By: Dylan C. Penningroth
| In 1924, a farmer named Kwadjo Agbanyamane and his mother borrowed £ P20 from a neighbor to buy some land near Peki, in the Gold Coast region of what is now Ghana. In return, Kwadjo “gave” the neighbor his six-year-old brother Kwamin, “to serve for the debt until” he could pay for the land. As the chief who judged the case put it, Kwamin’s labor was “to wash out the interest.”1 In 1904, in Alabama, another farmer, Hayes Shaw, hired out his nineteen-year-old son Nate to work. “Truthful to God,” Nate Shaw said later, “I got one suit of clothes out of my labor that year … and my daddy collectin the balance of it. Well, that was just like slavery with me.”2 | 1 |
| Neither Shaw nor Kwamin was a slave, but the subordination and vulnerability they experienced had roots in the era of slavery. Slavery was practiced in the Gold Coast region long before Europeans began buying and shipping people across the Atlantic to provide labor for plantation colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean. In what became the southern United States, slavery flourished for nearly 250 years.3 Although Britain finally banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, slavery remained a vital legal category in both Gold Coast and the United States for most of the nineteenth century, and left a legacy that lasted well into the twentieth. In both regions, the economics and ideology of slavery knit together notions of family and property. People in both places asserted powerful claims over members of their families—to “work em,” hire them out, “turn [them] over” to someone else, or even “give” them away.4 And although Shaw chafed at his father’s “bossin” and Kwamin eventually ran away, no one seriously questioned their relatives’ right to dispose of them, not even the boys themselves. Indeed, what bothered Shaw was simply that he “thought [he] was a little too old to be treated that way.”5 | 2 |
| A limited comparison of the southern United States and southern Gold Coast during the nineteenth century reveals that claims about family and property were rooted in a complex history of change in the two regions, including internal mass migrations of slaves, the rise of large new slave-based economies, and an intensified focus on kinship as a key component of the masters’ ideology of slavery. Masters and slaves struggled over claims to resources—including claims to people—and the social identities that underpinned them. In significant ways, the histories of both regions were shaped by debates about the claims that slaves and their descendants made to kinship and to the products of their labor. Those debates drew substance from—and in turn helped influence—the meanings of property, slavery, and social membership for all people, not just slaves.6 And as the stories of Nate Shaw and Kwamin suggest, the links among kinship, property, and slavery remained potent long after slavery itself was officially over. | 3 |
| Comparison has been an undercurrent in writings on slavery since the 1840s, but rarely do the histories of slavery in the United States and Africa come in for direct, sustained scholarly comparison.7 Instead, the dominant mode has been diaspora. It was once common for U.S. historians to include a portrait of “traditional” African culture as a baseline for sketching the development of African American culture, and American slavery has long been a foil for studies of slavery in Africa. But those portraits frequently lacked the attention to specific places and changes over time that would make them useful.8 Recent work in the Atlantic, or diasporic, school has opened more sophisticated routes between African and African American history, including political-military developments, cultural identities, religion, and demography.9 Much of the newer work draws on the increasingly detailed history of the Atlantic slave trade, thus further emphasizing the connection between “routes” and “roots.” Both studies of slavery in Africa and the diasporic work on the Americas contain, and often are implicitly grounded on, comparisons, but those comparisons are rarely sustained or explicit, and they are usually secondary to some other goal. There are comparative works on slavery, emancipation, and its aftermath, but few compare sites of slavery in Africa with those in the United States.10 | 4 |
| Black life in the Americas has long been interpreted through two major themes, both largely forged in the study of slavery: the dialectic of accommodation and resistance and the debate over cultural survivals and acculturation, themes that are sometimes fused into a framework of cultural adaptation and resistance.11 Acknowledging the tremendous diversity of African cultures, these studies show how slaves in the Americas forged collective identities, families, communities, and distinctive cultures that enabled them to resist the racialized oppression of slavery and carve out a space of autonomy and human dignity. Slaves’ descendants kept up the struggle from Bahia to Birmingham, tactically alternating public protest with the “infrapolitics” of slowdowns, pilfering, and sabotage.12 | 5 |
| Figure 1: The United States South, ca. 1860. Map drawn by Tom O’Connell, Northwestern University Library. | |
| Figure 2: The Gold Coast region in the early colonial period. Map drawn by Tom O’Connell, Northwestern University Library. | |
| The notion of slave resistance took longer to catch on in studies of Africa, largely because scholars disagreed on how to define slavery itself. One early and influential model, attentive to the variety of slave systems in Africa, portrayed slavery as an institution of marginality. In this view, slaves were kinless, dishonored outsiders, easily bought and sold; over time, that marginality was gradually reduced as slaves (or their descendants) were absorbed into the dominant society, notably through kinship. This model offered the important insight that Africans regarded slavery not as the opposite of autonomy, but as the condition of belonging to a master rather than in society. A second important model argued that slavery was defined in opposition to kinship, and that, as the most basic kind of property, the slave was the “anti-kin” and could never truly be assimilated.13 Neither model dwelled long on what slaves did or said, but resistance has since become a major topic in studies of slavery in Africa, with some scholars arguing that slaves’ responses to abolition efforts show a hunger for freedom and autonomy, while others see the “absorption” process as a struggle in itself, in which slaves made demands not so much for autonomy as to become full members in local institutions of community and kinship.14 Yet we understand much less about the views and actions of slaves in most parts of Africa than about those of U.S. slaves.15 | 6 |
| The enduring strength of the resistance paradigm is clear. As a basic framework for either African American or African history, however, there are limits to what it can do, and those limits are becoming increasingly apparent. For one thing, it implicitly presumes that autonomy is what oppressed people want, but as observers of both continents have indicated, autonomy is not a universal goal, nor is it universally defined in terms of the embodied individual.16 Then, too, as many critics have pointed out, black history is more than the story of race relations, but the resistance framework makes whites and whiteness the basic reference point for African American history, and forces scholars into an unproductive balancing act between acknowledging the horrors of slavery and showing how the slaves nevertheless “preserve[d] their humanity.” Indeed, historians are increasingly asking whether we can presume a solid and unified “subaltern presence” at all: black churches have grappled with conflicts over gendered “respectability,” “[a] leader of a movement can … go home and beat up a wife or children,” colonized people could be colonizers themselves, and some of the strongest resistance to European colonialism came from slaveholding Africans.17 It would be a mistake to assume that such power relations merely echo, or are ultimately less meaningful than, the story of white-on-black oppression—or that studying the former necessarily means downplaying the latter.18 Probing the internal dynamics of subaltern families and communities—issues of conflict, authority, and change over time—demands new interpretive frameworks that can complement the familiar dyads of race and resistance: master and slave, colonizer and colonized, white and Other. | 7 |
| Dialogue between African and African American history can help create such frameworks, not only through arguments about diaspora but also through carefully limited comparisons and attention to each other’s questions, perspectives, and methods. Africanists’ tradition of exploring inequality and power among Africans and the historical construction of seemingly fixed categories such as “kinship,” “tribe,” and “ethnicity” offer ways of rethinking standard narratives about “the black family” and “the black community.” At the same time, Americanists’ intense focus on the master-slave relationship and on the pervasive yet often subtle significance of race long after slavery’s official end can deepen our understanding of places such as Ghana both as colonial societies and as postslavery societies, and of how Africans shaped an emancipation process that is still commonly seen as driven mainly by Europeans, and can help trace out the inequality and subordination so carefully hidden behind pleasant-sounding official ideologies such as “kin incorporation.”19 | 8 |
| Comparison suggests different kinds of transatlantic links, links that engage Africa as more than the ancestral homeland of African American peoples and cultures. In contrast to Cuba, Brazil, and the Caribbean (the subjects of the few comparative studies of slavery and emancipation), scholars agree that in southern Gold Coast, as in many parts of Africa, slavery was not built on an ideology of race—at least as race was understood in the southern United States.20 Nor did the plantation, where slaves produced export crops, dominate the institution of slavery in Gold Coast as much as it did in the U.S. The region was much smaller and less populous, spanned several polities, and alongside slavery had a longstanding practice of human pawning, something unknown in the United States. It is difficult even to talk about “slavery in Africa,” given the variety of slave systems in that continent’s history. Yet both regions’ economies leaned heavily on significant enslaved populations—at least a third of the people in each region were slaves—and there were plantations in Gold Coast just as there were slave-worked industries in the United States. And despite a few rich grandees, slaveholding was widely dispersed in both regions by the 1800s, a pattern that had far-reaching political, cultural, and social implications.21 For all its differences, slavery (or slaveries) was woven into the fabric of Gold Coast and many other African societies just as tightly as it was in the Americas. That interweaving, along with the crucial differences of ideology and organization, means that comparing slavery in a specific African and a North American region can, as Thomas Bender puts it, help to “restore some sense of strangeness, of unfamiliarity” to the histories of both continents.22 At the same time, historians of each field will find the other realm strangely familiar in some respects. | 9 |
| Focusing on people’s experiences with property and family helps us see a world that sprawls beyond debates about smooth absorption or liberal freedom. Because nearly everyone in these societies eventually talked about, acted on, and experienced them, a close look at property and family provides valuable glimpses of the lives of ordinary people, including slaves and former slaves, as they dealt with the powerful and with one another. Because property and family were at the heart of the economics and ideology of slavery, they allow us to take seriously the hegemonic power of masters’ ideologies without missing the ways that slaves subverted or contested those ideologies. And because slavery nurtured intimate connections between property and family, they provide a bridge for comparing a variety of historical processes across two regions that otherwise seem incomparably different. | 10 |
| The outlawing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 catalyzed and accelerated enormous changes in the United States and the southern Gold Coast region. Rather than close the book on slavery, the slowdown of overseas slave trading opened new, expansionist chapters for slavery on both sides of the Atlantic. Between 1790 and 1860, the U.S. slave population quadrupled, to nearly 4 million people. Its geographic center swung southwestward as slave owners, encouraged by the federal government’s wars against Native Americans, dragged roughly a million black people from their homes in the eastern Carolinas and Chesapeake and forced them “down the river.” The collapse of overseas slaving led slavery to swell within Africa, too, and in many places to become more intensive. Since the British navy did nothing about slavery itself, thousands of people who otherwise would have gone into the belly of a slave ship now found themselves working as slaves in Africa. In what became Gold Coast, in the 1830s to 1850s, slaves taken from the north eventually fell into the hands of Akan-speaking masters who lived between the ocean and the slave-raiding hinterland. Those slaves’ toils expanded old slave-based economies, such as kola nuts, gold, and cloth, and helped to usher in new ones, including palm oil and eventually rubber and cocoa.23 In short, cotton became king in the U.S. South at roughly the same time that British officials were congratulating themselves on the rise of (slavery-based) “legitimate commerce” along the West African coast. By 1850, there were more slaves in Africa than in North America. In southern Gold Coast, as much as half of the population was unfree.24 | 11 |
| The success or failure of both of these nineteenth-century economies depended largely on myriad personal struggles between masters and slaves. Those struggles took many different forms. But in the nineteenth century, slave owners increasingly turned to kinship to explain and solidify their mastery. They did so in obviously very different ways: while Akan masters routinely recognized filial ties with their slaves, American slave owners rarely did. Yet both Akan and American slave owners intensified a longstanding focus on kinship as an ideological component of slavery, a tendency that coexisted and sometimes competed with the powerful ideology that designated the slave as a fundamentally different kind of being. On the one hand, there were images of slaves as a separate species, as “beasts,” as “vile” and “stupid.”25 In the United States, these ideas helped build the nineteenth century’s virulent ideology of race. On the other hand, there was an image of slaves as mbofra (“children”) or (in the U.S.) “mammies” in a master’s household.26 In Gold Coast, political and demographic pressures stemming from the end of the Atlantic slave trade prompted Akan elites—encouraged by the powerful Asante state—to step up a longstanding strategy of assimilating slaves into elite and ordinary households. These people, who made up a growing proportion of the slave population, were referred to in terms that emphasized their belonging in, as well as to, a household: gyaasefo (domestics, attendants; from gya-ase: place where the hearth stands; kitchen) and slaves “born in the house,” unlike the nnënkëfo (“bought” or “northern” slaves; sing. ëdënko) with their foreign accents and facial scarification. Anchoring this “assimilation” strategy, and further blurring the distinction between “household” and “family,” was an official ban on talking about where people came from: “Obi nkyerë obi ase” (“No one reveals the origins of another”).27 Although “domestic slavery” had been around for a long time, we can ask whether Akan slavery in the 1800s may have leaned harder than ever on an idea that was deepening among U.S. slave owners, too: the notion that a slave was one of the family. | 12 |
