often led to seri-
ous consideration of alternative means of enslaving or the consequences
of capture for the women and children of the vanquished males, as the
slaves they became, or for their masters. Gerda Lerner locates the origins
of patriarchy throughout the world’s history in habits of mind formed out
of male warriors’ unrestrained abuses of the foreign women they seized
and enslaved.1 Her argument is a loosely associational one, basically not-
ing the parallel degrees of male power and control attributed to both
slavery and patriarchy and documenting mostly ancient Mediterranean
body counts calculated in terms of the numbers of women and children
seized. She does not attempt to delineate a coherent historical sequence
from raping to slaving or to establish the causation that she implies.
Orlando Patterson takes Lerner’s point a step in this direction in his
meticulous account of the invention of freedom as an ideal of individual
autonomy, or escape from domination, in multiple contexts—internal/
mental/emotional, interpersonal, and abstractly civic.2 He reads the
dramatic, philosophical, and literary texts of ancient Greece and Rome
to ascribe the origins of the concept, beyond Lerner’s pragmatics, to the
women held in slavery at the dawn of a “Western civilization” built
around it. Patterson then follows the path of this liberating ideal, rather
than lingering on women and slavery elsewhere in the world, or for
that matter in Europe, through the only world culture to raise the yearn-
ing he attributes to ancient enslaved females to a universal human ideal
through its philosophical and spiritualized formulations in Rome and
early Christianity toward its resurrection as a practical civic ideal during
the European Enlightenment. As for civic freedom, it was not until the
twentieth century that civic participation was implemented for women,
even in the world’s most politically inclusive nations. Effective protec-
tion of women from personal abuse remains a challenge even in the
twenty-first century.
This chapter reverses Lerner’s focus on men capturing the women of
other men defeated on the fields of male conflict to attempt a historical
sketch of slaving throughout the world, more comprehensively than im-
plicitly male public levels of Western civilization, with accents on the

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286 joseph c. miller
utility of women for private purposes that I will term domestic. In this
broader history of slaving throughout the world, literally from the begin-
ning of history until recently, and in some places currently, the capture
and retention of women, not the slaughter of their men, was the point of
slaving. The slavers were generally parties marginal to the politics of the
worlds in which they lived, who captured women in calculated and very
effective strategies of recruiting outsiders essentially for the political, if
also incidentally economic, struggles inherent in all human communi-
ties, particularly before the modern triumph of material accumulation.
slavery, gender, and history
The axiomatically male “slave” who prevails in studies of slavery through-
out the world, in spite of efforts of many historians now extending over
more than a quarter of a century, derives from an implicit modern aboli-
tionist paradigm. Masters dominate; slaves, women as well as men, resist
in one way or another. This emphasis on domination—in exactly Patter-
son’s terms—tends to make gender equivalent to slavery and thus merely
inserts women into the prevailing male paradigm of exploitation, shame,
and consequently resistance as the only strategy available, or of any con-
ceivable interest, to the enslaved.3 But gender and slavery parallel one
another only on this single, abstracted logical axis of power. Once cre-
ated, thus, as Lerner puts it with “origins” against some presumably less
unpleasant (but unexamined) background, neither form of domina-
tion—slavery or gender—seems to have changed significantly.
In fact, both gender and enslavement have resonantly dynamic histo-
ries as strategic responses to the particular circumstances of specific times
and places. Like all historical processes, they have changed through in-
cremental steps, motivated by infinitely varying, complex, and differen-
tiated contexts. Further, in terms of historical processes thus conceived,
gender contrasts radically with enslavement. Gender is a relationship of
power internal to a community (or society or culture, depending on one’s
preferred analytical lens). To disable insiders otherwise sharing a vital
cultural and societal presence (social vitality, one might say, to coin a
phrase complementing Patterson’s “social death”),4 one must attribute to
them an inherent—but false—inferiority. Biophysical—undeniable and
immutable, at least to the modern eye—deviations from an arbitrary (or
politically negotiated) and narrowly defined norm are defined as defects.
Sexual difference possesses these characteristics in an almost ideal form,
since it bears an intuitive, highly emotional, even instinctual intensity,

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 287
at least for males, and particularly for men who fancy themselves as real,
primarily in their correspondingly physical virility. Highly sexualized bod-
ily characteristics thus trump any other imaginable personal abilities, in-
dividual achievements, family connections, or—in modern civic regimes
of legal standing. Since women are profoundly necessary in the most ele-
mental reproductive sense, they cannot be physically segregated. Instead
they are excluded ideologically from every sociological field of power,
which are thereby gendered exclusively and irrefutably male.
Gender, in excluding people already present, is thus much closer to
modern racism than to slaving, which by definition brings new people,
outsiders, onto a local scene. Gender’s entirely artificial displacement of
socially significant difference onto the physical body contrasts with the
real, but circumstantial and temporary, cultural (or political, or even so-
cial) alienness of people acquired and assimilated (or, if one prefers, for
the moment, dominated) as slaves. On a global scale, in spite of modern
efforts to impose permanence and heritability on slavery, enslavement is
inherently ephemeral as a societal standing. As a temporary state it is as
accessibly manipulable for women as the (male) master’s dependence on
their services, sexual and otherwise, and possible willingness to manumit
them or marry them, or both.
The other leading embodiments of inferiority, parallel to gender in
their genetic inevitability, are ancient naturalist ideologies of animality
or even bestiality (in all senses), or the inherent qualities attributed in
Africa to ethnicity or in India to caste, or the politicized “race” (as dis-
tinct from incidental and socially insignificant variations in individual
physiognomies) introduced in modern times to replace slavery in the
Americas as generations of native-born slaves and their freed descendants
of (very selectively attributed!) “African” descent grew up there. Thus
neither gender nor race “add” cumulatively to enslavement among the
modern political woes of women; instead, they succeed slavery histori-
cally, both for individuals as new women slaves integrated themselves in
the contexts they entered, and also collectively over time as modern
gender replaced slaving and other disabling strategies as means of domi-
nating females of local birth and connections.
A historicized narrative of strategies of slaving by specifiable interests
contextualized earlier in time or located elsewhere, can contextualize the
lingering masculinist focus on the historically unique and very modern
institutionalized slavery of the Americas as male. The key aspect of slav-
ing was moving individuals, violently or not, into new surroundings
where they found themselves alone, disabled culturally, and hence in

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288 joseph c. miller
positions of overwhelming vulnerability. They remained in such helpless
straits only temporarily, and their degrees of isolation varied, depending
on the contexts, primarily cultural and social, that they entered. One
thus cannot interpret the often-scattered evidence of slaving earlier and
elsewhere by (always deficient) comparison to the modern Americas.
Such a historicized narrative proceeds on an exceedingly broad scale—
notionally the last forty thousand years or so, and so no more than the
bare logic of the argument appears here,5 supported by references to only
the most (I hope aptly) selected examples to illustrate the basic point:
that slaving should be understood on global scales as a recurrent strategy
of moving people, mostly and centrally girls and women. They were not
necessarily outsiders in our modern sense of national identities, or even
culturally always culturally alien. Overt force was at most a secondary
factor in dominating them; anyone placed in vulnerable isolation tends
to cower, if only to survive. The purposes of acquiring women and their
children were not to exclude them but rather to include them in families,
lineages, palace retinues, temple communities, and other domiciliary
collectivities—notionally households—that made up what I will call so-
cieties or polities that were composite in character.6 That is, what counted
were local face-to-face communities that reproduced people, and people
built them up significantly by recruiting females as slaves.
Societal exclusion at the level of the large anonymous collectivities of
the modern world (nations, abstracted societies, and so on) was a sec-
ondary consequence of these primary motivations, and it was not a moti-
vating consideration for the slavers. In fact, for women integration and
vitality tended within households to be related inversely to their public
visibility. The multiplicity of such intimate communities and the inten-
sity of belonging within them thus contrast with the premise of a single
homogeneous mass of otherwise unattached individuals that underlies all
modern political theory, whether monarchical (in which all are subject,
similarly, to a singular monarch) or national (in which the subjects are
absolutely sovereign, and therefore necessarily equally so), and hence all
the modern theories of politicized slavery derived from it.
Under the actual historical circumstances of composite, or compound,
political environments that prevailed earlier and elsewhere, it was not
necessary to proclaim or enforce a subordinated public status for the
women and children taken into households and moved around among
them. The circumstances of removal themselves and the prevailing soci-
etal norms of private household patriarchy (in senses involving age as
well as masculinity) made public regulation of their status—religious

