Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 189

September 18, 2019: Constitution Week: The Bill of Rights

[September 17th is Constitution Day, so to celebrate this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that foundational American document. Leading up to a special weekend post on threats to the Constitution in 2019!]On the history, significance, and limitations of the Constitution’s first evolution.One of the most striking things about the Constitution that was ratified on June 21, 1788—when New Hampshire became the necessary 9th state to ratify—is that it was already different from the document that was created on September 17, 1787. The Federalist and Anti-Federalist debates about which I wrote in yesterday’s post spilled over into the ratification debates throughout state legislatures, and eventually necessitated the February 1788 deal that became known as the Massachusetts Compromise: that the group of Amendments drafted by George Mason and known as the Bill of Rights would be immediately added to the Constitution. (There were initially twelve proposed Amendments, but only ten of course made it into the final version.) It was only after that compromise that the legislatures of four states—Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, and New Hampshire—ratified the Constitution, so in a very real sense the document would not exist (not as anything other than a statement of principles, at least) without the Bill of Rights.I would argue that the true significance of the Bill of Rights lies not just in that necessary role, however, nor even in the important and often ground-breaking specific concepts and guarantees that it includes. To my mind, the Bill of Rights was and is so significant because it immediately and permanently established the Constitution as a living document. That is, while the body of the Constitution had laid out (in Article Five) the process by which the document could be amended, there was no guarantee that it would be so altered; and I believe that the longer it had existed in a static form, the more it might have seemed to be set and unchangeable as a result. But instead, before that document was even ratified, and more than a year before it and the government it created took effect as the law of the land (on March 4, 1789), it was amended. Those amendments were the result of a messy set of debates and compromises, but that too was precisely the point, on multiple levels: they remind us that the Constitution likewise was produced through a process; and they make clear that it was designed to allow for that process to continue, and through that process to change the document (and thus the laws and nation).Of course, the messy process that created the Constitution was also frustratingly and prominently racist, and the Bill of Rights (perhaps unsurprisingly, drafted as it was by a slave-owner) in no way escaped that all-too central element. After all, virtually every individual and collective right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights was at the same time legally denied to enslaved African Americans, who could not assemble in protest nor (in most cases) practice their religion of choice (that is, while of course many enslaved African Americans converted to and practiced Christianity, they hardly ever had any individual choice in the matter), who certainly had no right to a trial by jury nor to resist the authorities, and who day in and day out were subject to the most cruel and unusual punishments. While the 3/5s clause is the Constitution’s most overt and shocking illustration of the fundamental place of slavery and racism in the nation’s founding, I would argue that the gap between the Bill of Rights and the individual and collective experiences of enslaved African Americans is the document’s most engrained discrimination. This evolution was so important that the Constitution might not exist at all without it, but for hundreds of thousands of Americans, it was one more set of illusory and false promises.Next ConstitutionStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 17, 2019: Constitution Week: The Anti-Federalists

[September 17th is Constitution Day, so to celebrate this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that foundational American document. Leading up to a special weekend post on threats to the Constitution in 2019!]On three equally significant ways to frame the Constitution’s opposition.1)      Revolutionary Radicals: It’s no coincidence that two of the most prominent Anti-Federalists (a label which, to be fair, was imposed by the Constitution’s advocates and generally rejected by the group themselves, but which I’ll use in this post as a shorthand for the Constitution’s critics) were also two of the Revolution’s most famous firebrands, Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry. The Revolution itself can be reductively but not inaccurately divided into more radical and more conservative camps, as exemplified by Samuel and his second cousinJohn Adams. Moreover, as illustrated by John’s critique of the Boston Massacre’s participants, the proto-federalists tended to be a bit more suspicious of populism, while radicals like Sam and the Sons of Liberty encouraged and amplified popular passions. Again, all those issues are more nuanced than these couple of sentences can allow, but they do help explain how men like Adams and Patrick Henry ended up in the Anti-Federalist camp.2)      Advocates for Rights: Perhaps the single most important Anti-Federalist text was George Mason’s Objections to this Constitution of Government (1787). Mason’s objections were strong enough that he became one of three Constitutional Convention delegates not to sign the final document, but he ironically would eventually turn those objections into the impetus for drafting one of the Constitution’s most famous sections, the Bill of Rights (about which I’ll write more in tomorrow’s post). An emphasis on individual rights had been part of the American Revolution since its origins, as illustrated by another document of Mason’s (and predecessor to the Bill of Rights), the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights. Thanks to Mason and other Anti-Federalists, those emphases were carried forward into not just the debates over the Constitution, but also its final, ratified form. (It’s also important to note, as I’ll discuss tomorrow as well, that Mason, like many of these advocates for rights, was a slave-owner.)3)      Future Democratic-Republicans: Despite the expressed desire on the part of many of the founding generation (George Washington in particular) to avoid the creation of political parties, the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate was certainly also an origin point for the development of such parties in the U.S. Declaration author Thomas Jefferson was, from what I can tell, not one of the most prominent Anti-Federalist voices at the Constitutional Convention, but he was definitely in that camp, and would continue developing that perspective during his conflicts with Alexander Hamilton throughout Washington’s terms as President. That arc culminated in Jefferson’s creation of the Democratic-Republican Party, in the contested and crucial presidential election of 1800, and in the origins of a two-party system that (with many evolutions of course) has endured to this day. All of which, like so much else, can and should be linked to the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debates.Next ConstitutionStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 16, 2019: Constitution Week: The Articles of Confederation

