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This essay examines the broad impact of African American thought leadership on early American intellectual history. Though marginalized in many mainstream histories of American intellectual life–which often focus on the emergence of Black philosophers and Black professional historians later in the 19th century -- early national Black thinkers helped shape public understanding of critical ideas in American society and politics, including the meaning of citizenship and civil rights, emancipation and equality, and racial justice. African Americans also influenced public discourses on other key topics in American intellectual life, including the nature of human dignity and spiritual redemption in the Second Great Awakening, the meaning of Romanticism and Transcendentalism in American reform culture, and the authority of science and technology in antebellum society. Using the concept of thought leadership as a framing device to understand the power and impact of early Black ideas, I follow recent trends in the field of African American intellectual history that focus on that way that African American men and women became public authorities on key ideas and issues in American culture between the American Revolution and Civil War. Though they did not often occupy positions of educational, institutional, or legal power (the main provinces of intellectual leadership), Black thought leaders had a significant impact on early American intellectual history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article illuminates a lesser-explored aspect of the United States as a "slaveholding republic." Between 1816–1861, the U.S. Army relied on thousands of enslaved persons who served as officers' servants. In 1816, Congress authorized allowances, rations, and bonuses for officers' private servants while putting an end to the practice of soldiers serving as servants. This legislative move effectively subsidized and incentivized military slaveholding. The paper delves into the political circumstances and legislative maneuvers that led Congress to institutionalize military slavery, establishing mechanisms to sustain, fund, and expand the number of enslaved servants. Military slavery developed gradually with the foundation, bureaucratization, and professionalization of an American military peace establishment. It evolved from 1797 to 1816 through competing policy objectives, resulting in a long-lasting bureaucratic workaround euphemistically termed "servants not soldiers." Facing public criticism over officers' abuse of soldiers' labor, the army "outsourced" officers' servants through a dual process of privatization and racialization, differentiating between "public" and "private" service, between free, white soldiers and enslaved, black servants. Though serving slaveholders' interests, the adopted solution was a product of bureaucratic contingencies and ad-hoc decision-making and not a policy orchestrated by a cabal of enslavers. Interestingly, a basic question of reimbursement led somewhere unanticipated, ending in government-sponsored enslaved servitude. Acknowledging this contingency does not excuse the actions but underscores how slavery was often "solved" through institutional accommodation rather than political or moral opposition. Thus, slavery directly impacted the U.S. Army, a central national institution, altering the military system at its pivotal, formative moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The West India Regiments, men of African descent embodied into regular regiments of the British Army, played a hitherto unheralded role in the War of 1812. Knowledge of the military prowess of these regiments was widespread in the US in the early nineteenth century, and the British exploited this, mixed with a large amount of rumour and speculation as a terror tactic during the war. The West India Regiments were used as recruiters in the Chesapeake in 1814, and on active campaigns against New Orleans and Georgia in 1815. They were directly and indirectly responsible for the escape of thousands of enslaved people from slave states to British forces and even forced some US commentators to contemplate the recruitment of their own enslaved soldiers as a counterweight. While their military contribution to the war ended up being small, the psychological importance of regiments of black men within easy reach of the southern states lingered long after peace had been agreed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article corrects major historiographical flaws concerning Louisiana's early relationship with the United States and argues the federal tariff was the most critical factor influencing state reconciliation. Leading Louisiana historians like Peter Kastor concur that slavery inspired French-speaking Creole planters to embrace U.S. citizenship. Their consensus further holds that Creole commitment to slavery crystalized their national cultural acceptance. However, Creole planters shared far more with Caribbean slaveholders than those in the American South. Throughout Louisiana's early territorial and statehood years, slavery bolstered animosity between Anglo-Americans and Creoles. The former viewed Creoles through a racist lens and remained wary of their slave-related cultural practices, like openly acknowledging mixed-race relationships. The latter feared that English-speaking migrants would undermine their legal hegemony and inspire insurrection. Though slavery impeded Louisiana unity, the federal tariff did more than anything else to foster it. Throughout the 1820s, Creole planters became reliant on federal sugar protections to alleviate competition. Thus, the tariff gave