Slavery in the City: Architecture and Landscapes of Urban Slavery in North America ed. by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg (review)

The idea of physical space aboard a ship acting as a means of control over the enslaved is a familiar concept in the American historical imagination. Chained and stowed in cramped areas with little room to maneuver, enslaved Africans endured severe spatial confinement while crossing the Atlantic. These brutal conditions did not prevent rebellion in every case, but they did provide enslavers with a clear means of control over the enslaved at sea. Once the slave ship put in to port in the Americas, however, the idea of space as a means of control largely vanishes from historical interpretations. Buildings, structures, and other interventions in the natural landscape where the enslaved worked and lived do not often factor into the historian's imagination as part of the oppressive measures slaveholders used to sustain the peculiar institution. The collected essays in Slavery in the City: Architecture and Landscapes of Urban Slavery in North America provide a needed and successful corrective that effectively fills in this missing part of the story.

Since the 1960s, most studies have characterized urban slavery as an institution that was disappearing by the antebellum period. The embedded theme in these studies is that slavery in the city was an afterthought, superimposed on a landscape with which it was never truly compatible. Over time, America's growing cities absorbed and dissipated what was essentially a rural phenomenon. Slavery in the City dispels that myth by adopting a multidisciplinary and geographically diverse approach that brings together many perspectives on the subject. The result is an important contribution that unites many voices who have sought, since the late 1990s, to reinvigorate the study of urban slavery by refocusing attention on how America's urban spaces were often constructed with control over the enslaved population as the intended purpose of the landscape.

Edward A. Chappell's comparative study of enslaved housing in the Revolutionary-era Chesapeake and in Falmouth, Jamaica, demonstrates how urban slavery became a more complex institution over time rather than one that faded away. In each case, working spaces occupied by the enslaved became increasingly specialized to ensure segregation, limit access, and highlight servitude. Founding Fathers such as James Madison and Thomas Jefferson appear to have spent as much mental energy on where to put their cooks and how to be served as they did on politics. In John Michael Vlach's study of northern slave quarters, it is striking how differences between New Jersey and Virginia evaporated when it came to a slaveholder's thinking about space. While quarters varied by size and building materials, they shared the common goals of social division and physical separation to create control. Whether in the North or the South, in the West Indies or on the mainland, "the placement of walls, doors, stairways, and corridors" was consciously undertaken to "distinguish black space from white" (p. 64).

Whereas Chappell and Vlach reach their conclusions by looking at architectural plans in combination with insights from the letters and papers of elites, Clifton Ellis arrives in a similar interpretive place by using archaeological findings in concert with quantitative records. Instead of separate quarters, enslaved workers in Annapolis occupied cellars or garrets year-round. They emerged and circulated through the main residence to complete "a wide range of chores" and then disappeared once again into spaces of enslavement (p. 78). Despite the intimate connections that would seemingly result from living in such proximity, Ellis finds that "there is little evidence for daily interactions between slave and master" (p. 78). As shown in the preceding chapters, racial separation and social division were achieved through the relegation of spatial power.

Gina Haney's study of antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, highlights how political measures also transformed city spaces. Control over an urban enslaved population was especially important to...