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 289
monotheisms or secular—not only irrelevant but also potentially intru-
sive on the autonomous domains of familiae in Rome, or the Greek oikos,
or—in Africa—the lineage, or the Islamic or other households including
harems of women, or any other face-to-face primary domiciliary commu-
nity. As history, that is: as incremental, processual change (as distinct
from the radically contrasting typological abstractions accented by struc-
tural and institutional modeling), slaving (not institutionalized slavery)
worked because it extended and amplified prevailing practices of trans-
ferring dependent females among these households. It thus intensified
existing contexts and did not contrast with them, and certainly not
abominably so as modern (ideological) abstractions rightly reassessed its
individually disabling consequences in a new world of personal auton-
omy rather than the former worlds of responsible patronage, or—as mas-
ters under assault from abolitionists defended themselves in the nine-
teenth-century United States—paternalism.7
This historicized argument from strategies shifts the focus from Patter-
son’s emphasis on civic or social exclusion to domestic inclusion, the
complementing face of the double-sided coin of slavery, replaces perpet-
ual domination with temporary vulnerability, and contextualizes its
dynamic from a presumed solitary master oriented obsessively toward his
socially isolated slave to include other compelling concerns of both with
the large and complex communities, public as well as private, in which
both in fact lived. The slaves were not the problems, except personally
and incidentally, perhaps aggravatingly, but historically inconsequen-
tially; slaving, bringing in outsiders as a strategy of marginal masters to
get ahead of more established political rivals, was.
historical patterns of slaving
Domestic Communities
Starting at the beginning (~40,000 BP), Orlando Patterson has called at-
tention to the psychological and hence sociological efficacy of internaliz-
ing social bonds by immolating captured enemies—males—in gruesome
collective torture and sometimes intensely ritualized consumption of
their physical remains.8 Tens of millennia ago, at the ancient transition
from late hominids to early humans, even momentarily functional senses
of community would not have been presumed. Late hominids, or their
early human descendents, lived in small numbers in open environments
where lands were plentiful, people in short supply, and group identifica-
tion mostly opportunistic. Anyone then could find a place in any of many

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290 joseph c. miller
other small, only incipiently communal groupings, all of them persis-
tently short of numbers.
In these unstructured circumstances, groups tortured male enemy war-
riors whom they captured in occasional conflicts and took women and
children they captured directly into statuses that modern observers have
attempted to understand by analogy to adoption, marriage, and other
modern sorts of relationships. This accent on assimilation stresses the ap-
parent contrast with the residual disabilities of “outsider origins” in more
structured social aggregates that are preserved through reproduction.
However, people then would have understood grouping as essentially
contingent, with participants (more than “members”) understood as
hailing from the most varied personal backgrounds. Everyone came from
somewhere else, and so the issue was not so much rank inherited within
the group but rather recency of arrival and whether participants in them
retained options to move on again or had invested in local relationships
in order to remain. Women captured and removed from groups presumed
enemies had few options, since slaughter of their menfolk normally de-
stroyed any social options they might otherwise have had. One appreci-
ates the effect of the ritual immolation of captured enemy males more
fully if one takes account of the likelihood that the witnesses to their
slaughter included their widows and sisters.
In agricultural economies based on hoe techniques—in Africa, the
Americas, the southeast Asian archipelago, and Oceania—men were the
superfluous sex. There women routinely worked the fields, and men
tended to focus on intermittent and seasonal activities like hunting, on
the high-intensity phases of ongoing highly irregular cycles of cultivation
and harvesting, and on technical specializations involving mobility—fish-
ing, herding livestock, metallurgy, and so on. The intermittence of such
responsibilities left them available for other unpredictable and irregu-
lar—but often profitable—projects involving strength or speed, or both,
such as raiding (though less so home defense), commercial travel, and—
revealingly—dispensability in mining and other lethally dangerous un-
dertakings supportive of war and commerce. Men captured in wars would
then have been disposed of rather than kept, no longer immolated by
nascent collectivities but rather killed (and their sexual parts often
claimed) as trophies for individual warriors aiming to advance by demon-
strating valor and contributions to the politics of groups integrated
around a strongly communal ethos.
Women are thus males’ means to accumulation of progeny. As histori-
cal agents, men are demographically inert; women create, but men de-

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 291
stroy and are destroyed. Women and reproduction were therefore deter-
minants of historical change elsewhere in the world, particularly where
hoes remained the primary implements of agricultural production. There
labor—mostly female—was the scarce factor of production to wield these
much less efficient implements of cultivation to feed families. Women
and children, not lands to produce the food surpluses enabled by the
plow, were in demand. Collectivities—classically, groups organizing
themselves around complementary differentiation by sex and seniority—
described themselves through metaphors of reproductive relationships
among kin. Groups defined in terms of women bearing children calcu-
lated their successes in terms of their ability to increase their numbers
and thus to multiply and deepen their connections with their neighbors
via carefully arranged marriages of their young women. Sex was a plea-
surable incident between individual males and females; but marriage
was a reproductive responsibility that men and women assumed on be-
half of their respective communities of kin. Marriage and reproduction
were thus political. As efforts at in increasing populations succeeded,
pressures on these domestic groups grew apace, intensifying political
competition among communities of kin also intimately dependent on one
another. The men in charge of these groups favored slaving as a strategy
of recruiting additional women to preserve their own communities be-
yond the women from neighboring communities whom they married
legitimately.
A historical perspective on the processes through which people create
novelty out of whatever preceded emphasizes that they can do so only by
lengthy series of incremental steps. Applying this processual perspective
to what happened next in the broad history of slaving, we should expect
a further adaptation, and an increasingly anomalous distortion, of these
primordial practices of incorporating females and juveniles. One may
thus (schematically) infer the next stage of strategic incorporation of
women and children when population densities had grown, for reasons
possibly including tendencies to increase the available laboring capacity
of populations by acquiring nubile girls and women through slaving. In
drought-prone subtropical regions, scarcities of food forced foraging fami-
lies into increasing and laborious dependence on crops, exposing the
people who thus became cultivators, no longer able to move around in
pursuit of fresh terrain, to periodic famine. When the historical process
of forming human communities reached the threshold of dependence on
plow agriculture in river valleys around the subtropical world—let’s say
ten thousand years ago—basic demographic pressures would have tended

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292 joseph c. miller
to make female children relatively—or at least occasionally—surplus
to their communities’ primary needs for males for field labor and for de-
fense. One Malthusian implication of more productive agricultural tech-
nologies in the hands of males—plows, oxen, wheeled transport for sur-
pluses—seems to be that female fecundity, however necessary, could also
become a liability.
Farming communities facing such recurrent scarcities of food, particu-
larly the poorer among them, quite realistically disposed of surplus fe-
male reproductive potential that promised only to increase the number
of bellies that had to be filled.9 In more recent circumstances of dearth,
the evidence of such disposal of girls is ubiquitous: new mothers, or more
likely their male relatives, exposed girl infants they could not support or
abandoned them to families in need of domestic services to support privi-
leged ways of living that also made them better able to feed additional
hungry mouths. In elemental demographic terms, such disposal of girls
transferred human reproductive potential to wealthier populations able
to support it, and even to capitalize on it, with the rich living better and
the poor staving off total collapse only barely. Such transfers of girls
would have accelerated where urban centers of wealth and ostentation
developed, but these concentrated populations also created mountains of
refuse, and the accumulated filth supported diseases that also made cities
demographic sinkholes, eventually tending to encourage further inflows
of the females surplus to family needs in the countryside.
The extent to which such girls qualified as slaves would have de-
pended then, as it continues to do in modern recurrences of this truly
ancient tendency, on the degree to which they arrived in disoriented iso-
lation. None of the parties involved recognized the dichotomy between
slave and free created by modern ideologies of homogenous and mutually
exclusive civic categories, in which one either belongs individually and
fully to a nation or society, or one doesn’t. Identities instead were rela-
tional, situational, and thus flexible, even multiple depending on one’s
momentary circumstances. To the extent that the desperate rural fami-
lies who abandoned their girl children gave up any further responsibility
for them, or to the (very likely extensive) extent that families forced to
forsake them had also lost any ability to protect their own interests, and
to the likely considerable extent that the urban households that took
them in also took advantage of their relative independence of despised
rural clients, these girls were alone, abandoned, vulnerable, and—as
children—surely disoriented and utterly dependent. To the contrasting

