The Enslaved And Their Enslavers

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution's development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them. Throughout South Carolina's long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution's development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them. Throughout South Carolina's long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.

Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities. A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death. Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award – from the University Coop (Austin, TX) Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR) Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

A groundbreaking study of slavery and power in the British Caribbean that foregrounds the struggle for survival Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive. Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death. Provocative and unflinching, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.

Enslaved, A Chronicle of Resistance is the first modern book of poetry of its kind. It is a chronicle of enslavement and resistance told in an exquisite blend of prose and poetic verse. Through the esthetic and rhythms and rhymes of poetry, it chronicles the establishment and institutionalization of systemic racism. Each poem tells its own story, but each is also part of a bigger narrative. A story, within a story. A prelude to each poem sets the context and moves the story along. Some of these preludes describe the historical, cultural, societal, political or economic environment as well. Enslaved, is not just poetry about the atrocities of African slavery and the horrible price humanity continues to pay for it. Neither is it just a story of racism, bigotry, discrimination or prejudice. It is a story about dominion, power and control. It plunges the depths of depravity humanity can sink to and the things they are willing to do to justify it all. It is also a story of hope, courage and optimism that can only be told through poetry. It powerfully tackles the subjects of racism, Shadeism (the discrimination against an individual on the basis of their skin tone), the use of racist symbols and systemic racism in a time when the world is caught up in debate as to what all of that really means. It shows the birth of systemic racism and challenges readers to address it in whatever colour is rears its head. As humanity stands on a precipice, looking down into the darkness of its own historical hate and racial prejudice, Enslaved, A Chronicle of Resistance reminds them of past horrors, before challenging them to step back from the precipice. Sadly, for as long as humans have wandered the face of this blue planet some have hungered to exercise dominion over others. This heartless need to dominate and rule over those perceived to be "lesser" or "sub-human", has corrupted and contaminated humanity throughout history. Our conquered enemies become our slaves for life. We demand servitude as payment for debts real and imagined. Whole clans and tribes serve only as fodder for would-be landowners and royalty because of perceived status. From the cave to the pyramid, castle to tenement, the hunger to dominate another's life has beleaguered us. When driven by the need to occupy the top of the food chain, many are all too willing to stand upon the lifeless bodies of their fellow human beings. One practice, however, stands head and shoulders above it all. It is the one that serves as a lesson in what happens when one race uses all its resources, power, abilities and even the moral authority of its religion to rule over another. The depraved cruelty of the American enslavement trade has eclipsed all other known examples. However, we must acknowledge that a simple reason we are so keenly aware of the atrocities of the American enslavement of Africans is that it is well documented. We have historically accurate records that describe the brutalities done to the African enslaved people. There are court cases where enslavers were tried for killing the enslaved and more recently, historically accurate non-fiction books - and later movies - that use enslavement as the backdrop of storytelling. These have all served to help preserve Black history.

"The distinction among slaves is as marked, as the classes of society are in any aristocratic community. Some refusing to associate with others whom they deem to be beneath them, in point of character, color, condition, or the superior importance of their respective masters." Henry Bibb, fugitive slave, editor, and antislavery activist, stated this in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1849). In William L. Andrews's magisterial study of an entire generation of slave narrators, more than 60 mid-nineteenth-century narratives reveal how work, family, skills, and connections made for social and economic differences among the enslaved of the South. Slave narrators disclosed class-based reasons for violence that broke out between "impudent," "gentleman," and "lady" slaves and their resentful "mean masters." Andrews's far-reaching book shows that status and class played key roles in the self- and social awareness and in the processes of liberation portrayed in the narratives of the most celebrated fugitives from U.S. slavery, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and William and Ellen Craft. Slavery and Class in the American South explains why social and economic distinctions developed and how they functioned among the enslaved. Noting that the majority of the slave narrators came from the higher echelons of the enslaved, Andrews also pays close attention to the narratives that have received the least notice from scholars, those from the most exploited class, the "field hands." By examining the lives of the most and least acclaimed heroes and heroines of the slave narrative, Andrews shows how the dividing edge of social class cut two ways, sometimes separating upper and lower strata of slaves to their enslavers' advantage, but at other times fueling pride, aspiration, and a sense of just deserts among some of the enslaved that could be satisfied by nothing less than complete freedom. The culmination of a career spent studying African American literature, this comprehensive study of the antebellum slave narrative offers a ground-breaking consideration of a unique genre of American literature.

The everyday lives of enslaved people were filled with the backbreaking tasks that their enslavers forced them to complete. But in spare moments, they found time in which to earn money and obtain goods for themselves. Enslaved people led vibrant economic lives, cultivating produce and raising livestock to trade and sell. They exchanged goods with nonslaveholding whites and even sold products to their enslavers. Did these pursuits represent a modicum of freedom in the interstices of slavery, or did they further shackle enslaved people by other means? Justene Hill Edwards illuminates the inner workings of the slaves’ economy and the strategies that enslaved people used to participate in the market. Focusing on South Carolina from the colonial period to the Civil War, she examines how the capitalist development of slavery influenced the economic lives of enslaved people. Hill Edwards demonstrates that as enslavers embraced increasingly capitalist principles, enslaved people slowly lost their economic autonomy. As slaveholders became more profit-oriented in the nineteenth century, they also sought to control enslaved people’s economic behavior and capture the gains. Despite enslaved people’s aptitude for enterprise, their market activities came to be one more part of the violent and exploitative regime that shaped their lives. Drawing on wide-ranging archival research to expand our understanding of racial capitalism, Unfree Markets shows the limits of the connection between economic activity and freedom.

Centering Black voices and the narratives of enslaved people, this young adult history offers a thoroughly researched account with first-hand testimonies of how people in bondage were themselves a driving force behind their own emancipation. Features a new introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley, black & white illustrations and photographs, and updates throughout. "A significant contribution to American history."–Kirkus Reviews “[Breaking the Chains] will force many readers to reexamine their assumptions about American history….Young adults will be fascinated and better informed for having experienced this book.” –School Library Journal, starred review Generations of American history students have grown up believing that enslaved people accepted their lot and became attached to their enslavers, that rebellion was rare, and that liberation from slavery happened thanks to the enslavers. Celebrated historian and children’s book author, William Loren Katz offers a thoroughly researched look at the lives of enslaved people in the United States in Breaking the Chains. From their African abductions through their brave resistance to and escape from the ships and harsh plantation life to their roles in the Civil War, those given voice here show that enslaved people themselves were a driving force behind their emancipation. This compelling look at history is an educational eye-opener for history buffs of all ages, and offers clarity on one of the most turbulent periods of US history. This new paperback edition features a new introduction by historian Robin D. G. Kelley. “Katz masterfully steers the reader step by step through the astonishing forms of resistance, both active and passive. . . . powerful and authentic.” –Publishers Weekly