AHR Forum

Small-Scale Dynamics of Large-Scale Processes

REBECCA J. SCOTT

In his provocative essay, David Brion Davis, to whom all of us who work on the history of slavery owe so much, has offered a glimpse of several pedagogical and conceptual strategies that can help overcome the tendency toward the compartmentalization of the study of slavery. He notes two axes along which slavery studies can expand: first, the rich and by now familiar field of comparative studies; and, second, what he sees as the less developed area of broadly systemic approaches. Some of the latter might be characterized by the term Atlantic Studies. Though rarely invoked as a recognized subfield for the purposes of job definition, Atlantic Studies has indeed emerged as an organizing principle under which multiple phenomena within and outside metropoles and colonies can be linked, often with slavery at the core.1	1
Davis's argument for the centrality of slavery, however, goes beyond the importance of the slave trade and slave labor in the construction of the Atlantic system, and invokes the powerful apparent contradiction between the New World as a place of opportunity and new beginnings, on the one hand, and a place of retrograde and exploitative labor relations embodied in slavery, on the other. It is from this vantage point that he asserts that "the Big Picture" is indispensable.	2
Davis sketches a fascinating undergraduate course focused on the making and then the overthrow of New World slavery, encompassing themes as varied as biblical constructions of bondage and the life histories of the Italian bankers who helped to fund slavery in the Mediterranean and Atlantic sugar colonies. The examples he cites provide persuasive evidence that a focus on the system of slavery can yield, as he phrases it, "a different way of perceiving world history."	3
Nonetheless, I find myself slightly uneasy with the construction of the history of slavery as a systemic Big Picture that will, in Davis's phrase, serve as "a first step toward coming to terms with the nature and workings of historical evil." Slavery clearly was a historical evil. The Big Picture is essential. Why, then, does this kind of systems approach strike me as potentially problematic?	4
I think there might be two reasons. The first is that placing the evilness of slavery at the center, echoing an eighteenth-century view of the slave trade as the "original sin" that lay at the heart of the building of the United States, may lead toward a disproportionate focus on the sinners—in all their multiplicity—and a relative neglect of the sinned against. There is a certain irony here. What in the end makes slavery truly evil is its consequences for those who are subjected to it, yet focusing on the concept of evil tends to draw attention back to the evil-doer. If one is going to define a field around the evaluative concepts of sin and evil, I think, one has to complete the explanatory picture by looking as well at the behavior of those who were, in effect, not the sinners.	5
Second, the systems approach, for all its interpretive potential, tends to draw attention to the history of the actors with a system-wide scope of operation, toward bankers and traders and planters. These figures clearly do constitute a crucial part of the story. But one of the most durable insights of the past decades of scholarship on slavery has been the realization that one must look to the often very local interplay of the actions of slaves, free people of color, masters, nonslaveholding farmers, and the state. The term "agency," so often invoked to label all this activity, has become a bit shopworn, and holds its own methodological pitfalls in encouraging the scholar to emphasize fragments of autonomy even in situations of what we know to have been extreme constraint. Nevertheless, the search for this kind of evidence has transformed our understanding of slavery and counteracted earlier presumptions of total subordination. Indeed, David Brion Davis has been one of the most important scholarly voices to insist on the recognition of the reciprocities—asymmetrical though they always were—that lay at the heart of slavery. The problem of incorporating an understanding of slave agency into a system-wide analysis, however, remains to a large extent unresolved. An undergraduate course might do well to take advantage of the excitement of the unresolved character of this question within recent scholarship, and grapple with the problem.	6
In the most dramatic cases, of course, slave agency thrusts itself forward. Serious scholars of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic system now recognize the place of the Haitian Revolution—and thus the agency of the slaves of Saint Domingue—at or near the center of the story. Moreover, the work of Julius Scott and others has demonstrated the existence of complex linkages between slaves and free people, as well as among sailors and stevedores, who managed to send word of the events in Saint Domingue ricocheting from Port au Prince to Havana to Maracaibo to Charleston.2	7
