This presidential address was delivered at the 138th annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held in New York City on January 4, 2025.

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Paper Tracings in the Spectacularly Boisterous Archive of Slavery

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name. Although she has claim, she is not claimed . . . It was not a story to pass on. —Toni Morrison, Beloved

. . . not all silences are equal and . . . they cannot be addressed—or redressed—in the same manner. To put it differently, any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly. —Michel-Ralph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

In 1831, a will is recorded in South Carolina. The testatrix is Lucy Buchanan, a free Black woman. Like most wills, Buchanan’s included a request that her debts be “punctually paid out of such perishable property” that she might own at the time of her death. She left the remainder of her estate in real and personal property to a local white slaveholder, a man she described as a “friend” and who she named executor of her estate. She asked that he hold this property in guardianship for his son until such time as the son arrived at the age of twenty-one. At that point, the estate would fall to the son and in succession, his “heirs and assigns forever.” Her estate included, she stated, “my son William who is a Slave.” She further stated that she believed this decision represented “the best disposition that according to the laws of this state I can make for his welfare.”1

To date, I have found no other record of Lucy Buchanan or her son—no letters written by either of them or about them, no document created by the state. It is therefore with just the will that Lucy Buchanan and William enter the archive as far as I am aware. Moreover, it is not even clear that the will is a legal declaration. On the line that called for Buchanan’s signature, her name appears in typeset and inserted between her first and last name is the letter “X,” neither of which is unusual. An X-mark signature, typically a mark of handwriting illiteracy or disability made in lieu of an actual signature, is considered legally valid when properly witnessed, and there were witnesses to Buchanan’s will. But what exactly did they witness? Clearly, they did not witness Buchanan making an X signature as the X mark is, like her name, typeset. Was she even present for this non-signed but signed document? These problems notwithstanding, the will provides important insight into Lucy Buchanan’s life, including the violence of slavery that adhered to it.

The lack of a signature represents but part of the violence of the system of human bondage that created and operationalized the spectacle of a free Black mother of an enslaved child. Lucy Buchanan’s attempt to extricate herself and her child from this spectacle commands my attention. I linger with her justification for remanding her child—a child enslaved to her—to the care of a white slaveholder. Perhaps the young man to whom she ultimately wills her son is the child’s biological father, but that is pure speculation. I focus on her statement that leaving her child enslaved with this man was the “best disposition” she could “make for his welfare” under the laws of the state in which she lived, South Carolina. It was not what she wanted for her son, only what she thought was best for him under the circumstances.2 It dawns on me that Buchanan used one of the master’s tools—a will—to protect her child the best way she knew how. With this decision, she also telegraphed the violence that attached to her, inserting her testimony into the archive of slavery.3

Entering the archive of slavery is to confront what Foucault calls “the jostling violence of the facts they tell” and Arlette Farge terms “the rustling voices of the population.”4 The archive of slavery is a boisterous place where the violence of slaveholders jostles against the resistance and “rustling voices” of the enslaved, of the kind that characterizes Buchanan’s will and so many documents in which enslaved people cry out despite the curatorial efforts embedded in the archive that aimed to silence them. The “jostling violence” appears in the papers of slaveholding women who talked about Rose, an enslaved woman who led a rebellion in South Carolina during the Civil War. In letters to each other and diary entries, slaveholding women reported on Rose’s activities and celebrated her death at the hands of Confederate scouts.5 But Rose’s presence in their lives makes for the “jostling violence” in their papers. But unlike Foucault and Farge, I take this violence as evidence of the work of the least powerful to insert themselves into what becomes the archive of slavery and make their presence known.

The men and women at the center of Foucault’s discussion of “the jostling violence of the facts” are people he describes as “obscure and ill-fated,” who led “lowly,” indeed, “miserable lives,” and “all of them rabid, scandalous, or pitiful.” They are, he tells us, cobblers, army deserters, garment sellers, scriveners, and vagabond monks who but for their “encounter with power” would have left no trace at all in the historical record. He sees them as nothing more than “an anthology of existences,” people whose lives “convey not so much lessons to ponder as brief affects whose force fades almost at once.”6 Neither Lucy Buchannan nor Rose fit Foucault’s analysis, nor, I suspect, did the people he dismissed as irrelevant to history. Foucault’s archives were no doubt just as spectacularly boisterous as the archives of slavery. And as with the archive of slavery, the “jostling violence” in the archive where cobblers and others who occupy Foucault’s attention appear could not have been easily curated either. His too would have been a noisy archive.

The omnipresent noise in the collections of papers or special collections that emanates from the stories the powerful tell is easily drowned out by silencing mechanisms, and not merely those that arise from the manner of the archive’s construction, but also those we as scholars sometimes contribute as when we declare that the enslaved are silenced in the archive.7 It is easy to hear the jarring, jostling noise of slaveholders in the archive, and we have been taught well to hear it. There slaveholders are, loudly proclaiming and justifying their right to hold people in bondage, calculating the price of human beings, and selling and beating them. They are so loud that it is easy to center them even on those occasions when the nature of their encounter with enslaved people prevented them from centering themselves. Their brashness aside, they could not help but talk about the enslaved and they did so in ways that did not always buttress proslavery ideology. It is therefore puzzling that we have come to see the enslaved as so invisible in the archive and their voices as so curated or ventriloquized that it is nearly impossible to recover anything of value about them. Yet, even Foucault admits, perhaps unwittyingly, that power provokes the powerless. “How light power would be, and easy to dismantle no doubt if all it did was to observe, spy, detect, prohibit and punish; but it incites, provokes, produces. It is not simply eye and ear; it makes people act and speak.”8

My address pays homage not to silence but to the spectacular visibility and boisterous outcry of the enslaved in the archive. Here, unchecked by the expected decorum of the researcher, enslaved people reject the racism of the men and women who author most of the papers that have come to reside in authorized archives. They run away and give themselves revolutionary names. The paper tracings they leave behind are the stuff of my work and many of yours. These tracings—the incomplete records of births and deaths, of family ties, expressions of love and resistance—spill out of archival folders and boxes stuffed with the letters, diaries, and papers of slaveholders, furnishing merchants, and bankers.