| Slave owners worked hard to control the assimilation process and limit its implications. Slaves were not really kin. U.S. masters angrily denounced anyone who even mentioned the tan and brown faces that dotted most plantations—obvious evidence (as abolitionists loved to point out) of whites’ biological kinship with slaves. Did “slave origins” in Gold Coast operate in ways analogous to race in the United States? Scholars disagree about whether slaves or their descendants could ever really be assimilated into Akan societies.28 What is clear is that the Asante rule against revealing origins was never supposed to be a liberating doctrine, any more than paternalism was. Instead, comparison suggests that both of these were the official expressions of a wider, historically specific strategy by elites. Deeply rooted in the past, this strategy intensified in the early nineteenth century as an attempt to justify and make sense of a dramatic expansion of slavery.29 It helped to set the parameters of master-slave struggles, but it did not determine how they would turn out. | 13 |
| The assimilation strategy had complex and often contradictory implications for relations among free people, because, as both U.S. and African historians have noted, relations among free people contained their own power dynamics, and because slavery itself always had unruly ties with kinship. Masters’ wealth and domination over slaves were founded in part on manipulating kinship rules, but such strategies only underlined the most exploitative aspects of kinship in general, not just for slaves. In both regions, having female slaves released many free wives from working in the fields and the house. In Gold Coast, plenty of these enslaved women were married to their masters, as “junior wives.”30 The practice of pawning, although different from slavery, nevertheless illustrated both the power that a lineage held over its most junior members, who could be pawned as security for debts, and the thin line between property and kinship. Unlike slaves, pawns kept their kin ties and could be redeemed at any time.31Nwowa (people pledged as pawns) were different from “domestic” slaves “born in the house,” who in turn were different from nnënkëfo (who were not kin), but they all personified how easily property relations could overlap with kinship relations. If nnënkëfo foreigners (at least in principle) could look forward to becoming assimilated “domestics,” and pawns to being redeemed, it was still all too easy for either of them to skid into slavery when crisis struck.32 | 14 |
| U.S. slave owners never pawned or sold off their dependent relatives, as Akans sometimes did, but of course this was true only of their white relatives.33 The notion of slaves as family members threw an uncomfortable spotlight on the power dynamics of family itself, an institution where plantation mistresses lost property rights, where free fathers were “masters of small worlds,” and where beloved “mammies” and masters’ light-skinned children could be auctioned off. Indeed, in the early 1800s, just as the Atlantic slave trade was coming to an end, southern elites, backed by the courts, insisted on treating unskilled white workingmen as “domestic dependents,” to be lumped together in the same legal category as wives, children, and slaves, and subject to the rule of their husband/father/master/employer.34 Both matrilineal Akans and patrilineal white southerners thus manipulated kinship rules to tighten their grip on their “dependents,” but found that slavery drew out the hierarchical, even proprietary, dimensions of kinship in general. The question that Michael Johnson identified for Charleston elites may have been even more troublesome in southern Gold Coast: “if slaves were family members, were family members slaves?”35 | 15 |
| In southern Gold Coast, those battles over slave assimilation helped to redefine property and kinship for Akan people generally, not just the slaves. Slaves and masters worked toward different ends: the masters, to exert control over the slaves and assimilating slaves; the slaves, to become full members of society. Both slaves and masters used shifting strategies, but they shared the language of kinship and descent. And by using the same vocabulary, they changed its meaning. | 16 |
| First, slaves and masters sowed seeds of competition between two general patterns of reckoning descent: matrilineality and patrilineality. In matrilineal societies such as the Akan, descent through the line of the mother determined membership in a kin group. Kinfolk, in turn, mutually owed obligations and exercised rights, including inheritance. (An Akan man, for example, belonged not to his father’s kin group but rather to his mother’s; his closest authoritative senior kinsman was his maternal uncle.) There are vigorous debates about the historical realities behind “African lineality” in general, and especially the interaction between slavery and matrilineality. But the key fact here is that unlike the Akan freeborn, who belonged to their mothers’ kin groups, a slave child belonged completely to the lineage of his or her owner. And often that owner was a man. Thus, the people whose origins should not be revealed—the assimilating slaves—traced their kin membership through a father, albeit not a biological one. In this way, slavery in southern Gold Coast planted roots for a patrilineal system of inheritance and descent that tangled and competed with the matrilineal system. It was the mirror image of slavery in British America, where legally enforced matrilineality set slaves apart and affirmed free men’s authority over both property and their white and black “dependents.”36 Comparing such innovations reminds us how contingent these kinship systems were, and how intertwined they were with slavery, not only in Africa but in the United States as well. | 17 |
| The second reason why slavery so strongly affected property and kinship had to do with the struggles of assimilating slaves and their masters over kinship membership and rights to family property. Masters wanted to have it both ways. On the one hand, masters incorporated slaves into their own lineage, dodging the claims that their wives’ matrilineage normally would have over their household members. This is why free men liked to take slaves as junior wives: a slave wife was easier to control than a freeborn wife, whose family would protect her and claim her children for themselves.37 But at the same time, masters wanted to keep slaves as lineage-less outsiders. Defining slaves as metaphoric “orphans” gave masters sweeping rights over everything the slaves possessed: their belongings, their muscles, and their children. Masters stood to benefit by stripping slaves of any kin ties—and of the property rights that went with kinship. In 1869, for example, one woman lamented, “After the [funeral] custom Defendant took all my brother’s property, slaves and pawns … and when I asked him what right he had to take them away, he told me that I am a daughter of one of [his] slaves.”38 Indeed, kinlessness was often not so much a literal fact as a popular shorthand for someone whose lack of full personhood blocked her from being a sister or daughter in any socially meaningful sense. Slaves could live near their blood relatives and yet be unrecognized as kin because (to gloss U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney’s famous dictum in kinship terms) they had no family that anyone was bound to respect.39 | 18 |
| By the same token, Akan masters and their relatives counted on their slaves to perpetuate the family. The “children of the house” were inferior, but they were fictive kin, “relative[s] by service,” as one man put it, with potential claims, which only grew stronger as memories of slave origins were strategically blurred over time. Not only could slaves earn property and inherit from each other, but some bought slaves of their own, and a few became richer than their masters. “Domestics” could also, by the logic of kin incorporation, inherit the property of their master’s family, or even become the head of his lineage (to keep the title from going to some distant relative).40 Whether slave lineage heads were merely convenient placeholders and whether heading a lineage set a person free were matters of dispute, especially in the years after “legal status” abolition.41 But at least one slave–turned–family head is known to have “sold off” members of the family that owned him in order to settle its debts.42 Thus, by the mid-1800s in Gold Coast, not all slaves equated freedom with breaking away from the people who owned them. Although the logic of matrilineal descent made it legally impossible for the children of enslaved women to be kin, in practice, masters’ blurring of that line gave slave-descended people an opening to claim kinship with a rich family and its property, because “being one of the family,” like “owning property,” depended on marking and performing those genealogies, performances that were increasingly liable to dispute as generations passed. It is not enough to say, as one influential study has argued, that slaves were “socially dead.”43 Slaves established social ties all the time, including biological ties with their own masters, and so it was through community and kinship, not in its absence, that slaves and masters fought their battles. | 19 |
| No U.S. slave could ever become the head of his or her master’s family, much less sell off its members. And slaves essentially rejected the notion that they were part of a great big plantation family headed by their master.44 Yet inside slave communities, in their relations with each other, African Americans seized on the connection between kinship and power. Much as Gold Coast slaves tried to claim property and kinship with their masters, U.S. slaves’ efforts to raise and keep property led them to create and re-create kinship with other slaves and to command precious after-hours work from their kinfolk. Property underlined questions of authority within slave families, and spurred negotiations, even conflicts, between husbands, wives, parents, in-laws, and neighbors.45 Slaves’ claims to property made what has come to be called “the black family” ever more complex and malleable, and reinforced its connection to questions of power, ownership, and work. | 20 |
| Slaves and slavery also complicated important ongoing transformations in Anglo-American and Akan notions of property. Consider the relationship between individual and joint claims of ownership. In the United States, of course, a slave was a piece of property, a “chattel personal,” but practices common in southern business and inheritance often meant that one of those “chattels” could legally belong to several people at once, such as when slaves were hired out or mortgaged or held in trust for widows and underage heirs.46 Such arrangements quickly spun out webs of overlapping entitlements—”life estates” and “remaindermen” in the United States, “lineage” and “self-acquired” property in Gold Coast, to name just a few. Precisely because human “chattels” were so versatile, the potential for multiple ownership claims was even higher for them than for land or livestock or other kinds of property. If the ownership of slaves was complex, the ownership of property by slaves complicated matters still further. Most Americans knew that slaves, in principle, could not own property, and yet southern newspapers, courts, and ordinary whites frequently acknowledged that in practice they often did. Even if the law usually ignored property ownership by slaves, the everyday realities of dealing with property urged whites to take account of such claims. For example, settling a deceased slave owner’s estate often meant ordering his slaves to hire themselves out for the benefit of his widow, children, or creditors and letting them keep part of their earnings. Slave owners across the South allotted their slaves plots of land for gardens, to be worked after hours, or paid them for their “overwork” during the critical seasons. What masters conceded as a money-saving scheme, enslaved people turned into an informal economy that drew in white neighbors and fellow slaves: unevenly patrolled and often contested, but widespread nonetheless.47 As the North Carolina Supreme Court pointed out in 1845, the many statutes regulating trading with slaves implicitly “recognize[d] a sort of ownership by slaves.” The ownership of property by slaves opened a gap between the formal law of property (as defined by legal theorists) and the understanding that most people—even local magistrates—had about how property actually worked.48 Gold Coast slaves’ property claims were even stronger. And the tendency for Akan property to drift toward corporate ownership meant that a slave held as someone’s self-acquired property gained new rights (including property rights) when her master died and she became a “domestic.”49 | 21 |
| Some evidence suggests that during the final years of slavery, many masters, eager to take advantage of booming prices for cotton (in the U.S.) and palm oil (in Gold Coast), tried to choke off slaves’ customary rights, including their claims to property.50 Yet the underlying conception remained: for most people—slave or free—what turned possessions into property was a complex interchange of display and acknowledgment, guided by people’s shifting notions of what was customary in their neighborhood. Witnesses in both regions talked about asking permission to build or farm, presenting “rum” money, tearing down unauthorized walls, or seizing “canoe men”; they claimed to “know” their neighbors’ animals “by sight” or to be able to pace off land boundaries from memory.51 These were the things that let owners say, “The land is known by people generally that it is mine.” Indeed, one of the main reasons why slaves could be property owners was that free people’s property relations, including their legal rights, were also partly grounded in “custom” and local knowledge. As one Alabama man put it, “I seen it in her possession, and her master knew it, and everyone considered it her property.”52 | 22 |
| In sum, much work on the United States, Britain, and Gold Coast suggests that the notion of property as commodity was neither dominant nor inexorable; instead, it emerged haltingly before and during the period of early European settlement, and had to compete with other notions of property well into the 1800s. Fierce arguments raged over rights to commons, state, and lineage property; over the legal transformation of public resources (such as grazing land and river water) into private property or from self-acquired to stool property; and over the right to pass on private wealth through inheritance.53 The complexity of property in the nineteenth-century United States—where white husbands had property rights in their white wives, and where many things, especially land, slaves, and the slaves’ “petty gains and properties,” were claimed as property by more than one person—opens new possibilities for exploring what one fugitive slave called “the chattel principle” and its ramifications throughout American society.54 And although the nineteenth century’s momentous debates over property are often associated with free people—jurists, farmers, industrialists, and urban workers—comparison reveals that there were other traditions and definitions of property roiling the debate, including people at the margins of empire and even those at the furthest margins of society: the slaves. In both regions, slaves’ claims to property stirred up—and grew out of—debates among free people, struggles between masters and slaves, and evolving relations among slaves. | 23 |
