Biography and the Black Atlantic

By Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet

In Biography and the Black Atlantic, leading historians in the field of Atlantic studies examine the biographies and autobiographies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African-descended people and reflect on the opportunities and limitations these life stories present to studies of slavery and the African diaspora. The essays remind us that historical developments like slavery and empire-building were mostly experienced and shaped by men and women outside of the elite political, economic, and military groups to which historians often turn as sources.

Despite the scarcity of written records and other methodological challenges, the contributors to Biography and the Black Atlantic have pieced together vivid glimpses into lives of remarkable, through previously unknown, enslaved and formerly enslaved people who moved, struggled, and endured in different parts of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. From the woman of Fulani origin who made her way from Revolutionary Haiti to Louisiana to the free black American who sailed for Liberia and the former slave from Brazil who became a major slave trader in Angola, these stories render the Atlantic world as a densely and sometimes unpredictably interconnected sphere. Biography and the Black Atlantic demonstrates the power of individual stories to illuminate history: though the life histories recounted here often involved extraordinary achievement and survival against the odds, they also portray the struggle for self-determination and community in the midst of alienation that lies at the heart of the modern condition.

Contributors: James T. Campbell, Vincent Carretta, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Jean-Michel Hébrard, Martin Klein, Lloyd S. Kramer, Sheryl Kroen, Jane Landers, Lisa A. Lindsay, Joseph C. Miller, Cassandra Pybus, João José Reis, Rebecca J. Scott, Jon Sensbach, John Wood Sweet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9780812208702

Book preview

THE EARLY MODERN AMERICAS

Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor

Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC–Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

BIOGRAPHY

AND THE

BLACK ATLANTIC

Edited by

Lisa A. Lindsay

and

John Wood Sweet

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Biography and the black Atlantic / edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet. — 1st ed.

   p.    cm. — (Early modern Americas)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4546-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Blacks—Atlantic Ocean Region—Historiography. 2. Blacks—Atlantic Ocean Region—Biography. 3. Blacks—Atlantic Ocean Region—History. 4. Blacks—Atlantic Ocean Region—Biography. 5. Slave trade—Atlantic Ocean Region—History. 6. Biography as a literary form. I. Lindsay, Lisa A. II. Sweet, John Wood, 1966–. III. Series: Early modern Americas.

D13.5.A75B56   2013

909'.049601821—dc23                                                                                                                 2013012708

CONTENTS

Introduction: Biography and the Black Atlantic

LISA A. LINDSAY AND JOHN WOOD SWEET

PART I. PARAMETERS

Chapter 1. A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn

JOSEPH C. MILLER

Chapter 2. Understanding the Slave Experience in West Africa

MARTIN KLEIN

Chapter 3. Robinson Charley: The Ideological Underpinnings of Atlantic History

SHERYL KROEN

PART II. MOBILITY

Chapter 4. Black Pearls: Writing Black Atlantic Women's Biography

JON SENSBACH

Chapter 5. Recovered Lives as a Window into the Enslaved Family

CASSANDRA PYBUS

Chapter 6. From Slave to Wealthy African Freedman: The Story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo

JOÃO JOSÉ REIS

PART III. SELF-FASHIONING

Chapter 7. David Dorr's Journey Toward Selfhood in Europe

LLOYD S. KRAMER

Chapter 8. Methodology in the Making and Reception of Equiano

VINCENT CARRETTA

Chapter 9. Remembering His Country Marks: A Nigerian American Family and Its African Ancestor

LISA A. LINDSAY

PART IV. POLITICS

Chapter 10. The Atlantic Transformations of Francisco Menéndez

JANE LANDERS

Chapter 11. Echoes of the Atlantic: Benguela (Angola) and Brazilian Independence

ROQUINALDO FERREIRA

Chapter 12. Rosalie of the Poulard Nation: Freedom, Law, and Dignity in the Era of the Haitian Revolution

REBECCA SCOTT AND JEAN-MICHEL HÉBRARD

Afterword

JAMES T. CAMPBELL

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Biography and the Black Atlantic

LISA A. LINDSAY AND JOHN WOOD SWEET

In recent years, historians and other writers have begun to produce a surge of studies of the Black Atlantic organized around particular life stories. This approach builds on and also suggests the limitations of scholarship over the last generation, which has focused on the myriad flow of captives, capital, and cultures around the early modern Atlantic world.¹ Now, many scholars are populating this abstract and anonymous Atlantic with the historically situated experiences of individuals. A number of life histories are already in print, and more are in preparation.² In some ways historical works like these echo themes explored by novelists like Barry Unsworth, Toni Morrison, Manu Herbstein, and Caryl Phillips.³ Collectively, these studies suggest that we are in a moment of intense concentration on the Black Atlantic as lived experience.