The greatest difficulty arises as we try to incorporate agency that operates less epochally, that does not yield full-scale rebellion or create a new nation. Working with students to come to terms with this kind of evidence, I think, could be one of the most enlivening challenges in teaching a course of the kind Davis describes. The point is not simply the familiar one of incorporating specialized research findings into a lecture course, or that of finding the voice of subordinated actors. It is a larger one of enriching our notion of historical causation.	8
We might take as an example the classic theme of the development of the powerful and volatile concept of citizenship in the process and aftermath of the French Revolution. Laurent Dubois, in his recent book, Les esclaves de la République (1998), provides us with an account of an intriguing incident on the road between the Guadeloupan capital of Basse-Terre and the village of Trois-Rivières, in April of 1793. The government of the island was in the hands of citizens who identified with the French Republic and feared a royalist coup. On April 21, however, yet more alarming news reached them: hundreds of slaves on the sugar estates around the village of Trois-Rivières had rebelled, killing twenty-two whites. The white citizens and soldiers of Basse-Terre quickly armed themselves and headed in the direction of Trois-Rivières. On the way, they encountered a group of armed slaves, headed toward the city. The soldiers advanced on the slaves, and one challenged them: "Who goes there?" The soldiers were astonished by the reply that came back: "Citizens and friends!"	9
The slaves came forward to give their version of events. They had discovered that their masters were engaged in a royalist plot to overthrow republican rule on the island, and in order to halt the plot they had found themselves obliged to rebel and kill their masters. The puzzled militia took the slaves into custody and returned to Basse-Terre, the insurgents periodically shouting "Vive la République" as they marched. One of the most intriguing aspects of this event is that the anxious authorities, rather than bringing charges against the rebels for slave insurrection, instead opened an inquiry into the royalist plot in which the planters had apparently been implicated.3	10
The brief insurrection in Trois-Rivières never became a revolution comparable to that of Saint Domingue, and it nearly vanished from the written record of emancipation in the Antilles.4 Retrieving and further analyzing it, as Dubois has done, reveals the extent to which slaves were taking on the active responsibilities of citizenship in a republic and broadly redefining its scope in the process. They claimed for themselves a role their republican rulers had by no means intended they should take. This dynamic, I think, needs to be made central to our understanding of the Big Picture, and it is quite distinct from the issue of the perpetuation of evil under French colonial rule.	11
Fine, one might say, but what of the non-epochal cases where there is no insurrectionary activity at all? How can one show that the behavior of slaves was consequential not only for themselves but for the system in which they were enmeshed? Let me try an additional story, this one told to me by Tomás Pérez y Pérez, a ninety-six-year-old former sugar worker who labored nearly all his life in the sugar mill called Soledad, in the old district of Cumanayagua, on the south coast of Cuba.	12
Tomás Pérez y Pérez, b. 1902. Photograph by Paul Eiss.
Tomás Pérez's mother, Bárbara Pérez, was born into slavery on the Pérez Galdós plantation, where she served first as a field laborer and then as a personal servant to the owner's niece. Among her tasks was that of receiving the mail from the mail carrier when his cart came to the door. One day when she brought the mail in, she found the front room of the house empty, so she took the liberty of opening up a newspaper that had come with the mail, to see what she could make of it. Suddenly, the young mistress walked in. Bárbara Pérez quickly folded the newspaper, bent her head, begged pardon, and braced for punishment. The niece, however, told her that there was no need to beg pardon. "Don't tell anyone I saw you, and I'll teach you to read." Bárbara Pérez was evidently an eager student, and by the time abolition came in 1886 she could read and write.5	13
After emancipation, Bárbara Pérez was expelled from the Pérez Galdós plantation. She moved to the nearby town of Arimao, where she worked as a laundress. As her son remembers the story, each time a newspaper arrived in Arimao, Bárbara Pérez would read it to the whole town. But how, I asked him, could she read it to the whole town? He explained (in the patient way that you explain something to a person who seems not to understand the obvious) that each neighbor would take a chair from his or her house, and place it on the sidewalk, and sit down, and listen while Bárbara Pérez read.6	14
Bárbara Pérez, b. ca. 1867. Historic photograph, courtesy of the Perez family.
