Thinking about the political lives of slaves

• Published in: American nineteenth century history 2020-01, Vol.21 (1), p.25-37
• Main Author: O'Donovan, Susan Eva
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alienation; Commodities; labor; Mobility; politics; secession; Slavery; slaves; Workers
• ISSN: 1466-4658; 1743-7903
• DOI: 10.1080/14664658.2020.1744311

Recent scholarship on slavery has begun to draw attention to the ubiquity of mobility among America's bound workers. They moved as boatmen, teamsters, lady's maids, turpentine hands, and fugitives. They moved as commodities in a booming interstate trade. Most of all, they moved as workers. Functioning at one and the same time as the lifeblood, the infrastructure, and the lubricant of American slavery, bound workers were the gears of staple production. Slaves were, in short, the movers and makers of an economy that underwrote regional and national growth. Thus while generations of studies have opened up important understanding about human bondage and its crushing costs, evidence suggests as well that there was much more to the story than rupture, alienation, and loss. It was a political story too, one in which enslaved women and men were central protagonists. For, as this paper suggests, every time America's slaveholders put their slaves into motion - as workers on the road, on the go, and often alone - they offered to those slaves the learning and the discursive opportunities that they most wanted to withhold from them.