front cover of American Mediterranean
American Mediterranean
Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation
Matthew Pratt Guterl
Harvard University Press, 2013
How did slave-owning Southern planters make sense of the transformation of their world in the Civil War era? Matthew Pratt Guterl shows that they looked beyond their borders for answers. He traces the links that bound them to the wider fraternity of slaveholders in Cuba, Brazil, and elsewhere, and charts their changing political place in the hemisphere.Through such figures as the West Indian Confederate Judah Benjamin, Cuban expatriate Ambrosio Gonzales, and the exile Eliza McHatton, Guterl examines how the Southern elite connected—by travel, print culture, even the prospect of future conquest—with the communities of New World slaveholders as they redefined their world. He analyzes why they invested in a vision of the circum-Caribbean, and how their commitment to this broader slave-owning community fared. From Rebel exiles in Cuba to West Indian apprenticeship and the Black Codes to the “labor problem” of the postwar South, this beautifully written book recasts the nineteenth-century South as a complicated borderland in a pan-American vision.
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Breaking Chains
Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory
R. Gregory Nokes
Oregon State University Press, 2013
When they were brought to Oregon in 1844, Missouri slaves Robin and Polly Holmes and their children were promised freedom in exchange for helping develop their owner’s Willamette Valley farm. However, Nathaniel Ford, an influential settler and legislator, kept them in bondage until 1850, even then refusing to free their children. Holmes took his former master to court and, in the face of enormous odds, won the case in 1853.

In Breaking Chains, R. Gregory Nokes tells the story of the only slavery case adjudicated in Oregon’s pre-Civil War courts—Holmes v. Ford. Through the lens of this landmark case, Nokes explores the historical context of racism in Oregon and the West, reminding readers that there actually were slaves in Oregon, though relatively few in number.

Drawing on the court record, Nokes offers an intimate account of the relationship between a slave and his master from the slave’s point of view. He also explores the experiences of other slaves in early Oregon, examining attitudes toward race and revealing contradictions in the state’s history. Oregon was the only free state admitted to the union with a voter-approved constitutional clause banning African Americans and, despite the prohibition of slavery in the state, many in Oregon tolerated it and supported politicians who advocated for slavery, including Oregon’s first territorial governor.

Breaking Chains sheds light on a somber part of Oregon’s history, bringing the story of slavery in Oregon to a broader audience. The book will appeal to readers interested in Pacific Northwest history and in the history of slavery in the United States.
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The Escape
A Leap For Freedom
William Wells Brown
University of Tennessee Press, 2001
A well-known nineteenth-century abolitionist and former slave, William Wells Brown was a prolific writer and lecturer who captivated audiences with readings of his drama The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom (1858). The first published play by an African American writer, The Escape explored the complexities of American culture at a time when tensions between North and South were about to explode into the Civil War. This new volume presents the first-edition text of Brown’s play and features an extensive introduction that establishes the work’s continuing significance.

The Escape centers on the attempted sexual violation of a slave and involves many characters of mixed race, through which Brown commented on such themes as moral decay, white racism, and black self-determination. Rich in action and faithful in dialect, it raises issues relating not only to race but also to gender by including concepts of black and white masculinity and the culture of southern white and enslaved women. It portrays a world in which slavery provided a convenient means of distinguishing between the white North and the white South, allowing northerners to express moral sentiments without recognizing or addressing the racial prejudice pervasive among whites in both regions.

John Ernest’s introductory essay balances the play's historical and literary contexts, including information on Brown and his career, as well as on slavery, abolitionism, and sectional politics. It also discusses the legends and realities of the Underground Railroad, examines the role of antebellum performance art—including blackface minstrelsy and stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin—in the construction of race and national identity, and provides an introduction to theories of identity as performance.

A century and a half after its initial appearance, The Escape remains essential reading for students of African American literature. Ernest's keen analysis of this classic play will enrich readers’ appreciation of both the drama itself and the era in which it appeared.
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Indians in the Family
Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion
Dawn Peterson
Harvard University Press, 2017

During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an “unusual sympathy,” Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household. Through the stories of nearly a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their Native parents, Dawn Peterson opens a window onto the forgotten history of adoption in early nineteenth-century America. Indians in the Family shows the important role that adoption played in efforts to subdue Native peoples in the name of nation-building.

