Peter J. Parish, Slavery: History and Historians (1989).
Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975).
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008).
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery & Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013).
James Walvin, Atlas of Slavery (2006).
James Ciment, Atlas of African-American History (2001).
Jonathan Earle, The Routledge Atlas of African American History (2000).
Howard Dodson, Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture (2002).
Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave (1853) This is available online at multiple locations online, including:
https://archive.org/details/twelveyearslave00nort/page/n5
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45631
For an especially good print version with supporting documents and commentaries (including critiques of the film version of the book), see Henry Louis Gates Jr. & Kevin M. Burke, eds, Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Norton Critical Editions (1853, 2016).
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Northup
Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr., The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record: an extraordinary online collection of images relating to all aspects of the Atlantic slave trade:
http://slaveryimages.org
Before diving into the historical geography and landscape history of slavery, I want to remind us that the horrors of the institution express themselves on scales reaching far above and below the scales of landscape.
I'll begin and end the lecture with a powerfully eloquent passage from the historian Annette Gordon-Reed:
Whenever I read this passage [describing slave families being randomly divided after their owner died], I am struck by how this episode reveals the rock-hard essence of American slavery: one group of people under the whim and control of another. Families were torn apart--or lived with the constant threat of separation--not because of the vagaries of nature, primitive health care, or dangerous occupations, but in the ordinary course of a social, economic, and legal system that promoted these types of atrocities.
Make no mistake; in a society that treated human beings as property, and that placed the right to private property at the apex of its values, enslaved people could have no sure expectation of maintaining even the deepest, most elemental of their human connections.
To the dominant culture, absolutely nothing about black life was sacred. And yet, I know many things were sacred to enslaved people. They were human beings, and the desire for personal integrity, the impulse to create and maintain a family life, to build and be a part of a community, and to express spirituality in some manner, were as present within the community of slaves as they have been in all human societies.
Although the humanity of slaves is universal—it speaks to all who choose to recognize it—it draws me in in a very specific way.
Because I am black, the connection I feel to American slaves is particular in that it is racial. I simply cannot read about slave children, or see photographs or depictions of them, without at some point thinking of my own daughter and son.
Annette Gordon-Reed, “Sacred Legacies,” in Howard Dodson, ed, Jubilee : The Emergence of African-American Culture (2003)
Although I'll narrate and analyze slavery today in terms of its changing geographical and historical expressions, I'd urge you never to lose track of its human cost, which is perhaps best experienced in books like Frederick Douglass's famed autobiographies, or in Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853), which tells the story of northern black freeman who was kidnapped and forced into slavery for more than a decade. Northup's book and the 2013 film based on it convey lessons about the lived experiences of slavery that I can't hope to capture in a lecture like this one.
The geography of slavery: this will be the topic of today's lecture. This is a course on American landscape history, and slavery has its fingerprints on so many elements of the American landscape.
There are a number of concepts to which scholars often appeal when trying to make sense of slavery:
Relative to our course's focus on the making of the American landscape, key elements I’ll stress today about the ways slavery and freedom expressed themselves prior to the Civil War include:
One other point I want to make today: in this course, I am frequently drawn to historical phenomena in the landscape that I'm able to represent visually. Today, I want to be very explicit in acknowledging certain problems built into this bias of mine toward using of visual evidence. Here are a few of the challenges associated with illustrating slavery:
So how can we visualize the geography or institution of slavery? Here is one extraordinarily rich on-line resource that I strongly encourage you to explore if you are at all interested in the history of the Atlantic slave trade:
http://slaveryimages.org.
You might also read the book and watch the film "Twelve Years a Slave," based on the account written by the reenslaved free Black man Solomon Northrup. Finally, a recent work of scholarhip does an especially good job of exploring some of the environmental and geographical aspects of nineteenth-century slavery: Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery & Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013).
Johnson writes: While it is easy to lose sight of the elementally human character of labor—even that of forced labor—in light of the salutary political effect of labeling slavery “inhuman,” it is important to recognize that slaves’ humanity was not restricted to a zone of “agency” or “culture” outside their work. When slaves went into the field, they took with them social connections and affective ties. The labor process flowed through them, encompassed them, was interrupted and redefined by them. Slaves worked alongside people they knew, people they had raised, and people they would bury. They talked, they sang, they laughed, they suffered, they remembered their ancestors and their God, the rhythms of their lives working through and over those of their work. We cannot any more separate slaves’ labor from their humanity than we can separate the ability of a human hand to pick cotton from its ability to caress the cheek of a crying child, the aching of a stooped back in the field from the arc of a body bent in supplication, the voice that called time for the hoes from that which told a story that was centuries old.
