Microhistory and Movement: African American Mobility in the Nineteenth Century

African American history may be one of the last fields to receive a micro-historical treatment. Nineteenth-century African American history has been favored with sweeping accounts of the black experience, ranging from John Blassingame’s classic The Slave Community to Ira Berlin’s more recent Many Thousands Gone. Studies on more focused topics such as slavery in the Chesapeake or free blacks in the North have certainly contributed to knowledge of the black experience, but scarce records, especially the lack of firsthand accounts for many aspects of black life, make microhistory’s tight focus on the “proudly small” difficult to achieve.¹

Microhistories are intensely concentrated examinations of topics that often appear narrow and insignificant until the microhistorian reveals how the subject illuminates greater issues. The microhistory falls between the grand synthesis or theoretical analysis that slights individual human actors and the antiquarian social history that ignores the larger meaning of the countless details it relates. Microhistories can test the conclusions of the grand synthetic histories as well as reveal the patterns of life in a particular place and time.²

Microhistory’s close relatives include biography and the community study. While biography relates the individual life, savoring its uniqueness, microhistory challenges conventional historical narratives by revealing how a life, often a very ordinary one, defied societal patterns or lived up to them in unexpected ways. Microhistory observes historical change up close and notes how historical forces operated on individuals.³ Similarly, examining a place can reveal the contours of the larger society by elaborating the different types of communities—rural or urban, agricultural or commercial, northern or southern—that people construct. There have been classic studies of colonial towns and nineteenth-century rural communities.⁴ Many microhistories of places have been what J. Matthew Gallman has called “city biographies,” but people inhabit places, and studies of those places connect their inhabitants to larger trends. John Mack Faragher used Robert Pulliam, “the pioneer of Sugar Creek,” as the iconic figure illustrating the nature of frontier Illinois.⁵ Studies of northern African American communities, such as James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton’s study of Boston, have generally focused on cities. Melvin Patrick Ely used county court papers to reconstruct the life of free blacks in the rural Virginia community of Israel Hill.⁶ The works under review include both genres of microhistory: studies of individual African Americans and accounts of the post-Civil War black diaspora that created new communities of freedmen in the North. If there is a theme that unites them, it is that of movement. White mobility is taken for granted, perhaps because whites chose to migrate, while slavery made black mobility far more constrained, but Africans and their descendants migrated in ship holds crammed with bodies or coffles of slaves, chained at the neck, walking toward the newly opened cotton lands of the interior South. The authors discussed here use microhistorical techniques to examine struggles over black mobility.

Edlie L. Wong presents a nuanced history of sojourning cases in which a slave’s travels opened up the possibility of freedom. A scholar of African American literature, Wong draws from critical legal studies and race theory. She is...