[September 17th is Constitution Day, so to celebrate this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that foundational American document. Leading up to a special weekend post on threats to the Constitution in 2019!]On what was drastically different in the new nation’s first unifying documents, and what wasn’t.Until researching this post, I hadn’t really understood just how much the Articles of Confederation paralleled the American Revolution. I knew they went into effect in March 1781, while the Revolution was still very much ongoing, but it turns out that that timing was due solely to how long it took all 13 states to ratify the Articles (Maryland was the last state to do so, on March 1, nearly two years after Delaware had become the 12th to ratify); they were initially proposed in the immediate aftermath of the Declaration of Independence, in July 1776, and were after more than a year of heated debate approved by that Second Continental Congress and sent to the states for ratification in November 1777. Which is to say, the Articles weren’t a product of the Revolution (as I had always thought of them) so much as part of its impetus and origins, which now that I’ve reframed it that way does make sense—once the colonies had declared independence, it was vital that they immediately and consistently envision a political and civic arrangement through which they could exist in Perpetual Union (the usually elided part of their full title) without England, even (if not especially) while their war to establish and cement that independence was entirely ongoing.Better understanding that Revolutionary context for the Articles can help explain some of the ways in which they differed from the Constitution that would eventually replace them. The most famous such difference is that under the Articles the central government (known first as the Continental Congress and then, after 1781, as the Congress of the Confederation) was quite weak, both on its own terms and in comparison to the individual states. I had always attributed that to the colonists’ hatred of the King and thus fears of a tyrannical government, and of course those were factors; but given the highly regional nature of the Revolution (with different battles/campaignsfought across the regions and states in somewhat disconnected and certainly discrete stages), it makes perfect sense that the Articles granted each state the power necessary to respond to those particular, evolving circumstances without needing to rely on or wait for a central authority. It’s harder to understand the choice to deny Congress any ability to levy taxes, leaving the central government entirely dependent on funding from the states; that limitation frequently left not just Congress but the Continental Army in the lurch. But on the other hand, that too can be seen as a wartime decision: fighting a war requires continued support and buy-in from civilians, and it’s fair to say that in a war which originated with opposition to onerous taxes, many colonists might have been unwilling to continue supporting a new government which immediately began imposing its own taxes.Explicable or not, that element of the Articles continued to produce financial difficulties after the Revolution, and (along with the related histories of Shay’s Rebellion) contributed significantly to the move toward a new governing document. The ability to levy taxes was just one of many powers given to the far stronger federal government created by the Constitution (although not without extended debate, as I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post). But despite those shifts, the Articles can be seen as a predecessor to the Constitution, and not just in symbolic ways (ie, how the Constitution’s Preamble echoes part of the Articles’ opening: “The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defense, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare”). In particular, the Articles created the new nation as a representative, democratic republic, with the state legislatures appointing representatives from each state to the Congress of the Confederation. Since the fundamental nature of the nation’s political system was just as uncertain as every other Revolutionary aspect, this was a vital choice, and one that was carried forward into and enhanced by the Constitution. Next ConstitutionStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 14-15, 2019: Representing Slave Rebellions

