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This chapter focuses on 1862, with a particular emphasis on how Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign impacted enslaved people and free blacks. Throughout the spring of 1862, enslaved people, estimated in the thousands, sought refuge with Union forces. However, as this chapter illustrates, taking sanctuary with Union troops did not mean that the Valley’s African Americans were passive participants. This chapter highlights the various ways freedom seekers supported Union operations in the Valley throughout 1862. Simultaneously, the chapter also illustrates that the desire for survival at times trumped the desire for freedom and prompted some freedom seekers to return to enslavers. Although incidents such as these have been used by advocates of the Lost Cause to perpetuate the “happy slave” myth, this chapter discusses the complexities of life for African Americans and how what some interpreted as loyalty to enslavers was in fact an enslaved person’s loyalty to themselves. Finally, this chapter examines how some Union soldiers, due to interactions with enslaved people in 1862, became more open to transforming the war to preserve the Union into one that also eradicated slavery.

This chapter discusses how white New Yorkers turned the area's public spaces into “white space” through, among others, architecture, legislation, and surveillance. It examines the ways in which white New Yorkers tried to control the enslaved population in the public space, and how enslaved people managed to escape such control, even if only temporarily. The chapter shows that as slavery expanded in the eighteenth century, authorities increasingly restricted enslaved people's activities and movements in New York's public spaces. Enslavers created geographies of control: pass systems, surveillance, patrols, curfews, public punishments, and limitations on the number of enslaved people who could gather in public spaces were all used to control New York's Black population. It also investigates how enslavers utilized the celebration of Pinkster, the Dutch version of Pentecost or Whitsuntide, to support the system of enslavement. Yet such control was never complete, and enslaved people developed endless ways to escape or circumvent it, thus creating geographies of resistance.

This chapter reveals that over the course of the eighteenth century, Dutch American architecture began to include a more intentional ordering of domestic spaces to house enslaved men, women, and children and their labor in these homes. It examines slavery and the lives of the enslaved in these Dutch American houses, considering the home a physical, social, and emotional space. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Dutch American enslavers increasingly considered where to house the people they held in bondage as they began to spatially segregate the work and living spaces of these enslaved people from the main living quarters. The chapter further investigates the rival geographies enslaved people created in these spaces, and reviews the dual nature of these homes, as these buildings had very different meanings to their free and enslaved inhabitants. Through analysis of these different meanings, the chapter shows that for their enslaved inhabitants these buildings could never be a true home.

This chapter offers an overview of slavery in the Shenandoah Valley from the moment the first enslaved people reportedly arrived in 1727. Slavery’s importance steadily increased in the region from the era of the American Revolution, spurred in part by demand for hemp during the American Revolution, through the 1850s. Furthermore, chapter one examines the practice of enslavers renting surplus labor, various forms of resistance enslaved people employed in the Shenandoah Valley in the decades leading up to the Civil War, how enslavers attempted to subdue that resistance, and how enslaved people who escaped to points north carved out a new life for themselves. Examinations of these various elements reveals that although slavery might have superficially looked somewhat different in the Shenandoah Valley—enslavers working alongside those whom they enslaved or enslaved people not comprising as much of the total population as in areas where large plantations dominated the landscape—the experiences of enslaved people on an individual level did not differ at all from other areas. The Valley’s enslaved still suffered abuse, both physical and emotional, and desired freedom.

This chapter reviews how some of the company's enslaved laborers took advantage of the lack of spatial control in the Dutch colony and their close proximity to each other and several important institutions. It explores a variety of reasons why some of New Amsterdam's enslaved men and women had been able to attend the Dutch Reformed Church, use the courts to secure wages or defend property, and obtain a (conditional) freedom. The chapter then analyses the importance of place, space, and geography. Because enslaved people had very little control over their mobility or the environment in which they lived, the physical and social spaces that they inhabited played an especially important role in the ways they were able to partake in society. Ultimately, the chapter looks at the ways in which enslaved people navigated these systems and the colonial spaces.