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 293
degree that rural client families managed to send girls to live with urban
patrons interested in preserving the relationship, they might become
wards, or even pawns pledged—in theory only temporarily—against
credit extended in cash or grain or in other life-sustaining forms.10
Focusing on slaving, as this chapter does, rather than on slavery, em-
phasizes the processes of foreclosure, betrayal of trust, management of
family crises—urban as well as rural—and ordinary human greed at the
expense of the least indispensable or most vulnerable girls in them.
These inevitabilities of human life can readily be appreciated for their
potential to leave girls and women—as Patterson puts it—“natally alien-
ated” by stages and in varying degrees that culminated in the abject, if
frequently relatively brief, initial isolated vulnerability characteristic of
enslavement.11 From the points of view of the slavers, what we see as
slavery they could well have seen as unfortunate and abusive extensions
of efforts to minimize unavoidable hardships, hence sacrifices and trade-
offs, the inevitable losses of life. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
African and Asian authorities protested against the abolitionist ambi-
tions of European colonial authorities in exactly these terms. Abolition-
ists scorned their claims as hypocritical; historians need not indulge in
comparably arrogant (and political) dismissals.
In the long run, general tendencies emerged in much of Asia from in-
finitely numerous and various, if specifically unrecorded, incidents like
these. The implication of such probabilities for slaving and women is to
emphasize the collective distress threatened by the specifically female ca-
pacity to reproduce. Under these circumstances the tendency on the part
of the men responsible for large families to dispose selectively, in one
way or another, of girl children, was arguably conscientious. However
saddening such disposals might be to the mothers and girls they thus
separated from one another, girls were unfortunate but unavoidable ac-
companiments of fathers’ quests for sons to do the work and carry on
the name that would preserve the family for “posterity.” Hence the con-
tribution of distinctively female fertility to thinking of slaving as primar-
ily, normatively, involving women and girls. One need not invoke the
much more occasional circumstances of war, rape, and seizure of defeated
enemies’ women to account for this premise. Contrary to Lerner, history
suggests that slaving in ancient times was as often volitional as it was im-
posed by violence and must also have rested on prior (not subsequent)
patriarchy, as senior male heads of poor households disposed of the girl
children of the young mothers in them.

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294 joseph c. miller
Military Polities
The inherent multiplicity and inclusiveness of polities composed of many
recognized domestic domains” of kinship differed radically from modern
civic political environments premised on homogeneity, a singular stan-
dard of equality that led to the exclusionary category of institutionalized
slavery. Elsewhere, and earlier, historians cannot productively focus on
the public aspects of abstract societies—that is, the civic, government-
recognized, direct political presence of autonomous individuals, with ac-
tive participation (or accessibility or protection) for everyone resident in
political communities thus defined. The nineteenth-century idea of
quasi-racialized nationality is the eventual purest, and also most reduc-
tive, expression of modern notions of community as homogeneity, rather
than complementary diversity. Recognizing the modernity of the premise
of equality—very intensely embraced for the opportunity it promises to
individuals (however seldom it may deliver)—in political participation
(or participatory polities) is fundamental to distinguishing institutional-
ized slavery (and also gender) from earlier slaving (and sexually defined
social complementarities). It is that unhistoricized premise of modern
civic uniformity that defines the slave’s “death” as social, meaning ex-
cluded from national or civic aspects of lives that are in fact lived in much
more multiplistic dimensions. Or—as it is then easy to phrase the point—
the only aspect of slaves’ lives presumed to matter in the conventional
understanding of slavery is that they are “denied civil rights” or “lack a
moral [i.e., civic] personality” or simply are outsiders to this single civic
component of human existence in multiple dimensions.12
Nearly everywhere else in world history this political level of life,
which essentially regulated occasional interactions among strangers, or
encounters (not relationships) beyond the communities in which every-
one lived nearly all the time, left ongoing intimate relations to the latter.
“States” could not be said to exist there in any familiar sense; the over-
arching polity was secondary, external, and even alien to the familiae
basic to Roman society, the oikos in ancient Greece, or the lineages in
Africa. In places like these, males were anomalous as slaves, and they
were decidedly uncommon in most historical contexts anywhere in the
world before the northern Atlantic in the late seventeenth century.
Men, particularly young able-bodied ones, were potential competitors for
women and heirs, unless as eunuchs rendered impotent by castration.
From the perspective of the local communities composing these poli-
ties—including the imperial extension of the highly composite republic

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 295
of large aristocratic and military familiae—the imperial court at Rome
was conceptually a larger, very powerful household. It thus became the
central focus of these groups’ networks of alliances or external patrons—
the single great patron to whom everyone else was in perpetual debt. The
imperial court, as power personified, and as essentially military, carried
strong overtones of maleness. Unlike the domestic households compos-
ing the polity, contrastingly and complementarily gendered female and
seeking women to reproduce them, the imperial household (though not
the imperial or royal lineage seeking to control it) inherently reproduced
itself by slaving rather than through female fecundity. Only thus could it
achieve the (contrastive) autonomy that would-be rulers sought from the
people around them whom they purported to rule, but on whose repro-
duction they were otherwise profoundly dependent. The realities of
human life are always reciprocal; individual independence is, of course,
an illusion, or an ideology. Military power, particularly when aided by
cavalry techniques developed in Asia in the third and second millennia
BCE, put warriors within overpowering reach of vulnerable distant and
therefore alien communities, producing captives of both sexes in un-
precedented numbers. Men, as the classical sources from this era cited by
Lerner show, were dispensable, and women and children captured effec-
tively paid the troops whom imperial regimes could not otherwise afford
for their efforts and for the dangers they surmounted.
Mercantile
Merchants mounted the inevitable historical challenge to the power of
these militarized composite polities. Wherever commercialization of the
domestic communities composing them remained incidental, and mer-
chants remained dependent on provisioning the armies and distributing
the spoils of military expansion, enslaving local girls and women presented
tended to support the urbanizing consequences of managing success. But
merchants in the eastern Mediterranean invested currencies and com-
mercial credit they had developed to negotiate exchanges among them-
selves in domestic communities otherwise claimed by the warlords as
sources of taxes and tribute. Using cash or extending credit, classically
food in times of looming starvation, they indebted members of these com-
munities directly to themselves. The resulting persistent rural commer-
cial debt, payable in cash or equivalents, was distinct from the balanced
reciprocities that peasant collectivities maintained among themselves.
The rural cultivators’ primary means of paying what they owed, whether
as labor to produce salable surpluses or as collateral implicitly backing

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296 joseph c. miller
these obligations, was their wealth in people, in dependent women and
children within domestic communities headed by senior males legally
competent to contract debt on behalf of the group. The women and chil-
dren were thus vulnerable to concession to external creditors.
Merchants in effect thus inserted themselves into the older tendency
of famine-stricken families to abandon female infants or send girls to
wealthy patrons by lending them money or grain to stave off starvation
in the short term. Against these critical needs they might well have ap-
peared as potential saviors, but in the long run they sustained overpopu-
lation and forced further, future involuntary concessions of nubile young
women, consigning them to something not unlike the (thus perhaps
aptly named) world’s oldest profession. In highly commercialized modern
contexts, only nominally more voluntaristic, this prostitution of female
children, now including boys as well as girls, continues as one growing
form of “contemporary slavery.”13
By claiming women in satisfaction of debts, merchants also inserted
themselves between warlords and the populations they taxed. But en-
slaving females did not surface as a concern in the essentially male pub-
lic spheres of commerce or politics during earlier stages of this process of
mercantile intrusion on domestic households. The practice was, after all,
a private matter among commercial patrons and their indebted clients.
But further intensification of mercantile slaving through indebting agri-
cultural families extended to extracting males, as the legally responsible
heads of households, or forced them to pledge sons or other male depen-
dents against deepening indebtedness.14 Merchants evidently reached
such pervasive degrees of wealth in the eastern Mediterranean during the
first half of the last millennium before the current era. Judaic “jubilee”
laws of that era freed subjects of kings enslaved for debt at intervals suffi-
ciently regular to disable overly ambitious creditors without destroying
more responsible businessmen. We hear of the same triumph of Solon
(596–594 BCE), who recruited the populace of Athens, or saved it for
the owners of the lands they cultivated, by eliminating peasants’ debts
to merchants.
In such regions, as merchants encroached on the male domain of pub-
lic affairs, commercialized strategies of slaving thus became matters of
urgent political concern. By extracting local men as slaves, they threat-
ened to erode the availability of the male participants in the polities of
the era, targets of such immediate and compelling interests to the state as
payers of taxes and availability for military conscription, not to mention
occasional recruitment for monumental construction projects. Slavery,