In this volume, leading historians of Africa, the Americas, and Europe explore the potential for and implications of biography as a method for interpreting the connected histories of Atlantic societies. They do so through broad, conceptual analyses as well as case studies of individuals of African descent who lived, moved, and struggled through the early modern Atlantic world. By attaching names and faces to broad processes such as slaving, enslavement, identity formation, empire-building, migration, and emancipation, biography can illuminate the meanings of these large, impersonal forces for individuals.

The Black Atlantic is both a space and an argument.⁴ For cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, the modern Black Atlantic was a location of both physical movement—migrations and crossings both forced and voluntary—and of continual cultural exchange, shaped from the start by racial violence.⁵ The cultures of the African diaspora were hybrid and creative, even as they reflected displacement, loss, and trauma. Moreover, the violence and slavery at the heart of the Black Atlantic were not aberrations that set African peoples apart from modern society; rather, the Middle Passage and plantation slavery—capitalism with its clothes off, as Gilroy described it—were fundamental to modernity itself.⁶ Columbus sailed to Elmina on the Gold Coast of Africa long before the fateful voyage of 1492, and subsequent developments—from colonialism to the plantation complex, national independence movements, and decolonization—were the result of political, commercial, cultural, and ideological relationships between peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas.⁷

If the term Black Atlantic is redundant, it nonetheless embodies two lines of argument that remain worth engaging.⁸ First, although the importance of Africa, its peoples, and their descendants in the history of the Western world has been vigorously championed by certain scholars over the years, they have been and remain too often overlooked in the academic field of Atlantic history.⁹ Africans entered the Atlantic not as fodder for subsequent cultural transformation, but as people already familiar with instability and adaptation. Second, the complex process of racial formation that shaped identities and relations in the emerging modern world warrants continued exploration. Gilroy's Black Atlantic analyzed the ways European racialist thinking subjected people of the African diaspora to specific forms of violence and subordination and excluded them from ideas of modernity, thus creating the conditions for creative cultural production and trenchant critique. The people whose life stories are the heart of this volume were shaped by such forces. And, as the chapters that follow suggest, their strategies of affiliation went beyond (or around) the oppositions of race.

While the Black Atlantic represents an argument, biography represents a method. Why approach the Black Atlantic through the lens of life stories? For one thing, biography populates the Atlantic world with real individuals. Part of the power of biography as a narrative strategy is the capacity to move readers’ emotions by helping them imagine being someone else. As Joseph Miller reflects in his chapter, focusing on individuals—and trying to trace them through the historical record wherever they might lead us—has a tendency to disrupt broad generalizations and grand preconceptions, reminding us that even seemingly vast, impersonal processes such as slave trading and commercialization were experienced.¹⁰ Biography, Miller argues, reveals that, at the broadest scale and in the most intimate ways, there can be no such thing as a static history of slavery. Mediating on the classic work of sociologist Orlando Patterson, Miller agrees that at the moment of enslavement the fundamental feature of slavery is a radical and intense alienation. But Miller insists that after that point, the experience of enslavement is about efforts to reintegrate oneself into new social networks.¹¹ More broadly, as Lloyd Kramer echoes in his chapter, this sense of alienation and the need for reintegration is arguably one of the characteristic features of the modern condition. On the other side of the master-slave relationship, Miller suggests that biography can also reveal the contexts and decisions behind slaving, thus making explicitly historical a process that is often understood as static and structural. In sum, focusing on the experience of individuals can help remind us to avoid reduction—putting aside generic models of slavery and looking instead to contextually motivated strategies that reveal not only alienation and marginality but also the meanings of freedom.

Of course, approaching the Black Atlantic by reconstructing particular life stories is not easy. And it does not offer simple solutions to the ideological problems of the modern world or even to the methodological challenges of historians of the Atlantic. As Martin Klein points out in his chapter, anyone who tries such an approach confronts daunting challenges. First, how can historians recover the lives of enslaved people and others who left few written records? It would be easy to say that biographies of Africans and their Atlantic descendants cannot be written, either because of the presumed limitation of documentary sources or because of the genre conventions that have come to define the meaning of biography. From the beginnings of secular biography in the seventeenth century and continuing to the present, the genre typically involves creating a coherent narrative arc out of the lives of men and women who have achieved great prominence as politicians, military leaders, celebrities, thinkers, etc. Unlike the potential subjects of most Black Atlantic biographies, these are people who left behind vast archives of documentation produced by themselves and others. Typically, biographies of prominent people tend to valorize individual experience over large historical developments, while biographies of subaltern people tend to use the stories of individuals to represent the experiences of larger groups.¹² As Klein observes, typically what historians are able to discover of Black Atlantic lives are not cradle-to-grave biographies but rather fragments, a surviving shard or two of a lifetime of experience. The second major challenge for biographers of the Black Atlantic is a related one: How can the unusual individuals who ended up leaving substantial recuperable traces in the historical record be understood as anything other than simply exceptional? Do their extraordinary lives make them too different from others to suggest deeper insights? Ultimately, Klein concludes that by employing inventive research strategies—seeking out the sources that do exist and developing creative ways of analyzing them—historians have proved not just that biographies of Atlantic denizens can be written, but that they can offer insights that are otherwise elusive.

