Closer to Freedom

Chapter 4 focuses on the space of slave quarters, which were “extensions of two worlds” (93): places that served enslavers in the containment of laborers while not laboring, yet also places that were private, functioning as homes and as part of the rival geography.

Historically, the chapter grounds itself in the antebellum abolitionist movement. The supposedly sealed space of the plantation was “punctured” by abolitionist opposition beginning in the 1830s. Enslaved people’s knowledge of the abolitionist movement raised hopes of freedom, and the chapter analyzes two cases in which enslaved women obtained and displayed abolitionist imagery where they lived. The “audacity” of women who conspicuously displayed these print materials enabled the documentary evidence now available to scholars.

The first and more developed case study revolves around California, an enslaved woman in Mississippi hired by a man named George Young while her enslaver, James McDowell, was in Virginia. Young decided to move, and, though he did not want to have California and her family come with him, she insisted and “made quite a to do to follow my wife here” (96), Young writes. Camp argues that going on the hiring market would have separated California from her husband, Isaac. By staying with the Youngs, she and Isaac also remained within easy distance of all their children.

While providing general information about the dynamic between California, Young, his wife, and McDowell, Camp focuses this case study on a few lines written in an 1847 letter from Young to McDowell complaining that California was displaying abolitionist “Amalgamation prints” in her cabin. The fundamental question that Camp raises about this display is “What made her remarkable activities [of such a display] possible?” (98).

California had more autonomy and mobility than many enslaved people, because she hired out her own time. Her husband, Isaac, also hired out his time as a local ferryman, and he likely would have come in contact with Black sailors who carried news and information, including abolitionist materials, with them. As essential as this increased mobility and access to abolitionist materials, however, is what Camp describes as Young’s “complicity.” He wrote to McDowell that he “constantly feared” that the slave patrol would see California’s prints, resulting in “unpleasant difficulties.” However, Young did not force California to take the prints down or remove them himself. Anticipating McDowell’s dismay, Young explains that he does not want to punish enslaved people, especially those enslaved by others. In Camp’s additional research on Young, she finds letters describing his wife’s advocacy for enslaved people, with one man, Moses, appealing to Young’s wife after Moses’s third wife was sold away. Young’s wife then purchased Moses’s wife back.

Beyond the specifics of the personalities and lives involved in California’s case is the broader historical context of print culture and its geographic distribution. The print industry was “democratized” in the 1830s. In the late 1700s the paper-making machine was developed in France, and in 1833 the steam-powered press became available in the United States. The combination of these two inventions made printed material much cheaper to produce and, thus, distribute. Eighteenth-century British abolitionists had previously relied on printed material—specifically, images—in their campaigns. They introduced three visual icons that remained powerful through the antebellum era in the United States: the image of a kneeling enslaved person, asking of the viewer, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”; the image of a cross-section of a ship during the Middle Passage displaying the tight “packing” of enslaved people; and representations of violence, including whippings, “hunts” of fugitives from slavery, and auction scenes.

This imagery was central in the second wave of American abolitionism that kicked off in the 1830s with the rise of cheaper printing. The introduction of the steam-powered press enabled print production rates to increase 10 times in the early 1830s, and in 1835, the American Antislavery Society started its “Postal Campaign,” taking advantage of these increased and cheaper rates of production to distribute abolitionist print materials through the South. This campaign was successful not only because of these changes in production but also because of David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, in which he called directly on Black sailors to participate in the dissemination of abolitionist materials. Most enslaved people, however, were illiterate, and Walker relied on oral communication between enslaved people. The broader abolitionist movement similarly recognized the enforced illiteracy of enslaved people and relied heavily on its iconic imagery, which could be “read” by anyone. While Walker was reaching out to an enslaved audience, abolitionist texts and their corresponding imagery were aimed at northern white people and, secondarily, at white southern resisters. Still, enslaved people nonetheless created space for themselves in this world by procuring, disseminating, analyzing, and sometimes displaying abolitionist illustrations.

Various laws were passed in the 1830s in response to the penetration of print culture into the plantation. In 1835, Virginia passed a law outlawing any written or vocal resistance to the right to enslavement, which required postal carriers to report abolitionist materials. Mississippi passed a similar law, which outlawed any circulation of material by white people or Black people that might incite rebellion. White people could incur large fines or be forced to serve jail time, and Black people could be killed for this crime. Georgia and South Carolina enacted “quarantine laws” that approached abolitionist materials as contagion, restricting contact between Black men working on waterways and Black people on shore as well as the distribution of abolitionist materials and ideas. Camp argues that this historical context not only clarifies that California probably got her materials from Isaac, but it reveals her display to be radical and extremely risky.

Camp analyzes both California’s and Young’s opposed interpretations of the abolitionist “amalgamation prints” displayed on California’s walls. The visual stock of abolitionist print material revolved around enslaved people’s abuses, so Camp theorizes that California likely did not have any inspiring images of enslaved liberation on her walls. The images themselves, then, would not have cleanly communicated a narrative of Black liberation but, instead, signified northern commitment to abolition. The images told of a “community beyond their own” fighting for the liberation of enslaved people (109). Camp contends that this is what California and her family imagined in looking at these prints.

Young’s description of the abolitionist imagery as “Amalgamation prints” reveals his reliance on proslavery rhetoric of abolitionists as “amalgamationists.” This rhetoric characterized abolitionists not as advocating the emancipation of enslaved people as a moral necessity but, instead, as the facilitation of “amalgamation,” or interracial intercourse. Proslavery imagery ridiculed both white people and Black people through amalgamationist imagery. This imagery—circulated within proslavery rather than abolitionist material—would not have been displayed by California, Camp insists, and thus Young’s description of the prints reveals his own framework for interpreting the abolitionist movement. Though he interpreted California’s display through an anti-abolitionist lens, Young did nothing to remove the images. Because Young did not “own” California or Isaac, because his wife advocated for enslaved people, and/or because, in the age of paternalistic enslavers, he wanted to be seen as “humane” and liked by those he enslaved, he responded passively to California’s abolitionist commitment and defiant display. The slave patrol was designed, in part, to make up for the “deficiencies” of enslavers like Young.

By the 1860s, enslaved people were putting less effort into hiding these materials and the rival geography that enabled their dissemination. The second, very brief case study depends on the source material of Mattie Jackson’s autobiography. Jackson was enslaved as a child during the Civil War, and she describes her mother, who was functionally literate, reading a paper thrown to her by a Union soldier. Her mother’s enslaver, suspicious of her activity, later searched her room, located within the plantation house, finding a newspaper print of Abraham Lincoln displayed on the wall. Jackson’s mother received greater punishment for the display of Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, than for her literacy.