An argument I also make at greater length in History / Geography / Environmental Studies 460 points to the relative cost of labor and land in the United States, a theme that was implicit when we talked in recent lectures about the attractions of "free land" in the American West (and the fears of industrial employers and plantation owners alike that free land might alter the cost of labor they paid in running their enterprises).
In England, labor was abundant and land was scarce. In America, land was abundant and labor was scarce. Using these two seemingly simple observations, the scholar H.J. Habakkuk argued in his 1962 book American & British Technology in the 19th Century that the difference between British and U.S. labor systems explained the relatively rapid adoption, in the 19th century, of labor-saving technologies in the U.S. versus in Britain. But a more sinister corollary of his arguments about invest capital to lower the cost of labor points directly toward today's theme: the decision by some Americans to invest in slavery—akin by a certain economic logic to buying a machine.
Another scholar (one of my own most important teachers) who can help us think about the institution of slavery is Edmund S. Morgan. In his classic book American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), Morgan posed this paradox: how could it be that the chief authors of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, documents that are now celebrated for their affirmation of human liberty and freedom, were Virginia plantation owners whose livelihoods depended on the labor of the enslaved human beings they owned? Morgan offered an argument similar to Habakkuk's to explain this seeming contradiction: that whereas the British gentry had depended on large peasant populations to support their rural estates, a dearth of such peasants to provide cheap labor in the American colonies made slavery an economically desirable system for rich white landowners who were willing and able to purchase enslaved human beings. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, and many others were all large slaveholders.
As we begin to think about the place of slavery in the making of the American landscape, one theme that will run through this entire lecture is separation. Slavery involved separation -- and the power to enforce separation -- in myriad places and at myriad scales. To enslave human beings was to separate people from where they wanted to be and the people they wished to be near. The power to divide people and landscapes from each other is one of the defining features of slavery.
For Thomas Jefferson, a founding Virginia slaveholder who authored the Declaration of Independence and whose influence on the American landscape we've already encountered multiple times, small independent property holders were at the core of his vision of political and economic democracy. As we've already seen, Jefferson's "Empire of Liberty" would be protected in the American republic if the following characteristics could be sustained:
So if and when you visit Jefferson's home at Monticello (which we briefly encountered in the very first lecture of this course), don't forget that its iconic landscape was almost entirely constructed and maintained by slave labor. More strikingly still, Jefferson was like many slaveowning man who fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, whose life is brilliantly explored by Annette Gordon-Reed in her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). And to bring this back to us in Wisconsin: one of the sons of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Eston Hemings, is buried about a mile from here in Madison's Forest Hill Cemetery. The boundaries and separations of slavery are visible here too in our local landscape.
Let's now try to trace the geographical relationships of slavery halfway round the world to get a sense of their far-flung connections, boundaries, and separations in the making of the American landscape.
There had been a prior trade of enslaved or servile people from sub-Saharan Africa toward the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean as part of Arab caravan traffic prior to the rise of the European slave trade in the 17th century. Slavery has an ancient history, but from 1600 forward, never before had it been conducted on so extensive a scale with this degree of commercialism. Wikipedia has an especially extensive entry providing an overview of this history, with numerous maps and illustrations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade
Portuguese explorations and the beginning of slave trade along the Gold Coast of West Africa were in part enabled by ocean currents. Places like the Canary, Cape Verde, and Azore Island were the origin places of a slave trade that then began to move to parts of the West Indies and other parts of the Caribbean. Island geography helped enable slavery: the inherent isolation of islands helps explain how slaveholders could control slaves in these landscapes. (NB: The etymology of the word "isolated" is from the Latin īnsulātus, "made into an island.")
Some of the earliest colonies established by the Portuguese and many other European nations were sugar plantations. Indeed, we could say that many of the crops produced by slave-enabled colonies were "addictive:" coffee, sugar, and tobacco. Sugar started in the eastern Mediterranean, moved out to the Canaries and Azores in the mid-Atlantic, then leapt to the islands of the Caribbean. Sugar, molasses, and rum all became key commodities in this system of sugar plantations and manufacturing facilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_plantations_in_the_Caribbean
Where would the workforce for sugar production come from? Slaves. Certain racial hierarchies became ever more rigid as the demand for enslaved labor becomes greater. The control of the human body became crucial to the slave owner, yielding a microgeography of control: the African body in chains.