Yet, for some scholars, it is not enough that there is a trace of Lucy Buchanan and her son in the archive. Rather, they stress, it is the manner in which the archive was conceived and built out that tells us what is most important to know about her. By this view, the enslaved are so distorted, violated, and silenced that what survives of them can offer little of consequence; merely “fleeting glimpses” of the violations they endured that can take us nowhere. Moreover, in using these archival remains in our work, some argue, we run the risk of producing histories “that reproduce violent discourses.”9 As one historian sums it up, “some scholars of colonialism and slavery have measured the archives and found them wanting” and have cautioned that “an uncritical reliance upon—and regurgitation of—empirical facts from the archive” runs the risk of adopting a “methodology that replicates (and thereby perpetuates) the violence that we ought to critique.”10

There is value as we have learned in the argument that the archive of slavery is problematic on a number of levels, and one might say, even criminal in some respects. So, too, is there value in troubling the archive in new ways based on new analytical perspectives and methodologies. And it is good to keep in mind, as Jennifer Morgan reminds us, that scholars of slavery are forced not only “to weed through an overabundance of sources but to endure the absences, erasures, and mischaracterizations of racialized subjects.”11 Yet, when we place the focus on archival silence, I wonder if by this approach we short circuit the goal of learning as much as we possibly can about the lives of enslaved people—about their humanity, dignity, and refusal to be silenced—even from admittedly compromised archives. I wonder if this short-circuiting creates something akin to what scientists refer to as a “singularity,” a black hole from which the voices of enslaved people cannot escape or, if they do, only as muffled sounds.12

The archive of slavery is not a black hole where the desires of slaveholders are of such density and gravity that the voices of enslaved people cannot be heard. This is not the archive of the enslaved with which we work. The archive we have is one in which enslaved people speak, often loudly, and act with intention. Again returning to Morgan, I think, for example, of her writing of revisiting the archive of colonial slave law and discovering how much easier it was this time for her to see more precisely how the bodies of enslaved women “became the definitional sites of racial slavery,” and to find evidence of Black women reading the legal and social landscape, in effect “becoming slaves who theorized slavery.”13 In the early modern Atlantic world, Black women “acquired critical perspectives on the new world in which they were situated, she writes.”14 This, they continued to do into the nineteenth century and the Civil War era. Rather than a dark hole from which the stories of enslaved people cannot possibly escape, or be seen or heard, even in its damaged state, I see open circuits and pathways that allow us to confront distortions and what can appear as optical illusions. “Nothing is more troubled and more troubling,” “less reliable,” “less clear,” Derrida wrote, than the word archive.15 Yes, but historians possess the tools that those who measured their peace and power by their ability to control what was said about and to them feared and ultimately could never fully control. The words and actions of enslaved people assure us of this much.

This is not to say that the stories we retrieve, the ones we are able to grab hold of, those that escape, escape without damage. The bits and pieces—a letter or a brief mention in a letter or diary here, a legal instrument there—come to us encased in folders and boxes not designed to give them prominence, historical weight, or significance. But the presence of enslaved people in the archive at all—and it is a large and significant presence—means that slaveholders also do not escape undamaged. The voices of enslaved people in the archive undermine and invalidate proslavery ideology in all its traces.

Lucy Buchanan’s brief appearance in the archive is unquestionably distorted and violated. But she is not an optical illusion nor so distorted in the archive that we cannot learn something of significance about her, something that offers a context for her encounter with power and advances the historical record. Archives are all incomplete and damaged from their inception, but it is this damaged space that we historians have to work with. As I have written elsewhere, this way of seeing the archive leads me to see it as a place where historians’ questions and search for answers are capable of puncturing slaveholders’ illusions and self-regard and thereby open to view the people who refused them the regard they sought. I think slaveholders would have taken little comfort in the construction and interpretation of the archive created from their papers after most of them were long gone from the scene. They knew their papers were full of rumblings of discontent, and the jostling of voices that created a rival archive within and adjacent to their papers.16 This was surely the point Ruth Middleton made when she embroidered the story of her great-grandmother Rose and Rose’s daughter Ashley on a cotton sack. That sack became part of the adjacent archive, a rival archive created and maintained by the enslaved and their descendants over the centuries where, as Tiya Miles writes, “Traces of the abused and adored, the devalued and the salvaged, the lost and the found accrue.”17 The traces enslaved people inserted into the archive, including material culture, defied the distortions built into the papers of slaveholders and refuse silence.

Like distortions on a highway created by the heat, archival distortions wiggle and bend and give off an unwarranted shimmering effect. They are the advertisements slaveholders placed in newspapers seeking the capture and return of enslaved people who had become fugitives in defiance of slaveholding ideology, an ideology that turned the desire of Black people for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” into a crime. They are the wills in which slaveholders bear witness to a free black mother forced to close rather than open a door for her enslaved son’s freedom. Every slave who ran away and every Black mother forced to make unbearable decisions speak to the distortions, what they were designed to do, and what they could not fully achieve. The wiggling can be distracting. That is its aim. Our job is to understand as best we can the work of enslaved people that forced slaveholders to dissemble and distort, and thereby ensured that we would know. It is our job to give the wiggling no room.

