Author: beirne

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Stephanie M. H. Camp’s Closer to Freedom is a history of American slavery that uniquely focuses on the impact of the enslaved body’s location within ‘spaces,’ and the critical role of environments on individual sovereignty. This concept builds upon postcolonial philosopher Edward Said’s recognition of “rival geography,” wherein an oppressed group fights for space, both temporal and spatial, in opposition to the invading, materially superior power. (Camp 7) Slave women were not only subject to most of the same physical and psychological tortures as their male counterparts, but took on additional responsibilities and abuse stemming from their status as women.

Mr. highbeejonathan’s comment regarding slaves in the process of becoming “their own masters” struck me as poignant. Camp spends much of the book detailing how bondwomen kept personal identities though remaining masters of their own bodies. By designing their own styles of clothing to counteract the rags of servitude they were forced to wear, women used what Camp refers to as the “politics of the body” to subvert the system, not to mention entertain themselves. (Camp 60) In Camp’s telling, women’s bodies were not merely the subjects of whips and sexual violence, but were an important space in which they expressed their inner power. (Camp 68, 70)

Knowledge played a key role in slave resistance, and Camp points out that women were placed in a structural disadvantage in this regard. While bondmen were sometimes given the required written permission by their masters to travel, typically for work of some sort, women were rarely trusted with such liberties. (Camp 72) Not only did this result in lack of geographic know-how necessary for escape and insider trade secrets, but rendered the price of being caught without a pass at such trivial events as slave parties all the more risky. (Ibid) Both these tickets and the previously mentioned use of clothing are examples of Camp’s reliance on material history, or the history of ‘things’, presently in vogue among historians. Travel passes, in particular, could make the difference between life and death for a slave, providing meaning far more than scribbled-on scrap of paper. (Camp 15)

The idea of ‘movement’ is mentioned often in Closer to Freedom, as mobility is a basic freedom that universally defines what it means to be a human being. By being reduced to property, slaves were subject to the patriarchal strictures inherent to Southern plantations. Camp’s work makes the powerful case that their actions nonconformity are not merely useful in providing compelling historical context of the period, but were significantly disruptive tactics that vexed societal overseers within their own time.

In employing the work of political scientists, (James Scott in his discussion on the balance between “opposition” and “consent” among controlled populations), geographers (David Harvey’s identification of the importance of the “temporal and the spatial” in the lives of historical actors), and historians such as Stephanie McCurry and Mark M. Smith (bringing the reader the importance of the era’s focus on “boundaries of landownership” and “improvement,” respectively), Camp provides a technicolor academic perspective to a very particular subject too often written in a, excuse the pun, black-and-white manner. The ‘movement’ begun by the feet of slaves in traversing the boundaries of the plantation through escapes or by dancing the night away, served to pave the way for more overt political and social black movements to come.

Bibliography

Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Final Paper Topics:

1. What was the definition of ‘conservatism’ within Antebellum America?
   1. If the category existed, were conservatives necessarily states’ rights advocates?
2. Was there a significant economic appeal to abolitionism?
   1. Understanding that the business of the United States was/is business, was the Civil War a good business decision?
3. To what extent was the Democratic Party linked with Jim Crow?
   1. Did these laws constitute an entrenching governing strategy, or were they simply culturally unavoidable?

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

Slavery’s Capitalism, a hot-off-the-presses tome edited by Harvard’s Sven Beckert and Brown’s Seth Rockman, is a compilation of historical essays dedicated to the nineteenth-century emergence of America as an economic power; one that, the authors argue, was built largely upon a market where millions of human beings were simply highly-valued property. Important to us in 2016, these histories are presented as representative of “the current political and cultural moment in the United States,[where] the time appears right to construct a new narrative of American economic development.” (B&R 12) A new historical “prism of slavery” is in progress, the editors hold, one that accounts for slavery’s role in the formation and functions of international markets and standard business practices. (Ibid) This viewpoint holds current political poignancy, as viewing modern capitalism as fruit from the ‘poisonous tree’ of slavery and has not only contributed to tired calls for reparations, but also a significant challenge to the system of capitalism, generally, in the popular major party candidacy of Senator Sanders.

