Published by Number I New Series Volume XXI Volume Natchitoches, Louisiana Natchitoches, Northwestern State University State Northwestern Spring/Summer 2014 The Southern Studies Institute Southern Studies The An InterdisciplinaryAn Journal of the South Southern Studies
Southern Studies Volume XXI Number I 2014
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Southern Studies An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South
New Series Volume XXI • Number I Spring/Summer 2014
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Copyrighted © 2014 by Southern Studies Institute Northwestern State University of Louisiana Natchitoches, Louisiana 71497 http://socialsciences.nsula.edu/southern-studies [email protected] Northwestern State University is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (1866 Southern Lane, Decatur, Georgia 30033-4097: Telephone number 404-679-4501) to award Associate, Baccalaureate, Master’s, Specialist and Doctorate degrees. It is the policy of Northwestern State University of Louisiana not to discriminate on the bases of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability in its educational programs, ac- tivities or employment practices as required by Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Executive Order 11246, Sections 503 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Section 402 of the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjust- ment Assistance Act of 1974. The Southern Studies Institute disclaims responsiblity for statements made by contributors in all articles, reviews, and miscellaneous items whether of fact or by opinion. Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South
Director, Southern Studies Institute Editor Charles Pellegrin
Managing Editor William Housel
Book Review Editor Allison Rittmayer
Editorial Board Margaret Bauer Rod Andrew, Jr. East Carolina University Clemson University Angela Boswell Tim Huebner Henderson State University Rhodes College Brian Brox Randy Sanders Tulane University Southeastern Louisiana University Casey Clabough Jay Watson Lynchburg College University of Mississippi Holly Stave Jeannie Whayne Louisiana Scholars' College University of Arkansas Pearson Cross W. Kirk Wood University of Louisiana—Lafayette Alabama State University Katherine Henninger Joshua D. Rothman Louisiana State University University of Alabama James MacDonald Stephen D. Shaffer Northwestern State University Mississippi State University New Series Volume XXI • Number I Spring/Summer 2014 Contents Tim Scott to the United States Senate: Putting His Appointment and High-Profile Statewide Office Candidacy in Historical Context. Judson L. Jeffries 1 Alexander Cumming - King or Pawn? An Englishman on the Colonial Chessboard of the Eighteenth-century American Southwest. Ian Chambers 33 Colonial Servitude and the "Unfree" Origins of America. Matthew Pursell 55 Bundles, Passes, and Stolen Watches: Interpreting the Role of Material Culture in Escape. Matthew C. Greer 87
Book Reviews A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation as You Go. Thomas Aiello 97 Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer. Robert H. Butts 101 The Past Is Not Dead: Essays from theSouthern Quarterly. Kimberly Fain 105 The Odyssey of an African Slave. Ryan Frisinger 111 Nancy Batson Crews: Alabama's First Lady of Flight. Erinn McComb 115 Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014
About the Authors
Judson L. Jeffries is Professor of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Ian D. Chambers is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Idaho. Matthew Pursell is Assistant Professor of History at the University of West Florida. Matthew C. Greer is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Southern Mississippi. His paper, published in this volume, won the William F. Coker Award at the 2013 Gulf South History and Humanities Conference. Thomas Aiello is Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at Valdosta State University. Robert H. Butts is Instructor of History at Tyler Junior College. Kimberly Fain is Adjunct Instructor of English at Houston Community College. Ryan Frisinger is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Louisiana - Monroe. Erinn McComb is Assistant Professor of History at Del Mar College. Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South Spring/Summer 2014 • 21(1): 1 - 31
Tim Scott to the United States Senate: Putting His Appointment and High-Profile Statewide Office Candidacy in Historical Context Judson L. Jeffries Introduction In American politics, no elective offices have proven more difficult for African Americans to capture than the high profile1 statewide posts of governor and U.S. Senate. Only three Blacks have served as governor of an American state since Reconstruction—L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia, Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, and David Paterson2 of New York. Five African Americans3 have occupied seats in the United States Senate—Republican Edward W. Brooke III of Massachusetts, and Carol Moseley Braun, Barack Obama, and Roland Burris,4 all of Illinois as well as the October 2013 special election of Cory Booker in New Jersey. Recently, the appointment of Congressman Tim Scott of South Carolina, an African American, to the United States Senate by Republican Governor Nikki Haley reverberated throughout both the hallowed halls of Congress and the corridors of academia, especially in the field of American Politics where the study of candidates and elections is featured prominently in classroom lectures around the country. While many saw Scott’s appointment as reason for celebration, Political Scientist Adolph L. Reed Jr. offered that while Scott’s elevation “seemed like another milestone for African Americans”, that perception needed rethinking. He cautioned against “cheerleading over racial symbolism” and suggested that Scott was merely the latest in a long line of “cynical tokens” put forward by Republicans.5 Reed’s observation is not altogether unwarranted given the party’s apparent antipathy toward African Americans since the election of Richard Nixon nearly forty-five years ago. Not to be outdone, weeks later, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts appointed an African American to fill the senate seat vacated by John Kerry who joined the president’s cabinet as secretary of state. On this appointment Reed and other students of Black Politics were noticeably silent. The irony is--a party originally established by racist southern white men to enhance and maintain their real and perceived interests gets a pass--as it is now perceived
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by some as the party of African Americans, liberals and moderate whites and Latinos. Although the appointment of Mo Cowans, an African American former chief of staff for Governor Patrick was seemingly without substance,6 it escaped public criticism. Be that as it may, Haley’s appointment of Scott is historic in two ways: a) Scott is the first Black to represent the U.S. Senate from the South since Reconstruction and b) his appointment represents only the second time since then that a Black Republican will occupy a United States Senate seat. This combination of unique circumstances prompted editors of several major newspapers to give the story high priority.7 Few editors and their reporters pass up an opportunity of such historic importance. While Black high-profile statewide officer seekers are not the novelty they once were; their candidacies are still relatively infrequent. Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, no more than fifty African Americans have posed serious8 challenges for the offices of governor and United States Senate. Over that period, thousands of African Americans around the country have run for and won political offices of varying types. Some of the most notable wins by Black candidates have occurred in the U.S. Congress where more than one hundred African Americans have been elected to the House of Representatives. Moreover, since redistricting for the 1992 elections, African Americans have consistently held 40 or more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Blacks have also experienced tremendous success at the mayoral level. Since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 voters in more than 300 cities have elected African Americans to serve as their mayor. Blacks have been elected mayor in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Houston, Dallas, and Detroit, to name a few. In fact there are few major American cities in which an African American has not been elected mayor. Blacks have also captured an array of lower statewide offices including state Supreme Court judgeships, attorney general, Lieutenant Governor, and State Treasurer. In the state of Connecticut alone, a half dozen African Americans have been voted into the office of state treasurer. Some have pointed to the election of Blacks to lower statewide offices as evidence of the purported disappearance of overt racial hostility toward African American candidates. While some Whites have demonstrated a willingness to support a Black candidate for treasurer, for example, on the whole, many Whites have not done the same for Black high profile statewide aspirants, prompting some Black scholars and others to argue that there is a core of White voters who will not support a Black high profile statewide
- 2 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 candidate under any circumstance.9 Despite research that suggests that “old fashioned” anti-Black racism is waning, Black candidates have still been unable to win widespread support from White voters when competing for high profile statewide offices. Years ago one renowned political scientist explained Black electoral defeat this way: “When white voters casts ballots against African Americans today, it is not because of the candidate’s race, but is a response to the candidate’s party.”10 This line of thinking is not totally off-base; however, if this were true across the board, why then do White voters oftentimes support the White running mates of Black candidates more strongly than they do the Black candidates of the same party? In 1989, Don Beyer, Wilder’s White running mate for lieutenant governor, garnered 45,00011 more votes than Wilder, despite having no elected office experience and little name recognition.12 Mary Sue Terry, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, amassed an even greater vote total, picking up 60,000 more votes than Wilder. Governor Deval Patrick encountered a similar scenario in Massachusetts, tallying three to four hundred thousand fewer votes in 2006 than the White Democratic candidates for attorney general, secretary of the commonwealth, and state auditor.14 Other proponents of the “declining significance of race” thesis claim that some Whites may refuse to vote for a particular Black candidate not because of the candidate’s race, “but because the candidate is politically unacceptable.”15 In others words, some Black candidates have failed because some White voters have found them to be ideologically incompatible with their views as well as poorly qualified. This argument is not entirely without merit. There have been any number of poorly qualified, unimpressive, and ideologically out-of-touch Black high profile statewide hopefuls over the years. Marvin Scott and Alan Keyes are two such examples. A political also-ran whose ultra-conservative ideology many Blacks as well as Whites found off-putting, Keyes had been on the losing end of two previous U.S. Senate races in 1988 and 1992 before launching a rather meek Senate campaign in Illinois in 2004. A college professor at the time of his 2004 run for the U.S. Senate in Indiana, like Keyes, Scott had never held elected office, and it showed. The enormously popular Evan Bayh cruised to victory garnering more than seventy percent of the vote. A similar case could also be made against Harvey Gantt who lost to Jesse Helms in consecutive senate elections. By the time of Gantt’s rematch against Helms in 1996 he had lost two consecutive elections, one to Helms and a reelection bid for mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina.
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This argument, however, has little merit in the cases of Ron Kirk, H. Carl McCall, Ron Burris, Ken Blackwell, and Michael Steele; all of whom were highly qualified fiscally conservative Black candidates, who in the last twelve years, lost to White candidates (some of whom possessed less impressive credentials) for the offices of governor and U.S. Senate. This article puts Tim Scott’s appointment to the U.S. Senate into historical context. Scott’s prospects for election in 2014 are examined against the criteria gleaned from the growing literature on Black high profile statewide candidates with the hope that doing so will deepen our understanding of the challenges that Black high profile statewide office seekers face as they vie for the governor’s office and the United States Senate. Last, Scott’s historic appointment is put under closer scrutiny in an effort to determine its significance in the larger American body politic. In order to fully appreciate the challenges that Black high profile statewide hopefuls face, a thorough vetting of the literature is necessary.
Literature Review The study of Blacks and high profile statewide office began with John Becker and Eugene Heaton’s pioneering 1967/68 Public Opinion Quarterly article titled “The Election of Senator Edward W. Brooke III.” Becker and Heaton examined public opinion polls to explain Brooke’s historic victory.16 With the help of those data, they identified the issues on which Brooke capitalized. Despite the campaigns of several subsequent Black high profile statewide office seekers, more than twenty years passed before someone would pick up where Becker and Heaton left off. To be sure, Brooke’s four years as attorney general served him well as Massachusetts voters ushered him into the U.S. Senate on a tidal wave of support. In Rafael Sonenshein’s 1990 cutting edge piece, “Can Blacks win Statewide Office?,” he compares Brooke’s U.S. Senate win to that of Tom Bradley’s 1982 run for governor of California and Wilder’s 1985 Lieutenant Governor’s race in Virginia. Sonenshein asserts that despite Blacks’ lack of success, they can win statewide elections by paying their political dues, running in states where Whites have liberal attitudes, and putting together a campaign strategy that appeals to White voters.17 No doubt, Black office seekers would do well to pay their political dues and craft a campaign strategy that enables them to garner the kind of wide support from White voters needed to win statewide races. Sonenshein’s other points, however, merit close scrutiny; he suggested that Blacks identify states where Whites have liberal attitudes and run there. What Sonenshein means by liberal attitudes is not entirely clear; he also fails to identify said
- 4 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 states. Although not directly stated, perhaps Sonenshein is suggesting that Blacks run in states where Whites have a history of voting for Black candidates. It should be noted that the data show that Whites’ willingness to vote for Black candidates for lower-level offices such as congressman, mayor or the state legislature has not carried over to Black gubernatorial and senatorial candidates. When told of Sonenshein’s observation, former Governor Wilder commented, “Black candidates should not leave entire states unchallenged because of past voting patterns.”18 Brooke concurred, “I was told that Massachusetts was not ready for a Black statewide candidate, yet I won the election, defeating a candidate who had once been governor.”19 Finally, Sonenshein errs by putting the office of lieutenant governor on par with that of the governor and U.S. Senate. Although the office of lieutenant governor is a statewide post, it is largely ceremonial and therefore not commensurate with that of a governor or U.S. Senator. In fact, in some states the office of lieutenant governor is little more than a part time post. High profile statewide offices differ from lower statewide offices in several important ways: a) they are substantially more powerful, b) they are entrusted with greater responsibilities, c) they elicit greater media and voter interest, d) their campaigns are significantly more costly, and e) although not always the case, both voters and party decision makers usually expect candidates for high profile statewide offices to possess stronger political resumes than lower statewide office hopefuls. Points a) and b) should be underscored as Whites understand the power that high-profile statewide office holders wield. The same White voters may vote for a Black secretary of state, but be reluctant to vote for a Black senatorial or gubernatorial candidate.20 The 1990s produced a small body of scholarship in this specialty area. Building on Sonenshein’s work, Strickland and Whicker compared Wilder’s 1989 campaign to Harvey Gantt’s 1990 North Carolina Senate campaign. Agreeing with Sonenshein that Black candidates need to be savvy campaigners and have impressive resumes, Strickland and Whicker proffer an unusual wrinkle. They submit that Black candidates need to “look White.”21 Gantt appeared darker and “more Black.” They argued that looking “more White” might help Black statewide candidates. As evidence, they pointed to Wilder and Brooke (two light complexioned Black men), who at the time were the only two Blacks ever elected to high profile statewide office. With an N of 2, Strickland and Whickers’ hypothesis is hardly convincing. Suffice to say they did not expect Carol Moseley Braun, who was of a dark brown complexion, to fare well in the 1992 Illinois Senate race. Braun won nevertheless, defeating
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Alan Dixon, a longtime incumbent, in the Democratic primary before winning the general election by a comfortable margin, thus becoming the only Black female ever elected to the U.S. Senate. Needless to say, Braun’s victory undermines the notion that Black candidates need to “look White” in order to win high profile statewide office. When Brooke was made aware of Strickland and Whicker’s hypothesis about skin tone, he chuckled, “I seriously doubt that Whites are any less prejudiced against fair-skinned Blacks than they are toward darker-skinned Black candidates.”22 While Brooke may be justified in his reservations, Whicker and Strickland’s observation should not be dismissed outright. In their article “The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order” Jennifer L. Hochschild and Vesla Weaver submit that dark-skinned Blacks in the U.S. have lower socioeconomic status, more primitive relationships with the criminal justice system, diminished prestige, and less likelihood of holding elective office compared with their lighter counterparts.23 As more and more Blacks of varying hues run for high profile statewide office social scientists may be apt to put Whicker and Strickland’s hypothesis under rigorous examination. One year after Strickland and Whicker’s 1992 article was published a volume appropriately titled Dilemmas of Black Politics appeared that studied Andrew Young’s 1990 gubernatorial campaign in Georgia, Wilder’s 1989 gubernatorial victory, and Harvey Gantt’s 1990 North Carolina senate campaign.24 Of the three essays, Jones and Clemons’ chapter on Wilder was the most insightful; it explains the nuances of Wilder’s victory, accounting for factors that went unacknowledged by other scholars while at the same time advancing the deracialization thesis on which subsequent authors relied heavily.25 The North Carolina Senate contest offered more suspense than did the race for governor of Georgia, as Gantt led the ultra-conservative incumbent Jesse Helms heading into the final leg of the campaign, eventually losing by six percentage points. Young, on the other hand, failed to reach the general election, losing badly to the incumbent Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller in a run-off election. Few gave Young a chance against the well- connected Miller who went on to win the governorship. In an interview with former Governor L. Douglas Wilder in the mid-1990s, Wilder said “I encouraged Andy to run for lieutenant governor instead . . . I explained to Andy that he couldn’t beat the popular and well financed Miller that he stood a much better chance of winning the Lieutenant governor’s office, but Andy was determined to run for governor.”26
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In 1996, the same year that Gantt launched an undermanned and underfunded rematch with incumbent U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, political scientist Huey L. Perry published the timely Race, Governance and Politics in the United States that contained additional analyses of the candidacies of Young, Gantt, Wilder, and Carol Moseley Braun.27 These essays struck a similar chord to those discussed earlier as Prysby and Roger Oden situated Gantt’s loss and Braun’s victory, respectively, in the context of a deracialized campaign strategy while Pierannunzi and Hutcheson used the same approach to contrast Young’s 1981 mayoral campaign against his race for governor nearly twenty years later.28 Although Pierannunzi and Hutcheson purport to compare the two campaigns, very little analysis of Young’s mayoral campaigns is present. Alvin Schexnider’s essay on Wilder is refreshing as it goes one step further than the works previously mentioned by exploring the role that deracialization played in the way Wilder governed as the state’s chief executive officer.29 Although Schexnider does not provide sufficient data to support the argument that while Wilder may have employed a deracialized campaign strategy his style of governance was quite the opposite, his work does give policy oriented scholars who wish to pursue that line of inquiry a much- needed point of departure. Recently, a group of younger scholars have picked up where the above works left off. In a 2009National Political Science Review article titled “Three Wrongs and Two Far Right: The Wrong Candidate, the Wrong Year, and the Wrong State,” Wendy Smooth examines the campaign of J. Kenneth Blackwell for the purposes of explaining how a highly qualified two-time Black Republican statewide office holder, who was seeking to succeed another Republican governor, could lose so miserably to a Democratic challenger whose credentials paled in comparison.30 Blackwell garnered 37 percent of the vote to Ted Strickland’s 67 percent. As a Republican, Blackwell was sadly neither able to win any Black votes of significance nor able to tap into either the White moderate or conservative sectors of the GOP. In 2010, Andra Gillespie edited Whose Black Politics? Cases in Post- Racial Black Leadership, an impressive collection of essays that, unlike its predecessors, employs an array of qualitative as well as quantitative methods in order to examine the candidacies of ten post civil rights era Black politicians including Deval Patrick for governor of Massachusetts, Harold Ford, Michael Steele and Barack Obama for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee, Maryland and Illinois, respectively.31 A close read of these four essays reveals that while many factors account for Patrick’s and Obama’s success and Ford’s and Steele’s defeat, a common theme throughout is that race still figures prominently
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in electoral politics and as long as Blacks continue to vie for high profile statewide office, deracialization as a campaign strategy, will continue to be at the center of scholarly analysis.32 Although the body of scholarship on African Americans and high profile statewide office continues to grow, it still lags behind the increasing number of Black candidates who have launched campaigns for the offices of governor and U.S. Senator over the past several years. This article is among those that seek to keep pace with these rapidly evolving developments.
Who is Tim Scott? Despite public perception, Scott’s rise to the Senate was not meteoric nor did it come out of nowhere. In other words, because Scott was not widely known outside of the state of South Carolina, some erroneously believed him to be somewhat of a young upstart who was catapulted onto the national scene that is Congress’s upper chamber without having paid his dues. This is an argument with which Black candidates are all too familiar. The same was said of Barack Obama, a three term Illinois State Senator, whose introduction to America was made before a nationally televised audience in 2004 when, as the featured keynote speaker, Obama gave an impressive keynote at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Prior to the convention, few Americans had heard of Barack Obama. That night’s impressive oration, however, left him well-positioned to capture the United States Senate seat vacated a year earlier by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. Presented with the good fortune of running against Alan Keyes, someone who had lost two previous senate races, both in the state of Maryland oddly enough, Obama trounced Keyes winning more than 70 percent of the vote. Three years later, in the middle of his first term as a U.S. Senator, Obama, stunned many when he announced his candidacy for the presidency, after having served in public office for a total of ten years. Scott’s political pedigree, however, is more substantive in breadth and scope than was Obama’s before his foray into high profile statewide politics. Unlike Obama, Scott, the owner of Tim Scott Allstate and partner in the Pathway Real Estate Group, labored in the political vineyards for years before being appointed to the U.S. Senate. In 1995, Scott successfully ran for the Charleston County Council serving there for thirteen years, becoming the first Black Republican in the state to win elected office of any kind since the nineteenth century.33 One year later, Scott co-chaired Strom Thurmond’s last senate campaign in 1996. That same year Scott, confident that he could challenge for a seat in the state Senate, squared off against incumbent Robert
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Ford for South Carolina’s 42nd Senate district and was soundly beaten, 35 percent to 65 percent. Undaunted, Scott dedicated himself to the work of the County Council, earning a reputation as a hard worker. His decision to do so paid off as the voters reelected him in 2000 and 2004 by comfortable margins. In 2007, his colleagues elected him Chairman of the County Council. Having ingratiated himself with the party, Scott parlayed his relationship with Thurmond and other party stalwarts into a run for the state House. In 2008, Scott left the County Council to run for the majority White District 117 of the South Carolina House of Representatives, sailing through a three-way Republican primary with 53 percent of the vote. Running opposed in the general election, Scott again made history, becoming South Carolina’s first Black Republican representative in one hundred years. Shortly after assuming a seat in the South Carolina General Assembly, Scott was tapped as chairman of the Freshman Caucus and selected House Whip.34 Less than two years later, after considering a run for lieutenant governor, Scott, upon being heavily recruited by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, decided instead to run for the state’s recently vacated 1st Congressional District. Scott endeared himself to 1st Congressional District voters early on when he promised not to seek more than four terms if elected. By vowing to step aside after eight years Scott came across as someone who sought the office primarily to help improve people’s lives, rather than for personal and professional gain. Scott bested Paul Thurmond (the son of one of the South’s most well-known segregationists and a principal architect of the Dixiecrats of the late 1940s and early 1950s), garnering 68 percent of the vote in the Republican primary before facing Bobbie Rose in the general election.35 Rose failed to mount much of a challenge, losing 62 percent to 35.7 percent. Scott’s decisive win caught some by surprise, but the symbolic importance of his victory was hard to ignore, as the 1st coastal Congressional District is home to Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. Although Scott is a Black Republican he is, obviously, not the typical Republican. Unlike some junior members of Congress he is unafraid to make waves, choosing to speak out on the controversial issues of the day. He is not always in lockstep with his party, nor members of his own race. His criticism of African Americans and/or African American Democrats (including President Obama) is well documented. He believes the Affordable Health Care Act should be repealed. During the summer 2011 debate over raising the U.S. debt ceiling, Scott quipped that the president could be impeached over the debt crisis. As an evangelical Christian, Scott’s faith drives his
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politics.36 He opposes embryonic stem cell research. In the late 1990s Scott supported having the Ten Commandments posted outside of the county council chambers, maintaining it would remind members of the rules they should follow. The county council promptly approved the display where upon Scott nailed a King James Version of the Commandments to the wall. At a Tea Party gathering in early January 2012 Scott exclaimed that “the greatest minority under assault today are Christians. No doubt about it.” Scott opposes same-sex marriage, but he supports a federal version of the Arizona immigration law and right-to-work legislation. He is both a fiscal and social conservative. Considered a rising star within the party, in December 2012 Governor Haley, herself a person of color, appointed Scott to the United States Senate. In Haley’s introduction of Scott the governor made the following remarks about her appointee:
It’s a historic day in South Carolina. It is very important to me, as a minority female, that Congressman Scott earned his seat.
He earned this seat for the person that he is; he earned this seat for the results he has shown; he earned this seat for what I know he’s going to do in making South Carolina and making our country proud.38
To add to the intrigue, Haley appointed Scott to the Senate seat that for nearly fifty years was held by Strom Thurmond.
High Profile Statewide Offices: Why are they Important? High profile statewide offices hold both symbolic and substantive importance. Michael B. Preston argued nearly thirty five years ago that African American elected officials form a link between government and Black citizens in a way that Whites cannot provide.39 Simply put, as Blacks capture high profile statewide offices, African Americans may feel less estranged from the higher echelons of government. A former chief judge of the Richmond Circuit Court had this to say early in Wilder’s term: “Blacks are showing more interest in state government, focusing on who their legislators are and what they do. There certainly is a lot more interest in trying to get a piece of the action.”40 A Black elected official in Norfolk commented, “If we did not believe that we were players before, Wilder’s election makes us players now . . . I feel an access and closeness that many others felt to previous governors.”41 Black high profile statewide office holders also serve as role models, not only for the African American community, but an entire state, as well as
- 10 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 the nation. It is important that Whites see Blacks as capable of governing and making decisions that affect White people’s lives. Black high profile statewide office holders help to reverse the perception of Black inferiority on the part of Whites by demonstrating that they can govern as well if not better than Whites. It is also vital that young Blacks see people with faces like their own, serving as Governor and U.S. Senator. When Whites refer to a Black Governor or U.S. Senator as “Sir” or “Ma’am” at a public outing, the symbolism necessarily affects traditional attitudes among African Americans and Whites about superiority.42 Last, the presence of a Black Governor or U.S. Senator demonstrates to the youth, young Blacks especially, what is possible—that there are no limits to what one can achieve, if one only applies him or herself. Substantively speaking, voters understand that high profile statewide office holders hold tremendous sway over their lives, that decisions about matters such as education, housing, social services, judicial appointments, healthcare and welfare are (in part) made by those who occupy the offices of governor and United States Senate. High profile statewide office holders are able to influence legislation in a way that may be especially beneficial to members of their constituency. Second, high profile statewide office holders have the power to diversify government, both at the state and national level, in a way that other office holders cannot by bringing non-Whites and women into government by way of appointments and hiring. For example, some governors are empowered to make thousands of appointments to various departments, agencies and commissions, some of which are charged with running the state long after the incumbent has left office. During Wilder’s tenure as governor of Virginia, he appointed more people of color than the two previous Democratic governors combined. This point cannot be overstated as there is a feeling among Blacks that Black politicians carry into office a greater sense of urgency than do white politicians when it comes to addressing Black needs. In fact, recent research bears this out as David E. Broockman found in his work that Black politicians are more intrinsically motivated to advance Blacks’ interests than are white politicians.43 It should also be noted that Wilder appointed more women than his immediate predecessor who was lauded for appointing record numbers of women to the state’s commissions, departments and agencies.44 Third, some governors can also influence state public contracts and are able to eradicate policies that adversely and disproportionately impact people of color. Simply put, high profile statewide office holders have the power to influence public policy and redistribute benefits and services in a manner that
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is more equitable to African Americans and other historically marginalized groups. Fourth, high profile statewide office is especially important if one has Oval Office aspirations. High profile statewide office has traditionally been a stepping stone to the presidency. Typically candidates who are fortunate to win their party’s nomination for president are former governors and U.S. Senators. Since the mid-1930s, nearly 50 percent of all presidential nominees have been governors and roughly 25 percent have been senators.45 Of the past six U.S. presidents, one is a former U.S. Senator and five were former governors. While some may point to the fact that former senators have not been as successful as governors at winning the presidency or even getting their party’s nomination, it should be noted that many of them have gone on to serve as vice president of the United States. Joe Biden, Al Gore and Dan Quayle are three recent examples. Be that as it may, when it comes to seeking the presidency, any presidential aspirant would do well to have served as governor or U.S. Senator as those who have not are seldom in the conversation as potential nominees. Fifth, a close examination of presidential cabinets over the years suggests that governors and U.S. senators are often the preferred choice for those plum and influential posts. The fact that Whites have voted Blacks into an array of lower statewide offices over the years (but have not done the same for Black high profile statewide hopefuls) suggests perhaps that Whites are not totally unaware of the power and influence of the offices of governor and U.S. Senate when they vote against a Black high profile statewide hopeful. It is plausible that some Whites believe that if they support Blacks for high profile statewide office, Blacks will cater to African Americans to the detriment of Whites. For example, there were rumblings from Whites in 1989 that were they to vote for Wilder “he might fill most of his 4,000 appointments with Blacks.” One northern Virginia voter complained “I’m afraid he’s going to bring his helpers from all over the country and put them in office.” Said another voter, “he’s [Wilder] got all those kinfolk to look out for.”46 Unabashed statements (made to reporters) such as these suggest that some Whites were not entirely comfortable with the idea of an African American occupying the governor’s mansion. Although relatively small, this growing literature on Black high profile statewide aspirants is important, because it focuses on candidates and campaigns, rather than voters, as the unit of analysis. It is difficult to understand the uniquely American style of governance, however, without understanding how individuals are elected to office (and who is elected). Such knowledge reveals much about the interests that are represented by
- 12 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 elected officials as well as the structures that undergird our institutions. Some Whites will support African American candidates in biracial contests under certain conditions. This article assesses Scott’s candidacy for the 2014 Senate race against the existing literature on Black high profile statewide candidates.
