Browsing by Author "Edwards, Laura F"

My dissertation examines the presence of enslaved prisoners in local jails and workhouses of antebellum South Carolina from 1730-1850 with a particular focus on the 1790s as a transformative period. Those sites expose the close relationship between governmental authority and the discipline of black people, a relationship that has gone largely unexplored and one that ultimately recasts larger questions about race and criminality, property and ownership, and state formation in the slave South. Much scholarship locates government control over criminal African Americans within penal institutions in a post-emancipation moment and then traces the implications through convict leasing, chain gangs, and penitentiaries in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The presence of enslaved people within jails and workhouses during the antebellum period, however, challenges the assumptions that frame the chronology.

Primary source materials such as legislative documents, court records, newspapers, personal diaries, travel journals, and slave narratives reveal that jails and workhouses not only secured law and order within slave societies but also functioned as tangible symbols of government power to which all people, including the enslaved, were subject. The presence of enslaved people within penal institutions, however, increased over time, a trend that coincided with burgeoning racialized conceptions of criminality and contributed to a larger transformation in racial ideology. And while slave owners and government officials united to uphold white supremacy, they disagreed over government’s role in regulating enslaved people. Lengthy confinements, in particular, became a frequent point of conflict between white slave owners and local government officials. Finally, the dissertation explores how the changes evident in antebellum penal institutions reflected the ways in which the nation wrestled with the growth of government. Indeed, those changes reflected the challenges inherent in the statemaking process as the meanings of liberty and citizenship shifted and changed. As important, they revealed the construction of a new social order in the American South which firmly, and exclusively, placed enslaved people on the lowest rung of the social, political, and legal hierarchy. By considering the intersections of statemaking, property, and criminality, the dissertation roots “the condemnation of blackness” in the practice of enslavement and in the Early National and Antebellum state making projects.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a cadre of black women merged the ideals of the "New Woman" and the "New Negro" to configure New Negro Womanhood. For these women, the combining of these two figurations encapsulated the complexity and strivings of black women attempting to achieve racial and gender equality and authorial control of their bodies and aspirations. New Negro women challenged racial and gender inequality and exclusion from participating in contemporaneous political and cultural currents. New Negro women are meaningful in understanding how ideas about black women's political, economic, social and cultural agency challenged New Negro's ideological focus on black men and New Woman's ideological focus on white women. At the core of the New Negro woman ethos was a transformation in how black women thought about the possibility of moving into the public sphere. Black women etched out the parameters of individual and collective aspirations and desires within a modern world in which they were treated as second-class citizens.

My dissertation explores New Negro womanhood in Washington, D.C. The nation's capital functioned as a preeminent site for the realization of African American possibility. The District of Columbia also offered unique opportunities for African American political, civic, social and cultural involvement. More specifically, the city was a fruitful site for the development of African American women's leadership, entrepreneurship and creativity. I use black beauty culture, performance activism, women's suffrage activism, higher education, and black leisure spaces in Washington to examine how black women grappled with and configured ideas about black modernity. Each of these areas provided a distinct context in which African American women in Washington transgressed boundaries of both racial and gender hierarchies and aspired to greater visibility, mobility, and legibility within the modern world. African American women in Washington embraced New Negro Womanhood as a conduit to black modernity.

“Cultures of Emotion: Families, Friends, and the Making of the United States” explores the centrality of families to the new republic’s economy and governing institutions in the post-Revolutionary period. In so doing, my work brings the insights of scholarship on the early modern period to the post-Revolutionary United States, where the literature has tended to focus on men and women as individuals, rather than understanding them as members of far-flung family networks. While focusing specifically on several prominent families based in North Carolina and Virginia, the dissertation shows that during this period, wealthy elites during this period had extensive interests in their states and the federal government. They identified so closely with these bodies that they collapsed their interests with the public interest and used their access to them to advance their families’ interests in the name of the public good. By folding the institutions of federal and state government into their family networks, the new republic’s elites organized their own lives and these developing institutions around the metaphor and idea of family. As this dissertation argues, these dynamics were built into the institutional structure of the new nation, creating a governing system intertwined with the familial networks of the elite.