It was not only methodological difficulties that kept stories of Africans and their descendants largely out of the mainstream of Atlantic history. As Sheryl Kroen shows, the emergence of the Atlantic as a salient political and analytical framework in the mid-twentieth century was rooted in a long ideological effort to naturalize the history of capitalism by sidelining the histories of slavery, conquest, and colonialism—and the result was a decidedly white Atlantic. For centuries, Western histories of the Americas and of the broader Atlantic have been framed largely as stories of European expansion. But as Kroen shows, the modern vision of the Atlantic emerged in the aftermath of World War II, a moment not only of economic crisis in war-ravaged Europe but also of deep ideological crisis about the capacity of capitalism to produce good results. Partly in concert with the Marshall Plan, postwar British, French, and West German information officers worked to convince their citizens of the continued viability of capitalism and the importance of their alliance with the United States. In Britain, this effort involved resuscitating Daniel Defoe's fictional Robinson Crusoe and transforming him into an animated English Everyman called Robinson Charley, who was the hero of a series of short propaganda films.

Of course, for this story to work, the original Robinson Crusoe had to be cleaned up a good deal. In Defoe's 1709 novel, after all, Robinson begins his Atlantic career as a sailor on slave-trading vessels and moves up to managing a sugar plantation in Brazil before his fateful shipwreck, where his comfort is greatly enhanced by the appearance, and compliance, of the dark-skinned man Friday. Instead, in a remarkable instance of what Kroen calls Atlantic dreaming, the British government recast Robinson Crusoe in a way that erased slavery, colonialism, and conflict and replaced them with a benign narrative of primitive accumulation and division of labor inspired by Adam Smith. Other European governments followed suit in promoting such Atlantic dreams, offering up remarkably white, conveniently prosperous, and perpetually peaceful zones of mutually beneficial trade, and casting these historical fantasies as the foundations of so-called Western Civilization. As historian Bernard Bailyn has noted, the uncanny alliances between the Atlantic history framework and NATO membership, evident as early as the 1950s, have remained remarkably durable.¹³

The effort to represent the Atlantic world as a scene of political unity and benign capitalism—as Marx pointed out and Kroen reminds us—was part of a long ideological struggle over how to tell the story of modern political economy. The Robinson Crusoe story became so conventional that Marx used its nickname, the Robinsonade. In contrast, the authors in this volume collectively attempt to rewrite the history of the Atlantic, to repopulate it with African captives and slave traders, with people struggling for personal freedoms in addition to political liberties, as a struggle against racism as well as for democracy. The Black Atlantic is a way of arguing against the Robinsonade.

The biographical case studies in this volume are organized around three major themes: mobility, self-fashioning, and politics. Many of the biographical figures presented in all three sections, for instance, were remarkably mobile. Traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, or among different parts of the Atlantic rim, they challenge us to rethink political geography from the bottom up. Mobility also facilitated reinvention, or self-fashioning, for many of our biographical subjects. It may well be that identities are always situational and relational, but these biographies highlight both the processes and the stakes of self-creation for African-descended people amid the violence and insecurity of the Atlantic world.¹⁴ Finally, there is the question of politics. What is revealed over and over in different ways in different contexts is the centrality of black actors, slavery, and colonialism to the political history of the modern Atlantic. What we see is not just political ideologies disseminated from metropolitan centers to colonial peripheries, but appropriations and rewritings of Western political thought in various registers, from individual struggles for emancipation to colonial struggles for independence.

Mobility

The scholars in this collection have worked to evoke and analyze the human dimensions of vast and complex historical dynamics by tracing individuals as they move from one place to another and from one subject position to another. Doing so challenges historians and other writers to develop more satisfying and powerful analyses of important issues—to reveal unexpected comparisons and connections, to reconsider facile abstract distinctions between slavery and freedom, and to explore common dynamics that undergird local phenomena and personal experiences dispersed in space and even time. Such juxtapositions and interconnections may not in themselves produce complete analyses of the broad dynamics that connected slavery, white supremacy, and colonialism to capitalism, liberalism, and the idea of the autonomous nation. Yet they can help suggest the nature of these problems, point to some ways of moving beyond nation-bound narratives, and challenge liberal ideologies of modernity that cast unfreedom as an atavistic condition and the formerly colonized world as somehow behind the formerly imperial world in time.