The Criteria A close read of the literature on Black high profile statewide office seekers uncovers a significant amount of overlap between the criteria and frameworks developed therein. Prominent within the literature are four key criteria over which a candidate has varying degrees of control and three criteria over which the candidate has little to no control. Although the latter are addressed, the bulk of the discussion that follows is devoted to the criteria over which the candidate has some control. These are the criteria, if negotiated wisely and effectively can help position African American candidates to challenge competitively, for a high profile statewide office.
Criteria over which candidate has some control: 1. The candidate must craft a savvy and pragmatic deracialized campaign strategy.
2. The candidate must have served an appropriate political apprenticeship.
3. The candidate must have strong party support.
4. The candidate must have won his or her last election.
Criteria over which the candidate has little to no control: 5. The state must have moderate to liberal racial attitudes and at least a moderate-sized Black population.
6. The election must be an open seat.
7. Factionalism must exist within the opposing party.
In the following pages, Scott’s 2014 candidacy for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina is examined within the context of the existing literature on African American candidates for high profile statewide office, beginning with those factors that are outside of the candidate’s control.
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Applying Criteria to Scott’s 2014 Prospects Open Seat The impending 2014 U.S. Senate race in South Carolina will not be an open seat election; rather it will feature Scott as the sitting U.S. Senator from the Palmetto state, placing him in an even stronger position than had he been vying for an open seat. As the incumbent, Scott will be in the enviable position of having access to an array of resources that will stand him in good stead as he attempts to make history by becoming the first ever popularly elected African American to the United States Senate in the South.47 Only twice in American history has an African American run for high profile statewide office as the incumbent. Thomas Pettigrew and Denise Alston assert that as whites get accustomed to seeing a Black candidate holding a particular office, white voter hostility tends to wane.48 In other words, whites began to see the candidate as the incumbent rather than as the Black candidate. The 2014 election will undoubtedly test that hypothesis. Party Factionalism Although South Carolina’s Democratic Party is not fractured or in turmoil, it is not as strong as its Republican counterpart. The Democrats are in the minority in both the upper and lower chambers of the state house, occupying 18 out of 46 senate seats (39%) and 46 out of 124 house seats (37%). Furthermore, the Democrats hold none of South Carolina’s statewide offices (including the top three posts, governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general) and just one of seven U.S. House seats. Additionally, in the past forty years, only one Democrat has been elected to the U.S. Senate in South Carolina, and of the past five governors only one has been a Democrat, suggesting that many of the state’s voters may be more conservative leaning than liberal in their political tastes, which, may ironically bode well for the Black candidate in this case. South Carolina’s White Voters and the Black Electorate Judging whether or not a state’s voters are liberal to moderate is a difficult undertaking. Both formers Governor Wilder and U.S. Senator Edward Brooke cautioned against basing one’s decision to run or not to run for high profile statewide office on the “perceived” attitudes of White voters and the size of the Black electorate. Brooke reminded this author that at the time of his election in Massachusetts the state was only three percent Black. You never know until you try is the adage to which both men referred. Having said that, when one considers South Carolina’s demographics, Scott’s 2014 electoral prospects appear; on the surface at least, promising. It should be noted that while President Obama did not win South Carolina in either
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2008 or 2012, he did garner a significant number of votes. Although White support of Black candidates for lower-level officers have historically not carried over to Black high profile statewide office seekers, there is no reason (theoretically at least) to believe that Whites who supported an Obama presidency would be reluctant to support a Black candidate for the U.S. Senate. In other words, controlling for party identification, there is no reason to believe that whites would be open to a Black president, but not a Black Senator. Furthermore, of the fifty states, South Carolina has the fifth largest African American population at thirty percent. Finally, although no Black has ever been elected to statewide office in South Carolina, only Illinois (with 14) has sent more Blacks to the U.S. Congress in its history than South Carolina, which has sent ten African Americans to the nation’s capital. Few of them however, were elected by majority White districts. An Appropriate Political Apprenticeship Turning now to those factors over which candidates have some control, many African Americans have longed believed that Blacks have to be “twice as good” as their White counterparts to stand a chance. Margaret Edds, a Caucasian woman and longtime writer for Norfolk’s Virginian Pilot wrote more than twenty years ago that Black candidates need superior qualifications to even have a legitimate shot at defeating a White candidate.49 The race factor accentuates the need for African American candidates to have an impressive record of elected office experience. Political scientist Andrew Hacker maintained that Whites often complain that Black voters settle for Black candidates with less-than-adequate credentials,50 hence the need for an appropriate apprenticeship, the absence of which gives some White voters a ready-made excuse to withhold their support from African American high profile statewide candidates. An appropriate political apprenticeship for African American high profile statewide office hopefuls entails having elected office experience, including having been elected to a lower-statewide office, to demonstrate to White voters that they can govern statewide. Among the one hundred sitting U.S. Senators in 2012, nineteen of them had some statewide office experience, several of whom had been elected to multiple lower statewide offices, before mounting their senate campaigns. As for the governors, twenty of them had held a lower statewide office before being elected to the state’s top post. In this regard, Scott’s record compares favorably to those who currently hold high profile statewide offices. As Scott looks to his 2014 run for the Senate, he will do so with nearly two years of senatorial experience on his resume, a sufficient enough of time to become familiar with the rigors and nuances of
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the job as well as acquaint himself with the state’s voters and potential donors. Fortunately, with only two years in the senate he will likely not have accrued the kind of controversial record with which both the media and voters typically take issue. If the candidate has, in the past, held offices other than lower- statewide posts, it is imperative that those offices are in majority-White districts as Blacks who represent majority Black districts are at a disadvantage. The latter are easier to stereotype as too race-oriented to represent Whites fairly. Indeed, one of the reasons that Black congressmen shy away from away from high profile statewide office bids is because the liberal stands that they took as congresspersons governing a majority or heavily Black district are difficult to defend in a statewide election.51 An appropriate apprenticeship also includes having an extended track record of public service as well as having won one’s last election. African Americans who run for high profile statewide office after having lost their previous election are not taken seriously by either the media or the voters, as they are relegated to underdog status from the outset. Here again, Scott meets these criteria, not only as someone who has spent seventeen years of his life in elected office, but also as someone who has represented majority White constituencies, most recently as a member of the U.S. Congress where three-quarters of his district was comprised of White residents. Interestingly, if Scott is elected in 2014 he will become the first African American ever from the House of Representatives of any party to be elected to the United States Senate. While the House of Representatives has been a stepping stone to the U.S. Senate for many White house members no African American has ever made the transition.52 It is worth noting that while African Americans who aspire to high profile statewide office would do well to secure an appropriate political apprenticeship; many White candidates have not found it necessary to do the same. Indeed, it is not uncommon for White political novices to capture high profile statewide offices. Of the current fifty U.S. Governors, eight (16%) had no elected office experience before becoming their state’s chief executive officer, and of the one hundred U.S. Senators, 26 percent were political novices prior to launching their Senate campaigns. Still, serving an appropriate apprenticeship gives Black candidates a perceived political legitimacy in the eyes of the media, donors and the voters. In addition to making the candidate legitimate, an appropriate apprenticeship also affords White voters the opportunity to, over time, familiarize themselves with the Black candidate. Historically, Whites have not supported Black high profile statewide candidates at the same rate that Black voters have supported White
- 16 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 high profile statewide hopefuls. Some believe, however, that if White voters have a chance to get to know the candidate, then race becomes less of a factor, hence the importance of having a long record of public service.53 Finally, an appropriate political apprenticeship also affords African American high profile statewide office seekers the opportunity to hone their political acumen as well as gain valuable legislative and administrative expertise. Such opportunities bode well for candidates as they try to position themselves for important committee assignments, not to mention key committee chairmanships. The skills that candidates can glean from these experiences are crucial to governors and U.S. Senators, whose success in office is dependent upon compromise and one’s ability to form coalitions across party, ideological and racial lines. Major Party Support Another factor critical to winning high profile statewide office is strong major party backing. At a panel discussion at Harvard University several years ago, former Democratic Alabama congressman Artur Davis, who ran for governor in 2010, lamented that he and other potential Black Democratic candidates for high office rarely get support from the Democratic establishments in their states, who cast them as “unelectable.”54 He added when leading white Democrats are approached about supporting Blacks for statewide office, they will “give you 50 reasons” why such candidacies are virtually impossible.”55 In a recent interview with Wayne Sowell, the 2004 Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Alabama, Sowell admitted that the support he received from the Democratic Party can be aptly described as “piss poor.”56 “Even after I claimed the nomination there were people within the party who tried to discourage me from running for the senate . . . in other words they wanted me to accept offers for other positions, they wanted to buy me out said Sowell.”57 Theo Mitchell, a longtime assemblyman and state senator, as well as the Democratic nominee for the 1990 South Carolina’s governor’s race is equally candid. Says Mitchell: “the Democratic Party wasn’t enthusiastic about my candidacy at all . . . in fact there were key white Democrats who supported my republican opponent . . . they grinned in my face while at the same time giving campaign contributions to my republican counterpart.”58 In order to secure the support of a major party, African American candidates have to become party insiders, something Scott seems to have accomplished. Considered a mentee of Strom Thurmond’s, Scott has seemingly ingratiated himself with party regulars and is widely liked and respected within Republican circles. Despite the opinions of some scholars
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who cite the declining significance of political parties,59 for African American candidates at least, functioning within party circles is crucial if they are to get the nomination, let alone win the election. Strong party support includes such things as key endorsements from party influentials, unification of the electorate, media exposure and fundraising.60 Endorsements from key party actors can lend credibility to an African American candidates’ campaign.61 Strong party support of a Black candidate helps to make his or her candidacy more palatable to White voters. In light of Scott’s election to South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District two years ago, an area that is seventy five percent White, it is plausible that some White Republicans, who in the past, were not necessarily accustomed to voting for a Black candidate will put aside their racial predilections for the sake of the party and cast a vote for Scott for the U.S. Senate in 2014. It is also important to note that White party leaders can help shield African American candidates from negative campaign tactics. Some of the most well-known segregationists in the state of Virginia, Watkins Abbott and A.L. Philpot supported Wilder’s candidacy for governor in 1989. Equally important, whenever race was raised, both men went to some lengths to deflect attention away from it, preferring instead to draw people’s attention to the issues and the candidate whom they believed was best equipped to move Virginia forward. The support of these one-time hard-liners stood Wilder in good stead, especially, when he ventured into parts of Virginia that had a reputation for being inhospitable to Blacks.62 Parties also perform such essential functions as fund-raising and voter registration.63 Thus, the Black candidate who operates within the party apparatus is privy to these indispensable resources. The fundraising aspect is especially important, given that, historically, Black high profile statewide campaigns have been less-well financed than White high profile statewide campaigns. The 2006 and 2010 Senate races in Tennessee and Florida are two such examples. Former Congressman Harold Ford raised an impressive $13 million compared to his Republican opponent, Bob Corker, who raised $18 million. Four years later in Florida, Congressman Kendrick Meek squared off against former Governor Charlie Christ and Marco Rubio, the eventual winner, in the process raising $8.8 million to Christ’s $13.6 million and Rubio’s $21 million. Additionally, historically, the rate of political action committee (PAC) funding received by Black candidates, typically has not match that of White candidates.64 Commonly known as the mother’s milk of politics, the amount of money raised and spent by a candidate is oftentimes
- 18 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 inextricably linked to that election’s outcome. The candidate who raises the most money often (but not always) wins.65 U.S. Senate incumbents raise, on average, $9.4 million, whereas challengers raise, on average, $1 million. As the incumbent, it would appear that Scott is well-positioned on this front, however given the history of Blacks and campaign funding it will be interesting to see how he fares in this area, especially since his Republican predecessor, Jim DeMint, raised an average of $8 million over two Senate campaigns and South Carolina’s other Republican Senator Lindsey Graham raised nearly 10 million dollars during his 2008 reelection campaign. Another point worth noting is that, over the years, a noticeable portion of Black candidates’ war chests has come from out of state. This is not to say that Black candidates for high profile statewide office have been wholly unsuccessful at cultivating donors at home, because they have not. Well-funded Black Senate hopefuls in the past several years include Harold Ford in Tennessee and Lt. Governor Michael Steele in Maryland. However, in the main, White candidates for high profile statewide office have proven more adept at raising funds within their home states than have Black high profile statewide hopefuls. Take for example, the hotly contested 2002 U.S. Senate race in Texas. Ninety two percent of funds raised by John Cornyn came from individuals within the state of Texas, whereas only 70 percent of money raised by Kirk came from within the state. Cornyn used this issue to create the impression that, if elected, Kirk would be beholden to liberal and non-Texas interests.66 The Black high profile statewide office seeker who enjoys strong party support is in a position to elicit considerable media attention. Candidates who run for the offices of governor and U.S. Senate as independents or third party candidates are often viewed as protest candidates and not taken seriously, hence reporters and their editors do not feel compelled to cover their campaigns. Media scholar Thomas Patterson says that candidates who have a demonstrable chance of winning are likely to garner the greatest amount of media coverage.67 Because minor and third party candidates rarely win and are normally perceived as long shots, media personnel see little reason to follow their campaigns.68 As mentioned earlier, Scott’s appointment to the U.S. Senate had reporters across the South, and indeed the country, scurrying to cover this historic moment; there is no reason to believe that such interest on the part of the media will wane as his 2014 campaign revs up. Party support can also help unify the electorate. Although the number of people who identify themselves as Democrats and Republicans has
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purportedly waned over the years,69 one could argue that party ID remains an important voting cue, which in turn helps offset the potential adverse impact of a Black candidate’s race. This does not mean that White voter defection or abstention will not occur, but rather that strong party identification will help minimize this phenomenon. Deracialized Campaign Strategy Another way in which a Black candidate can perhaps minimize the divisive impact of race is to employ a deracialized campaign strategy. McCormick and Jones’ concept of a deracialized strategy entails style, issues, and mobilization tactics.70 The purpose of the strategy is to, again, mitigate against the impact that race has often had in biracial elections by avoiding references to ethnic or racially construed matters, while at the same time emphasizing those issues that appeal to a wide community. A Black candidate’s platform, then, plays an important role in cultivating the biracial or multiethnic coalition needed to succeed in high profile statewide contests.71 As African Americans do not make up a majority in any state, they alone cannot vote into office a Black high profile statewide candidate. Resultantly, Black candidates are heavily dependent upon White support. Historically, Black office seekers, generally, have identified with the working class and poor, particularly the Black working class and poor, espousing Black empowerment as a campaign theme. Such a strategy is impractical for a run at a high profile statewide office as it will undoubtedly mobilize the Black community, while at the same time alienate White voters. On the other hand, ignoring Black voters would be ill-advised, since doing so could undercut Black voter enthusiasm. An examination of the candidacies of successful Black high profile statewide office seekers reveals that a Black candidate’s success in attracting support from the White electorate seems to require projecting a conciliatory and accommodating image. Black candidates who appear surly, fiery or defensive do not do particularly well with White audiences. Therefore, it is crucial that Black candidates for high profile statewide office affect a statesman like posture and disposition, which Scott has done. Even before Scott was appointed to the U.S. Senate he took special care to downplay the significance of race where his candidacy was concerned. For example, when much was made of his 2010 election to the U.S. Congress, Scott proclaimed to a group of cheering supporters “the relevance of me being Black is really, fortunately irrelevant . . . the voters voted for a guy who they felt represented their values and their issues and their philosophy.”72
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A candidate’s image also carries over to the people with whom he or she associates. Simply put, Black candidates for High profile statewide office must pass the racial friendship litmus test. Some Whites need to know that the Black candidate, for whom they are considering voting, does not have among his or her coterie of friends someone who espouses Black Nationalism or castigates Whites for Black people’s condition. For this reason, a Black candidate for high-profile statewide office cannot solicit the assistance of racially polarizing figures such as the Reverends Jesse Jackson, Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton or the Nation of Islam’s Minister Louis Farrakhan; men who are popular within many African American circles, not as much among White communities. Shortly after his election to the U.S. Congress, Scott was extended an invitation to join the Congressional Black Caucus, but declined. “While I recognize the efforts of the CBC and appreciate their invitation for me to caucus with them, I will not be joining them at this time . . . my campaign was never about race,”73 Scott said. Last, African American candidates need to emphasize those issues that appeal to a broad community such as abortion, the economy, war, education, healthcare, taxes, and the environment. Issues such as welfare and Affirmative Action are racially charged issues that many Whites find off-putting. Equally as important, Black candidates cannot be viewed as weak on crime, an issue deeply intertwined with racial sentiment.74 For example, Black candidates who oppose capital punishment while running against White candidates in predominantly White jurisdictions oftentimes do poorly with White voters. Scott has shown the ability to appeal to White voters. His campaign for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District is evidence of that. In a state where the Confederate flag still remains atop the statehouse, Scott convinced a district-two thirds of which is White, that he, not the son of Strom Thurmond, could best represent its interests in Washington. As mentioned earlier, Scott is more in tune with the conservative White voters than perhaps any Black high profile statewide office seeker in recent years. While he is conservative, he is not ultra or strangely conservative in the way that Alan Keyes is. In other words, people do not find him to be so conservative that his sanity comes into question in the way that Keyes’ does. Scott supports right to work laws, opposes same-sex marriage, and supports immigration reform. Having said that, while Scott has demonstrated an ability to campaign to White voters he has yet to do it across an entire state. Numerous Black politicians have, in the past, elicited strong White support in cities and districts, but were unable to do so across an entire state when a high profile statewide office was at stake.
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Another challenge that awaits Scott is convincing Black Democrats and independents who view Black Republican candidates with suspicion that being a Black Republican is not synonymous with being a “sell-out.” Extensive study of Black high profile statewide campaigns as well as conversations with former Black politicians reveal that there is no better venue in which to broach this issue than in the Black church, the institutional core of the Black community.75 The Black church is a space where a Black candidate can galvanize Black voters while at the same time affording him or her low visibility. The Black church has historically served as a place where mobilization strategies are crafted away from the general public. During Wilder’s run for governor in 1989, a fair amount of his time was spent in Black churches throughout the state, often away from the White owned media. Wilder understood that some Black voters would look askance at his attempts to ingratiate himself with White voters, hence he spent considerable time campaigning in Black churches where he could deliver a message that he knew would resonate with Black voters, while at the same time taking time to explain why he had to make certain public statements as well as take certain public stances on various issues. In those meetings Wilder often exclaimed, “We’ve come too far to turn back now,”76 knowing full-well that those in attendance would understand the gravity of his words. This tactic helped assuage any concerns that may have surfaced during his campaign. Said one Wilder organizer, “His message to us was I’m not taking your vote for granted; I need your vote . . .” That same organizer demonstrated her understanding of the racial dynamic where Black candidates are concerned admitting, “Doug cannot be depicted as a Black candidate running for the governor’s office . . . this would be political suicide.”77 No African American Republican high profile statewide candidate (save Edward Brooke in 1966) has ever made significant inroads into the Black electorate. Again, Blacks are skeptical of other Blacks who align themselves with the Republican Party. Many Black voters are more likely to cast their support for the white Democrat than the Black Republican. For example, during the 2006 election cycle, Steele garnered less than thirty percent of the Black vote in Maryland; Blackwell fared less well at twenty percent and Lynn Swann, a candidate for governor, collected a mere thirteen percent of the Black vote in Pennsylvania. Scott will be faced with the daunting task of expanding his primary support base; in this case, the White electorate, while at the same time connecting with Black voters in a way that no Black Republican high profile statewide office seeker has done in nearly
- 22 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 fifty years. In 1966, Brooke was quick to note before Black audiences “I am not your average Republican.”78 Brooke pitched himself as a moderate. He also made clear that he would represent people of all race and stations, as he had done as attorney general. During the campaign he rebuked both Black radical extremists and White right-wing extremists: the result; Brooke won more than 60 percent of the total vote, beating a longtime politician and former Massachusetts governor.79 One could argue that Scott can win without Black support as South Carolina’s Republican high profile statewide winners have historically been ushered into office on a wave of White support, with very little Black support. While this is true, all of those Republican candidates had a decided advantage over Scott—they were White. Although Scott appears well positioned for 2014, there will undoubtedly be some White voters (Republicans included), who, in spite of Scott’s qualification and his ability to connect with White voters will withhold their support based on race. In her article “How Black Candidates Affect Voter Turnout” Ebonya Washington found that both white Democrats and Republicans are less likely to vote for their parties’ candidate when he/she is Black.80 In light of that, Scott can ill-afford to surrender the Black vote to his Democratic challenger. Instead, Scott may do well to compensate for the loss of White support by appealing to those Black voters who may understand and appreciate the potential historic significance of the looming 2014 election.
Conclusion Although Scott’s candidacy is unique the November 2014 special election will confirm and/or reject several long standing hypotheses regarding: a) the purported emerging new South, b) Black voters’ unwillingness to vote for Black Republicans, c) White voters’ unwillingness to vote for Black high profile statewide candidates generally, d) Black congress members’ inability to matriculate to the U.S. Senate, and e) the presence of white voter hostility toward a Black incumbent. For years, many African American students of politics and laypersons alike have long believed that Black candidates for high profile statewide office have to be “twice as good” as their White counterparts in order to muster a serious challenge, let alone win the office. Indeed in some quarters within the Black community, there is the belief that the conditions have to be just right in order for a Black to win high profile statewide office or as one former Black
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elected official (who wishes to remain nameless) said, “the stars have to align just right . . . everything has to fall into place.” Given the dynamics that have played out in those few contests where Blacks have been elected governor or to the United States Senate, such a viewpoint is difficult to dispute. Nearly twenty years elapsed before a second African American was elected governor and more than twenty five years passed before the U.S. Senate sat its second Black popularly elected senator in 1992. Obama followed twelve years later. Given the circumstances under which Obama was elected into office one could argue that his path to the U.S. Senate was a case of “catching lightning in a bottle.” In light of this trajectory, it does not appear that Blacks will be ushered into high profile statewide offices in the ensuing years in a manner that reflects their share of the U.S. population. If the numbers of officeholders was in line with Black’s share of the population—12.2 percent—there would be at least 12 Black senators and six Black governors. By contrast, the percentage of Blacks in the House of Representatives is nearly consistent with their share of the population—43 members, or 10 percent. Wilder’s election as governor of Virginia (considered the template by many students of Black politics) was historic and momentous, because he was elected (albeit by a mere 7,000 votes) by the voters in a state once considered the capital of the Confederacy. Brooke’s election to the Senate was huge, as he was elected to the U.S. Senate in a heavily Democratic state where the Black population comprised just three percent of the populace. The elections of Booker, Braun and Patrick were noteworthy, because they were again elected by the voters. Indeed, Braun bested the incumbent on her way to victory. Scott, on the other hand was appointed to the United States Senate, and although it appears he is well positioned to become only the fourth African American elected to the U.S. Senate and just the second Black Republican, until he actually campaigns for the office to which he was appointed and is elected by the voters of the Palmetto state, the gravity of his appointment and subsequent candidacy will not be fully known until November 4, 2014.81
Notes: 1. High profile statewide office is a term that the author coined twenty years ago to describe the offices of governor and U.S. Senate. 2. As the lieutenant governor of New York, Paterson was elevated to the governor’s office due to the resignation of Governor Eliot Spitzer. Paterson served from 2008 to 2010, but did not seek election in 2010 citing his low job approval rating, which Paterson attributed to race.
