Browsing by Author "Jones, William D"

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    Remaking African America in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1790–1860
    (2020-04-23) Jones, William D; Sidbury, James
    This dissertation is a history of black life in the wake of forced migration to the lower Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century. It is a history of bought and brought enslaved people, of the local material and environmental conditions that drove their forced migration; of the archives that recorded their plight; of the families and churches they remade; and of how they resisted. Its focus is Louisiana because the consequences of the domestic slave trade there were intense, and unique local archives can measure them. If Africans and their descendants made African America in the coastal plains of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a narrative that historians have extensively explored in colonial Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, and Louisiana, their descendants remade African America in the lower Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century. Stripped from their homes to supply the labor for the nineteenth-century cotton and sugar revolutions, black men and women brought to Louisiana remade friends, families, and communities in the new sites of their enslavement. And they remade identities. On the one hand, the nineteenth-century polyglot and diverse communities of enslaved people in Louisiana revealed the varied trajectories of seventeenth and eighteenth-century black Atlantic peoples. On the other hand, the slave trades to the lower Mississippi Valley also clarified transatlantic black identities. The power of race and the shared plight of black people were never more evident than where diverse diasporic African and African-descended people lived and survived enslavement together. Documents from local parish archives, Civil War widows’ pension, Works Progress Administration narratives, church documents, and lawsuit casefiles, the major sources consulted for this dissertation, attest that black men and women brought to the lower Mississippi Valley between 1790 and 1860 remade African America in the slave trade’s wake.