As historians, we are trained to see the distortions—whether created intentionally or accidentally, whether the result of malice or the peculiar carelessness that attaches itself to racial ideology. In her influential article “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman invites us to consider the question of what we can and cannot know about archival distortions. Despite Venus’s many guises, she writes, as well as the fact that “she is found everywhere in the Atlantic,” our knowledge of her can be “little more than a register of her encounter with power,” leaving us with only “a meager sketch of her existence.”18 Following Foucault, she sees Venus’s presence in the archive as a case where “An act of chance or disaster or an aberration produced a divergence or an aberration from the expected and usual course of invisibility and catapulted her from the underground to the surface of discourse. We stumble upon her in exorbitant circumstances that yield no picture of the everyday life, no pathway to her thoughts, no glimpse of the vulnerability of her face or of what looking at such a face might demand.”19 But perhaps there is more to Venus’s story just as there is to Lucy Buchanan’s.

Hartman’s article, published in 2008, was in line with the work of scholars of colonial empire and imperialism on questions of archival silences and distortions, but none, arguably, has been as influential in the work of historians of slavery and for those who study enslaved women in particular.20 In her important contribution to the subject, Marisa Fuentes sets out to “trace the distortions of enslaved women’s lives inherent in the archive;” she “raises questions about the nature of history and the difficulties in narrating ephemeral archival presences by dwelling on the fragmentary, disfigured bodies of enslaved women” and the “fleeting glimpses” we get of enslaved people in the archive. She asks how it is possible to write the history of enslaved women while also meeting “the disciplinary demands of history that requires us to construct unbiased accounts from these very documents.” Is it possible to “construct a coherent historical accounting out of that which defies coherence and respectability” while simultaneously “historicizing, mourning, remembering, and listening to the condition of the enslaved?” Is it possible even when “the women who appear in the archival fragments . . . offer a crucial glimpse into lives lived under the domination of slavery,” but are “systematically distorted?”21 But the vexing question remains. How is it possible to know anything of value if, as Hartman writes, all we can know about enslaved women is “what can be extrapolated from an analysis of the ledger or borrowed from the world of her captors and masters and applied to her.”22

What can be extrapolated from a ledger, a letter, or a will, from the world of “captors and masters,” is no small thing. To see the lives of enslaved people as impossible to know because the archives on which we rely are so wretchedly compromised is to return to a historiography that argued that it was impossible to write a history of the enslaved because they left no records or the records in which they appear are compromised beyond repair. But there are other paths. The wiggling and bending distortions in the archive cry out for the work of historians, and for several decades now, scholars have answered the cry.23

Lucy Buchanan’s will, steeped in the violence of slavery, is without question problematic, but it is nonetheless a powerful paper trace that offers more than a fleeting glimpse of her, more “than a register of her encounter with power.” Though unaccompanied by a trove of other documents that might tell us more about her, the will is still consequential. Her name is there, and it records some of the things she thought and endured. Her encounter with power as a formerly enslaved person is but one element of her story. If we look closely, Buchanan’s will ensures that we get more than a “meager sketch of her existence.” She refuses us, as she refused the white men who “witnessed” her last will and testament, an uncomplicated story.

Buchanan’s will acknowledges the power of slaveholders and it shows Buchanan jostling with them. It defies any sense of the archive as a site of stateliness and decorum. The archive was never what its most fervent champions desired it to be. Despite its outward appearance, much of its inner life betrayed any sense of propriety, good taste, or decency. The noisiness of everyday life intrudes where it is not wanted. The rumblings of kingdoms and dynastic rivalries, imperial conquest, revolution, peasant and slave rebellions, religious conflict, and more that can be neither contained nor constrained, are there in unbecoming fashion. For students of slavery, as for students of medieval Europe, the archive is punctuated with much less than majestic matter. Its rowdiness cannot be helped. Here, enslaved people, who are often said to be invisible and silenced, speak and act.

In the archive, Buchanan’s life intrudes on any sense of propriety. Her will is unbecoming, ill-fitting of the purposes of the archive of slavery. Like thousands upon thousands of other paper tracings, it helped transform the archive into a raucous place. This is actually the only fate possible. This archive of slavery, we remember, was built not by slaveholders but by men and women who came after and sought to deify slaveholders and who believed enslaved people were not fit to be seen or to be heard voicing thoughts and ideas at variance with proslavery ideology. But in the archive they built, slaves are quite visible and their presence represents more than mere aberrations, arbitrary bits and pieces, or paper tracings of lives that come into view as a result of their encounters with power but are not themselves purposeful or important.

In archival records scholars traditionally consult to write the history of enslaved people and slavery, the enslaved do often people appear as a result of an encounter with slaveholders’ power. They have run away, been sold, gifted, or hired out. They are there in bills of sale; records of births, illness, and death; or as part of the tabulation of the number of acres planted in cash crops per enslaved worker and documentation of profits and losses. They show up on slave passes that allowed the movement of enslaved persons beyond the plantation and in the records of slave patrols established to ensure that no Black person without a pass or a badge designating them as a free Black person moved about freely. But all these records testify to more than an enslaved person’s encounter with power. Like Buchanan’s will, these fragments and paper tracings also mark and record slaveholders’ encounters with the enslaved. They explain and record enslaved peoples’ defiance and often enough, acknowledge them as legal theorists.24 They mark the actions of enslaved people that prompted the encounters that contribute to the archive’s rowdiness. Disregarded by those who put them there, who never imagined that they might become sources to tell a history of Black people and Black life at variance with proslavery ideology, the paper tracings fully inhabit the archive.