| In both the United States and Gold Coast, abolition intensified and reshaped already longstanding contests over what it meant to be one of the family. In Gold Coast, ex-slaves faced a world in which there was no decisive end to slavery. The British officials who passed abolition laws in Gold Coast were aghast at the upheavals they thought they had seen in the Caribbean during the 1830s and the United States during the 1860s, and, using their experience in India as a model, they took pains to avoid similar disruptions, even if it sometimes meant downplaying their own proclamation.55 In late 1874, the colonial government stopped recognizing slavery as a legal status and banned the importation of new slaves into the colony, but until 1908 it was still perfectly legal to hold slaves, and imports continued.56 By contrast, African Americans’ struggles over property and kinship took place in a world where slavery was definitely dead, but few agreed on what should replace it. | 24 |
| As many scholars have shown, the legal systems set up under colonial rule served a variety of powerful groups: ruling elites, male elders, and the colonial state itself. Those groups’ jostling assumptions and interests often opened up space for ordinary people, and even slaves, to seize on legal institutions to pursue their interests. In southern Gold Coast and the U.S. South, abolition laws, along with the legal regimes that imposed them, intensified already heated intellectual debates over property and family. Many former slave owners and their descendants found themselves arguing over property with former slaves. In the United States, moreover, the unprecedented expansion of black property owners intensified struggles among the descendants of slaves. Although most disputes probably never reached any court, the cases that did get there offer glimpses of fierce battles over who owned what—and whom.57 | 25 |
| Abolition laws went hand in hand with shifts in jurisdictional boundaries. Gold Coast’s 1874 Abolition Ordinance was administered, albeit haltingly and inconsistently, by a newly expanded system of district commissioners and high courts, themselves part of the just-minted “Gold Coast Colony.”58 In the United States, after the Confederacy was beaten, military courts gave way to Freedmen’s Bureau offices, and eventually to “reconstructed” civil courts. The legal systems that gradually emerged in both regions complemented and interlaced with older understandings from the time before abolition. Village chiefs and heads of families continued to mediate disputes, but the presence of colonial, military, or Freedmen’s Bureau courts (however fleeting) opened new possibilities for former slaves. | 26 |
| As Lauren Benton points out, the changes that colonialism wrought in jurisdictional boundaries were inseparable from questions of cultural identity and of property. In both Gold Coast and the United States, emancipation was a time when law was widely seen as constitutive of political authority and cultural identity, and when many people—including former slaves—found new opportunities in “jurisdictional complexity.” “I have always found it hard to discover what is the native law upon any point whatsoever,” sighed one British judge in a family land case. His American counterpart would have agreed: sorting out the ownership of southern property was “a terrible job,” even though the South’s “native law” was clear enough.59 How could anyone regularize and make useful sense of property in contexts where few people could show legal documents, where local customs often seemed to contradict obvious legal principles (such as when U.S. ex-slaves claimed to have owned property), and where a whole category of property had been (or was in the process of being) abolished? | 27 |
| One solution was to ask local experts for help to “crystallise” local custom into a foundation that courts could rely on. The “Courts should do all that is in their power to fix these will-o’-the-wisps called native customs, and transfer them to the records,” urged one British judge in Gold Coast, carefully rejecting any that did not date from “time immemorial.”60 In the 1870s and 1880s, the American Southern Claims Commission, charged with compensating loyal southerners for property taken by the Union Army, relied heavily on witness testimony about local custom in making its judgments. So did many Freedmen’s Bureau and provost courts, while they lasted.61 But such efforts went further in Gold Coast, largely because of its evolving policy of “indirect rule.” Indirect rule tried to create a double judicial system, in which “pure native tenure” was supposedly communal, and individual ownership was an “absolutely foreign” Western concept. But “[b]y linking land ownership to community membership,” as Sara Berry points out, colonial officials “opened a Pandora’s box.” In any given case, one could ask: Which community owned the land, and who were its members?62 No one had a more desperate stake in such questions than those who lived on the margins of community—the slaves. | 28 |
| Much debate has centered on whether the abolition laws really transformed Gold Coast societies, as measured by the number of desertions, freedom petitions, or prosecutions for slave-dealing.63 Many unfree people in Gold Coast and elsewhere in West Africa did run away in the wake of abolition laws. But even in places where there were relatively few “slavery cases” and where (as some scholars argue) no mass exodus took place, ex-slaves still pursued their interests, in ways that can be compared to the situation in the United States, where slavery ended with war and exodus. Struggle and negotiation themselves represented continuity with the slavery era, even if the colonial era shrouded that nineteenth-century dynamism in the still mists of “time immemorial.” | 29 |
| Former slaves in both regions used law strategically. Going to court was not easy, especially for ex-slaves, who probably were reluctant to confront their former masters there. So it is likely that many disputes never made it to any court. But those that did reveal important patterns. Rather than walk directly into a chiefly or colonial court, slaves tended to provoke a crisis by deliberately doing something “wrong” outside of court, leaving ex-masters to pursue the matter in court.64 As in the American South, slavery was so woven into the social fabric that “relations between slaveholders depended upon slaves,” and so when southern Gold Coast slaves overstepped (or neglected) their bounds, they threw into doubt not only their own rights but also the rights of a whole range of free people: creditors, heirs, settlers, even their masters. African Americans may have been more likely to challenge white landowners directly. Whites who had barely noticed disputes among blacks during slavery now confronted black women and men who refused to “hush,” or even threatened to “sling the shit out of” their boss.65 But given the risks—a creditor’s cold shoulder, a torched cabin, or a bullet to the face—it is likely that freedpeople in the United States, like those in Gold Coast, picked their battles carefully. | 30 |
| Ex-slaves also took advantage of the incompleteness of formal law and the persistence of local understandings about property and kinship. British officials and Union officers alike complained that litigants took their disputes from one forum to the next, from family meetings to official courts and sometimes back again, shopping for a favorable verdict.66 Because of Britain’s insistence on ruling through “native law,” Gold Coast litigants could go a step further, and argue over which body of law should apply in their case—British, Gã, Fante, Asante, “Mahammedan,” or even “Brazilian” law—arguments that reflected both the complexity of identity in this region and the courts’ eagerness to pin it down. Akans literally made history when they went to court; their testimony captured precious details about changes in a nineteenth-century African society, but also in the sense that it pulled Europeans into an ongoing debate among Africans about the past, much as Reconstruction-era officials in the United States had to grapple with local southern customs about property and social relations.67 | 31 |
| Despite their shortcomings in policy and implementation, “legal status” abolition and the revamping of legal institutions opened new possibilities for debating property and kinship and how they were “customarily” linked. Before 1874, Akan masters had confidently gone to British courts to claim runaway slaves as property; after 1874, as the scope and geographic reach of abolition laws haltingly widened, they were more likely to claim property from their former slaves, often in ways that drew upon the longstanding notion that a slave was one of the family. In court, some masters affirmed kin ties, speaking of their former slaves as their children and saying that these so-called children did not really own the property they lived on. In both regions, in family property disputes with other free people, some masters now asked their old family slaves and pawns to testify for them; it seemed natural that someone who had “nursed [and] carried” the master’s children “at [her] back” would “know more about the family affairs than anyone else.”68 In Gold Coast, such tactics catered to the sensibilities of colonial officials, who were increasingly willing to paint “domestic slavery” as a mild institution, so different from Caribbean slavery that it scarcely deserved the name “slavery” at all.69 | 32 |
| Other ex-masters sailed right into the winds of change: they grabbed hold of potentially vulnerable pieces of property by cutting their ties with their former slaves. After 1874, and especially after 1908 (when slaveholding was finally banned in Gold Coast), some ex-masters began to argue that if abolition had ended masters’ rights over their slaves, it must also have ended slaves’ rights to family property.70 Not all Gold Coast elites opposed abolition. But for many former slave owners and their descendants, “legal status” abolition was a chance to clarify (or maybe redraw) the boundaries of their families, often at the expense of old family slaves. And the colonial courts encouraged them, ruling that once slaves stopped fulfilling their traditional “services” and “responsibilities,” they were breaking an “implied contract” and therefore lost “any interest” in the family property.71 | 33 |
| For their part, some ex-slaves believed that abolition had not cut them off from their masters’ families, and that they still had rights to family property. In Gold Coast, many ex-slaves challenged their former masters not by leaving, but by asserting their rights as family members, even if it meant affirming their slave origins. One group of slaves even claimed that only “the domestics” had the right to elect chiefs.72 By exercising some right that the masters did not think they possessed, slaves challenged masters to acknowledge the implications of the ideology of kin incorporation. Here, ironically, they may have had help from Gold Coast’s elites: because in trying to avoid the laws against slave-trafficking, many masters now told officials that their slaves were really their wives or children; because customary courts tended to favor “claims based on family rights over those of individuals”; and because British officials (convinced that they were following “native custom”) were willing to affirm slaves’ “rights against [their master] and his estate.”73 Without really meaning to, Gold Coast elites opened a door for slaves to carry their visions of Akan slavery—and its ideology of kin incorporation—right into colonial courts. | 34 |
| And although their ideas of slavery were different in many respects from those of the paternalists of the American South, Akan ex-masters seem to have reacted with a similar mix of steely grasping for family property and heartfelt anger at their wayward “children.” J. D. Taylor protested that abolition gave ex-slaves nothing more than the right to “go free,” but in this they want to take the master’s own family property which their grandmothers met in the family house along with them and change the tribal name to be their own … And this I object [to] entirely. They are no more slaves to me and my family and have no right to take my tribal stool and all the properties in connection.74 | 35 |
| U.S. masters had never allowed their slaves property “rights,” but, like Taylor, they argued that abolition had terminated whatever customary claims slaves held, just as it broke the family bond between slave and master. And many of them began trampling on ex-slaves’ customary rights to “private crops,” gardens, chickens, and the like.75 From the slave owners’ viewpoint, slaves were part of the family only in a carefully limited sense, and only so long as they were slaves. Like their American counterparts, many Akan elites believed that abolition had caused the “docile” family servants of yesteryear to become “homeless” and “lazy,” turning them into a “criminal class … without tribal or family control.”76 With land prices climbing in towns such as Cape Coast, ex-slaves and ex-masters alike found it convenient to ignore the old maxim “Obi nkyerë obi ase” and talk openly about where people came from. Disputes over property in the years after “legal status abolition” helped change the meaning of kinship in southern Gold Coast, because many former slaves asserted rights to property owned by their masters and based those claims on the old dictum that a slave was one of the family. | 36 |
| Few U.S. slaves could argue that being one of the master’s family gave them rights to his plantation property. Indeed, as Adrienne Davis points out, one purpose of postwar anti-“miscegenation” laws was to protect whites’ wealth from the claims that might otherwise arise after white men had sex with black women.77 However, freedpeople did connect land rights with membership in kin groups, just usually not white ones. And as they did so, they changed both land rights and kinship. The key was the slow, but significant, rise of blacks as landowners. Nearly 18,000 black southerners owned farms by 1870, and nearly 208,000 by 1910. Statistics are difficult to come by, but by the early 1900s it is likely that a substantial proportion of black-owned land and houses was classified—in the eyes of blacks, but perhaps not by law—as “heir property.” These were things that were owned corporately by a large and complicated network of kin, not by any single person; rights to the old “home place” were founded on descent from what one man called the “old Founders,” and keeping “All of the land … in the family” was a point of pride.78 Likely nurtured by southern courts’ halting treatment of black estates, heir property (or “family land”) became a source of strength for blacks—enabling them to pool resources and protect themselves from outside pressures.79 Thus, much as the proponents of “pure native tenure” in Gold Coast tied landownership to “tribal” or kin group membership, African Americans increasingly tied land rights to membership in kin groups. But since kinship had always been such an adaptable concept, this linkage opened a Pandora’s box for African Americans, too: Who belonged in the family? And what did it mean to belong? | 37 |