Creoles a considerable incentive to embrace national political identities. Louisiana's redoubtable statesman Edward Livingston was particularly instrumental in promoting reconciliation on both sides. Before becoming Andrew Jackson's Secretary of State, the exiled New Yorker spent decades representing his adopted state's culturally divergent Creoles. When South Carolina triggered the Nullification Crisis in 1832-1833, Livingston spoke with Louisiana's unique perspective and eloquently guided Jackson's response which deftly balanced federalism's necessities with states' rights concerns. Thus, through the tariff, Louisiana not only embraced its new American identity, but the government employed Louisiana's voice to preserve the Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the era of gradual emancipation, between about 1780 and 1830, ordinary African Americans tested the power of correspondence in efforts to advance their claims to freedom. Their demands often exceeded the limits of emancipation laws, but the letters themselves became a form of evidence in cases that challenged the existing legal regime. This article draws upon the correspondence files of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to reveal a pattern of antislavery activism in which enslaved and free Black correspondents communicated their views directly white abolitionists, seeing themselves as participants in a cooperative activist partnership. Writing as deferential petitioners, indignant parents, aggrieved victims, and shrewd negotiators—sometimes all within the space of the same letter—African Americans used correspondence to present their political concerns as inseparable from their daily lives. Harnessing the medium of correspondence, they made immediate demands for legal freedom and relief from suffering. They also made implicit claims to equality through their conscious deployment of language and letter-writing conventions to reflect good moral character—a prerequisite for equal membership in the body politic. Together, these sources demonstrate that African Americans used letter-writing to secure freedom for themselves and their families as well as to emphasize the universal injustice of slavery and the moral obligation to oppose it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians' decisions about what words to use to describe historical actors can be affected by editing practices and community norms. However, historians must also be attentive to how historical actors understood their own identities and life experiences as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terms Black and African American are the products of twentieth-century political and cultural movements that struggled to find terms to define, unite, celebrate, and recognize the heritage and identity of people of African descent in the United States. Today, African American typically refers to the ethnicity, nationality, and culture of Black people residing in or born in the United States. Black typically refers to a racial category and an elastic cultural, ethnic, and, arguably, political identity that is not defined by nationality or geopolitical boundaries. These two terms are only the most recent articulations of a long tradition of collective self-identification that began during the earliest days of slavery and colonialism in the Americas. This essay examines the social and political shifts that engendered new ways of naming Black identity and the names and terminology intellectuals have used to describe people of African descent in the Americas in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Vanessa M. Holden foregrounds her experience working with her local community in an exploration of the use of the terms "slave" and "ensalved" in historical writing. She engages with primary material and historians' own careful public debate about both terms. An ongoing conversation in the feild of slavery scholarship accross multiple historical contexts, the two terms deserve to be approached with nuance and care for the lives of those held in bondage during the period of Atlantic slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews the efforts of modern historians to explain the rise and development of capitalism in the early United States. Often assumed to be synonymous with democracy and freedom, capitalism as a system of social and economic organization has presented historians with an interpretive dilemma—suggested by the allusion to "the genie and the troll." The rich historiography from the 20th and early 21st centuries is surveyed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1860, with the Civil War looming, David and Elizabeth Frazier (a free Black couple), petitioned for a legal exemption to an 1806 statute demanding that any newly-freed African Americans emigrate from the Commonwealth within a year of their emancipation. Their petition capped a decade-long struggle to gain their freedom and keep their family intact, during which the Fraziers campaigned on fronts spanning from the courtroom to the slave market. Through a microhistory of the Fraziers' battle for the right to remain in the Commonwealth, this essay explores the ways in which a slave state used emigration policies to safeguard the institution of slavery. It also reveals the ferocity with which Black Virginians defended their families and communities, and, by examining the Fraziers' twin deployment of the law and of relationships built through a decade of work amid the horrors of the domestic slave trade, reveals how free people of color seized the scarce options available to them. Between the law of white supremacy and the maw of slave capitalism, the Fraziers carved out a modicum