In the archive of slavery, we find Lucy Buchanan making a heartbreaking decision, knowing it means that she, a free Black woman, will die with her son enslaved. We find fugitive slaves naming themselves “North Star.” Whether in honor of the star that guided so many to freedom in the North or the name of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, they troubled the archive by doing so. So did Annie Bumbree, a Black woman living in a refugee camp during the Civil War who when offered a job as a domestic servant for a northern white family declined it, stating her preference “to do for herself.”25 In the archive are sumptuary codes that addressed the refusal of enslaved people to believe in race and laws restricting Black sailors from entering the port of Charleston, where their presence stood as another contradiction to slaveholding ideology. These laws announced the presence of “racecraft” that governs among other things, as Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields write, “what goes with what and whom (sumptuary codes), and how different people must deal with each other (rituals of deference and dominion), where human kinship begins and ends (blood) and how Americans look at themselves and each other (the gaze),” as it performs “its conjuror’s trick of transferring racism into race.”26 Such laws also announce a boisterous archive. Like other historians, I wish for more documents written by enslaved people, or as one scholar puts it, “evidence of a sort for which there had never been documents enough or for which documents mainly, however multiplied, would never be enough.”27 In their absence, I linger in the archive with the millions of paper tracings that are there in which enslaved people claim for themselves more than a trace in history.

I take the documentation of enslaved peoples’ “encounter with power” as penned by slaveholders as a record not only of a moment that captures the power of the slaveholding class but that also captures the agitation of the enslaved that led to the encounter. This kind of reckoning takes into consideration the violated lives of enslaved people as well as their refusal to be silenced and proposes that we can tell their stories without reproducing the violence inherent in archival documents. At any rate, historians are not magicians. It is beyond our power to reproduce violence or “violent discourse.”

In last year’s AHA presidential address, Edward Muir referenced a passage from Simon Schama’s book Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations. Here Schama quotes a section from Henry James’s novel, The Sense of the Past, that speaks to the problem of damaged archives. In the novel, a young historian laments that: “‘recovering the lost was at all events . . . much like entering the enemy’s lines to get back one’s dead for burial.’” The novel, Schama writes, “sets out the habitually insoluble quandary of the historian: how to live in two worlds at once; how to take the broken, mutilated remains of something or someone from the ‘enemy lines’ of the documented past and restore it to life or give it a decent interment in our own time and place.”28 Working in the archive of slavery is like this in a sense, where the archive represents “enemy lines” that hold the “broken, mutilated remains” of the enslaved. But it does not take magic to see them and give them “a decent interment.”

The “enemy lines” in the archives of slaveholders, like all enemy lines could be and were infiltrated. Slaveholders were not free to create records without any opposition. Nor did what they created require the erasure of Black people, quite the opposite. If it were the case, as one historian argues, that “enslavers did the careful, deliberate work of historical production and erasure,” we can only say that they simply did a pretty bad job; indeed, they failed miserably.29

The archive of slavery documents the violence of slaveholders and their allies, as well as the refusal of their victims to be silenced. Those in power speak not only to address others in their class but also those they expect to pay homage to them. If the archive is a boisterous place, part of the noise—often appearing as outbursts—derives from the protests of the powerful against the acts of the powerless. This is true even in the law. For what more is the 1664 Maryland law proclaiming “That whatsoever free-born woman shall intermarry with any slave . . . shall serve the master of such slave during the life of her husband; and that all the issue of such free-born women, so married shall be slaves as their fathers were,” than an outburst, a plea in the form of a protest, that acknowledged and attempted to silence the actions of the powerless. Or the 1662 Virginia law purporting to settle the apparently increasingly vexing question of how to prevent the children of enslaved women from claiming freedom or, put differently, how to make the wombs of enslaved women vessels for reproducing a population of enslaved people. And so, this famous outburst:

WHEREAS some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or ffree, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shalbe held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother, And that if any christian shall committ ffornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the ffines imposed by the former act.30

We may also take as an example the case of William and Mary Butler’s an encounter with power. The Butlers enter the archive in 1770 in a suit for their freedom in which they accused Richard Boarman of illegally enslaving them. By the Maryland Act of 1663, the marriage of their mother, a white woman, and their father, an enslaved man, made the couple’s children free. The law addressed the problem of “‘divers freeborn English’ or white women” who, whether at the instigation of their masters or mistresses or to satisfy their own “lascivious and lustful desires” “to the disgrace” of the English people and Christian nations, married Black men, free or enslaved. To avoid the “divers inconveniences, controversies, and suits” that might arise, the law declared the issue, or children, of such free-born women to be free.31 This too was an outburst.

In these and other paper tracings in the archive, the outbursts are predictable. They gave lie to the notion of race as an immutable characteristic, exposing racism as “a social practice” and “racecraft.”32 What other than racecraft can possibly explain a law that determined whether a child was born enslaved or free solely on the basis of whether or not the womb that carried the child belonged to a woman declared free or one declared unfree? There is nothing quite like it. Even birthright citizenship does not depend on the status of the mother or require that the womb be the womb of a citizen.33

Over 150 years after the Butler’s suit, long after slavery had migrated from an institution of the British colonial American mainland to an institution sanctioned by the United States, Lucy Buchanan faced the violence of the law. Her will testified to her tortured existence as a formerly enslaved person. Though free by the time she made the will, she had given birth while enslaved, when her womb, by law, could not hold a fetus who could become a free-born person. How Buchanan secured her own freedom and came into legal possession of her son as her slave is unclear. But the fact that she died the same year she “signed” the will suggests that desperation may have played a role in her decision to leave her child enslaved to a white man she trusted to “treat him humanly and kindly.” She was no doubt cognizant of the South Carolina slave code that by 1735 required privately emancipated slaves to leave the province no later than six months after their emancipation. Anyone who dared return faced being “sold by the public treasurer for the use of the public, unless such manumission be approved of and confirmed by an order of both Houses of Assembly.” In 1740, free Black persons who left the state were expressly “forever prohibited from returning.”34 That Buchanan remained in the state herself suggests that she had not long been free. But facing death, she sought to protect her son who was probably too young to make it on his own if forced to leave the state. The law that kept a child born to an enslaved woman enslaved even after the mother became free was its own kind of violence.