[On September 9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ve AmericanStudied Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to this weekend post on cultural representations of such revolts.]To wrap up this week’s series, and in anticipation of the upcoming film Harriet, brief thoughts on five examples of cultural representations of slave rebellions:1)      Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1855): Harriet Beecher Stowe’s follow-up to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a quite different and unjustly forgotten novel, the tale of a fictionalized escape slave and a potential slave revolt based in equal measure on Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner (Stowe even included Turner’s Confessions as an appendix to her novel), as well as other histories and stories of slavery. I haven’t read the whole of Dred since graduate school, but passages still stick with me nearly two decades later, and the novel as a whole makes for both a vital complement to UTC and a compelling contemporary representation of slave rebellions. 2)      The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967): I said much of what I’d want to say about William Styron’s controversial historical novel in the first paragraph of that hyperlinked post. Styron certainly made some troubling choices, and they deserve (indeed, demand) our attention and critique; but I am not willing to agree with the idea (advanced by some of his critics, past and present) that a white author could never write a historical novel from the perspective of an African American figure like Turner. Such an author could never have the last or the definitive word, of course—but the act itself, fraught as it may be, is not outside the bounds of historical fiction; and the resulting novel should to my mind be read and critiqued specifically, not hypothetically. 3)      The Birth of a Nation (2016): Ironically, the most recent cultural representation of Turner’s revolt, this time in the form of Nate Parker’s dramatic film, suffered from its own (far more overt and troubling) controversy surrounding its creator, which no doubt contributed to its relative lack of prominence. Perhaps for similar reasons, I haven’t had a chance to see the film yet, so can’t speak to its particular representation of Turner and his histories. But as I wrote in Thursday’s post, those histories deserve a consistent and central presence in our collective memories, and I believe both Styron’s novel and Parker’s film can (without eliding their controversies and failings) help us better engage this crucial American story.4)      Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt, Virginia, 1800 (1936): But there’s also something to be said for works that don’t come with such baggage, and Harlem Renaissance ’s historical novel about Gabriel Prosser’s thwarted revolt is one such text. I haven’t read Black Thunder since I was a teenager, but even then I was struck by its boldly unapologetic focus on and celebration of Prosser’s perspective and goals, elements that were even more striking in the 1930s (but remain so into the 21st century). Bontemps’s book isn’t as stylistically or thematically impressive and important as roughly contemporary works like Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Native Son (1939), and maybe it wouldn’t work as well in a literature class as a result; but it’s a vitally important historical novel, ground-breaking in its time and still significant in ours.5)      Barry Jenkins on Gabriel Prosser (2019): The New York Times’s inspiring and important 1619 Project, a PDF of which is available at that hyperlink, features among its many stand-out pieces a short piece about Prosser (page 46 in that document) written by the talented young filmmaker Barry Jenkins (who is now at work on a film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s historical novel of slavery The Underground Railroad ). In just a few paragraphs, moving from Prosser’s individual identity to the broadest cultural and historical contexts for his planned revolt and then back to Prosser once more, Jenkins reminds us—as his films, like all the best cultural texts, consistently do—of how art can illuminate history. All the histories on which I’ve focused in this series need continued artistic attention, including and beyond this group of texts.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other cultural works you’d highlight?