The focus is on two elite families: the Coles of Virginia and the Camerons of North Carolina. Both families were prominent members of the southern elite with networks centered in the South that extended throughout the country and stretched across the Atlantic. Members of both networks held prominent positions in state and national government, and both networks had extensive and varied business interests.

This dissertation combines the history of the Atlantic World with women’s, women’s, economic, political, and legal history to explore the economic and political implications of the connections between the “private,” domestic world of the family and the “public” world of governance at the federal, state, and local levels. The focus on family and affective labor, combined with the contributions of recent work in legal history, recasts our understanding of economic and political development in this period. Examining the intersections of politics with family business networks in the antebellum United States reveals the limitations of the power of governing institutions, particularly at the state and federal level, and the interdependent relationship between elite family networks and government. Government was not a unified, monopolizing force. Rather, governing authority lay in different arenas—at the local, state, and federal levels, and elite families used their networks to access government at these levels to support their economic interests.

“Cultures of Emotion” uses affective labor as a lens through which to examine a unique blend of sources: personal, business, and political correspondence, as well as ledgers, bonds, and other business and political documents. The personal correspondence allows me to reconstruct the basic outlines of kinship networks by revealing the work that men and women did in creating and maintaining familial ties through performances of specific emotional norms. The personal, business, and political correspondence of women and men in the families I study reveals repeated elements in correspondence that served as performances of emotional kinship bonds, as well as conventions to follow. Following the connections established in this correspondence to the ledgers, bonds, and other statements of credit and debt between the network’s members uncovers the webs of credit and debt that sustained elite families. These business and political records underscore the importance of kinship in maintaining these webs of credit and debt and constitute an important link in understanding the way the network’s political and economic power rested on familial bonds and incorporated the institutions of state and federal government as a member, firmly situating the economic and political networks in the domestic realm. Such an approach recasts our understanding of the nineteenth-century United States, centering families in the work of governance and highlighting women’s central role in their families’ economic and political work.

Drawing on local criminal court records in western and central South Carolina, this dissertation follows the legal experiences of black girls in South Carolina courts between 1885 and 1920, a time span that includes the aftermath of Reconstruction and the foundational years of Jim Crow. While scholars continue to debate the degree to which black children were included in evolving conversations about childhood and child protection, this dissertation argues that black girls were critical to turn-of-the century debates about all children's roles in society. Far from invisible in the courts and jails of their time, black girls found themselves in the crosshairs of varying forms of power --including intraracial community surveillance, burgeoning local government, Progressive reform initiatives and military policy -- particularly when it came to matters of sexuality and reproduction. Their presence in South Carolina courts established boundaries between early childhood, adolescence and womanhood and pushed legal stakeholders to consider the legal implication of age, race, and gender in criminal proceedings. Age had a complicated effect on black girls' legal encounters; very young black girls were often able to claim youth and escape harsher punishments, while courts often used judicial discretion to levy heavier sentences to adolescents and violent girl offenders. While courts helped to separate early childhood from the middle years, they also provided a space for African-American children and family to engage a legal system that was moving rapidly toward disenfranchising blacks.

Narrating Infanticide: Constructing the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century America traces how modern ideas about gender and race became embedded in the institutions of law and government between the Revolution and the end of Reconstruction. Contemporary understandings of gender and race actually consolidated only in the aftermath of the Civil War, as communities embraced beliefs that women and African Americans constituted distinctive groups with shared, innate characteristics related solely to the fact that they were female or racially different. People then applied these ideas about gender and race to all arenas of life, including the law.

