Catherine Armstrong

Introduction: poor white slave ownership

Popular conceptions of slavery in the Atlantic World traditionally imagine slave masters as being class-conscious wealthy landowning white men endowed with extensive political and cultural power. Academic scholarship has increasingly striven to debunk this simplistic representation by highlighting the diversity of the slave owning population. Indeed, instances of slave ownership by companies, by women, by free blacks and by poor whites, have complicated the traditional definition of slave masters. As the second of two forums that seek to develop the idea of non-traditional slavery in the United States, the following contributions do not aim to dismiss the significance of the plantation system and of large slaveholders, but, by using them as a paradigm, they seek to examine forms of slaveholding which departed from this model. As Peter Parish argued, such ‘exceptional and peripheral aspects’ of slavery – which he dubbed the ‘edges of slavery’ – can illuminate a great deal about the peculiar institution. The articles that follow interrogate the extent to which atypical masters were different from traditional slave holders in their attitudes and behaviour towards the ‘peculiar institution’ and towards their slaves. ‘Every historian of the Old South knows’, as James Oakes pointed out, that ‘the “typical” slaveholder did not necessarily own the “typical” slave’. The slaveowners and enslaved people featured in the three articles that follow are far from typical, and their stories challenge us to rethink our assumptions about slave ownership in the American South across three centuries. Sandra Perot, Laura Sandy and Lydia Plath draw our attention to a much understudied type of slaveowner: the poor white. David Brown has recently noted that ‘poor whites remain marginal in the work of most Old South scholars, who continue to focus on planters and slaves’. This is no doubt true, but the authors in this forum seek to complicate this further by focusing on those poor whites who were also slaveholders. All three articles thus contribute to current historiographical debates about the nature of class and slave ownership in the American South by revealing non-traditional slaveowners who occupied multiple – and many would assume, paradoxical – statuses during their lives. Sandra Perot tells the story of a seventeenth-century dairymaid named Molly Welsh, who arrived in Maryland as an indentured servant, but who eventually

‘Boiled and Stewed with Roots and Herbs’: Everyday Tales of Cannibalism in Early Modern Virginia

Cannibalism seems a far from everyday occurrence, and yet its incidence in the extraordinary setting of dangerous frontier Virginia was treated by one author in the 1620s as an ordinary and usual part of life. This chapter explores how and why such a seemingly horrific act was normalised in this way by one of the most famous commentators on the early English settlement in North America and what this reveals about early modern attitudes to cannibalism.

Print, religion and identity: The cultural significance of Thomas Gage

ABSTRACT This article revisits the Atlantic significance of Thomas Gage, by placing his experience in the context of the religious turmoil of the seventeenth century and of stories of other converts from Catholicism, showing that his biographers’ judgement of him, as uniquely heinous, is unjustified. Five aspects of his life are explored, illustrating the complexities of his experience and the liminality of his identity. His early life as a Catholic, the renouncing of his faith in 1642, his life as an author, a traveller and a propagandist are discussed, concluding that Gage’s hybrid identity was an example of the way that isolated figures in the Anglo-Atlantic world negotiated a safe passage through the religious turmoil of the early Stuart and Civil War eras.

Introduction: Slavery and landscape

By the eighteenth century, racial slavery had matured into a fully fledged, firmly established, profitable form of labour in the Atlantic World. In slave societies, the development of the plantation unit led to the geographic and demographic concentration of the slave population and to a growing homogenization of the activities bondsmen performed. Until the 1960s, studies on slavery in the Atlantic World traditionally focused on a particular type of slave, the plantation slave. However, these long-held traditional conceptions of slavery and slave experience have since been complicated by scholars such as Peter Parish whose work on ‘the edges of slavery’ conclusively demonstrated the existence of phenomena such as urban slavery, slave self-hiring, quasi-free or nominal slaves, domestic slave concubines, slave vendors, slave sailors, slave preachers, slave overseers, and many other types of ‘societies with slaves’. The articles in these forums do not aim to challenge the significance of the plantation system, but, by using it as a paradigm, they seek to introduce new variables that develop our understanding of the slave experience. The articles that follow build on a growing scholarship which strives to enrich the history of slavery in the United States by taking into account two fundamental and relatively understudied determinants of the slave experience: landscape and the climate. Variations in the landscape and climate shaped enslaved people’s perceptions and experiences of slavery. The following three articles show both how slaves used the landscape and climate to resist and perform freedom, and also how slaveholders used the physical environment as yet another means to exert control by eliciting fear or causing pain to their enslaved property. A central focus is the enslaved experience on the borderlands: in Tony Perry’s case, the border state of Maryland whose climate provided special challenges for the slaves. In Jennifer Stinson’s case, it is the Upper Mississippi Valley where the landscape and remoteness of the Old Northwest framed a very different type of slavery and, in Catherine Armstrong’s, the marginal spaces within the South: roads, rivers, woods, swamps and uncultivated plantation sites. Dell Upton’s work in the 1970s and 1980s laid the groundwork for the discussion of the places of slavery, describing the way that a slave’s imagined world was a series of discrete places separated by rigid boundaries. Boundaries such as walls did not limit the slave quarter; rather, slaves perceived their world as including the

Frederick Law Olmsted and the cultural geography of southern slave autonomy

ABSTRACT Frederick Law Olmsted’s account of his journeys through the southern states, undertaken from 1852 to 1857 reveals that Olmsted, in whom a sense of place was especially strong, characterised enslaved people’s relative freedom by place, delineating the plantation (even its slave quarters) as the areas of strictest control while liminal spaces at the edge of plantations, as well as roads, rivers, towns, markets and cities represented places of autonomy. These sites became places of resistance, with Olmsted contrasting his depictions of supposedly docile, naive, slow-witted slaves on the plantation, with those more articulate, confident and able whom he met on the margins. In revealing the potential of African-Americans to live as free people in the U.S.A., Olmsted reinforced the normalisation of the plantation for slave experience. This chapter will explore examples such as the landscape strategies of southern maroons and Olmsted’s slaves’ autonomy by road, river and sea.

Reaction to the 1622 Virginia Massacre: An Early History of Transatlantic Print

In 1607, when they arrived in Virginia, the English encountered a powerful native American empire, a loose confederation of Algonquin-speaking tribes under the leadership of Powhatan.1 Many settlers and commentators in England believed, wrongly, that they would easily subdue the native people and bring them under European control, just as a few hundred Spanish had gained control of a powerful and wealthy Native Central American empire nearly a century before. However, the English considered that they were going to behave with more civility than the Spanish, by providing the natives with knowledge that they might become civilized human beings, while educating them in Christian ways to save their souls.2