September 13, 2019: Slave Rebellions: Henry Highland Garnet’s Address

[On September 9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of such revolts.]On the contextual and the contemporary importance of a striking speech.When I learned I would have the chance to teach 19th Century African American Literature (the first of our two-course Af Am survey sequence, and a class cross-listed between our English Studies and African American Studies programs) for the first time in Spring 2018, I knew I would want to include a number of texts and voices on the syllabus that I have never before taught. Of course folks like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and Charles Chesnutt and Ida B. Wells, favorites whom I’ve taught many times before, would occupy prominent places. But for my own experience and benefit, and even more for the goal of exposing the students to the widest range of texts and figures possible, I wanted to balance such existing favs with ones with which I’m far less familiar. Thanks to the great first volume of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature , I had no shortage of such authors and works to choose from, and included at least one text per week that I’ve never taught before. One of those is also a fitting text with which to conclude a week of posts on slave revolts: Henry Highland Garnet’s stirring and controversial 1843 speech “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America.” Garnet (1815-1882), a former slave (he escaped from slavery in Maryland with his entire family when he was about 10 years old, moving to New York City) turned Presbyterian minister and Abolitionist activist, delivered his “Address” at the 1843 National Negro Convention in Buffalo. An aggressive and impassioned call for noncompliance and violent resistance—the final paragraph opens, “Let your motto be resistance! resistance!RESISTANCE!”—Garnet’s oration, which came to be known as the “Call for Rebellion” speech, drew forth condemnations from Douglass and other abolitionist leaders, although it also fell just one vote short of approval as an official resolution of the convention. And that duality—the speech’s controversy yet also its popularity—offers a vital illustration of the spectrum of perspectives, voices, arguments, and goals within the nascent Abolitionist movement, much less the broader social and cultural debates over and narratives of slavery and race in America. I can’t imagine a better course in which to engage with that breadth and depth of voices and ideas than a survey of 19th century African American literature, and I believe Garnet (among others, like David Walker) helped us engage with those themes and threads fully and successfully.My goal for the course was to focus on those historical topics and frames pretty consistently, but there’s no way that this course—like any in the age of Teaching under Trump, but also in specific and particularly salient ways—wouldn’t engage with 21st century American issues and conversations as well. For example I made sure to have a #BlackLivesMatterthread throughout the semester, to think about what our different authors and texts have to add to that concept and conversation. In the case of Garnet’s speech, even his titular address to a slave audience—as well as the speech’s opening clause, calling that audience his “Brethren and Fellow Citizens”—reflects a humanizing and individualizing perspective on each and every African American slave that wasn’t necessarily central to every Abolitionist argument (at least some of which focused on slavery as a system, on broader moral or economic questions, and so on). One of many interesting contemporary echoes that it’s vital to draw out of this speech and all of the course’s complex and crucial texts.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

September 12, 2019: Slave Rebellions: Nat Turner

[On September 9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of such revolts.]On one challenge and one benefit to remembering the rebel leader as an American hero.A few weeks back, a scholarly friend on Twitter shared a Virginia license plate that offered a tribute to Nat Turner, leader of a late August, 1831 slave revolt that became one of the largest and most significant in American history (I can’t find the image now, but the plate read something like NATTRNR). Another academic Twitter friend responded, asking (in implicit conversation with the ongoing debate over Confederate memorials in Virginia and beyond) why they aren’t statues and tributes to Turner throughout the state, memorializing him as the revolutionary leader and figure that he quite literally was. The presence of all those white supremacist neo-Confederate tributes offers one clear explanation for that absence, of course—communities that for a century honored men who committed treason in defense of slavery weren’t likely to have also honored enslaved revolutionaries. But while those white supremacist perspectives of course remain (DUH, said 2019 America), our communities and collective memories have certainly moved beyond them in all sorts of ways. So should we erect Nat Turner statues throughout Virginia?In a moment I’m going to make the case that we should do so, but it’s important to note that the question is a complex and fraught one, for one particular reason that differentiates this revolt from the others about which I’ve written this week: Turner and his fellow rebels killed many of the white families at the plantations where they stopped to free enslaved people, with the revolt’s white casualties eventually numbering 60 men, women, and children (including ten under the age of five). It appears that these murders were not incidental but purposeful, and in fact exemplified one of Turner’s central goals for the revolt (as he would later recount them in the controversial document The Confessions of Nat Turner): he hoped not just to gain freedom for enslaved African Americans, but also and perhaps especially to spread “terror and alarm” among the area’s white population. That goal makes Turner quite literally a terrorist, and while he and his fellow rebels committed those acts of terror in direct relationship to an entirely understandable cause, they nonetheless purposefully and consistently committed them. To my mind, that makes Turner distinct from a parallel revolutionary leader like Harriet Tubman, who certainly was willing to fight slave-owners but did not (as I understand the history at least) make killing them a central priority alongside freeing enslaved people.So the story of Nat Turner is, to put it succinctly, not without its controversies and horrors. But of what historical figure can we not say the same? Abraham Lincoln, to cite one relevant example, ordered the mass hanging of 38 Dakota Native Americans during the Civil War, a history that we certainly should remember much more consistently but that does not (I would argue) mean the Lincoln Memorial or other such tributes are not appropriate. To be sure, statues or memorials to Turner would need to include the violence of his rebellion (just as memorials to Lincoln should mention his complexities more fully than they currently do). But in the multi-century battle against slavery, a battle that culminated quite directly in the Civil War, Turner and his fellow rebels comprise one of the most striking and successful acts of resistance and revolution. If we want to represent that battle as a defining history of American inclusion (and I certainly think we should do so), then yes, Nat Turner needs statues and tributes as a complex but crucial leader in that fight.Last rebellion tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 11, 2019: Slave Rebellions: Denmark Vesey

