New Histories of Slavery and Emancipation

It is a common refrain in the historiography of slavery to say that in the context of early America, freedom could not exist without slavery. Notable, then, is not that slavery so much as gave way to freedom, but how those two things could exist simultaneously. The history of emancipation, a process decades in the making, is a study of contradictions and compromises, and the difficulties in achieving that goal speak to slavery’s vitality and strength.

In two new studies on slavery, freedom, and emancipation, M. Scott Heerman and Elizabeth D. Leonard propose new ways of thinking about these topics and the contradictions entwined within them. Heerman’s The Alchemy of Slavery traces the long history of human bondage in the Illinois Country, from its decades as a colony within the vast French North American empire all the way through the Civil War. This book joins a growing list of scholarship on the transformation of the Upper Mississippi River Valley over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather than focusing on indigenous power or economic change, Heerman centers slavery and its long history in the heart of the North American continent. The Illinois Country was rather unique among slave regimes in the Atlantic World. For one, there were few if any plantations, and certainly none on the scale as those found on the eastern seaboard in Virginia or the Carolinas. Since slavery was not organized around the plantation system, Heerman argues that it did not exist as an institution. Instead, it was a set of adaptable practices that took numerous forms over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as masters adapted to changing imperial and national regimes. These forms include indigenous slavery, African slavery, and lifelong indentures that “often coexisted alongside one another in the same community” (9). As a result of these multiple forms that unfreedom could take and the constantly changing imperial and state boundaries, Illinois slavery was characterized by its dynamism, much more so than other, more institutional systems of enslavement. The “alchemy of slavery” was how it was able to adapt to ever-changing circumstances.

What is unique and fresh about this study is that Heerman deftly connects Illinois’s colonial past with its national future through its legacy of enslavement, which he argues left an indelible mark on the state—and nation—through the Civil War. Heerman begins his study with an analysis of a category of enslaved people within Illinois that represents the diversity of slavery in the Prairie State. The slave economy in eighteenth-century Illinois was diverse, and masters “drew on different slaving practices, drawn from indigenous and Atlantic frameworks, to make a single localized slave system” (36). Over time, when new forms of racial hierarchy took hold as a result of American settlers pouring into the region at the start of the nineteenth century, that diverse enslaved population would come to be known as the “French Negroes.” Keeping with his effort to demonstrate how adaptations in practices of enslavement could shape the landscape of slavery and freedom in the United States, Heerman shows how new US settlers in Illinois created the “French Negro” category and that in doing so they made “slavery synonymous with blackness, putting all slaves, regardless of their true origins, into an invented legal category of people” that in turn were exempted from state or national emancipation laws (61).

Creating discrete racial categories was hardly the only way masters maintained their hold on their enslaved property. While Heerman acknowledges that the creation of the US government did not immediately bring about radical change among inhabitants of the Illinois Country, circumvention of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery became a priority among masters in the territory. Masters adapted by creating an indenture system...