| Consider Lot Richardson, a former slave who went to a South Carolina court to claim a separate “portion of the land” that “the whole family” had been working as a single, undivided unit since their father bought it in the waning days of the Civil War. A week later, their father died—murdered by Lot, some said, through magic. On one level, these neighborhood rumors and secrets reflected the difficult process of adapting older traditions of owning movable property (rooted in the “slaves’ economy”) to establish new understandings of owning land (which slaves could not do). But “the family” not only moved to “keep Lot out of the Land,” they also started denying “that he Lot is one of the family” at all.80 Like their Gold Coast counterparts, freedpeople did much more than codify age-old relations of kinship and property; they actively shaped them. In their testimony, litigants tried to redefine kinship to their advantage, elaborating or specifying or sometimes obscuring their family histories and (in southern Gold Coast) reifying a set of rules that supposedly governed kinship. Yet, as Lot Richardson’s experience suggests, kinship—like the supposedly inalienable, eternal family land itself—was usually provisional and contestable in practice, no matter how timeless and systematic it was made to seem in principle.81 Unlike ex-slaves in Gold Coast, African Americans rarely tried to claim kinship with the master. But in both regions, “family property” played a significant role in the lives of former slaves, making it more important than ever to define who was one of the family, and who was not. | 38 |
| Much of that redefinition hinged on the institution of marriage. As we have seen, elites’ control over marriage and its socio-legal implications for inheritance and descent had been a keystone of the slave system in both regions. And although slavery ended more suddenly in the United States than in Gold Coast, emancipation spurred enormous changes in the institution of marriage and intense debates about its meaning. Officials in both regions marveled at the fact that “many … who had been married as slaves” now were going “through the ceremonies of native marriage a second time as free persons.” Importantly, many of these freedom marriages in Gold Coast were between masters/husbands and their enslaved wives. By contrast, in the United States, few African Americans asked their former masters to marry them, while thousands of them went to great trouble and expense to legalize their “broomstick” marriages to other ex-slaves. Still, ex-slaves and their relatives in both regions knew that a real marriage was, as a North Carolina soldier said, “the foundation of all our rights,” and that the only way to have one was to perform the rites in full.82 | 39 |
| But the redefinition of kinship went much further. Officials in both regions noticed that some ex-slave heads of families were trying “to collect within the circle of their own authority every person connected with their family by ties of blood.”83 “These freedmen,” said a Bureau agent, wanted “to live in a patriarchal manner by getting as many of the children of their kinsmen around them as possible” and to be “supported by their labor.”84 These were cynical statements. Yet comparing them suggests a deeper question about ex-slaves’ widely noted efforts to track down lost relatives and reunite their scattered families. In both regions, former slaves were taken back or married legitimately into their families, but on what terms? The question is not so much how fully ex-slaves became assimilated, but rather how kinship continued to function as a framework for controlling people and property. For ex–slave women, getting married may have blurred the stigma of slavery and strengthened their hand in dealing with husbands and former masters, but it did not end their exploitation by men, and it did not necessarily improve their position or that of their children.85 Indeed, evidence from the United States suggests that the well-known withdrawal of black women from the white-owned fields was only the beginning of a complex struggle among black people, one that played out behind the curtain of marriage; and some men believed that legal marriage gave them sweeping rights over their wives and children, even to the point of considering them “property,” theirs to “work” or “hire out” or set “free.”86 Instead, it brought new players (women’s relatives), new stakes (voting rights for African American men, rights over children), and new options for contestation (legitimate wives could go to court, whereas “concubines” could not). Looking at Gold Coast, where husbands were often also masters, helps us see the hierarchical, proprietary dimensions within African American kinship, dimensions that emancipation laid bare, even as it smashed the hollow paternalist claims of white-black kinship. | 40 |
| Southern Gold Coast was not necessarily typical of Africa; nor can the U.S. South represent the Americas. But by inviting us to think of family and property as interconnected social processes, the story of slaves’ efforts to claim kinship and property begins to open useful comparisons between these two regions, and beyond. The important point here is not whether African Americans’ ideas of property and family came from Africa, but that there are rich opportunities in bringing African history and American history into closer conversation.87 | 41 |
| First, the comparison challenges us to think about the negotiated, contested character of property and kinship, whose importance reaches far beyond either region or the world of slavery. Although property is a venerable institution, it often does not fit Westerners’ commonsense notion of individuals holding exclusive legal rights over a thing—not even in the West. Indeed, studies of property around the world are increasingly focused on its ambiguities, the gaps and contradictions between property rights—what the law says property is—and the everyday realities of property.88 But by the same token, evidence suggests that possessions are valuable not only for using or selling, but also for the social relationships they embody, ready to be called into action. Hence, disputes over property were just as likely to call forth the social ties and histories that people sank into property, that created and gave meaning to property, as to elicit talk of dollars and cents. Likewise, comparison contributes to longstanding efforts to break down “the public/private armor that segregates family from market and sex from economics.”89 For African Americans, no less than for whites or Akans, slavery and its aftermath revealed that kinship itself was a social process fraught with powerful, often proprietary, and sometimes even violent claims on people. | 42 |
| Second, in both southern Gold Coast and the American South, the ending of slavery brought ordinary people face to face with a strange new legal system, one that seemed ready to push aside the practices and laws they had known all their lives. It did not push them aside, however, because federal and colonial officers wanted to preserve what they assumed were traditional local institutions, such as county courts and “native custom” (even if that sometimes meant leaving slave-like practices undisturbed), because tradition was itself created and re-created during these “colonial” contexts, and because ex-slaves—along with plenty of free people—wanted the law to be another way to pursue their interests, not the only one. Such legal pluralism has been a fact of life far beyond these two post-emancipation societies.90 As a result, although government officials badly wanted to build the modern state on the bedrock of law, in practice, legal and extralegal processes have been hopelessly, vibrantly mixed together. | 43 |
| In some ways, the logical comparison for the Old South would be another plantation society, perhaps Zanzibar, or the Sokoto Caliphate, which contained as many as 2 million slaves in 1900. But in other ways it is the differences that make Gold Coast a useful comparison. Family relationships between American masters and slaves existed only in whispered-about affairs or violent rapes, and in some masters’ paternalist, self-serving idea that they ruled over one big plantation family.91 Not many American slaves could seriously lay claim to their master’s inheritance, but their Gold Coast counterparts took such claims to court, and often won. From one perspective, we might say that they won because slavery in Gold Coast was built around an ideology of kinship, rather than the ideology of race that structured master-slave relations in the United States. As a result, the end of slavery seemingly had very different implications for kinship in the two regions. Kinship between American masters and slaves was unthinkable. And once blacks were legally free, whites had to go to new lengths—laws against “miscegenation,” vicious lynchings—to try to keep the possibility of kinship with blacks unthinkable.92 In Gold Coast, by contrast, where a slave could become one of the family, there was often no reason to deny kinship after slavery’s end. Sometimes there were good reasons to claim it. | 44 |
| Yet in Gold Coast, well into the 1950s, people were still arguing before the West Africa Court of Appeal about what slavery meant for people’s family status and rights to property. And although slavery is legally gone from Ghana today, and many people avoid talking about “slave origins,” they still matter there and many other places in Africa, for everything from inheritance to work to local politics and religion. Indeed, in 1995, the Supreme Court of Ghana affirmed the exclusion of a candidate for a royal stool on the grounds of his ancestors’ “slavish origin.”93 The tenacity of controversy about slave origins, along with the historic Akan tendency to associate “northern” or “bought” slaves with foreign accents and facial marks and even animality, suggests that slavery was rooted in another powerful ideology, beyond notions of kinship.94 As historians have long recognized, there was a racial component to slavery elsewhere in Africa, one that developed in part through centuries of complex interactions with Indian Ocean and Mediterranean societies, although that component is seldom associated with the kind of slavery that flourished in much of southern Gold Coast.95 If, as some scholars argue, ex-slaves were associated with but never truly assimilated into West African societies, then comparisons with American history might alert us to the possibility that potent notions of blood, descent, cultural practice, ideas of honor, and inherited status lurked behind talk of slave origins.96 They might let us explore whether particular racial ideologies developed in slave societies throughout Africa, not just in those regions in contact with Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. And they might open new ways of seeing how debates about slave origins—with their emphasis on lineage and kinship—may have helped nurture such racial ideologies, and if so, how the descendants of slaves responded. These are necessarily speculative questions. But asking them comparatively helps deepen our understanding of slavery and its legacies on both sides of the Atlantic. | 45 |
| It is by now axiomatic that the end of slavery in the United States touched off multi-sided struggles over the meaning of freedom, and that independence from whites was central to the ex-slaves’ vision of freedom. Many scholars of slavery in Africa have argued that autonomy was only one strategy among many, and a risky one at that: rather than try to get away from their old masters’ lineages, many ex-slaves elbowed their way further in. Yet neither autonomy nor assimilation adequately captures the dynamics of vulnerability, subordination, and dependency that people grappled with in either place. Combining Americanist and Africanist perspectives suggests that many of the fiercest struggles during and after slavery happened between members of the same family. It suggests that those struggles grew out of specific yet comparable historical contexts, and that they did not fade away simply because slavery was outlawed. Viewed in this way, emancipation looks less like a final break with the history of slavery than a kind of “declaration of bankruptcy,” delegitimizing and reorganizing certain categories without necessarily extinguishing the kin- and community-based relationships of subordination that underlay them.97 It is this willingness to see kinship and community as ever-changing ideologies of power that define rights to property and people that allows us to weave together the complex, contradictory threads of absorption and resistance, the better to understand the changing realities behind “kin incorporation,” “the black community,” and “the black family.” The story of how people made their way up from slavery was more than a struggle for dignity and autonomy; it was also a struggle over belonging. | 46 |
This essay has greatly benefited from critical readings by Sara Berry, Adrienne Davis, Laura Edwards, Jonathon Glassman, Dirk Hartog, Michael Johnson, Walter Johnson, Greg Mann, Richard Roberts, David Schoenbrun, Butch Ware, Richard White, and the anonymous readers for the AHR. Research and writing were supported by Northwestern University, the Newberry Library/NEH, and the expert staffs of the Melville J. Herskovits Library at Northwestern University, the Public Records and Archives Administration of Ghana, and the United States National Archives and Records Administration. Earlier versions were presented in the history departments at Johns Hopkins University, Penn State University, and Stanford University, and at Columbia Law School, the American Society for Legal History, the American Bar Foundation, the Northwestern University Program of African Studies, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dylan C. Penningroth is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 2002, and Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, studying with Michael Johnson and Sara Berry. He is the author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003), and is currently working on a study of African Americans’ engagement with local courts in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South. Notes1Kwadjo v. Ayimah, August 31, 1927, Civil Court Record Book, Konor’s Tribunal, Acc. no. 2024/1963, Ghana Public Records and Archives Administration Department at Accra [hereafter PRAAD, and formerly named National Archives of Ghana] (“gave” and “serve”); cross-examination of respondent by Konor, ibid. (“wash out the interest”). This article focuses on the largely Akan area around the coastal towns of Cape Coast and Elmina, and, to an extent, the culturally diverse area around the southeastern towns of Accra, Akuse, and Peki. By “Akan,” I mean the broad linguistic/cultural group that occupied large parts of what are today Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, including Asante (the most prominent Akan state in this period) and large parts of the culturally complex region between Asante and the Atlantic Ocean. Parts of this region came under Asante rule at various points in the 1800s; the coastal area was officially declared a British colony in 1874, leaving the interior area (south of Asante) as a “protectorate” until 1902. By “Africa” and “African,” I