of liberty for themselves and their children, escaping forced migration in their bondage and forced emigration in their freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines both the origins of the "free state" concept in U.S. history as well the little-known, brief period that Delaware was widely considered a "free state." Americans had long talked about "slaveholding" and "non-slaveholding" states—but it was not until the late 1810s and early 1820s that northerners began to use the words "free state." This change represented a rhetorical escalation from "non-slaveholding state" to a term with an even clearer moral valence. But it was not originally obvious to observers exactly which states should be included in the "free" cohort, and, for a time, white Delawareans were successful in convincing themselves and their fellow Americans that they should be counted amongst the northern free states. This article charts Delawareans' arguments in favor of their "free state" status, as well as, over time, their state's fall from grace into the "slave state" category. That it was only in the years after the Missouri Compromise that a nebulous group of non-slave states solidified into an identifiable core of "free" ones demonstrates that the development of the sectional divide in the pre-Civil War era was more gradual and more uncertain than previously thought. It reveals a process of negotiating a "free" identity on a state level that did not mirror reality on the ground. Finally, it uncovers the rhetorical process behind the large-scale erasure of enslaved African Americans' realities in the creation of the "Free North" myth along its borders, even when the evidence of their existence and their experiences would have been impossible for their white neighbors to ignore [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders William Still's work aiding fugitive slaves as the leader of Philadelphia's Vigilance Committee during the 1850s. It argues that Still's management of the committee, his commitment to bringing a level of order and efficiency to the work of the Underground Railroad, was an essential element of the committee's success in the 1850s in its effort to aid fugitive slaves in their flight from bondage. Still and his coworkers increasingly embraced the language of business and capitalism as a way of describing their work. Like other businesses of this era, Still's Vigilance Committee embraced new transportation and communication technologies in order to compete with slavecatchers who after passage of the new Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 were increasingly able to use the federal government as an ally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The myth of Manifest Destiny is predicated on the successful annexation of lands desired by U.S. territorial expansionists, particularly during the James K. Polk's presidency (1845-849). But another myth, that Polk accomplished all four of the goals for his presidency, has obscured the fact that one of the biggest prizes desired by annexationists, Cuba, remained out of reach. This essay explores the close U.S.-Cuba relationship in the 1840s, revealing why both supporters and opponents believed Cuban annexation was eminent in the 1840s, even as the U.S. fought a war against Mexico. It also suggests how a more nuanced view of the course of U.S. territorial expansionism can counter the idea of American exceptionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the material origins of gold coinage to argue that enslaved gold miners built the metallic foundations of America's financial system. It traces two concurrent changes in the production and use of the nation's first domestically mined specie from the 1830s to the 1850s. During America's first gold rush in the late 1820s and early 1830s, white mine owners transported thousands of enslaved miners to goldfields in northern Georgia and western North Carolina. As mines grew, the industry shifted away from the undifferentiated workforces of the early gold rush and came to rely on enslaved women who were experts in the technically-complex work of refining gold. As the means of mining shifted, so did the kind of money that gold became. In the early 1830s, the Second Bank of the United States sought southern gold, which it used to back paper money. In the midst of the Bank War, hard money advocates and Democratic partisans came believe that coins made from Southern gold held the key to a safer and more stable currency system. As a result, the federal government provided economic and technical support to the slave-labor dependent mining industry in the name of monetary reform. Using gold mine owners' account books and correspondence, the records of the US Mint, Congressional debates, newspapers, geological reports and scientific treatises, this article underscores the links between the material production of coin and abstract capital, demonstrating that the antebellum period's political debates and financial institutions all revolved around acquiring and controlling gold made by enslaved men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On November 20, 1841, John Quincy Adams delivered an address that shocked the nation. The former President, Congressman, and advocate of the Amistad slaves, urged his fellow citizens to support Britain's cause in the Opium War, which, as he put it, was a war for "human freedom." Why would so zealous a champion against slavery endorse a war to sell an addictive substance? This article offers a critical reinterpretation of Adams's lecture on China. By focusing on an excised portion of his original manuscript, it argues that Adams's remarks can only be understood because of—and