A chapter of particular interest to me, an aspiring student of political parties and ideologies, was Andrew Shankman’s “Capitalism, Slavery, and the New Epoch: Mathew Carey’s 1819.” Shankman reveals that Carey, a political economist and Federalist, envisioned the foundation of slaves and capitalism as essential to his grandiose vision of America’s future within the ‘American System’ platform of the Whig Party. (B&R 243, 244) Shankman reveals that even though there were reforming tendencies in the Whig party, the economic theories underlying its politics cannot be detached from slavery. (B&R 244) This can perhaps be understood as a microcosm of the North at large, where even though while many in the region attempted to temporally disconnect themselves from the “peculiar institution,” one’s quality of life–be it in investments or in the clothes on their backs–was somehow connected to human bondage. The pro-slavery Carey, a Philadelphian, lamented that some Federalists attempted to portray southerners “as demons incarnate, and destitute of all the good qualities that dignify and adorn human nature”; a real ‘basket of deplorables,’ if you will. (B&R 244) Carey was frustrated to find out that his pro-slavery stance was nevertheless not enough to convince southerners to expand federal power as the American System saw pertinent, with the underlying cause for concern being that with great central power came opportunities to undermine slavery. (254-55)

I appreciated Mr. andrewjarrakelly’s citation of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence in his discussion of the historical question regarding the reasons the United States economy took off in the nineteenth-century in relation to the rest of the world. It has always been a question of mine whether the antebellum South was holding the United States back economically, with evidence being the country’s even greater economic expansion after the Civil War. Pre-war, cotton was by far the nation’s premier export, and it was entirely grown in the South; yet, there have been intellectual attempts at labeling the antebellum Southern economy as altogether backward, especially in comparison with the more modern capitalist experiments of the North (B&R 119) Slavery, a fairly substantial elephant in the room, has prevented widespread recognition of seeming ‘modernization’ that came along with institutionalized human-trafficking and labor bondage. As Walter Johnson also recognizes in River of Dark Dreams, Beckert and Rockman point out that with investment in slaves came the desire to maximize efficiency, with transference and worth becoming “routinized and predictable.” (B&R 12) Reading Slavery’s Capitalism makes clear that capitalism in America, and indeed the world, was owned by the issue of slavery.

Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126

Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127

David A. Beirne

HIST 571T

Dr. Shrout

31 August 2016

The Early Republic: A Look Into the Comanche Empire and French Louisiana

Two histories pertaining to developments in early eighteenth-century North America are Sophie White’s article “Massacre, Mardi Gras, and Torture in Early New Orleans” and Pekka Hämäläinen’s book The Comanche Empire. White, highlighting French Louisiana between 1729 and 1731, and Hämäläinen, addressing the surrounding decades that marked the height of the Comanche Empire (notably not ‘tribe,’ ‘peoples,’ etc.), successfully offer alternative analytical approaches that reveal a region anything but dominated by the whims of encroaching colonial interests. In these narratives, there is no guarantee that the British colonies that would form the United States were destined to march across the continent, nor were the land’s competing powers solely European. The Comanche and Natchez prove that there was nothing inherently manifest about Manifest Destiny.

The title of White’s 2013 article, “Massacre, Mardi Gras, and Torture in Early New Orleans,” represents the three demarcations of Marc-Antoine Caillot’s account of his time as a clerk for the Company of the Indies in French Louisiana from 1729 to 1731. (White 497) Caillot began by recounting the 1729 Natchez Indian massacre of French colonists that claimed 237 lives, continued by providing “[t]he earliest known account of a Mardi Gras masquerade in New Orleans,” before cutting immediately to the torture of a Natchez woman by a communal gathering of the Tunica tribe and French settlers. (White 497)  Though one may not expect the telling of The Big Easy’s first Fat Monday dress-up to commence and end with scenarios of massacre and torture, White effectively illustrates how integrally linked incidents of “hedonism, feasting, and cross-gender disguises” were in the origins of an American tradition enjoyed nearly three-hundred years hence. (White 497)
Rather than an arena where European colonial powers steamrolled backwards indigenous populations, both White and Hämäläinen present Native American populations as competitive and not infrequently victorious players in power relations in the early eighteenth-century North American southwest. In matters of trade, territorial politics and cultural influence, tribes like the Comanches and the Natchez exercised significant agency in their contact with French, Spanish and intertribal interests across a borderlands incessantly in flux. While some of these engagements were fruitful for both sides, this region, in Hämäläinen’s words, “was a violent and traumatic place where Natives and newcomers saw one another more as strangers and adversaries than as co-creators of a common world.” (Hämäläinen 8)

Both authors focus on objects and the material world in the lives of colonists and Indians, manifesting a growing trend among cultural historians in employing contemporary understandings of the meanings and usages of ‘things’ to illustrate broader period leitmotifs. Hämäläinen displays, for instance, how different interpretations of the material world contributed to a differing concepts of power between the Comanches and Europeans. “The idea of land as a form of private revenue-producing property was absent in Comanche culture, and livestock and slaves in a sense took the place of landed private property.” (Hämäläinen 5) White continues with another analysis of ‘things,’ declaring that “[c]lothing is never simply the blandly functional or frivolously fashionable covering of the body,” but rather is active in “creating, affirming, and upholding identity on a daily basis.” (White 499) What one dons is especially significant during times of change or ambiguity, and life was nothing if not uncertain in the Comanche Empire and French Louisiana. A constant French anxiety in the New World regarded their ability to maintain their “precarious Frenchness” in spite of the threat of “creolization,” or the gradual adopting of native culture. (White 499, 500)

