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13. Freedom as a Negotiated History, or an Alternative Sort of Event: The Transformation of Home, Work, and Self in Early New York
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199 Chapter Thirteen Freedom as a Negotiated History, or an Alternative Sort of Event The Transformation of Home, Work, and Self in Early New York Christopher N. Matthews Abstract During the early American period in New York the labor force shifted from one that included a large number of enslaved persons to one consisting entirely of persons who were free. This transformation was formalized through a Gradual Emancipation Act passed in 1799 that allowed slavery to continue legally in the state until 1827. This movement toward freedom may be tied to a political economic shift recorded by both historians and archaeologists that redesignated the basis of social standing from work to the possession of the self illustrated by the demands of the labor market and in the creation of the home as a space apart from work. While colonial and early postcolonial labor was largely controlled by masters who both employed and housed workers, with freedom, laborers and masters alike were removed from the workplace to informally class-segregated residential sections of the city. From these homes masters and laborers then convened in the new public space of the labor market , which materialized their equivalence as persons and potential citizens of the American democracy. Using data from archaeological studies of the New York metropolitan region, this chapter identifies how the expectations of freedom smoothed the ruptures caused by the dispossession of workers from the control of their labor and the introduction of the home as a possession that defines the “real” self. Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose. —Janis Joplin, “Me and Bobby McGhee” What is the difference between slavery and freedom? In twenty-first century culture, these concepts are so ingrained in our thinking—the first imagined as an absolute evil and the other as a self-evident 200 Eventful Histories and Beyond good—that we view this question as only an abstract philosophical dilemma. We rarely stop to wonder what slavery and freedom mean in concrete terms. —Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, Slavery, Freedom, and the Law in the Atlantic World Embodied in William Sewell’s (2005) theoretical proposal for an “eventful sociology” is the relatively simple idea that history matters in part because history has matter, or consequences that contribute to the qualities, meanings, and textures of material life. As Beck et al. (2007:834) suggest, archaeologists should be attracted to this idea because of its applications to the study of material culture, such that, as Sewell describes, “schemas can be inferred from…material form.” Schemas, or generalizable social principles, are mechanisms by which agents come to learn and, more important, to validate their experiences. Appealing in this approach is an appreciation that much of social life is under consistent negotiation, that people act as much from positions of security and knowledge as they do from fear, distrust, and uncertainty. Validation sustains negotiated arrangements, which is another way of describing a functioning society. The lack of validation generates crisis and, for some, if not most or all, the desire for social reconstruction. But are there not many forms of validation? Negotiations have a way of bringing assumptions about persons, groups, objects, resources, and relationships to the surface of social discourse, where they can be uncovered, validated, and/or challenged. This is one way to describe what Sewell calls an “event.” However , negotiation is neither a cause nor a result of history, in the sense of a force that has the power to bring about change. It is something quite different. History enables negotiation, for making and writing histories is the basis of the constructions that put people in positions requiring negotiation. What people say about themselves and others; what they believe to be likely or true about themselves and others; and what they hope may come to be likely or true about themselves and others derive from the histories people construct about themselves and others (Roseberry, 1989; Sider and Smith 1997). Negotiation and history, that is, cohabitate. In fact, the experience of negotiation may serve as the basis for many forms of validation for participants may consider themselves agents in the making of history. Yet, are such constructed considerations always valid? This requires looking more carefully at what an event is. For Sewell, it is “sequences of occurrences that result in transformations of structures” (in Beck et al. 2007:835). I suggest this overlooks one of the more profound forms of events: those moments in which transformation appears possible or even...