not in spite of—his antislavery convictions. At a time when Britain was curtailing the interests of Southern slaveholders through meddling in the coastwise slave trade, Adams attempted to shield Britain's moral capital through an ambitious, if problematic, exposition of political theory. This article therefore makes the case that Adams's remarks on China deserve a more prominent place in his oeuvre. By recasting the Opium War as a landmark in the age of emancipation, Adams calls attention to a factor that many scholars of slavery and abolition may have missed: how the problem of racial slavery in the nineteenth century became inseparable from the problem of opium addiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When in 1852 Frederick Douglass hailed whaling in the Pacific Ocean as labor that black and white men did together, and in 1851 when Herman Melville cited Thomas Jefferson's "Observations on the Whale Fishery" in the opening extracts of Moby-Dick, both Douglass and Melville alluded to a history of the entanglements of whaling, national identity, and slavery that had been a long time in the making. When Jefferson wrote his "Observations" in 1788, he was putting his thinking about a warming climate, the rivers and coasts that connected the American interior to the Atlantic Ocean, and the political transformations of a revolutionary Atlantic world to work in the service of a very particular vision of the future. He was certainly doing much more than representing the interests of Nantucket whalers, the purported goal of the report. Indeed, he was attempting to graft his vision of republicanism onto an oceanic world of contested geopolitics and natural history. The issue of whaling implicated Jefferson's entire body of thought and with it the Jeffersonian project of continental expansion and agrarian political economy, the viability of American empire, and the legal and environmental security of white supremacy and planter enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the political implications of African exclusion from full participation in the American Early Republic. Rather than thinking of Africans as incipient "Americans," I examine points of social and political connection that tied African-descended peoples of North America to those in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of Africa and the Early Republic have overlapping interests both temporally and thematically. To date, this has largely been dominated by the role of the slave trade in both histories. Drawing on some existing examples of the historiography that makes use of comparison and shared methodology, the essay proposes that the two fields can learn from each other in ways that extend beyond their connections to the slave trade and enslaved labor. This essay suggests three ways that the two fields could be further enriched by sharing methodologies, by being imaginative about comparisons across time, and by thinking about the shared trends that developed in their overlapping Atlantic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the crucial role that ideas about race and slavery played in the formation of the Early Republic. Instead of highlighting, as have others, the paradoxical emergence of race-based slavery in a society devoted to freedom and liberty, Jason Young instead envisions this conflict as merely a more recent iteration of a much larger trans-Atlantic concern. The central conflicts of citizenship and alienation that were at the heart of key Constitutional debates in the Early Republic were also playing out in West Africa and Western Europe. Instead of reflecting novel problems of state, these debates animated political formations and conceptions long before they arrived on American shores. In this way, viewing the Early Republic through an African Diasporic lens promises new ways of thinking not only about slavery and abolition but also about the processes of nation-building around the Atlantic rim at the turn of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the possibilities and limitations of using the slavevoyages.org database to research the histories of enslaved people who came to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade. It argues that there are limits to what can be known about individuals based solely on the region from which they departed Africa aboard a slave ship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the establishment of unauthorized U.S. consulates throughout the Spanish Empire transformed both the infrastructure of Spanish colonial rule and the diplomatic relationship between Spain and the Early Republic. In places such as New Orleans, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba, U.S. consuls exercised extraterritorial jurisdiction over national citizens without the authorization of Spanish imperial authorities, sparking intense diplomatic conflicts over the boundaries of national sovereignty. Invoking diplomatic reciprocity, Spanish colonial officials also made use of unauthorized consulates in Savannah, New Orleans, and Natchez in order to contain U.S. expansion, protect Spanish subjects and property, and police runaway slaves and Native Americans. Over the 1800s, these ad-hoc uses of unauthorized consulates challenged metropolitan designs and international diplomatic norms as they locked both U.S. state authorities and Spanish colonial governments in negotiations of state sovereignty, transnational migration, and reciprocity and created a new institutional framework of transnational governance in the Spanish Caribbean and the North American Gulf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the legacies of American statesman and founding father Thomas Jefferson. Topics include his correspondence with fellow American statesman and founding father James Madison, his plantation known as Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, and his views on the legacy of the American Revolution. His relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, is also mentioned.