mean sub-Saharan Africa excluding the settler societies of southern Africa.2 Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York, 1989), 37.3 The slave systems that Europeans built on the backs of African workers supplanted older systems of slavery among Native Americans in this region.4 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 37, 54 (“hire them out” and—speaking of his plans for his own half-brothers—”work em,” “turn [them] over”); Ayoler v. Yomley et al., April 3, 1946, Civil Court Record Book, Konor’s Tribunal, Acc. no. 2024/1963, PRAAD (deeding away a child “as gift”).5 Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 54 (“bossin”), 37 (“too old”).6 A pair of 1874 laws in Gold Coast banned slave-trading and abolished the “legal status” of slavery, but only within the colony and protectorate. The laws were written so narrowly, moreover, that slaveholding and pawnholding (discussed below at note 31) remained legal until 1908. Governor George Strahan’s 1874 proclamation of “legal status” abolition was different from, yet usefully comparable to, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. While it did not take place during a civil war, it drew from some of the same ideological assumptions, was aimed at an old and well-established system of slavery, was imposed on slaveholding populations that mostly did not want it, and, far from resolving “the slavery issue,” ushered in massive struggles over defining what would come after.7 As Frederick Cooper wrote nearly thirty years ago, “By and large, Africanists and Americanists are studying slavery in isolation from one another, venturing into the others’ territory only to make a point about their own.” Cooper, “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies,” Journal of African History 20, no. 1 (1979): 103.8 Indeed, one problem was that in their portraits of “traditional” Africa, U.S. historians commonly glossed right over slavery. See, for example, Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972), 197–198, 289, 448–450; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976), 198–201, 211–212, 222–224, 242, 328–343, 351–352. For the use of American slavery as a foil for slavery in Africa, see Igor Kopytoff and Suzanne Miers, “African `Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” in Miers and Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, Wis., 1977), 3–6, 48–55.9 Works in this tradition are much too numerous to list here. For overviews and critiques of recent literature, see Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 1 (2001): 3–21; Emmanuel Akyeampong, “Africans in the Diaspora: The Diaspora and Africa,” African Affairs 99, no. 395 (2000): 183–215; Paul E. Lovejoy, “The African Diaspora: Revisionist Interpretations of Ethnicity, Culture and Religion under Slavery,” Studies in the World History of Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation 2, no. 1 (1997): n.p., http://web.archive.org/web/20010606194224/www2.h-net.msu.edu/~slavery/essays/esy9701love.html (accessed August 5, 2007).10 To my knowledge, the only Africa-U.S. comparisons of slavery or emancipation are Harry A. Reed, “Slavery in Ashanti and Colonial South Carolina,” Black World 20, no. 4 (1971): 37–40, 70–74; Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, La., 1983), 30–38; Ralph Austen, “How Unique Is the New World Plantation?” in Serge Daget, ed., De la traite à l’esclavage (Nantes, 1988), 55–71; Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, “Introduction,” in Cooper, Holt, and Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000), 1–32; and Diana Paton and Pamela Scully, “Introduction,” in Scully and Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham, N.C., 2005), 1–34.11 W. E. B. Du Bois, Herbert Aptheker, and Kenneth Stampp were the first to frame slaves’ culture in terms of resistance, an idea that later scholars elaborated and reshaped into a thesis about slavery as a dialectic of accommodation and resistance. How African that culture (or cultures) was remains a subject of intense debate. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York, 1935); Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943); Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956; repr., New York, 1975).12 See, for example, Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 75–112. These works have diverse agendas, but all build on the rich scholarship on “infrapolitics,” day-to-day and cultural resistance that dates back to Du Bois.13 On marginality, see M[oses] I. Finley, “Slavery,” in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), 308–309; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), esp. 5–9, 62–65; Kopytoff and Miers, “African `Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” 3–81. On the slave as “anti-kin,” see Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold, trans. Alide Dasnois (Chicago, 1991), and Jonathon Glassman, “No Words of Their Own,” Slavery and Abolition 16, no. 1 (1995): 131–145. Earlier scholarship debated whether there even had been slavery in Africa before the Atlantic slave trade. See Walter Rodney, “African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave-Trade,” Journal of African History 7, no. 3 (1966): 431–443; J. D. Fage, “Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History,” Journal of African History 10, no. 3 (1969): 393–404.14 Works emphasizing resistance and autonomy include Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 1983), esp. 247; Lovejoy, “Fugitive Slaves: Resistance to Slavery in the Sokoto Caliphate,” in Gary Y. Okihiro, ed., In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History (Amherst, Mass., 1986), 71–95; Gad Heuman, ed., Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World (London, 1986); Kwabena Opare Akurang-Parry, “‘Missy Queen in Her Palaver Says de Gole Cosse Slaves Is Free’: The British Abolition of Slavery/Pawnship and Colonial Labor Recruitment in the Gold Coast [Southern Ghana], 1874–ca. 1940” (Ph.D. diss., York University, 1999), esp. 326; Gerald M. McSheffrey, “Slavery, Indentured Servitude, Legitimate Trade and the Impact of Abolition in the Gold Coast, 1874–1901: A Reappraisal,” Journal of African History 24, no. 3 (1983): 349–368. On struggles over membership and its meaning, see Cooper, “The Problem of Slavery in African Studies,” 122–125; Wyatt MacGaffey, “Lineage Structure, Marriage and the Family amongst the Central Bantu,” Journal of African History 24, no. 2 (1983): 181–186; Marcia Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life-Stories from East/Central Africa (New York, 1993); Edward Alpers, Gwyn Campbell, and Michael Salman, eds., Slavery and Resistance in Africa and Asia (London, 2005); Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion, and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–1888 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1995), 22–24, 95–107. Kopytoff and Miers themselves did recognize the possibility for “tension” and “contradictions” in the incorporation process; “African `Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” 39.15 Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (New York, 1998), 237–251, contains a thoughtful examination of this problem.16 David L. Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1403; Kopytoff and Miers, “African `Slavery’ as an Institution of Marginality,” 3–24, 40, 49–55, 76–78; Glassman, Feasts and Riot, 106–114; Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 115. The most famous narrative of American slavery portrayed autonomy in sinister colors, with its accounts of deracinated slave children and brutal, self-willed masters freed from all restraints; Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; repr., New York, 1969), 33–42, 48–65, 79–80, 119–128.17 Thomas C. Holt, “African-American History,” in Eric Foner, ed., The New American History (Philadelphia, Pa., 1997), 329–330. On the theoretical difficulties of exploring patriarchy within U.S. black communities, see Susan A. Mann, “Slavery, Sharecropping, and Sexual Inequality,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 774–798. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), xxiv (“preserve[d] their humanity”); Morgan’s phrasing reflects much broader historiographic trends, and is belied by his careful attention elsewhere to conflict among slaves. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Florencia Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review 99, no. 5 (December 1994): 1511; Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (Berkeley, Calif., 2003); Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa. And see Nell Irvin Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” in Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 125–146; Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” in Joan W. Scott, ed., Feminism and History (New York, 1992), 183–208; Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York, 1996), 164–165, 242–244, 255–256; Anthony E. Kaye, “Neighborhoods and Solidarity in the Natchez District of Mississippi: Rethinking the Antebellum Slave Community,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 1 (2002): 1–24; James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Colonial Encounters in the American Great Basin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). Walter Johnson deploys histories of resistance to critique the related concept of “agency.” Johnson, “On Agency,” 113–124.18 Some Americanists have warned that the focus on resistance threatens to distort or even “whitewash” the history of U.S. slavery. Wilma A. Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (New York, 2003), 4; William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York, 1996); Peter A. Coclanis, “The Captivity of a Generation,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 3 (2004): 544–555.19 For a trenchant critique of the tendency to cast emancipation as European-driven, see Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, “‘We Shall Rejoice When Slavery Shall Cease to Exist’: The Gold Coast Times, the African Intelligentsia, and Abolition in the Gold Coast,” History in Africa, no. 31 (2004): 19–42.20 Slavery in several Islamic African societies was built on ideologies of race. See, for example, Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery; Rudolph T. Ware III, “Slavery in Islamic Africa, 1400–1800,” in Stanley Engerman and David Eltis, eds., Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 3 (Cambridge, forthcoming). Of course, as these and other studies show, race itself was always a moving target.21 In the early 1800s, there were slightly more than 500,000 people in Asante’s “southern dependencies,” and roughly 300,000 to 350,000 in Asante itself, of whom as many as half were slaves. Ivor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (1975; repr., New York, 1989), 127; Gareth Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807–1956 (Rochester, N.Y., 2005), 59, 126; Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 167. Cf. the U.S. South’s population of 2.45 million in 1800 and 12.3 million in 1860, of whom about one-third were enslaved. Calculated for the fifteen slaveholding states plus the District of Columbia from Second Census of the United States (1801; repr., New York, 1990), 1; Population of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (1864; repr., New York, 1990), 598–599. One-quarter of U.S. southern white households owned slaves. According to Austin, so did “most commoner matrilineages” in southern Gold Coast; Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 117.22 Thomas Bender, “Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 11.23 James Sanders, “Palm Oil Production on the Gold Coast in the Aftermath of the Slave Trade: A Case Study of the Fante,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 15, no. 1 (1982): 49–63; Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 114–127, 215, 236–241; Beverly Grier, “Pawns, Porters, and Petty Traders: Women in the Transition to Cash Crop Agriculture in Colonial Ghana,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 304–328. For similar trends elsewhere in Africa, see Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 159–183; Robin Law, ed., From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (New York, 1995). On slave occupations, see Kwame Arhin, “The Economic and Social Significance of Rubber Production and Exchange on the Gold and Ivory Coasts, 1880–1900,” Cahiers d’études africaines 77–78, no. 1 (1980): 57–60; H. J. Bevin, “The Gold Coast Economy about 1880,” Transactions of the Gold Coast and Togoland Historical Society 2 (1956): 73–88.24 Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (New York, 1990), 23. Rough estimate of southern Gold Coast population from Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 167. Austin stops short of a specific number; Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 126.25 For images of slaves as vile, animalistic, or stupid, see J. G. Christaller, A Grammar of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi (Basel, 1875), 34; Kwaku Dua Panin (1841), quoted in Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century, 706; T. C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante (Cambridge, 1995), 96; McSheffrey, “Slavery, Indentured Servitude,” 363; for West Africa broadly, see Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, 61, 74–75, 127; and for the U.S., see Steven Jay Gould, “American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin: Blacks and Indians as Separate, Inferior Species,” in Sandra G. Harding, ed., The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 84–115.26Abofra (pl. mbofra) was used for both “child” and “servant”; H. M. J. Trutenau, ed., Dictionary, English-Tschi (Asante), Enyiresi-Twi (1909; repr., London, 1973), 35, 168; J. G. Christaller, A Dictionary, English, Tshi (Asante), Akra (Basel, 1874), 36, 48, 215. For similar blurring in Gã and Fante-Twi, see Rev. J. Zimmermann, A Grammatical Sketch of the Akra- or Gã-Language, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1858), 2:28, 242; J. Delaney Russell, A Fanti-English, English-Fanti Dictionary (London, ca. 1910), 78; W. M. Cannell and Jacob B. Anaman, A Concise Fanti-English Dictionary (London, ca. 1886), 32. Akurang-Parry’s research on abaawa (“housemaid,” “servant,” “forced female labor”) suggests that these links kept evolving into the 1900s. Akurang-Parry, “‘Missy Queen in Her Palaver,'” 357–366. On the nineteenth-century “mammy” ideal, which seems to have no Akan counterpart, see Deborah G. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (New York, 1999), 46–61. On U.S. paternalism, see Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York, 1993), 111–127; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, esp. 3–7.27 On Asante’s shift of policy and the “domestic slavery” ideology, see Anatole Norman Klein, “Inequality in Asante: A Study of the Forms and Meanings of Slavery and Social Servitude in Pre- and Early-Colonial Akan-Asante Society and Culture” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1980), 34, 99–105; and Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century, 708–709. On the breadth of Akan slaveholding, see Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 117. For gyaasefo, see J. G. Christaller, A Dictionary of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi (Chwee, Twi) (Basel, 1881), 159. For “domestics” and “house-born slaves” versus nnënkëfo, see testimony of Eccuah Bimba in Bimbah v. Mansah, November 26, 1891, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/115; Klein, “Inequality in Asante,” 95, 99–100, 193; Trutenau, Dictionary, English-Tschi (Asante), 168, 173; Christaller, A Grammar of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi, 121. And for similar linguistic slippage in Gã, see John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Portsmouth, N.H., 2000), 148 n. 52; Zimmermann, A Grammatical Sketch, 2:242, 326. On scarification, see R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution (1929; repr., New York, 1969), 35 n. 2. Scarification thus takes on a very different significance than in Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998). For the ban on origins talk, see Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, 40; Klein, “Inequality in Asante,” 95, 184–192. Austin offers evidence that this ban had real legal power, at least in late-nineteenth-century Asante, an impression furthered by its portrayal in R. S. Rattray, Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (Oxford, 1930), 124–128; Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 119. It probably drew from eighteenth-century assumptions and debates, and it applied to all origins disclosures, not just those of slaves.28 Akosua Adoma Perbi, “A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana from the 15th to the 19th Centuries” (Ph.D. diss., University of Ghana, Legon, 1997), 179–182; Raymond Dumett and Marion Johnson, “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery in the Gold Coast Colony, Ashanti, and the Northern Territories,” in Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, Wis., 1988), 71–116; Ivor Wilks, Forests of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (Athens, Ohio, 1993), 78–82; and cf. Kwame Arhin, “Rank and Class among the Asante and Fante in the Nineteenth Century,” Africa 53, no. 1 (1983): 11–12, 18; Akurang-Parry, “‘Missy Queen in Her Palaver,'” 366–377; McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante, 95–101; and Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, esp. 35, who insists that West African slaves were never assimilated, because slavery was the antithesis of kinship. As important as this insight is, its totalizing logic tends to overlook possibilities for contestation and change.29 The pro-slavery “apology” in the U.S. arguably peaked after 1835, when northern abolitionists flooded the South with anti-slavery writings. Drew Gilpin Faust, The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1981), 9–10. But the underlying logic of paternalism dated back at least to the closing of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808. Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, 1987), 59–60.30 Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 119, 175–179. On the link between enslaved and free women’s workloads elsewhere, see Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, 260–261, 276; Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, “Women’s Importance in African Slave Systems,” in Robertson and Klein, eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, Wis., 1983), 3–25; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? 49–59, 66–67; Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 179.31Regina v. Arkoo and Ashon, March 31, 1883, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/103, PRAAD. A pawn (awowa, “in place of,” pl. nwowa) was “a security given by a debtor to a creditor, to be returned” when the debt was paid off. The pawn could be a thing, a person, or a certain set of rights over a thing or person. Pawning is best seen as a deal between matrilineages, not individuals. Gareth Austin, “Human Pawning in Asante, 1800–1950: Markets and Coercion, Gender and Cocoa,” in Toyin Falola and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds., Pawnship in Africa: Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, Colo., 1994), 122–124. In practice, the line between pawnship and slavery was not always firm. Falola and Lovejoy, “Introduction,” ibid., 4, 8–9, 13–15; Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women, 9, 42–43; Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, 44–45; Perbi, “A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana,” 196–197. As Lovejoy and David Richardson suggest, both the distinction and its frequent breakdowns were important. Lovejoy and Richardson, “The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa, c. 1600–1810,” Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (2001): 67–89.32 Testimony of Eccoah Incromah and of Thatey in Incromah v. Thatey, November 17, 1877, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD. Christaller offered the sample sentence “poverty causes a freeman to become a slave”; A Grammar of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi, 157. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, 53; Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 194–195; Grier, “Pawns, Porters, and Petty Traders,” 309. Indeed, the complexity and dynamism of these categories—which also included akyere (people designated for sacrifices) and domum (war captives)—makes it difficult to delineate them clearly. Moreover, our judgments must rely largely on sweeping and often contradictory observations by Europeans in the 1800s.33 Actually, it was anomalous and shocking for a white American to sell his wife—but not unheard of. See Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York, 1984), 237–239; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995), 89.34 Indeed, in the 1830s to 1850s, pro-slavery ideologues (and anti-slavery Garrisonians) boldly equated the subordination of white wives with the subordination of slaves: both were “domestic dependents,” an equation echoed in a leading case on slave-owned property. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 214–225; Waddill v. Martin, 1845 N.C. Lexis 194. On selling masters’ children, see “Interview with Harriet Casey,” in George P. Rawick, general ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn., 1972), vol. 11: Arkansas Narratives, Part 7, and Missouri Narratives, 74; “Mrs. Ellen Cave,” ibid., vol. 6: Alabama and Indiana Narratives, 50. On white workingmen as “domestic dependents,” see Laura F. Edwards, “The Problem of Dependency: African Americans, Labor Relations, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South,” Agricultural History 72, no. 2 (1998): 313–330; Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York, 1993), 226–258.35 Michael P. Johnson, “Planters and Patriarchy: Charleston, 1800–1860,” Journal of Southern History 46 (1980): 71. The emphasis here on precolonial matrilineal authority over women is consistent with Stefano Boni’s revision of the important findings of Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian. See Allman and Tashjian, “I Will Not Eat Stone”: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante (Portsmouth, N.H., 2000); and Boni, “Twentieth-Century Transformations in Notions of Gender, Parenthood, and Marriage in Southern Ghana: A Critique of the Hypothesis of `Retrograde Steps’ for Akan Women,” History in Africa 28 (2001): 15–41.36 For a provocative linkage of matrilineality and slavery, see Wyatt MacGaffey, “Changing Representations in Central African History,” Journal of African History 46, no. 2 (2005): 200. On the use of lineality to set slaves apart, see Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York, 1993), 277–279; Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, 31. Thanks to Mary Ryan for this insight.37 Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, 33, 40; Reed, “Slavery in Ashanti and Colonial South Carolina,” 38; Robertson and Klein, “Women’s Importance in African Slave Systems,” 3–25. In its own way, pawn marriage also strengthened a husband’s rights within marriage, but only slave marriage let him sidestep matrilineality’s claims to his children. Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 146–147, 175.38 Testimony of Effuah Adooah in Adooah v. Awooah, July 19–23, 1869, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/91, PRAAD. And see Mensah v. Watts, January 25, 1877, Cape Coast Judicial Assessor’s Court Record Book, SCT 5/4/19, PRAAD; Saccoom v. Amoanee, July 26, 1881, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/100, PRAAD.39 Taney wrote that blacks “were so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” an assertion that almost mirrors Meillassoux’s definition of the slave as anti-kin. Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856) Lexis 472. Again, official ideologies did not necessarily match reality. Indeed, many unfree people (including both pawns and slaves) actually had kin nearby and were “outsiders only to their holders’ kinship groups.” Kwabena Opare Akurang-Parry, “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast: Colonial Modes of Emancipation and African Initiatives,” Ghana Studies 1 (1998): 22–27.40 For “relative[s] by service,” see testimony of Quabina Amooquando in Abban v. Sago, January 24, 1883, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/103, PRAAD; Ayima v. Grunshi, May 6, 1890, Akuse District Civil Record Book, ADM 31/4/3, PRAAD; and for an example of slippage between “brother” and “slave brother,” see testimony of John Harrington Midley in Sisarkun v. Arkwah, August 25, 1904, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/136, PRAAD. On time and slave origins, see A. Norman Klein, “The Two Asantes: Competing Interpretations of `Slavery’ in Akan-Asante Culture and Society,” in Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., The Ideology of Slavery in Africa (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1981), 152; Akosua Perbi, “Slavery and Ghana’s Pre-Colonial Social Structure,” in Per Hernæs and Tore Iversen, eds., Slavery across Time and Space: Studies in Slavery in Medieval Europe and Africa (Trondheim, 2002), 165. For inheritance among slaves, see testimony of Quacoe Dantee in Adooah v. Awooah, July 19, 1869, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/91, PRAAD. On the differing property rights of “domestics” and nnënkëfo, see Klein, “Inequality in Asante,” 232–234; Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 107, 119. On slaves holding land rights through their masters’ lineages, see Arhin, “The Economic and Social Significance of Rubber Production,” 52. On slave-owning slaves, see Inyebbribee v. Animah, May 30, 1877, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD; Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, 41. On slaves richer than their masters, see Klein, “Inequality in Asante,” 253–254. On slave lineage heads, see Abamba v. Otoo, May 19, 1881, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/100, PRAAD; Enkatsiah v. Saynah, March 3, 1883, Elmina Civil Record Book, SCT 5/4/277, PRAAD.41 “Slaves are often headmen,” explained a witness, but “[t]he fact of a slave being made a head man does not alter his status he does not becomes free.” Testimony of Quow Quotah in Abban v. Sago, January 24, 1883, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/103, PRAAD. Meillassoux heartily concurs; The Anthropology of Slavery, 123–125. Yet a slave-headman could use that position, however temporary in theory, to start carving out the respect, honor, and genealogical legitimacy that constituted “freedom,” as Quow Sippah seems to have done. Sippah v. Mensah, August 16, 1881, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/100, PRAAD. Thanks to David Schoenbrun for helping me think this point through.42Ampima v. Deamua (1844), quoted in John Mensah Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws (1897; repr., London, 1968), 142–143. See also Christaller, A Grammar of the Asante and Fante Language Called Tshi, 155.43 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.44 Many U.S. slave owners were shocked in 1865 when “their” “mammies” and other black dependents walked off and left them. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? 168–169.45 Larry E. Hudson, Jr., To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens, Ohio, 1997), xxi. On property, authority, and conflict in slave communities, see Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), 85–89, 97–108.46 Adrienne D. Davis, “The Private Law of Race and Sex: An Antebellum Perspective,” Stanford Law Review 51 (1998–1999): 231–232; George Stroud (1827), quoted in Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 61; Thomas D. Russell, “A New Image of the Slave Auction: An Empirical Look at the Role of Law in Slave Sales and a Conceptual Reevaluation of Slave Property,” Cardozo Law Review 18 (1996): 473–523.47 These schemes had little to do with sentiment; the point was to shift some of the cost of maintaining the slaves (more than a fifth of a cotton plantation’s total output) onto the slaves themselves. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., The Slaves’ Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas (Portland, Ore., 1991), 19; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (1977; repr., Cambridge, 2001), 4. Because of space considerations, I am underplaying the geographic and chronological diversity of the “slaves’ economy”; these are sketched in Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 177, 184–187; and Berlin and Morgan, The Slaves’ Economy.48 The quotation is from Waddill v. Martin, 1845 N.C. Lexis 194; see also Rice v. Cade, 1836 La. Lexis 198. These are the only cases I know of in which antebellum southern courts protected slaves’ property, but the courts seem not to have interfered with it, either, unless the sums got too big—say, $1,560, as in the case of an enslaved woman named Milly. See Lea v. Brown, 1860 N.C. Lexis 253. Some high court decisions referred to slave-owned property offhandedly. See State v. Negro George, 1797 Del. Lexis 70; and Oswald v. McGehee, 1854 Miss. Lexis 180. And for arguments about the legal status of slaves’ possessions, see McNamara v. Kerns et al., 1841 N.C. Lexis 53; Graves v. Allan, 1852 Ky. Lexis 11. According to Laura F. Edwards, who stops short of calling such claims ownership, such gaps reflected the intensely local character of U.S. law in this period. Edwards, “The People and Their Peace: The Reconstitution of Governance in the Post-Revolutionary South” (unpublished ms. in author’s possession).49 On slaves’ rights to self-acquired property (which for male slaves, according to Rattray’s 1920s informants, included rights in their wives), see Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, 38–41, and Austin’s analysis of enslaved sharecropper settlements in Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 120–121. On the enhanced rights of “domestics,” see Klein, “Inequality in Asante,” 228–233, although again, scholars disagree about the role and separateness of Asante state slavery.50 A. Norman Klein, “Slavery and Akan Origins?” Ethnohistory 41, no. 4 (1994): 649 n. 11; McSheffrey, “Slavery, Indentured Servitude,” 361–364; H. C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave, Twenty-Nine Years a Free Man—Recollections of H. C. Bruce (York, Pa., 1895), 62–76; and testimony of Samuel B. Smith, Esq., November 19, 1863, 3–4, File 7, Records of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, File O-328 (1863), Entry 12, Letters Received, 1805–1889, Correspondence, 1800–1947, General Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, RG 94, National Archives, Washington, D.C. [hereafter NARA].51 For rum money and other practices, see testimony of Quacoe Esum in Abakan v. Ackarsahn, July 22, 1879, and Ammanee v. Affaree, July 22, 1879, both in Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD. For walls and canoe men, see