Manhood Enslaved: Bondmen in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey by Kenneth E. Marshall (review)

Kenneth E. Marshall’s compelling new book recreates the lives of bondmen in the rural North and demonstrates slavery’s pernicious persistence in the Middle Atlantic. The author takes Somerset County, New Jersey, as his primary area of study, though he also makes forays into neighboring locales on both sides of the Delaware River.

Marshall constructs the narrative flow of Manhood Enslaved around the lives of three different bondmen in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New Jersey: Yombo Melick, Quamino Buccau (also known as Smock), and Dick Melick. The essential primary sources for this investigation are two nineteenth-century histories, the Memoir of Quamino Buccau (1851), by Quaker abolitionist William J. Allinson, and The Story of an Old Farm (1889), by businessman Andrew D. Mellick Jr. Each text suffers from the romanticized and racialized assumptions of their days, but Marshall, who invokes the scholarship of the Subaltern Studies Group, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Ranajit Guha, reads “against the grain” to recover vital details from them.

Marshall builds upon earlier work on rural slavery in the North, notably Graham Russell Hodges’s Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), in his emphasis on slave manhood in the region. Marshall defines slave manhood as “necessarily fluid” (6), even as he points to two dominant models of white manhood: the “achiever” and the “Christian gentleman” (18). The author provocatively claims that Christian gentlemen such as William Allinson had “fewer opportunities to assert white masculine authority,” which meant that their “interactions with oppressed blacks thus served as a critical means of masculine empowerment” (19). However, Marshall modifies the claim of empowerment somewhat when discussing the mutually constitutive relationship of bondman and master: “Quamino needed Allinson to help him survive in a racist society . . . and Allinson needed Quamino to help articulate his ideas about . . . black people” (29). Still, Allinson’s book served more as a paternalist “platform for his manhood as an aggressive abolitionist Christian” than it did as a faithful record of Quamino Buccau’s life (40).

If Yombo Melick was most culturally African, Quamino Buccau, whose life spanned from 1762 to 1850, was the most religious (chapter 4). Allinson held Buccau up as a shining example of a pious African American, worthy of manumission from the cruelties of slavery. The emphasis on religion was notably gendered. Marshall argues for Buccau’s development of a “masculine sense of self” through religion, calling it a “relational social construction” (101). The idea of gender as performance is implied here, especially as seen through Buccau’s performance of a particular kind of black manhood at his manumission interview. Here Marshall is at his theoretically most sophisticated; for Quamino Buccau, he argues, Christianity carried “multiple social, psychic, political, and spiritual dimensions” (108). Ultimately, Buccau employed obsequious comportment toward his white masters in spiritual matters and successfully obtained a much-desired manumission.

In his analysis of the couple Dick (born ca. 1749) and Nance Melick (chapter 5), Marshall considers the complex and intriguing range of possibilities in the interplay of race and gender. Sold to Aaron Malick in 1798, Dick Melick “projected the image of a responsible, Christian, and dominant family man” (110), with a self-representation very different from that of Yombo Melick. Maintaining this image was difficult, however, without “the daily support of an extended black community” (113). In that vein, Marshall considers the importance of holidays and militia training to the Melicks for purposes of building community and a sense of cultural sovereignty. The author also traces the lives of the Melicks’ children, as much as the extant records allow. All of the Melicks’ surviving children were eventually sold and most likely separated from their parents, another indication of the commonalities of slavery’s brutality in both North and South. But, Marshall argues, in...