R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Sidbury, James"

Browsing by Author "Sidbury, James"

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Critical Bodies: Disability and Slavery in Early Republic Virginia
(2023-12-01) Jones, Kimberly V.; Sidbury, James
“Critical Bodies: Disability and Slavery in Early Republic Virginia” argues that disabled enslaved people were not disposed of in the economic system of slavery. Because enslaved people with disabilities were critical bodies in maintaining the wealth of enslavers, and thus the creation of the United States, their varying degrees of able-bodiedness, had to be lawfully considered. As such, white enslavers created laws and financial policies to account for their disabilities and continue to extract the labor of enslaved people with disabilities to maintain and enhance their wealth. This dissertation examines petitions to the Virginia legislature, coroner records, and narratives of formerly enslaved people to examine how enslavers and enslaved people navigated disabilities in and on enslaved people’s bodies and minds from 1778 until 1850. “Critical Bodies” focuses on the life cycle of enslaved people and their encounters with enslavers and the law to define their disabilities within the complex and fluid interpretations of their bodies and abilities in Virginia. An analysis of enslaved peoples’ disabilities and enslavers’ responses enriches our understanding of gender, law, slavery, and capitalism by focusing on the appearance of disability that incorporates age, mental illness, and reproductive labor. “Critical Bodies” sheds light on the experiences of disabled enslaved people in Virginia and enriches scholarship on the relationships, institutions, and trauma created in slavery.
Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of South Carolina, 1659–1739
(2018-04-18) Johnson, Andrew Andrew; Sidbury, James; Goetz, Rebecca A.
This dissertation argues for the importance of enslaved Native Americans in the history of early South Carolina. European colonists were forced to draw from captives originating in North America and Africa if they wanted to use enslaved labor since South Carolina was a site of slaving from two continents. Many colonists ended up a polyglot African/Native American population to coerce labor from in their economic pursuits. The gendered dynamics of the trans-Atlantic (more male) and Native American (more female) captive trades led to opportunities for marriage between enslaved people from both continents, whose offspring were called “Mustees.” By understanding the place of enslaved Native Americans—making up a full quarter of the enslaved population of South Carolina in the early eighteenth century—this dissertation argues for drastically different interpretations of the workings of the captive trades and the development of the colonial state, the social and spatial development of enslaved society, the development of plantation management, and finally the formation of a creole culture. I propose a transformative understanding of the entangled histories of the peoples who made up the enslaved population of early South Carolina and how they came together through circumstance to forge a new culture from their accumulated knowledge and experience by intertwining the histories of enslaved Native Americans and Africans. This dissertation is interdisciplinary in method, utilizing an ambitious approach with history, sociology, anthropology, and geography. Enslaved Native Americans have been erased from the broader histories of enslavement in the Americas and I am writing them back into the narrative, not as a first chapter, giving way to African slavery, but as important actors in their own right. My project therefore undercuts racist teleologies undergirding popular assumptions of both the inevitability of the disappearance of Native American peoples as well as chattel slavery in the Americas as being only the history of African peoples.
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For the Relief of “Lewd and Abandoned” Women: An Urban History of Late Antebellum New Orleans
(2022-11-15) Kodama, Maki; Sidbury, James
For the Relief of “Lewd and Abandoned” Women: An Urban History of Late Antebellum New Orleans examines the precarious experiences of working-class women who faced various oppressions by state authorities from the 1840s until the dawn of the U.S. Civil War. While scholarship on the working-class women in New Orleans has often focused on the development of Storyville, a red-light district area that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, “disorderly” women in the antebellum New Orleans were already a social issue and faced stigmatization of being “lewd and abandoned.” Although these women hardly left behind records of their own, this dissertation provides a richer account of the working-class women who were considered unruly and ungovernable through analyses of five different institutions that were heavily invested in the problems of “lewd and abandoned” women in antebellum New Orleans—the police authorities, local presses, workhouses, a charity organization, and the military. Piecing together the fragmented documents created by the institutions, this dissertation shows that the state authorities perceived their “disorderliness” and lack of patriarchal figures as a threat to public order and imposed control over their bodies and labors by arresting, bringing them to trial, and temporarily incarcerating them at the workhouse. At the same time, the state authorities never completely intended to eliminate them. While some private charitable organizations tried to alleviate the situation by offering poor relief, the state authorities sought ways to claim their labor and pleasure, as did soldiers who engaged in commercialized sex with these women. For the Relief of “Lewd and Abandoned” Women contends how the working-class women experienced physical and geographical restrictions on their body, labor, and autonomy.