The themes of physical movement and personal transformation are central to Jon Sensbach's discussion of the challenge of recovering the lives of women in the Black Atlantic. Sensbach focuses on two eighteenth-century figures—Rebecca Protten and Maria the Mooress from St. Thomas—both of whom survived enslavement in the West Indies, became evangelists, and traveled the world as Moravian missionaries. Rebecca Protten is the central figure in Sensbach's 2005 book, Rebecca's Revival, which traces this remarkable woman from the Danish colony of St. Thomas to Germany and then to the Gold Coast.¹⁵ Here, his focus is the process of constructing and interpreting such a biography. The lives of enslaved women in the Atlantic world, he points out, have been elusive for historians, who generally lack sources and analytical perspectives to evaluate them. Furthermore, the well-noted characteristics of (some) Atlantic figures—like mobility—were often inaccessible to women, for whom the possibility of voluntary movement was more restricted. Rebecca Protten and Maria thus were exceptional figures because of their mobility and religious influence, as well as the paper trail they left behind. Yet Sensbach argues that their singular lives can also represent broader issues that affect the culture as a whole. While Rebecca Protten's experiences by no means typified those of black women in the eighteenth century, he writes, they represented powerful impulses presumably shared by most: the attempt by enslaved and free black women to contest the effects of the slave trade; the search for self-determination and free will; and the quest for spiritual reckoning with a capsized world. Moreover, as Sensbach's book recounts in more detail, Protten's life prompts a reinterpretation of eighteenth-century Christianity by revealing a mass movement of the enslaved, who defied their masters to claim Christianity as their own religion.

Like Sensbach, Cassandra Pybus shares with readers the great methodological challenges of reconstructing life histories of the enslaved, but also the creative, painstaking, and ultimately rewarding ways she has managed to do so. Building on her efforts in Epic Journeys of Freedom, Pybus has been meticulously reconstructing the lives and international itineraries of Virginians who fled slavery and joined the British during the American Revolution.¹⁶ Her research highlights patterns of kin relationships, naming conventions, and religious affiliations that reveal not only herculean efforts by enslaved people to sustain family and community, but remarkable success in doing so. Jane Thompson was one such person, who, as Pybus recounts, fled Tidewater Virginia with Lord Dunmore's army and her husband, son, daughter-in-law, and several grandchildren. Family bonds as well as shared Methodism kept the Thompsons and others like them together under the hardships of slavery and then relocation, disease, and privation. In New York and later in Nova Scotia, the Thompsons were joined by more relatives; in 1791 the entire clan together moved to the new British colony of Sierra Leone—except for Thompson's husband, who had died, and Jane herself, now considered too old and frail for the Atlantic crossing. Though it ended in sad circumstances, Jane Thompson's life story vividly illustrates how mobility was a strategy of pursuing freedom and protecting the bonds of family.

While Sensbach and Pybus focus on physical movement, João José Reis highlights social mobility. Manoel Joaquim Ricardo (ca. 1775–1865), the subject of Reis's chapter, endured the forced migration of the Middle Passage, but his story also highlights the possibilities of, and constraints upon, social mobility in a slave society. Likely a victim of the Sokoto jihad in what is now northern Nigeria, Ricardo arrived in Bahia in 1806 or 1807. By the 1830s, still a slave, he had become a respected merchant and even a slaveholder in his own right. He extended his trade to business partners in West Africa, where his legitimate enterprises may have been a cover for illegal slaving. After achieving freedom through his master's will, Ricardo abandoned trans-Atlantic trade but became active in the internal Brazilian slave trade as well as the real estate market. In the face of intense discrimination against free Africans, Ricardo circumvented the law against African landowning, married in the Roman Catholic Church to ensure the inheritance rights of his wife and offspring, and educated his children. By the time he died in Bahia, he was one of the wealthiest men in the province, an extraordinary instance of social mobility among freedmen, most of whom left slavery to enter a world of poverty.

Although Ricardo's trajectory was clearly extraordinary, Reis argues that he can serve as a guide to the world of nineteenth-century African libertos in Bahia. While Ricardo's material success points to the possibilities of assimilation and mobility, his social life continued to revolve around the African community. Ricardo was a ladino, Reis writes, a man who had learned to manipulate the symbols and protocol of Bahian slave society, who became skilled in the white man's ways without abandoning his Africanness. Reis prefers the term ladino to Atlantic creole, but both terms refer to the transformations in identity and society created by the connected cultures of the Atlantic world. The varied and specific forms such transformations took are revealed in part by biographical studies such as those in this volume.

Self-Fashioning

Exploring the life histories of individuals in the early modern Atlantic world, particularly those involved in slavery and freedom struggles, challenges some of the basic tendencies of modern biography as a genre. Typically biographies emphasize individual agency, success against the odds, and stories of progress toward the resolution of personal dilemmas.¹⁷ In contrast, individuals among the African diaspora have often confronted violent loss, subordination, and tragic failure against vast abstract forces, like capitalism and colonialism, that are beyond their control. Many of the life stories collected in this volume show struggles for survival, prosperity, and community against a seemingly endless series of obstacles. While their successes are inspiring, what is remarkable about the subjects of these biographies is also the web of barriers—including dangers of enslavement, limits on freedom, and constraints on citizenship—that they and many others in the connected world of slavery and white supremacy faced.