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or in fact not slavery itself but rather the slaving that transferred people
out of nascently inclusive political domains or merely locally among the
communities constituting them, then became visible by the public stan-
dards of conventional modern scholarship. Rulers, attempting to create
more inclusive monarchical states out of compound domains, codified
written public laws—as distinct from previous personal dicta and ad hoc
fiats—to further their ambitions to rule directly.
Heads of composite military regimes thus tried to advance their strate-
gies of governing by protecting the people, formerly secluded within do-
mestic domains, whom they thus transformed into subjects by protecting
them against merchants threatening to foreclose on the communal com-
ponents of their domains. The enslaving of local men, to which unre-
strained commercial accumulation eventually led, thus threatened to
overwhelm the delicate balances of composite polities. Only in Africa in
the eighteenth century did the warlords, and later merchants, consolidate
their power by encouraging—not repressing—commercialized slaving; in
so doing, they abandoned or threatened local supports and left them-
selves dependent on Atlantic commercial credit.
But in Judea and Greece and then Rome kings and emperors managed
to forestall what amounted to an impending ancient bourgeois revolu-
tion mounted by merchants enslaving local debtors. The resulting Roman
law of slavery was in fact a compendium of laws regulating manumission,
defining degrees of civic standing for the manumitted, or citizenship and
availability to the imperial state, with residual rights retained by the
manumitters. The interest of Roman jurisprudence in slaves as such was
secondary, since these people attained recognition by the Roman state
only as freedmen. Slaves appeared as such in law primarily within a sub-
set of general commercial regulations, which reflected not slavery but
rather slaving, the transactional moments in the lives of the people thus
moved. To treat the legal status of transactions involving people these
laws invoked the standard legal principle of reasoning by analogy with
other more conventional sorts of commercial transactions—hence the
later-definitive invocation of the analogy (in Rome, for these very lim-
ited purposes of transferring particular interest) of res (thing), the notion
of living chattel (personal, rather than collective, or “real,” property),
exemplified (as legal principle, not personal characterization) by domes-
tic livestock, for instance, cattle.
These commercial aspects of slaving—that is: acquisition of personnel
through purchase—were not gendered but implicitly referred primarily
to the men eligible to enter the public sphere through manumission.

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298 joseph c. miller
They left the women slaves relatively invisible, except when they occa-
sionally passed through public markets. However, the majority of trans-
fers of women and children undoubtedly continued as off-market private
transactions among related households, as infant girl foundlings re-
trieved from alleyways, and other very ancient private ways of taking
females in as slaves.15
With commercial prosperity growing in the wake of military conquests
and brutally efficient plundering and needs for provisioning all around
the Mediterranean, merchants used their money and credit to challenge
both the military rulers of the composite polities and the great urban
households and peasant collectivities that constituted them. Generally
in Asia and around the Mediterranean, the contenders of these three
types settled into uneasy standoffs that continued into the recent past.
The best-known examples of this pattern arose, of course, from the tense
compromise in the Islamic ecumene at the center of this vast region.
There the parties to this tripartite struggle took the familiar form of cleri-
cal, literate, and learned, legal heirs to the religious charismatic commu-
nalism of the Prophet Muhammad, military conquerors who competed to
claim secular authority in his name as caliphs and emirs, and communi-
ties of merchants who, in practical terms, integrated the geographically
vast and varied but politically divided world, supporting its local and re-
gional military powers. Rather than reading slaving in Muslim Asia and
northern Africa during the twelve centuries from about 700 AD to about
1900 as a single, static, culturally homogeneous Islamic type, with the
usual Orientalist bias toward considering it as primarily involving sexu-
ally enticing (to males) females kept in harems,16 historians must instead
recognize deep processes of change under way within the recurring ten-
sions of slaving and the primacy of gendered strategies —of men for mili-
tary purposes as well as of women for the households of the wealthy—in
sustaining them.17
Males and Modernity in the Americas
Christian counterparts of these domestic premises of enslaving women—
though not of men—extended to the European shores of the Mediter-
ranean. Italian merchants carried the ancient model of enslaving women
into the Atlantic in the sixteenth century but then shifted their empha-
sis to males as the Americas developed as an arena of profound commer-
cialization. The ensuing trade in enslaved men from Africa led to signifi-
cant majorities of enslaved males in the New World. It was there that
men became the political economic backbone of the specie-producing

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mines and commodity-producing plantations that made the Americas so
commercially valuable. That is, with African men European slavers con-
verted historic strategies of enslaving females for household and commu-
nity reproduction to dedicated and driven production of nonconsumable
commodities by enslaved males. The unprecedented masculinity and com-
mercialization of slaveries in the Americas in turn made men the hall-
marks of the presentist conventional literature on slavery everywhere
around the globe.
As Portuguese and Spanish merchants and military aristocrats started
to realize deep-seated European lusting for a tropical cornucopia of pre-
cious metals—African lands of gold, and mountains of gold and silver in
the Americas—Europeans began by delivering relatively costly skilled
and acculturated Africans across the Atlantic for urban domestic services
in the style familiar in Renaissance Mediterranean cities—Christian as
well as Muslim. Early on (1542–43), the New Laws of the Hapsburg
monarchy then struggling to create a united Iberian Spain, eliminated
the threat to these political ambitions that slaving by a generation of
rampaging (and surely raping) conquistadores posed in far-off America.
By the 1520s and 1530s, these conquerors of the Aztecs, Inca, and Maya
were already busy turning themselves into an independent military aris-
tocracy in unchallenged control of native populations whom they effec-
tively proposed to enslave on vast domains well beyond the effective
reach of the crown.
The New Laws consigned the welfare of the natives to the church, in
close alliance with the monarchy, and interposed royal law between the
conquerors and the conquered. Later monarchs in Spain then effectively
excluded domestic merchants, growing wealthy on the vast wealth in sil-
ver that developed in the later sixteenth century, by consigning deliv-
eries of enslaved Africans to foreigners through the famous asiento con-
tracts of the seventeenth century. This commercial policy also limited
deliveries of Africans to replace the Native Americans as slaves to the
needs of politically benign urban households in the cities of Spain’s
colonies and confined their transport to harmlessly foreign merchants.
These restrictions that the crown thus placed on its potential military ri-
vals and—particularly—on merchants demonstrated the same wariness
of domestic domains inflated by slaving that had first appeared in the an-
cient centers of commercialization around the Mediterranean. In all
cases, slaving was rendered all the more politically sensitive in monar-
chical regimes by the substantial numbers of men among the conquered
natives and the male majorities among the Africans imported.

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300 joseph c. miller
Other Europeans brought unprecedentedly large numbers of male
Africans in the seventeenth century to toil in sugarcane plantations in
tropical American lowlands depopulated by disease and by the slaving
and other brutalities of the conquerors. The resulting hordes of angry
men lived segregated in barracks and worked in large gangs, and they also
died in great numbers and were replaced with still more recently im-
ported successors. Such large aggregates of males clearly held the poten-
tial both to overwhelm and also to embolden the tiny minorities of Eu-
ropean owners and officials in the Americas. The grandiosely self-styled
(but still in fact struggling) Baroque “absolute monarchies” in Europe
had to assert themselves legally or lose control.18 The Portuguese crown
attempted feebly to decree limits on commercial slaving’s evident risks
for its monarchical sponsors but in practice was far less absolute than in
its lofty Christian pretensions. In the ultimately fabulously wealthy cap-
taincies of Brazil it utterly failed to intrude on the privacy of sugar slav-
ery—an industrialized and masculinized extension of the Renaissance
Iberian domestic privacy of female slaving. Hence, weak monarchs in
Lisbon created little subsequent legal history—with its emphasis on
men—of slavery in Portugal’s American possessions, until modern (and
mostly foreign) pressures toward abolition in the nineteenth century
made the issue a public one in late-imperial and republican Brazil.
Rather, in the cities of Portugal’s huge American domain the domestic
aspects of slaving (and relatively routine private manumissions) pre-
dominated, with greater emphasis on the women and the familial rela-
tions they created, and exploited, than among the majorities of males
recently arrived and sent to sugar plantations, the notoriously all-but-
private domains of the senhores de engenho, or sugar barons. The histori-
cally inverse ratio of the viability of privately enslaving women to their
public visibility in Brazil had expanded to obscure also the men in slav-
ery there. Male slaves within an acknowledged community are appar-
ently anomalies so anxiety-inducing that they are difficult to acknowl-
edge, and all the more so as the alleged masters know, but cannot admit,
their ultimate dependence on them. Parallel tendencies toward denial
appear in gender, of course, with men’s sheer reproductive dependency
evident, but obsessively obscured, in terms of the physical generative ca-
pacities that women possess but that they do not.
Elsewhere in the Americas thoroughly commercialized plantation en-
terprises, epitomized by Caribbean plantation production of sugar, drew
the attentions of the stronger monarchs of northern Europe. The French
and the British, in particular, concentrated African great numbers of