[On September 9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of such revolts.]On three compelling historical details about the leaderof a thwarted 1822 rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina.1)      Caribbean origins: Like many enslaved people, Vesey’s name changed in the course of his life; in his case, both his first and last name reflect aspects of a childhood spent in slavery on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. His birth name was apparently Telemaque, and he was possibly descended from the region’s Coromantee indigenous people. When he was a teenager he was purchased by a Bermudan sea captain named Joseph Vesey, with whom a few years later (after the American Revolution’s conclusion) he would move to Charleston. After he gained his freedom in that city (more on that in a moment), he formally took Captain Vesey’s last name; he either adopted or was given the first name Denmark as a reflection of the European nation of which St. Thomas remained a colony in the late 18thcentury. While the gradual abolition of the slave trade meant that more and more enslaved African Americans were born in the U.S., Vesey reflects the continuing international identities included within that multi-layered community.2)      Winning the lottery: Roughly 15 years after he and his owner moved to Charleston, Vesey literally and figuratively hit the lottery: on November 9, 1799, he won $1500 (more than $33,000 in contemporary terms) in a city lottery, which allowed him to purchase his freedom from Joseph for $600. That hyperlinked blog post and podcast episode from the Charleston County Public Library’s (and specifically its historian Dr. Nic Butler’s) wonderful Charleston Time Machine series goes into great detail about how and why such city lotteries developed, and the story has a lot to tell us about post-Revolutionary American communities, economics, and civic life. Without downplaying in any way the brutal realities of slavery in turn of the 19th century Charleston (and everywhere else), it is nonetheless striking that an enslaved man like Vesey could not only take part in the city’s lottery, but could have his life so profoundly affected and changed by that communal event.3)      The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church: More than two decades later, increasingly angry about the conditions of enslaved people in and beyond Charleston, Vesey and peers would spend more than a year planning the proposed July 1822 revolt. But only remembering him for that moment obscures his decades as a “free man of color” in the city, a period that included his marriage to an enslaved woman named Beck, the development of his successful carpentry business, and his co-founding of an AME Church (part of the broader AME movement, the first independent African American denomination in the US). In the aftermath of the failed rebellion, Charleston leaders ordered that church building destroyed; but it nonetheless can and should be seen as an ancestor to the city’s contemporary Emanuel AME Church, site of domestic terrorist Dylann Roof’s June 2015 mass shooting of nine African Americans. While Roof embodies the worst of American exclusion, past and present, both the church and Vesey (while echoing those horrific histories) help us remember alternative, inclusive histories.Next rebellion tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

PPS. After completing this post, I realized I hadn't highlighted a great recent historical work on Vesey and collective memory: Blain Roberts and Ethan Kytle's Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (2018).