African traders from the interior of the continent met European traders on the Gold Coast, and a series of trading relationships developd. Cape Coast Castle in Ghana can serve as one symbol of slavery built into the landscape. Here's a satellite view of it today:
https://goo.gl/maps/gR5P5sSUPFE2
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coast_Castle
http://www.capecoastcastlemuseum.com
We've seen this kind of structure before: it is a military fortification, and it is also a prison. There are dozens of these fortifications along the Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, and Slave Coast of West Africa, built by the Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, Swedish—virtually all of the European colonial powers, all seeking to participate in the trade in enslaved Africans.
From these fortifications holding bound slaves, enslaved African peoples were forced through "the Middle Passage," the journey across the Atlantic Ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage
The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, England, features exhibits that help us visualize the Middle Passage: ships making the journey across the Atlantic Ocean following the prevailing winds and currents, and street names—place names—in Liverpool named for prominent slave owners. The mortality rates along the Middle Passage were high, and the conditions were brutal.
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/index.aspx
Occasionally slaves attempted revolts, and occasionally did so successfully—as in the celebrated case of the 1840 Amistad ship that became a celebrated legal case in the U.S.
If you look at where slaves went, you'd see that North America was far from being the biggest recipient of slave shipments. Instead, the vast majority in the early years went the Caribbean, where disease and the brutal tropical working conditions produced staggering mortality rates. By 1690-1730, the largest number were going to Brazil. By the 1730-1770 period, a vast majority of enslaved people were again going to the Caribbean. For a stunning animation of the changing direction and volume of the trade from 1545 to 1860, see
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html
Working on a Caribbean sugar cane plantation had its own geography, and was horrifically brutal work. The United States had a very small sugar trade; instead, in the U.S. most enslaved peoples were put to work growing processing tobacco, rice, indigo, and eventually cotton.
Let's now turn to the United States. What was the geography of American slave markets prior to the Civil War?
The international importation of slaves into the United States was banned in 1807-1808, so most slave traders in the 19th-century U.S. were transporting enslaved human beings born in the United States. Control, separation, and the threat of violence were central to the built form of the slave market: slaves were held in prison-like cells and holding pens while awaiting sale. Physical inspection and branding of human bodies as if they were little more than animals further marked those bodies as property for the purposes of those who bought and sold them. Slave trading blocks were constructed in many city squares in Southern cities. The process of a slave auction was also brutal, especially in the ease with which it separated families, wives from husbands, children from parents.
Where did these slaves wind up working working? Cotton growing expanded from relatively limited areas in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama early in the ninteenth century to an extensive area in the interior Southeast by the eve of the Civil War. This helpful map will enable you to compare areas of cotton cultivation in 1860 with other major crops that year:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~prael/maps/crops1860.jpg
and the Paullin Atlas site will enable you to see a series of maps showing the spread of cotton growing from 1839 to 1924:
http://dsl.richmond.edu/historicalatlas/142/b/?sidebar=toc&view=plate
The growing cotton market 1820-1860 reinforced and exacerbated the growing demand of slaves. Notice the paradox here: despite growing abolitionist sentiment in parts of the U.S. Northeast, no other part of the country bought so much cotton to supply its growing textile mills.
One of the reasons that the Carolinas (especially South Carolina) became a leading area of slave resistence in the decades prior to the Civil War was the prevalence of malaria in wet, low-lying and wet areas near tidewater. The threat of disease meant white slaveowners often stayed in Charleston, leaving black field managers in charge of their plantations. No other state of the Union had a higher percentage of (enslaved) African Americans than South Carolina, which almost certainly contributed to the pro-slavery sentiments (and fears of slave rebellion) of white residents of the state. Tidewater areas were demographically dominated by people of African descent, as were some of the planting techniques, especially for rice, as the geographer Judith Carney has explored in her book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (2001). The irrigation and cropping techniques for raising rice in the South Carolina lowlands were not European, but were in fact brought by enslaved peoples from West Africa, where comparable practices are still being used today.
Although I have inevitably emphasized the systems of control and oppression under which slaves labored in this lecture, I also want to emphasize that enslaved people found opportunities for depending spaces of autonomy. We can see this in the gardens that slaves tended to produce for their own consumption, often on the margins of plantations, away from the eyes of white overseers, where they often grew crops of West African origin. The Sea Islands off the coast of Geogia were an interesting example of a hybrid cultural landscape where African Americans sometimes experienced surprising degrees of autonomy.
