ABSTRACT Race and Freedom in the African Americas: Free People of Color and Social Mobility in Cartagena and Charleston
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Copyright John Garrison Marks August 15, 2016 ABSTRACT Race and Freedom in the African Americas: Free People of Color and Social Mobility in Cartagena and Charleston by John Garrison Marks 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. iii Acknowledgements Someone—though I cannot remember whom—once told me that while writing my dissertation I would experience the highest highs and lowest lows of my career. Though I of course don't know what the future holds for me, I can unequivocally say that I would not have survived the challenge of completing a dissertation without the help and encouragement of some of the best advisors, colleagues, friends, and family I could have asked for. This dissertation would not have been possible without the financial support I received from Rice University. The Department of History's generous research funding policies allowed me to make a preliminary trip to Bogotá, a trip to Seville, Spain, and numerous trips to South Carolina to spend many weeks conducting research. A six-month Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship from Rice likewise allowed me to conduct the careful archival research in Bogotá and Cartagena that made this dissertation possible. The Department of History also provided funding that allowed me to present my research at numerous conferences and scholarly meetings, the feedback from which has surely improved the final product. Thank you to Lisa Tate, Paula Platt, and Bev Konzem for dealing with the paper trail from all of these research trips. I have benefitted from an incredible dissertation advisor in Jim Sidbury. Jim came to Rice the year after I started in the doctoral program, a stroke of luck for which I will be forever grateful. Jim has always been generous with his time and willing to offer advice and feedback whenever I needed it. He challenged and encouraged me throughout the process of completing this dissertation—and knew when each was needed—and his iv careful reading of my chapters along the way has immeasurably improved my work. He has been a model advisor for me and I would not have been able to complete this dissertation without his help. I also want to thank my dissertation committee members, Caleb McDaniel, Alida Metcalf, Jim Sweet, and Jenifer Bratter, for their help during the dissertation process and their careful reading of this work. Alida's help as my Latin American history advisor was essential as I moved from being an Americanist who had traveled to South America to a scholar with a deep understanding of the region. Caleb's cultural history research seminar helped me improve as a writer and producer of historical scholarship in a way that truly prepared me to begin writing a dissertation. Additionally, Caleb has been one of both the smartest and kindest people I have met in academia, and he has provided me a model of how to conduct myself as a teacher and a scholar. My other professors and informal advisors have helped me grow during my time at Rice. Thank you in particular to John Boles, Rebecca Goetz, David Dow, Randal Hall, Bethany Johnson, Ussama Makdisi, Carl Caldwell, Ed Cox, Kerry Ward, Lora Wildenthal, and John Zammitto. I owe a great deal of gratitude to all of these professors for helping a student fresh out of undergrad who thought he knew everything to mature as a scholar and professional. At Rice, I have been extremely fortunate to be part of a collegial and supportive cohort of graduate students. I continue to believe that the relationship among the history graduate students at Rice is both uncommon and one of the program's greatest strengths. I am truly grateful to be able to count so many excellent scholars as helpful colleagues and lifelong friends. Sam Abramson has been a fantastic colleague, office mate and co- instructor, and I am very thankful to be able to count him among my closest friends. v Whitney Stewart, in addition to being my symposium co-organizer and anthology co- editor, is a wonderful scholar and great friend who has agreed to read my work on countless occasions. Ben Wright has always been willing to offer me sage advice, and I am especially thankful to have had a likeminded person like him a few years ahead of me in this process. Hanging out with, arguing with, and soliciting advice from Carl Paulus, Sarah Paulus, Jim Wainwright, Allison Madar, Andy Lang, and Joe Locke will always be some of my most lasting, if haziest, memories of graduate school. Kelly Weber, Tim Stefonowich, Lauren Brand, Andrew Johnson, Blake Earle, Wright Kennedy, Maria Montalvo, David Ponton, Keith McCall and all the other Rice history graduate students have been phenomenal friends and colleagues that I really consider myself lucky to have met. I will look back fondly to my time spent with all of you on the fifth floor of Fondren, at Valhalla, at the HOMELESS lectures, and all over Houston. The length of this paragraph is hopefully a small testament to the close-knit, collegial community the history graduate students at Rice have created. My academic career was shaped in a major way by my time at Lynchburg College. My undergraduate advisor, mentor, and friend Kirt von Daacke helped me grow as a person and as a scholar beginning from my first semester at Lynchburg. As Kirt introduced me to the process of primary research and historical writing, his high standards and unwavering support helped mold me into the scholar I have become. I will forever be grateful for the guidance and attention I received from him at Lynchburg. Thanks as well to the rest of the LC History cohort—Dr. Nikki Sanders, Ashley Schmidt, Charlotte Arbogast, and Jonathan Shipe—for their support and friendship (and for commiserating with me as we all dealt with Kirt). vi I also need to thank the #Twitterstorians community on Twitter. Being a part of such a huge community of scholars has been incredibly helpful to me in getting through the intellectual and personal challenges of writing a dissertation. Particularly after I moved away from Houston, the #Twitterstorians helped me feel like I wasn't writing my dissertation in isolation. The ability to float ideas out and get instant feedback has absolutely improved the quality of this work. I may have wasted some time on Twitter while working on this dissertation, but I gained at least as much benefit from the awesome community of scholars on there. I won't go so far as @ mentioning you in my acknowledgements, but thanks to all of you. Thanks as well to my family: my brothers, Roger and George, and my parents, to whom this work is dedicated. My mom and dad have always been supportive of my desire to get a Ph.D. and have helped me in innumerable ways while I was in graduate school. My mom got more phone calls from me over the past six years than she probably ever imagined, and has always had good advice and encouragement, even when I made things seem pretty bleak. I have a vivid memory of my dad telling me when I was fairly young, probably about twelve or so, to just read everything I could get my hands on; that proved to be sage advice. So thanks, Mom and Dad, for always supporting and believing in me. Finally, I need to thank my wife Caroline for all of her support during the dissertation process. She has not only helped me get through the many personal challenges and low-points this process entailed, she has spent countless hours listening to me talk through research questions, reading my work, and offering me careful and critical feedback along the way. Even while I was living in Bogotá, Caroline found ways to keep vii supporting me. Though she probably doesn’t want to, she now knows this material as well as almost anyone. Thank you Caroline, for being so supportive and loving throughout this process, I wouldn’t have been able to finish it without you. It’s impossible to finish a dissertation without help, and I am very thankful to have had lots of it from lots of phenomenal people. While any mistakes and deficiencies that might remain in the following pages are mine alone, I can’t stress enough how much I appreciate the support I’ve had from so many of you while I wrote this.