On Agency, Freedom, and the Boundaries of Slavery Studies

Discussing chattel slavery necessitates interrogating freedom. Freedom by definition is “the condition of being free or unrestricted; personal or civil liberty; absence of slave status; power of self-determination; quality of not being controlled by fate or necessity.”¹ The scholars reviewed in this essay ask questions about freedom from the perspective of the enslaved. How did enslaved people define freedom? Was freedom achieved only through legal mechanisms such as manumission? Was freedom experienced in spaces such as the cabins or in places such as the border states? To what extent were larger political movements shaped by the enslaved pursuit of freedom? Conversely, to what extent did larger political movements shape not only the definition of freedom but the possibility, as well? Freedom can be found in nearly every aspect of chattel bondage examined in these works – being truant from the plantation for a period of time, resisting sexual exploitation by choosing who to love, and challenging one’s status by bringing a freedom suit to court, to name but a few. As the five works reviewed here suggest, slavery and freedom were inextricably linked, and enslaved agency (or lack thereof) often determined divergent experiences of autonomy and liberation from bondage. This article discusses enslaved agency, manifestations of freedom in slavery, and the limits of both as categories of analysis. I argue that a singular definition of freedom and its manifestations does not exist, because the conditions and experiences of enslavement were not monolithic.

In his remarkable essay “On Agency,” historian Walter Johnson argues that the historian’s overemphasis on agency threatens to minimize the brutality that inscribed the lives of the enslaved.² Johnson is especially critical of the notion that scholars can “give” a subject agency rather than understanding subjects as architects of their own actions. Johnson argues that overemphasizing the historian’s “discovery” of black humanity inadvertently supports the hegemonic assumptions about black inferiority that scholars precisely want to negate.³

Each of the authors reviewed here address agency in their formulation of freedom. Damian Alan Pargas, for example, tackles the agency debate in his introduction by viewing agency through the lens of the enslaved family. Pargas suggests that diverse labour forces impacted how enslaved people exercised agency and more importantly, how this agency shaped slave families. (202) Pargas notes that the very existence of enslaved families “worked against agency as (they) kept people in place.” (7) Enslaved families were flexible, but this flexibility was dependent upon choices and opportunities determined by respective labour regimes. Ultimately, Pargas aims “to avoid an overemphasis on agency.” (9) Pargas’ ability to present members of enslaved families as individuals who realized their familial ideals amidst the horrors of slavery allows the author to strike a middle ground in the debate. (9)

Rather than strike a balance, Max Grivno and Amrita Chakravarti Myers point out the limits of agency. Grivno notes that enslaved men and women in Maryland achieved freedom largely because slave owners found a way to meld slavery with the most attractive aspects of free labour. (151) By allowing enslaved people to delay their freedom or that of their children, owners inevitably tied future generations to slavery. Once freed, it was assumed, then African Americans would have greater opportunities. Yet as Amrita Chakrabarti Myers argues, for free black women agency fell somewhere between life choices and the legal apparatus. (18) Therefore, when faced with real-life situations, Myers suggests that historian’s “agency had its limits.” (11) Indeed, Damion Alan...