Concubine

This chapter tells the history of Sarah Conner, an enslaved woman sold through the domestic slave trade from Virginia to New Orleans, Louisiana. Conner used money earned through socially reproductive labor to purchase her freedom. Her emancipation was complicated, however, by the man with whom she lived and who legally enslaved her, Theophilus Freeman. Freeman failed to properly register Conner's freedom with the city courts. When Freeman filed for bankruptcy, his creditors attempted to claim Conner's body for payment of his debts, illustrating the ways in which women of African descent, enslaved and free, could be trapped within the sexual economy of slavery. Chapter three also considers the experiences of enslaved concubines more broadly, challenging a sharp divide between accommodation and resistance in their actions and focusing instead on the impossible position in which they found themselves.

The U.S. Coastal Passageand Caribbean Spaces of Freedom

In November 1841, the U.S. slaver Creole transporting 135 slaves from Richmond to New Orleans was seized by nineteen slave rebels who steered the ship to the British Bahamas, where all secured their liberation. Drawing from this well-known story as a point of departure, this chapter examines the understudied maritime dimensions of British free soil policies in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on how such policies affected the U.S. domestic slave trade and slave revolts at sea. In contrast to the more familiar narrative of south-to-north fugitive slave migration, this chapter sheds light on international south-to-south migration routes from the U.S. South to the circum-Caribbean.

Prologue

The prologue introduces Natchez, Mississippi, and the principals involved in a murder that made national headlines. It provides the history of the planter aristocracy, explains perceptions of the South in the 1930s, the Natchez pilgrimage, the domestic slave trade, the national media attention, and attempts by earlier writers to document the story. Well known families include the Merrills, the Minors, and the Danas. There is also some discussion of Mississippi during the Civil War and the Cotton Kingdom.

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This chapter focuses on the common order for bondsmen and women to dance, act lively, and smile in the domestic slave trade. Through an analysis of the coffle, slave pen, and auction block experiences of slaves, the chapter reveals the reasons why music and dance often were incorporated into the complex system of the domestic slave trade. It examines how performing coffles functioned as public advertisements for not only planters but also those hoping to achieve planter status. It considers the manner in which these singing and dancing coffles positively promoted the institution of slavery to non-slaveholders. It shows that the coffle served as an organized transportation network of slaves to the auction block within the interstate slave trade. While slave coffle scenes represented to whites a justification of their enslavement of blacks, they represented an avenue of agency for blacks. Dance and music also publicly presented the racial hierarchy of the time.