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Amani T. Marshall discussed aspects of slave resistance in his 2014 article called “They Are Supposed To Be Lurking About the City”: Enslaved Women Runaways In Antebellum Charleston.” His article focused on bondwomen living in Charleston, South Carolina. This is much more specific than Stephanie M. H. Camp’s Closer To Freedom: Enslaved Women And Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Both discuss resistance associated with women, but Marshall emphasized skilled women living in the city, instead of on a plantation. Marshall’s main argument was that bondwomen “found freedom in southern cities, where they could assert control over their bodies and labor while maintaining kinship ties” (Marshall 188).
Marshall began his article with several examples of enslaved women running away from their masters. These women had opportunities to support themselves because they were skilled as seamstresses or cooks, for example. Their owners printed newspaper advertisements for their runaways, but these ads did not deter the women from continuing to run away and using their newly discovered autonomy to their benefit (Marshall 188-191). Women in an urban setting had more access to freedom and mobility due to their skilled work experience.
Marshall’s next section discussed the process of slaveholders hiring out their slaves to learn skills and make them a profit. For instance, freed women of color who were entrepreneurs taught enslaved women their skills. The bondswomen were also “empowered to reject their slave status” by the competitive environment that limited job opportunities for the enslaved (Marshall 193). Not only did those apprentices learn a trade, but they also gained confidence and a desire to be free (Marshall 195). He also explained that bondswomen’s “ability to hire their time, choose their employer, and live out encouraged enslaved women to evaluate their employment situations based on wages, labor assignments, and working conditions” (Marshall 201). Enslaved female apprentices in Charleston gained skills and knowledge that they could use to live free with their families when they ran away.
Marshall’s final section and conclusion emphasized the bondswomen’s growing power and their ability to avoid losing their freedom. He explained that Charleston eventually required this group of women to wear badges to limit their employment options (Marshall 204-206). However, the women understood that their labor had value and that they did not have to remain in bondage. Marshall ended by stating “they recognized that freedom was more than simply a legal concept, but rather a lived experience that could be realized in the city through their own resourcefulness and hard work” (Marshall 212). Their perception of freedom clearly undermined their owner’s attempts to keep them enslaved dependent workers.
By contrast, Camp’s Closer to Freedom presented a compelling narrative about the bondspersons’ resistance on Southern plantations. Women and men rebelled against a system that tried to control every aspect of their lives, including spatial and temporal boundaries (Camp 4). She argued that truancy, or temporary flight, allowed women and men to gain knowledge that proved useful for more permanent escape during the Civil War (Camp 36, 123). Camp also explained that the enslaved took control of their bodies in the way they dressed or escaped to social events at night (Camp 68). While the book was published in 2004, it laid a good groundwork for understanding the plantation dynamics through the eyes of those in bondage.
Due to Marshall’s emphasis on the urban antebellum setting, his sources were often associated with Charleston. He used newspaper ads, census records, and artifacts to support his argument. Marshall utilized information from oral history but not to the same extent as Camp. In addition to oral histories, Camp used plantation and government records, journals, letters and abolitionist material to demonstrate a variety of examples of men and women’s resistance from several plantations on the South. On the other hand, Marshall, presented an urban perspective of antebellum bondwomen’s resistance. The city environment provided more opportunities for women to not only find skilled positions but also a chance to resist their owners and the limitations of slavery. In the end, primary evidence demonstrated that enslaved people were capable of rebelling successfully in both settings.
While Marshall and Camp clearly explained the complex world of slave resistance, their arguments could still be improved. Camp had the tendency to be repetitive in her use of examples, perhaps to emphasize her main points. Marshal on the other hand, provided several different examples of free and enslaved skilled women. His narratives pointed back to his argument that bondswoman took matters into their own hands and took advantage of their situations to achieve some, if not all, of their freedom. One critique of Marshall would be that he focused his attention on Charleston, which is a place that had a higher black population than white until 1860 (Marshall 192). Knowing this fact, was Charleston the exception or the norm when it provided refuge for runaways? Was it easier for people to stay hidden in large cities in general or was it mainly because the white population lost some authority as a minority?
Each of the historians chose a bottom-up approach to slavery that gave agency to bondwomen and bondmen living in the South. In contrast to the economic history of slavery in Beckert and Rockman last week, Marshall and Camp viewed slavery from social, cultural and gender perspectives. The bondspeople did not blindly accept their low status of manual laborers; rather, they found ways to separate their enslaved lives from their personal lives. Even though Marshall did not directly reference Stephanie Camp’s work, her ideas may have still influenced Marshall’s writing. Marshall did refer to other related scholarship, such as writings by Cynthia Kennedy (Braided Relations) and Midori Takagi (Rearing Wolves). This could simply be because these authors’ analysis were also based on an urban environment, not a plantation.
Placing Marshall’s article along side this week’s reading demonstrated that slave resistance occurred throughout the South. Enslaved people in the cities and on plantations opposed their chattel slavery through various acts of resistance. Their actions were not always about escaping to the North, but instead they sought access to freedom from within their local setting. These scholars recognized that these people were still able to shape their own lives despite their experiences with slavery.
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Bibliography
Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Marshall, Amani. 2014. “They Are Supposed to Be Lurking About the City”: Enslaved Women Runaways in Antebellum Charleston. The South Carolina Historical Magazine. 115, no. 3: 188-212.