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enslaved males on tiny islands. They found themselves constrained to
accept women from merchants seldom able to buy males in Africa in the
numbers they demanded and drove them into the canebrakes to produce
commodities. In French Martinique and Guadeloupe, where the French
developed their first American plantations, Louis XIV, the most absolute
of the Europe’s Baroque generation of monarchs in the second half of the
seventeenth century, faced the classic monarchical dilemma of convert-
ing distant American conquests into sources of wealth for himself with-
out dangerously enabling the merchants whom he needed to do so. Try-
ing to consolidate royal power at home and simultaneously concerned
to convert private private plantations abroad to colonies in the modern
sense of government-controlled dependencies, the Sun King asserted
monarchical authority through another characteristic codification of
law. In the famed Code Noir of 1684–85 his ministers synthesized the
premises of female domestic slaving that all of Europe had inherited from
ancient Rome with the male commercial initiatives in the New World.
This second New World monarchical legal intrusion on the historic
privacy of female slaving, rephrased in the commercially oriented laws of
the early-modern Atlantic as a matter of personal property, arose explic-
itly from fears of the unprecedented risks of managing so many African
men in spaces so distant and confined, and thus as vulnerable, as these
small islands in the Antilles. But in terms of the historic European and
Asian tensions between monarchical power and male slaving, it at-
tempted to reconcile political conflicts between domestic autonomy and
public accountability as old as politics itself. The French code, following
Portuguese and Spanish Catholic precedent, enlisted the church’s sacra-
mental authority over marriages and births among the enslaved—essen-
tially over their reproduction—in the service of modulating the planters’
otherwise absolute claims to the privacy of their property in human be-
ings. But the planters in Martinique and Guadeloupe, and later in the
much larger French colony of Saint Domingue on the western end of the
formerly Spanish island of Hispaniola, were more commercially dynamic
than continental France, or at least sufficiently integrated into the Dutch
and then the English West Indian commercial networks that they could
afford to ignore the crude forms of administrative control over deliveries
of new Africans extended by Louis’ successors in Paris.
Planters triumphed over both the Code Noir’s moral exhortations to
care responsibly for the people they enslaved (mostly the women, one sus-
pects) and its effort to define public, royal authority in the islands—that
is, to quell unrest among the African men then giving fits to planters.

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302 joseph c. miller
The huge majorities of men taken to Saint Domingue, the most brutal
and profitable production regime in the Caribbean, eventually demon-
strated the anticipated danger in 1791 by taking advantage of Saint
Domingue planters’ momentary distraction from policing and security in
the wake of revolution in France. In the resulting “Haitian revolution”
men, many of them former slaves, created an independent nation led by
blacks. However epochal Haiti may seem, looking backward from the
present, historians might better contemplate it as an expectable outcome
of the highly risky dynamics of merchants assembling too many males be-
yond the range of effective military constraint. The exuberant commer-
cial prosperity of eighteenth-century merchants bringing males to Saint
Domingue culminated in disaster for the planters burdened with at-
tempting to control them.
Finally, fewer laws decreed from London encumbered merchants and
planters in the English and then British Caribbean and North America
in their attempts to grapple with the anomalies of attempting to control
African men assembled in large and volatile aggregates through public
commercial strategies of slaving. In the sugar islands of the West Indies,
where these men, as well as smaller numbers of women, outnumbered En-
glish settlers and estate managers everywhere by as much as ten to one,
the problems of policing were enormous. The tiny cohort of planters—
who were the islands’ closest, though still faint, approximation to a po-
litical public—dealt with them with exemplary brutality.19 The enslaved
men conspired, if we are to believe the anxious rumors that circulated,
and actually revolted with genuinely threatening frequency, not to men-
tion the ominous presence of renegade maroons left in acknowledged
control of some of the mountainous regions of the largest of the sugar is-
lands, Jamaica.
Historians have noted, though only in passing, the frequency with
which women reported on these plots among their menfolk. But the cate-
gorical and racialized accents on solidarity among people defined only
as ungendered slaves and blacks, prevailing in the literature, have dis-
tracted attention from this tendency of the women in slavery to betray
the plotters among their male counterparts. Attention to explaining
these women’s motivations suggests at least the possibility of sexual poli-
tics among the enslaved. A residual, faint echo of Old World domestic
female slavery, often of “colored,” or métis, women born in the islands
and their children by white fathers, reverberated in even these most ex-
treme examples of commercialized modern enslavement of males. The
male violence of discipline and revolt desexualized other women as mem-

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 303
bers of the work gangs in the islands’ canebrakes, their reproductive ca-
pacities suppressed by the physically depleting work demanded of them.
With integration of women and men in these unisex, or unsexed and un-
gendered, gangs, tensions between the sexes nonetheless surely emerged
within them, complicated, of course, by white male masters’ sexual ex-
ploitation of the women they owned as slaves. The occasional favoritism
and even personal fondness that drew a few of these women into the less
conflictive ambiance of planters’—or more often overseers’—households
thus could have prompted their reported collaboration with masters pres-
suring less privileged men to the point of desperate rebellion.
The survival strategies of women in the protoindustrial slavery of
Caribbean sugar plantations generally emphasized manipulating the men
attracted by their sexuality, as distinct from the femininity all but de-
stroyed for those consigned to work in the fields but reclaimed—where
possible—by raising children, including those of their masters. By the
usual (politicized, but not gendered) views of slavery, this proposition may
appear highly politically incorrect, if not also improbable or even impos-
sible. However, on global scales, these uniquely—and not unrealistic—
female strategies of surviving enslavement, even exploiting its available
intimacies, would have resurrected Old World strategies of females in
slavery. It would have made sense for them to capitalize on their physical
capacities as women, otherwise helpless but reproductive and sexually
desirable to men whom they could not control.
In socially multiplistic and differentiated cultures in Africa,20 women
were celebrated for their fecundity; hence femaleness remained ungen-
dered in the modern sense of being politically disabling and physical fe-
males could function as “men”. But in the Americas the individuating
and leveling effects of commercialization universalized the competitive-
ness among males limited elsewhere in composite polities to public
places. For enslaved women, the likely strategy was closer to the African
communal ethos of belonging—that is, trying to avoid the further sepa-
ration of being uprooted yet again, thus suffering anew the vulnerability
of isolation, or—equally if not more distressing—losing children they
had borne.21 To the ends of remaining, of belonging, they used the per-
sonal and emotive strategies effective within the intimacy of the do-
mestic households in the Old World, where nearly all their predecessors
had lived. All the more so as commercialized slaving in the Atlantic rad-
ically intensified the prospect of being forced to start over, again and
yet again. The unpredictably changing economic conditions of remote
and abstract markets invited, even forced, owners to survive by selling

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304 joseph c. miller
the people whom they owned as slaves. An intimate relationship might
lessen this risk.
The large scales of laboring forces on American plantations and other
productive enterprises—in the tropics, approaching numbers in the hun-
dreds—severely reduced opportunities to form the personal ties that would
have added ties of patronage and even some sense of moral responsibility
for (if not to) their dependent families. Older (or, one might emphasize,
more) ethical systems throughout Africa and Asia from ancient Greek
philosophy to early (and some later) Christianity to Islam and beyond all
had emphasized household heads’ responsibilities for everyone present in
their domestic domains, including the enslaved. Slaving previously had
worked, in significant part, because it took advantage of the already weak
(socially and politically)—that is, women and children—and dispersed
them in such households, embedded in bonds of personal intimacies
more than in legal bondage. The massed and masculinized modern slav-
ery of the Americas was, at least to this extent, a contradiction in terms,
or at the very least so expensive to pursue and to police a project involv-
ing males that it would ultimately topple of its own ungainly weight.
Problematic Paradoxes in North America
And so it did, though not, of course, without a mighty struggle. The end
of the story of slaving as a history of women, and the ultimate manifesta-
tion of the historical contradiction of attempting to enslave males in sig-
nificant numbers, began in the English colonies in North America. Slav-
ery elsewhere in the Americas thrived in significant part because high
death rates among the enslaved there ensured sufficiently high propor-
tions of newly imported replacements to limit the ability of the enslaved,
mostly males, to form reproducing communities of their own. In con-
trast, slightly larger proportions of women among the slaves arriving on
the North American mainland seem to have been enough to set the sur-
vivors on a path of reproducing themselves, thus shifting the effective
character of enslavement toward a native-born community, often of
generations depth.
The rice and tobacco planters of the mainland were economically
marginal to the England’s eighteenth-century Atlantic empire and could
not compete seriously with their much wealthier planter counterparts in
the sugar-rich islands in the West Indies for the majorities of new males.
The relative modesty of mainland slaving thus condemned them to ac-
cept African women unwanted by planters in the Caribbean. Always short
of hands, these North American masters encouraged their reproduction,