testimony of Quabina Awoosie in Ahkery v. Awoosie, September 17, 1869, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/91, PRAAD. For knowing animals “by sight,” see Sub-Asst. Cmr. F. W. Liedtke to Bvt. Maj. A. M. L. Crawford, September 10, 1866, in Dingle v. Waring, Proceedings of Provost Court, 1867–1868, Berkeley District, Entry 1394, RG 393, Part IV, NARA. See also testimony of Caroline Hamlet and of Isaac Allen, both in State v. Edwards, October 17, 1877, Folder 18, Box 2, Criminal Cases, Circuit Court Papers, Warren County, Mississippi, Old Court House Museum, Vicksburg, Miss. [hereafter OCHM]; testimony of John Mingo in Trial of Chance, September 26, 1805, Amelia County, Condemned Slaves File, Library of Virginia [hereafter LV]. For pacing off land, see testimony of Thos. H. Massy in Haywood v. Turner, November 1867 (n.d.), Entry 1594, Proceedings of the Provost Court, Fayetteville, North Carolina, RG 393, Part IV, NARA.52 Testimony of Quabina Awoosie in Ahkery v. Awoosie, September 17, 1869, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/91, PRAAD; testimony of George Richardson, quoted in Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 107. “Display” and local acknowledgment mattered in areas beyond property, too. See Michael P. Johnson and James Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York, 1984), 35–43, 82–94; Ariela R. Dubler, “Wifely Behavior: A Legal History of Acting Married,” Columbia Law Review 100 (2000): 957–1021. On local custom and knowledge as constitutive elements of U.S. law, see Edwards, The People and Their Peace.53 Testimony of Yahoo Quamassi in Wooraduah v. Occootah, June 1, 1877, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD; Bayaidee v. Mensah, September 8, 1877, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD; Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana (esp. on the pivotal Akan distinction between rights to produce and owning the soil); Klein, “Inequality in Asante”; Parker, Making the Town, 126; on Lagos, see Antony Hopkins, “Property Rights and Empire Building: Britain’s Annexation of Lagos, 1861,” Journal of Economic History 40 (December 1980): 787; and on the U.S., see Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985); Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); Gregory S. Alexander, Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776–1970 (Chicago, 1997); Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology; Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review 4 (July 1985): 899–935. Property and credit in colonial and precolonial Africa were long studied mainly through the prism of long-distance trade. For more recent perspectives, see Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana; Jane I. Guyer, ed., Money Matters: Instability, Values and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities (Portsmouth, N.H., 1995); and Sara Berry, No Condition Is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, Wis., 1993).54 On the shifting constellation of marital rights, see Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). Examples of multiply claimed property included slave-hiring (discussed above), “settlements” and other estates for wives and daughters, and trusts. Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York, 1985), 248–255; Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, esp. 31–62. For slaves’ “petty gains and properties,” see Waddill v. Martin, 1845 N.C. Lexis 194. On the chattel principle, see J. W. C. Pennington (1849), quoted in Johnson, Soul by Soul, 19.55 McSheffrey, “Slavery, Indentured Servitude,” 354. For detailed analyses of European officials’ “vacillating” and often contradictory policies toward unfree labor in West Africa, see Akurang-Parry, “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast,” 11–34; Martin A. Klein, Slavery in Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge, 1998); Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (New York, 1993).56 Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, “Rethinking the `Slaves of Salaga’: Post-Proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast (Colonial Southern Ghana), 1874–1899,” Left History 8, no. 1 (2002): 33–60. The 1908 law also banned pawning. For an example of how British officials carefully limited their judgments in “slave cases,” see In re Pocoo, November 16, 1876, Cape Coast Judicial Assessor’s Court Record Book, SCT 5/4/19, PRAAD.57 In addition to the studies cited above, my analysis draws on Laura F. Edwards, “Status without Rights: African Americans and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South,” American Historical Review 112, no. 2 (April 2007): 365–393; Richard Roberts and William Worger, “Law, Colonialism and Conflicts over Property in Sub-Saharan Africa,” African Economic History 25 (1997): 1–7. For classic statements on the “hegemonic” function of the law, see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 25–49; Martin Chanock, “Paradigms, Policies, and Property: A Review of the Customary Law of Land Tenure,” in Kristin Mann and Richard Roberts, Law in Colonial Africa (Portsmouth, N.H., 1991), 61–84. The Gold Coast cases presented here help to contextualize an older historiography that portrayed slavery in Africa as benign; those studies wrestled to make sense of slave systems that did not seem to be founded on racial ideologies, using evidence from the very years those systems were supposed to be ending. Thanks to Jonathon Glassman for this observation.58 A. N. Allott, “Native Tribunals in the Gold Coast, 1844–1927,” Journal of African Law 1, no. 3 (1957): 166–169; A. N. Amissah, “The Supreme Court, a Hundred Years Ago,” in W. C. Ekow Daniels and G. R. Woodman, eds., Essays in Ghanaian Law: Supreme Court Centenary Publication, 1876–1976 (Legon, Ghana, 1976), 1–4.59 Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2002), 10–11; Parker, Making the Town, 174–177; C. J. Hutchinson (1890), quoted in Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws, 177; Special Agent Robert B. Avery to Commissioner Orange Ferriss, June 4, 1878, Entry 326, Letters Received from Special Agents of the Commission, 1871–1880, M87, Roll 10, Records Relating to the Southern Claims Commission, RG 56, NARA.60 For “crystallise,” see Angu v. Attah, June 23, 1916, in Judgments of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on Appeal from the Gold Coast Colony, 1874–June 1928 (Accra, 1929). For “will-o’-the-wisps,” see Welbeck v. Brown (1884), quoted in Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws, 187–188.61 Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 126–130, 136–140, 150–161.62 Berry, No Condition Is Permanent, 106–107; Chief Justice Maxwell (1919) is quoted on 106.63 Such actions speak volumes about the effectiveness of colonial policies and African initiatives. But masters’ waning ability to call on the coercive powers of the state opened a range of possibilities for slaves, not just autonomy and not just through flight or freedom suits. The debate is (and was) fueled by the perception that post-abolition disruptions (or the lack thereof) indicate something about the nature of slavery in Africa—harsh or “mild”—a premise implicitly grounded on comparison with American slavery. McSheffrey, “Slavery, Indentured Servitude,” 349–368; Claire C. Robertson, “Post-Proclamation Slavery in Accra: A Female Affair?” in Robertson and Klein, Women and Slavery in Africa, 220–245; Dumett and Johnson, “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery”; Trevor R. Getz, Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast (Athens, Ohio, 2004), 125–136; Kwabena Opare-Akurang, “The Administration of the Abolition Laws, African Responses, and Post-Proclamation Slavery in the Gold Coast, 1874–1940,” in Suzanne Miers and Martin Klein, eds., Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (London, 1999), 150; Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa, 17–18, 159–215. Foreshadowing similar scholarly debates, Zanzibari nationalists in the 1950s drew a contrast between New World slavery and “a supposedly benign `Arab slavery.'” See Jonathon Glassman, “Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa,” American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (June 2004): 747.64 Of the cases I examined from various Gold Coast colonial courts, there were thirty-eight in which one litigant or her ancestors were allegedly enslaved to the other litigant. Of these, twenty-five were brought to court by ex-masters or their descendants. An additional forty-six cases involved slaves but did not clearly indicate the litigants’ relationship to one another, involved pawnship, or otherwise did not clearly relate to slavery. Akurang-Parry notes that very few pawns brought freedom suits, even though the abolition law lumped pawnship with slavery; “‘Missy Queen in Her Palaver,'” 254.65 Testimony of Quassie Ackarsahn in Abakan v. Ackarsahn, July 22, 1879, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD; Ekrofull v. Assimah, January 20, 1880, Elmina District Commissioner’s Court, SCT 23/4/1, PRAAD; Walter Johnson, “Inconsistency, Contradiction, and Complete Confusion: The Everyday Life of the Law of Slavery,” Law and Social Inquiry 22, no. 2 (1997): 422 (“relations between slaveholders”). For a Gã example, see Parker, Making the Town, 126–128. For “hush,” see testimony of J. B. Droughon in State v. Armstrong, January 14, 1870, 037.326.4, Criminal Action Papers, Edgecombe County, North Carolina, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh [hereafter NCSA]; and cf. Robertson, “Post-Proclamation Slavery in Accra,” 237. For “sling,” see testimony of Gillem Fitzgerald (freedman) in United States v. Fitzgerald, September 30, 1867, Proceedings of a Military Commission at Vicksburg, Mississippi, OO2701, RG 153, NARA.66 Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 111–130; “Gold Coast. Domestic Slavery. The Jurisdiction of the Judicial Assessor, and the Legal Character and Limitations of British Power upon the Gold Coast, March 1874,” CO 879/6, no. 47, Public Record Office, Kew, England [hereafter PRO]. For similar patterns elsewhere in Africa, see Richard Roberts, Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912 (Portsmouth, N.H., 2005).67 For examples, see the various cases relating to Jemima Nassu and the Accra “Brazilian” community, including Nassu v. Basel Mission (1915) (“Mahammedan Law”), in Some Judgments of Divisional and Full Courts Held in the Gold Coast Colony (Accra, 1919); Azuma v. Fiscian (1953), 14 West Africa Court of Appeal [hereafter WACA] 287; and Bassil and Acquah v. Honger (1954), 14 WACA 569. See also Alcione M. Amos and Ebenezer Ayesu, “‘I Am Brazilian’: History of the Tabon, Afro-Brazilians in Accra, Ghana,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, no. 6 (2002): 35–58. “Fante” denotes a set of Akan-speaking polities that occupied this coastal region in the 1800s, but which did not necessarily share a common identity apart from their opposition to Asante, which Britain capitalized on for its own purposes. Gã did not belong to the Akan linguistic group, and Gã identity has an equally complex history.68 I use 1874 here as a rough marker for a shift that almost certainly took years. For examples of masters claiming runaway slaves, see Davis v. Mensah, October 11, 1869, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/91, PRAAD; Arwoonie v. Arwoochie, March 20, 1871, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/94, PRAAD; Appeah v. Agnafforol, August 15, 1871, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/96, PRAAD; Cardon v. Danbogen and Appeah, September 5, 1871, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/96, PRAAD. On claiming property from former slaves, see Abban v. Sago, January 24, 1883, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/103, PRAAD; Korkor v. Plange, n.d., Akuse District Civil Record Book, ADM 31/4/4, PRAAD; Ashon v. Aduah, August 17, 1908, West Africa Court of Appeal Record Book (Cape Coast), SCT 5/4/294, PRAAD. For “nursed” and “carried,” see testimony of Ambah Bessemah in Grant, Wharton et al. v. Pieterson, April 26, 1877, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD. For “know more,” see deposition of Townley Johnson, August 30, 1867, in Hume and Crosby v. Beale, Case 919, Records of the United States Supreme Court for the District of Columbia, NARA [hereafter EDC]; see also Dick v. Cobbah, November 19, 1877, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD.69 Gold Coast, Domestic Slavery, March 1874, CO 879/6, no. 47, PRO; Extract from Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Committee on West African Lands, February 7, 1913, ADM 11/1/975, PRAAD; Minute by J. E. W. Flood, January 8, 1930, CO 323/1027/7, PRO.70 For evicting family slaves, see Attah v. Sam and Others, October 27, 1881, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/100, PRAAD; and Bimba v. Mansah (1891), in Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws, 139. J. C. de Graft Johnson, the colony’s assistant secretary for native affairs, wrote an official “Memorandum on the Vestiges of Slavery in the Gold Coast” while fighting an inheritance dispute of his own. The other party was the son of his father, J. W. de Graft Johnson, and one of his family’s old “domestics.” Asst. Sec. for Native Affairs J. C. de Graft Johnson to Sec. for Native Affairs, July 8, 1930, ADM 11/1/975, PRAAD; In re J. W. de Graft Johnson, July 31, 1929, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/158, PRAAD.71 On Akan anti-slavery, see Akurang-Parry, “‘We Shall Rejoice,'” 19–42. On “services,” “responsibilities,” “implied contract,” and “interest,” see the judgment in Abban v. Sago, January 25, 1883, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/103, PRAAD; and Lintott Brothers v. Solomon (1888), in Sarbah, Fanti Customary Laws, 123–124. These rulings implied that slaves who did continue their services would still have such rights.72 As one ex-slave said, many chose to assert their familial rights rather than “avail themselves of their freedom.” Testimony of Eccuah Bimba, November 18, 1891, in Bimba v. Mensah, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/115, PRAAD. See also Hutchison v. Duma et al., August 20, 1884, Elmina District Commissioner’s Court, SCT 23/4/2, PRAAD. For affirming slave origins, see Mansah and Others v. Dolphyne, May 11, 1883, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/103, PRAAD. On chiefly elections, see Toku v. Ama (1890), in John Mensah Sarbah, Fanti Law Report of Decided Cases on Fanti Customary Laws (London, 1904), 58–63. The court ruled against them, guided by its “native assessors,” of whom at least one was himself a slave owner.73 On camouflaging slaves, see Regina v. Cofie and Ancomah, April 30, 1877, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD; Regina v. Ochay, April 7, 1875, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/99[101], PRAAD; Regina v. Tandoe, December 2, 1876, Cape Coast Judicial Assessor’s Court Record Book, SCT 5/4/19, PRAAD; Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, “‘The Loads Are Heavier Than Usual’: Forced Labor by Women and Children in the Central Province, Gold Coast (Colonial Ghana), ca. 1900–1940,” African Economic History 30 (2001): 39–43; Rex v. Iregbu (1938), 4 WACA 32. For “claims based on family rights,” see Berry, No Condition Is Permanent, 117. For “rights against … his estate,” see E. Fairfield, “Memorandum on Gold Coast Slavery, and the Measures Recently Taken for Its Abolition,” March 14, 1876, HCA 30/1029, Royal Commission on Fugitive Slaves, PRO; Gold Coast, Domestic Slavery, March 1874, CO 