Buchanan’s will transferring the power to make life and death decisions for her son to a white slaveholder commands our attention as an example of the “jostling violence” in the archive. In it, Buchanan attests to the inhumane circumstances she faced, the violence inherent in having to make such a decision. Clothed in the legal garb of a free person in making her will, she acts like a free person. But the will she signs is unlike any that a free white mother would ever have to sign though it was not uncommon for white men to sell, will, or gift enslaved children to whom they were the biological fathers.

The production of white supremacy in slave societies and in societies with slaves was perforce ever attentive to the thoughts and actions of enslaved people. The records of slaveholders demonstrate that they could barely write about themselves without writing about enslaved people. The messages conveyed in letters to loved ones that included greetings to enslaved people were a tiny, but knowing, part of this. The enslaved took center stage, as noted above, in laws crafted by southern states and localities. Though not allowed to testify in court, legal instruments concerning them— some no more than a page and some that run hundreds of pages—filled court dockets and now fill archives. A passport housed in the Williams Research Center in New Orleans or a record of a sale in the Notarial Archives Research Center are paper tracings that open windows into the lives of enslaved people.35 So, too, is the 1863 testimony of a fugitive slave who provided evidence of treason on the part of a slaveholder to Union authorities. So too, is the appearance of Patience with her five children on a list of “Runaway Negros” from 1851 that was kept by the operator of an Underground Railroad station.36

Slaveholders kept people they enslaved at the top of their minds always, and it shows in the archive. As many historians have noted, they routinely mentioned Black people in conversations among themselves and with other people with whom they interacted. These conversations took place everywhere, including on steamboats, where, Walter Johnson writes, “slavery was a stock topic of conversation,” topics that ranged from “the eagerness with which slaves looked forward to the end of the harvest” to “the valuation of enslaved children for sale by the pound,” “the supposed culpability of enslaved women for the high rate of mortality among their infants,” “the ways enslaved people made money from the garden plots allowed them by their owners, and whether or not said owners later found themselves indebted to their slaves,” and the list goes on.37 These kinds of conversations, Johnson argues, “represent an important aspect of the intellectual history of the Cotton Kingdom” and “must be understood as white supremacist rituals, serving as a vehicle by which white people unknown to one another could make connections based on a conversation about black people.”38

These conversations did not go unchallenged by enslaved people or their descendants. I think of Farah Jasmine Griffin’s reading of a scene near the end of Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, where, Griffin writes, “an army of Black women march to 124—the house where former slave Sethe, her daughter Denver, and the ghost of slavery, Beloved, reside.” There, “singing in unison,” they “confront the evil legacy of white supremacy and the slave trade, fight it and, in this instance win.” In this confrontation, “the voices of singing Black women disremember the ghost of slavery and break the back of words in order to communicate beyond them and destroy their power over Black bodies. And it is this dual action—the breaking of physical and discursive bonds—that precipitates the healing.” An “ocean of sound . . . continues to communicate when language breaks down,” she writes.39

For many of us, the term archive, as Antoinette Burton writes, conjures up a mystical world where “the hands-on, hard work of history evidently takes place and . . . historians get their professional credibility—by breaking into a sweat, if not a fever.”40 The “hands-on, hard work” of scholars like Jennifer Morgan, Marisa Fuentes, Stephanie Smallwood, Walter Johnson, and Saidiya Hartman, among others, has drawn slavery scholars more closely than ever before to understanding the difficulties of working in the archive and the importance of new methodologies to navigating and addressing them. What I am trying to think through is how to keep this defining work in mind while also seeing, simultaneously, the sound of slavery made by enslaved people that, like the ocean of sound created by the women in Beloved, counteracted and cried out against the slaveholders who trafficked in their bodies, minds, and labor, and the against the silencing tactics of their descendants who trafficked in history.

In the paper tracings enslaved people left in the archive of slavery, I see an ocean of sound made by enslaved people that makes the archive of slavery a spectacularly boisterous and fruitful site of study. The archive is not a monolithic enterprise but a multiplicity of sites that have their origins in different times and different modes and expressions of power that matured in yet still different modes of power across time. The archive of slavery in the United States is not the archive of colonial South Asia or colonial Angola. Yet no matter its location or origins, historians have proved themselves attune to the archive’s distortions and other limitations. And, I argue, we must also be attuned to seeing in the paper tracings we find in the archive of slavery the presence of the enslaved not merely as fleeting moments, but evidence of the voices and sounds of distress, resistance and joy central to the making of the archive. Power, like agency, as one historian reminds us, is “historically conditioned.” And as another adds, it is “never total.”41 In the archive enslaved people speak fugitive words and enact fugitive lives. These are records of great moment, not silence.

Archival records do not reproduce white supremacy. Its users may and often have. What we make of these records is of first importance. If in searching for enslaved women in the archive, all we can see are their violated bodies and silenced voices, we are lost. And perhaps more than lost, it seems to me, we acquiesce in the work of the descendants of slaveholders and their allies who sought to memorialize in the safe spaces of the history books and public memorials that they controlled a view of slavery in which the focus would be on slaveholders, not the enslaved.42 In this world, Lucy Buchanan does not occupy the prominent place she did in the world of the powerful white men who witnessed her will. She is invisible. Rose does not occupy a prominent place in the thoughts and fears of white slaveholding women in the world she fought to destroy. The fugitive slaves who named themselves “North Star” are of no consequence, nor is Susan Davis, born enslaved in 1840.43 In her AHA 2010 presidential address, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich reminds us of what we lose when we miss the details that allow “us to see connections that might otherwise be invisible”44

Power does not operate in a vacuum, and the insights to be gained from paper tracings demonstrates this magnificently.