Yet understanding the roles of women and African Americans through universalizing legal conceptions of gender and/or race--conceptions that crystallized in law only in the wake of the Civil War--elides the complexity of the ways in which antebellum communities responded to the interactions of women, the enslaved, and free blacks with the legal system. My study's focus on infanticide, a crime that could only be perpetrated by females, reveals how women--and men--of all races involved themselves in the day-to-day legal processes that shaped the daily lives of Americans during the early republic and antebellum periods. Communities responded to cases of infant death informed by understandings of motherhood and child mortality specific to that particular case and individual, rather than shaping outcomes--as they began to do so after the Civil War--based on broad assumptions about the race or gender of the offender. My conclusions are drawn from almost one hundred cases of infanticide and infant death between 1789 and 1877 gleaned primarily from court records and newspapers in Connecticut, Illinois, and North Carolina. In addition, the study draws on reports of other instances from around the nation, as narrated in sources such as diaries, periodicals, newspapers, crime pamphlets, and medical journals.

“Nourishing Networks: The Public Culture of Food in Nineteenth-Century America” examines how daily practices of food production and distribution shaped the development of New Orleans’ public culture in the long nineteenth century, from the colonial era through the mid-twentieth century. During this period, New Orleans’ vendors labored in the streets of diverse neighborhoods where they did more than sell a vital commodity. As “Nourishing Networks” demonstrates, the food economy provided the disenfranchised—people of color, women, and recent migrants—a means to connect themselves to the public culture of the city, despite legal prohibitions intended to keep them on the margins. Those who were legally marginalized exercised considerable influence over the city’s public culture, shaping both economic and social interactions among urban residents in the public sphere. To the vexation of some elites, these vendors helped determine what New Orleanians ate, how much it cost, and how they ate it. More than that, they shaped the cultural meanings of food. Exploring key sites of public culture including the municipal markets and their surrounding streets, the dissertation situates New Orleans’ local food culture within broader changes like slavery and abolition at the national and even international level—a perspective that places the city’s vendors at the center of a much larger transformation in Americans’ relationship to food, which was always about much more than sustenance. In fact, food became a mode through which disenfranchised Americans participated in the political culture: those without the vote claimed a voice through their role in the country’s food culture and economy.

““Propertied White Women, Family Property, and Governance in the Post-Revolutionary South,” examines white women’s changing legal and social relationship to family property—chiefly land and enslaved people—in the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana from 1790 to 1840. My research shows that throughout this time, many white women owned and managed land, enslaved people, and other forms of personal property, both formally in their own names, and informally, as representatives of their families. But when state lawmakers amended laws in the decades following the Revolution, they changed white women’s formal legal relationship to family property and enslaved people.

As southern state lawmakers enacted new laws to stabilize and grow their exploitative slave states, they invested a broader class of white men with more authority over family land and enslaved people. Traditional legal customs, which had made room for propertied women to manage family businesses and estates, increasingly gave way to more formal and uniform laws that promoted men’s individual control over family property and collective control over enslaved people. My dissertation argues that new laws had unintended consequences. By making it more difficult to pass property through female family members, these laws could undermine the ability of individual patriarchs to keep property within their families and ensure the status of future generations. While wealth remained a powerful and meaningful marker, white masculinity gradually became more important in claiming the vote and, more broadly, a voice in public governance. Upon witnessing the indirect and unintended consequences of laws, which in some instances jeopardized women’s control over property, elite white lawmakers (who were the same group that enacted the laws) began to rethink the laws. Consequently, women, family, and property became a large part of debates about status in the decades following the American Revolution. My conclusions are drawn primarily from legal documents, including state and local court records, state digests and code books, petitions, census records, land grants, conveyance records, wills, and marriage contracts. In addition, this study also pulls from other sources that explain how propertied families and their communities reacted to these legal changes, including memoirs, family papers, newspapers, travel literature, and personal correspondence.

This dissertation examines the changing concepts and experiences of slavery and freedom in South Carolina from its founding in 1670 through 1747, a period during which the legal status of "slave" became solidified in law. During the course of South Carolina's first eight decades of settlement, the legal statuses of "slave" and "free" evolved as the colony's slaveholders responded to both local and imperial contexts. Slaves and slaveholders engaged in a slow process of defining and refining the contours of both slavery and freedom in law. The dissertation explores how this evolution occurred by focusing on three topics: constant conflict that afflicted the colony, free white colonists' reliance on the loyalty of slaves, and South Carolina's law and legal system.

