Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas (review)

Mariana L. R. Dantas has provided a well-written and thoroughly researched comparative history of slavery and freedom in the eighteenth century. Focusing on Sabará, Brazil and Baltimore, Maryland, Dantas aims to show how enslaved and later free African descendents played a fundamental role in their own struggle for greater autonomy and freedom. As she explains, rather than “pursuing the question of how persons of African origin and descent adapted to urban environments to benefit from what they had to offer,” Dantas explores “the question of how this group contributed to shaping an environment that could prove beneficial to them” (p. 3). This approach separates Dantas’s work from traditional studies and at the same time it broadens overarching studies of enslavement and freedom in the Americas. By placing Africans at the center of her study, she is able to provide a richer examination of the ways that they used labor to retain a measure of control over their lives.

Further, Dantas furnishes a truly comparative study. Her work relies heavily on primary research and her analysis is based on primary source materials from Sabará as well as Baltimore. These sources include wills, manumission papers, Church records, and municipal documents. Additionally, some print materials such as newspapers, town directories, and census data for Baltimore were available. The book is organized into six chapters that portray the vibrant urban spheres that constitute the backdrop of the study as well as carefully situating its primary subjects. Chapter one describes the growth and development of Sabará and Baltimore—one an older mining town, the other a fairly young city that grew quickly after the War of Independence. The second chapter focuses on population demographics and uses qualitative and quantitative analyses to chart the evolution of slave populations and that of free blacks. Chapter three concentrates on slave labor. The fourth chapter examines manumission and the role of labor in negotiating autonomy, while the final two chapters explore the historical experiences of free urban blacks and their descendents.

Whereas the two largest slave societies, Brazil and the United States, might logically invite comparison, Dantas explains that the specific cities used in her study proved ideal for her purposes; both used slave labor, and each city also witnessed the considerable growth of freed men and women and their descendents. This feature enables her to examine how labor functioned among enslaved Africans as well as how they deployed it in bids for freedom and manumission. This aspect of her research is arguably the most provocative. By tracing changes in labor and exchanges between slaves, masters, and freed men and women, Dantas does indeed place Africans at the center of her research. She also shows how Africans and their descendents created social networks and worked to obtain legal and political representation for themselves. However, she is careful not to overstate the power that African descendents wielded. Rather, Dantas uses the transition from slavery to freedom to demonstrate the complexity of the shifts as well as their progression overtime (much of the study concentrates on the period between the 1750s and the early 1800s). But also, Dantas’s work shows how the transition from slavery to freedom was not always a linear one. Sometimes the efforts of the enslaved worked, in other cases efforts to gain freedom were stymied—as was the case with Nicácio, who had successfully managed to purchase his own freedom only to have his manumission annulled after his former owner’s wife contested it in court (p. 124).

Dantas has provided a much needed and welcomed addition to current work on urban slavery and the growth of independent free communities. Her attention to detail and commitment to comparative historical research makes her work a valuable model for future studies on the African Diaspora.