This chapter describes the founding of Washington, D.C., as the capital of the United States. The area that became Washington was a fully functioning slave society, and the city that grew atop those fields incorporated slavery into every aspect of life. From its inception Washington embodied the contradiction endemic to America itself, the paradoxical juxtaposition of freedom and slavery that bedeviled the nation and ultimately led to the Civil War. Enslaved people worked on public construction projects, they were bought and sold within sight of the Capitol, they drove the hacks that crisscrossed the city, and they waited on the men who ran the nation. Early Washington was a Southern city that was immersed in slavery and benefited immensely from it. Another contradiction embedded into the fabric of the city was that its citizens lacked democracy’s basic unit of currency: the right to vote. The city became a political colony, a district whose fate rested not with the local people who called it home but with the national political leaders who resided there temporarily.

This chapter evaluates the impact that the Odyssey's projected narratives of agency has on those who are not the returning hero, in particular, on the enslaved people who make up a significant part of Odysseus's world. It employs frameworks and insights from Disability Studies in an attempt to understand the general impact of Homeric discourse on the people represented within the narrative and its possible impact on audiences outside of it. The chapter argues that the Odyssey ultimately uses the authorizing force of cultural discourse to marginalize, to dehumanize, and even to render certain types of violence acceptable. After outlining some basic concepts from the field of Disability Studies appropriate to Homer, it explains how this framework informs the way slaves, in particular, are treated by the Odyssey and, especially, provides structural and cultural motivations for the mutilation of Melanthios and the hanging of the enslaved women. In particular, Disability Studies illustrate how certain characters and bodies are marginalized to define an ideological center and how this marginalization relies on cultural processes of infantilization and vilification.

Successful early Kentucky distillers were often immigrants from Ireland and Scotland or settlers from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania who were experienced in the craft. The distilling labor force was often drawn from family members, neighbors, or enslaved peoples. Tradespeople in complementary industries included farmers, millers, coopers, woodcutters, carpenters, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, and teamsters. Farmer, miller, and distiller households often included employees who boarded with the family. Some distillers owned slaves who worked at various jobs. To house the workforces of large distilleries or clusters of distilleries, “distillery towns” might be developed by investors and distillers. Prior to 1900, few women worked at distilleries, but as distillers automated their bottling lines, women were often hired as bottlers and labelers. Some distillers built grand mansions that, in some towns, developed into a “Whiskey Row.”

This chapter shows how considerations of geography and space can contribute to our understanding of slavery. Such analysis requires an interdisciplinary approach, but the chapter relies on a wide array of archival sources, from account books to church records, located in multiple archives across the United States and The Netherlands. The chapter also reiterates that although enslaved New Yorkers often lived in the same houses as the people who claimed to own them, they were certainly not inhabiting the same parts of the home or treated as members of the family. Through spatial analysis, the chapter reveals that even enslaved people inhabited or frequented the same places as their enslavers, their experiences within these spaces were inherently different. Ultimately, the chapter recalls how enslaved New Yorkers created alternative ways of knowing and navigating the spaces they inhabited and frequented. Regardless of their enslavers' efforts, their movements and activities could not be controlled.

The book’s introduction stresses that while a handful of historians have examined various aspects of the African American experience in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War era, the topic has been largely ignored or inaccurately portrayed. The introduction’s cornerstone is a historiographical discussion of how authors such as Joseph Waddell, John Walter Wayland, and Julia Davis—who minimized slavery’s role in the Valley, promulgated the myth that slavery was not important to the Valley’s agrarian economy, and wrote that enslaved people in the Shenandoah Valley were treated better than in other parts of the slaveholding South—influenced various authors. Finally, the introduction highlights the various primary source material, including freedom narratives, never before utilized by historians who investigated any aspect of the Shenandoah Valley’s African American story.

This chapter describes civilians' efforts to protect themselves against looting, burying their possessions or, in the case of women in the U.S. South, going so far as to hide them under their hoop skirts in specially designed pockets. The threat of looting had profound effects on the material world, resulting in not only the movement of thousands of people and their possessions but also the creation—and creative reuse—of objects that were designed to prevent the loss of one's monetary and emotional valuables. In addition, human property and movable property were linked because the looting of houses by Northern troops and enslaved people's self-emancipation often occurred in tandem. Ultimately, acts of theft, fear of looting, and the stolen objects themselves performed powerful cultural work in the United States during and after the Civil War.