879/6, no. 47, PRO.74 J. D. Taylor to Sec. Native Affairs, January 18, 1909, enclosed in Taylor v. Kwansah, Appeal from Native Tribunal of Anomabo (Case no. 29/1909), ADM 11/1/40, PRAAD. Kwansah had apparently kept up ties to a lineage outside his master’s, something that, according to the masters’ ideology (and the modern scholarly model of “social death”), was not supposed to happen. See also the testimony of Yowah Wooraduah in Wooraduah v. Occootah, June 1, 1877, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/102, PRAAD.75 Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 141–154; Foner, Nothing but Freedom, 55–67. Sometimes they literally trampled the gardens. See Bennett v. Poppenheim, December 30, 1867, Proceedings of Provost Court, 1867–1868, Berkeley District, South Carolina, Entry 1394, RG 393, Part IV, NARA.76 For “homeless,” see James Hutton Brew (1885), quoted in Roger S. Gocking, Facing Two Ways: Ghana’s Coastal Communities under Colonial Rule (Lanham, Md., 1999), 62. For “lazy” and “criminal class,” see de Graft Johnson, “Memorandum on the Vestiges of Slavery in the Gold Coast.” Contemporaries’ comments about Gold Coast ex-slave criminality should be read skeptically in light of similar comments by white Americans about black Americans. Cf. Akurang-Parry, “‘The Loads Are Heavier than Usual,'” 47 n. 29, and Dumett and Johnson, “Britain and the Suppression of Slavery,” with Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1997), 111–121; Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80 (Urbana, Ill, 1998), 90–100.77 Davis, “The Private Law of Race and Sex,” 278. This was not necessarily an idle fear, at least not in Virginia. See George et al. v. Pilcher et al., 1877 Va. Lexis 69; Thomas’ Adm’r v. Bettie Thomas Lewis et al., 1892 Va. Lexis 73; Burdine v. Burdine’s Executor, 1900 Va. Lexis 7.78 For ownership statistics, see Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Urbana, Ill., 1990), 174. On “heir property,” see Will of Louisa Warren, November 20, 1866, in Polk v. Costley et al., Case 1911, EDC; Margaret Davis Cate and Orrin Sage Wightman, Early Days of Coastal Georgia (St. Simons Island, Ga., 1955), 171; Thomas W. Mitchell, “From Reconstruction to Deconstruction: Undermining Black Landownership, Political Independence, and Community through Partition Sales of Tenancies in Common,” Northwestern University Law Review 95 (2000–2001): 505–580; C. Scott Graber, “A Blight Hits Black Farmers,” Civil Rights Digest 10, no. 3 (1978): 21–22. And cf. Jean Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002). For “home place,” see Elizabeth Ware Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 1862–1868 (Boston, 1906), 234; for “old Founders,” see Samuel Boles to Bvt. Maj. Gen. Birge (1865), A-5863, Freedmen and Southern Society Project, College Park, Md.; for “All of the land,” see “Interview with James Sawyer,” Hertford County [N.C.] Documents, 131–192, Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University [hereafter Frazier Papers]; “J.B. Jeter, 58, and wife, 35,” Documents Collected in Macon County, Alabama, in June–July 1931, 131–192, Frazier Papers.79 On southern courts and black inheritance, see Davis, “The Private Law of Race and Sex,” 270. For a different but comparable pattern, see Parker, Making the Town, 126.80 Testimony of York Polite, Lot Richardson, Sancho Richardson, and Jerry Polite, all in Richardson v. Richardson, April 24, 1868, Provost Court Beaufort, South Carolina, Box 2, Provost Courts North and South Carolina, 1866–1868, Entry 4257, RG 393, Part I, NARA. Sancho testified: “the general repute among the people is that Lot is the son of Alex R. but witness does not admit that he Lot is on[e] of [them?] & the family wishes to keep Lot out of the Land. [T]he idea of the family is that Lot wants a portion of the land.”81 See Mensah v. Watts, January 25, 1877, Cape Coast Judicial Assessor’s Court Record Book, SCT 5/4/19, PRAAD; Adooah v. Awooah, July 19, 1869, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/91, PRAAD; Regina v. Arkoo and Ashon, March 31, 1883, Cape Coast High Court, SCT 5/4/103, PRAAD; “Native Customary Law of Succession to Property Other Than Stool Property,” Edwumaku Division (Case no. 22/1925), ADM 11/1/919, PRAAD.82 Chief Justice David Chalmers (1878), quoted in Akurang-Parry, “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast,” 26; Argaikoon v. Ammah, Elmina District Commissioner’s Court, May 14, 1880, SCT 23/4/2, PRAAD; Robertson, “Post-Proclamation Slavery in Accra,” 239; Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1997), 47. “Jumping the broom” was a common way of solemnizing the union of an enslaved couple while simultaneously emphasizing that it was not a legal marriage.83 [George C.] Strahan (1875), quoted in Akurang-Parry, “‘Missy Queen in Her Palaver,'” 93; and more generally, Akurang-Parry’s insightful discussion of “kin-based redemption,” ibid. (also discussed in Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 225). For similar remarks from U.S. government agents, see Enclosure, J. M. Gachy to Capt. E. Pickett, May 27, 1867, Entry 1057, Miscellaneous Papers, 1867–1868, Agent, Warrenton-Woodville, Georgia, Subordinate Field Offices, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, NARA; and William F. Mugleston, “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction in Virginia: The Diary of Marcus Sterling Hopkins, a Union Officer,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86, no. 1 (1978): 55.84 A. E. Niles to H. W. Smith (1868), quoted in Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), 103.85 Narrative of Ann Ulrich Evans, St. Louis, Mo., in Rawick, The American Slave, vol. 11: Arkansas Narratives, Part 7, and Missouri Narratives, 113–115; affidavit of Lucy Hill in State v. Bob Hill, July 5, 1876, Davis Bend Magistrate’s Book, OCHM; State v. Harris (1868), Case 9036, Records of Supreme Court, NCSA; testimony of Mamle in Mamle v. Doku, May 7, 1946, Civil Court Record Book, Konor’s Tribunal, Acc. no. 2024/1963, PRAAD; Akurang-Parry, “Slavery and Abolition in the Gold Coast,” 26–27; and on the patrilineal Gã, see Robertson, “Post-Proclamation Slavery in Accra,” 239–242. A related question has to do with the “feminization” of pawning in the early 1900s, a phenomenon with no real American counterpart. An extensive literature emphasizes the historical specificity and contingency of marriage and gender relations in Africa, raising provocative questions about their links with the ending of slavery. For example, see Barbara M. Cooper, “Reflections on Slavery, Seclusion and Female Labor in the Maradi Region of Niger in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of African History 35, no. 1 (1994): 61–78; Sandra E. Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (Portsmouth, N.H., 1996); Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos (Cambridge, 1985).86 For proprietary language regarding children and wives, see the narrative of Letha Johnson in Rawick, The American Slave, vol. 9: Arkansas Narratives, Parts 3 and 4, pt. 4, 98; testimony of James Bracey in Bracey v. Toney, October 10, 1867, Proceedings of Provost Court, Sumter, South Carolina, Entry 4257, Box 4, RG 393, Part I, NARA; United States v. George Robinson, August 10, 1867, ibid.; Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York, 1998), 47–50. For “work,” “hire out,” and complaints about elders who treated them as if they were slaves, see Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 26, 37–38, 54–55; Henry v. Susan Herbert, Case 2665, EDC; “[Interview with] Frank Brown,” December 9, 1929, Documents from Court of Domestic Relations, Chicago, Box 131–81, Frazier Papers. For setting a son “free,” see Sherman A. James, “The Narrative of John Henry Martin,” Southern Cultures 1, no. 1 (1993): 96. Many of these complaints were by black children about their mothers and grandmothers, suggesting that gender inequalities were cross-cut with age-based inequalities. On the withdrawal from field work, see Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 44–55. U.S. scholarship has traditionally interpreted this withdrawal as a bid for black autonomy from white control and focused on how it affected the renegotiation of work between whites and blacks and the southern economy generally. Recent work has begun to explore what it meant for relations inside black families. See Kevin McCarthy, “Ambiguous Awards: African American Child Custody and the Modernization of Status in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South” (unpublished manuscript in author’s possession); Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion; Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk.87 Much evidence suggests that they did, and, moreover, that the bar for proving such connections is set higher for Africa than it is for Europe. This despite at least 110 years of scholarship on diasporic links stretching as far back as “Folk-Lore and Ethnology,” Southern Workman 24 (September 1895): 154–155. Gomez states the problem succinctly: “The African simply cannot get his due”; Exchanging Our Country Marks, 248–249.88 In addition to the works cited above, see Robert C. Ellickson, “Of Coase and Cattle: Dispute Resolution among Neighbors in Shasta County,” Stanford Law Review 38 (1986): 623–687; Katherine Verdery, “Fuzzy Property: Rights, Power and Identity in Transylvania’s Decollectivization,” in Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham, Md., 1999), 53–81; Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership (Boulder, Colo., 1994); Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York, 1989). I am indebted to David Altshuler for this phrasing.89 Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, chap. 5; Michael J. Watts, “Idioms of Land and Labor: Producing Politics and Rice in Senegambia,” in Thomas J. Bassett and Donald E. Crummey, Land in African Agrarian Systems (Madison, Wis., 1993), 157–193. For “public/private,” see Davis, “The Private Law of Race and Sex,” 228; Wright, Strategies of Slaves and Women, 15.90 See, for example, Brooks, Captives and Cousins; Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (New York, 1999); Eliga H. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2003): 471–510; Michael J. Lowy, “A Good Name Is Worth More Than Money: Strategies of Court Use in Urban Ghana,” in Laura Nader and Harry F. Todd, Jr., eds., The Disputing Process: Law in Ten Societies (New York, 1978), 181–208.91 And sometimes not even then. Consider the descendants of Thomas Jefferson, many of whom seem to be waiting for eyewitness proof before they admit that their famous ancestor had sex with Sally Hemings. James Dao, “A Family Get-Together of Historic Proportions,” New York Times, July 14, 2003, A9; Chris Burritt, “Jefferson-Hemings Debate Becoming More Heated,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, April 30, 2000, A12.92 The term “miscegenation” was coined during the 1864 campaign for U.S. president, a campaign widely seen as a referendum on Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Martha Hodes, “Wartime Dialogues on Illicit Sex: White Women and Black Men,” in Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York, 1992), 230.93In re Kweku Damptey, 1 WACA 12 (1930); Bassil and Acquah v. Honger, 14 WACA 569 (1954); Duke et al. v. Henshaw, 10 WACA 27 (1944); Santeng v. Darkwa and Ayimadu, 6 WACA 52 (1940); Brobbey and Others v. Kwaku, 1 Ghana Law Reports [hereafter GLR] (1995–1996) 125 (quotation at 145). As appellate cases, these may be the tip of a larger iceberg, but more work is needed. Ethnographic studies suggest that “slave” and “free” descent still mattered in different parts of Africa into the 1960s and beyond, but these divisions must be linked to specific historical changes over the years since emancipation. On the “legacy of slavery” in twentieth-century Ghana, see Appeal of Yaw Appiah Danquah, Birim District, Appeals from Decisions of Native Courts, 1907–1909, ADM 11/1/1440, PRAAD; Omanhin Isaac Blay to Sec. Native Affairs, February 13, 1907, Attuaboe Native Affairs (Case no. 489/07), ADM 11/1/13, PRAAD; K. Poku, “Traditional Roles and People of Slave Origin in Modern Ashanti: A Few Impressions,” Ghana Journal of Sociology 5, no. 1 (1969): 34–38; Klein, “Inequality in Asante,” 298–299 n. 69; J. H. Nketia, Funeral Dirges of the Akan People (1955; repr., New York, 1969), 145; Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 119, 216; Akosua Perbi, “The Legacy of Indigenous Slavery in Contemporary Ghana,” FASS Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1996): 83–92; Peter Haenger, Slaves and Slave Holders on the Gold Coast: Toward an Understanding of Social Bondage in West Africa (Basel, 2000), 185–190; Akurang-Parry, “Rethinking the `Slaves of Salaga,'” 45–46; Arhin, “Rank and Class,” 11–12. On struggles over unfree origins elsewhere, see Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa, 242–251; Gregory Mann, “The Tirailleur Elsewhere: Military Veterans in Colonial and Post-Colonial Mali, 1918–1968″ (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2000), 207, 226–277; Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, 66, 120–125, 318–319; Paul Riesman, First Find Your Child a Good Mother: The Construction of Self in Two African Communities (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992).94 For twentieth-century examples, see Ampong v. Aboraa [1960], GLR 29; Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, 35 n. 2, 41; Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana, 420.95 David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 32–51; Glassman, Feasts and Riot; Troutt-Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism; Marte Bogen Sinderud, “Freemen, Slaves and Dependents: Problems of Social Categorisation in the Lamidate of Ngaoundere, Northern Cameroon,” in Hernæs and Iversen, Slavery across Time and Space, 179; Philip Burnham, “Racial Classification and Ideology in the Meiganga Region: North Cameroon,” in Paul Baxter and Basil Sansom, Race and Social Difference (Harmondsworth, 1972), 301–318; Ware, “Slavery in Islamic Africa”; Bruce S. Hall, “The Question of `Race’ in the Pre-Colonial Southern Sahara,” Journal of North African Studies 10, no. 3–4 (2005): 339–367.96 The term “associated” is from Akurang-Parry, “‘Missy Queen in Her Palaver,'” 366–377. Cf. Hall, “The Question of `Race,'” 357–360. Following Jonathon Glassman, by “race” and “racial ideology” I mean “a mode of thought,” one that is “in constant interplay with social structures and political processes” as it produces and reproduces “meanings concerning particular ways of categorizing humanity” “by inherited traits and characteristics”; concepts of “race” and “ethnicity” are part of the same discursive spectrum, with “race” putting more emphasis on bodily difference to indicate that “the metaphor of descent … is more than mere metaphor.” Glassman, “Slower Than a Massacre,” 723–728. Here I am suggesting that Gold Coast slavery, with its practical and ideological linkages to kinship and lineage, helped produce social meanings that might be called “racial.” As a “shifting field of discourse” rather than a fixed social structure, this understanding of race allows for the kind of slippage, contestation, and socioeconomic mobility that many ex-slaves seem to have experienced in twentieth-century Ghana, and for useful comparison—not conflation—with American histories.97 Thanks to David Schoenbrun for suggesting this pungent phrase. Again, in Gold Coast, slavery was outlawed raggedly and (relative to the U.S.) slowly. See n. 6 above. | |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.