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3. The words African American and Black are used interchangeably throughout according to sound and context as well as to avoid repetition. 4. Ron Burris, who served from 2008 to 2010, was appointed by governor Rod Blagojevich to serve out the remaining two years of Barack Obama’s term. Burris accepted his appointment under a cloud of controversy that swirled around the governor who had reportedly sought to sell the office to the highest bidder. Convicted of corruption, the governor is currently in prison. 5. Kelefa Sanneh, “Tim Scott and the Case of the Black Republican,” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/tim-scott- and-the-case-of-the . . . accessed August 14, 2013. 6. When Mo Cowans was appointed he made it clear that he had no interest in retaining the seat and would not run in the special election. For reasons that are unclear his appointment was nevertheless treated with a significant amount of hoopla. 7. Using Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe to access U.S. newspapers one finds that many of the country’s major newspapers covered the story. 8. This writer defines a serious challenge by a Black candidate as a Black candidate whom the voters (via public opinion polls) and media (via the nature of the coverage) believe has a viable chance of winning the office sought and/or a Black candidate who advances to the general election. There have been, however, several cases over the past twenty five years where a Black candidate ran among several white candidates and was the beneficiary of a divided white vote, thus advancing to the general election. Other times a sacrificial lamb of a Black candidate ran in the general election only because the Party felt obliged to run someone for the office rather than suffer the humiliation of conceding the election. Alvin Greene of South Carolina is an example of the former. Greene stunned the political world when he won the Democratic primary by besting several other candidates who split the white vote in the 2010 race for the United States Senate. Few believed that Greene would emerge victorious in the general election. He did not disappoint, losing by a margin of 28 percent to 63 percent to Jim DeMint. Many years earlier, few voters believed that Marvin Dawkins of Virginia who won the Republican primary would beat Charles Robb, a popular Democrat for the United States Senate in 1988. The same is true of Alan Keyes’ bid for the United States Senate in Illinois in 2004. Years earlier, neither Maryland voters nor the Maryland or Washington, DC media believed that Alan Keyes could unseat Barbara Mikulski and John Sarbanes for the United States Senate in Maryland in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Keyes later lamented this very
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fact in a quasi- scholarly article one year after his 1988 senate loss. Specifically, Keyes argued that the media did not believe that he could win and it manifested in its coverage of his campaign. This coverage, in turn, impacted the voters’ perception of him. For more details see Alan Keyes, “My Race for the Senate,” Policy Review 48 (1989): 2-8. 9. Judson L. Jeffries and Matt Wavro, “Can African Americans Win High Profile Statewide Offices in the South? A Study in Southern Inhospitality,” Journal of African American Studies 15 (2011): 415-432. 10. Charles S. Bullock, “Racial Crossover Voting and the Election of Black Officials,”Journal of Politics 46 (1984): 238-257. 11. Virginia State Board of Election. 1989. Official Election Results of Virginia Gubernatorial Election, 10. Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia. 12. Critics might wonder if Beyer’s and Wilder’s position on key issues may have accounted for the vote disparity between the two men. The answer is no. Beyer stood on the same politically advantageous side of the key issues as Wilder (e.g. abortion rights, affirmative action, education, the environment, the economy, taxes, and crime). 13. Virginia State Board of Elections. 1989. Official Election Results of Virginia Gubernatorial Election, 10. Richmond: Commonwealth of Virginia. Mary Sue Terry’s outpouring of support may, in part, be explained because of her popularity as the incumbent attorney general. However, Beyer’s strong showing is more difficult to explain. In fact, when Senator Chuck Robb was asked by a reporter to assess the Democrats chances of a clean sweep, that is winning the offices of governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general Robb had momentarily forgotten Beyer’s name. Outgoing Governor Gerald Baliles who was standing nearby came to the rescue, thereby saving the senator from any further embarrassment. 14. A similar pattern unfolded in 2010 as both the state auditor and the secretary of the commonwealth outpolled Patrick, again by three to four hundred thousand votes. 15. Abigail Thernstrom,Voting Rights—and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2009); Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). 16. John Becker and Eugene Heaton, “The Election of Senator Edward W. Brooke,” Public Opinion Quarterly 31 (1967/68): 346-358. 17. Raphael Sonenshein, “Can Blacks Win Statewide Elections?”, Political Science Quarterly 105 (1990): 219-241.
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18. L. Douglas Wilder, Interview by Judson L. Jeffries, July 1995. 19. Edward W. Brooke, Interview by Judson L. Jeffries, July 1995. 20. Linda F. Williams, “White/Black perceptions of the electability of Black political candidates,” National Political Science Review 2 (1990): 45-64. 21. Ruth Ann Strickland and Marcia L. Whicker, “Comparing the Wilder and Gantt campaigns: A model for Black statewide success in statewide elections,” Political Science & Politics 25 (1992): 204-212. 22. Edward W. Brooke, Interview by Judson L. Jeffries, July 1995. 23. Jennifer L. Hochschild and Vesla Weaver, “The Skin Color Paradox and the American Racial Order,” Social Forces 86 (2007): 643-670. 24. Marilyn Davis and Alex Willingham, “Andrew Young and the Georgia State Elections of 1990”, in Georgia Persons, ed., Dilemmas of Black Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 147-175; Zaphon Wilson, “Gantt Versus Helms: Deracialization Confronts Southern Traditionalism,” in Georgia Persons, ed., Dilemmas of Black Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 176-193; Charles E. Jones and Michael Clemons, “A Model of Racial Crossover Voting: An Assessment of the Wilder Victory,” in Georgia Persons, ed., Dilemmas of Black Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 128-146. 25. The concept of deracialization was first promulgated in a 1977 article in First World by Charles V. Hamilton titled “Deracialization: Examination of a Political Strategy”, but Jones and Clemons are credited with advancing the paradigm. 26. L. Douglas Wilder, Interview by Judson L Jeffries, July 1995. 27. Huey L. Perry, ed., Race, Politics and Governance in the United States (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). 28. Charles L. Prysby, “The 1990 U.S. Senate Election in North Carolina,” in Huey L. Perry, ed., Race, Politics and Governance in the United States (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 29-46; Roger K. Oden, “The Election of Carol Moseley-Braun,” in Huey L. Perry, ed.,Race, Politics and Governance in the United States (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 47-64; Carol A. Pierannunzi and John D. Hutcheson, “The Rise and Fall of Deracialization: Andre Young as Mayor and Gubernatorial Candidate,” in Huey L. Perry, ed., Race, Politics and Governance in the United States (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 96-106. 29. Alvin J. Schexnider, “Analyzing the Wilder Administration through the Construct of Deracialization Politics,” in Huey L. Perry, ed., Race, Politics and Governance in the United States (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 15-28.
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30. Wendy Smooth, “Three Wrongs and Two Far Right: The Wrong Candidate, the Wrong Year and the Wrong State: J. Kenneth Blackwell for Governor,” National Political Science Review 12 (2009): 45-62. 31. Andra Gillespie, ed., Whose Black Politics? Cases in Post-Racial Black Leadership (New York: Routledge, 2010). 32. Angela Lewis, “Between Generations: Deval Patrick’s Election as Massachusetts’ First Black Governor,” in Andra Gillespie, ed., Whose Black Politics? Cases in Post-Racial Black Leadership (New York: Routledge, 2010), 177-194; Lorrie Frasure, “The Burden of Jekyll and Hyde: Barack Obama, Racial Identity, and Black Political Behavior,” in Andra Gillespie, ed., Whose Black Politics? Cases in Post-Racial Black Leadership (New York: Routledge, 2010), 133-154; Sekou Franklin, “Situational Deracialization, Harold Ford, and the 2006 Senate Race in Tennessee,” in Andra Gillespie, ed., Whose Black Politics? Cases in Post-Racial Black Leadership (New York: Routledge, 2010), 214-240; Tyson D. King-Meadows, “The “Steele Problem” and the New Republican Battle for Black Votes: Legacy, Loyalty, and Lexicon in Maryland’s 2006 Senate Contest,” in Andra Gillespie, ed., Whose Black Politics? Cases in Post-Racial Black Leadership (New York: Routledge, 2010), 241-270. 33. Sean Sullivan, “Who is Tim Scott?” The Washington Post 17 December 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/ wp/2012/12/17/who-is-tim-scott/ 34. Ibid. 35. John Steele Gordon, “Delicious Irony,” Commentary Magazine (December 2012). http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/12/17/ delicious-irony/ 36. John Avlon, “Why Tim Scott Should Replace Jim DeMint,” The Daily Beast, 8 December 2012: http://www.thedailybeast.com/ articles/2012?12/08/why-tim-scott-should-replace-jim-demi 37. Ibid. 38. Kelefa Sanneh, “Tim Scott and the Case of the Black Republican,” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/tim-scott- and-the-case-of-the- . . accessed August 14, 2013. 39. Michael B. Preston, “Black Elected Officials and Public Policy: Symbolic or Substantive Representation?” Policy Studies Journal 7 (1978): 197-200. 40. Judson L. Jeffries,Virginia’s Native Son: The Election and Administration of Governor L. Douglas Wilder (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2000), 95. 41. Ibid.
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42. Ibid. 43. David E. Broockman, “Black Politicians Are More Intrinsically Motivated to Advance Blacks’ Interests: A Field Experiment Manipulating Political Incentives,” American Journal of Political Science 57 (July 2013): 521-536. 44. Virginia State Archives, Office of the Governor, Letters and Correspondence. L. Douglas Wilder, 1990-1994. (CSR Papers); Virginia State Archives, Office of the Governor, Letters and Correspondence. Gerald Baliles, 1986-1990. (CSR Papers); Virginia State Archives, Office of the Governor, Letters and Correspondence. Charles Robb, 1982-1986. (CSR) Papers). 45. Barry C. Burden, “United States Senators as Presidential Candidates,” Political Science Quarterly 117 (Spring 2002): 81-102. From 2002 to 2012 the calculations were done by the author. 46. Judson L. Jeffries,Virginia’s Native Son: The Election and Administration of Governor L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2000), 42. 47. It needs to be made clear that Blacks who served in the U.S. Senate during Reconstruction were not ushered into office by the voters, as all U.S. Senators, at that time, were chosen by members of the state legislature, not the voters. U.S. Senators were not voted into office until 1913. 48. Thomas F. Pettigrew & Denise Alston,Tom Bradley’s Campaigns for governor: The dilemma of race and political strategies. Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political Studies. 49. Margaret Edds, Free at Last: What Really Happened When Civil Rights Came to Southern Politics (Bethesda, Md.: Adler & Adler, 1987). 50. Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black, Whites, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992). 51. Haslimah Abdullah, “Obama aside, blacks struggle to win major offices.” The grio msnbc http://thegrio.com/2012/04/10/obama-aside- blacks-struggle-to-win-major-offices/ accessed August 7, 2013. 52. Gbemende Johnson, Bruce I. Oppenheimer and Jennifer L. Selin, “The House as a Stepping Stone to the Senate: Why do so few African Americans House Members Run?”, American Journal of Political Science 56, (2012): 387-399. 53. Margaret Edds, Claiming the Dream: The Victorious Campaign of Douglas Wilder of Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC.: Algonquin, 1990). 54. Halimah Abdullah, Obama aside, “Blacks struggle to win major offices” the grio msnbc http://thegrio.com/2012/04/10/obama-aside-blaks-
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struggle-to-win-major-offices/ accessed August 7, 2013. 55. Ibid. 56. Wayne Sowell, Telephone Conversation with Judson L. Jeffries, November 13, 2013. 57. Ibid. 58. Theo Mitchell, Telephone Conversation with Judson L. Jeffries, November 25, 2013. 59. Martin P. Wattenberg, The Declining Significance of American Parties 1952-1996 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 60. John C. Green and Daniel J. Coffey,The State of the Parties: The Changing Role of Contemporary American Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). 61. Charles E. Jones & Michael L. Clemons, “A Model of Racial Crossover Voting: An Assessment of the Wilder victory,” in Georgia Persons, ed., Dilemmas of Black Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 128-147; Joe McCormick & Charles E. Jones, “The conceptualization of deracialization: Thinking through the dilemma,” in Georgia Persons, ed., Dilemmas of Black Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 66-85. 62. Margaret Edds, “Ex-Segregationist among those rallying, improbably for Wilder,” The Virginian Pilot & Ledger Star, 1 September 1989, A1. 63. Russell Dalton, Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2008). 64. Allen Wilhite and John Theilman, “Women, Blacks and PAC Discrimination,” Social Science Quarterly 67 (1986): 283-298. 65. Rodney A. Smith, Money, Power & Elections: How Campaign Finance Reform Subverts American Democracy (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). Wilder’s 1989 victory is one of few examples where a Black candidate for high profile statewide office raised fewer dollars than his opponent, but still won the race. Wilder raised $6.8 million compared to Marshall Coleman who raised nearly a third more, $9.27 million. 66. A more recent example of this occurred during the 2006 U.S. Senate contest in Maryland where twenty four percent of Ben Cardin’s money came from outside Maryland, Virginia and DC whereas 36.6 percent of Steele’s funds came from places outside the tri-state area. 67. Thomas Patterson, “The Press and Candidates’ Images,” International Journal of Public Opinion Research 1 (1989): 123-135; Thomas
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Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993). 68. Thomas Patterson,Out of Order (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993). 69. Morris Fiorina, “Parties and Partisanship: A 40-year retrospective,” Political Behavior 24 (2002): 93-115; Martin Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952-1996 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 70. Joseph McCormick and Charles E. Jones, “The conceptualization of deracialization: Thinking through the dilemma, in Georgia Persons, ed., Dilemmas of Black Politics (New York: Longman, 1993), 66-85. 71. Kristofer A. Frederick and Judson L. Jeffries, “A Study in African American Candidates for High Profile Statewide Office,”Journal of Black Studies 39 (May 2009): 689-718. 72. Robert Behre, “Scott easily defeats Thurmond for GOP nod,” The Post and Courier, 23 March 2012. http://www.postandcourier.com/ article/20100623/PC1602/306239934 73. Sean Sullivan, “Who is Tim Scott?”, Washington Post 17 December 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/ wp2012/12/17/who-is-tim-scott 74. Thomas F. Pettigrew & Denise Alston,Tom Bradley’s Campaigns for governor: The dilemma of race and political strategies.Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political Studies. 75. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement(New York: Free Press, 1984). 76. R. H. Melton, “Wilder Broaches the Subject of Race,” The Washington Post, 4 October 1989, C1. 77. Ibid. 78. Edward W. Brooke, Interview by Judson L. Jeffries, March 2007. 79. Edward W. Brooke, Bridging the Divide: My Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 80. Ebonya Washington, “How Black Candidates Affect Voter Turnout,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 212 (2006): 973-998. 81. This senate seat was not scheduled for an election until November 8, 2016, but due to the appointment of Scott to replace Jim DeMint, who stepped down during his tenure, an election will be held on November 4, 2014 for the remaining two-years of the seat’s period.
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Alexander Cumming - King or Pawn? An Englishman on the Colonial Chessboard of the Eighteenth-century American Southeast Ian D. Chambers In 1730 Sir Alexander Cumming a Scottish Baronet, following a dream of his wife, visited the Cherokee Nation in South Carolina. Leaving Charles Town on March 13, 1730, Cumming spent approximately four weeks traveling throughout Cherokee space before returning to Britain and claiming to have been crowned “King” of the Cherokee during a ceremony at Nequasee Town House. Cumming was accompanied on his return by seven Cherokee “chiefs” who he then presented to the King George II. In his memorials to the Crown and members of the Board of Trade, Cumming repeatedly stressed Cherokee submission to British domination. Revisiting Cumming’s journal and exploring additional contemporary documents suggests that Cumming, rather than ascending to the office of “King” and facilitating British control and domination of the Cherokee, was actually a pawn in Cherokee relations with the British. His self-proclaimed coronation was in reality a political adoption by the Cherokee that, by using the correct ceremonies, positioned the British in an acceptable position to provide communication, trade, and interaction between the two nations. The methodological tool utilized to reevaluate this moment of colonial interaction is spatial habitus. That is, the linkage of a person’s identification with a specific location, or locations, as a means of verifying identity and informing the act of contact. Issues of fixidity and control underpinned the spatial habitus of the British colonist. Whereas the Cherokee, although recognizing discrete spatial locations, combined this understanding with an understanding of the possibility of linkage between spaces—a linkage structured and ritualized that, when performed correctly, allowed for movement between those spaces. Applying this method to the narrative of Cumming’s visit reveals multiple spaces showing not only the spatial understanding of the colonist but of the Cherokee and the spatial contestation that followed. The story begins in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, where on December 18, 1691, Alexander Cummings, our protagonist, was born.1
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Thirty-eight years later, in 1729, Cumming “was induced, by a dream of Lady Cumming’s, to undertake a voyage to America, for the purpose of visiting the Cherokee nations,”2 and from these mysterious beginnings came one of the strangest moments of British-Cherokee interaction that ended with seven Cherokees in the court of King George. While the full manuscript of Cumming’s journal is unfortunately lost, we still have access to it in its published form in The Daily Journal, a London newspaper of the era.3 The report appeared in two sections. The first, published in September 1730, provided an overview, detailing in broad strokes the daring deeds of Cumming leading up to his arrival in London with seven Cherokees, claiming to be the chosen leader of the Cherokee nation. The second report, published the following month, gives a more detailed day-by-day account of his travels.4 In a period when the struggle for control of what Herbert Eugene Bolton has termed the “Debatable land” of the southeast, any statement of British spatial control was viewed, by both the British general public and political elite, not only as a geographical but also, also as a political success.5 Spain and England contested ownership of the region ever since England established a toehold with the founding of James Town in 1607. Over time European contestation for the region intensified particularly after the arrival of the French at Fort Maurepas, near modern day Biloxi in 1699. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the broader southeast had been the scene of frequent diplomatic and on occasion military conflict. The publication of Cumming’s journal and the widely publicized presence of the Cherokee who accompanied him reassured the British public of their country’s position strength in the region and also allowed the British government to solidify its relationship with the Cherokee. The combination of public and political consciousness assured that, in the eighteenth century, the trip was represented a moment of unqualified success for British colonial ambitions. Cumming’s position and role has been interpreted differently over time. During the nineteenth century, historians ascribed Cumming the role of official ambassador from the British crown; something Cumming himself had denied in his journal.6 More recently, Cumming has been viewed as nothing more than an oddity, “a one-man firework display wildly emitting sparks and colored lights and blazing rockets.”7 I plan to re-introduce Cumming as an important part of early eighteenth century Cherokee-British interaction and describe a moment when the British imagination of the southeastern Native American population prompted an attempt at political and spatial domination. Simultaneously the Cherokee viewed the moment through
- 34 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 their own interpretation of the British. Therefore it becomes a moment when differing interpretations of colonial interaction are brought into sharp relief. Arriving in Charles Town in December 1729 and using his title as collateral, Cumming convinced the colonists that he possessed considerable wealth and proposed to “settle in Carolina, and do wonderful Things for the Good of the Country.”8 To solidify his position, and declare his intention to assist the people of the colony, he began to write promissory notes which “by his punctual Payment of them upon Sight, in a little Time they acquired a Credit and Currency equal with Money.” With this secure footing, Cumming began to develop his financial dealings within the colony, buying “several large Plantations.” In addition, he opened a loan office issuing more notes bearing a ten-percent interest payment. Using the money gained from these several ventures, he was able to buy an ‘abundance of Gold and Silver and a great Deal of Country Produce which he shipt away continually.” With his financial and social position secured, Cumming drew on the help of several leading traders and merchants to furnish his journey among the Cherokee.9 On the afternoon of March 13, 1730, at “about five,” Cumming left the home of Mr. James Kinlock at New Gilmerton, South Carolina, in the company of Indian trader George Chicken and Surveyor George Hunter and headed into Cherokee country. Three days later, Cumming and his companions, who now included William Cooper, “a bold Man, and skilled in the Cherokee Language,” traveled to an underground cave near the home of a Mr. Coxe. Here, we get an early indication of Cumming’s desire to leave his mark in South Carolina, and in this case it was literal.10 Cumming informs us that “Mr. Chicken, and Mr. Coxe, made several marks to show that they had been there.” Cumming wasn’t content to just enter his name and engraved King George II of Great Britain, wrote by S.A.C., branding the cave, and symbolically the land, for Britain.11 By leaving this mark, Cumming was attempting to ensure that the space in which he stood became known not only physically for Britain, but also conceived of as part of British jurisdictional and intellectual space. This desire to identify, fix and record is seen repeatedly throughout his journey. Whenever Cumming met an “Indian” he would “take his name down in his book saying that he had made a friend of him.” By this act Cumming has added each individual to his personal knowledge, recording and thereby fixing them under British knowledge and control. Over the next few days, Cumming continued his journey along the Cherokee Path, the main trading trail into Cherokee Country.12 When he arrived at the Cherokee town of Keowee on March 23, 1730, he revealed the true purpose of his journey to both the Cherokee and his traveling
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companions. Over dinner in the house of one of the Town’s traders, Cumming was informed that there recently had been “Messengers from the lower Creeks, with the Cherokees, desiring them to come over to the French Interests.”13 Cumming suggests in his journal that this warning highlighted the danger both he and British interests were under thereby emphasizing, for his reading audience, the courage he showed in his journey. However, I would like to argue instead that this warning provided the catalyst that forced Cumming’s next action. As a self-conceived ambassador, acting, in his own mind, on behalf of Britain to visit, define, mark, and thereby control the Cherokee nation. Cumming acted on the threat of French incursion into the region as is demonstrated by his response to the news in the events that unfurled in the Keowee Town House that evening.14 The Town House was full with a reported 300 hundred Cherokees in attendance as well as nine British traders. Cumming waited patiently while the town’s leaders spoke and then gave his speech.15 Cumming began by informing the Cherokee who he was and that he had come as an individual citizen and proposed a toast to the King during which he hoped, if not demanded, that all others would pledge their loyalty and allegiance to King George. To take such an aggressive attitude within this situation shocked the traders who, with Cumming’s encouragement, fell to their knees, he then turned to the Cherokee, revealed the four firearms and the cutlass he had under his cloak, demanded that the “head Warriors… acknowledge his Majesty King George’s Sovereignty over them on their knee.” Joseph Cooper, a trader who was the evening’s interpreter also, declared:
If he had known before hand what Sir Alexander would have order’d him to have said, he would not have ventured in the Town-House to have been Interpreter, nor would the Indian Traders have ventured to have been Spectators, believing none of them could have gone out of the Town-House without being murdered, considering how jealous that People had always been of their Liberties.16
Cumming and his contemporaries leave us no explanation of the Cherokee reaction to this alarming episode, although as Cumming and the rest of the party were alive to tell of the events we must assume that some form of accommodation was met. For Cumming, situated within the British spatial and political understanding, the meeting represented the first step in the conquest of the Cherokee nation for the British crown. In Cumming’s mind, the Town House
- 36 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 is no longer a location for Cherokee people to discuss and debate their town’s affairs and, through clan affiliation, the broader Cherokee nation; the space now symbolized a site of established British political authority and control. Cumming viewed the Town population as British subjects and informed them that if they failed to submit to the king “they would become no people,” for any population beyond British space had no fixidity, and therefore, no existence. Cumming’s intent to make the Cherokee British subjects, to mark, define, and control the people and land is seen by his response to trader Ludovick Grant. When asked what he had planned to do if the Cherokees had refused to submit; Cumming
answered with a Wild look, that . . . if any of the Indians had refused the King’s health to have taken a brand out of the fire that Burns in the middle of the room and to have set fire to the house. That he would have guarded the door himself and put to death every one that endeavored to make their Escape that they might have all been consumed to ashes.17
This statement, which worried the traders who heard it, indicates that, for Cumming, there were only two positions available to the Cherokee: to accept their position as subservient members in British space or death. To affirm his position and his claim of dominance over the Cherokee, Cumming demanded a second meeting eleven days later, on April 3, 1730, at the Cherokee Town of Nequassee. Cumming informed the members of the Keowee community that he expected that “one of their head Men should bring full Power from the lower Settlements, another full Powers from the upper Settlements, and the third full Powers from the middle settlements.”18 In demanding individuals to represent the physical regions of the whole nation, Cumming planned to repeat his conquest of the single village on a national scale. For those Cherokee in the Keowee Town House on March 23, 1730, operating in a different political understanding, there is an alternative interpretation of the events. James Adair, a contemporary of Cumming, provides us with a clue as to the Cherokee understanding. Writing of Cherokee government Adair notes that:
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They can only persuade or dissuade the people, by their force of good-nature and clear reasoning, or colouring things, so as to suit their prevailing passions. It is reputed merit alone, that gives them any titles of distinction above the meanest of the people.19
What Adair saw as a lack of authority within the administration of the Cherokee was actually recognition that each person’s voice and opinion could, and would, be heard in debate. Their belief in an egalitarian approach to politics did not mean, however, that every point contained equal value. As the quotation suggests, certain people could gain a greater degree of influence through their action or “merit.” This opens up the possibility for someone with a proven history of success in warfare or negotiation to rise into a position of heightened influence, what Adair referred to as, a title of distinction. Adair’s quotation also suggests that strength of argument and oratorical skills played a large part in any debate. It is therefore possible that an individual could through force of personality and argument influence the policy of the Town. Accepting that all people could be heard and that a powerful debater could gain influence it is therefore possible that this was the route that allowed Cumming to, apparently, dominate the community of Keowee. Cumming’s behavior in Charles Town prior to his journey into Cherokee space indicates that Cumming had self-confidence and skills of persuasion, and his willingness to make such a dramatic display of force in the Keowee Town House suggests that he possessed considerable courage and frequently assumed great authority. Both of which may have been recognized by the Cherokee as ulanigvgv; temporary personal power that can be used for good or bad.20 That Cumming possessed such power may explain how he was able to take such strong positions in the Town House. However, if we consider the incident at Keowee as an isolated and individual event, the Cherokee’s apparent submission appears puzzling, even allowing for Cumming’s oratory skills and assertive behavior. However, if placed into the broader view of a Cherokee understanding, a different image appears. Although Cumming believed his actions ensured control and dominion over the Cherokees, in actuality he was absorbed or adopted into Cherokee space. The first step in understanding this alternate view of Cumming’s involvement with the Cherokee focuses on the role of negotiation with Cherokee political life. Cherokee individuals involved in negotiations had authority, in a loose sense, to represent the position of the larger group, but no
- 38 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 authority to enter into additional negotiations or agreements without further consultation with the larger group. Cumming’s actions, therefore, can be reinterpreted through this understanding. Whereas Cumming saw his request at Keowee to summon other Cherokee leaders as an instruction to facilitate a broader control, the Cherokee recognized it as an opportunity to adjourn the negotiations and return to the larger group to discuss the next step. For the Cherokee, the Town of Keowee alone did not have the authority to commit the whole nation to a position of allegiance. The apparent Cherokee acquiescence in the Keowee Town House was in actuality a necessary step in their political structure. That is, they deferred the negotiations until a larger Cherokee group was able to convene and discuss Cumming’s proposal.21 Working in tandem with the need for larger group discussion was a second aspect of Cherokee political life, the need for harmony. At its core, the Cherokee spatial and political system recognized that discrete places needed to be combined through ceremonial means for life to continue. Within political debate, this aspect of the spatial persona played out through the pursuit of harmony. When harmony was threatened, the deferral of decision- making was a common method of maintaining harmony. When involved in negotiations the Cherokee, deflected requests for immediate resolutions instead choosing to withdraw, discuss and return. An example of the manner in which pursuit of harmony through deflection operated can be found by turning to another of Cummings’s contemporaries, Colonel George Chicken. On Tuesday January 14, 1725, at the town of Tugaloo, Chicken met with representatives from several Cherokee Towns. During the meeting, Chicken forwarded seven points for discussion, which ranged from details of recent activity among the Creek to the Cherokee relationships with the English. The fifth issue raised by Chicken, detailed below, marked the beginning of the Cherokee process of decision deferral. Chicken raised the question of a standing Cherokee army. He informed the Cherokee that:
… if you would but Consider Yourselves how Numerous you are and how little you would Miss the drawing out of each Town in the Nation a small Number of Men, you would not talk of defending your Towns but would Raise an Army of Men and Defend your Enemies before they come Nigh your Towns.22
Chicken operated from within a British understanding. He therefore assumed that the logic of a single unified national project, such as an army,
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would make sense and be acceptable to the Cherokee. For the Cherokee, however, the need for separate discrete spaces, i.e. towns, each responsible for its individual defense, was the logical answer to the challenge of an external enemy attack. In order to maintain harmony within negotiations where British and Cherokee views were clearly divergent and not easily resolved, the assembled Cherokee leaders attempted to defer a decision, assuming that Chicken would recognize and accept this tactic. Initially the Cherokee promised to “all go and consult together abt [sic] what” Chicken proposed, promising to return later with an answer. Upon further discussion, the Cherokee informed Chicken that they would take action upon his suggestion to send out scouts to look for the enemy but, with regard to the formation of a national Cherokee army, they “had concluded to send to the other Towns in order to meet them to Concur abt [sic]” the suggestion. Chicken responded by once more promoting the concept of a unified army. He informed the Cherokee that “unless they had a body of men to go out against the enemy when they were discovered that their Scouts would be of little Service to them.” The Cherokee attempted to defer a decision for a fourth time, and Chicken again pushed for the creation of an army. The Cherokee then attempted a different approach to defuse and deflect the problem. They accepted that “if the enemy comes on them before they can gett a body it would not be the Englishes fault because they have given them Notice of it.” Even with this assurance that blame would not be apportioned to the English, an important concession in a clan based society like the Cherokee where culpability was a key factor in decisions of retaliation. Despite this assurance, Chicken still refused to back off and once more pushed for a commitment to a standing army. In a final attempt to deflect the decision, driven, we must assume, by exasperation at Chicken’s continued failure to recognize the appropriate form of negotiation, the Head Warrior of Toxsoah agreed to go out and “gett what men he could to goe along with him.” This final act allowed for an acceptable solution to both parties. Chicken assumed that this was the beginning of a national army with the Head Warrior of Toxsoah as the commander, while the Cherokee saw it as the promise of one man, not of the whole group. Thus after several hours of negotiation, harmony was restored.23 The use of decision deferment was one intellectual tool available to the Cherokee during their interaction with Cumming. A second involved the Cherokee relationship to personal power. Individual power for the Cherokee was not a fixed attribute possessed inherently. Rather, it was a potential that the correct behavior could reveal
- 40 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 and incorrect actions could remove. Power was therefore flexible, and no one was able to assess instantly how much power an individual might have. Thus, according to anthropologist Raymond D. Fogelson, “overt deference and respect afforded the safest course to follow in interpersonal relations. Such behavior minimized the possibility of giving offense and, perhaps, suffering hostile repercussions.”24 Cumming’s actions, bringing weapons into the Town House and demanding subservience, put him outside the normal rules of behavior for Cherokee negotiations. Therefore, it made eminent sense for the Cherokees to defer a decision and palliate someone behaving so boldly and aggressively. Yet, these same actions suggested, as noted earlier, that Cumming possibly possessed personal power or ulanigvgv.25 An incident that occurred between Cumming’s stance in the Town House of Keowee and his later “coronation” at Nequassee suggested, from the Cherokee view, that Cumming may have possessed outstanding individual power. On March 27, as Cumming entered the Town of Tassetchee “there happen’d to be most terrible Thunder, Lightning, and Rain.”26 One European who had lived with the Cherokee for ten years in the early eighteenth century reported that Cherokee perceived thunder and lightning as bringing messages from spiritual beings. Individuals who assumed themselves to be superior to others and gave “themselves over to al sort of crulletie and abominations” would be struck down by lightning as punishment for their inappropriate behavior. However, if lightning did not strike the offender but fell “hard by Them,” then “that is a message” for others to “ammend thire lives and To obay thire seperriors.”27 A Cherokee reading of the meteorological events of the evening of March 27 when Cumming remained unscathed by the thunder and lightning suggested that Cumming possessed strong spiritual power. Cherokee caution regarding power, as detailed above, along with the earlier mentioned strategy of deferment in negotiation suggest another way to understand the events involving Cumming between March 23 and April 3, 1730. Seen from a Cherokee perspective Cumming neither controlled nor dominated the proceedings. Instead, Cherokees constructed a meaning and a place for Cumming that allowed him to be respected but not accepted. They recognized the potential Cumming held but did not ascribe him authority. Rather, the Cherokees found a course within their political understanding to defer any decision making to a later date. After leaving Tassetchee, Cumming headed to Great Tellico where he unwittingly describes an alternative set of political actions being played out. The actions taken by “Moytoy, the Head Warrior” shift Cumming’s journey from a daring act of British politics to capture the Cherokee within
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British space, to a move by a leader of a Cherokee Town to politically adopt Cumming, thereby creating a link between the two nations. In the process, Cumming moves from being a King to being a pawn of Cherokee politics. Arriving at Great Tellico on March 29, 1730, Cumming comments that he saw “a great many Enemies Scalps, brought in and put upon Poles at the Warriors doors.”28 This is his first mention of the martial prowess of the Cherokee. Two interpretations can be made of this display. The first would be to suggest that Cumming, influenced by the scalps, saw the Town and its leader as a dominant force in Cherokee society. That he later anointed Moytoy as “Emperor of the Cherokee” reinforces this view. By asserting control over the Cherokee, Cumming, created a fixed hierarchical structure within Cherokee society, which, as a member of the British aristocracy, he would both understand and feel comfortable within. The second interpretation inverts the first. With the second, one could assume that the scalps had been intentionally displayed by the Town not to assert Moytoy’s primacy in Cherokee society but to demonstrate his skill as a warrior. As a warrior, Moytoy was situated in the Cherokee space that dealt with diplomatic relations with outsiders, thereby offering himself as a suitable person to be the focus of interaction between Cumming and the broader Cherokee polity. Cumming saw an opportunity to assert British domination and control over the Cherokee, whereas the Head Warrior Moytoy saw an opportunity to create a link between the British and the Cherokee through Cumming. It appears that both parties viewed the meeting through the lens of their own political understanding and with an eye for political opportunity. During an initial meeting with Moytoy in the Great Tellico Town House, Cumming was informed that there had been discussion “among the several Towns” of the Cherokee in the previous year to make “Moytoy Emperor over the whole, but that now it must be whatever Sir Alexander pleased.”29 With this statement, Cumming expands his claim to a position of dominance among the Cherokee; if the man whom the Cherokee have already considered for leadership is prepared to submit to Cumming, then what apart from total dominance are the British to expect?30 However, when viewed through the Cherokee spatial persona the events that unfolded are given a different light. Moytoy did not claim power to place himself as Principal Chief among the Cherokee. Rather, he sought to position himself as the man who could control the potential power that Cumming possessed and by that control establish a link between the Cherokee and British.31 The following day, March 30, while still in Great Tellico, Cumming was involved in another Cherokee ceremony, writing that
- 42 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 he was “Particularly distinguished in the Town-house by Moytoy, where the Indians sung songs, danced, and stroked his Head and Body over with Eagles tails.” This event was not included in Cumming’s first published overview of his trip, included instead was the later meeting at Nequassee on April 3, thereby highlighting the perceived coronation. However, for the Cherokee, the March 30 meeting had considerable significance, for it provided the first step in linking Cumming and the Cherokee. By ensuring both that the ceremony took place in the Town House of Great Tellico and assuming a leading role, Moytoy positioned himself to act as spatial ambassador of the Cherokee. The next major incident, and for Cumming the culmination of his ascendancy to leadership of the Cherokee, was the bestowing of the crown of Tannassy during his alleged coronation. This occurred on April 3, 1730, at the Town of Nequassee, where the “Kings, Princes, Warriors, Conjurers, and Beloved Men were all met.”32 Cumming described the events in the Nequassee Town House in the following terms:
Here with great Solemity Sir Alexander was placed in a Chair, by Moytoy’s Orders, Moytoy and the Conjourers standing about him, while the warriors stroked him with 13 Eagles tails and their Singers sung from Morning to Night, and, as their Custom is on Solemn Occasions, they fasted the whole Day.33
Cumming then gave a speech in which he detailed the power of the King and demanded the Cherokee’s submission. Additionally he “ordered that the Head Warriors should answer for their Conduct of the People to Moytoy, whom he appointed their Head, by the unanimous Consent of the whole People.”34 For Cumming, the image is clear. The Cherokee became subjects of Britain and if they were not totally controlled, they were at least no longer politically outside the British political space. In order to give physical presence to the events, Cumming collected not only the signed affidavits of the British traders present, but additionally— “as Evidence of the Truth of what had happened”—brought to London seven Cherokee.35 Cumming’s actions on, and reaction and comments to, the events of April 3 indicate the manner in which a British spatial understanding, based upon fixidity and control, operated as a political act.36 Cumming looked for an opportunity to act upon the Cherokee, not to interact with them and therefore reached out from British space. Cumming used force in an attempt to dominate and control the Cherokee and as he continued his journey, he
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attempted forms of control through meeting Cherokees and recording names, further fixing them in the record of his journey. Buoyed by early success, he pushed his reach further, demanding a meeting with the leaders of the whole nation. At this later meeting at Nequassee, Cumming considers himself to have been crowned king of the Cherokee, thereby both securing his position and more importantly fixing the Cherokee nation within the knowledge of the English. One of his first acts is to dictate the structure of society and outline the political relationship between the British and the Cherokee, ordering “the head Warriors should answer for the Conduct of their People to Moytoy, whom he appointed their head . . . and he to answer to Sir Alexander.” 37 Historian Verner W. Crane correctly argues that the Cherokee ‘had no real notion of acknowledging English “sovereignty,” much less of parting with their lands to either Cumming himself or to the “Great Man on the other side of the water.” Nevertheless, it is clear that something of a political and ceremonial nature did occur on this date. The Cherokee did meet in national council and Cumming was involved in some form of ceremony in front of the assembled Cherokee. Therefore, if the events do not represent Cherokee submission to British authority, then what do they represent? I suggested earlier that the events in Keowee have a different meaning when viewed through the spatio-political behavior of the Cherokee. I now want to expand this argument further and refocus the view of Cumming’s entire journey through the spatial and political understanding of the Cherokee. Firstly, let us examine the importance and significance of the national council at which Cumming claims to have obtained sovereignty. The dramatic ceremony that Cumming viewed as a coronation may not be as dramatic or as singularly esteemed as Cumming would have us believe. In 1725, five years before Cumming’s journey, Colonel George Chicken traveled throughout the Cherokee nation.38 Chicken was not there to assert his control over the Cherokee, but rather to convey a message or “talk” from the South Carolina authorities. Like Cumming, Chicken spent only a short time in Cherokee space traveling from Town to Town before speaking to a gathering of all Towns. Chicken’s actions suggest that—in contradiction to Cumming’s claim that the meeting surrounding his coronation was such a gathering as “never was seen at any one time in that Country,”—it was not unusual for the Cherokee to gather in large numbers to hear the “talks” of British visitors. Chicken’s 1725 journey provides another inconsistency in Cumming’s claims. Chicken describes his own arrival in Keewhohee (the Town Cumming referred to as Keowee), in the following manner:
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At my Arrival here King Crow and the head men were out of the Town at their Plantations and a Messanger being sent to inform them of my Arrival, they Imediatly[sic] Repaired to the Town and soon after, they after their Ceremonial way placed me in a Great Chair in the most Publick Place in the Town and set down by me themselv’s faning me with Eagles Feathers.39
The similarity between this ceremony and that which Cumming experienced in Nequassee is obvious. Therefore, we can suggest that the ceremony Cumming experienced was not the coronation he thought, but rather an often-used method to incorporate an external individual. It represented a political adoption which allowed the Cherokees to establish a link to an external discrete space, allowing the voice of that outside space to be heard. Additionally, Cumming’s positioning of Moytoy as “Emperor” in order to verify British control over the Cherokee is also open to a Cherokee interpretation. Moytoy’s efforts can also be seen as his attempt to place himself as the gatekeeper to contact with the British. Moytoy did not declare himself sovereign over the Cherokee, although the British would increasingly view him as if he had, rather he offered himself as the person who would sponsor Cumming’s interaction and linkage with the Cherokee nation. The final point to be made with regard to the ceremony of April 3, 1730, concerns the artifact that gave Cumming’s claim of coronation its greatest legitimacy, the crown of Tannassy.40 Cumming, in the overview of his journey, mentions the crown and ceremony simultaneously tying together the ceremony and the crown. However, a closer reading of the events reveals that Cumming did not receive the crown on the day of the ceremony, but rather on the following day, thus suggesting a dissociation between event and artifact. There are other inconsistencies in the tale of the crown and how it came into Cumming’s possession. The quotation below, from Cumming’s initial overview report of the journey, details Moytoy’s and the Cherokee’s submission to Cumming and positions the crown as a symbol of that capitulation.
April 4. The Crown was brought from greatTannassie , which, with five Eagles tails and four Scalps of their Enemies, Moytoy presented to Sir Alexander, impowering him to lay the same at His Majesty’s Feet.41
For the reading audience, this is a clear assertion that the Cherokee are within the British spatial and political knowledge as a people who are known
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and importantly controlled by the British. The next quotation, taken from Cumming’s later day-by-day account, offers a subtle but significant shift in the role of the crown.
April 4. The Solemnity continued, SirAlexander made some Presents, received their Crown, Eagles tails, and Scalps of their Enemies, to be laid at his Majesty King George’s Feet.42
The crown has shifted position. It is no longer offered to Cumming as a symbol of obsequiousness, but rather as a gift given after and in return for, “Presents” given to the Cherokee by Cumming. This subtle movement in the proceeding has turned the object from a symbol of authority to a symbol of reciprocal contact. Examining the reports of other Europeans present at the presumed coronation ceremony further complicates the role of the crown. In his journal, Cumming suggests that as early as March 30 the possibility of his coronation was raised, and writes that Moytoy and Jacob “determined to present him [Cumming] with the crown of Tannassy.”43 This early introduction of the supposed coronation reinforces Cumming’s later assertion of authority. A different interpretation comes from trader Ludovick Grant, who explains the crown’s introduction in the following terms:
From Telliguo we rode over to Tannassee and afterwards returned by Neguasse Where several Traders met us and a good many Indians. Sir Alexander had been informed of all the ceremonies that are used in making a head beloved man, of which there are a great many in the nation. They are called Ouka, and we translate that word king, so we call the Cap, he wears upon that occasion his Crown . . . Sir Alexander was very desirous to see one of them, and there being none at that Town One was sent for to some other Town. He Expressed Great Satisfaction at Seeing of it, and he told the Indians that he would carry it to England and give it to the great King George.44
Grant, who was with Cumming in both Great Tellico and Nequassee, indicates that, rather than being discussed prior to the ceremony of April 3, the crown was introduced at a later date. Additionally, it appears that the Cherokees had no intention of presenting the artifact to Cumming as a crown or any symbol of authority, but rather that it was an ethnographic artifact displayed only upon Cumming’s insistence.
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Finally, we must consider the role physical geography played in the events that occurred during Cumming’s journey. The claimed coronation takes place in Nequassee and Cumming asserts that it is Moytoy, of Great Tellico, who performs the act. However, the crown itself comes from a third discrete Town location, Tannassee. This diversity of geographical location involvement in the interaction between the Cherokee and Cumming is expanded following Cumming’s supposed coronation. On April 6, 1730, during his return to Charles Town, Cumming informs us that they “proceeded to Ookunny, where Sir Alexander found a House built for him.”45 Cumming later claimed that the house came with “certain Territories there unto belonging as an acknowledgement” of his position “as their Governor & Lawgiver,” stating that additional space was assigned to him “in every Town through which Sir Alexander had passed in his journey throughout the mountains.”46 This act, the linkage between landholding and political power, would appear logical in Cumming’s spatial understanding, as it matched the associations seen within the framework of hierarchical and political control that operated in Britain at the time. On the contrary the act of constructing a house for Cumming adds a further aspect to the Cherokee understanding of Cumming’s visit. By constructing a house for Cumming, in a Cherokee Town, Ookunny, and in a Cherokee style, the Cherokee have positioned and included Cumming in their physical and intellectual space. They have created a way for Cumming to have a stake in one of the two aspects of Cherokee national membership: Town affiliation. The positioning of Cumming’s residence in Ookunny, which appears to be a village with ties to the Township of Keowee, achieves two further objectives.47 Firstly, it places Cumming at the edge of Cherokee space in the region most closely related to Charles Town, thereby increasing the ease of communication between British and Cherokee space. Secondly, it offers the intriguing possibility that Cumming may have acquired some form of national Cherokee membership, clan affiliation the second of the two aspects of Cherokee national membership, for he now has links to the Upper Settlements through Great Tellico and Tannasse, to the Middle Settlements through Nequassee, and to the Lower Settlements through Ookunny and Keowee. Taking all these points together, we find that an incident reported by an English traveler as a strong claim to European action based on a spatial and political understanding of control and domination is, in fact, a powerful demonstration of Cherokee authority.
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It appears that the time in England had a strong impact on the Cherokee with one of their number reportedly crying out “I tank you, I tank you, I tank you all” at the dockside as they boarded the ship for the trip home.48 The negotiations and agreement made in London was used by both groups when needed rather than fully implemented and a period of peace, at times uneasy, existed between the Cherokee and British up to the 1750s. Of the individual players, a member of the Cherokee delegations rose to a position of power within his nation. The youngest of the visitors, known at the time as Okoonka, later took the name Attakullakulla and became a leading figure for the Cherokee.49 Initially it appeared that the trip had made him a fervent supporter of the English. In 1736 he became a vocal member of the group of resisting diplomatic entreaties from French emissaries among the Overhill Towns of the Cherokee. Three or four years after this date however, he was captured by Ottawas allied to the French and taken to Canada where he remained captive until 1748.50 This captivity appears to have shifted Atakullakulla’s views towards what I term “aggressive neutrality” whereby he was able to use each European nation as a bartering tool to extract concessions from the other. As for Sir Alexander Cumming he continued a long and at times extraordinary path. Following the visit, Cumming was appointed to several military posts and claimed numerous others. He also made proposals to the crown for multiple grand schemes. These included the creation of a colonial bank with a startup cost of £1,000,000, which among other things would improve the “British Colonies in America and elsewhere” and “preserving them at the same time in a natural and easy state of dependency on Great Britain their Mother Country. He also proposed settling 3 million Jews in the Cherokee nation; a proposal aimed at clearing the national debt.51 Many of these proposals were written during his stay in Poultry Compter – a debtors prison in London where he resided during the middle of the eighteenth century before being released in 1763 to become a pensioner in the hospital housed in Charterhouse London.52
Notes: 1. In 1703 at the tender age of 12 Cumming was granted a Captain’s commission in the Earl of Mar regiment by Queen Anne and ten years later gained a Doctorate of Law from the University of Aberdeen. Over the next few years Cumming was to lead a company against the Jacobites in the 1715
- 48 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 uprising, turn down the Governorship of Bermuda, and in 1725, after his fathers death, became the second Baronet of Culter. As the decade drew to a close Cumming’s eclectic career included a failed attempt to enter Scottish politics and admission to the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. Biographical details from The Scottish Tartans Museum Web site at http://www.scottishtartans.org/cuming.html, accessed 22 February, 2006. 2. For details regarding the impetus for his trip see Daniel Lyons, The Environs of London: Being an Historical Account of the Towns Villages and Hamlets, within Twelve Miles of that Capital: Interspersed with Biographical Anecdotes, Volume 4, (London, 1795-96), Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. University of Mississippi, 11 March 2014
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1730. 9. Cumming returned to England shortly before payment of his loans became due. After his departure, in an attempt to recoup their money, several members of the Charles Town community broke into his treasury. All they found inside were “some empty Boxes, old Iron and other Rubbish” and it was “computed” that he carried off “no less than £15000 sterling” a substantial amount for the period. “Extract of a Letter form South Carolina,” Cumming’s Manuscript, Ayer MS 204, Newberry Library, Chicago, p. 21. 10. The Daily Journal, Thursday, October 8, 1730. 11. The Daily Journal, Thursday, October 8, 1730; The cave is marked on George Hunter’s map to the south side of the Santee River, slightly below the Township of Amelia. See George Hunter and A. S. Salley, George Hunter’s map of the Cherokee country and the path thereto in 1730 (Columbia, S.C.: Printed for the Commission by the State Co., 1917). 12. The Cherokee Path, mapped in 1730 by George Hunter, the Surveyor-General of the Province of South Carolina, ran for 130 miles from Charles Town and passed though the Cherokee Lower and Middle Towns before terminating at Settico in the Overhill Towns. 13. The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730. 14. Veteran trader Ludovick Grant, who was in Keowee that evening, left a report corroborating the events that occurred in the Town House. See “Historical Relation of the Facts Delivered by Ludovick Grant, Indian Trader to His Excellency the Governor of South Carolina’,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Volume X (1909). 15. The named Europeans were Joseph Cooper, Ludovick Grant, Joseph Barker, Gregory Haines, Daniel Jenkinson, Thomas Goodale, William Cooper, William Hatton, and John Biles. 16. The Daily Journal, Thursday, October 8, 1730. 17. Grant, “Historical Relation,” 56. 18. The Daily Journal, Thursday, October 8, 1730. 19. James Adair, History of the American Indians (New York: Promontory Press, 1974), 460. 20. See Raymond D. Fogelson ‘Cherokee Notions of Power’, in Raymond D. Fogelson and, Richard N. Adams (eds.), The Anthropology of Power: Ethnographic Studies from Asia, Oceania, and the New World, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1977) 21. Long-term English traders also recognized this need for full national endorsement. While discussing a failed transfer of land from the
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Cherokee, trader Ludovick Grant was to suggest that, the reason for failure was “because of the head men were not present.” Grant, p. 64; for a discussion of the “pragmatic” attitude by the Cherokee to external threats see Robert K. Thomas,Cherokee Values and World View, (Unpublished manuscript, University of North Carolina, 1958), esp. p. 14. 22. Randolph Boehm, (ed.,) “Journal of the Commissioner for Indian Affairs on his Journey to the Cherokees and his Proceedings there,”Records of the British Colonial Office, Class 5 Part 1:Westward Expansion 1700-1783, Volume 12, (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1972). 23. This harmony ethic has continued to be an important part of Cherokee life. When John Gulick conducted research among the Eastern Cherokee in the mid twentieth century, he observed a similar need, writing that, “When social decisions must be made, involving the resolution of differing points of view, the aim is circumspectly to work out a unanimous decision. An outvoted minority is regarded as a source of conflict and disharmony. Anyone whose views absolutely cannot be accommodated to the otherwise unanimous decision simply withdraws from the proceedings.” John J. Gulick, “The self-corrective service and persistence in Conservation Eastern Cherokee culture,” Research Previews, (1959) p. 6. 24. Fogelson, “Cherokee Notions of Power,” pp. 189-90. 25. Fogelson “Cherokee Notions of Power.” 26. “Account of the Cherrokee Indians, and of Sir Alexander Cuming’s Journey Amongst Them,”The Historical Register, Vol, XVI, No. LXI (1731), p. 3. 27. Alexander Longe, “Small Postcript on the ways and manners of the Indians called Cherokees,” Southern Indian Studies, Volume XXI, (October, 1969): 39. 28. The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730, and Thursday, October 8, 1730. 29. The Daily Journal, Thursday, October 8, 1730. 30. The Daily Journal, Thursday, October 8, 1730. 31. It must be remembered that the translator, or linguist, in these negotiations was Ludovick Grant, a trader based in Great Tellico who therefore had reason to promote the importance of the leader of this Town. 32. The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730. 33. The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730. 34. The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730. 35. The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730.
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36. British and Cherokee spatial understandings are examined in my doctoral dissertation Ian D. Chambers, “Space the Final Frontier: Spatial Understandings in the Eighteenth Century American Southeast,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 2006). 37. The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730. If we compare this declaration of British spatial understanding, and the sense of control it contains, to the following quotation from Robinson Crusoe upon his return to the island we find some interesting parallels. “I shar’d the Island into Parts with ‘em, reserv’d to my self the Property of the whole, but gave them such parts respectively as they agreed on.” Both Crusoe and Cumming, after claiming possession and control of the physical and intellectual space in which they found themselves, feel confident and able to redistribute that space to others. Defoe, Daniel and Michael Shinagle, (ed.), Robinson Crusoe, (W.W. Norton, 1975), 220. 38. Colonel George Chicken was father to George Chicken, who later accompanied Cumming. 39. “Colonel Chicken’s Journal to the Cherokee, 1725,” in Newton D. Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 101. 40. Ludovick Grant described Cumming’s “crown” as a “cap” worn by beloved men which “resembles a wig and is made of Possum’s Hair Dyed Red or Yellow.” Grant, “Historical Relation,” 57. 41. The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730. 42. The Daily Journal, Thursday, October 8, 1730. 43. The Daily Journal, Thursday, October 8, 1730. 44. Grant, “Historical Relation,” 57. 45. The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730. 46. Cumming’s Manuscript, VAULT Ayer MS 204, Newberry Library, Chicago. 47. Cumming reports that the “King, who had been just then made at Ookunny” was the same person as the “King of Keowee.” The Daily Journal, Wednesday, September 30, 1730. 48. The Court Magazine (August 1762), quoted in James C. Kelly, “Notable People in Cherokee History: Attakullakulla,” Journal of Cherokee Studies, Volume III, No. 1(Winter, 1978): 4. 49. Kelly, “Notable People,” 2-3. 50. Kelly, “Notable People,” 6-7.
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51. Cumming’s Manuscript, VAULT Ayer MS 204, Newberry Library, Chicago. 52. Gordon Goodwin, “Cumming, Alexander,” Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 13, pp. 294-5.
Author’s Note: The author thanks his colleague Adam Sowards for his time and help with this article.