The chapter begins by stating that a widely circulated picture of a white soldier and a Black Confederate soldier is actually a photograph of Andrew Chandler and his family slave, Silas. Slaves were sometimes allowed to purchase military uniforms or were provided them by their masters, which explains why there are photographs of Black men in Confederate uniforms. At the onset of the war, Confederates believed they could offset the disadvantage of having a smaller population and less war-making power than the Union by utilizing slave labor. The government impressed enslaved people to work on earthworks, railroads, and weapon production. They also performed various jobs in camps such as cooking, performing music, and assisting in hospitals. White soldiers often brought slaves from home to act as personal servants. At times, the presence of personal slaves created class tensions within camps. Enslaved people often took on various tasks in camps for payment. While the shared experience of war likely brought the enslaved and their enslavers closer together, the racial hierarchy was strictly, and often violently enforced by the enslavers. Enslavers’ belief that their slaves were loyal to them and the Confederate cause sometimes caused emotional distress when a slave would run away or defect to the Union.

This chapter opens with Sonthonax’s decree of 1793 that emancipated the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue. French revolutionary Léger Félicité Sonthonax brought a Civil Commission to Saint-Domingue in 1792 along with 6,000 soldiers. Their mission was to convince white landowners to form a coalition with mulatto landowners in order to crush the rebellion of enslaved people and preserve the colonial system. This delegation was fraught with contradictions as it was a microcosm of the conflict that had engulfed France: the struggle between aristocrats (the king, military leaders and Church leaders, and powerful landowners) and the bourgeoisie (businessmen and factory owners). Saint-Domingue’s social fissures were complex, with six major groups vying for power: the partisans of the new French government; the aristocrats; the freedmen, mixed race and black; the small whites; the leaders of the rebel slaves; and the masses of enslaved people. Trouillot explores the quicksand of shifting alliances and feuding rivalries during this early period of the Haitian Revolution. The white aristocrats refused to ally with the landowning and slave-holding mulatto and black freedmen. The new French government formed a coalition with the freedmen. The small whites resisted and were crushed by the new French government troops. The aristocrats turned to England and Spain for military assistance against the new French government, and these nations invaded and occupied parts of Saint-Domingue. To gain the upper hand, Sonthonax emancipated enslaved people willing to fight with the new French government in June 1793. Days afterward 10,000 French colonists fled the colony by ship. Sonthonax attempted to recruit the leaders of the rebel slaves; however, they were already fighting in the Spanish army and enjoying their freedom—some were even trafficking slaves. By emancipating the enslaved population in August of 1793, Sonthonax lost the support of the slave-owning aristocrats and freedmen, who were the principle power holders, and he was unable to recruit the leaders of the rebel slaves who saw no advantage in collaborating with an army that was losing ground. Having lost control of the traditional alliances, Sonthonax had overcorrected and found himself leaning upon those who had nothing to lose, the enslaved population.

This book concludes with a description of how Virginian men and women found it easier to reach the safety of federal lines than did enslaved people in other areas of the Confederacy, for the Union army maintained a presence on three sides of the state and made frequent incursions toward the capital city. By 24 May 1861, the first documented fugitive slaves of the war had already sought out Union troops at Fortress Monroe, near historic Jamestown, and had begun to work as military laborers. Enough black Baptists in the commonwealth took advantage of the relative ease of escape that the Rappahannock Baptist Association, in which black members outnumbered whites by a two-to-one margin, ruled that fugitives from slavery be expelled from church membership. As their justification for this punishment, whites cited only the “general sanction which the Scriptures unquestionably give to slavery,” forgetting the irony that white evangelicals had been among those questioning the teaching of scripture on the institution only a few generations before.

This chapter reconsiders the foundations of slave law in Virginia in the years immediately following 1619. In contrast to prevailing trends in English law, the colonial experience in Virginia granted justices extensive discretion in the application of English legal traditions, and they used this discretion to craft a customary law of slavery long before the articulation of formal statutes regulating the treatment of enslaved people. This chapter offers a detailed case study of how this process worked by examining the case of Brase, an African man captured from a Spanish ship and brought to Virginia in 1625. It recovers the legal innovations that the justices developed to ensure that Brase would be held in bondage despite the lack of a formal law of slavery in Virginia.