In December of 1811, enslaved blacksmith Gilbert Hunt helped save about a dozen white women from a horrific theatre fire in Richmond, Virginia, by catching them as they came out of a third-story window. This article examines this story of Hunt's heroism in the broader context of Euro-Virginians' changing understandings of race and slavery between 1811 and the Civil War. It also explores how Hunt has been remembered in Richmond and environs since emancipation and how historians have written about him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 1944 saw the publication of Capitalism and Slavery in the United States. Authored by Eric Williams, a young colonial West Indian Negro and professor at Howard University, the book shattered conventional wisdom by intertwining and recasting the histories of European industrialization, African enslavement, and abolitionism. Though Williams's three-quarter century old work has been often reprinted and remains revered as something of a bible among postcolonial radicals, it has suffered a form of blasphemy in recent years. An influential and growing body of US-based historical studies invested in "rethinking capitalism and slavery" has cited the old study in ways that misrepresents its contentions. Capitalism and Slavery has been miscomprehended in books like Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014) by Sven Beckert, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) by Edward E. Baptist, Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World (2016) by Greg Grandin, and River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2015) by Walter Johnson. This scholarship, though impressive in many regards, twists out of Williams' text a thesis that he never proposed. Extending a North Atlantic tradition that dates to the 1960s', the authors have tied Williams to a claim about the "incompatibility" between capitalism and slavery that is entirely at odds with his argument. Ultimately the new Americanist efforts to rethink the relationship between capitalism and slavery have wound up "throwing shade" on Williams' writing rather than illuminating it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, originally presented as the Presidential Address at the July 2018 annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, explores ways in which Lunsford Lane has been interpreted and employed as a biographical subject and within public narratives. Academic and public historians alike have not accepted Lane for who he was, forming him into a model of racialized virtue, industriousness, and entrepreneurialism that would satisfy white audiences while minimizing and masking his otherness defined by his enslavement and his blackness. The address asks scholars and public historians to be more reflexive and empathetic in their use of biography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historical articulation of whiteness as a narrative of white victimhood was neither inevitable nor articulated primarily by working-class actors. That ideology emerged as an expression not of the intrinsic racism of working-class men and women, but as a discourse about them engineered by slaveholders and their political allies on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1850s. White victimhood emerged in response to the radicalism of labor abolition, the effort to eradicate both chattel slavery and the injustices of factory work and political disfranchisement simultaneously. At their most radical, labor abolitionists demanded voting rights for all citizens and an end to the trafficking of both people and the commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Jacksonian Democracy reveals no simple tales of white liberty and black slavery, American citizenship and Indian dispossession, or mob rule versus the rule of law. It is a complex story about white male independence dependent on relationships of racial paternalism and the gendered hierarchy of the household, the age of the common man that could anticipate both the political economy of robber barons and the modern regulatory state, and a political worldview that would spawn anti-abolitionist riots as well as overlapping critiques of black and wage slavery. Its legacy for our times is similarly complicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines abolitionist Lucretia Mott's views on the Underground Railroad. In 1856 Mott publicly dismissed fugitive slave assistance, comparing it to Liberian colonization, both of which she considered unable to compete with natural increase of slaves and thus ineffective in toppling U.S. slavery. Such a position was incongruous with the general attitude among U.S. abolitionists who categorically denounced Liberian colonization as a racist, pro-slavery movement while amplifying their Underground Railroad activism in the 1850s. The article attributes the timing of Mott's 1856 remark to a partisan abolitionist strife spanning the Atlantic and explains her disregard of fugitive assistance to her puristic commitment to women's rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between South Carolina's slavery of African Americans and the state during the early 19th century, referencing the conceptual history of that period. An overview of the South Carolina slave labor, including slave labor's role in producing what is referred to as the state space, is provided.