As the United States aggressively expanded into Indian territories between 1790 and 1830, government officials stressed the importance of assimilating Native peoples into what they styled the United States’ “national family.” White households who adopted Indians—especially slaveholding Southern planters influenced by leaders such as Jackson—saw themselves as part of this expansionist project. They hoped to inculcate in their young charges U.S. attitudes toward private property, patriarchal family, and racial hierarchy.

U.S. whites were not the only ones driving this process. Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw families sought to place their sons in white households, to be educated in the ways of U.S. governance and political economy. But there were unintended consequences for all concerned. As adults, these adopted Indians used their educations to thwart U.S. federal claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the political struggles that would culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

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The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard
Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Committee
The Presidential Committee on the Legacy of Slavery
Harvard University Press, 2022

Harvard’s searing and sobering indictment of its own long-standing relationship with chattel slavery and anti-Black discrimination.

In recent years, scholars have documented extensive relationships between American higher education and slavery. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard adds Harvard University to the long list of institutions, in the North and the South, entangled with slavery and its aftermath.

The report, written by leading researchers from across the university, reveals hard truths about Harvard’s deep ties to Black and Indigenous bondage, scientific racism, segregation, and other forms of oppression. Between the university’s founding in 1636 and 1783, when slavery officially ended in Massachusetts, Harvard leaders, faculty, and staff enslaved at least seventy people, some of whom worked on campus, where they cared for students, faculty, and university presidents. Harvard also benefited financially and reputationally from donations by slaveholders, slave traders, and others whose fortunes depended on human chattel. Later, Harvard professors and the graduates they trained were leaders in so-called race science and eugenics, which promoted disinvestment in Black lives through forced sterilization, residential segregation, and segregation and discrimination in education.

No institution of Harvard’s scale and longevity is a monolith. Harvard was also home to abolitionists and pioneering Black thinkers and activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Eva Beatrice Dykes. In the late twentieth century, the university became a champion of racial diversity in education. Yet the past cannot help casting a long shadow on the present. Harvard’s motto, Veritas, inscribed on gates, doorways, and sculptures all over campus, is an exhortation to pursue truth. The Legacy of Slavery at Harvard advances that necessary quest.

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The Making of a Southerner
William Barclay Napton's Private Civil War
Christopher Phillips
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Christopher Phillips has brought to life a man, a story, and a voice lost in the din of competing post–Civil War narratives that each claim a timeless divide between North and South. William Barclay Napton (1808–1883) was an editor, lawyer, and state supreme court justice who lived in Missouri during the tumultuous American nineteenth century. He was a keen observer of the nation’s sectional politics just as he was a participant in those of his border state, the most divided of any in the nation, in the decades surrounding the Civil War. This book tells the story of one man’s civil war, lived and waged within the broader conflict, and the long shadows both cast.
But Napton’s story moves beyond the Civil War just as it transcends the formal political realm. His is a fascinating tale of identity politics and their shifting currents, by which the highly educated former New Jerseyite became the owner or trustee of nearly fifty slaves and one of the most committed and thoughtful of the nation’s proslavery ideologues. That a “northerner” could make such a life transition in the Border West suggests more than the powerful nature of slavery in antebellum American society. Napton’s story offers provocative insights into the process of southernization, one driven more by sectional ideology and politics than by elements of a distinctive southern culture.
Although Napton’s tragic Civil War experience was a watershed in his southern evolution, that evolution was completed only after he had constructed a politicized memory of the bitter conflict, one that was suffered nowhere worse than in Missouri. This war-driven transformation ultimately defined him and his family, just as it would his border state and region for decades to come. By suffering for the South, losing family and property in his defense of its ideals and principles, he claimed by right what he could not by birth. Napton became a southerner by choice.
Drawn from incomparable personal journals kept for more than fifty years and from voluminous professional and family correspondence, Napton’s life story offers a thoughtful and important perspective on the key issues and events that turned this northerner first into an avowed proslavery ideologue and then into a full southerner. As a prominent jurist who sat on Missouri’s high bench for more than a quarter century, he used his politicized position to give birth to the New South in the Old West. Students, teachers, and general readers of southern history, western history, and Civil War history will find this book of particular interest.
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Moses and the Monster and Miss Anne
Carole C. Marks
University of Illinois Press, 2008
This engaging history presents the extraordinary lives of Patty Cannon, Anna Ella Carroll, and Harriet Tubman, three "dangerous" women who grew up in early-nineteenth-century Maryland and were vigorously enmeshed in the social and political maelstrom of antebellum America. The "monstrous" Patty Cannon was a reputed thief, murderer, and leader of a ruthless gang who kidnapped free blacks and sold them back into slavery, whereas Miss Anna Ella Carroll, a relatively genteel unmarried slaveholder, foisted herself into state and national politics by exerting influence on legislators and conspiring with Governor Thomas Holliday Hicks to keep Maryland in the Union when many state legislators clamored to join the Confederacy. And, of course, Harriet Tubman--slave rescuer, abolitionist, and later women's suffragist--was both hailed as "the Moses of her people" and hunted as an outlaw with a price on her head worth at least ten thousand dollars.

