Tag: Slaves

In “Reading the Runaways,” David Waldstreicher shows us how early America was structured in a hierarchy based on what degree of freedom a person had. Obviously, a wealthy white male would be an example of someone who was completely free while an African slave would be at the other end of that spectrum. However, people like indentured servants or slaves of mixed race (who would therefore be lighter skinned and more able to “pass” as white should they escape) would fall somewhere in between the two. Waldstreicher discusses how some slaves, especially more skilled ones, were allowed to go out and seek their own work, giving them a certain degree of freedom, and also making the possibility of escape more likely.
Waldstreicher talks about how unfree people who escaped would try and pass themselves off as free by imitating a more free type of person by taking on the specific qualities of a more free person, such as different clothing, hairstyle, and emphasis on any valuable skills they may have possessed. Slave owners knew this, and therefore any ads for runaway slaves would point out what clothes they were thought to have, their skills, and a multitude of other things aside from their bare-bones physical appearance. Waldstreicher paints a picture, therefore, of an uneasy world in which Americans were constantly on the lookout of anyone suspicious who may be passing themselves off as a more “free” person than they really are. By observing those around them and looking for signs that a person may in fact be “unfree,” the free people exerted a certain kind of power over the unfree in their watchfulness. In his post for this week, Ian Solcz discusses that idea and does a great job of putting it in a modern perspective by comparing that watchfulness to the way people today observe and judge those with tattoos or other forms of body art.
While Waldstreicher focuses on people’s vigilence in their looking out for those less free than them, Thomas P. Slaughter in the first chapter of Whiskey Rebellion reverses that somewhat and focuses on how less free members of society were always on the lookout for any kind of abuse from people above them (or more “free” than them). In that chapter, Slaughter focuses on how upset people, generally those in poorer, more rural regions, would get about the idea of internal taxes, both in England and America. For example, he starts by discussing how the rural parts of England, along with Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, were always the ones most upset my Parliament’s attempts to tax internally. (12) On pages 17-20, he discusses how angry American colonists (who were themselves at the time a fringe part of the British Empire far removed from the true power center in London) became over internal taxes in the lead up to the Revolution in the 1760s. In his post this week, Ben Hartshorn discusses the language of that anger, specifically how colonists conflated internal taxes with a form of slavery being imposed on them.
Waldstreicher and Slaughter both show us that the political atmosphere in early America (and Britain) was one of hyper-awareness of both others’ and their own status in a society where each rung on the hierarchy meant a lesser degree of freedom. It makes sense that American colonists thought of themselves as slaves when they sensed a group of people above them in the British hierarchy (those in Parliament) treating them unfairly would call themselves slaves. After all, they would look at anyone below themselves on the ladder as somewhat of a slave, so what else would they call it when they were suffering from unfair taxation imposed by those above them on that same ladder? Both Waldstreicher’s article and the first chapter of Whiskey Rebellion give great insight into the role of freedom in the structure of early American society.