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- 54 - Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South Spring/Summer 2014 • 21(1): 55 - 85
Colonial Servitude and the “Unfree” Origins of America
Matthew Pursell Bound labor was at the center of the making of the British Atlantic world, but historians have only recently clarified the formal terms and demographic contours of servitude.1 It is now clear that in legal terms indentured servants and convicts were positioned between slaves and free, that they were at least as important as migrants as they were as laborers, and that their experiences were enormously, if not endlessly, varied. But if these dimensions of servitude have come into focus, contemporaries’ understandings of the practice remain largely uncharted. Observers were generally critical of servitude, even as they asserted the essential legitimacy of the master-servant relationship and the appropriateness of subjecting the poor and laboring classes to this onerous condition. Both scholarship and the early modern public discourse on servants confirm America’s unfree past while complicating distinctions between free and unfree.2 There has been an outpouring of scholarship on marginalized groups in colonial British America in the last few decades, but Richard Dunn’s observation in the early 1980s that in many ways “the history of colonial labor is almost untouched” still applies to some degree to servants.3 In recent years the appearance of several important studies has begun to address this omission, but this scholarship still lacks the depth and breadth of those on other laboring classes such as slaves and wageworkers.4 Moreover, scholars have examined the institution’s formal arrangements and servants’ demographic profile, but neglected the public discourse surrounding the practice.5 The neglect of servants is particularly striking when contrasted to the attention received by slaves throughout the colonies and by wage labor of the early republic.6 There are a number of reasons for this divergence. Servants lack a natural constituency. The history of African Americans in the colonial era flourished first in the wake of the civil rights movement, as scholars looked for the origins of slavery and racism. Similarly, the struggles of organized labor in the modern United States inspired an enormous literature on the
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genesis of wage labor and class-consciousness among early American hirelings. Servants sometimes appear in these accounts, but mostly as a prelude to the emergence of slavery, racial ideology, and class relations.7 This tendency is driven in part by the perception that servitude was a dead end. While racial slavery and a bastardized artisanal system were part of the making of modern America, servitude was an archaic labor system with no future. Just as a servant’s time of service ended with death or the expiration of a contract, so did the institution fade away with the turn to slave labor in many colonies in the West Indies and on the mainland and later with political and economic revolutions in the United States. The relative neglect of servants is all the more surprising given recent shifts in the geographic orientation of early American scholarship. Since the pioneering work of the Chesapeake School, this region has competed with, if not eclipsed, New England as the first and most important region on the mainland and, for some scholars, as the locus of modern America’s origins.8 After all, English servants arrived first in Virginia, and the Chesapeake remained a destination for servants into the eighteenth century. Likewise, the Atlantic turn among students of British colonial America has not generated as much interest in servants as might be expected.9 Atlantic history facilitates the study of groups whose distribution transcended modern national boundaries, and servitude was no more peculiar to the Chesapeake than slavery was to the Antebellum South. As Amy Bushnell has noted, Atlantic history has also privileged the peopling of the British colonies and those groups who were most closely linked to exported commodities.10 Servitude was a dominant mechanism of migration that stitched together the recruiting grounds of the British Isles and the Rhinelands with destinations in America.11 As a labor system, it helped launch the production of staple crops like tobacco and sugar. Whether viewed from the perspective of Europe or the Americas, servitude was of great importance. Over half of all European migrants to the British colonies between 1600 and 1780 arrived as bound laborers.12 Servitude was, then, a rite of passage for generations of settlers, facilitating their migration and defining the terms of their integration into colonial societies. In the West Indies and mainland colonies, servants did much to establish viable colonies as they carved out farms and plantations, built roads and docks, and worked in fields and households. In the process, as migrants and workers, they played a role in the development of the British Empire. Moreover, servitude left a wider legacy. It helped mark the colonies as distinctive and shaped the enduring European view of America as a land of
- 56 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 opportunity and—just as often—as a barbaric frontier.13 Servitude laid the foundation of slavery, first in Virginia and Barbados. It also surely shaped the worldview of those who entered society as freemen when their terms expired, informing their expectations about work and authority, though this history has yet to be written. Given the importance of servitude, its disappearance was itself a watershed in the history of the British Atlantic world. Recent studies of servitude have traced the institution’s formal arrangements and its geographic and demographic contours.14 American servitude constituted a particular status, but one arrived at through a number of routes. Most numerous among servants were those who signed contracts before embarking for the colonies. These contracts stipulated that the servant would serve for a period of time—for adults, most often four or five years.15 In exchange, servants received passage to the colonies, maintenance (food, lodging, and apparel), and freedom dues in cash or kind. As economic historians have suggested, indentures functioned as a credit mechanism by which the costs of transportation were covered with the promise of future service.16 Those who arrived in the colonies without a written contract were generally younger and less skilled than those with indentures. This group served by the “Custom of the Country,” a phrase that referred to the provincial statutes that regulated labor relations. The redemptioner system was a third form of servitude, one that brought mostly German-speaking migrants to the Delaware Valley in the eighteenth century. Redemptioners often paid a portion of their transportation costs up front. After disembarking, they were granted a short period during which they might locate a third party to pay the owed sum.17 The shipper then sold those who failed to secure a loan or a purchaser in order to cover the outstanding debt. This arrangement potentially allowed migrants with some capital to select their masters and reduce the duration of their service. The same laws and customs that governed the service of these voluntary recruits also generally applied to those kidnapped, convicted, or otherwise coerced into servitude. This group included political, military, and religious exiles, as well as an unknown numbers of children and adults who were sent to the plantations illicitly. It can be said with some certainty that among these were fifty thousand convicts, most of whom were transported to the Chesapeake following the passage of the Transportation Act of 1718.18 The scope of the illegal traffic remains obscure.19 While it is true that some native-born colonists (including orphans, debtors, and Indians) became servants, recent scholarship has confirmed that the vast majority of servants were immigrants.20 While contemporary observers often highlighted
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recruitment through coercion and duplicity, it seems that such immediate force was only common for convicts and political and military exiles. The fact that most people who became servants did so voluntarily raises the question of motives.21 For colonial promoters—and some historians—the principal motive was the promise of landed independence, a status that was as unattainable as it was coveted in Europe.22 But despite the stipulation of land as freedom dues in some indentures, they rarely resulted in a freehold outright.23 Capital was required for the patenting and surveying of land as well as for the initial stocking and planting needed to establish a functioning farm. With few exceptions, those released from service found that land ownership was possible only after a period of wage work or tenancy. The earliest bound migrants who survived their terms probably had the most success in achieving this goal.24 In the Chesapeake and mid-Atlantic colonies, land prices rose sharply after the first decades of settlement. In the West Indies, where the commitment to sugar and slavery quickly concentrated arable lands, out-migration was often the only option.25 Another explanation for the willingness of Europeans to become servants emphasizes the domestic problems of underemployment and poverty and the limited alternatives of migrants. As the contraction of the supply of English servants after 1660 suggests, the colonial institution was dependent upon such push factors. Addressing migrants’ motives, James Horn has argued that if some were drawn to the colonies by the prospect of land ownership, for many others, “the future was mortgaged in return for the immediate benefit of food, lodgings, and regular work.”26 As we will see, dependency was ubiquitous in the highly stratified early modern world, so that exclusion, not subordination, was the greatest threat to the poor and laboring classes.27 Those who signed indentures were under no illusion that their American servitude would be unconditional, anymore than their previous freedom had been. The broad patterns of servitude’s geography are now reasonably clear. Conceived soon after the settlement of Jamestown, servitude quickly expanded in conjunction with tobacco production in Virginia in the 1620s and in Barbados soon thereafter.28 The institution continued to spread as other colonies developed their own staple crops and acquired a modicum of settlers. On the mainland, Maryland probably surpassed its southern neighbor as a destination of servants in the 1680s, and Pennsylvania and the southern Lowcountry imported significant numbers of servants in the 1680s and 1690s.29 Servants began to arrive in the Leeward Islands, as more colonies began to cultivate minor staples and eventually sugar. Nevis and St. Kitts
- 58 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 became destinations in the 1660s and 1670s, and servants were transported to Jamaica in the following two decades.30 Voluntary servitude constituted 60 to 65 percent of all seventeenth-century European migration to the mainland, including 80 percent (86,000) of those arriving in the Chesapeake and roughly half of white migrants to the English West Indies.31 In the Caribbean, where sugar and slaves increasingly dominated the landscape, the use of bound white labor sharply declined by the eighteenth century, but some Leeward Islands—notably Antigua in the 1740s and 1750s—still served as destinations, and Jamaica continued to import some servants through the 1720s and fewer into the 1750s.32 In the 1700s the proportion of white migrants arriving as bound laborers on the mainland declined to 50 percent, but their numbers were far larger in absolute terms than in the previous century.33 The Chesapeake was the only region that continuously imported large numbers of servants throughout the colonial era.34 Pennsylvania became a major destination in the 1720s, and some servants arrived in Georgia in the 1730s.35 Several patterns have emerged from the literature on servant demographics. The predominance of the English in the 1600s was qualified only by the large Irish presence in Barbados—where roughly 12,000 political prisoners were exiled—and in the Leeward Islands.36 Eighteenth-century servants were more diverse. Some 36 percent of the 91,100 Irish and 46 percent of the 84,500 German-speaking migrants arrived as servants, making the Delaware Valley the principal destination of voluntary servants.37 Some 13,000 Irish convicts and 36,000 English convicts were transported, mostly to the Chesapeake.38 Servants constituted 66 percent of the 55,000 voluntary English migrants in this century, with Maryland as their leading destination.39 Rhine Valley redemptioners were more gender-balanced than other groups.40 There is also some evidence that after the 1680s servants were increasingly likely to have some craft or trade skills and less likely to be from agricultural backgrounds.41 Nevertheless, the demographic profile of servants can be broadly characterized as including more men than women, more young than old, and more of the laboring and lower middle classes than the better sort.42 The causes and timing of servitude’s decline and disappearance varied across British America.43 Rapid population growth and economic hardships precipitated migration from England in the first half of the 1600s, but thereafter birthrates fell and wages increased, reducing the pool of willing migrants. This “inflexible supply” was one of the forces that precipitated a series of regional transitions to slavery in the colonies.44 The shift occurred first in Barbados and was later repeated in the Leeward Islands, Jamaica,
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Virginia, and finally in Maryland.45 But this transition did not unfold in precisely the same way in each region, and it did not occur in all colonies. In the West Indies, slaves moved into fieldwork before skilled work, and the transition was relatively prolonged and uneven in the Chesapeake.46 In the Delaware Valley servants were largely replaced by free white labor, not slaves. The transportation of convicts had its own logic and continued unabated until 1775.47 When the Atlantic economy surged in the 1820s, oceanic transportation costs had fallen enough to preclude the use of indentures as the dominant mechanism of European migration to the United States.48 Compared to most occupations in early modern society, colonial servitude was an undesirable station, but it is important to remember that dependency was in and of itself not unusual. Though the “republican synthesis” of the last several decades has conclusively established “independence” as a common aspiration among Europeans in this period, dependency was a fact of life for laborers on both sides of the Atlantic.49 While England had experienced a significant shift toward wage work by 1600, large numbers of workers were still bound for a term of service during which they were legally subject to the will of their masters in a variety of ways.50 Colonial settlement was dominated by unfree migrations, and all colonial populations had larger proportions of dependents than did the population of England.51 Wives, minors, apprentices, servants, and slaves were just some of those who found their relationship to the state and economy mediated by the expansive authority of propertied household heads, if not in precisely the same way. Dependency was ubiquitous, but the terms and conditions of colonial servitude were particularly severe. Servants’ transatlantic passage to the colonies contributed to, without entirely determining, the institutional adaptations that marked servitude as an especially difficult condition. First, the impracticality of personal recruitment made the “saleable” status of servants convenient, allowing American planters to procure English workers through a shipper (either a merchant or shipmaster).52 Servants were sold, bartered, transferred in wills, and attached to liens and debts.53 It should be noted here that the extent to which historians view this practice as innovative, depends in part on whether they trace its origins to English service-in- husbandry or pauper apprenticeship and vagrancy law.54 Regardless, the selling or otherwise transferring of people like property—without concern for the servant’s will—was novel if only for its scale.55 Second, the high cost of passage entailed a relatively large initial investment for buyers, which in turn dictated long terms of service.56
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Historians do not entirely agree as to whether these terms were determined by rational choices within an efficient labor market or the arbitrary dictates of shippers.57 Nevertheless, long terms of unpaid service were a constant feature of servitude that had profound effects that cut across otherwise varied circumstances. Thus one servant in early Virginia begged his family in England to redeem him in part because he faced hardships typical of a frontier.58 A century and a half later, another servant who lived in a now much more developed Virginia, described his life there as one of relative comfort and ease, but nevertheless bemoaned his inability to earn money or support his family back in Scotland.59 If material conditions for servants varied widely, long terms always delayed the pursuit of family, property, and citizenship. Third, these large upfront costs likewise encouraged the strict enforcement of performance.60 That is, a master was naturally more concerned with keeping servants than hirelings from shirking tasks or absconding. If masters often used incentives to manage their servants, they clearly possessed an impressive array of coercive disincentives, including a pass system, corporal punishment, and the extension of terms.61 Moreover, masters could reasonably expect magistrates, assemblymen, and the propertied community at large all had an interest in circumscribing the personal freedom of servants in the name of maintaining order. Debates over what Douglas Hay has termed the “balance of law”—in this case, the degree to which the law favored either master or servant—have recently been clarified, if not entirely settled. While servants often had some access to the courts to enforce their contracts or appeal to statutory protections, propertied men not unlike their masters controlled the colonial assemblies that enacted servant codes and the courts that adjudicated disputes.62 Given this context, it is not surprising that some historians have viewed the law as a tool of coercion for masters.63 But in the West Indies and the mainland colonies, servants had the right to bring grievances before a magistrate, and recent research has provided evidence that some servants enjoyed meaningful legal recourse and even high rates of success, at least in cases where outcomes are known.64 Concrete evidence that many servants had meaningful legal recourse does not, however, change the fact that masters enjoyed substantial legal powers over their servants or even that servants’ legal recourse was tenuous. The evidentiary basis for these new findings is limited in terms of the sizes of samples and the times and places where court outcomes are known.65 Moreover, several factors might have kept grievances out of the courts.
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Servants faced the possibility of a whipping or an extended term if justices found their petitions to be frivolous.66 It was also not unusual for even egregious cases of neglect or abuse to result in unfavorable judgments for the servant,67 and masters sometimes threatened or abused servants who filed a petition or considered doing so.68 Given all this, many servants must have thought twice before petitioning. It is also likely that geographic location limited some servants’ access to magistrates, and that outcomes would vary by the particular master and servant’s standing in the community.69 In spite of his findings that petitions were often effective, Tomlins concluded that servants were much more subject to coercion in the law than were free workers in the colonies.70 The juridical status of servants mattered, but it provides only limited insight into the lived experience of servants. In part this is true because they continually struggled to achieve a modicum of security and autonomy and thus placed limits on their bondage. Their actions took myriad forms, from deferential pleas to open rebellion.71 Making the most of opportunities the institution provided, servants won small privileges by building bonds of trust and even affection with masters. Others appealed to sympathetic third parties to intervene when their masters turned violent. Common transgressions included shirking duties, stealing and selling goods, lingering on garden plots or covertly selling their labor. Running away was endemic.72 Much less frequent were cases of arson, murder, and revolt. Servants were at a disadvantage in their struggles with their masters, but they often managed to achieve a small measure of freedom within servitude.73 If the formal status of servants cannot fully account for the struggles of master and servant, neither can it explain the variety of servants’ experience.74 Two meticulous studies of particular Maryland plantations that examine the use of bound servants found dramatically different norms of care and discipline, to give just one example of this variety.75 Scholars have just begun to identify underlying causes, but slave studies are suggestive. Some causes were relatively immediate and constant, such as the individual master’s prosperity and disposition. Larger forces—such as disease environments and the demands of particular crops—shaped wider patterns of experience and help explain why recalcitrant servants were sometimes threatened with being sold to the Chesapeake or the West Indies.76 Even as our understanding of servants’ legal status has improved, it seems that this is only the starting point for comprehending servants’ lives. Perhaps in part because there was no monolithic servant experience, historians have differed in their overall evaluations of the practice. Some
- 62 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 have equated servitude with slavery, as an extreme form of exploitation that generated explosive class tensions.77 Others have cast it in more benign terms, as a kind of apprenticeship, characterized by reasonable treatment and prospects of future advancement.78 The brief institutional history of servitude above suggests that within the spectrum of early modern labor forms, it was located—at least in its formal terms—just shy of slavery.79 If servants were never truly reduced to property, only slaves’ personal freedom was more circumscribed by legal disabilities and coercion. If servants’ work and usage and status were varied, only slaves were more likely to encounter menial labor, physical discipline, and social stigma. In turning from the institution of servitude to its cultural handling, the scholarship becomes much less complete. Scores of chronicles, autobiographical works, promotional tracts, novels, plays, chapbooks, and broadsides addressed the practice, but this public discourse has received little attention.80 Those who left a record of their thoughts on servitude differed widely in their social locations, political agendas, and opinions. Former servants sometimes protested that they had been trafficked and treated as slaves, and promoters responded by highlighting the similarities between servants in America and husbandmen or apprentices in England. Thus early modern attitudes in many ways anticipated historians’ disagreements over the nature of servitude. But the issues at stake that were first identified in the early seventeenth century remained relatively consistent throughout the colonial era. The terms and conditions widely ascribed to servitude were particularly enduring, while the public’s sense of what groups should and should not be bound in such a servile station slowly evolved. Moreover, most observers cast servitude as a very onerous station even if they did not invariably condemn the practice itself. Such attitudes thus constituted one element of what Allan Kulikoff has identified as the “anti-colonial rumor and truth” that circulated in the British Atlantic.81 In a world in which dependency was common, paternalism gave people on both sides of the Atlantic a framework for thinking about the relations of masters and servants.82 At its core, this idiom cast heads of households as benign masters over all their dependents—responsible for their necessaries and care and expecting obedient service in return. Paternalism reigned when and where the household was the foundation of social organization, as not just the locus of familial relations and consumption but also of governance and production.83 Household heads thus held legal and customary rights and responsibilities later assumed by the state and to some extent by more socially detached employers. Thus paternalism was rooted in
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beliefs about the necessity of hierarchy even as it asserted reciprocity as the household’s central dynamic. Paternalism’s contradictions would play out in contemporaries’ attitudes toward servitude. On the one hand, this ideology cloaked potentially exploitative relations in the garb of familial bonds and complimentary duties. As such it tended to blunt criticisms of the practice, circumscribing them within a particularistic and moralistic compass and reassuring readers that “the master as the servant” would “perform his duty.”84 On the other hand, paternalism also provided servants and other observers with sanctioned avenues of censure. In contrast to modern conceptions of social groups as neatly divided into free and unfree, paternalism drew attention to several specific, variable conditions faced by laborers—such as the master’s disposition, the modicum of security provided by dependency, and the perils of formal freedom.85 Throughout the colonial era, the master- servant relationship that stood at the center of a wide variety of labor relations was considered a legitimate relationship providing some benefits to both parties.86 While paternalism had the tendency to make colonial servitude seem familiar and benign, critics nevertheless suggested that its specific terms and conditions rendered it an undesirable condition.87 Free migrants experienced some of the hardships associated with servitude—such as the difficult Atlantic passage and the resulting separation from kith and kin.88 But most of the characteristics ascribed to servitude correspond closely to the historical practice, including the alienability of servants, their hard labor and poor living conditions, and their strict governance and perceived lack of recourse. In time these ideas crystalized into a set of standard phrases that continually appeared in public discourse. Promoters argued that such claims were exaggerated, that they reflected past practices, or that the prudent recruit could procure more favorable terms. But in doing so, they attested to the power of servitude’s poor reputation.89 Migrants’ entry into servitude and their subsequent sale were particularly conspicuous themes in public discourse. The “commoditization” of servants was viewed as especially troubling, as registered in the often- repeated phrase, “sold a slave.”90 The public reviled spirits and “merchants in men,” and accounts of Britons and Germans enticed or kidnapped and then sold to the plantations elicited widespread public interest.91 Narratives of these dramatic cases of recruitment may have spoken to broader anxieties about those who signed indentures only because of their poverty and limited prospects.92 All servants were stigmatized by their status as property, and
- 64 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 alienability was recognized as precluding servants’ ability to select their own masters.93 A former servant from Barbados spelled out one important implication of this feature of servitude when he wrote, “he that hath a good master too day…may have a tyrant too morrow.”94 It was also widely reported that servants faced difficult work and living conditions. As one of Daniel Defoe’s characters put it, “we work’d Hard, lodg’d Hard, and far’d Hard.”95 Especially in the seventeenth century, historical and imaginative accounts referred to the arduous labor associated with clearing land and producing staple crops. When an English servant recalled, “I dreaded Virginia for the Ax and Haw,” his audience would have readily understood his reference to the tools of manual labor in the colonies.96 Many accounts also described servants’ inadequate shelter and clothing, and in an era when the consumption of beef was a marker of English prosperity and liberty, it was widely reported that servants were “kept upon a very coarse diet.”97 Servants’ strict governance and their inability to seek redress without inciting recriminations were also much discussed topics. Generic references to tyrannical masters were common and often accompanied by accounts of abuse. Such individual instances of cruelty were at times generalized to a “planter spirit” and to unjust provincial laws. Unease about masters’ arbitrary authority was exacerbated by the perception that servants were cut-off from traditional means of recourse and escape. Historical and imaginative accounts narrated frustrated attempts to appeal to magistrates and servants’ failed attempts to abscond. As one unhappy young servant wrote to his brother, “it is not here as in England, for as soon as you are once here, there is no getting away again.”98 A coherent unfavorable image of servitude had coalesced in the early decades of the 1600s and was recapitulated throughout the colonial era. This is precisely what John Hammond suggested in his promotional tract of 1656. Writing nearly five decades after the settlement of Jamestown, he complained that the hardships of early immigrants lingered in the public’s imagination and “to this day brand Virginia.”99 It is true that legal constraints on personal liberty continued to be viewed as a normal condition of labor. But in the public imagination the specific terms and conditions of American servitude rendered it a particularly severe variant of dependent labor. As Charles Leslie wrote in his history of Jamaica, servitude was “that State of Life” that was the “meanest and most disgraceful, which a white man can be in.”100 As Leslie’s reference to “white men” suggests, attitudes toward servitude turned on a sense of which groups were subject to it as much as it
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did on the institution’s particular terms and conditions.101 To put it another way, to recognize that servants were in a difficult and degraded condition was not necessarily to condemn the practice indiscriminately. To extend an argument made by David Eltis in relation to slavery, assumptions about which groups fell within the orbit of servitude always informed evaluations of the practice.102 Religion, national origins, social rank, and race were all invoked to denote the changing boundaries of belonging and exclusion, privilege and servility, though the salience of each waxed and waned over time.103 Debates about servitude were also shaped by—and in turn shaped— the public perception of slavery and race that emerged in the colonial era. Scholars have suggested that the development of something approaching a modern conception of race was one of the greatest transformations born of European colonization. There is a general consensus that the emergence of slavery—more than inherited cultural assumptions about blackness and whiteness—engendered these conceptions.104 The presumption of inherited bodily difference that was strongly associated with skin color was, as Joyce Chaplin has argued, an ideology “crafted to support systems of human subjugation.”105 Historians have long recognized that servants played a supporting role in the emergence of slavery and the making of race. In Edmund S. Morgan’s germinal account of colonial Virginia, servants paved the way for racism in two ways. Servitude and attitudes toward servants prepared Virginians to accept slavery and riotous former servants led the leadership to turn to slaves and a racial ideology to bring stability to their regime. A number of subsequent studies of the West Indies and Chesapeake have confirmed Morgan’s contention that in the seventeenth century there emerged a racial ideology with the power to reduce class tensions among whites by elevating their status and condition at the expense of singularly degraded and exploited slaves.106 The public discussion of servitude in this era does reveal that the proximity of servants and slaves led some critics to suggest that servants were treated like slaves as both “human merchandise” and abject plantation bondsmen. In response, promoters and recruiters struggled to stabilize the two terms, disassociating “servant” from “slave” and arguing that racial slavery had ameliorated the conditions of servants.107 Both those who asserted that servants were better used than slaves and those who argued that servants should be better used often took the enslavement of Africans for granted and thus contributed to the legitimization of slavery. Moreover, the idea that white privilege should exempt whites from at least one central dimension of
- 66 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 servitude was explicitly articulated in an anonymous letter to the New York Independent Gazette in 1786 that declared, “the traffick in white people was contrary to the feelings of a number of important citizens and to the idea of liberty this country has so happily established.”108 The public discourse on servitude, however, also confirms the embryonic character of racism in the Anglo-American world and suggests that the emergence of the assumption of white privilege was a more prolonged, uneven, and contested process than some have suggested. Observers sometimes identified enslaved women and men of African descent by their social location and ascribed religious and cultural attributes.109 Moreover, not all accounts of servitude made mention of slavery. When slavery was named, it often appeared as a strikingly elastic metaphor.110 Even when observers clearly were referencing Atlantic slaves, they formulated the relationship between servitude and slavery, whites and blacks, in a variety of ways.111 Unambiguous assertions that whiteness precluded servitude were rare in the colonial era.112 The best evidence that contemporaries generally did not view white privilege as precluding bondage is that throughout the colonial era observers employed ideas about social class when they sought to divide proper subjects of servitude from its sympathetic victims.113 At times directly invoked, rank was at other times referenced obliquely through, for example, a discourse of honor.114 Such concerns were ubiquitous, but they were most conspicuous in stories about those of the “better sort” who were occasionally sold in the colonies.115 One Jacobite rebel, exiled and sold a servant in the West Indies, attested to the importance of rank in evaluating servitude when he wrote, “What a lamentable Sight is it, to see an ingenuous well-born Gentleman fainting under the Lash of an inexorable Clown...whose Father was scarce good enough to be the meanest of Gentleman’s Lacquey.”116 The disorderly fringes of recruitment that disrupted, or in this case even reversed, customary social hierarchies elicited the greatest indignation. The attention that cases of “well-born gentlemen” elicited suggests that servitude for the “common sort” was widely condoned. As John Dryden commented in his Mistaken Husband, when “poor folks brats” were kidnapped to the West Indies, “the Church-wardens wink at such small faults.”117 Throughout the era merchants transported the poor and laboring classes to America, and as Edmund Morgan demonstrated, views of the “lower sort” as inferior and disorderly legitimated servitude since its inception.118 The power of ideas about social class to make such distinctions did not diminish over time. The dramatic expansion of convict transportation after
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1720, for example, often served to recast all servants—not just convicts—as criminal, alien, and exploitable. Thus one anonymous observer defined such servants by their position in the colonial labor regime rather than by race, well into the eighteenth century. Absentee planters in England, he wrote, “treat free-born Englishmen as they do Negroes and Felons in the Plantations.”119 Recent scholarship has demonstrated that our modern conceptions of a world divided into free and unfree cannot comprehend even the formal terms of servitude, which positioned servants between slaves and freemen. Moreover, even this more exact identification of servants’ civil status cannot explain the full content and variety of their experience, which remains largely uncharted. Contemporaries, accustomed as they were to the ambiguities of dependency, were in some ways better equipped to make sense of the practice. They knew that servitude provided a modicum of security and the potential for reciprocity, even as they cast it as an onerous condition suitable only for the “lower sort.” They thus challenge facile accounts of the expansion of English liberties and the birth of American freedom, even as they force us to rethink the nature of freedom itself.