All three women lived for a time in close proximity on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, an isolated region that thrived on tobacco and then lost it, procured slaves and then lost them, and produced strong-minded women and then condemned them. Though they never actually met, and their backgrounds and beliefs differed drastically, these women's lives converged through their active experiences of the conflict over slavery in Maryland and beyond, the uncertainties of economic transformation, the struggles in the legal foundation of slavery and, most of all, the growing dispute in gender relations in America.

Throughout this book, Carole C. Marks gleans historical fact and sociological insight from the persistent myths and exaggerations that color the women's legacies, and she investigates the common roots and motivations of three remarkable figures who bucked the era's expectations for women. She also considers how each woman's public identity reflected changing ideas of domesticity and the public sphere, spirituality, and legal rights and limitations. Cannon, Carroll, and Tubman, each in her own way, passionately fought for the future of Maryland and the United States, and from these unique vantage points, Moses and the Monster and Miss Anne portrays the intersecting and conflicting forces of race, economics, and gender that threatened to rend a nation apart.

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Patriarchy in Peril
William Byrd II and Slavery in Early Virginia
Dennis Todd
University of Tennessee Press, 2023
William Byrd II was a prominent eighteenth-century Virginian who at the time of his death owned over 180,000 acres and employed laborers and enslaved Africans to work his land. His letters, diaries, and surveying documents have become key texts in the study of American history, and he is one of the most quoted and discussed figures of his era.

Byrd himself was perhaps the early colonial epitome of a patriarch, and typically, when historians examine Byrd and the prominence of patriarchal thought in colonial Virginia, they examine his relationships with his immediate family. In this book, however, Dennis Todd examines the patriarchal relations between Byrd and the workers on his plantations—his apprentices, his wageworkers, his overseers, his white servants, and especially his slaves. In doing so, this book illuminates a neglected stage in the formation of slavery in Virginia. Todd argues that patriarchal principles, which are often assumed to have justified slavery and to have offered a template for slave management, in fact did neither. Byrd was not the only Virginian to wrestle with the contradictions between patriarchal values and the realities of slavery, but few were as articulate.

In examining Byrd through the twin lens of slavery and patriarchy, Patriarchy in Peril makes an important contribution to our understanding of the man and his place in Virginia society as well as the contentious formation of early America.
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Piedmont Farmer
David Golightly Harris 1855-1870
Philip N. Racine
University of Tennessee Press, 1990
The journals of David Golightly Harris are a unique daily record of a fifteen-year span in the life of a Piedmont South Carolina farm family that owned ten slaves and cultivated one hundred acres.  Documents from small slaveholders are few, making these journals an invaluable source of information about the agricultural routines of a small antebellum farm as well as a revealing commentary on regional and national affairs, slavery, education, religion, family relationships, and community life.  
An especially compelling feature of this book is its inclusion of writings by Harris's wife, Emily, who took over the journal when he went to war for the Confederacy in 1862. Recounting the trials of managing the farm and raising seven children in her husband's absence, Emily's words offer poignant insights into the daily struggles of those who tended the home front during the Civil War.
"Piedmont Farmer is one of those rare books that deserves a place alongside The Cotton Kingdom, My Bondage and My Freedom, The Children of Pride, Mary Chesnut's Civil War, and the recent Freedom volumes as an indispensable source for historians of the nineteenth-century South."—David C. Rankin, The Journal of Southern History
"Harris's journals are important because they span the years before, during, and after the Civil War. . . . Philip N. Racine's annotations are extensive and extraordinarily rich in detail and insight. Enhanced with photographs, maps, and a comprehensive index, the Harris journals are not only a major contribution to southern history, but also they are a poignant view of agriculture and an explicit confirmation of slavery's burden."—David E. Schob, Illinois Historical Journal