The only thing worse than becoming native was being destroyed by them. The beginning of Caillot’s narrative surrounding the first Mardi Gras is his telling of the 1729 Natchez massacre. Those who were not killed and tortured were kidnapped, stripped (whereby the Natchez stole “their sartorial signs of Frenchness”) and returned for ransom back to New Orleans near-to-‘buck naked.’ (White 497) If the wearing of clothing could garner power, then the removal of clothing, particularly in being compelled, represented the removal of such. The prisoners of the Natchez massacre, upon their return to New Orleans, were gratefully transformed once again, this time to their former identities upon the receiving new French clothes (for a fee, of course). (White 498) In the Natchez stealing and appropriating of French clothing, the tribe confounded increasingly fragile boundaries of identity among the French settlers.
With French becoming captives, not to mention some African slaves being set free by the Natchez, a metamorphoses in clothing could signify a return to normalcy for a world gone mad. “When participants reverted to normative roles, as they inevitably did, the effect was to reaffirm, restore, and strengthen the status quo.” (White 500) Caillot’s next tale, another account that “alternated the passivity of being stripped with the agency of getting re-dressed (or dressed up),” was the first recorded New Orleans Fat Tuesday masquerade. (White 498) Caillot claims that the happening was his idea, and preceding its telling with his account of the Natchez massacre spoke to his understanding of the situation of his fellow countrymen. (White 497, 500) In the masquerade, class, gender, religious and racial roles were reversed (“[s]ome, like Caillot, masked as women (one as an amazon)”), which White attributes to the attempt at showing the transient nature of clothes and identity as well as the calming effect that a return to “habits ordinaires,” or ordinary clothing, can have. (White 512, 538) “Frenchness itself was a construct, and one that colonists such as Caillot. . . may have experienced more acutely once transplanted to the colonies, where they were confronted with the otherness of Indians.” (White 537)

Caillot’s story concludes with the day after Easter in 1730, where the Tunica tribe, along with some French colonists, tortured a Natchez woman hanging within a square frame of wooden beams, torching successive parts of her body while feasting on others. (White 497, 498) Referencing “the diplomatic significance of gifts of human bodies” to a number of Native American tribes, White details how the Tunica tribe had offered the captured woman as a gift to the governor of Louisiana after the Natchez had reportedly kidnapped, raped and performed various creative acts of bodily dismemberment and cannibalism upon French women. (White 521 f. 48) Like Hämäläinen’s account of the Comanches, where the Native American group was often the initiator of issues of diplomacy and commerce, the Tunica meant to use the Natchez woman as a political symbol of good will with their French allies. (White 519) on the other side of the coin, the Natchez and Comanche proved that Indian tribes could use their military prowess to exert control for land and property, “as the Natchez. . . re-exerted their authority over the land and their political and military dominance of the region,” and saw that “Louisiana’s most fertile agricultural settlement was decimated.” (White 502) These tactics could be brutal, but with cause. One contemporary author “perceived a psychological component to the torture of women, the purpose of which was to weaken the resolve of French troops stationed nearby as they laid siege to Natchez strongholds.” (White 527)
Though the governor officially denied the request, he allowed for the Tunica tribe to publicly torture the woman in front of, and at times with the participation of, the event’s numerous colonial attendees. French hostility against this woman was due to her being the wife of the Natchez chief and, with what White recognizes as the common “authority of Native women in the South in making decisions about the life or death of captives,” was thus largely responsible for the brutalization of French women. (White 519 f. 47) Caillot’s account, in which torture and anthropophagy were engaged in not only by the Tunica sauvages (the French word for Indian) but his fellow countrymen as well, would have been understood as alarming to any God-fearing French person. Even the acts cannibalism undertaken by the Tunica and the French onlookers took on a different meaning than that of their enemy. “For some Indian nations, the metaphor of consuming human flesh served as a symbol for the very act of enslavement,” while the French countrymen utilized cannibalism as a way to respond to this Natchez act, thereby giving similar activities entirely new cultural meanings. (White 529)  According to White, “torture became a grotesque but also sensual act that held the promise, and the release, of gustatory pleasure.” (White 529) Clothing, nakedness and the flesh became materialized in these accounts, and were provided with underlying meanings that enabled their usage in exerting and depriving power.

Bibliography

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

White, Sophie. “Massacre, Mardi Gras, and Torture in Early New Orleans.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 3 (July 2013): 497-538.