Power is never silent or invisible, and neither is the response to it. That response may be muffled in real time and in how it reaches us through the archive. But most often, it is like a swollen river escaping the banks of its confinement. To such an analysis, Foucault offers a bait without a switch. “We may amuse ourselves, if we wish, by seeing a revenge in this,” he writes of the resistance of the poor and disfranchised, “the chance that enabled these absolutely undistinguished people to emerge from their place amid the multitudes, to gesticulate again, to manifest their rage, their affliction, or their invincible determination to err—perhaps it makes up for the bad luck that brought power’s lightning bolt down on them, in spite of their modesty and anonymity.”45 I am not amused. The people who gesticulate and rage against power may be “undistinguished,” but their rage was of consequence, their affliction, a thing they fought.

Perhaps we have been more taken with the power of slaveholders than enslaved people were. When we encounter records written by enslavers, we are sometimes too quick to dismiss them as incapable of rendering any significant insight into the lives and thoughts of enslaved people. Reckoning with the disremembering of the lives of enslaved people, the project of the archive of slavery, only seems increasingly problematic in part, perhaps, because we have gotten out of the habit of doing it, out of the habit of wrestling with the archive of slavery as a site of encounters created by the enslaved. Asa H. Gordon, writing in 1929, did not have this problem. “The successful runaway was not only an abolitionist in the narrow sense in that he abolished his own personal slavery,” he wrote, “but in a larger and more important sense he helped the abolition movement by calling out from the slave-owning class attempts at retaliation which were so cruel and inhuman that they advertised the whole system as infamous.” Gordon ends this thought with this important observation: “The fugitive slaves agitated class owners and goaded them into acts and policies which ultimately injured their cause and tremendously aided the abolition movement.”46

Designed to be the preserve of important church and state documents and important people, the archive was punctuated from the first with violence and the voices of the “undistinguished.” Even the most stately of archival collections prove boisterous, teeming with the spectacular visibility of people without power, or who lacked an elevated station in life. In the field of slavery studies in which I work, the visibility of people who were not supposed to be visible as subjects has been my lodestar. I have been interested in “paper tracings”—the discarded and disregarded—that populate the archives and make it possible for scholars to say something of the lives of people who did not write letters or keep diaries or account books. These are the tracings that allow us to see Charity Folks in Jessica Millward’s Finding Charity’s Folks, Jane in Marisa Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives, Delphine in Emily Owens’ Consent in Presence of Force, the recently emancipated woman that sewed the cloak Sarah Jones Weicksel documents in her forthcoming book A Nation Unraveled, and the women in Kathleen Hilliard’s Masters, Slaves, and Exchange who slaveholders sought to bind to their control through “gifts” of dresses and blankets, to cite a few.47 Library and archival collection guides do not organize or curate these tracings to ease the way. But if one is patient and interested, the thoughts, deeds, loves, laughter, disappointments, and sufferings of people legally denied the right to literacy and whose lives the archive of slavery was not designed to accommodate will reward us. And when they do, the researcher must suppress expressions of delight in finding enslaved people, knowing that there they will also find much pain. Yet, the noise made by the enslaved is both deafening and rewarding.

This address had its most immediate origins in a memory of a time when my mother traced my feet on a piece of paper, about which I wrote in an AHA Perspectives on History column. Armed with that tracing, she went downtown to buy a pair of shoes for me. As I wrote in the column, this was not an uncommon ritual in the South, one that saved many a Black child from untold humiliations but did not spare their mothers, fathers, or grandparents who were forced to endure the ritual to its bitter end. They had to make the tracings, carry them to the store, dig into their pockets and purses for the sheet of paper or paper bag on which they had traced the feet, and offer them—these tracings rather than the actual feet of the child—to a white clerk. They had to endure, I suspect, the clerk’s effort to maintain proper physical distance even from the piece of paper, to watch him look at it and take it to the back of the store to measure against a pair of shoes.

In that column, I wrote that I imagined garbage cans in alleyways behind segregated department stores all across the South filled with the tracings of the feet of Black people, “paper tracings” discarded and disregarded, and with them the stories they might tell.48 Beyond that, I thought about the work that went into scraping together hard-earned dollars to put aside for new shoes for the first day of school, May Day celebrations, spelling bees, and Easter, and the mental preparation required to make the tracing and carry them to the store.49 I wondered whether their ultimate disposal required separate garbage bins for “colored people” like the medical implements with “CER” for “Colored Emergency Room” scratched on them. I imagined that even in their discarded and disregarded state, these tracings would have been painfully visible, in particular to the Black women and men who cleaned the stores and picked up the trash from alleyways. I wondered what they thought of the sight of garbage cans filled with the tracings of the feet of Black people, and felt. These memories and imaginings of mine stand unadorned by any official documentation. They refer to paper tracings not thought worthy of preserving. They remind us not only of how much has been lost, discarded, and disregarded, but of the value of the tracings that remain.

I take “discarded” to mean not only that which is literally and often deliberately thrown away or gotten rid of, like the paper tracings of my feet, but also that which is ignored, neglected, unattended to, disregarded. Historians of slavery and freedom and in many other fields confront both of these meanings. We know that many records have been lost while others have been kept and stored with care in libraries and archives. It is the latter that we have no choice but to use and if we are open to listening, the spectacularly boisterous archive made so by enslaved people is there for us see like.

We acknowledge that works by the hands of enslaved people are notoriously in short supply in the archive. We have comparatively many, many fewer letters penned by them or records of their daily lives in their own words. But we go too far when we see the archival document, in the words of Farge, is as no more than “a tear in the fabric of time, an unplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event” in which “everything is focused on a few instants in the lives of ordinary people, people who were rarely visited by history, unless they happened to form a mob and make what would later be called history.”50 Again, we must remember that the archive is a site that documents enslaved and ordinary people forcing their way into history, thus ensuring that history will visit them frequently.