Notes: 1. Simon P. Newman, for example, places bound labor at the heart of the making of the Atlantic world. A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2013). 2. Seth Rockman is just one of the more recent scholars to argue that “unfreedom” was central to America’s origins. “Unfree Origins of American Capitalism,” in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives & New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 335-361. It is useful to view servitude as part of an unfree past, but such sweeping characterizations of various labor forms as either free and unfree obscures as much as they illuminate. 3. Richard Dunn, “Servants and Slaves: The Recruitment and Employment of Labor” in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, eds. Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 158. 4. The publication of Kenneth Morgan’s synthesis of the scholarship on mainland servants illustrates the progress made in the study of servants, though it does not cover the West Indies. Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 2000). The latest generation of important regional studies that cover
- 68 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 servitude are Hilary Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627-1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); James Horn, Adapting to a New World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Sharon Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). They explore the three principle sites of servitude in British America: Barbados, the Chesapeake, and Pennsylvania, respectively. The only comprehensive scholarly survey of the institution remains Abbot Emerson Smith’s Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947). The best overview of demographics and economics of servitude for all British colonies is David W. Galenson’s White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). This work on North America has been refined by Christopher Tomlins, who has greatly advanced our understanding of servant numbers and the legal culture of work as it pertained to servants in various regions. Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For the best study of servants who arrived as convicts, see Roger A. Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 5. David Hancock has recently bemoaned the scholarly divide between economic and cultural history. “Rethinking The Economy of British America,” in The Economy of Early America, ed. Matson, 92. 6. Thus, for example, Ira Berlin’s challenge to scholars to go beyond accounts of slavery as a largely static institution of the Antebellum South has been met, but we have just begun to trace the evolution of servitude across time and space. See his, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society in British Mainland North America,” American Historical Review 85.1 (February 1980): 44-78. John Elliot has recently identified the explosion of scholarship on Africans in the Atlantic world as one of the most important changes in the field of colonial American history. “The Very Violent Road to America,” New York Review of Books, June 9, 2011. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard noted the neglect of servants relative to slaves in their classic study. The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 224, 242. 7. Newman’s A New World of Labor gives significant attention to servants in Barbados. But, as his title suggests, it is also the most recent example of casting servants in a supporting role in a more important drama—
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the birth of Atlantic slavery. Edmund S. Morgan wrote the classic account of the emergence of slavery and racial ideology that incorporated white servitude in a supporting role. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). Marcus Rediker incorporated servants into his account of the genesis of uprooted and exploited Atlantic proletariat. “‘Good Hands, Stout Heart, and Fast Feet’: The History and Culture of Working People in Early America,” Labour/Le Travail, Vol. 10 (Autumn, 1982): 123-144. 8. See, especially, Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: the Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). 9. Bernard Bailyn, a prominent champion of Atlantic history, has made servitude an important component of his central organizing concept of “peopling.” He considers servants primarily as immigrants, rather than closely examining their lives and labor in the colonies. See, for example, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1986). 10. Amy Bushnell identified this tendency in her critical assessment of Atlantic history. “Indigenous America and the Limits of the Atlantic World, 1493-1825,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 191. 11. Tomlins’ work on the mainland suggests that servants were more much more important as a proportion of all migrants than they were as a proportion of the labor force. “Reconsidering Indentured Servitude: European Migration and the Early American Labor Force,” Labor History 42:1 (2001); Freedom Bound, 8. 12. For early rough estimates of servants as migrants to the British colonies that have generally held up, see Stephen Innes, Work and Labor in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 10; and Richard S. Dunn, “Servants and Slaves,” 189. For current estimates for the mainland, see Tomlins, “Reconsidering Indentured Servitude.” He suggests that servants constituted 60 percent of the migrants in the 1600s and 50 percent in the eighteenth-century, a period of far greater total migration. No such careful demographic studies exist for the West Indies, but rough estimates are provided in the following survey. 13. Jack P. Greene has noted both opportunity and barbarism as central themes in seventeenth-century European perceptions of America. Bernard Bailyn has posited barbarism as central to the colonial experience itself. Both provide evidence that white servitude was a major facet of both
- 70 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 ideas without fully acknowledging its importance. Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993); Bailyn, The Peopling of British North American: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1986); The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York: Random House, 2012). 14. See, especially, Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America; Tomlins, Freedom Bound; and Farely Grubb, German Immigration and Servitude in America, 1709-1920 (New York: Routledge, 2011). Some of the excellent work done by Galenson, Grubb and Tomlins has been based on registrations of servants leaving British ports. Bailyn has recently parsed the 1770s registration. Voyagers to the West, 67-84. 15. Minors often served until adulthood—that is, somewhere in their early twenties. The length of terms also varied somewhat over time and place. Servants in the West Indies generally served shorter terms than did those on the mainland, and over time the period of service throughout the colonies declined somewhat. See Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 7-13, 102-113. 16. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 12. This perspective explains how mass-migration occurred in spite of primitive capital markets, but does not illuminate experience or contemporary views. 17. The length of time allowed became both less flexible and shorter (typically fourteen days) in the second half of the eighteenth century. Morgan, Slavery and Servitude, 47. The third party might be a friend or relative already established in the area, or a master, who would pay after indenturing the passenger. 18. See Ekirch, Bound for America. 19. The best introduction to “spiriting” is still Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage, chap. 4. See also, Bailyn, Voyagers to the West, 307-312. 20. Christopher Tomlins, “Early British America, 1585-1830,” in Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain & the Empire, 1562-1955, eds. Hay and Paul Craven (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 118. 21. The servant migration appears larger when viewed from the colonies than it does when viewed from Europe. Bailyn confirmed earlier studies that identified internal migrations as important in seventeenth-century England. See his, The Peopling of British North American: An Introduction (New York: Random House, 1986). Marianne S. Wokeck has similarly demonstrated that far more Germans emigrated eastward than westward in
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the eighteenth century. Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), chap. 1. 22. David Eltis, “Slavery and Freedom in the Early Modern World,” in Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom, and Free Labor, ed. Stanley L Engerman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 23. Land was only offered as dues during the first decade or two of settlement. Land was no longer offered in Virginia indentures by the middle of the 1620s, and arable land was no longer available in Barbados and the Leeward islands after the first decade of settlement. Greene,Pursuits of Happiness, 161. At least in the Chesapeake, falling prices for tobacco also reduced the availability of credit to former servants. 24. Allison F. Games found that former servants in Barbados enjoyed considerable economic success in the first few years of settlement and before the expansion of sugar production. “Opportunity and Mobility in Early Barbados,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, eds. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995). For a nuanced summary of the debate over ex-servant opportunities for acquiring land in the Chesapeake, see Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan and Jean B. Russo, eds. Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 4-6. They suggest competing theses may be based on regional variations in levels of development. 25. Studies of the Chesapeake suggest that freedmen’s opportunities for owning land were sharply curtailed in the 1660s. Land in Barbados was difficult to acquire a decade earlier. See, for example, Russell Menard, “Transitions to African Slavery in British America, 1630-1730: Barbados, Virginia and South Carolina,” in his Migrants, Servants and Slaves: Unfree Labor in Colonial America (Burlington: Ashgate, 2001). Newman found that Barbados offered little opportunity to the “vast majority” of former servants in the colonial era. See his, A New World of Labor, 98-105. Only in the relatively large island of Jamaica did former servants continue to have some prospect of acquiring land. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 161. 26. Horn, Adapting to the New World, 76. In his fine study of Virginia law, John Ruston Pagan demonstrates ambivalence as to the motives of his subject, Anne Orthwood. He notes the poverty and stigma she faced in England, yet suggests—without direct evidence—that her choice to become a servant was based on her perception of colonial opportunity. Anne Orthwood’s Bastard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 12-15.
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27. Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 53, No. 2 (April, 1996): 268. 28. Horn, Adapting to a New World, chap 3; Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados. 29. Russell R. Menard, “British Migration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century,” in Colonial Chesapeake Society, eds. Carr, et al.; Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 27, 86. 30. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 95, 123, 124, 149. 31. For the mainland, see Tomlins, “Reconsidering Indentured Servitude,” 10-11, 38. Hillary Beckles has suggested that indentured servants alone made up about half of all European migrants arriving there during the 1600s. “The ‘Hub of Empire’: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century,” in Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 1, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 223. 32. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 85, 95, 124. 33. Tomlins has suggested that the percentage of mainland immigrants arriving as servants decreased to 40 percent of all voluntary migrants in the eighteenth century. With the inclusion of convicts, the percentage rises to 50 percent. See his, “Reconsidering Indentured Servitude,” 38. 34. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 85. 35. Grubb, German Immigration and Servitude in America, chap. 2; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 46-47; Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 86. 36. Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘riotous and unruly lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644-1713,” William and Mary Quarterly 47.4 (1990): 503-522; Newman, A New World of Labor, chap. 4. 37. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, chap. 2; Grubb, German Immigration and Servitude in America, Introduction. 38. Ekirch, Bound for America, 115-116. 39. Tomlins, “Reconsidering Indentured Servitude,” 7-8. 40. On gender ratios, see Horn, Adapting to a New World, 36-37; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 58-59; Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 48-49; Morgan, Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America, 12-13. 41. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 173. Galenson’s analysis of registrations led him to conclude that skill levels may have actually
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declined before the 1680s and increased thereafter. 42. The issue of the social origins is contentious. Abbot Emerson Smith and other early scholars concluded that most servants came from the poor and laboring classes. Colonists in Bondage, 7. Mildred Campbell suggested most servants had middling social origins. “Social Origins of Some Early Americans,” in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History, ed. James Morton Smith (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959). Galenson noted that the large numbers of men whose past occupations were not enumerated on the registrations were likely younger and less skilled than others. He concluded that servants came from a broad cross-spectrum of English men below the gentry. “‘Middling People’ or ‘Common Sort’?: The Social Origins of Some Early Americans Reexamined,” William and Mary Quarterly XXXV (1978): 499-525. Horn summarizes the Chesapeake migrants of the 1600s as being mostly between the ages of 15 and 25 and as coming from a “broad spectrum of working people, ranging from the destitute and desperate to the lower-middle classes.” Adapting to the New World, 32. Much of this scholarship does not consider convicts. For limitations of the registrations served as the basis for much of this scholarship, see, for example, McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 243. 43. There is some debate as to the causes of servitude’s demise in various regions. Salinger suggests that an emerging pool of cheap free labor undermined the institution in the mid-Atlantic, while Grubb argues instead that the key factor was the decline in transportation costs in the early nineteenth century. Aaron S. Fogleman argued that the egalitarian impulse of the American Revolution was largely responsible for the shift from unfree to free immigration, though his thesis has been contested. Salinger, To Serve Well and Faithfully, 148-150; Grubb, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 85 (1988); Fogleman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 85, No. 1 (June, 1998): 43-76. 44. The literature on the transition is vast. For a still useful introduction to the terms of this debate, see McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 236-244. For a more recent synthesis, see Edward Countryman, ed., How did American Slavery Begin? (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 45. Our understanding of the timing and extent of the transition continues to evolve. For a recent revision on Virginia, see John C. Coombs,
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“The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 68, no. 3 (July 2011). For new work on Barbados, see McCusker and Menard, “Sugar Industry in Seventeenth-Century Barbados Sugar Revolution,” in Tropical Babylon: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 46. Galenson identified this two-part transition.White Servitude in Colonial America, chap. 9. 47. Convict numbers were substantial until the revolution severed this link. When prison ships and other schemes failed, Parliament began transporting convicts to Australia. Ekirch, Bound for America, chap. 8. 48. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 179-180. Farley Grubb, “The End of European Immigrant Servitude in the United States: An Economic Analysis of Market Collapse,” Journal of Economic History 54 (1994): 794-824. In the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress passed the Debt Peonage Act, ending “voluntary servitude.” Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 32, 37. In the Caribbean, freedmen had a period of apprenticeship akin to servitude in the 1830s. On some islands, South Asian and Chinese indentured servants replaced them. See Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 193) and David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834- 1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For an overview of competing explanations for decline on the mainland, see Grubb, “The Disappearance of Organized Markets for European Immigrant Servants in the United States: Five Popular Explanations Reexamined,” Social Science, History 18 (1994). 49. For the literature on independence, see Shallope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 29 (Jan. 1982): 334-56, and Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology,” American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985): 461-73. In England, wage labor was growing rapidly by 1600, though these workers were still subject to criminal discipline. J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Hay, “England, 1562-1875: The Law and its Uses,” inMasters, Servants and Magistrates. Colonization entailed a resurgence of bound labor and an expansion of landed independence. See Gordon S. Wood, The
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Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991); Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Dependency still permeated society at all levels of both societies. 50. In addition to the prevalence of long-term apprenticeships, agricultural workers continued to be employed on the basis of one-year contracts. Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Wage work itself was often conceived of as a form of dependency. See, for example, Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (New York: Norton, 1961). For a concise summary of the “modern” character of the English economy, which also discusses the persistence of dependency, see Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 30- 35, 102-113. 51. For the mainland as essentially yeoman, see Kulikoff,From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers. For the colonies’ reliance on unfree labor, see Richard S. Dunn, “Servants and Slaves” and McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, chapter 11. Cathy Matson recently noted, “most labor in colonial America was unfree to some degree.” Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America, 30. In her recent study, Shammas’ estimates that dependents constituted 80 percent of the population of the thirteen colonies on the eve of the revolution were, where it was actually more ubiquitous than in Britain. Given the relative scarcity of yeomen and artisans in the West Indies, the proportion of dependents there likely surpassed that of the mainland. A History of Household Government in America, 32, 37. 52. Galenson developed the thesis that the Atlantic passage engendered servitude’s institutional terms. White Servitude in Colonial America, 6-10, 28-30. 53. See Morgan, Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America, 20. 54. Galenson identified servants-in-husbandry as the English precursor of servitude. White Servitude in Colonial America. In contrast, Horn points to pauper apprenticeship. Adapting to a New World. 55. Masters used their control of the assemblies and courts to shift the balance of law against not just servants but also men who sold them. Pagan argues that because planters were foremost concerned with purchasing laborers (over other forms of property), Virginia law became pro-buyer, giving planters greater legal recourse. Pagan views this change as a reasonable response to the difficulty of determining the quality of human capital (as in the case of disease or pregnancy). See his, Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, chaps. 5, 7.
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56. It should also be noted that the studies of terms did not consider those servants who arrived without contracts and served by “custom of the country.” These servants were numerous and tended to be younger and thus serve much longer terms. Horn, Adapting to a New World, 269. 57. In their quantitative studies of servant registrations for the all the colonies, Galenson and Grubb have provided evidence that the servant trade constituted an efficient market in which the relatively long but varied terms of service consistently and closely corresponded to variations in costs and the value of the individual servants. Horn has cast doubt on the corollary of this efficient market thesis—the assumption that servants negotiated their terms and destinations. Adapting to a New World, 65-69. 58. Richard Frethorne, Letters, 1629, in The Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. Susan Kingsburg (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), 4:58-62. 59. The Journal of John Harrower: An Indentured Servant in the Colony of Virginia, 1773-1776, ed. Edward Miles Riley (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg, 1963). 60. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America, 6-10, 28-30. 61. Even slavery accommodated some combination of incentives and punishments as managerial strategies. See, for example, Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 155-158. 62. Pagan traces the web of financial and familial ties that bound magistrates together and highlighted the broader confluence of interests between the courts and the propertied household heads of one Virginia county in the seventeenth century. However, Pagan strenuously resists any suggestion that the law was simply a tool of gentry interests. Anne Orthwood’s Bastard, 117. 63. Some studies have emphasized the coercive elements of the law. Theodore W. Allen examined prosecutions of servants in Virginia county courts for bearing children out of wedlock and for running away between 1634 and 1710. He did not examine favorable outcomes for servants. The Invention of the White Race. Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1997), 126, 131. Other studies of labor law have been limited to statutes, rather than examining court proceedings and outcomes. See Robert Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English & American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill:
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University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 64. Christine Daniels recently suggested that servitude was less onerous than assumed. Servants, she argues, had access to the British “jurisprudential tradition” through the right to petition and that this legal recourse fundamentally qualified masters’ authority. “‘Liberty to Complaine’: Servant Petitions in Maryland, 1652-1797,” in The Many Legalities of Early America, ed. Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 219-249. Tomlins’ study is more thorough and his claims more qualified. He looked at a larger sample of outcomes on a wider variety of cases in three counties across the mainland colonies. “Early British America, 1585-1830.” Statutes bearing on servants have been examined for the West Indies, but there are no such careful studies of court proceedings there. 65. Tomlins’ findings on the Chesapeake, for example, are based on eighty cases for which the outcomes are known. Moreover, he does not seek to completely upend our understanding of servants as subject more than most to criminal discipline. The sample of court decisions Daniels analyzes does not support her sweeping claims. The very small numbers of complaints about ill usage is striking and may point to forces precluding servants from petitioning magistrates. Favorable decisions on term length and freedom dues would not have undermined masters’ authority in the same way that decisions on usage would have. 66. Carole Shammas has recently made this point. See A History of Household Government in America, 37. 67. Richard B. Morris includes many such examples in his account of colonial labor and the law. See, for example, a mistress who killed her servant by chopping off his toes. Government and Labor in Early America (New York: Harper & Row, 1946), 472. In his study of Barbados, Newman has argued that there is little evidence of masters being punished for abuse of servants, even in cases of murder. For Newman, colonial law was an extension of planters’ search for “mastery.” A New World of Labor, 94-95. 68. Peter Williamson, a servant in Pennsylvania, suggested as much when he wrote, “nor dare the servant, when he is thus chastised, presume to vindicate himself, for fear of giving a new offence to this unrelenting tyrant, whose humour must be indulged, even at the expence of strokes and blows.” See his, French and Indian cruelty (York: N. Nickson, 1757), 131. 69. Those in less established areas or on isolated farms and plantations presumably had less access to courts.
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70. Such terms often served to exacerbate hazards like climate and disease that all migrants might face. See David Cressy for concerns about the passage and the separation from kin and community among a largely free group of migrants. Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 71. For an example of a deferential plea, see Ronald Hoffman,Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 258. For an example of a servant rebellion that helped topple a regime, see Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (New York: Verso, 1997), 317. 72. The important distinction made betweengrande and petit marronnage that has been identified among slaves applies to servants as well. See John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, Second Edition (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1998), 274-292. 73. This formulation is based on Berlin’s description of the master and slave struggle. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 3003), 3-5. 74. Here, as elsewhere, my understanding of white servitude is shaped by slave studies. In his study of sugar districts of northeastern Brazil, Stuart Schwartz suggests that the term “slave” is most meaningful in terms of civil status, and that slavery varied greatly as a labor form, often overlapped with other forms. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, 251- 254. Berlin has argued that civil status is just the starting point for the study of slaves and that many factors influenced the varied experience of slavery, including perhaps especially the nature of different work regimes. See, for example, his introduction with Philip Morgan to Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, eds. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). 75. In the seventeenth century, on Robert Cole’s relatively modest farm, servants shared lodgings, food and tasks with their master; enjoyed decent clothing and medical care; and likely faced little “immoderate correction.” Lois Green Carr, Russell R. Menard, Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991), 111. It should be noted that the last conclusion about discipline was the authors’ inference. In the eighteenth century, the Carrolls family servants were frequently whipped and collared
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and thus generally treated “as harshly in terms of punishment” as their slaves. Ronald Hoffman,Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland, 258. 76. See, for example, Matthew Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude in the British Atlantic, 1640 to 1780” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2005), 275. 77. Such comparisons have been more pronounced in less scholarly work. See, for example, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007). More rigorous studies have made the comparison without entirely equating slaves and servants. Hilary Beckles, for example, suggests that servitude was a form of proto-slavery. White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados. 78. See, for example, Salinger’s study of Pennsylvania, “To Serve Well and Faithfully,” 25-28. In his study of the Chesapeake, Horn suggests that servitude was more onerous than other traditional forms of labor, but he objects to Beckles use of the term “proto-slavery.” Adapting to a New World, 274. Daniels argues that servitude was a relatively benign extension of apprenticeship. See her, “’Liberty to Complaine.’” 79. This conclusion is strengthened by Tomlins’ work that more clearly distinguishes the formal status of servants and free workers. Robert Steinfeld argued that free workers, like servants, were subject to criminal discipline in the colonies. The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relations in English & American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). But Tomlins has demonstrated that actual cases of this practice were extremely rare. “Early British America, 1585-1830.” 80. For a survey of this literature, see Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude in the British Atlantic.” 81. Allan Kulikoff,From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, 46. 82. “Paternalism” here is foremost understood as an ideology revealed in print culture, though it extended in contested forms to labor relations. See, for example, servants referring to their households as “families” or to servitude as wrenching apart families. Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude,” 50, 299. My use of paternalism is informed by labor and slave studies. For classic formulations, see E.P. Thompson,Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991) and Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordon Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974). Paternalism as used here corresponds in ways to Philip Morgan’s “patriarchalism,” rather than the
- 80 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 paternalism that he argues emerged in planter culture in the second half of the eighteenth-century Southern mainland. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 261-284. 83. For a classic statement of early modern England as a society of households, see Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965). The authoritative account of households in North America is Shammas’ A History of Household Government in America. Elizabeth Fox- Genovese put the agrarian household at the center of her account of slavery in the Old South. See her, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Because colonial societies were “underinstitutionalized,” to use Morgan’s expression, bound laborers faced their masters in a more direct relationship than did most laborers in Europe. Slave Counterpoint, 275. 84. John Hammond, Leah and Rachel, or, The Two Fruitfull Sisters Virginia and Mary-land in Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633-1684, ed. Clayton Colman Hall (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 292. 85. George Alsop, for example, spoke to the hardships attending freedom from servitude. He wrote of his experience in Maryland, “Liberty without money is like a man opprest with the gout, every step he puts forward puts him to pain.” George Alsop, A Character of the Province of Maryland (London, 1666). 86. I am arguing here that dominant ideas about labor and authority are revealed in the selectivity of indignation and sympathy. David Brion Davis famously interpreted the selective arguments of abolitionist thought as revealing underlying ideological interests. See his, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966). Here I am similarly suggesting that writers’ silence on dependency and on the bondage of the poor and laborers reveal normative assumptions. For a critical response to Davis’ methods, see Thomas Haskell inThe Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 87. The critical tenor of the dominant public discourse on servants represents a corrective to facile accounts of colonization as the expansion of English liberties or as the pursuit of happiness. Both the traffic in servants and their status in the plantations raised concerns about the vigor and limits of English liberties in America. For careful scholarship that privilege expanding liberty, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and Greene, Pursuits of Happiness.
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88. The profound sense of loss at the separation from family and friends may have been more salient than historians have realized. Ubiquitous in literary accounts, such sentiments are common in historical records as well. See Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude,” 16. Ekirch noted the frequency with which families tried to prevent relations from being transported to America. Ekirch, Bound for America, 65-69. 89. While some promoters addressed specific charges and even specific critics explicitly, they often instead addressed the onerous reputation of servitude obliquely, through what Michael Warner has called a “ghost” discourse. See his, “What’s Colonial about Colonial America,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 58. 90. The term is used by Horn. Adapting to the New World, 268. Teresa Michals has argued regarding late-eighteenth-century anti-slavery thought that both popular expectations and the common law sanctioned various forms of dependent labor, but censured the treatment of workers as commercial property. “‘That Sole and Despotic Dominion’: Slaves, Wives, and Game in Blackstone’s Commentaries,” Eighteenth Century Studies (Winter, 1993-1994): 195-216. 91. Recruitment was often cast as entailing force and deception, but authors occasionally pointed to the limited options of some servants that blurred the line between coercion and voluntarism. Spiriting served as a synecdoche for the institution as a whole. It is also not surprising that the English reading public might be most interested in the dimension of servitude that was most immediate. The audience for these accounts understood that illicit recruitment would result in an undesirable condition, and the significance of recruitment was heightened by the perception of servitude as a distant, rigorous, and irreversible condition. Thus, as the common expression “sold into slavery,” suggests, the traffic and term of servitude were coupled, if at times implicitly. Another explanation for the salience of spiriting in the historical and imaginative accounts of the day is that it was the most likely way that someone of the middling or upper class might become a servant. 92. Such arguments anticipated abolitionist sentiment. Nicholas Hudson demonstrated that a critique of slavery as an unbridled commerce had appeal among both plebeians and elite, with conservatives viewing it as dubious mercantile accumulation. “‘Britons Never Will be Slaves’: National Myth, Conservatism, and the Beginnings of British Antislavery,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 34:4 (2001): 559-576.