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 305
or perhaps initially tolerated it out of sheer inability to prevent it, though
taking care to specify that all children born to enslaved women would in-
herit their mothers’ status as slaves. Thus, in a generation or two, en-
slaved women on the estates of the Chesapeake tidewater and Carolina
Lowcountry were creating plantation communities of a peasantlike
multigenerational quality.22 However despised and excluded by their
masters, among themselves they were no longer alone.
As African women and then their African American daughters in the
Lowcountry and in the Chesapeake created these very unslavelike fami-
lies, albeit all also owned by their masters, they thus produced a variant
of slavery very “peculiar” in the context of global historical patterns of
slaving, one even more radically contradictory than other attempts to
work male slaves in large numbers elsewhere in the Americas. Elsewhere
the cutting edge of viability for slaving was its continuing flow of iso-
lated, disoriented new arrivals; in North America children born locally
to enslaved women found at least limited acceptance in the households
of their birth, their knowledge, and connections greatly lessening the
disabilities under which they would otherwise have suffered.
Elsewhere, women had been more valuable as potential contributors
to, and even as members of, families and households than they had been
for the cash they might generate through sale. But to North American
planters, always exposed to indebtedness, their children were assets, even
collateral for the credit enabling commercial expansion. The ability of the
women enslaved to create families—however compelled some also were
by masters no less given to sexual exploitation of vulnerable females than
were their counterparts elsewhere—gradually freed their owners from
the necessity of continued costly imports. By thus relieving their owners
of the need to borrow to buy replacements, they also obviated slaving’s
basic premise: maintaining proportions of isolated newcomers among the
enslaved sufficient to disable subversive collaboration. They also man-
aged to construct significant—if also always precarious—slave households
on the estates where most of them lived in the early and mid-eighteenth
century.23 These women thus set the parameters of a growing population
of native-born slaves within which the rest of the history of North
America would develop, including the audacity of the rebel planters and
merchants in the colonies in 1776. Key players in this “American revo-
lution”—in some arguable part, at least—dared to take this step toward
independence because of debts deriving from the slaving required to ac-
quire more men and also because these female slaves’ children (often also
their own) had released them from any need to buy and pay for more.

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306 joseph c. miller
The less prosperous slave-owning gentry of the Middle Atlantic and
Southern colonies also added a distinguishing populist element to poli-
tics on the mainland, beyond the overwhelmingly commercial tone of
British slaving and absentee planting in the Caribbean. They turned to
the poor (free) farmers and townsmen of the colonies to muster local po-
litical support, particularly in the 1760s, after the government of George
III in London began to raises taxes on consumption in its already in-
debted North American colonial dependencies. They extended their
distinctive heritage of English “liberties” from monarchical grants of
privilege to a claim to civic public initiative then unmatched anywhere
in the world. In the new United States, numerous settlers of modest
means but accorded full civic standing under the constitution of the
new republic—farmers, artisans, traders, sailors—closed off prospects
for slaves to compete with them by purchasing comparable freedom on
their own or, if freed gratuitously by their owners, to support themselves.
Additionally, the high proportion of European women present as
wives—more or less voluntarily in the colonies and then in the nascent
United States—produced children with “legitimate” interests in the es-
tates that their menfolk had exposed them to all the risks of life in the
early Americas to build. In the commercial circumstances of the Ameri-
cas, where wealth inhered in assets rather than in offspring, they ex-
cluded the slave children of their husbands—masters of their households
as well as of the women enslaved—from any claim to these inheritances,
even to paternity itself. These legitimate wives, as reproducers and in-
creasingly gendered as dependent as the nineteenth-century politics of
populism made a practical and populist reality of the Bill of Rights, thus
again—as elsewhere in the world—exploited other women in slavery as
the only available people politically weaker than themselves. The mod-
ern gendered solidarity of females as yet flickered only faintly.
Hence the distinguishing inflexibility of North Americans’ applica-
tion of the general European rule of matrilineal descent for slaves, or
rather limiting civic identity to one inherited exclusively through legiti-
mate mothers. Hence also the eventual distinctively rigid racialization in
the United States of an otherwise general axiom of slavery, which had
once secured the children of slave women in the interests of the house-
holds that had harbored them. In the United States matrilineal status as
slaves instead became the means of excluding individuals from an emerg-
ing modern civic society. Later, race condemned anyone bearing any de-
tectable taint of African ancestry as black, thus making slave men, freed-
people, and eventually their emancipated children all invisible in an

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 307
America defined reassuringly as exclusively white.24 To this unique North
American “public,” anxious about their political liberties since colonial
times under the developing intensity of monarchy in England and de-
pendency in the Americas, awareness of these enslaved men, never in
fact far below surface of the anxious imaginations of many, at times be-
came a public preoccupation verging on panic.
This very particular North American outcome of holding women in
slavery nonetheless became the instance that subsequently defined the
modern paradigm of slavery as a public institution, seemingly male. The
commercialized slaveries of the Americas were predominantly male; do-
mestic slaving elsewhere had been—and also remained in varying de-
grees—as a history of women. But in North America—decidedly unlike
the British Caribbean, the French Antilles, Brazil, or Cuba—the fe-
male majority of those in slavery was determinative in leaving families
of native-born, English-speaking, Christian descendants, certainly the
case by the paradigm-forming years of the antebellum generation in the
1840s and 1850s, and particularly by counting both the women and their
uniquely female extensions, their children. The highly commercial in-
debtedness of their owners, increasingly marginalized by the financial
growth of the growing industrial and banking sectors of the Atlantic
economy, forced them to retain families in relentless highly institution-
alized slavery.
slavery, women, and gender
Over the forty or fifty thousand years of human history, slaving had re-
curred as an endlessly viable strategy of recruiting, from external sources,
the vital personnel who enabled household heads to compete from posi-
tions of growing marginality within more and more structured political
contexts. Girls and women constituted the isolated individuals extracted
from their families of origin and included in new households through this
profoundly contradictory, tragic, and thus all-too-human tendency to
seek short-run survival of communities at the expense of indefinitely ex-
tending the problems that threatened them. Slaving was private, or do-
mestic, and concerned primarily with the prosperity—or reproduction—
of whatever reproducing collectivities were recognized, all of them
ultimately dependent on women for the progeny who might preserve
them, for the food and laborious preparation of it that would sustain
them, and for all the other essential tasks not diminished in signifi-
cance in the least (in fact, quite the contrary) by terming them domestic.

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308 joseph c. miller
Cash exchanges were not the primary means of sustaining individual au-
tonomy that they have become in modern times; rather, everyone needed
to belong.
Households were primary units of production, and enslaved women in
them worked, but work was the daily lot of nearly everyone, of either sex
or any age. The women brought into households as slaves added distinc-
tive value primarily in their ability to contribute children uncontested
by maternal relatives, who were thus promising future bearers of the
prospects of the collectivities that claimed them. Dispersed in the se-
cluded courtyards or walled compounds of private families, their social
vulnerabilities, which remained long after they had survived the per-
sonal disoriented vulnerability of their initial displacement, surely con-
tributed to the undisputed power of the male heads of the households
where they lived. In this very precise sense their presence enabled the
patriarchal inclinations of their masters, husbands, and fathers. Unlike
males, they presented relatively manageable problems to discipline at
home, and beyond its confines they constituted no significant threat to a
long sequence of aspiring, recurrently more public political authorities.
Commercial environments were another matter. In the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Atlantic, merchants enslaved men for productive
labor on unprecedentedly large scales, far beyond what metropolitan
monarchical law or royal armies were prepared to manage. The increas-
ing and eventually overwhelming numbers of enslaved African men then
became dark specters looming in the increasingly racialized imagina-
tions of their self-styled masters, from “rebellion to revolution.”25 By buy-
ing African men they converted slavery in the Americas from a strategy
focused on females, which over tens of thousands of years had sustained
the domestic components of every culture created anywhere in the
world, to a self-contradiction.
Earlier and elsewhere, militarized monarchies had repeatedly recog-
nized the intolerable threats posed by large gangs of armed slave merce-
naries under the command of aristocratic rivals or mercantile intrusions
on indebted peasant communities. The resulting ancient public laws of
slavery thus dealt not with the ubiquitous but politically unproblematic
enslavement of women and girls but rather only with the males enslaved,
or rather the males not deliberately worked directly to death in such dan-
gerous and debilitating occupations as reclaiming salt marshes or rowing
galleys or diving for pearls or mining in the ancient Mediterranean as
well as in the modern Americas. Rapid demise or effective quarantine of
enslaved men generally worked well enough to preserve viable majorities