As a historian, I know of no more vivid image of the construction of the public sphere than this picture of a woman recently enslaved, now supporting herself by washing clothes, who with her neighbors creates a public ritual and a space for the discussion of news from the wide world in the dusty, riverfront town of Arimao. One could carry the story forward, to the outbreak of the Cuban War of Independence in 1895, tracing the capacity of the well-informed residents of Arimao to mobilize in support of the Liberation Army. But even if we freeze the frame on the image of the recently emancipated Bárbara Pérez, lectora (reader) to the town of Arimao, we have captured a crucial element in the postemancipation construction of citizenship.	15
Finding and recounting stories like that of the insurrection at Trois-Rivières or of the public readings at Arimao will not, by itself, solve the vexed question of how to integrate micro-level data into macro-level explanations. But we might begin by assuming that a course aimed at conveying a systemic understanding of slavery will work best if it also conveys multiple dynamic explanations. To the extent that such dynamics can be convincingly located in the agency of subordinate actors, it should be possible to tell these stories as part of even the most ambitious Big Picture, not merely as illustrative sidebars.	16
The encounter of French republicanism with slavery was both a set of epoch-making intellectual developments in Paris and a meeting on the road to Trois-Rivières after which things in Guadeloupe could not be the same again. The redefinition of citizenship for former slaves in Cuba was both a complex defensive stratagem on the part of the Spanish colonial state and the seizing of the skill of reading by Bárbara Pérez, laundress and later midwife, who was determined that the community around her was entitled to aspire to more than mere survival.	17
We might close with a final image, also from the sugar country of south-central Cuba. Cayetano Quesada was born in 1879 to slave parents on the Santa Rosalía plantation and came of age during the transition from slavery to free labor. In October of 1895, he joined a small band of local rebel forces seeking to link up with the insurgency that had emerged to the east, which fought both against Spanish colonial rule and against the racial hierarchy built by a society based on slavery. Cayetano Quesada served as a private in the rebel Cienfuegos Brigade until near the end of the war in 1898. After the war, he and his fellow veteran Ciriaco Quesada settled on adjacent plots of land in the village of San Antón, at the edges of the Santa Rosalía and Soledad plantations. They raised cattle and horses, and planted corn, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and plantains.7	18
One hundred years later, in June of 1998, Cayetano Quesada's daughter Ramona Quesada, who lives with her husband, Evelio Castillo, on that same plot of land, was understandably surprised to find several historians walking up the pathway to her door, archival notes in hand. The ensuing conversation, as we sat together with her family on the patio, was an exchange of memories, notes, and reflections on the past. Recalling the stories she had heard from her father and others, she gave a harrowing account of the death of one of Cayetano Quesada's brothers during slavery and spoke of the struggle of the former slaves of Santa Rosalía to obtain and hold on to land. As evening fell, Ramona Quesada reflected on our encounter, both in terms of family and in terms of history. First, she expressed her pleasure at talking about her father and learning that documents about him had survived: "It is a joy to know this." Then she made an observation that speaks to the pedagogical and interpretive questions at hand. "I thought that my father's effort . . . had been erased from the history of Cuba."8	19
Ramona Quesada de Castillo, b. 1935. Photograph by Jack Kenny, 1998.
