Biography and the Revolutionary Black Atlantic

For observers of the early modern black Atlantic world, biography is a formidable, but tantalizing task. These biographers strive to recover the lives of individuals whose personhood white contemporaries sought to negate through enslavement and racism. Slavery was, at its core, an assault on the individual, as masters forced new names on people of African descent, abused their bodies, ripped their families apart, and tried to bend wills. This brutality was repeated millions of times over several centuries throughout the Atlantic world. Locating and narrating an individual life from this ruthless context is a scholastic feat and an emphatic assertion of the humanity of the enslaved.

Historians Jane Landers and Matthew Clavin take two different approaches to this project of biographical recovery. In Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, Landers pieces together fragments of evidence to reconstruct the lives of several men of color who took advantage of the political upheavals of the late eighteenth century to search for freedom on their own terms. Clavin, meanwhile, uses the life story of one notable black revolutionary, Toussaint Louverture, to gauge the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Civil War–era United States. Despite their distinct emphases and methods, both works demonstrate how people of African descent shaped landmark historical moments (for Landers, the American, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions; for Clavin, the U.S. Civil War). As a result, we gain a fuller understanding of the ways that black people—for all the obstacles they faced—were significant political actors in Atlantic history.

Borrowing from Ira Berlin in his seminal book, Many Thousands Gone (1998), Landers refers to her individuals collectively as "Atlantic Creoles." Although most often associated with people of African descent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the term encapsulates key traits of the men Landers seeks to describe. Some were recent migrants from Africa, while others were born in the Americas; some were enslaved, and others were free. Regardless, all were on the move. As one revolution after another unfolded, these men roved the circum-Caribbean and southern North American mainland in an effort to secure liberty. They were also culturally mobile, able to negotiate with aplomb several imperial milieus (English, French, Spanish, and U.S.), and to deal with diverse social and racial ranks—from indigenous populations and slaves to colonial officials and the white ruling elite. Landers' Atlantic Creoles defied the constraints of race and station, and they could do so, in part, because of the disruptions wrought by revolution.

Republican revolution unleashed a language of liberty and equality, and it inaugurated decades of warfare. In the crossfire of armed conflict, Atlantic Creoles found the best, albeit still dangerous, opportunities to make bids for freedom and autonomy. The fog of war provided some cover for escape, yet as Landers argues, political calculation was central to the decision of when to run, where to go, and ultimately, for whom to fight. Slaves and free people of color read the political landscape to determine the location and regime most conducive to their goals, and Landers demonstrates the variety of conclusions Atlantic Creoles reached in this regard. Somewhat counterintuitively, the colonies that cried loudest for liberty were not always seen as its safest havens. The United States is a well-known example: during the American Revolution, tens of thousands of slaves fled to British lines seeking freedom. But Landers introduces the Iberian Atlantic into this narrative, showing how, for the runaway South Carolina slave Prince (eventually Juan Bautista) Whitten and his family, Florida offered a surer path to freedom. Returned by Britain to Spain with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, Florida was a polyglot colony with people from assorted Indian, African, and European backgrounds. Most importantly for Whitten, the Spanish government recognized his liberty and...