Moreover, biographies tend to assume a stable, autonomous individual and focus on that person's inner, unique experiences. In this sense, biography has shared many of the conventions of the novel, which also emerged in the early modern period. In contrast, a generation of African social history has taught us that the qualities of situational and relational identity were particularly salient in African societies before, during, and after colonialism.¹⁸ The power of this model of subjectivity is exemplified by Lloyd Kramer's chapter on the African American memoirist David Dorr, while those by Vincent Carretta and Lisa Lindsay reveal historical actors who were struggling for self-realization against the heritage of slavery, even as they unsettle the stable subjects of conventional biography.

The central question in Kramer's biographical chapter is how the experience of moving from one social, cultural, political context to another allows opportunities for self-reinvention as well as the affirmation of personal subjectivity. Kramer focuses on David Dorr, an enslaved African American man who in the early 1850s traveled as a body servant through Europe and elsewhere, returned with his owner to Louisiana, ran away to freedom in Ohio, and wrote about his experiences in A Colored Man Round the World (1858). If, as Joseph Miller emphasized, a central experience of slavery is the challenges of disruption, renewed isolation, moving on, and starting over, Dorr embraced these opportunities through his travels as well as in his writing about them afterward. Modern travel writing almost always involves the author's developing sense of freedom in new, strange contexts. For Dorr, travel allowed him to reimagine what it meant to be a man and a citizen of the world, and it seemingly gave him the moral courage to break away from his owner and assert his claim to freedom.

If travel outside the social and racial hierarchies of slavery was crucial for Dorr, it also make it clear how much more complex and dynamic his sense of self was than the terms freedom or equality might imply. One series of experiences that helped Dorr constitute a new sense of himself as a man of means and gentility involved having the content of his character—his refinement, his intelligence, his savoir faire—mirrored back to him by representatives of the European upper crust, people he considered in a far better position to judge such things than many Americans he might meet in person or as readers. At the same time, Dorr recounted another set of stories in which foreign women found him sexually attractive. In the end, Kramer suggests that Dorr's writing affirms what intellectual historians might call a ‘proto-existential’ celebration of independent selfhood. Not just the travel, but the writing of his book, had furthered Dorr's intellectual and psychological journey toward becoming a new kind of man.

The same might be said, in a different vein, of Olaudah Equiano, probably the best-known ex-slave and author in the history of the Black Atlantic world. In a 1999 journal article and then in his book Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, Vincent Carretta revealed historical evidence indicating that Equiano might have been born in South Carolina rather than the Bight of Biafra, as he claimed in his autobiography.¹⁹ As Carretta recounts in his chapter, questioning the authenticity of Equiano's description of his African homeland and the Middle Passage provoked resistance from some historians as well as Nigerian nationalists who would claim Equiano as an ancestral hero. Here, Carretta confronts his critics by considering Equiano's purpose and strategy in writing his life story. Equiano's Interesting Narrative was published in 1789 just as abolitionists launched their assault on the slave trade in Britain's House of Commons. The antislavery movement badly needed an account of the slave trade from a victim's perspective, and that is exactly what Equiano's published description provided. It elicited the empathy of readers and thus made a persuasive case not only for the barbarity of the Atlantic slave trade but also for the innate capabilities of Africans. All this required that Equiano be African, not African American. Carretta also points out that Equiano's self-fashioning should be understood in the context of an eighteenth-century literary culture in which distinctions between fiction and nonfiction were often blurry; and he wryly observes that in this context, Equiano's literary achievements have been underestimated.

Lisa Lindsay's chapter, too, muses on the questions of an individual's origins, presenting different versions of his history as a reflection both of different kinds of sources and the kind of creative self-presentation that was pervasive under structures of slavery and white supremacy. In the 1850s an African American named James C. Vaughan started a new life in Yorubaland, now southwestern Nigeria. He allegedly had been instructed to go to Africa by his dying father, a Yoruba former slave in South Carolina. In Nigeria, according to family lore, Vaughan encountered people bearing what he recognized as his father's tribal marks, who acknowledged him as a long-lost relative even though they could not accept his Christianity. Other evidence reveals, however, that James Vaughan's father could not have had such facial markings, as he was born in Virginia. As was the case for Equiano, the circumstances under which Vaughan talked about his ancestral origins help explain his possible motives. His challenge as an immigrant to Yorubaland during a time of warfare and dramatic political change was to assimilate well enough to achieve physical security and social connections, but to remain outside onerous patron-client obligations. The story of his father's alleged Yoruba connections, tempered by differences over religion, established Vaughan's claim to belonging, even while it justified his (partial) independence. Ethnicity, in this chapter as in Carretta's, is as much as strategy of local affiliation as a source of longstanding identification.²⁰

In post-emancipation societies of the Americas, freedpeople engaged in fierce contests for economic self-sufficiency and personal autonomy.²¹ But, like Vaughan's, many Atlantic-world biographies also center on struggles not to be autonomous.²² People of the Black Atlantic continually fought against the personal isolation that loomed within slavery. If the alienation of enslavement can be seen as an intense form of modern individualism, as Paul Gilroy suggested, then perhaps at a human level the black experience was not so different from those of others in the Atlantic world—a point consistent with Kramer's portrayal of David Dorr.²³ Biographies of the Black Atlantic show in stark relief the personal struggles of the modern age—for selfhood, dignity, prosperity, freedom, justice, and community.