Through its use of social and legal history, as well as close reading, the dissertation shows that South Carolina's legal and military contexts gave unplanned meaning to slaves' activities, and that this had the effect of permitting slaves to shape slavery and freedom's development in practice and in law. In various ways, the actions of slaves forced slaveholders to delineate what they considered appropriate life and work conditions, as well as forms of justice, for both slaves and free people. As such, slavery as an institution helped give form to freedom. Drawing on legal records, newspapers, pamphlets, and records of the colonial elite, the dissertation argues that slaves' actions--nonviolent as well as violent-- served as a driving force behind the legal trajectory of slavery and freedom in South Carolina. These processes and contexts change our understanding of colonial America. They reveal that slaves influenced the legal regulation of slavery and that slavery and the enslaved population played a critical role in defining freedom, a central tenet of American democracy. Contrary to modern assumptions about freedom and even the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, this dissertation shows how slavery actually constrained freedom.

Slavery and freedom are central issues in the historiography of nineteenth-century America. In the antebellum era (1820-1860), personal status was a fluid concept and was never as simple as black and white. The courts provide a revealing window for examining these ambiguities because court cases often served as the venue for negotiations over who was enslaved and who was free. In St. Louis, enslaved men and women contributed to debates and discussions about the meaning of personal status by suing for their freedom. By questioning their enslavement in freedom suits, slaves played an important role in blurring the law's understanding of slavery; in the process, they incurred the enormous personal risks of abuse and the possibility of sale.

Using the records of over 300 slaves who sued for freedom, as well as a variety of manuscript sources, newspapers, and additional court records, this project traces these freedom suits over time, and examines how slave law and the law of freedom suits shifted, mainly in response to local and national debates over slavery and also to the growing threat of anti-slavery encroachment into St. Louis. When the laws tightened in response to these threats, the outcomes of freedom suits also adjusted, but in ways that did not fit the pattern of increasing restrictions on personal liberty. Instead, the unique situation in St. Louis in the 1840s and 1850s, with its increasingly anti-slavery immigrant population, allowed slaves suing for freedom to succeed at greater rates than in previous decades.

“‘To Restore Peace and Tranquility to the Neighborhood’: Violence, Legal Culture and Community in New York City, 1799-1827” examines the various ways ordinary people, legal officials, lawmakers, and editors negotiated the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion, or what historians call “belonging.” It uses legal cases and crime publications to analyze contradictory visions of the public good within the context of key political and social changes in the city, state, and nation. The dissertation moves from the operations of violence on the ground to the ideological implications of violence in the era of gradual emancipation. New Yorkers—male and female, free and unfree, native and immigrant—could and did participate in legal proceedings. Complainants and witnesses relied on the processes of law rather than actual verdicts to establish order in their personal lives and in their communities. This dissertation contends that people made and remade community through the adjudication and interpretation of violent conflict.

Violence was indicative of daily exchanges and disagreements, all of which were linked to how people envisioned themselves and the “other,” or what scholars refer to as “reputation.” Gendered and racialized identities developed from negotiations that transpired inside and outside legal forums. White women, free blacks, and enslaved and indentured persons continually redefined notions of femininity and blackness through the violence they employed.

Concepts of reputation and race and gender formation intersected in legal forums and in broader discussions about how men and women should conduct themselves in the nineteenth century. At a moment when lawmakers debated the nature of citizenship, crime publications intentionally highlighted violent offenses to offer a particular vision of who citizens should be and to marginalize the working classes, immigrants, and African Americans. The institution of slavery and the violence inherent to it became a means for editors to portray African Americans as socially inferior and to guard the city’s moral reputation against abolitionists. Ultimately, violence played a role in the efforts of editors and lawmakers to delegitimize free blacks’ social and political belonging in New York and the nation as a whole.