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 309
of women among the enslaved. Where mortality failed, first and with dis-
tinctive political effect in North America, the exception proved the rule
that slaving and men did not mix well, for masters or for monarchs and
even less—in the United States—for popular majorities.
But because the men they enslaved to cultivate sugar and other com-
modities in the Americas nonetheless added significant impetus to the
growth of commercialization in Europe and the Americas and, second,
because of the accompanying growth in public consciousness on the part
of the English participants at the forefront of this process, enslaved
African males demanded public political attention. In these ways they
almost at once became preoccupations of political economists, the theo-
rizers of public economy, then the concern of leaders and members of
small participatory and populist religious sects, and eventually of monar-
chical, and particularly of national, governments themselves. The many
men enslaved in the Americas thus almost immediately raised to intol-
erable intensities the problematic politics that elsewhere and previously
had kept strategies of slaving focused on women. Their sheer presence,
increasingly seen as an abomination in a modern civic polity premised
on human equality before categorical law, as well as their direct actions,
thus ended slavery there in less than two centuries.
But abolition, in effect a populist political strategy of the capitalist in-
terests consolidating their control over emergent national governments
in the nineteenth century, focused only on the politically problematic
among the enslaved—the males, the “men, and brothers.”26 Abolition in
the Atlantic thus represented the fully modern extension of the imag-
ined—but more than obviously unattained—homogenizing ideals of
European commercial interests that had emerged in the preceding cen-
tury. Subsequent, and not only coincidentally virulent, racism then res-
urrected ancient tropes of rampaging black rapists. European men strug-
gling under the repressive sexual mores of the Victorian era—themselves
gendered expressions of the fearful implications of the unrestrained indi-
vidual autonomy at the heart of modernity—projected impulses declared
base onto the black men freed. The women, white and black, no longer
displaced, were isolated and dominated in the domiciliary domesticity of
the modern nuclear family—or at least those whose respectable husbands
and masters could afford to keep them there. Households had shrunk
from their historic significance as robust, female-populated units of pro-
duction and reproduction to hollow shells of material consumption. The
political weakness of women was reimagined as physical in origin, and
women in modern nations were walled off, once again, from public political

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310 joseph c. miller
spaces but they were also newly deprived of the appreciated positions that
household economies had once provided them. It would take another
century of feminism—turned outward on the male public sphere by the
absence of new, vulnerable enslaved women and girls who gave other
women degrees of female authority within the compounds, great houses,
and courtyards of the world of old—to begin to emancipate all women,
“free” as well as the formerly enslaved. Race today constitutes the remain-
ing challenge
notes
1. Gerda Lerner, “Women and Slavery,” Slavery and Abolition 4, no. 3 (1983):
173–98; See also Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986).
2. Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic
Books, 1991).
3. Essentially the argument of Claire Robertson and Marsha Robinson, “Re-
modeling Slavery as If Women Mattered,” in this volume, and in the tone set by
Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy.
4. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
5. This chapter develops one aspect of a more complex and longer argument
being developed in Miller, Slaving and History (New York: Cambridge University
Press, forthcoming). Epistemological aspects of the argument will be elaborated fur-
ther in Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
forthcoming), developed from the inaugural David Brion Davis Lectures given at
the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Resistance, Yale Univer-
sity, 7–9 February 2005. As the central historical argument has few correlates
(known to me) in the essentially structural (sociological and economic) literature
on slavery, I will make no attempt to list even the most excellent and basic works,
except for occasional references to parallels in specific concepts.
6. For this idea as it is beginning to emerge in Africa, see the notion that Roder-
ick J. McIntosh elaborates in terms of power as “heterarchy” in The Peoples of the
Middle Niger: The Island of Gold (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); McIntosh, Ancient Mid-
dle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2005). For another elegant phrasing, see Kassim Kone, review of In
Quest of Sunjata: The Mande Epic as History, Literature, and Performance, ed. Ralph
A. Austen, African Studies Review 44 (2001): 156–58.
7. This is essentially the contrast between the characterizations of slavery in
Africa in Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Suzanne
Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977); Claude
Meillassoux, Anthropologie de 1’esclavage: Le ventre de fer et d’argent (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1986), trans. Alide Dasnois as The Anthropology of Slavery:
The Womb of Iron and Gold, foreword by Paul E. Lovejoy (Chicago: University of

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domiciled and dominated: slaving as a history of women 311
Chicago Press, 1991). Miers and Kopytoff accent domestic practice while Meillas-
soux emphasizes broader theoretical and structural issues.
8. Patterson, Making of Western Culture, ch. 1.
9. Also see the alternative economic phrasing of the same population dynamics
in Gwyn Campbell, “Female Bondage in Imperial Madagascar, 1820–95,” in the
companion volume to this one.
10. On pawnship in relatively modern African contexts, see Paul E. Lovejoy and
Toyin Falola, eds., Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa, expanded ed. (New
Brunswick, NJ: Africa World, 2003).
11. See Patterson’s famous multicomponent definition in Slavery and Social
Death, 12.
12. Along these lines, for the United States, see Laura F. Edwards, “Enslaved
Women and the Law: Paradoxes of Subordination in the Postrevolutionary Caroli-
nas,” in this volume. The phrases quoted come, of course, from classic sociologically
inspired definitions of slavery: Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in
the Americas (New York: Knopf, 1947); Moses I. Finley, “Slavery,” International Ency-
clopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills, 19 vols. (New York: Macmillan/Free
Press, 1968), 14:307–13; and culminating in Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.
Meillassoux, in spite of a heavy theoretical emphasis on materialism, in fact defines
slavery essentially in terms of female fertility, or lack thereof, as a population ex-
ploited below its own subsistence, that is unable to reproduce itself. Meillassoux,
Anthropology of Slavery.
13. Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999).
14. An unnoticed regularity of kidnappings of young men by intimates and asso-
ciates of their older male relatives is evident in the few accounts of boys who sur-
vived the Atlantic Middle Passage in the eighteenth century. Jerome S. Handler,
“Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British
America,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 1 (2002): 23–56. Children could hardly have
been expected to understand possible financial circumstances behind what they ex-
perienced as unaccountable betrayals.
15. With the promising exception of Francesca Reduzzi Merola and Alfredina
Storchi Marino, eds., Femmes-esclaves: Modèles d’interprétation anthropologique,
économique, juridique (Rome: Jovene Editore, 1999).
16. Martin A. Klein, “Sex, Power, and Family Life in the Harem: A Comparative
Study,” in the companion volume in this set, Women and Slavery, vol. 1, Africa, the
Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne
Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).
17. Limitations of space unfortunately preclude providing details; the standard
literature gives primarily the generalizing cultural and static tone. The works of
Ehud Toledano are most historically sensitive. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the
Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997); Toledano,
“The Concept of Slavery in Ottoman and Other Muslim Societies: Dichotomy or
Continuum,” in Slave Elites in the Middle East and Africa, ed. Miura Toru and John
Edward Philips (London: Kegan Paul International, 2000), 159–75; and the excellent

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312 joseph c. miller
Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
18. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History,
1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Benton, “Legal Spaces
of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism,” Comparative Studies in So-
ciety and History 47, no. 4 (2005): 700–724.
19. Vincent Brown, Specter in the Canes: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic
Slavery (in preparation). See also Brown, “Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in
Jamaican Slave Society,” Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 1 (2003): 24–53.
20. Again, parallel to what McIntosh has elaborated as “heterarchical.”
21. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World
Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
22. The elegantly documented exemplary study is Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar
to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: Uni-
versity Press of Virginia, 1997).
23. My approach to the dynamics of slaving in North America refers to, but does
not rely on, a range of literature masterfully integrated in historical terms, for the
first time, by Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in
North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1988),
and artfully extended and consolidated by accenting the unique reproductive success
of these women in Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American
Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003).
24. A deliberate reference to Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random
House, 1952).
25. In the paradigmatic phrasing of Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolu-
tion: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1979).
26. For precisely this point, further, within the parallel “republican” context of
the French Antilles, see Myriam Cottias, “Gender and Republican Citizenship in
the French West Indies, 1848–1945,” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 233–45;
reprinted in this volume. Similarly, Bernard Moitt, “Freedom from Bondage at a
Price: Women and Redemption from Slavery in the French Caribbean in the Nine-
teenth Century,” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 2 (2005): 247–56; also in this volume.