Politics

In their movements around the Atlantic, and in their personal efforts at self-fashioning, many of our Black Atlantic actors were also deeply involved in large-scale political and ideological developments. The chapters by Jane Landers, Roquinaldo Ferreira, and Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrand reveal the Atlantic world not just as a space for the unidirectional transmission of people and ideas, but as an integrated zone of exchange, meaning, debate, and struggle. The channels and networks around and across the Atlantic world were often determined not by national boundaries or even by imperial networks, but by linguistic and cultural traces of earlier orders. These patterns challenge historians to rethink transnationalism, a concept that often still depends on nations as the basic units, rather than as historical artifacts and residues. The biographies here suggest different links between geography and politics, showing actors operating within, across, and around imperial circuits rather than always routed back through the metropolis. They also reveal politics at different scales: within colonies, empires, and nations; at the level of ideology and discourse; and through struggles against the racism and violence situated at the core of capitalist modernity.

These stories remind us that enslaved people did not simply receive metropolitan ideas, but appropriated, revised, and indeed transformed their meanings. The Atlantic was not a conduit by which the Enlightenment moved from the metropolis to the colonies, but an integrated zone of intellectual exchange and circulation. And it was one in which the enslaved were not only crucial actors but also crucial thinkers. Indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people of the African diaspora took on the political ideals of the Enlightenment, using them in their own struggles, shaping them through circulation, and arguing that they should not be merely uttered but enacted.²⁴

The central figure in Jane Landers's chapter was swept up in, and made his own contributions to, politics across a remarkable range of colonial spaces in the Atlantic world. Francisco Menéndez grew up in a multicultural community around the Gambia River, was brought to South Carolina by English slavers in the early 1700s, joined Native Americans in the Yamasee War, escaped to Spanish Florida—where he led the first free black town in what is now the United States—was later captured and served as a slave in the Bahamas, and probably ended his life in Cuba. Such mobility, Landers argues, shaped people like Menéndez personally, and also shaped the geopolitics of the Atlantic world. The polyglot and literate Menéndez personified Ira Berlin's cosmopolitan Atlantic creole—someone with linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility.²⁵ The ways he and others put these skills to use, pressing claims for freedom while offering valuable skills and information to the powerful, helped determine political relations between the English and Spanish in southeastern North America. For a time, too, Menéndez exercised political leadership over people described by contemporaries in Spanish Florida as his subjects. His story, like that of Scott and Hébrard's Rosalie described below, illustrates some of the networks of personnel, information, and authority created by the enslaved in pursuit of freedom. Such life histories point to alternative ways of mapping the Atlantic world, beyond the political boundaries created by imperialists and colonizers.

Roquinaldo Ferreira's chapter emphasizes the colonial reverberations of metropolitan political change. But it also challenges national or imperial frames of political reference by pointing to alliances of sentiment and action that bypassed the metropole completely. Ferreira focuses on a merchant and colonial official in the Angolan seaport of Benguela named Francisco Gomes, who in the early 1820s was accused of plotting a rebellion to free the colony from Portuguese rule and ally it with newly independent Brazil. Gomes was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, possibly as a slave, but in 1800, around age fifteen, he was sent into criminal exile across the ocean to the Angolan city of Benguela. Over the next two decades, he rose to considerable wealth and prominence, in large part by working through the apparatus of the colonial state. When Gomes and several other wealthy black Benguelan merchants were accused of plotting to massacre the city's white population and the broader white-dominated Angolan colonial government they represented, Portuguese colonial authorities used the opportunity to wrest power from local elites. Moreover, the alleged revolt was deeply intertwined with the trans-Atlantic ramifications of Brazil's recent revolt against the Portuguese. Like Brazil, Angola had also been influenced by the liberal revolution in Portugal itself in 1820, which had given birth to provisional juntas, led by provincial elites, in various parts of the Portuguese Empire. Colonial officials feared that Gomes and other black merchants had been plotting to break Benguela away from colonial Angola and ally it with newly independent Brazil. There is an irony here, of course: that Gomes was plotting to overturn the colonial state apparatus which had so largely shaped the course of his life and through which he had risen from criminal outcast to wealthy merchant. Indeed, one wonders to what extent this conspiracy was real and to what extent it was a fantasy, ploy, or projection of white colonial elites concerned about the success and prominence of black competitors for wealth and status. The main point, however, is the wide-ranging, trans-Atlantic sphere for political thinking and operation.

Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard's chapter presents a similarly broad political context for their biographical subject, Rosalie of the Poulard Nation. Scott and Hébrard trace the experience of a family that struggled for freedom, dignity, and equality on both sides of the Atlantic and in a series of different nations over the course of three generations, between the Haitian Revolution and the U.S. Civil War. The story begins with efforts to inscribe on paper the freedom of a woman called Rosalie and her children, at least some of whose father was Rosalie's erstwhile owner. Over the next several years, in Haiti and later as a refugee in Cuba, Rosalie obtained a series of different documents attesting to her freedom. The purpose of a private emancipation agreement—even for a woman who was freed by a similar document years earlier, for a daughter who was born free, and for a family freed at one point by metropolitan French decrees and by British military law—was to shield the family from whatever questions about their past might be raised in other contexts, in other jurisdictions, in the future. Eventually, Rosalie returned to Haiti, but at least one of her daughters emigrated to New Orleans, where she married a respectable local man of color and businessman. Rosalie's daughter and her family ultimately left Louisiana for France, where their son was educated.

It was Rosalie's European-educated grandson who returned to New Orleans and, in the aftermath of the Civil War, was elected to the state's constitutional convention and who fought for the inclusion of language protecting a variety of civil rights, and protections of equality for women as well as men—including provisions designed to give the rights and protections of marriage to women like his grandmother. This expansive constitutional moment—promising a radically freer, new South after the upheavals of war—was short-lived, and Rosalie's descendants moved back to Europe to pursue their business interests and live their lives. What their story shows most clearly is the deep and specific connections (often overlooked and frequently impossible to reconstruct) between the struggles for freedom and racial equality that began in the eighteenth century and continued into the twentieth, in the Caribbean, in North America, in Europe—and back and forth between the continents over time.

Ultimately, this account of Rosalie and her descendants leaves us with the troubled legacies of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, post-Civil War American white supremacy, and the twentieth-century horrors of systematic genocide. In the aftermath of World War II, Jim Crow in the United States was beginning to buckle under the weight of a long tradition of resistance, and much of the world, including Kwame Nkrumah's Africa, was successfully engaged in anti-colonial independence movements. It was also just at this moment—when both white supremacy and colonialism were losing their claims to morality, legitimacy, and political potency—that the erasure of the Black Atlantic was being consolidated in Euro-American discourse, despite the continuing protests of Afro-diasporan scholars. The white-washed mythography of Robinson Charley emerged to provide a legitimate narrative of (North) Atlantic unity and to draw a veil over the brutal history of the origins of the modern, interconnected world. Ultimately, these stories remind us, as W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized long ago, how much so-called Western Civilization rested on a foundation of slavery and colonialism, a hidden history of sweat, blood, death, and despair.²⁶ The challenge remains: not simply to rebut what was being said, but also to reveal what was being obscured and dismissed—that is, to refute the narrative of Robinson Charley.

What, then, is the moral of these stories? Atlantic history has always been a kind of political project. In the aftermath of World War II, it was primarily an attempt to valorize Anglo-American political alliances and to rehabilitate liberal capitalism in the wake of disastrous decades of international economic depression and global warfare. But does emphasizing the diversity and humanity of the modern world merely add stories of the marginal without challenging existing myths about the nature of our modern, interconnected world?

For one thing, life stories—with all their specificity and particularly—can serve as a corrective to some of the more generalizing tendencies of cultural and demographic history. While Gilroy called attention to the connections between mobility, violence, the production of race, and cultural creativity, the particular biographies explored in this volume prompt us to remember that the networks by which people, ideas, and things moved around the Atlantic were not amorphous or general, but concrete and specific. In practice, trans-Atlantic connections were not even, but lumpy—or perhaps choppy. Critics of the concept of globalization have pointed out the ways that transnational connections are shaped by unequal access to power, whether economic, political, or otherwise, so that what is often glossed as global in fact refers to specific and often bounded networks. As historian Frederick Cooper put it, The world has long been—and still is—a space where economic and political relations are very uneven; it is filled with lumps, places where power coalesces surrounded by those where it does not, places where social relations become dense amid others that are diffuse. Structures and networks penetrate certain places and do certain things with great intensity, but their effects tail off elsewhere.²⁷ The same can be said for the Black Atlantic, and indeed Atlantic history more generally. Attending to individual stories and trajectories can help us see particular spatial linkages, and how they and their meanings changed over time. The transnational, hybrid cultures of the Black Atlantic took different shape in different moments and places, and among different people. It is one thing to call attention to the production of new cultures and identities, but the biographies here remind us that this was not a unitary process, and they endow it with specificity.

Moreover, focusing on individual life stories demonstrates that such large-scale historical processes as migration, trade, and colonialism look different when viewed from the bottom up. For traders, captives, peasants, sailors, children, and a range of others, historical developments were experienced—that is, made and lived through by people whose relationships to these processes were different than those of political, economic, and military elites. And while the experiences recounted in these life stories very often involved survival against the odds and in many cases extraordinary achievements, a powerful recurrent theme is the pathos of alienation and the human struggle to overcome it. This is a central feature of the experience of enslavement and the modern condition. The biographies here show that such struggles and strategies are not only about cultural symbols and racial identities, but also about families, communities, and alliances ranging in scale from the intimate to the broadly political.