The Editor: Philip N. Racine is Kenan Professor of History at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He edited "Unspoiled Heart": The Journal of Charles Mattocks of the 17th Maine in the Voices of the Civil War series published by the University of Tennessee Press.
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The Power of Their Will
Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba
Teresa Prados-Torreira
University of Alabama Press, 2021
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2022

A valuable narrative of the often paradoxical and conflicting human bonds between female owners and the enslaved in nineteenth-century Cuba
 
In the early nineteenth century, while abolitionism was rising and the slave trade was declining in the Atlantic world, Spain used this opportunity to massively expand plantation slavery in Cuba. Between 1501 and 1866, more than 778,000 Africans were torn from their homelands and brought to work for the Cuban slaveholding class.
 
An understudied aspect of Cuban slaveholding society is the role of the white Cuban slave mistress (amas). The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba illuminates the interaction of female slaveholders and the enslaved during this time. Teresa Prados-Torreira shows, despite the lack of political power in a highly patriarchal society, Cuban women as property owners were instrumental in supporting the long duration of slavery, whether by enforcing the disciplining of the enslaved in the domestic sphere or helping to create the illusion of slavery as a humane institution. Thousands of Creole slaveholding women relied on slaves to lead a comfortable life. Even the subsistence of many poor women depended on the income derived from the hiring out of their enslaved.
 
In this accessible cultural history, culled from government documents, fiction, newspaper articles, traveler’s accounts, women’s wills, and archival research, Prados-Torreira coalesces a valuable narrative out of the often paradoxical and conflicting stories of the human bonds between the female owner and the enslaved. Narrative chapters, enlivened by vignettes, describe the daily life of slave mistresses in the main cities of Havana and Santiago and other towns, workings of sugar mills and coffee plantations, how slaveholding women coping with slave rebellions and wartime during the Ten Years’ War, and how personal relationships could occasionally affect the balance of power.
 
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The Slave Master of Trinidad
William Hardin Burnley and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Selwyn R. Cudjoe
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
William Hardin Burnley (1780–1850) was the largest slave owner in Trinidad during the nineteenth century. Born in the United States to English parents, he settled on the island in 1802 and became one of its most influential citizens and a prominent agent of the British Empire. A central figure among elite and moneyed transnational slave owners, Burnley moved easily through the Atlantic world of the Caribbean, the United States, Great Britain, and Europe, and counted among his friends Alexis de Tocqueville, British politician Joseph Hume, and prime minister William Gladstone.

In this first full-length biography of Burnley, Selwyn R. Cudjoe chronicles the life of Trinidad's "founding father" and sketches the social and cultural milieu in which he lived. Reexamining the decades of transition from slavery to freedom through the lens of Burnley's life, The Slave Master of Trinidad demonstrates that the legacies of slavery persisted in the new post-emancipation society.
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Slavery and Social Death
A Comparative Study, With a New Preface
Orlando Patterson
Harvard University Press, 2018

Winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, American Sociological Association
Co-Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science Association

In a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South.

Praise for the previous edition:

“Densely packed, closely argued, and highly controversial in its dissent from much of the scholarly conventional wisdom about the function and structure of slavery worldwide.”
Boston Globe

“There can be no doubt that this rich and learned book will reinvigorate debates that have tended to become too empirical and specialized. Patterson has helped to set out the direction for the next decades of interdisciplinary scholarship.”
—David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books

“This is clearly a major and important work, one which will be widely discussed, cited, and used. I anticipate that it will be considered among the landmarks in the study of slavery, and will be read by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—as well as many other scholars and students.”
—Stanley Engerman

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Slavery Evolution Cherokee Society
1540-1866
Theda Perdue
University of Tennessee Press, 1987

Slavery was practiced among North American Indians long before Europeans arrived on these shores, bringing their own version of this “peculiar institution.” Unlike the European institution, however, Native American slavery was function of warfare among tribes, replenishment of population lost through intertribal conflict or disease, and establishment and preservation of tribal standards of behavior. American Indians had little use, in primary purpose of slavery among Europeans.

