Making a Free State: Slavery, Servitude and the Mary Clark Story

April 3, 2010 TAH Workshop Resource Page

In 1821, Mary Bateman Clark, an enslaved woman who who been compelled to sign a contract for 30 years of service after her owners brought her to Indiana, sued for her freedom before the Indiana Supreme Court. Her case helped cement the state's status as free territory, and also shaped modern ideas about "free labor." Her story opens up broad questions about the meaning of freedom, about changing ideas about nation states, labor systems, race and citizenship. It takes us into the history of antislavery and revolutionary politics, and the debates over slavery and territorial expansion that dominated U.S. politics through the Civil War. It is also a story that resists being compartmentalized as "African American History" or "Women's History;" rather, it makes clear that these subjects are all central to American history.

Our relatively short time together will probably not allow us to fully examine all of these issues. I offer the following outline as a menu to guide our conversation. The headings include questions or arguments about these broader topics that I use in my own teaching. Under each, you will find links to readings and materials from my American survey course at IU. A list of books that might make useful further reading comes at the end.

I have embedded this page in the website I use for my survey course, which you are welcome to exploreusing the links on the upper right. "Current Week" will take to the schedule, through which reading questions, brief lecture outlines and timelines containing key "facts" from lecture are also available. Many of the primary source readings and questions on the site were initially assembled by Prof. Konstantin Dierks, whom you met last fall. The site (and course) are a bit unwieldy, and I will streamline them in the future.( You can count on this material being available as a reference for at least the next year or so, however.) My fellow presenters and I are eager to learn more about how you use web resources, and on how we can construct a website that will help make the Mary Clark story useful in the K-12 classroom. (See more on this below.)

 

Defining Freedom, Slavery, Servitude, Nation, State and Territory: Terms with Historically Fluid Meanings.

Thought questions:

  • What does it mean to describe the United States as a free country? To think of oneself as a free person? How and when do you teach about freedom and national identity?
  • What defines a nation: Principles? People? Territory?

Slavery and Servitude

Key Points: In broad terms, what we now think of as free labor - defined through contracts, individual worker consent, wages for services - is historically aberrant. In early modern Europe and its colonies, household heads controlled the labor of their dependents: wives, children, servants and slaves. Some 80% of the colonial population at the onset of the American revolution were dependents. To be dependent, however, did not mean that one was unfree. Bound labor as a servant was a normal part of the lifecycle for much of the population.

Mary Clark's case, historian Robert Steinfeld argues, marked a pivotal moment in American (and arguably international) legal history, in which "the category of indented service began finally to collapse into the category of slavery, both now classified merely as forms of involuntary servitude. It marked the moment in which free/unfree began to take on their modern character as absolute and opposite, and it brought contemporaries within site of the modern understanding of the labor relationship." (Steinfeld, Invention of Free Labor, 127). To appreciate the full significance of Clark's case, one needs to understand slavery and servitude as dynamic and developing institutions. Over time, they redefined each other, as well as ideas about race and freedom.

To make this point in my survey, I have students read the some of the laws regarding slavery and servitude from seventeenth-century Virginia. I ask them to list the laws by year, and track the ways in which they categorize people: i.e. master, mistress, servant, slave, English, Christian, Negro, runaway, etc. Benjamin Franklin's "Observations" also lead to useful discussion about race. Defining slavery and servitude through these materials leads to a more fruitful discussion of revolutionary era ideas about freedom.

 

Slavery, Servitude and Revolutionary Politics

Why didn't the Constitution reinscribe the Declaration of Independence's language about the "right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?

Imagining a world without slavery: 1755-1787

Key point: An international movement against slavery emerged in parallel with the U.S. revolutionary movement, and it made sure that America's political founders could imagine a world without slavery.

1787: Northwest Ordinance and Constitutional Compromises on Slavery

Key point: The Northwest Ordinance's defined the Northwest Territory as "free soil" in a quid pro quo that probably helped secure Constitution's compromises on slavery and the slave trade, and which implicity acknowledged that slavery would expand in the South.

