Bibliography
Baptist, Edward. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2015.
Edward Baptist argues “The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States rich and powerful…”His narrative helped me draw out the threads of Capitalism that underlie the entire system of slavery, and later sharecropping. Recognizing the economic foundation underneath slavery allowed me to approach documents and consider the human costs of these financial transactions. It also helped me identify relevant primary sources to include as objects. Because enslaved people did not often leave behind textual sources, historians must use the records that enslavers kept instead such as bills of sale, legal records, and probate inventories.
———. Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Edward Baptist’s earlier work gave me the specific, local context of slavery. Many Tallahassee natives and longtime residents have heard the myth that Tallahassee became the capital because of its central location between Pensacola and St. Augustine. While this work recalls that myth, it also adds that middle Florida was an area in which enslavers from other states wished to transplant planter society and a system of unpaid forced labor into the territory. Furthermore, Baptist here contextualizes that the settlement of Florida required the violent removal of indigenous American populations. Settlers learned which land was arable thanks to these populations and after removing them, built their plantations in those spaces.
Berry, Daina Ramey. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from Womb to Grave in the Building of a Nation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017.
Daina Ramey Berry’s monograph approaches how enslaved people rationalized and considered their own commodification. In it, she explores how this commodification their life experiences and thoughts about birth and death. This book particularly helped me consider bills of sale and records of public auctions especially when they contained evidence of women and/or children. While records rarely give the reasoning behind the values assigned to human beings, Berry’s work made me consider how the people could affect their own values, and why they would want to. In addition, it highlighted the violent overtones of enslaver’s pro-natal attitudes. The joy of birth and life became distorted knowing that a child would be born into enslavement.
Blackmon, Douglas. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 2008.
Douglas Blackmon argues that the abuses of slavery persisted into the twentieth century through different economic and legal forms. For instance, sharecropping, a type of tenant farming, often bound emancipated African Americans to the land they worked under enslavement through debt and predatory contracts. A loophole in the thirteenth amendment in addition permitted slavery so long as the party was convicted of a crime and imprisoned which led to convict leasing. This book influenced the chronological frame of my project. A key part of understanding slavery and its legacies is also understanding how it persisted and changed after the Civil War.
Hunter, Tera. Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Tera Hunter reexamines marriage in enslaved communities as a “de facto” institution and what it looked like post-emancipation. Like Brenda Stevenson, Hunter argues that the institution of marriage did not completely capture the range of relationships that enslaved people formed. It can be difficult to piece together their familial ties based on records, but when possible, its also possible to consider the plausible alternatives to the nuclear family. It also led me to consider not only how marriage impacted enslaved people, but why enslavers would consider allowing it in the first place. In conversation with the economic historiography of American Slavery, birth was not only an aspect of life for enslaved people distorted by slavery, but it was also a commodifiable one by enslavers.
Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
Leon Litwack demonstrates how freemen and freewomen and their freeborn descendants navigated the realities of Jim Crow. They had to fight for access to education. Sharecropping effectively rendered many of them dependent on former owners. They also suffered from violent acts like lynching. Polls prevented them from voting with literacy tests and other devious methods such as the grandfather clause and poll taxes. Litwack’s book assisted my search of primary sources beyond the Civil War. Documents such as sharecropping contracts and store accounts reveal the persistence of post Reconstruction Era policies in regulating African American lives. It further contextualized the continuity between the antebellum and reconstruction periods.
Rivers, Larry. Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000.
Larry Rivers offers a narrative of slavery across all of Florida, rather than the geographically specific focus of Ed Baptist’s work. While the narrative does not extend beyond emancipation, it did provide context about Spanish occupation, British involvement, and the eventual settlement of the territory by Americans. In particular, this book offered me more context about what America needed to do in order to settle Florida. Like Baptist, it discusses the forced removal of indigenous Americans. However, it also gives detail on how Fort Gadsden came to be community of Indigenous Americans, free African Americans, and Maroons. The violent politics of settlement and the destruction of Fort Gadsden played a role in the Florida territory’s development into a slave state.
Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Caitlin Rosenthal examines how enslavement drove the historical development of accounting practices. Her book assesses financial records to uncover patterns of resistance and reveal how enslavers created various modes of documenting the financial transactions of human bondage. Because this project examines so many instances of legal and financial records, it was a key work to influence my methodology and historical reasoning. It helped me take my analysis beyond values and interrogate how enslavers recorded transactions. Furthermore, it helped me realize that the type of record further contextualizes what it can reveal about the people within them. For instance, the event recorded by the probate record of an estate sale provides us with different information about the people than a record of somebody’s taxable property.
Smithers, Gregory. Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History. Jacksonville: University Press of Florida, 2012.
Gregory Smathers challenges longstanding economic arguments about enslaved reproduction. It brings forth the historical context that influenced the “racial and sexual objectification of black bodies,” the blurring of African American gender roles, the fragility of Black families, and African American memory-making to explain the brutality of life and death. While I did not find a way to incorporate his scholarship directly into my project, it helped me raise questions in many cases regardless of the source’s ability to answer them. For example, there is a large body of scholarship about the acts of sexual violence and rape that enslavers committed on enslaved people. Specifically, when the descriptor “Mulatto” came up, I attempted to investigate connections between that person and the enslaver(s) in question to contextualize that person’s experience.
Stevenson, Brenda. Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Brenda Stevenson provides a dualistic look at family, sexuality, and marriage in both free white, black and enslaved communities in Loudoun, Virginia. Her work is earlier than Tera Hunter’s, but it provided a helpful introduction to the realities of family and kinship for enslaved people. Stevenson’s work assisted my project by pointing out the various alternatives to the nuclear family that existed in these communities. In addition, it highlighted how the economic transactions of enslavers broke up families. In many cases, auctions or property transfers split entire families apart. When I could not tell much about the person in a record, Stevenson taught me that there is still a way to know what happened to them based on contextual information.