Theda Perdue here traces the history of slavery among the Cherokee Indians as it evolved from 1540 to 1866, indicating not only why the intrusion of whites, “slaves” contributed nothing to the Cherokee economy. During the colonial period, however, Cherokees actively began to capture members of other tribes and were themselves captured and sold to whites as chattels for the Caribbean slave trade. Also during this period, African slaves were introduced among the Indians, and when intertribal warfare ended, the use of forced labor to increase agricultural and other production emerged within Cherokee society.

Well aware that the institution of black slavery was only one of many important changes that gradually broke down the traditional Cherokee culture after 1540, Professor Perdue integrates her concern with slavery into the total picture of cultural transformation resulting from the clash between European and Amerindian societies. She has made good use of previous anthropological and sociological studies, and presents an excellent summary of the relevant historical materials, ever attempting to see cultural crises from the perspective of the Cherokees. The first over-all account of the effect of slavery upon the Cherokees, Perdue’s acute analysis and readable narrative provide the reader with a new angle of vision on the changing nature of Cherokee culture under the impact of increasing contact with Europeans.

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Slavery in Zion
A Documentary and Genealogical History of Black Lives and Black Servitude in Utah Territory, 1847-1862
Amy Tanner Thiriot
University of Utah Press, 2022
According to an Akan proverb, “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” This belief underlies historian Amy Tanner Thiriot’s work in Slavery in Zion, which combines genealogical and historical research to bring to light events and relationships unknown or misunderstood for well over a century. The total number of enslaved people in Utah’s early history has remained an open question for many years, due in part to the nature of nineteenth-century records, and an exact number is undetermined. But while writing this book Thiriot documented around one hundred enslaved or indentured Black men, women, and children in Utah Territory.
 
Slavery in Zion has two major parts. The first section provides an introductory history, chapters on southern and western experiences, and information on life after emancipation. The second section is a biographical encyclopedia of names, relationships, and events. Although Slavery in Zion contains material applicable to legal history and the history of race and Mormonism, its most important contribution is as an archive of the experiences of Utah’s enslaved Black people, at last making their stories an integral part of the record of Utah and the American West—no longer forgotten or written out of history.
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Slavery Unseen
Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History
Lamonte Aidoo
Duke University Press, 2018
In Slavery Unseen, Lamonte Aidoo upends the narrative of Brazil as a racial democracy, showing how the myth of racial democracy elides the history of sexual violence, patriarchal terror, and exploitation of slaves. Drawing on sources ranging from inquisition trial documents to travel accounts and literature, Aidoo demonstrates how interracial and same-sex sexual violence operated as a key mechanism of the production and perpetuation of slavery as well as racial and gender inequality. The myth of racial democracy, Aidoo contends, does not stem from or reflect racial progress; rather, it is an antiblack apparatus that upholds and protects the heteronormative white patriarchy throughout Brazil's past and on into the present.
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Slavery's Descendants
Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation
Jill Strauss
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Race remains a potent and divisive force in our society. Whether it is the shooting of minority people by the police, the mass incarceration of people of color, or the recent KKK rallies that have been in the news, it is clear that the scars from the United States’ histories of slavery and racial discrimination run too deep to simply be ignored. But what are the most productive ways to deal with the toxic and torturous legacies of American racism?

Slavery’s Descendants brings together contributors from a variety of racial backgrounds, all members or associates of a national racial reconciliation organization called Coming to the Table, to tell their stories of dealing with America’s racial past through their experiences and their family histories. Some are descendants of slaveholders, some are descendants of the enslaved, and many are descendants of both slaveholders and slaves. What they all have in common is a commitment toward collective introspection, and a willingness to think critically about how the nation’s histories of oppression continue to ripple into the present, affecting us all.

The stories in Slavery’s Descendants deal with harrowing topics—rape, lynching, cruelty, shame—but they also describe acts of generosity, gratitude, and love. Together, they help us confront the legacy of slavery to reclaim a more complete picture of U.S. history, one cousin at a time. 