From "Indian Country" to "Slave Country": the politics of expansion

Key points:

Slavery entrenched in 1790 because:

  • Constitution gave disproportionate power to slaveholders
  • St. Domingue
  • Economics of expansion

Mary Clark's case, debate about slavery in Indiana reflects tensions between different groups of migrants.

  • Those who claimed Clark as property followed pattern common to Eastern slave holding families, who maintained wealth and status by sending their children and slaves to the west.
  • White opposition to slavery was anchored by those who opposed it on religious grounds. Broader political support came from groups that slavery threatened to push to the economic or political margins. Indiana's Quaker migrants fit both descriptions; many came from the Carolinas because their antislavery religious stance had become untenable there.

Slaveholders in National Government during the 1790s

  • Washington, Sec of State Jefferson, Attorney General (Edmund Randolf) all large planters from VA
  • 29 of 65 representatives (45%)
  • 10 (from MD, VA, NC, SC & GA) of 26 senators (38%)
  • 14 reps (1/4) and 8 senators (1/3) were planters who owned 20 or more slaves

Slavery and Economic Inequality among Southern Whites

1790

  • 95% of slave population in South
  • 1/3 of Southern population enslaved
  • 1/3 of Southern households owned slaves
  • National economy, wealth reliant on exports (15% produce exported)
  • 1/2 national exports from South
  • slave grown tobacco, indigo and rice 1/3 national exports

1850s

  • 1/4 Southern white families owned a slave
  • Fewer than 5% (1/20) were “planters” with 20 or more slaves
  • Cotton, expansion supposed to promote white democracy; actually increased economic disparity among whites.

Enslaved Population

  • 1776 under 500,000 slaves
  • 1790 nearing 700,000 slaves in U.S. (15% of U.S. population)
  • 1820 1.5 million enslaved people (15%)
  • 1860 4 million (13% of U.S. population)

U.S. and the slave trade

  • 250,000 people imported (forced) from Africa between 1788 and 1808 abolition of the slave trade (rival number imported during the entire colonial period)
  • Domestic slave trade (Chesapeake - VA & MD) to the deep south became second most “modern” & important southern economic enterprise in antebellum South
  • 1790s - Chesapeake families lost 1 in 12 members to trade
  • By 1820 - 1 in 5
  • More wealth to be made in “slave country” through trade in slave labor than in land speculation

Slave Rebellions

  • 1789-1804 - St. Domingue/Haiti
  • 1800 - Gabriel's Rebellion (VA)
  • 1811 - Rebellion outside New Orleans
  • 1822 - Vesey Conspiracy (Charleston, SC)
  • 1831 - Nat Turner's Rebellion

Reenacting the Mary Clark Story / Websites and the Classroom

Eunice Trotter and Ethel McCane will present the immediate historical context for Mary Clark's story, along with a short dramatization. They have been piecing the details of this event and of Clark's life together over many years, and tell a story that goes beyond what is currently in the history books. Graduate students from my colloquium on Digital HIstory are helping them to develop website that will present Clark's story and serve as a resource for K-12 teachers. We are eager to hear your thoughts on what would make such a site useful to you, and to talking about reenactment in the classroom.

The wikipedia article on slavery in Indiana offers accessible background reading for this part of the presentation. (Our workshop discussion will likely bring to light ways to improve the wikipedia entry.)

The Mary Bateman Clark website is currently under construction. Its URL is: www.marybatemanclark.org

Recommended further reading:

    1. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History, 1st ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). 
    2. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2006).  
    3. Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2005).  
    4. Andrew R. L. (Andrew Robert Lee) Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996).  
    5. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2008).  
    6. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007).  
    7. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999).  
    8. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South, 1st ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007).  
    9. Thomas P. (Thomas Paul) Slaughter, The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition, 1st ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008).  
    10. Christopher Tomlins, “Law, Population, Labor,” in The Cambridge History of Law in America, ed. Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins (Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press, 2007).  
    11. David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).