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93. For contrasts to servants-in-husbandry and apprentices, see Horn, Adapting to a New World, 254. 94. Marcellus Rivers, Englands slavery, or Barbados merchandize (London, 1659), 17. 95. Daniel Defoe, The History and Remarkable Life of the Truly Honourable Col. Jacque (London, 1723). 96. Thomas Hellier,The Vain Prodigal Life (London, 1680), 11. 97. Peter Williamson, French and Indian Cruelty (York, 1757). 98. The Memorial of William Lauder(London, 1718). 99. John Hammond, Leah and Rachel, 285. 100. Charles Leslie, A New History of Jamaica (London, 1740). 101. The issue is cogently formulated in Stanley Engerman’s introduction to his Terms of Labor. 102. David Eltis argues that the boundaries of a moral community that precluded slavery were expanding in conjunction with capitalism. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For another view, see Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery, 360-361. 103. For example, charges that American servants were subjected to unchristian usage were ubiquitous in the first decades of colonization, but faded toward the turn of the eighteenth century with the decline of religious fervor and conflict in the British Isles. A seventeenth-century discourse of English liberties peaked soon after 1688 in part in response to the prolonged military and commercial rivalry with France. In the long eighteenth century critics often argued that servitude cast doubt on the vigor and extent of British liberties. For a fuller discussion of this evolution, see Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude.” 104. Winthrop Jordon wrote the classic account of Old World conceptions of color as informing the emergence of racism. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1968). 105. Joyce Chaplin, “Race,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, eds. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 154. 106. Hillary Beckles, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, Edmund S. Morgan, Kathleen M. Brown, and Susan D. Amussen have all argued for such a transition in various parts of the British Atlantic world. Beckles, Rediker and Linebaugh, and Amussen all suggest that the introduction of slaves and the development of a racial ideology in West Indies had ameliorated
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the condition of servants and resolved the problem for elites of class tensions among whites by 1660. Morgan and Brown made a similar claim for the Chesapeake in the decades following Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. Beckles, “English Parliamentary Debate on ‘White Slavery’ in Barbados, 1659,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 36 (1982): 344-53; Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commmoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 107. See, for example, Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude,” 131. 108. New York Independent Gazette (New York, 1786). It is significant that the issue clearly identified in this letter is the trade in servants, rather than other dimensions of servants’ status, circumstances, and labor. 109. Roxanne Wheeler argues that religion, culture, and civility were the dominant idioms used by Europeans to write about Africans in the Atlantic world in the 1700s. Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 110. Authors used the term to highlight political persecution, an extreme state of dependency, or the reduction of men to chattel, all tropes that predated the appearance of the Atlantic institution. See, for example, Moses I. Finely, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. 111. Contrast the above New York Independent Gazette letter with an anonymous broadside that was also informed by revolutionary rhetoric but which cast slaves and servants in sympathetic terms. Observations on the slaves and indented servants, inlisted in the army of the United States (Philadelphia, 1777). 112. Not all scholars agree that the introduction of slavery and the emergence of race elevated whites in ideological and material terms. For example, in his sweeping exploration of the emergence of American slavery, Robin Blackburn argues that the introduction of slaves to the plantations did little to improve the conditions of servants and poor whites. The Making of New World Slavery, 358-9. For examples of servants enjoying privileges
- 84 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 denied to slaves, see Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, chap. 3. 113. Keith Wrightson identifies various criteria for determining rank in the 1600s. “The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches,” in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure, eds. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, Keith Wrightson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 177-202. For models of social class in the eighteenth century, see Peter King’s “Edward Thompson’s contribution to Eighteenth- Century Studies: The Patrician-Plebeian Model Re-examined,”Social History 21:2 (May 1996). Critics have argued that Thompson’s “bipolar” model left out the middling classes. See, for example, Paul Langford,A Polite and Commercial People, England 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 114. Francois Furstenberg’s discussion of a discourse of virtue is suggestive here. He finds that in the revolutionary era, slaves were viewed as lacking honor for having allowing themselves to be subjected to such an abject condition. “Beyond Slavery and Freedom: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 4 (March, 2003): 1295-1330. 115. See Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude” and A. Roger Ekirch, Birthright: The True Story that Inspired Kidnapped (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). Such victims were often able to secure relatively favorable terms and conditions or even their freedom. Such selective public interest and sympathy was noted for African “noble slaves” in eighteenth-century Britain in Randy Sparks’ Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004), 119-120. 116. The substance of a letter from one of the prisoners who were transported from Liverpool to the West-Indies (London, 1716), 3. The letter is discussed in Pursell, “Changing Conceptions of Servitude,” 189-194. 117. Dryden, The Mistaken Husband (London, 1675). 118. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, chap. 3. 119. Anon., The Fortunate Transport (London, 1748), 43.
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Bundles, Passes, and Stolen Watches: Interpreting the Role of Material Culture in Escape Matthew C. Greer Abstract Throughout the history of slavery in the Americas, African Americans resisted their bondage by attempting to escape it, usually through running away. Advertisements placed in local newspapers in order to return these bondspeople to their owners have tremendously aided our ability to understand the African American past. While the conditions surrounding these enslaved runaways were often highly individualistic, several themes, such as the strategies used in escape, unify the stories of these “plantation rebels.” A recent compiling of runaway slave advertisements from Mississippi identified 225 individual who materially equipped themselves with items ranging from spare clothes to travel passes while preparing for their escape. This article will interpret the strategies of mobility, physical survival, and social survival that escapees could utilize as a result of the objects that they took with them, and which can aid in our understanding of the experience of slave escape in the antebellum South.
On August 6, 1830, officials in Adams County, Mississippi, incarcerated Abraham Moore as he was in the process of escaping his enslavement. Listed amongst his personal effects were “sundry articles of clothing tied up in a bundle.”1 Five years later, George, another escapee, faced a similar fate in Simpson County, Mississippi, when a forged free pass he had been using to aid his movements southward from Yazoo County failed to pass inspection.2 In the spring of 1859 Catherine, an enslaved domestic laborer, absconded from the suburbs of Natchez with several items of jewelry belonging to her mistress, including “a lady’s Gold Watch [sic], enameled in green… [and] having a small landscape” etched upon it.3 While each of these individuals attempted to flee the horrors of slavery, vast differences exist in the specifics of their unique experiences of escape, just as each had highly individualized experiences while held in bondage. However, within these individual narratives, unifying themes exist,
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allowing scholars to interpret various aspects of the African American past.4 In these examples, all three individuals used material culture to aid in their bid for freedom: Abraham through using a container to carry the “sundry articles” of clothing he wanted to take with him, George in using a free pass to move though the Pine Hills of Mississippi, and Catherine in absconding with her mistress’s valuable jewelry. An examination of a recent compiling of runaway slave advertisements from twenty-five Mississippi newspapers identified a cohort of 225 individual escapees who equipped themselves with physical objects in order to aid their efforts. From these snapshots of African American life, three broad strategies for the use of material culture in escape attempts present themselves, which help to expand our understanding of enslaved escape in Mississippi, and across the antebellum South. These strategies include the use of things (including animals) to aid in moving across the landscape, using objects in order to physically survive while on the run, and the display of fine clothing and jewelry to enter into new social networks. Material culture extends into every aspect of daily life, ranging from the use of simple tools, to complex expressions of identity. Only escapees who appeared to have materially equipped themselves for their endeavor were selected for analysis, rather than attempting to interpret items which may have been taken by the escapees simply out of habit, and not as part of any greater strategy of escape. This includes personal effects, such as eye glasses, rings, and combs worn in the hair on a regular basis, as well as clothing worn during escape, because it is impossible to determine if escapees directly selected the clothing for their escape, or indirectly selected it through coincidence. Items forced upon bondspeople by plantation managers, such as leg irons, were not included either, as escapees did not choose to equip themselves with these instruments of oppression. When both slave owners and jailers penned runaway advertisements, their primary goal was to list details needed to facilitate the identification, and subsequent return, of the individual(s) in question. Therefore, when authors noted objects in their accounts, they did so with the sole intention of these items serving as identifiers, and as such, there is an emphasis on the clothing worn by the escapees, as these, in conjunction with physical appearance, would have been the most highly visible attributes an author could describe. This trend not only manifests itself in the overall dataset, with the vast majority of escapees listed with descriptions of their clothing, but also extends into the cohort used for this research; with two thirds of the cohort having the spare clothing they escaped with listed in the advertisements. It is possible
- 88 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 that escapees possessed a range of smaller, non-diagnostic, items which the authors did not mention, or may not have even been aware of, and therefore are not reflected in these advertisements. While these biases shape the way in which we interpret the role of material culture in escape, they do not discourage such an endeavor, as African Americans individuals intentionally selected the items included in this research, and incorporated them into their strategies of escape.
Strategies of Mobility In order to successfully move through Mississippi towards their intended destination, escapees used a variety of strategies involving equipped material culture. Broadly defined, these strategies fall into two main categories; the ability to move across the landscape, and the ability to pass inspection by Euro-Americans they encountered during these movements. Fifteen advertisements identified forty-one individuals using boats to aide in their escape. This does not include bondspeople who fled on steamboats, as the escapees did not equip themselves with those vehicles. Of the identifiable vessels, four individuals used canoes, and thirty-five escaped on flat boats or skiffs. Approximately half of the escape attempts using boats involved multiple individuals, which differs dramatically from the dataset as a whole, which only saw approximately 20 percent of escape attempts containing multiple individuals. This indicates that while lone individuals did use boats in their attempted escapes, vessels could play a significant role in collaborative flights. One instance, occurring in 1835, clearly demonstrates the role of boats in group escapes. On the night of September 20, seven escapees from the plantation of James Surgette met with three individuals from the same plantation who had left “several weeks before,” and an additional three African Americans from Natchez, to jointly cross the Mississippi River.5 Although the author of the advertisement did not relate any specifics of their crossing, this conglomeration of escapees speaks to the importance that boats could have in facilitating larger groups escaping bondage, and suggests the level of organization and planning that could exist in these ventures. However, water vessels were not the only source of transportation used in escape, as twenty-three African Americans fled on horseback. All but two of these attempts listed a single escapee, and one of these two the exceptions was group of four individuals sharing a single pony.6 This group was comprised of three men and a twenty-year-old-woman, who was the only female advertised as having used a horse in her escape. If we exclude this
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contingent as an outlier, as all four could not have ridden one horse, then fleeing slavery via horseback becomes an exclusively male endeavor generally conducted by a lone individual, and potentially was an extension of personal mobility strategies seen in slavery. Bondsmen enjoyed significantly greater mobility than their female counterparts across the antebellum South, despite restrictions imposed by the plantocracy.7 One of the ways which men were able to move across the landscape was through using horses, generally owned by either themselves or members of their kin network, particularly when visiting family members on neighboring plantations.8 This use of horses to circumvent mobility restrictions appears to have extended to escape as well, as bondsmen seeking to escape could simply ride off the plantation, similar to the way they could have done countless times before. Meanwhile, instances of escapees driving wagons and drays only occurred once in the dataset, despite bondsmen commonly driving these while conducting sanctioned business,9 potentially because these vehicles would have been restricted to traveling on roads, increasing their chance of detection. Horses, however, could navigate a variety of terrains, increasing an escapee’s chance of avoiding any unwanted attention. This is not to imply that escaping on horseback, or for that matter in boats, were especially safe strategies, as individuals using both of these carried the inherent risk of notice and capture. One way that escapees mitigated this risk was by carrying passes in order to legitimize their travel. The advertisements indicate eight individuals as having a free pass in their possession, while the plantation managers suspected an additional twenty- three individuals of obtaining these documents. All of the individuals were males, with the exception of Flora, a thirty-nine-year-old woman. The preponderance of men with passes appears to be a further extension of the gendered inequality of mobility seen in slavery.10 Even amongst men, it does not appear that free passes were easy to obtain, as only eight individuals definitively possessed these documents. Group composition within the advertisements containing free passes further demonstrates this. Three of these eight African Americans escaped in groups, with the sizes ranging from two to five individuals. Amongst these escapees, only one individual per group possessed papers, suggesting that the others could not obtain these documents. In fact, while obtaining passes could require connections to people with the skill to forge a free pass, the acquisition of these papers could lead to strife within the African American community. Joe, in order to aid his escape in June 1837, stole a pass from Ben Brown, a freedman, resulting in the subsequent incarceration of Brown.11 The
- 90 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 remaining two individuals in Joe’s group were unsuccessful at acquiring passes, again demonstrating the elusive nature of the useful documents to both male and female escapees. While some escapees used passes to legitimize their presence on the landscape, others went to lengths to blend into the surrounding social fabric to avoid detection. One way to do this involved the use of clothing as a disguise, a technique six escapees adopted. Two of these individuals wore clothing of the opposite gender in order to disguise themselves, including Luke, who, during his trial for the murder of Samuel S. Smith in 1834, reportedly ran “off in women’s clothes.”12 Had the author of this advertisement not noted this important detail, Luke may have been able to pass unnoticed by the members of the general public, who would have been on the lookout for a black male. While some escapees used gendered clothing to disguise themselves, others attempted to pass “in the character of an Indian,”13 in order to avoid notice while on the run, as four individuals in the dataset indicate. This disguise involved the use of clothing, similar to the techniques of masking the gender of an escapee. However, when attempting to pass themselves off as Native American, African Americans were faced with the added difficulty that, given the generic phenotypic differences between these two groups, their “hair [would] be sufficient [for Euro-Americans] to detect” escapees.14 In order to overcome this, three of the four African Americans using this disguise wore horse hair wigs or hair caps in order to improve the likelihood of passing themselves off as a Native American, and thereby, of being able to pass unmolested while traveling towards freedom.
Strategies of Physical Survival While the ability to move across the landscape was integral to escape, individuals on the run also needed to be able to physically survive during these endeavors in order to reach their intended goal. While skills and knowledge learned in their daily life could afford African Americans the ability to survive on the run, individuals often needed objects to aid their survival, such as firearms, mosquito bars, and winter apparel. Seven individuals carried guns with them in their escape, all of whom were male. These weapons may have played one of two roles in escape strategies. First, escapees could provide food for themselves by hunting. Archaeologists and historians have recovered numerous indications that hunting with firearms was a longstanding tradition within enslaved communities, and as such, the use of guns in escape may be an extension
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of this practice. Alternatively, guns could also serve as physical protection against any potential human threats encountered by an escapee. Of course, such distinctions may not have existed in the minds of the escapees, with firearms taken in order to fulfill both needs. However, in one case, the role of firearms solely for physical protection, rather than a potential hunting tool, is evident. In the fall of 1855, authorities captured a middle aged escapee named William in Jefferson County, Mississippi, despite his possession of “a fine Colts [sic] repeater.”15 As this pistol would have been of limited use in hunting, we can safely assume that William had intentionally armed himself in order to deal with the slave patrols he expected to encounter. However, there is no indication that he used his revolver in the event of his capture, indicating that the strategies for which escapees equipped themselves did not always work out in practice. Escapees often took a variety of routes in their bid for freedom, some of which could involve crossing swampland, and other low-lying areas. For escapees traveling in such areas, challenges unique to local environmental conditions, such as mosquitos, required consideration. One of the ways in which escapees equipped themselves for this issue was carrying mosquito bars, known today as mosquito nets, as four escapees in the cohort demonstrate. All of these individuals were traveling in the delta and low-lying areas associated with the Mississippi River during the warmer months of the year, a place and time when mosquitos would have been at their worst. Whether escapees carried this netting along to prevent mosquito borne diseases, or simply to alleviate the inevitable suffering induced by the swarms of biting insects, mosquito bars do appear to indicate a material consideration of specific environmental conditions. Other environmental conditions appear to have been more ubiquitous throughout Mississippi. While the state has relatively mild winters, cold weather was a factor which, when ignored, could be dangerous. In the winter of 1855, the Sheriff of Holmes County advertised a recently incarcerated escapee, named George, who had suffered frostbite due to a lack of clothing prior to his capture.16 Escapees could avoid this fate by taking extra clothing and blankets with them. However, determining whether escapees carried blankets or extra clothing intentionally as part of a cold weather survival strategy, or for some other purpose can be difficult. In the case of blankets, the majority of noted instances occurred in the colder months of the year, and in the three identified cases occurring outside of these months, the escapees equipped themselves with numerous other items as well, suggesting that the blankets were not included as part of a specific strategy. This suggests
- 92 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 that escapees took blankets with themselves to stay warm during the winter. When looking at equipped clothing, it is not possible to make similar determinations based off articles escapees carried away with themselves, given generically ambiguous descriptions in the advertisements. However, there were numerous instances of extra shirts, coats, and pants worn by individuals, almost all of which occur in the winter, which likely were attempts by escapees to prevent the frost-bitten fate of George.
Strategies of Social Survival Running away is an act which required strategies to take African Americans out of the society that surrounded them. Individuals and groups tried to pass safely through the landscape, and escapees had to confront the natural elements of Mississippi. While these are important aspects of escape, it is imperative that we bear in mind the fact that even when an individual left their own community behind, they would still need to interact with new social networks during, and after, their escape; particularly those networks which existed amongst other African Americans. While jailers and plantation managers did acknowledge the presence of preexisting social connections individuals may have used in their escape, an interpretation of the recorded material culture can provide insights into the ways in which escapees entered into new social networks. One way escapees did this was through the use of fine clothing and jewelry, as well as trade wares, as cost signaling devices. Cost signaling is a theoretical perspective in which an individual uses public displays, such as wearing expensive clothing items, or other finery (cost signaling devices), in order to signal their value in social and economic relationships to other individuals, or receivers.17 Such a strategy would be best employed in situations where there are larger populations, such as urban areas, in order to maximize the amount of receivers seeing the signaling device, as well as in situations where the majority of the population did not already know the signaler, as receivers who already knew the signaler would not be swayed such exterior displays.18 Considering these stipulations, cost signaling is a strategy which would be valuable to escapees, given the large amount of potential new receivers they might encounter, especially in urban areas. Such a perspective also allows clothing, especially fine clothing, to take on a more active role in escape than had been previously offered in suggestions that escapees used these articles to blend into their surroundings, or carried them as potential trade goods for sale while on the run.19 Obtaining a firm count on the number of escapees who equipped themselves with fine clothing to use as cost signaling devices is problematic
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due to a general lack of depth in the descriptions of equipped clothing. However when an escapee took with them articles such as “a variety of fine clothing,” “a very genteel suit of clothes,” or “a blue cloth coat [with] gilt buttons,” the presence of fine clothing can be determined.20 A total of eighteen individuals carried clothing identifiable as being “fine,” although, given the aforementioned difficulties, there is a high likelihood that more escapees did so as well. Additionally, individuals may have intentionally equipped themselves with fine clothing by wearing it, rather than carrying, during their escapes, and therefore did not meet the requirements for this cohort. While identifying clothing as cost signaling devices can be problematic, jewelry and watches provide more concrete evidence for this strategy, as such items are of limited value for other purposes. Nine individuals possessed these items. One of the better examples of the use of these items comes from the description of William, the pistol toting escapee mentioned above. In addition to wearing cashmere pants, he openly displayed a silver watch on a gold chain, and “four or five gold breastpins”21; clearly cost signaling devices which would have spoken loudly to potential receivers. The importance of cost signaling devices is evident when compared to two other items which escapees had the potential of using to interact with new social networks; work tools and musical instruments, as both of these would allow escapees possessing them to signal their skills to make connections. However, in the entire cohort, there were only two escapees who took work tools,22 both used for woodworking, while three individuals carried violins, despite the presence of thirty escapees listed as carpenters and fifteen listed as violinists in the dataset. It is possible that the general lack of these items relates to logistical decisions escapees made when planning their flight or, to a lack of access to work tools while preparing for their endeavors. However, the ability of bondspeople to equip themselves for escapee, seen throughout this paper, suggests that other factors were involved in this the fact that only 15 percent of individuals with a known expertise in woodworking and the violin did not chose to take the tools which could market these skills to new social networks. If it was more important for an African American to broadcast his or her abilities by implying their value in social or economic relationships through the display of fine clothing, and other cost signaling devices, then an escapee would not have had the need to carry tools while on the run; especially if the implements they needed could be easily acquired, or supplied by others in their new social network.
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While carrying tools may not have aided attempts to enter into new social networks, escaping with trade wares does appear to have allowed escapees the opportunity to do so. John Robinson, when leaving Lowndes County in 1835, took with him trade wares, which he “peddled through the Chickasaw nation” while on his way to Memphis,23 which implies that he was able to successfully interact with new social networks he encountered due to his possession of these wares. While scholars do not typically considered trade wares as cost signaling devices, their economic value could have fostered social relationships, even if these only existed for the short amount of time associated with their sale. * * * While most escapees do not appear to have equipped themselves for their flight, material culture could play an integral part in the strategies of escape implemented by those who did take items. These “bundles, passes, and stolen watches” allowed individuals to travel and survive while running towards freedom, and aided escapees to establish themselves in new social networks along the way.
Notes: 1. The Natchez, 7August 1830. The dataset utilized for this research is comprised of 456 individuals identified in 344 runaway advertisements recently compiled by the Documenting Runaway Slaves project. See Douglas B. Chambers and Max Grivno, eds., “Mississippi Runaway Slaves: 1800-1860” (2013), Documenting Runaway Slaves, Paper 1, available online at http:// aquila.usm.edu/drs/1/. All subsequent citation will be by the paper name and the date the advertisement ran. 2. The Mississippian, 5 June 1835. 3. Mississippi Free Trader, 11 April 1859. 4. See John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweinger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 5. The Vicksburg Register, 22 October 1835. The use of a boat is not specifically stated, but it is highly unlikely that these individuals would have swam across the river, so the usage of a boat can safely be implied. 6. Port Gibson Correspondent, 30 August 1822. 7. Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
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8. Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolks: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 103. 9. Ibid., 64, 81-82. 10. The Ariel, 18 October 1828. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 28-30. 11. Southern Argus, 27 June 1837. 12. The Vicksburg Register, 8 January 1834. Luke is listed as being “heavily bearded,” a hindrance to his disguise which the author of the advertisement appears to not have been concerned with. The available advertisements do not indicate that Luke was captured in Mississippi, suggesting that his disguise may have succeeded. See Franklin and Schweinger, Runaway Slaves, 223, for a similar example. 13. The Vicksburg Register, 3 November 1836. 14. Liberty Advocate, 4 April 1839. 15. Fayette Watch Tower, 7 December 1855. 16. Mississippian State Gazette, 28 February 1855. The advertisement suggested that he was not clothed at all. 17. Jillian E. Galle, “Cost Signaling and Gendered Social Strategies Among Slaves in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake: An Archaeological Perspective,” American Antiquity 75, no. 1 (2010): 21. 18. Ibid., 22, 24-25, 37. 19. Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 222-223. Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Clothing and African-American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Past and Present 148 (1995): 160 20. The Mississippian, 19 April 1834. The Mississippian, 27 May 1836. The Mississippi State Gazette, 27 November 1824. 21. Fayette Watch Tower, 7 December 1855. 22. In one of these instances, two escapees are mutually listed with a shared carpenter’s hatchet. The Vicksburg Register, 26 June 1834. An additional escapee walked off “carrying an axe,” but this instance was not included, as it is not possible to determine if this tool was taken expediently or intentionally. The Vicksburg Register, 28 June 1832. 23. The Vicksburg Register, 24 December 1835. Robinson also wore earrings, which may have served a cost signaling device. During his capture, he insisted he was a free man, however, if this claim was true, then it would not discount his use of trade wares to enter into new social networks while on the move.
- 96 - Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South Spring/Summer 2014 • 21(1): 97 - 99 Book Review
A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation as You Go. Beckwith, David W. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 296 pages.
Reviewed by Thomas Aiello Valdosta State University
ThoughBrown v. Board of Education happened in 1954, through vari- ous maneuvers and a reliance on local option politics, many Mississippi school districts had yet to integrate by 1969. In the Delta community of Leland, Mississippi, the school superintendent sought to cushion the blow of deseg- regated schools by integrating the teaching staff first. To that end, he hired a recently graduated white business major from Ole Miss to teach history to students at the district’s black school. David W. Beckwith was massively un- qualified for the job. It was, the account claims, his willingness to take the job that was his principal qualification, though the author provides no evidence that the district made any concerted effort to find actually qualified teachers for the position. So begins Beckwith’s memoir, A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation as You Go. He goes on to explain that Leland was under a federal court order to desegregate, and that the hiring of white teachers for the district’s black school was a strategy to delay integration while still qualify- ing for federal funding. Still, it got him a job, and Beckwith’s first days with the faculty produced the telling series of revelations expected of an educated white southerner meeting educated black southerners for the first time. The problem with Beckwith’s account is that the revelations obviously only went so far. Beckwith adds dialog to his memoir for dramatic effect, which is prob- lematic because of the narrative’s absolute reliance on it and its caricatured depiction of black student speech. Though it is hard for a reader to believe that any resident of Leland, Mississippi was without a relatively significant accent, only the black students are depicted as speaking in dialect. This kind of presentation ultimately causes broader problems with the manuscript. Beckwith begins the school year with the unsurprising prob-
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lems of poor discipline and academic performance, but he begins to make an impact on the students and create a positive rapport. His manuscript is self-serving, as are all memoirs, but when combined with the dialect problems, A New Day in the Delta becomes uncomfortably paternalistic. In an effort to broaden the students’ horizons, for example, Beckwith decides to require the parents of each of his students to provide seventy-five cents for a subscription to Junior Scholastic Magazine because he had found it rewarding when he was a student. Some of the parents did not provide the money, either because they expected schoolbooks to be provided by the state or because they couldn’t afford the excess whims of their children’s teacher. Beckwith explains that he paid for the subscriptions himself, and after wrestling with whether or not to provide them to students who never provided seventy-five cents, he decides to give magazines to all of his students. It was a nice gesture from Beckwith, but at the same time, the notion of a white man deciding what’s best for black students based solely on memories of his own childhood, then forcing their impoverished parents to pay for his notions or to accept charity in its stead is nothing if not a display of Old South paternalism. Of course, that display can also be incredibly helpful for those at- tempting to understand the racial negotiations that took place between white and black during the integrationist period, the legacy of those negotiations, and the makeup of the white mind in their wake. Ultimately, Beckwith’s would not remain the only white mind in his school. Leland’s delaying tactics were unsuccessful, and the integration of students began in Beckwith’s second semester. The number of violent confrontations increased. The racism of the white students and teachers was evident. The viability of the Leland schools and of Beckwith’s classroom, however, was maintained largely by the sense of inevitability felt by everyone involved. During the students’ integration, Beckwith noticed that the abject poverty of many of the white students matched that of his black charges. At the same time, as locals outside of the school began railing against the integra- tion, the Leland Chapter of the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race blamed “limousine liberals,” who made their fortunes on the backs of white workers and sent their children to private schools, for the new heresy. Beckwith makes clear that poverty played a substantial role in all aspects of both racial tensions and education in Mississippi, driving both the poor performance of students and the poor reactions of adults. The racism of those adults was paramount, as Beckwith found himself threatened both by white supremacist groups and parents of disgruntled and underperforming white students because his previous semester as a white
- 98 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 teacher of solely black classrooms gave them reason to doubt his authenticity and racial loyalty. Racial loyalty dominated within the teaching fraternity, as well. Beckwith and his two white colleagues who began the school year at the black school had joined the black teacher’s union, for example. After the inte- gration, their colleagues unsuccessfully tried to pressure them into switching to the white union, and tensions remained even between white members of the faculty because of the suspicion of divided loyalties. As Beckwith frankly admits, “The racial divide had begun to dominate every facet of school life” (228). That it did. The problems don’t abate asA New Day in the Delta comes to its conclusion. The students and teachers both complete a dif- ficult and traumatic school year, but there are obviously more problems to come. Beckwith would not be in the system to experience them, as his time in the Leland schools helped him decide to attend graduate school. He did, however, return more than thirty years later to relive his year in the system. Beckwith’s epilogue, written after his return, emphasizes the fates of those who had played prominent roles in his brief teaching life. But perhaps more significantly, the school system is still there. Its first difficult integrated year was followed by more difficult years, its problems only exacerbated by the same poverty and closed-society thinking that hurt them in the 1960s, but as of 2003 the system was, if not thriving, at least unflaggingly stable. Overt racism and more subtle paternalism have given way to a general acceptance that allows all of Leland’s students and teachers to benefit from the difficult work of Beckwith and his colleagues, achieving the goal of Brown v. Board of Education. A New Day in the Delta is an interesting and remarkably revealing ac- count of one Mississippi community’s late school desegregation, but it doesn’t do the work of unpacking its content for the reader. It is less an analysis of desegregation, and more a remembered tale of a long-ago participation—a primary source that stops at the water’s edge of objective analysis. That being the case, the narrative explains just as much about the mind of Beckwith and similar reluctant white southerners swept up in a process that they had lost the ability to control. And in that effort, the memoir is entirely successful.