Informed Activism: Antislavery Knowledge Production and the Global Discourse of Slavery, 1833-1843
(2018-08-09) Skidmore, William E; McDaniel, W. Caleb; Sidbury, James
Between June 12 and June 23, 1840, more than 500 abolitionists met at Exeter Hall and debated the state of slavery throughout the world. More than 1,000 spectators attended the morning and evening panels daily as this international delegation discussed their ideas, views, and plans for how to bring the different forms and systems of slavery to an end. While this international convention included abolitionists from Spain, France, Switzerland, the British West Indies, Haiti, Canada, South Africa, British Guiana, most of the attendees (roughly 400) came from Great Britain and the United States. By uniting minds and hearts, this antislavery conference produced one of the nineteenth century’s most comprehensive bodies of scholarship on slavery and abolition The Convention of 1840 represented an impressive and unique achievement for this time. As later generations of antislavery and human rights activists attended similar international conferences and meetings, their scholarly activism benefited from Special Rapporteurs, transnational non-profit and interstate organizations that arranged these gatherings, and academic scholarship on slavery recognized by elite institutions. The international delegation of abolitionists at the Convention 1840, however, started their knowledge production and exchanges without these advantages. This is a dissertation about how knowledge production and information politics in the antislavery movement got started, as well as the additional obstacles that arose in this transnational crusade. In five chapters, this dissertation explores how Anglo-American abolitionists investigated systems of slavery outside of their national antislavery movements and how this knowledge shaped their activism and relationships with other reform groups. I achieve three primary objectives. First, I show how antislavery knowledge shaped the development of the transatlantic antislavery movement. Second, I show that antislavery organizations and abolitionists did not consider all forms of slavery the same. By following the scholarship that abolitionists produced about different systems of slavery, this study reveals that antislavery societies and abolitionists had an informal hierarchy that characterized specific slave systems as worse and more in need of eradication than others, which in part, gives coherence to the uneven and seemingly erratic development of the transatlantic antislavery movement. Finally, this dissertation argues that information and knowledge production lay at the heart of abolitionism. The creation and circulation of knowledge informed Anglo-American antislavery societies of where they needed to direct their attention, resources, and activism.
Introduction: “Beasts, Birds, and Bondsmen: Animal and Slave Interactions in Atlantic World Slavery.”
(2021-04-28) Pasierowska, Rachael Lindsay; Sidbury, James; Slenes, Robert W.
Across the Atlantic world, communities had close relationships with the animal world both tangibly and intangibly. From West Africa to Central-West and Central Africa, peoples responded to animals in both similar and dissimilar ways. In the Americas, European and Native Americans held their own respective beliefs and interactions with the animal world. Each of these societies attributed some level of cultural recognition to animals representing a central theme as to how people would later respond to animals when pushed together in the Americas. Enslaved Africans brought with them a multitude of cultural beliefs and understandings of animals. So too did European colonists and migrants. To complete this transatlantic triangle, Native Americans had their own beliefs and cosmologies where animals were very present. As these different peoples came together through transatlantic slavery, we see a merging of multiple beliefs, cosmologies, and perceptions. Herein lies the secondary aim of this study: to test and apply contested theories of creolization and cultural transferral. This approach allows one to look deeper at the interactions between cultures not only from across various African ethnicities, but also from Europeans and Native Americans where possible. Through incorporation of the three slave societies of America, Brazil, and Cuba, I am better able to address similarities and differences can be more easily addressed with respect to geographical scales. A primary finding is that in the societies of America and Brazil, indigenous peoples shared many similar beliefs with enslaved Africans regarding animals. Second, this dissertation shows how sometimes, Native Americans and Africans came together, which resulted in the formation of Afro-American cultures displaying a triadic portrayal of cultural evolution. This contrasts to the often-dyadic depiction on which scholars have hitherto concentrated their research. Finally, it is shown that Cuba housed a much more multi-ethnic African composite of cultural identity. Animal and enslaved Africans interactions provide a case study through which to speak to the multiple complex cultural formations during the era of transatlantic slavery.