It is easy to miss all of this when we are ill-prepared to hear it and have too little patience with it when we do. The result is that we add our own effacement, our own silencing, our own acceptance of the notion that traditional archives, because they are inherently corrupt spaces in which the enslaved are engulfed in violence, can offer us little more than silence about the people whose lives we want to study. But we cannot at once claim that enslaved people are silenced in the archive and then use those same archives to “explore . . . the moments when information about enslaved individuals became worth recording and controlling” and “what it meant to be at once enslaved and the subject of enslavers’ historical machinations.”51 If we start from the notion that “enslaved people’s histories are worth fighting for,” we have lost the battle and the war.52

Perhaps in our eagerness to condemn, and justly so, archives in which we have too few documents written by enslaved people or which capture their perspective, we often miss or overlook enslaved people who are visible, enslaved people who bore witness “to something it is impossible to bear witness to,” forcing the historian to listen for the seeming “something absent.”53 Enslaved people refuse us the privilege of finding them silent or the ill-conceived privilege of seeing them as worth fighting for. Consider Mary Reynolds who said this: “Slavery was the worst days that was ever seed in the world.” She recalled this as she catalogued the things she had experienced and witnessed, too much of which, she stated, were “things past tellin.” But like hundreds of other formerly enslaved people, she told them. She talked about the scars on her body that remained “to this day” and the things “worse than what happened to me,” like men and women she had seen placed “in the stock with they hands screwed down through holes in the board and they feets tied together and they naked behinds to the world” and the fatalities that followed when flesh was cut “most to the bones.”54

I have written elsewhere about my encounter with the prayer of a father as he watched Black children dying in Civil War refugee camps.55 It was a simple prayer: “Our children dyin’ fast in decamp, and as we tote them from one place to udder and burden in de cold ground.” One sentence long and captioned “A Father’s Prayer,” it captured for me, the “ocean of sound” in the archive made by enslaved people and left in paper tracings that can further anchor our endeavors to understand them. To hear the sound requires a willingness to “privilege those utterances meant to be small and insignificant.”56 It requires understanding, as Vincent Brown writes, that “materials testifying to untidy politics rarely fit the established narratives of nations, peoples, and historic events. It means reading “for traces of the experience of slavery,” as Walter Johnson writes. It means understanding, as Leslie Brown writes, “that there is no perfect archive.” It means, as Jennifer Morgan writes, that “there is an imperative to return, to understand the past through records created to do the very opposite of what we ask of them.”57

In sum, the noise in the archive of slavery can be immensely rewarding, and I invite our continued commitment to listening. In the result we may say: We may not know “her name” but we are looking for her. She is not disremembered or unaccounted for. Her story is a story to pass on.

 