The movement of cotton agriculture from the Carolina coasts to the Black Belt of Mississippi and Alabama during the period from 1830-1860 brought an influx of enslaved humanity to the interior of the continent. By the eve of the Civil War, a tremendous amount of cotton was moving north from this region to mills in the Northeast.
Cotton is a very different crop than tobacco or rice. By the time it was being cultivated in Mississippi, massive plantations owning hundreds of slaves had emerged. Poor white with small landholdings were increasingly unable to compete with these large-scale plantations, producing a class politics that in some ways has analogs today..
The cotton gin, invented in Eli Whitney in 1794, revolutionized the processing of raw cotton, just as the mechanization of cotton spinning and then weaving revolutioned its manufacture into textiles. All these technologies created the conditions for growing numbers of slaves to be centralized by large capital holders onto massive plantations. One other technological revolution also changed the interior cotton trade: the invention of the steamship moving cotton bales and food up and down the Mississippi River. Cotton plantations in the lower Mississippi Valley, unlike the rice plantations we looked at in Georgia, were largely monocropping, Unable to produce sufficient food for their workforces, they depended on importing food from the upper Ohio and upper Mississippi valleys. The result was an interregional network of trade that connected grain and hog growers in the upper Mississippi Valley with cotton, rice, and indigo growers in the lower Mississippi valley.
Shipped from the docks of New Orleans, cotton moved into the industrial economy. Here again are themes that have been present throughout this lecture: changes in scale, continuities of enslavement, changes in transportation, industrialization, expanding markets, all knitted with the threat of organized violence into a complicated set of power relationships and dependent on the backs of enslaved human beings.
To leave a plantation, an enslaved individual needed a signed letter or a metal tag, and private police forces enforced such markers by punishing, sometimes lethally, any slave who dared try to travel without them. The incarceration and physical punishment of black bodies are further racial phenomena that are with us today.
What were slaves to do? There are famous examples of revolts, with Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia perhaps the best-known example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner
Such rebellions fueled white fear, and were used to justify white oppression: the white South was full of anxiety that their systems of control might fail. The poster child for white fear was remarkably successful Haitian Rebellion (1791-1804), where formerly enslaved peoples successfully seized political power for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
Another form of resistance was flight. Never forget how difficult and dangerous this was. To flee the plantation was to put one's life at risk, and often to leave behind the people one loved. Many slaves had spouses and children that tied them to a place. Indeed, the survival and defense of the Black family under such conditions was itself a form of resistence. So was the building of cultural practices—churches, songs—that could give voice to such violence. Before he came to the University of Wisconsin to found its History Department, William Francis Allen gathered slave spirituals and published for the first time a volume of Slave Songs of the United States (1867), eventually going on to become the UW teacher who inspired the young Frederick Jackson Turner to become a historian.
https://archive.org/details/slavesongsofunit00alle/page/n7
We'll give the last word to Annette Gordon-Reed, the historian and legal scholar at Harvard University who has written so powerfully about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Heming:
Whenever I read this passage [describing slave families being randomly divided after their owner died], I am struck by how this episode reveals the rock-hard essence of American slavery: one group of people under the whim and control of another. Families were torn apart--or lived with the constant threat of separation--not because of the vagaries of nature, primitive health care, or dangerous occupations, but in the ordinary course of a social, economic, and legal system that promoted these types of atrocities.
Make no mistake; in a society that treated human beings as property, and that placed the right to private property at the apex of its values, enslaved people could have no sure expectation of maintaining even the deepest, most elemental of their human connections.
To the dominant culture, absolutely nothing about black life was sacred. And yet, I know many things were sacred to enslaved people. They were human beings, and the desire for personal integrity, the impulse to create and maintain a family life, to build and be a part of a community, and to express spirituality in some manner, were as present within the community of slaves as they have been in all human societies.
Although the humanity of slaves is universal—it speaks to all who choose to recognize it—it draws me in in a very specific way.
Because I am black, the connection I feel to American slaves is particular in that it is racial. I simply cannot read about slave children, or see photographs or depictions of them, without at some point thinking of my own daughter and son.
Annette Gordon-Reed, “Sacred Legacies,” in Howard Dodson, ed, Jubilee : The Emergence of African-American Culture (2003)