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Passports to the Atlantic: Enslaved and Free Travelers of Color from Nineteenth Century New Orleans, 1818-1831
(2022-12-12) Francis, Hannah Jager; Sidbury, James
Passports to the Atlantic: Enslaved and Free Travelers of Color from nineteenth Century New Orleans, 1818-1831 examines a collection of passports granted by the city of New Orleans for enslaved and free people of color to travel outside of the city. Between the years 1818 and 1831, the city required enslaved and free travelers of color going to places as close as across Lake Pontchartrain and as distant as Europe to obtain passports from the Mayor’s Office. During the thirteen years the passports remained a travel prerequisite for travelers of color, New Orleans issued passports for 481 people of African descent. The 481 travelers of color listed in the collection of passports includes both male and female travelers as well as adults and children. In the passports, the city documented information such as the names, ages, statuses, sex, racial designations, heights, physical descriptions, birthplaces, methods of travel, and destinations of the travelers of color. Using this information, Passports to the Atlantic discusses the experience of people of African descent inhabiting New Orleans in the early nineteenth century as well as their connections to the Atlantic World. This dissertation considers issues such as race, mobility, status, and disability to demonstrate the diversity of black life in New Orleans.
Race and Abolition in the Anglophone Atlantic, c. 1730 – 1840
(2020-04-22) Smith, Sean Morey; Sidbury, James
The assumption that African-descended people were more able than European-descended people to labor in the “hot” climates of southern North America and the Caribbean was an important justification for slavery in the British Empire since at least the early eighteenth century, and it continued to be invoked by both British and American enslavers after the Revolution. However, pro-slavery writers were not alone in making claims about the association of race and climate. A surprising number of anti-slavery activists agreed with their opponents that racial difference made people of African descent more able to live and work in hot climates. When the association between climate and race was challenged, it was almost always by black activists. Seemingly, even well-meaning, radical abolitionists overlooked the damage done by repeating racial assumptions. This dissertation traces the various ways that climatic-racial arguments were used to attack and bolster slavery. It argues that the persistent and shared usage of these arguments demonstrates the flexibility of these widely shared ideas. This flexibility encouraged their spread and acceptance and enabled the application of climatic-racial ideas beyond slavery itself into debates over citizenship, subjecthood, and social and cultural belonging. This dissertation tracks the use of climatic-racial arguments in political debates related to slavery to reveal the many ways they could be deployed from the 1730s through the 1840s. However, this is not a history of abolition or emancipation. Instead, case studies related to abolition show the persistence of climatic-racial argumentation. Focusing on the use of climatic-racial thinking also creates a new perspective from which to view the connections between race and abolition. This perspective puts specific elements of pro- and anti-slavery thought into closer proximity, demonstrating their shared premises. It also enables comparisons between how these ideas were varyingly deployed in the United States and Great Britain as well as their use by black and white activists. Additionally, it highlights how interpretations of nature and climate always reflect human cultural and political biases, and it explains how a specific kind of thought could change and persist across a period of dramatic change, such as abolition.
Race and Freedom in the African Americas: Free People of Color and Social Mobility in Cartagena and Charleston
(2016-11-08) Marks, John Garrison; Sidbury, James
This dissertation explores the social and cultural worlds of free people of color in the African Americas. It investigates how free people of color navigated social life and negotiated the boundaries of racial difference in two crucial mainland American port cities: Cartagena, along the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and Charleston, situated in the heart of the South Carolina lowcountry in the United States South. Transnational and comparative in perspective, this work reveals how free people of color leveraged laws, institutions, personal reputations, and carefully cultivated social networks to improve their individual circumstances as well as those of their families and communities. This dissertation reveals the complex parallels and differences between the challenges and opportunities for free people of color in the urban Americas, particularly in their efforts to achieve social and economic mobility. It argues that even when their means to achieve social distinction differed, efforts by free people of color to improve their individual circumstances challenged the logic of white racial ideologies and subtly questioned the legitimacy of American racial hierarchies. While free people of color often declined to confront more directly the systems of white supremacy that undergirded American society, the work of free people of color to achieve social and economic uplift paved the way for the continued struggle to achieve respectability, freedom, citizenship, and equality.