September 10, 2019: Slave Rebellions: Gabriel’s Rebellion

[On September 9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of such revolts.]On how a thwarted 1800 revolt both echoes and diverges from familiar tropes.Although it was discovered and more than 25 of its intended participants executed before it began, in many other ways the Virginia slave revolt planned in August 1800 by a twenty-something enslaved man named Gabriel (often known as Gabriel Prosser, after the last name of the Richmond-area family that owned him and his two brothers) closely parallels the Stono Rebellion and many other such histories. It was led by a striking individual, a talented and literate young man who was described by contemporaries as “a fellow of great courage and intellect above his rank in life.” It pulled together enslaved people from a number of neighboring plantations, with a plan to march together toward a future of freedom and opportunity far different from the world of chattel slavery. And in its aftermath, the fears it inspired contributed to a number of repressive legal and social responses, including an 1806 law passed by the Virginia Assembly that required free African Americans to leave Virginia within a year or face potential re-enslavement. Yet as historian Douglas Egerton has uncovered and discussed at length in his magisterial book Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 & 1802 (1993), there are many specific aspects of Gabriel’s rebellion that diverge from those broadly familiar tropes and reveal significant cultural and historical contexts for turn of the 19th century Virginia and America. Many of those have to do with Gabriel himself, and particularly with his (by the summer of 1800) longstanding and well-established status as a skilled blacksmith for hire. That category of enslaved person will be familiar to anyone who has read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, as Douglass was similarly hired out by his owner during his time in Baltimore. And it’s important to be clear that this was still very much a form of slavery, as it was the owners/plantations that chiefly benefitted from the work and wages, not the enslaved laborers. Yet nonetheless, this side of Gabriel’s life and identity reminds us of a fundamental truth captured by works like Mechal Sobel’s The World They Made Together: that 18th and 19th century Virginia, and America, were literally and figuratively constructed by both individuals like Gabriel and the intersections of all the cultures and communities present in this evolving society.Gabriel’s experiences in that role no doubt contributed to his evolving visions of both his own life and his society, and thus to his plans for rebellion and social change (according to Egerton, after his rebellion succeeded he planned to “drink and dine with the merchants of” Richmond). Another factor, and an even more complex and (at least in this context) under-remembered one, is the fraught relationship between France and the era’s political systems. Egerton discovered evidence of white co-conspirators (whom Gabriel had likely met during his work as a blacksmith), at least one of whom was a French national. Not coincidentally, part of Gabriel’s plan involved kidnapping Virginia Governor James Monroe, a friend and ally of Vice President Thomas Jefferson in his Democratic-Republican Party. By late August 1800 the highly contested presidential campaign between Jefferson and Adams was in full swing, and much of Jefferson’s support came from Southern planters and farmers. Fears of both slave revolts and of French radicals could well have undermined or splintered Jefferson’s coalition, which would help explain why (again, according to Egerton) evidence of the French co-conspirator’s activities was never produced in court proceedings. Far too complex contexts to address adequately in a few sentences, but a reminder that every slave rebellion, including Gabriel’s, is far more multi-layered than overarching tropes or tropes might suggest.Next rebellion tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 9, 2019: Slave Rebellions: The Stono Rebellion

[On September 9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of such revolts.]On two historical lessons from a largely forgotten colonial-era revolt.By various historical measures, the slave revolt that began on this date two hundred eighty years ago was the largest and most significant in the British mainland colonies. Roughly 60 enslaved African Americans took part, following the lead of an enslaved man known alternately as Jemmy and Cato (the latter likely due to his slave-owners, the Cater family whose plantation was located near the Stono River). Over the following week Jemmy and his fellow rebels took part in multiple armed encounters with South Carolina whites as they marched toward Spanish Florida and the promise of freedom (more on that in a moment), with 25 whites and nearly 50 rebels killed in those conflicts. Although the rebels did not achieve their goal, the revolt resulted in a number of important changes in the colony: especially the passage of the restrictive Negro Act of 1740; but also various attempts to mitigate the harshest treatment of slaves by South Carolina slave-owners. Yet while the warehouse where the rebellion began has since 1974 been designated a National Historical Landmark, I would argue that outside of that area the revolt has not been well-remembered (as an example, I had never heard of it until I was searching for historic anniversaries as topics for weekly series).For all those significant aspects, and for the simple fact that it happened, the Stono Rebellion should be better remembered (and I was happy to see panels about it at the National Museum of African American History & Culture when my family and I visited a few weeks back). And better remembering the revolt likewise helps us engage with complexities to colonial American history and identity. For one thing, the Spanish influence on the rebellion highlights the multi-national realities of colonial America: as part of their ongoing conflicts with England, both in the Americas and in Europe, Spain had proclaimed that any enslaved African American held in an English colony would be free if he or she were to make it to Spanish territory; just a year prior to the revolt, free African Americans had indeed founded a settlement of their own, Fort Mosé, near the Spanish city of St. Augustine. Of course the history of Spanish imperialism and settlement in the Americas was entirely intertwined with the foundational and ongoing histories of slavery, and this particular proclamation and era can’t be viewed outside of those larger contexts (or as an idealistic, abolitionist stance from the Spanish). But all those factors simply add to a nuanced narrative of multi- and trans-national communities and relationships across the 18thcentury Americas. At the heart of nearly all of those transnational communities by the 18th century, of course, were enslaved African Americans. And what the Stono Rebellion especially helps us remember is just how significantly multi-national the community contained in the reductive phrase “African Americans” truly was. Jemmy was described in a contemporary account as “Angolan,” which historians such as John Thornton have argued makes it likely he, along with the cohort of enslaved men with whom he began the revolt, had been born in and kidnapped from the West/Central African kingdom of Kongo. Long linked to Portuguese traders, the Kongolese had converted to Catholicism as early as the 15th century, and the kingdom maintained its own relationship with the Vatican. Those factors made it more likely both for these Portuguese-speaking enslaved people to have learned of the Spanish offer of freedom and for them to be drawn to Catholic Florida as a religious as well as social alternative to South Carolina. Moreover, the rebels began their revolt on the Feast of the Nativity of Mary, a choice that seems clearly to have linked the rebellion to their Catholic identity and ideals. Besides helping contextualize the Stono Rebellion, those details remind us that the community of enslaved African Americans was, in reality, a profoundly multi-national collection of cultures, all of which had already become part of an evolving American community by September 1739.Next rebellion tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 7-8, 2019: Academic Labor: Hire Jeff Renye!