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- 100 - Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South Spring/Summer 2014 • 21(1): 101 - 03 Book Review
Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer. Andrew, Rod. Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 640 pages.
Reviewed by Robert H. Butts Tyler Junior College
Rod Andrew Jr., professor of history at Clemson University, has pro- duced an exhaustive biography of Wade Hampton. Hampton, a South Caro- lina planter, Confederate officer, and redeemer governor has been the subject of several biographies over the past several years. Nevertheless, Andrew uses Hampton’s life to look at how the planter class considered themselves the leaders of southern society. While wealthy planters thought of themselves as a master class, they also felt that they had a responsibility to those southerners that lived beneath them on the social ladder. Planters had a duty to defend and maintain order and safety in their native region. This responsibility extended to the slaves that the masters owned. The master class thought of themselves as parents and thought in theory that they treated their slaves like children. However, the author does point out that profit sometimes overtook parental concerns, and planters like Hampton were not above selling slaves to further their financial status. Hampton’s parental feelings only seemed to extend to slaves that he had personal contact with, like the house slaves that he had under his control. An- drew also notes that Hampton was a committed white supremacist and never doubted the inferiority of African Americans throughout his long life. Andrew describes how Hampton’s feelings of duty and responsibility drove him into volunteering to fight for the Confederacy. Hampton was a conservative when it came to the issue of secession and disunion. The wealthy planter feared that secession would destroy the antebellum southern society that he had known. Hampton feared the radical Fire Eaters and did not take a public stand on secession debates raging in South Carolina. However, after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter and Lincoln called for volunteers to take up the fight against the South, Hampton’s attitude changed. The planter
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joined the Confederate Army and even recruited men to form his own divi- sion. Hampton thought that after Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the Republicans posed a bigger threat to the South than rabid secessionists like the Fire Eaters. Hampton thought it was his duty to defend his native region against those threats. The planter’s hatred of Yankees only deepened as he rose to become Robert E. Lee’s cavalry commander after the death of General J. E. B. Stuart. Hampton also possessed a feeling of chivalry: a code of honor which called on him to defend his home state and native region. Hampton thought that many Union officers, like General William T. Sherman, did not possess this sense of honor. He hated Sherman because the general made war on civil- ians as he marched across Georgia and the Carolinas. Hampton’s disgust with Sherman only deepened after he blamed the Union general for burning his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina. Hampton considered it dishonor- able and below a gentleman to displace the civilian populace. This antagonism did not dissipate over time and only ended with Sherman’s death in 1890. In fact, Hampton hated the Yankees so much that he refused to sur- render. He proposed to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, after the fall of Richmond, that he would accompany the chief executive to Texas and carry on the fight. Hampton returned to his home in South Carolina where his wife dissuaded him from this mission. In 1865, Hampton came to realize that the world that he had known was destroyed. However, his sense of duty and responsibility did not end with his military career. In 1876, Hampton reentered South Carolina politics. Hampton served in the state legislature before the war. Again, a sense of duty and responsibility drove the former Confederate officer to enter the electoral arena. Hampton wanted to deliver his home state from what many white South Carolinians considered to be the scourge of Reconstruction. The state had been governed since the passage of the Reconstruction Acts by carpetbag- gers and scalawags. Many of the old planter class thought that many of these interlopers had misled gullible blacks in supporting and empowering a south- ern Republican party. The Republican Party, which had control of the state government in South Carolina, had run up the public debt and been rife with corruption. The Republican governors had been unable to maintain order within the state without federal assistance. This usually took the form of these governors appealing for federal troops. By 1876, many residents of South Carolina wanted an end to Reconstruction. Hampton agreed to run for governor on the Democratic ticket. He promised to root out corruption and run the state government economically. Additionally, he would preserve law and order without federal interven-
- 102 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 tion. Hampton also promised to respect and protect the rights of African Americans. Hampton won the election of 1876, despite evidence of fraud and physical intimidation of African American voters by whites. After conferring with Hampton, President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the state and ended Reconstruction. Hampton kept his word, and during his administration he did at- tempt to protect the rights of African Americans. He even appointed several African Americans to state offices. However, Hampton never contemplated according blacks social equality. He wanted to build a biracial Democratic Party with blacks subservient to whites. But his promises of racial fairness failed when he left the state to become a United States senator in 1878. Younger, more radical figures came to dominate the Democratic Party; men like Benjamin Tillman, who spewed racial hatred, dominated state politics by the 1890s. Tillman and his followers erected numerous electoral and social barriers that would not be torn down until the civil rights acts of the 1960s. By the time of his death in 1902, Hampton, had become an anachronistic figure. Andrew compiles a well-researched and written tome on Hampton’s life. The author consults numerous primary sources, including the volumi- nous letters that Hampton wrote that were included in the family papers. Andrew presents a well balanced view of Hampton. He criticizes Hampton for his racial views, but paints a portrait of a man devoted to duty and honor. The writer gives the reader a sense of the tremendous personal tragedies that Hampton endured; Hampton buried two wives and also lost a brother and son during the Civil War. The book is aimed at both a general and an academic audience. Civil War scholars will be impressed with Andrew’s in-depth study of Hampton’s military service from First Manassas to Trevillian Station. Additionally, scholars of Reconstruction and southern politics will find Andrew’s discussion of Hampton’s role in the post-bellum electoral arena particularly interesting.
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- 104 - Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South Spring/Summer 2014 • 21(1): 105 - 09 Book Review
The Past Is Not Dead: Essays from theSouthern Quarterly. Chambers, Douglas B., ed., with Kenneth Watson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 211 pages.
Reviewed by Kimberly Fain Houston Community College
In this five part essay collection,The Past Is Not Dead: Essays from the Southern Quarterly, editors Douglas B. Chambers and Kenneth Watson present the last fifty years of southern issues with a national appeal. The essay collection is preceded by a foreword from the first female editor, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw (tenure: 1974-1991), and an introduction from former editor Chambers (tenure: 2005-2011). Each section mirrors the interdisci- plinary subject matter of literary and historical essays from the 1960s-2000s. Section one has three essays reflecting the geo-political and socio-economic concerns of the 1960s, such as the subjects of levees, southern disillusion- ment, and American Federalism. Section two, with four essays from the 1970s, demonstrates the journal’s willingness to confront topical issues such as Dickey’s Underworld, the Social Security Act of 1935, Southern Belles, and the Americanization of Mississippi. Section three contains five essays from the 1980s. Each essay is authored by well-known African American scholars, including Thadious M. Davis and Manning Marable, who discuss the South- ern tradition, southern writers, the Blues as Folk History, W.E.B. DuBois and Black Religion, and gender and patriarchy in Absalom, Absalom!. Section four features four essays from the 1990s on mythic aspects of reality and fantasy, such as allusions in Welty’s works, Margaret Walker Alexander’s Natchez ad- dress on Wright, Faulkner’s fiction and fact, and race and gender in southern novels. Section five has five essays that continue Prenshaw’s determination to transform the Southern Quarterly from a "white" journal to "a journal of the arts in the South" (xxxviii). By the 2000s, the journal chose a “cosmopoli- tan approach to southern studies, specifically including the ‘global South,’ the African Diaspora and the Caribbean” (xxxviii). This review reflects the changing emphasis of the journal. From the rigid Presidential leadership of
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the proud segregationist Dr. William D. McCain (1955-1975) to Aubrey K. Lucas’ (1975-1996) tenure as President during the era of the “New South.” Ultimately, the journal had contributions from national scholars such as Joseph Millichap on Robert Penn Warren (1996), Burton R. Pollin on Poe (1999), and Phillip C. Kolin on Tennessee Williams (1999); and “from well-known southern writers including Cleanth Brooks (1993), Robert Penn Warren (1993), Ellen Douglas (1995), David Madden (1995), and Harry Crews (1998)” (xxxiii). The essays highlighted in this review best represent the Southern transformation occurring in each era, the journal’s broadening perspectives, and the South’s cultural influence within the nation. During Prenshaw’s seventeen year tenure, she was instrumental in transforming the journal into a nationally recognized Southern journal. In her forward, Prenshaw relays her intentions for featuring a diverse depiction of the South through the Southern Quarterly. Under Prenshaw’s editorial supervision, in-house scholars gained more recognition, subscribers increased, and the scholarship of the university was acknowledged beyond the borders of Mississippi. Prenshaw’s forward emphasizes that her great ambition was to encompass “cultural studies of the South, specifically incorporating the visual, musical, architectural, folk, and popular arts with literary and histori- cal study” (x). She encouraged scholars to submit their work, serve as peer reviewers and editors, and to participate in special features of the journal (x). Initially, Southern Miss faculty were the only contributors when Dr. William D. McCain was university president. McCain was “[a]n unapolo- getic southern nationalist, Mississippi Dixiecrat, and arch-supporter of the then-segregated ‘southern way of life’” (xvi). However, Douglas B. Chambers refers to McCain as enigmatic because he “continued his public advocacy of white supremacy and his ideological opposition to integration and civil rights in Mississippi and throughout the South” (xviii), yet he “eventually integrated Southern Miss in 1965 without public incident” (xvi). This multi-faceted his- tory adds to the depth of the Southern Quarterly, which “remains one of the oldest academic journals of southern studies in the U.S.” (xvi). Douglas B. Chambers' introduction successfully details the literary history of the University of Southern Mississippi, which was formerly named Mississippi Southern College. In 1910, the institution was founded as a teacher’s college. On February 27, 1962, the governor and legislature officially approved a name change to the University of Southern Mississippi (xviii). For the purpose of "articles grounded in research and scholarship," in October of 1962, the Southern Quarterly was founded by editor James L. Allen Jr. (xv). Chambers believes that “The development of the journal over the past fifty
- 106 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 years mirrors the modern history of the University of Southern Mississippi (xv). Furthermore, Chambers discusses how the journal evolved under new presidential and editorial leadership in each era of the past fifty years. In section one, the collection presents three essays by Mississippi professors during the 1960s. Although these essays discuss the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Society, and federalism, their relevance transcends time (xxxvii). Arthell Kelley discusses the consequences of the Mississippi flood of 1927 in the “Levee Building and the Settlement of Yazoo Basin.” Writing in 1963, Kelley relays the following image: “Seven hundred thousand people were made homeless. People sought safety on levees, on roof tops, and in trees. A vast rescue fleet of small boats reported rescuing 330,000 people from house tops and trees” (20). Those images conjure the more recent memories of broken levees and the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Meanwhile, John Ray Skates’ discusses political resistance to the New Deal, which was echoed in recent debates about the stimulus package and big bank bailouts. Finally, an essay on American Federalism by William H. Hatcher is a histori- cal discussion of the conflicts between states’ rights and federal rights that remain a source of contention within the contemporary political sphere. In the post-Civil Rights Era of the 1970s, Prenshaw’s editorial ap- pointment in 1974 began a new era for the journal. Prenshaw published es- says on New Criticism of the Southern poet James Dickey, the Social Security Act of 1935, the iconic status of the Southern Belle, and the Americanization of Mississippi. Although the journal featured an essay on the New Deal in the 1960s, Martha Swain’s essay entitled “Pat Harrison and the Social Security Act of 1935” signifies the inclusion of “female scholars on southern subjects” (xxxvii). Kathryn L. Seidel explores the formation and appeal of “The South- ern Belle as an Antebellum Ideal.” Seidel writes of John Pendleton Kennedy’s heroine in Swallow Barn. Bel Tracy, the protagonist, is the first literary figure who exemplifies the Southern Belle archetype (87). Her protective father adores his talented “motherless, young and exuberant” daughter who is de- scendent from landed gentry in Virginia (87). Eventually, she is rescued from her romantic ideals derived from authors such as Sir Walter Scott and marries an appropriate young man (87). Ultimately, the purpose of these novels is to reinforce the “Southerners" notions of the superiority of their way of life, the actualities of plantation life, and the literary convention of the sentimental novel, which gave rise to a new subgenre, the plantation novel” (88). How- ever, by elevating the Southern Belle into iconic status, slaves were viewed as inferior because they were deemed as property; therefore, blacks were devoid of white virtue and liberty.
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By the 1980s, the Southern Quarterly was reaching prominence. Essay topics ranged from the subject of the southern tradition, to southern writers, to folk history, to W.E.B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner. In “The Black Faith of W.E.B. Du Bois: Sociocultural and Political Dimensions of Black Religion,” Manning Marable writes that Du Bois attacked Christianity for supporting racial segregation. Du Bois was both “an agnostic and an Anglican, a staunch critic of religious dogma and a passionate convert to the black version of Christianity” (149). Moreover, Du Bois believed that “His God was the God of black liberation” (163). After committing his life to enlightenment and racial equality, Du Bois would die in self-imposed exile in Ghana. Marable’s essay is properly juxtaposed to Susan V. Donaldson’s essay entitled “Women, Narrative, Patriarchy in Absalom, Absalom!”. Donaldson examines the gender issues in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! which is an epic novel on slavery and the ante-bellum years of the South. Both essays function as a social history and binary depiction of the American experience. Issues such as race, gender, and regionalism are prevalent in the section devoted to the 1990s. Harriet Pollack’s essay on Welty discusses her “combina- tion of southwestern humor with fairy tale” and her ability to rewrite a genre by infusing a female perspective into the tale (191-192). Pollack claims that Welty “leads readers to consider the difference between a literary memory and the fiction-at-hand, she pushes them toward a discovery of meaning” (205). In other words, Welty acknowledges the distinction between fact and fiction in literature, forcing the reader to experience a transformation. Ultimately, the reader changes because they will “revise initial predictions based on the allusion” in the narrative (205). In Margaret Walker Alexander’s address entitled “Natchez and Richard Wright in Southern American Literature,” she speaks at the inaugural Natchez Literary Celebration. Walker states that “The South is both an historical region and a mythical place, at least in the litera- ture” (208). Alexander’s discussion is a pivotal link between Harriet Pollack’s essay “On Welty’s Use of Allusion: Expectations and Their Revision” and Don H. Doyle’s discussion of fiction and fact in Faulkner’s Mississippi Frontier. Alexander mentions that “Richard Wright’s grandfathers were slaves in Missis- sippi, in Natchez. One became a sharecropper on Travellers Rest plantation, and one was a Civil War soldier who never got his pension” (209). From these impoverished roots, one of the greatest writers is born. Alexander insists that “For Richard Wright, Mississippi was no Garden of Eden, it was a racial hell” (211). Although Richard Wright was influenced by Faulkner, he didn’t agree with Faulkner’s perspective of the southern mythology of Christian honor and notions of “racial superiority and inferiority” (211). Faulkner believed that
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“[s]lavery, miscegenation, and rising capitalism destroyed the pastoral paradise and ruined the Edenic South” (211). Welty, Wright, and Faulkner demon- strate mythic elements of literary memory and the influence of race, gender, and regionalism on southern heritage. This section which is devoted to the 1990s concludes with a southern interpretation of The Awakening by Barbara C. Ewell from a race and gender perspective. To exemplify the literary thought of the 2000s, the editors choose to include essays on the Atlantic Ocean, the African Diaspora, southern cuisine, death southern style, slavery, and famous photographs featuring tenant farm- ers. Essays such as Randy J. Sparks’ “The Southern Way of Death: The Mean- ing of Death in Antebellum White Evangelical Culture,” Robert Hall’s “Africa and the American South: Culinary Connections,” and Ann Bradford Warner’s “Harriet Jacobs at Home in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” express that the inextricable connection between culture, food, heritage, economic status, and southern lifestyle. By including these diverse depictions of the South, Chambers and Watson demonstrate the depth of the southern culture, tradi- tion, and its inhabitants in this entire essay compilation. Clearly, there is a connection between fact and fiction that has become romanticized mythol- ogy rooted in truth. Warner states that Jacobs’ “conveys two worlds, white and African American, that exist in a haunting parallel” (338). For African Americans, both perspectives were apparent; therefore, Jacobs wanted to “make both of them visible to a broader audience” (338). Evidently, visibility is the intention behind the composition of this collection as well. The Past Is Not Dead: Essays from the Southern Quarterly is a power- ful collection of southern literary history. This history defines not only the South, but the American culture. For those who seek to understand the complex and contentious yet interdependent relationship between blacks and whites in the South, this book is extremely enlightening. By featuring accomplished scholars who are artistically equipped to analyze great southern authors and literary works, the Southern Quarterly has encapsulated southern culture and participated in the formation of southern identity. For anyone fascinated by the South, its authors, race, class, and gender, The Past Is Not Dead is one of the most important essay collections scholars of the South will ever read. In essence, this book juxtaposes the concepts of fact and fiction, black and white, rich and poor, in a manner that is visible to all readers.
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- 110 - Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South Spring/Summer 2014 • 21(1): 111 - 13 Book Review
The Odyssey of an African Slave. Sitiki, Ed. Patricia C. Griffin. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009. 211 pages.
Reviewed by Ryan Frisinger University of Louisiana - Monroe
The Odyssey of an African Slave traces the journey of African-born Sitiki to America’s Atlantic coast in the early nineteenth century and his subsequent settlement in St. Augustine. It is the only known firsthand slave account to have surfaced from the state of Florida. Throughout the text, the author’s resilience and seemingly undaunted optimism are exemplified in the many seasons of his life, from his capture and enslavement as a young boy, to his eventual liberation and rise as a religious leader within the local com- munity. The historical backdrop of the story provides a fascinating context, encompassing nearly a century of major political and social changes within the United States, including the abolition of the very institution that dictated the majority of Sitiki’s life. Of state and local interest are Sitiki’s detailed descriptions of his longtime home of St. Augustine, Florida. Within his lifetime, Sitiki witnessed the state’s transition from Spanish to American control and from territorial status to statehood. Thanks to St. Augustine’s rich cultural heritage, the city boasted a diverse population and was not overly segregated in comparison to other Southern cities of the time. As a result, Sitiki was able to build rapport with many of the townspeople, as well as the tourists that stopped to admire his carefully tended orange groves. His appointment as local minister helped further establish him as a fixture within his local community and ensured that, in time, Sitiki himself would become a unique and treasured symbol of St. Augustine’s storied past. Sitiki’s narrative is somewhat atypical of slave accounts, in regards to both tone and content. Throughout, Sitiki (renamed Jack Smith upon his arrival in the American South) maintains a rather indifferent attitude towards slavery, offering no outright critique or condemnation of either his masters or
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the institution itself. Instead, he maintains a more lighthearted sense of ad- venture and even wonderment in recounting the events of his childhood and formative years. As he ages, the reality of his enslavement becomes less present in the text. The majority of his story, therefore, is devoid of many of those ele- ments that historians and popular audiences have generally come to associate with many slave narratives. Instead, Sitiki’s memoir reads more like the work of a local historian, documenting both the physical and cultural features of his hometown, as well as the local plant life, in the spirit of a true agriculturalist. Similar to other slave accounts, the role of religion emerges as both present and prominent in the life of the author. Sitiki’s religious experience is especially insightful because it showcases his commitment and ambition in establishing and heading St. Augustine’s first all-black (both pastor and con- gregation) Methodist church. Griffin adequately expounds on this achieve- ment and utilizes this aspect of Sitiki’s life in helping to form a more complete picture of the subject’s character and aspirations, beyond merely what he presents in the text. When evaluating Sitiki’s literary treatment (or lack thereof ) of the subject of slavery, one must take into consideration the circumstances sur- rounding the authorship of the text. Sitiki, despite his fluency in English, required assistance in the transcription of his memoirs. His one-time master, Buckingham Smith, was therefore responsible for penning the two separate drafts and corresponding notes that make up the final published version presented by editor, Patricia C. Griffin. The implications of the collaboration upon the resultant text do not escape Griffin. Her commentary allows for the possibility that the general dynamics of a master-slave relationship, and specifically that of Smith and Sitiki, who knew one another almost their entire lives, may have impacted the narrative to some extent. At times, evidence of Buckingham Smith’s formal education and interest in local history seemingly manifests itself in the text, either through stylistic prose or detailed-laden reminiscences regarding the state of the town a half-century earlier. Consequently, the pair’s work may prove enlightening, not only for those interested in the life of Sitiki or the text’s value strictly as a slave account, but also those seeking primary sources concerning Spanish- occupied Florida and St. Augustine. In fact, since its recovery, the account has proven a valuable resource, in regards to historians’ efforts to reconstruct the city landscape and daily life of the Second Spanish Period. Despite this attention to detail in certain sections, the original manu- script is far shorter in length than many surviving slave accounts. Sitiki’s words actually take up less than a quarter of the volume, while Griffin’s treat-
- 112 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 ment of the original text fills the rest of the space. Interesting to note, how- ever, is the fact that the conclusion of the manuscript drifts off mid-sentence, leaving readers with a markedly unfinished version, although to what extent is anyone’s guess. Throughout, Griffin does an admirable job supplying an informed context to supplement the source material, allowing the reader to draw as much as possible from the narrative. Her background in anthropology complements her approach to the text and shines through in her exploration of the psychological effects of slavery and subsequent liberation upon the protagonist. Furthermore, as a longtime Florida resident and author of other scholarly works on the state’s history, Griffin’s regional expertise serves to enhance those sections in which Sitiki describes old St. Augustine. Time and again, Griffin’s remarks are especially helpful in flushing out a rather remarkable story that is sometimes masked by an unassuming literary style or all-too-brief treatment of seemingly pivotal moments in the author’s life that give way to meticulous descriptions and lengthy inventories. Still, the original text represents an amazing legacy in United States and African-Amer- ican history, as well as a proud and valued addition to state and local history in Florida and St. Augustine. The editor’s commendable efforts in construct- ing a final draft from the recovered notes and manuscripts coupled with her corresponding research have helped bring Sitiki’s self-proclaimed purpose in penning the account to fruition nearly a century-and-a-half later. In recount- ing the specifics of a most extraordinary life, it seems the author sought simply, in his own words, to satisfy those “strangers who seem to desire hearing more of me than they learn.”
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- 114 - Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South Spring/Summer 2014 • 21(1): 115 - 17 Book Review
Nancy Batson Crews: Alabama's First Lady of Flight. Rickman, Sarah Bryn with a Foreword by Jane Kirkpatrick. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 232 pages.
Reviewed by Erinn McComb Del Mar College
Women have had a rich history in flight since the days of Harriet Quimby and Bessie Coleman. During World War II, American women broke down gender barriers and for the first time flew in military cockpits. Women pilots ferried some of the most awesome war planes—Curtiss P-40 Warhawks, North American P-51 Mustangs, and the A-20 twin-engine attack plane. Independent author Sarah Byrn Rickman presents a riveting and heartfelt biography of ferry pilot Nancy Batson Crews, an original member of the Women Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) of World War II. While Crews was representative of what Rickman calls the “free woman, a rarity in the mid-twentieth century” she argues that Crews’s “life defies pigeonholing” and thus represents the “complexity” of American gender roles (4). For instance, before the war Crews’s mother helped mold her attractive young daughter into a fiercely independent woman of her time. She was one of the first of five women chosen for civilian pilot training at the University of Alabama. As a pilot, Crews survived the trials and tribulations of war, but her contribution to history did not end in 1945, as she continued to break gender stereotypes in the post-war era. After serving in World War II, Nancy married fellow University of Alabama alumni and veteran, Paul Crews, moved to California and had three children: Paul Jr., Radford, and Jane. While facing the untimely deaths of family members and fellow pilots, Rickman maintains that it was Crews’s independence that allowed her to persevere in the WAFS, as a civilian pilot, glider instructor, mayor, and real-estate developer. Unfortunately for Paul Jr. and Nancy, it was the combination of independence and southern prejudice that led to their estrangement for almost thirty years, until just before her death in 2001. Despite Crews’s flaws, Rickman argues that she broke the
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mold of not only what was considered a southern lady, but she also exercised independence and power outside the traditional roles of white, middle class, American women. Rickman uses the oral histories of Crews, her family, and her fellow pilots as lenses into the history of World War II women. After meeting Nancy in 1992 at the International Museum of Flight in Columbus, Ohio, Rickman was enamored with Crews and sought to write the story of the twenty-five women pilots gathered together by Nancy Love in 1942 to form the WAFS. Out of her interviews and friendships with the WAFS/Women’s Army Service Pilots (WASPS), Rickman has written The Originals: The Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron of World War II (2001); Flight from Fear(2002); and Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II (2008). Crews’s story gives readers a glimpse into the beginning of the WAFS, as well as the incor- poration of the WAFS into Jacqueline Cochran’s WASPS in 1943. Despite safety concerns, as well as tension between the WAFS and the WASPS, all remained dedicated to their mission of ferrying planes for the war effort. Through Crews’s words, Rickman is able to capture the sisterhood and loyalty that the WAFS felt for Love, even though they viewed her work as taking a back seat to that of Cochran. Rickman makes it clear that the downfall of the WASPS was due to the existing gender climate in the United States. The women were originally recruited to free up a man to fight overseas. However, the Army had a surplus of male pilots as they experienced fewer pilot losses than expected during the war. Some male pilots found themselves unemployed. As a result, the govern- ment disbanded the WASPS whose duty was not to “replace” a man, but to “release” him (72). In June 1944 Congress dismissed the WASPS declaring that, “the recruiting of inexperienced women and their training as pilots be terminated immediately” (67). The original recruits were anything but inex- perienced; they averaged one-thousand flying hours before joining the WAFS. Despite being heralded for their service, the United States government did not recognize the WAFS/WASPS as part of the military until 1979. Crews took a ten year break from flying after the termination of the WASPs, but life in the suburbs could not silence her independence. Crews returned to flight and earned a living towing gliders. She took care of Paul Sr. when he was diagnosed with diabetes, and upon his death in 1977, was alone. Crews continued to ferry planes, and even became mayor of California City, California. She was never involved in women’s rights campaigns; instead, she was herself, an individual, and Crews continued to exercise her independence later in life. Crews returned to Alabama after her mother’s death and invested
- 116 - Southern Studies • Volume XXI • Number I • Spring/Summer 2014 the family land into a real-estate venture, creating Country Lake Estates, and finally, co-piloting for King Air with fellow “granny pilot” Chris Beal Kaplan (152, 156). Crews continued to live outside the parameters of gender roles well into the 1990s as a pilot, politician, and businesswoman. Her biography opens the door for future scholarship into the lives of women pilots and how they embraced their newfound freedom and individuality and used it to navigate post-war suburban gender ideals. Further research into the intersec- tion of gender roles and technology and medicine would make an excellent addition to the historiography of women in aviation—especially given that the WASPS were grounded during menstruation. Overall, Rickman’s work demonstrates that the benefit of biography is not only that it preserves the stories of those who made history, but it reminds us that history is about the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.
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