Notes

  1. The will of Lucy Buchannan, South Carolina Wills and Probate Records, 1670–1980, Will Book No. 1, 1841, Ancestry.com. The literature on archives is vast. Only as tiny fraction is considered here. [↩]
  2. It was not uncommon for Black people who owned slaves to do so in order to protect enslaved family members. See, for example, Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (Pantheon Books, 1974). [↩]
  3. The reference to the “master’s tools” is from Audre Lorde: “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984), 112. [↩]
  4. Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New Press, 2003), 279; Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Yale University Press, 2013), 105. [↩]
  5. Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 4 (2013): 501–32. [↩]
  6. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 279, 280–82. [↩]
  7. As Archivist B.M. Watson notes, archives do not “arrange themselves” and what we often refer to as archives are more properly labelled personal papers. See B.M. Watson, “Please Stop Calling Things Archives: An Archivist’s Plea,” Perspectives on History, January 22, 2021. [↩]
  8. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 291. [↩]
  9. Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1, 4, 5, 6. [↩]
  10. Rashauna Johnson, “Streets and Archives: Slavery and the Spaces of Early New Orleans, “Process: A Blog for American History, April 5, 2017; Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey-Berry, “Researching Nineteenth-Century African American History,” The Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2022): 429–47. [↩]
  11. Jennifer L. Morgan, “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism: An Afterword,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (2015): 153–61, here 155. For important insights, see also Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). [↩]
  12. In science, a singularity is the center of a black hole that is a point of infinite density and gravity from which no object can ever escape, not even light. On the damage that the idea of silence can do, see also the critical intervention by Leslie Harris. Leslie M. Harris, “Imperfect Archives and the Historical Imagination,” Public Historian 36 (2014): 77–80. [↩]
  13. Morgan, “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism,” 159. [↩]
  14. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery, 208. [↩]
  15. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 90. [↩]
  16. Thavolia Glymph, “The Southern Historical Collection and Civil War and Reconstruction History: A Past and a Future,” Southern Sources: A Symposium Celebrating Seventy-Five Years of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, March 19, 2005. [↩]
  17. Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake (Random House, 2021), 4. See also, Thomas S. Foster, “‘No Perfect Archive’: Recovering Histories of Enslaved People at Abingdon Plantation,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 12, no. 4 (2022): 448–72. [↩]
  18. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–18, here 1–2. [↩]
  19. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2. [↩]
  20. Michel-Ralph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton University Press, 2009); Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Silence 2, no. 1–2 (2002): 87–109; Asheesh Kapur Siddique, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (Yale University Press, 2024), 3–5. [↩]
  21. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 1, 2, 4. [↩]
  22. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 2. See also, Stephanie E. Smallwood, “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved,” History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 117–32. [↩]
  23. See, for example, Trouillot’s, Silencing the Past and, published the same year, Derrida’s Archive Fever. For a summary of the openings that legal records provide taken from her larger body of work, see Ariela J. Gross, “Archives of the Dispossessed: Mourning, Memory, and Meta History,” English Language Notes (April 2021): 219–21. [↩]
  24. Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinship: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Dylan C. Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright, 2023); Thavolia Glymph, “Women and Children Refugees, The Civil War, and the Law of War,” The Huntington Library Distinguished Fellow Lecture, March 20, 2024. [↩]
  25. Account Book, Zachariah T. Shugart Papers, 1838–1912, The Huntington Library; “Departures to Serve,” May 1864, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, RG 105, National Archives, Washington, D. C. [↩]
  26. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Verso, 2012), 25. [↩]
  27. Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (New York: Vintage, 1992), 319-20. I am indebted to Edward Muir’s presidential address for guiding me back to Schama. [↩]
  28. Schama, Dead Certainties, 319, quoted in Edward Muir, “Conversations with the Dead,” American Historical Review 129, no. 1 (2024): 1–21, here 3. [↩]
  29. Maria R. Montalvo, Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), 131. [↩]
  30. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 (R. Buchanan & G. Bartow, 1823), 2:170. [↩]
  31. Thomas Harris, Jr. and John M’Henry, Maryland Reports: A Series of the Most Important Law Cases, Argued and Determined in the Provincial Court and Court of Appeals of the then Province of Maryland, from the Year 1700 down to the American Revolution (I. Riley, 1809), 371–73. [↩]
  32. Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 17, 19; Martha S. Jones, “Enslaved to a Founding Father, She Sought Freedom in France, New York Times, November 23, 2021; Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge (37Ink/Atria, 2017). [↩]
  33. On birthright citizenship, see Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018). [↩]
  34. John Belton O’Neal, The Negro Law of South Carolina (John G. Bowman, 1848); Thomas Cooper, Statutes at Large of South Carolina 3rd Vol. (A.S. Johnston, 1838); Thomas Cooper, Statutes at Large of South Carolina 4th Vol. (A.S. Johnston, 1838); Daniel J. McCord, ed., Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 7th Vol. (A.S. Johnston, 1840), 384, 651, 443. [↩]
  35. Johnson, “Streets and Archives”; Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis. See also Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (University of Georgia Press, 2000); Rebecca Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2012); Ariel J. Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and the Law on Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge University Press, 2020). [↩]
  36. Examination of Thomas Washington, Servant of Judge R B Barnes, November 4th, 1861, Joseph Hooker Military Papers, Huntington Library; Account Book, Shugart Papers, The Huntington Library. [↩]
  37. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2015), 135–36. [↩]
  38. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 136. [↩]
  39. Jasmine Farrah Griffin, “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black Women’s Vocality,” in In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays (Norton, 2023), 24-25. [↩]
  40. Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2003), 139–40. [↩]
  41. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 9; Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Belknap Press, 2020), 15. [↩]
  42. See for example, Mary C. Simms Oliphant, The New Simms History of South Carolina Centennial Edition, 1840-1940 (The State Company, 1940); Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland, A History of the South, 4th ed. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972). W. E. B. Du Bois spoke eloquently on this. See Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–80 (Free Press, 1998), 710–29. First published 1935 by Harcourt Brace (New York). [↩]
  43. On Susan Davis, see Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barrers, Won the Vote, and Insisted in Equality for All (Basic Books, 2020), 2–3. [↩]
  44. Laura Thatcher Ulrich, “An American Album, 1857,” The American Historical Review 115, no. 1 (2010): 1–25, here 1. [↩]
  45. Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 284. [↩]
  46. Asa S. Gordon, Sketches of Negro Life and History in South Carolina, 2nd ed. (University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 20. First published 1929 by W. B. Conkey Co. (New York). [↩]
  47. Jessica Millward, Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (University of Georgia Press, 2015); Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Kathleen Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Sarah Jones Weicksel, A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press, 2025). See also Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024). [↩]
  48. Thavolia Glymph, “The Irretrievable Past? Tracks and Residues, Imagined Sources, and the Writing of History,” Perspectives on History, January 17, 2024. Even when Black parents or other relatives did not have to take tracings of their children’s feet to stores to buy shoes, they often had to endure other indignities, as Mamie Garvin Fields recalled, such as being called “Auntie” by shoe salesmen. (Mamie Garvin Fields with Karen Fields, Lemonswamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (The Free Press, 1983), 10). [↩]
  49. But the thing about racial segregation, of course, was that it was no respecter of class within the Black community. Children whose parents did not have to pinch pennies still got their feet traced. [↩]
  50. Farge, The Allure of the Archives, 6–7. [↩]
  51. Montalvo, Enslaved Archives, 5. [↩]
  52. Montalvo, Enslaved Archives, 130. [↩]
  53. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Zone Books, 2002), 13, 17. [↩]
  54. Mary Reynolds quoted in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol. 5, Texas Narratives, pt. 3 (1941; repr., Greenwood Publishing Co., n.d.), 238. [↩]
  55. “Three Months with Contrabands,” by a Surgeon, New York Herald-Tribune, October 21, 1863. For the essay in which I cite this document, see Thavolia Glymph, “Black Women and Children in the Civil War: Archive Notes,” in Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation, ed. David Blight and Jim Downs (University of Georgia Press, 2017): 121–35. [↩]
  56. Aisha Finch, “‘What Looks Like a Revolution’: Enslaved Women and the Gendered Terrain of Slave Insurgencies in Cuba, 1843–1844,” Journal of Women’s History 26, no. 1 (2014): 112–34, here 124. See also, Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 56. [↩]
  57. Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 11; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999), 11; Harris, “Imperfect Archives and the Historical Imagination,” 79; Jennifer L. Morgan, “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism: An Afterward,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (2015): 153–61, here 157. [↩]