Finally, at the most basic level, the chapters in this volume show that writing Black Atlantic biographies is methodologically possible. To be sure, sources are scarce and fragmentary. The narratives that emerge are often partial, fleeting, or disjointed. But their effect can nonetheless be powerful—perhaps in part because the challenge to the ideology of the autonomous individual has made us more open to hybrid identities, shifting senses of self, and all the ways these life stories depart from the normative genre conventions of biography with its stable subjects, valorized individualism, and coherent personalities.

Exploring what can be known about the men, women, and children who populated the Black Atlantic helps to put faces on broad historical processes and reveal them as experienced. The people who created the modern world include not just Robinson Charley and his putative peers, but also a wide range of others. Who they were, we don't always know. Millions of their names have been lost to time. But some of them have stories.

PART I

PARAMETERS

CHAPTER ONE

A Historical Appreciation of the Biographical Turn

JOSEPH C. MILLER

The so-called biographical turn in the Black Atlantic—during its agonizingly long opening phase of slave trading and slavery—is a historiographical advance that I find as profound as the quantitative turn,¹ the sweeping research of pan-disciplinary proportions a half-century ago that generated the scholarship that has now crested in the launch of the Voyages database.² Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. This assemblage of rigorously documented detail, for all its comprehensive richness at the level of the slaving ventures designated in its entirely appropriate title, has only intensified popular and scholarly quests for the humanity that the database lacks: information on the people carried in the holds of those 35,000 (and doubtless still counting) vessels. These human beings were believed all but lost to history, with the exception of the very few survivors of its infamous middle passage able to tell their stories to nineteenth-century abolitionists, and nearly all of those in the quite atypical (and marginal to the trade as a whole) United States.³ Even Stephanie Smallwood's elegant evocation of the experience of saltwater slavery relied more on cultural insight, in the aggregate, than on individuals’ experiences.⁴ Marcus Rediker's intense analysis of slave ships, those floating microcosms of capitalism and cruelty, features moments in the lives of a few enslaved individuals, but does not pause to reconstruct the lives themselves.⁵

In the meanwhile, the biographical turn, to which the participants in this volume (other than myself) have given so much momentum, is gathering momentum. They have demonstrated again the lessons that Phil Curtin taught us in his original census of the slave trade: unimagined masses of evidence are lying around in plain sight for those willing to look beyond the received wisdom. Vince Carretta stunned us all simply by following the trail marked in Olaudah Equiano's Narrative, as did Paul Lovejoy and Robin Law for Muhammad Gardo Baquaqua's autobiography.⁶ In terms of research strategies, Randy Sparks reversed this conventional course from published autobiography to archive-based confirmation (or not) and expansion of detail and context by noticing neglected aspects of documentation familiar as sources for other kinds of history and elegantly contextualizing the voyages of Two Princes of Calabar from Africa to England and back.⁷ Beyond the relatively private framework of English institutional culture, in which most of the records note only individuals’ passing engagements with officialdom or moments of public notoriety,⁸ the Catholic parish records of moments of personal passages through life, notarial archives of private contracts, and the legal standing of the enslaved in monarchical courts of law have enabled several of this volume's contributors to move well beyond the relatively troubled and problematic moments glimpsed in official records to start to reconstruct fuller lives, carrying surviving individuals from their moments of betrayal through the isolation of enslavement, and eventually finding new places for themselves, however tenuous, and however humble.⁹ For this recovering social historian—raised as I was in twentieth-century historiography's detour through social history, quantitative history, and political economy, and still lingering in the structural successors of that era in contemporary cultural history—I welcome the epistemological implications of putting individuals and their experiences back where they belong, at the base of properly historical inquiry. If the social scientists, quantifiers, and particularly economists have left the people out of the story, it is our job—as historians—to put them in.

An Epistemological Perspective on History

The essential shift in perspective is from structures and abstractions—for example, volumes and directions—to people and their experiences. My friends reading this reflection on the state of our field of slavery studies will know my now long-running crusade to historicize our endeavors.¹⁰ This historical framing is the context in which I welcome biography, because it has the potential to detect and then try to understand the many and diverse experiences of being enslaved. My plea to the biographers assembled in this endeavor is to exploit that potential for revealing the humanity of the enslaved and their experiences of enslavement, rather than merely appropriating isolated elements from the rich and often, perhaps always, surprising details of real people's real lives in support of the existing highly structural approach to them only as slaves, and to their lives only as slavery. They were much more than that, and they made much more of their experiences, however constrained, than merely suffering or resisting.

No one here lingers in the iconic slavery portrayed in modern popular culture—in the United States, essentially African American men working in the cotton fields of the antebellum South; in England or France,