campbell2.contributors 6/22/07 8:21 AM Page 313
CONTRIBUTORS
Henrice Altink is a lecturer in modern history at the University of York
(U.K.). She has published extensively on representations of Jamaican
slave women and the workings of the Apprenticeship System in Jamaica
and is currently working on the construction of womanhood in the
African Jamaican community, 1865–1938. Her publications include
Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition,
1780–1838 (2007); “ ‘To wed or not to wed?’: The Struggle to Define Afro-
Jamaican Relationships, 1834–1838,” Journal of Social History (Fall
(2004); and “Imagining Womanhood in Early Twentieth-Century Rural
Afro-Jamaica,” Journal of Caribbean History 40, no. 1 (2006). She may be
reached at ha501@york.ac.uk.
Laurence Brown is Lecturer in Migration History at the University of
Manchester. He has published articles on migrant networks in posteman-
cipation Martinique and Barbados in the Journal of Caribbean History
(2002) and the New West Indian Guide (2005). In the edited collection
Imperial Careering: Colonial Lives across the British Empire (2006) he ex-
amined how indentured Asian migration was reshaped by global inter-
actions between the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans during the
nineteenth century. He is currently completing a monograph on the his-
tory of migration in the Caribbean.
Gwyn Campbell holds a Canada Research Chair and is the director of
the Indian Ocean World Centre in the Department of History, McGill
University (gwyn.campbell@mcgill.ca). Born in Madagascar and raised
in Wales (where he worked as a BBC radio producer in English and
Welsh), he holds degrees in economic history from the universities of
Birmingham and Wales. He has taught in India, Madagascar, Britain,
South Africa, Belgium, France, and Canada and served as an academic
consultant to the South African government in the lead-up to the 1997
formation of an Indian Ocean regional association. He has organized a
313

campbell2.contributors 6/22/07 8:21 AM Page 314
314 contributors
series of international conferences on slavery following the “Avignon
format” (after the place where they were inaugurated), the latest—“Sex,
Power, and Slavery” at McGill University in 2007—to mark the bicente-
nary of the British Anti-Slave Trade Act. As author, editor, or coeditor,
he has more than one hundred publications, a significant proportion of
which are on the theme of unfree labor and slavery.
Myriam Cottias, colonial historian, is a researcher at the Centre Na-
tional de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS; CRPLC, Université des An-
tilles et de la Guyane) and directs the Centre International de Recherches
sur les Esclavages, sponsored by the CNRS. She has edited Esclavage et
dépendances serviles: Histoire comparée with Alessandro Stella and
Bernard Vincent (2006) and D’une abolition, l’autre: Anthologie raisonnée
de textes consacrés à la seconde abolition de l’esclavage dans les colonies
françaises (1999). Her recent publications include De la nécessité d’adopter
l’esclavage en France: Texte anonyme de 1797 (2007), coedited with Arlette
Farge, and La question noire: Histoire d’une construction coloniale (2007).
Laura F. Edwards is a professor in the History Department at Duke Uni-
versity. She is the author of Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political
Culture of Reconstruction (1997) and Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore:
Southern Women in the Civil War Era (2000). She is currently working on
The People and Their Peace: The Re-Constitution of Governance in the Post-
Revolutionary South. Contact: ledwards@duke.edu.
Richard Follett is Reader in American History at the University of
Sussex, Brighton, England. He is author of The Sugar Masters: Planters and
Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (2005) and multiple articles
on slavery and emancipation in the American South. He was founding
editor of the periodical Atlantic Studies and now works on race and labor
in the late nineteenth-century U.S. South and on the psychology of
American slavery. Contact: r.follett@sussex.ac.uk.
Tara Inniss (Innisst@aol.com) is a recent PhD graduate from the Uni-
versity of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, in Barbados. Her research
focuses on children’s health during slavery and the apprenticeship period
in the English-speaking Caribbean. She also recently completed the
Master of Social Development program at the University of New South
Wales in Sydney, Australia. She now works as a development consultant
in the Caribbean.

campbell2.contributors 6/22/07 8:21 AM Page 315
contributors 315
Barbara Krauthamer is an assistant professor of history at New York
University. She has published articles and completed a forthcoming
book manuscript on African American slavery and emancipation in the
Choctaw and Chickasaw nations. She is currently a fellow-in-residence
at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where she is
working on a book about runaway slave women in eighteenth-century
South Carolina and Georgia. She can be reached at bk39@nyu.edu.
Suzanne Miers is a professor emerita of history at Ohio University. She
is the author of Slavery in the Twentieth Century and coeditor of The End
of Slavery and other books. For further biographical details, see “A Trib-
ute to Suzanne Miers” in this volume.
Joseph C. Miller is the T. Cary Johnson Professor of History at the Uni-
versity of Virginia, where he has taught since 1972. He is a historian of
early Africa with training at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
under Jan Vansina and Philip D. Curtin. His early research on oral tradi-
tions in Angola led to Atlantic-scaled interests in the Angola-Brazil
trade in slaves and a 1988 monograph, Way of Death: Merchant Capital-
ism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830; to a comprehensive bibliog-
raphy of slavery and slaving throughout the world about to appear (spon-
sored by the Virginia Center for Digital History) in searchable online
format; and to a long-term effort to historicize the study of slavery on a
global scale, developed significantly through his participation in the series
of Avignon conferences that have led to the current, and other, volumes
of papers. Further details are available at www.virginia.edu/history/faculty/
miller.html.
Bernard Moitt is associate professor and chair of history at Virginia
Commonwealth University in Richmond. He has published several arti-
cles and chapters in anthologies on francophone African and Caribbean
history, with particular emphasis on gender and slavery. The author of
Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (2001), he is also edi-
tor of Sugar, Slavery and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the
Mascarenes, and the United States (2004). Contact: bmoitt@vcu.edu.
Kenneth Morgan is Professor of History and Deputy Director of the
Centre for American, Transatlantic and Caribbean History (CATCH) at
Brunel University, London. His publications concentrate on the social
and economic history of Britain and her colonies and on music history.

campbell2.contributors 6/22/07 8:21 AM Page 316
316 contributors
He is the general editor of British Records relating to America in Micro-
form (BRRAM) and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His
books include Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century
(1993); Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British Economy, 1660–1800 (2000);
and Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (2007). Con-
tact: kenneth.morgan@brunel.ac.uk.
Claire Robertson is a professor of history and women’s studies at The
Ohio State University. She has conducted fieldwork in Ghana, Kenya,
and Saint Lucia and published six books, including Sharing the Same
Bowl, which won the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Award in
1985, and more recently Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood,
which won the Peggy Koppelman Award from the Popular Culture Asso-
ciation and American Culture Association in 2003. She has also pub-
lished a number of articles on the subjects of African women, slavery,
education, trade, feminist theory, and other topics. She may be reached
at Robertson.8@osu.edu.
Marsha Robinson
Felipe Smith (felipes@tulane.edu) is an associate professor in English at
Tulane University, where he teaches American and African American
literature. He has published American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and
Black Literary Renaissance (1998) and is currently working on his second
book, The Dark Side of the Modern: Race and the Jazz Age. He has also
published essays on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and
Claude McKay.
Mariza de Carvalho Soares is an associate professor in the depart-
ment of history at Universidade Federal Fluminense-UFF, Brazil. She is
the Director of Núcleo de Estudos Brasil-África-NEAF at UFF. Her best-
known book, Devotos da Cor: Identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão no
Rio de Janeiro, século XVIII, which came out in Brazil in 2000, is cur-
rently under contract with Duke University Press to be translated into
English. Contact: marizacsoares@ig.com.br.

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WOMEN AND SL AVERY
volume one
Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic
contents
A Tribute to Suzanne Miers/Martin A. Klein and Richard Roberts
Preface
Introduction: Women as Slaves and Owners of Slaves: Experiences from
Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Early Atlantic/Joseph C. Miller
I. Women in Domestic Slavery across Africa and Asia
1. Women, Marriage, and Slavery in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Nineteenth
Century/Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch
2. Sex, Power, and Family Life in the Harem: A Comparative Study/
Martin A. Klein
3. The Law of the (White) Father: Psychoanalysis, “Paternalism,”and
Cape Slavery /Sharifa Ahjum
II. Women in Islamic Households
4. Mjakazi, Mpambe, Mjoli, Suria: Female Slaves in Swahili Sources/
Katrin Bromber
5. Prices for Female Slaves and Changes in Their Life Cycle: Evidence
from German East Africa/Jan-Georg Deutsch
III. Women in Households on the Fringes of Christianity and Commerce
6. Thralls and Queens: Female Slavery in the Medieval Norse
Atlantic/Kirsten A. Seaver
7. African Slave Women in Egypt, ca. 1820 to the Plague of
1834–35 /George Michael La Rue

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8. Female Inboekelinge in the South African Republic, 1850–80 / Fred
Morton
IV. Women in Imperial African Worlds
9. Women, Gender History, and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century
Ethiopia / Timothy Fernyhough (†)
10. Female Bondage in Imperial Madagascar, 1820–95 / Gwyn Campbell
11. Internal Markets or an Atlantic-Sahara Divide? How Women Fit into
the Slave Trade of West Africa / Paul E. Lovejoy
12. Women, Household Instability, and the End of Slavery in Banamba
and Gumbu, French Soudan, 1905–12 / Richard Roberts
V. Women in Commercial Outposts of Modern Europe
13. From Pariahs to Patriots: Women Slavers in Nineteenth-Century
“Portuguese” Guinea / Philip Havik
14. “It All Comes Out in the Wash”: Engendering Archaeological
Interpretations of Slavery / Elizabeth Grzymala Jordan
15. Free Women of Color and Socioeconomic Marginality in Mauritius,
1767–1830 / Richard B. Allen
Contributors
Index