Sue Peabody

There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime

There Are No Slaves in France examines the paradoxical emergence of political antislavery and institutional racism in the century prior to the French Revolution. Sue Peabody shows how the political culture of late Bourbon France created ample opportunities for contestation over the meaning of freedom. Based on various archival sources, this work will be of interest not only to historians of slavery and France, but to scholars interested in the emergence of modern culture in the Atlantic world.

Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal Principle

Although each national regime in the Atlantic world developed its own unique legal tradition in regulating slavery and abolition, similar social conditions and the interactions throughout the hemisphere often led to similar legal ‘solutions’ to the tensions between slavery and freedom. In particular, many societies in Europe, Africa and the Americas confronted the anomaly of enslaved people moving between societies or legal regimes where slavery was permitted by law and societies where slavery was rejected as alien to legal custom and tradition or as a result of the abolition movement. Considerable evidence suggests that local, popular traditions, dating back at least as far as the sixteenth century, freed people in bondage when they crossed particular state borders. We call this custom, sometimes articulated in court decisions or positive legislation by various legislative bodies, the ‘free soil principle’. This free soil principle was exploited by early English abolitionists in the celebrated Somerset case, decided in England in 1772. Somerset’s legal team, headed by Granville Sharp, used the contradiction between colonial laws permitting slavery in America and an absence of positive law regulating slavery in England as the ‘thin end of the wedge’ to argue for a legal presumption that slaves entering England thereby became free. Much ink has been spilled on whether Lord Mansfield’s ambiguous legal decision in this case in fact freed all slaves then resident or subsequently arriving in England, but it is clear that the popular consensus held that it did. The Somerset decision also lived on into nineteenth-century United States law, where it was frequently Slavery & Abolition Vol. 32, No. 3, September 2011, pp. 331–339

Poursuivre en justice pour s’affranchir : une forme de résistance ? L’exemple de l’esclave Furcy

La decision d’un esclave de revendiquer sa liberte en justice est certes un acte de resistance contre l’esclavage, mais ce n’est pas necessairement un acte antiesclavagiste. Au moyen de la micro histoire, cet article fait etat des differences entre la comprehension personnelle d’un esclave de sa condition injuste et les arguments avances par ses avocats pour obtenir sa liberte. La lutte individuelle de l’esclave Furcy n’a pas contribue de maniere significative au mouvement antiesclavagiste francais au XIXe siecle. Au contraire, la decision de la Cour royale d’affranchir Furcy en fonction du principe du sol libre a stabilise le regime esclavagiste colonial jusqu’a la Revolution de 1848.

France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent?

For generations early American historians have believed that it is impossible to recover the originary cultures of Africans transported into slavery in America. Plantation owners tended to label their enslaved workers on behavorial grounds, believing that different African cultures produced characteristic patterns. Thus all the labels have been treated as suspect or faulty. Equally, American historians have assumed that enslaved Africans, traumatized by the experience of captivity and the Middle Passage and deliberately thrust into quarters with people seized from different African locations, necessarily lost their own cultural traditions as one of the costs of enslavement. Linda Heywood and John Thornton take on all these assumptions in Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660. They argue that the cultural traditions of the first generation of Africans in Britain’s North American colonies are eminently recoverable because they came from a welldefined region in West Central Africa and, as the fields and quarters were filled with laborers from the same region, they were able to establish and practice their own particular cultural customs in America. During the first half of the seventeenth century, Heywood and Thornton demonstrate, enslaved workers in the English and Dutch colonies overwhelmingly came from West Central Africa, specifically Angola and Kongo. They argue that this region was characterized by a much more unified set of cultural traditions, including the two dominant languages of Kikongo and Kimbundo, than other parts of the coast to the north and south from which enslaved labor had been drawn earlier and would come later. Moreover, by then West Central Africa had had an intense relationship with European culture, including Roman Catholicism, for generations and therefore African leaders were able to exert control over the terms of the trade. Thus, according to Heywood and Thornton, the founding generations of enslaved Africans in English and Dutch America shared both language and cultural traditions and were able to maintain those traditions within slavery. And, although numbers were small compared with the larger waves that would be transported from other parts of the African coast later, they argue that the established influence of the founders continued. They thus take up and amplify Ira Berlin’s formulation of the creole generation of Africans in the Atlantic world. Where Berlin depicted Atlantic creoles as a generation of knowledgeable and sophisticated individuals who improvised roles for Slavery and Abolition Vol. 30, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 135–159

Taking Haiti to the people: History and fiction of the Haitian revolution

There are clearly great pleasures in a story well told. In fact, I suspect that a great many of us were drawn to the field by consummate storytelling: an inspired work of historiography, an exceptional historical novel or a professor whose lectures made history come alive. Two thousand and four, the bicentennial of Haiti’s independence, has brought us two exceptional works of historical storytelling about the Haitian Revolution: Laurent Dubois’ narrative history, Avengers of the New World and the third novel of Madison Smartt Bell’s fictional trilogy, The Stone that the Builder Refused. Both are outstanding exemplars of their respective genres and engage the reader in the story of a successful slave rebellion that, while marginalized for the better part of two centuries, is now being recovered by a new generation of historical scholarship. Hayden White once demonstrated that ‘serious’ historical writing could be analyzed in much the same way as works of fiction, by attending to its characters, plots and tropes. In this vein, I want to examine Dubois’ Avengers and Bell’s Stone side by side, to explore the ways that they employ historical facts and incidents to their own narrative ends. Bell’s novel, The Stone that the Builder Refused, is the culmination of a narrative arc that began with two earlier novels, All Soul’s Rising and Master of the Crossroads, which all together constitute some 2,000 pages. Dubois’ Avengers covers much the same Slavery and Abolition Vol. 27, No. 1, April 2006, pp. 125–132