‘A sufficient and adequate squadron’: The navy, the transatlantic slave trade, and the American commercial empire

From its creation, the Africa Squadron, although tasked with suppressing the slave trade, did more to defend American sovereignty and expand American commercial access along the west coast of Africa. In both of these regards, Great Britain and the British Navy were the most prominent obstacles in the way of the United States achieving its goals. These tasks were among the most important imperatives that drove American foreign relations during the antebellum era. Thus the Africa Squadron is best understood as a case study of the vital role the navy played in not just conducting but also shaping American diplomacy. This article examines the circumstances surrounding the creation of the Africa Squadron, concluding that the flotilla was less concerned with actually ending the transatlantic trade in humans than with serving as a check on British power at sea.

First Bull Run/Manassas

This chapter examines the First Battle of Bull Run, also known as the First Battle of Manassas, and argues that the Civil War’s first battle represented the last battle of antebellum military cultures of free and slave states. Before the Civil War, Americans refused to maintain a large U.S. Army. In the antebellum era, states organized local militia units based on their perception of internal and external threats; fear of slave revolt prompted slave states to maintain larger, more effective units, particularly cavalry units. Troopers who manned cavalry militia also staffed the slave patrols that brutally enforced the slave regime. In contrast, free states had no such fears, and their militias were moribund before the Civil War. When war came, slave states’ superior military capability led to Confederate victory at Bull Run/Manassas. Later, volunteer units from the free states achieved a level of competency that overcame this initial disadvantage.

“We Chilluns, Long wid Her, Wuz Lak de Udder Slaves”: Free Black Families and Quasi-slavery in the Late Antebellum Era

This article shows how and why some free black families ended up living among the enslaved in the late antebellum era. Enslavers brought free people of colour into forms of informal quasi-slavery that differed little from enslavement despite their free legal status. Despite a lack of evidence, piecing together free blacks’ experiences through surviving sources reveals much about the porous boundary between slavery and freedom where enslavers manipulated marginality for financial gain. There was no sharp delineation between slavery and freedom but instead a continuum of oppression characterized by varying degrees of persecution and fragile freedoms.

Grand Strategy of the Master Class

This chapter discusses the role of Southerners and slavery in US foreign policy from the antebellum era to the Civil War. Studies that explore slavery's specific impact on foreign policy have generally confined themselves to the ways that slaveholders worked to secure fugitive slave laws, enact restrictions on black sailors, or, at most, fight to add new slave states to the Union. However, the kind of domination that slaveholders desired went beyond the need to reinforce their narrow property rights, or even the desire to expand the amount of territory under slave cultivation. Antebellum slaveholders assumed national Cabinet posts to command the power of the entire United States, and then, crucially, to use that power to strengthen slavery in world politics. If grand strategy is “the intellectual architecture that gives form and structure to foreign policy,” slaveholding leaders were not merely provincial sectionalists but bold and cosmopolitan strategic thinkers. Their profound ideological commitment to slavery did not merely affect domestic politics within a divided republic; it left a deep imprint on the “strategic culture” of American foreign policy.

Medical Violence, Obstetric Racism, and the Limits of Informed Consent for Black Women

This Essay critically examines how medicine actively engages in the reproductive subordination of Black women. In obstetrics, particularly, Black women must contend with both gender and race subordination. Early American gynecology treated Black women as expendable clinical material for its institutional needs. This medical violence was animated by biological racism and the legal and economic exigencies of the antebellum era. Medical racism continues to animate Black women’s navigation of and their dehumanization within obstetrics. Today, the racial disparities in cesarean sections illustrate that Black women are simultaneously overmedicalized and medically neglected—an extension of historical medical practices rooted in the logic of biological race. Though the principle of informed consent traditionally protects the rights of autonomy, bodily integrity, and well-being, medicine nevertheless routinely subjects Black women to medically unnecessary procedures. This Essay adopts the framework of obstetric racism to analyze Black women’s overmedicalization as a site of reproductive subordination. It thus offers a critical interdisciplinary and intersectional lens to broader conversations on race in reproduction and maternal health.

The Men of the Thirties

In this lecture Woodward charts the development of southern liberalism from the late Enlightenment to the early antebellum era when southern enslavers articulated a new defense of the institution of slavery as a positive good. Those who dissented fell under intense scrutiny, and no longer comfortable with the South’s ideological aggressiveness they left the region in exile. Woodward explains how these exiles were torn between their conscience and loyalty to families and region. The exiles of the thirties typically came from the most privileged class, from wealthy enslavers, cultured families of position and distinction. They were influenced by the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, and especially drawn to abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld at Lane Theological Seminary. These exiled white southern abolitionists include James G. Birney; James A. Thome; and the Grimke sisters, Sarah and Angelina.

To Honor and Obey

In the antebellum era, eastern Virginians embraced a definitive and harsh understanding of divorce and its role in society. There, few filed for divorce, most likely knowing that local courts would be unsympathetic even if they dared risk social disapproval. Those who did choose this path shaped their narratives to meet the community’s understanding of gender and marriage. Petitioners framed themselves as long-suffering spouses forced to choose this most undesirable option. Their cases also reflected a greater acceptance of gender hierarchy in the home, especially through their expectation of wifely obedience.

No More, Together

In the antebellum era, border southerners increasingly made use of contractualism in their divorce petitions. Contractualism, or the growing understanding that marriage was not a permanent, sacramental institution but a contractual one with rules, procedures, and escape clauses, allowed more men and women to file for divorce and to use a variety of causes to explain their decision. It was also a dangerous ideal in a society in which so many residents found themselves permanently bound to masters with no legal recourse or escape. Nonetheless, in Kentucky, western Virginia, and Appalachian Virginia, unhappy spouses found an outlet in the local courts and through their use, or manipulation, of legal statutes.

Torn Apart

This chapter explores the impact of the Civil War on divorce in the postwar period. As in other parts of the United States, the Civil War had a profound impact on the psyche and emotions of the people involved, and years of distance and separation and battlefield trauma led to the breakdown of many relationships. The situation in Kentucky and West Virginia was exacerbated by two particular circumstances: the establishment of friendlier divorce laws in the antebellum era and the embrace of domesticity and mutuality before and during the conflict. Hastily arranged marriages and the flexibility to more easily end those relationships when they failed, led to a rash of divorces in the border South in the years following the war.

Under Description: The Fugitive Slave Advertisement as Genre

This essay analyzes the discourse of the fugitive slave advertisement (FSA) to argue that these texts form what I call a “genre of personhood.” Centered on physical and behavioral descriptions of escaped slaves, FSAs offer a window into the heuristics that slaveholders used to identify, explain, and anticipate slaves’ behavior in the antebellum era, constructing an implicit model of enslaved personhood by means of consistent syntactic patterns and semantic tropes. I argue for the continuity of these texts’ descriptive and scriptive (or instructive) functions, finding that FSAs conscript the white reader into searching for a fugitive not only through overt appeals but by structuring the reader’s perceptual experiences via linguistic cues. Ultimately, the essay not only excavates the opportunistic and incomplete construction of personhood from heterogeneous materials but also reveals the interdependence of literary description and extraliterary genres like the FSA.