[Usually around this time I’d be sharing Fall Semester Preview posts. I’m on sabbatical, so no teaching for me this Fall; instead I thought I’d connect Labor Day to issues of academic labor this week. Leading up to this special weekend tribute post!]A tribute to one of the most impressive academics and people I know.When I ended Monday’s post by recognizing perhaps the most important truth of 21stcentury academic labor—that the difference between those of us who have a tenure-track position and those of us who do not is entirely one of luck—I did so not only because of my general sense of those contemporary realities, but also because of a very specific piece of evidence: the situation of my best friend in the profession, Dr. Jeffrey Renye. That hyperlinked Guest Post is one of many times that I’ve had the chance to share and highlight Jeff’s work on this blog, from multiple Guest Posts to tributes to his teaching and his scholarship, among others. I still remember quite clearly meeting Jeff for the first time in the late summer of 2000, at the orientation for our PhD program in English at Temple University. We connected instantly, shared numerous classes as well as an office when we began teaching the following year, and have remained close for the nearly two decades (!) since, including the chance to share scholarly conversations such as his Nathanael West presentation on my 2013 NeMLA roundtable on nominees for a National Big Read.I suppose those many connections over multiple decades could be seen as bias on my part, but I would say precisely the opposite: I am as familiar with, and thus able to offer an accurate assessment of, the specifics of Jeff’s teaching, scholarship, service, and professional career and identity as I am or could be with anyone’s. So when I say that Jeff is both the single best teacher I’ve met in this profession, one of the most interesting and impressive interdisciplinary scholars, and one of the most dedicated and responsible colleagues and department members, I do so based on a strikingly large sample size. You could say that it’s thus very ironic that Jeff has spent the seven years since he received his PhD in a number of adjunct faculty positions at multiple institutions; you’d be right, but I believe it’s a frequent and telling irony. That is, I would go one step further still than where I began this post—it’s not just that adjunct faculty members are as deserving of tenure-track positions as those of us lucky enough to have them; it’s that they are in my consistent experience (not at all limited to Jeff) some of the very best teachers, scholars, and community members in this profession.I can’t personally change that overall frustrating reality, although I’ve tried in the course of the week’s series to highlight various ways we can all work toward that goal. But when it comes to Jeff, I can and do make, to every academic department, program, and institution out there, the plea in this post’s title: Hire Jeff Renye! I make that plea not because of all the aforementioned ways in which Jeff is such an impressive teacher, scholar, and community member (although, I mean, duh), but as an appeal to your self-interest. Your department and institution, your students and faculty members, indeed every aspect of your academic community will benefit immeasurably if you have the good luck to hire Jeff Renye.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Academic workers (or any other kind) you’d highlight?