Reflections on Juneteenth: Session Two
(Rice University, 2020-06-19) Torres, Michelle; McDaniel, Caleb; Sidbury, James
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.
The Development of Slaving Societies in the Americas: Marginal Native and Colonial Slavers in São Paulo and Carolina, 1614–1715
(2021-08-13) Wright, Miller Shores; Sidbury, James; Dias, Camila L
The Development of Slaving Societies in the Americas is a comparative history of slaving, slavery, and ethnogenesis that focuses on changes in slaving practices in São Paulo and Carolina between 1614–1715. It illuminates how colonial slavers coopted Native practices of slavery in Brazil in the late sixteenth century and in Carolina in the seventeenth century to create slave trades that trafficked in Native people. This dissertation reveals how Native and colonial figures used slaving as a profitable strategy to create wealth in people as dependents and as commodified, exchangeable trade goods, effectively transforming our understanding of Native peoples lived experiences as captors and captives in colonial borderlands. Through analyses of colonial council records, wills, inventories, and the correspondence of Jesuits, Franciscans, and colonial officials, this work follows those actors who benefitted from slaving and those commodified by it, demonstrating that slaving societies formed based on the slaving strategies employed by colonial and Native actors. As Native slave trades proved profitable and violence spread, Native and colonial slaving led to the coalescence of Native groups through incorporating refugee Natives fleeing slavers and Native slavers themselves. Building on studies of Native slavery in Latin America the project draws on insights from Africanists to move beyond Eurocentric colonial categories of enslavement—free versus unfree. Instead, the dissertation analyzes how the slaving strategies of colonists and Native groups in two borderlands created slaving societies who focused their socio-economic organization and production on the enslavement of Native peoples in the Americas. Through a comparison between the creation of Native and colonial slaving societies in São Paulo and Carolina, this dissertation makes two interventions: one historical, through identifying broader patterns of slaving strategies in the Americas, and another historiographical, by moving beyond nationalistic narratives of slavery, violence, and cross-cultural exchange.
The Racialized Politics of Home in Slavery and Freedom
(2017-04-18) Stewart, Whitney Nell; Sidbury, James; McDaniel, Caleb
While most historians interpret the motivations of the black freedom struggle—including the acquisition of legal freedom and citizenship—as public and traditionally political issues, this project places black homes at the center of the narrative. Scholars often overlook how the rights of home—including privacy, freedom of movement, and the security of self and family in one’s dwelling—suffused the private and public politics of nineteenth-century Americans. Black women and men sought solutions to violent social injustices by drawing on a long tradition of resistance and activism that began before the opening of ballot boxes, government offices, and citizenship. They sought freedom and rights through the home. This dissertation uses a wide range of material, visual, and textual sources to demonstrate how enslaved and free black Americans gave meaning to their lives, shaped their hopes, and sought individual and social change through their dwelling space, structure, and objects. Home was a concept, space, and structure that shaped the meaning and experience of slavery and liberty. Throughout the long nineteenth century, the black home functioned simultaneously as a symbol that could destroy or invigorate the racist social structure that undergirded slavery. In physical dwellings throughout the American South, black men and women fought to build privacy and security into their dwellings and lives, even as white southerners racialized these rights for white families only. Looking across the chasm of war and emancipation uncovers the crucial role of home to evolving notions of freedom in the tumultuous long nineteenth century. Revealing the connections between race, home, and liberty, this project reorients the narrative of the black freedom struggle towards the domestic spaces and objects that shaped the politics of nineteenth-century Americans.

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