The word Ramona Quesada chose—effort (esfuerzo)—seems particularly appropriate. It was not just that Cayetano Quesada's name and experiences should be remembered. Rather, it was that history itself should recall his effort—an effort aimed, among other things, at altering the large structures of discrimination, impoverishment, and colonialism in Cuba. Ramona Quesada was just ten years old when her father died, and she seems to have tried over her lifetime to find the place that her memories of him might occupy within a more abstract narrative of Cuba's national history. We, too, must try—stimulated by David Brion Davis's proposal and by Ramona Quesada's memories—to envision a way of teaching the history of slavery that can portray the breadth and complexity of the slave system into which Cayetano Quesada was born, and of the society that he helped to build after its destruction.	20
Rebecca J. Scott is Frederick Huetwell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and a specialist on the history of slavery and emancipation in plantation societies. She has recently written "Reclaiming Gregoria's Mule: The Meanings of Freedom in the Arimao and Caunao Valleys, Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1880–1899," Past and Present (forthcoming) and "'Stubborn and Disposed to Stand Their Ground': Black Militia, Sugar Workers, and the Dynamics of Collective Action in the Louisiana Sugar Bowl, 1863–87," Slavery and Abolition 20 (April 1999). She is co-author, with Frederick Cooper and Thomas C. Holt, of Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (2000). With Michael Zeuske (University of Cologne), she is currently studying the genesis of claims to property and citizenship in rural Cuba, focusing on formal and informal systems of property rights. Notes I would like to thank Frederick Cooper, Laurent Dubois, David Hancock, Thomas C. Holt, Winthrop Jordan, Lawrence Levine, Aims McGuinness, Peter Railton, Julie Saville, Julius Scott, and Harold Woodman for ongoing discussions of these questions of evidence and interpretation. David Brion Davis has himself been enormously gracious in this continuing debate. My greatest debt is to the residents of Cienfuegos, San Antón, and Pepito Tey, in central Cuba, who have given generously of their time to share recollections of their parents and other kin in the context of the project "Rescate de la Memoria Viva," under the auspices of Orlando García Martínez and the Archivo Provincial de Cienfuegos. Particular thanks are due to Araceli Quesada y Quesada, Caridad Quesada, Ramona Quesada de Castillo, Evelio Castillo, Gerardo Quesada, Francisco Quesada, Humberto Quesada, Tomás Pérez y Pérez, Olga Pérez Ponvert, and Leonardo Alomá. 1 David Hancock's recent study, for example, places the slave-trading entrepôt of Bance Island, off the coast of Sierra Leone, at the center of his analysis of one set of Anglo-American trade networks. See Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge, 1995). Thomas C. Holt situates both slavery and metropole-colony relations at the heart of his interpretation of liberalism in The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, 1992). The list could go on, encompassing works by both historians and anthropologists who have chosen to place colony and metropolis into the same analytic field. 2 See Julius Scott, "A Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Age of the Haitian Revolution" (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 1986). 3 See Laurent Dubois, "A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1789–1802" (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1998); and Dubois, Les esclaves de la République: L'histoire oubliée de la première émancipation, 1789–1794, Jean-François Chaix, trans. (Paris, 1998), 15–24. 4 An initial reference to it does appear in Anne Pérotin-Dumon, Être patriote sous les tropiques (Basse-Terre, 1985), 179–82. 5 Interviews with Tomás Pérez y Pérez, Cienfuegos, Cuba, March and June 1998. 6 Interviews with Tomás Pérez, 1998. Bárbara Pérez was also an avid fan of novels, and she apparently read vigorously until the end of her very long life. For a discussion of Tomás and Bárbara Pérez in the context of central Cuba at the turn of the century, see Rebecca J. Scott, "Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Cuba: A View from the Sugar District of Cienfuegos, 1886–1909," Hispanic American Historical Review 78 (November 1998). 7 For a detailed discussion of the experiences of Cayetano and Ciriaco Quesada, see Rebecca Scott, "Reclamando la mula de Gregoria Quesada: El significado de la libertad en los valles del Arimao y del Caunao, Cuba, 1880–1899," Islas e imperios (Barcelona) 2 (April 1999). 8 We were a group of four visitors: Orlando García Martínez from Cienfuegos, Leonardo Alomá from Pepito Tey (the former Soledad), and Aims McGuinness and myself from the University of Michigan. The June 1998 interview with Ramona Quesada and Evelio Castillo was ably transcribed by Evelyn Baltodano.

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