Funding for the production of this book was provided by Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund (
https://www.furthermore.org).


 
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Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782
Virginia Bernhard
University of Missouri Press, 1999

Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782, offers a fresh perspective on the complex relationship between racism and slavery in the often overlooked second-oldest English colony in the New World. As the first blacks were brought onto the islands not specifically for slave labor, but for their expertise as pearl divers and cultivators of West Indies plants, Bermuda's racial history began to unfold much differently from that of the Caribbean islands or of the North American mainland.

Bermuda's history records the arrival of the first blacks, the first English law passed to control the behavior of the "Negroes," and the creation of ninety-nine-year indentures for black and Indian servants. When the inevitable reality of slavery took hold in Bermuda, slaveholders realized that they, like their slaves, were not free. Slavery dictated and strained the relationships between whites and blacks, but in this smallest of English colonies it differed from slavery elsewhere because of the uniquely close master-slave relations created by Bermuda's size and maritime economy.

At only twenty-one square miles in area, Bermuda saw slaves and slaveholders working and living closer together than in other societies. The emphasis on maritime pursuits offered slaves a degree of autonomy and a sense of identity unequaled in other English colonies. This groundbreaking history of Bermuda's slavery reveals fewer runaways, less-violent rebellions, and relatively milder punishments for offending slaves.

Bernhard delves into the origins of Bermuda's slavery, its peculiar nature, and its effects on blacks and whites. The study is based on archival research drawn from wills and inventories, laws and court cases, governors' reports and council minutes. Intended as an introduction to both the history of the islands and the rich sources for further research, this book will prove invaluable to scholars of slavery, as well as those interested in historical archaeology, anthropology, maritime history, and colonial history.

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Soul by Soul
Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
Walter Johnson
Harvard University Press, 2001

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
Winner of the Avery O. Craven Award


Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.

Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders’ letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market’s slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by “feeding them up,” dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage.

Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the “peculiar institution” in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery.

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Speculators And Slaves
Masters, Traders, And Slaves In The Old South
Michael Tadman
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tadman establishes that all levels of white society in the antebellum South were deeply involved in a massive interregional trade in slaves. Using countless previously untapped manuscript sources, he documents black resilience in the face of the pervasive indifference of slaveholders toward slaves and their families. This new paperback edition of Speculators and Slaves offers a substantial new Introduction that advances a major thesis of master-slave relationships. By exploring the gulf between the slaveholders’ self-image as benevolent paternalists and their actual behavior, Tadman critiques the theories of close accommodation and paternalistic hegemony that are currently influential.
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Unloose My Heart
A Personal Reckoning with the Twisted Roots of My Southern Family Tree
Marcia Edwina Herman-Giddens
University of Alabama Press, 2023
A deeply personal memoir that unearths a family history of racism, slaveholding, and trauma as well as love and sparks of delight

Marcia Herman’s family moved to Birmingham in 1946, when she was five years old, and settled in the steel-making city dense with smog and a rigid apartheid system. Marcia, a shy only child, struggled to fit in and understand this world, shadowed as it was by her mother’s proud antebellum heritage. In 1966, weary of Alabama’s toxic culture, Marcia and her young family left Birmingham and built a life in North Carolina.

Later in life, Herman-Giddens resumed a search to find out what she did not know about her family history. Unloose My Heart interweaves the story of her youth and coming of age in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement together with this quest to understand exactly who and what her maternal ancestors were and her obligations as a white woman within a broader sense of American family.

More than a memoir set against the backdrop of Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle, this is the work of a woman of conscience writing in the twenty-first century. Haunted by the past, Unloose My Heart is a journey of exploration and discovery, full of angst, sorrow, and yearning. Unearthing her forebears’ centuries-long embrace of plantation slavery, Herman-Giddens dug deeply to parse the arrogance and cruelty necessary to be a slaveholder and the trauma and fear that ripple out in its wake. All this forced her to scrutinize the impact of this legacy in her life, as well as her debt to the enslaved people who suffered and were exploited at her ancestors’ hands. But she also discovers lost connections, new cousins and friends, unexpected joys, and, eventually, a measure of peace in the process. With heartbreak, moments of grace, and an enduring sense of love, Unloose My Heart shines a light in the darkness and provides a model for a heartfelt reckoning with American history.
 
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