Journal article
“We chilluns, long wid her, wuz lak de udder slaves”: free black families and quasi-slavery in the late antebellum era
- Abstract:
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This article shows how and why some free black families ended up living among the enslaved in the late antebellum era. Enslavers brought free people of colour into forms of informal quasi-slavery that differed little from enslavement despite their free legal status. Despite a lack of evidence, piecing together free blacks’ experiences through surviving sources reveals much about the porous boundary between slavery and freedom where enslavers manipulated marginality for financial gain. There was no sharp delineation between slavery and freedom but instead a continuum of oppression characterized by varying degrees of persecution and fragile freedoms.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 355.6KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1017/s0021875820001735
Authors
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Journal:
- Journal of American Studies More from this journal
- Volume:
- 55
- Issue:
- 5
- Pages:
- 991-1018
- Publication date:
- 2021-04-01
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1469-5154
- ISSN:
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0021-8758
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
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2037693
- Local pid:
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pubs:2037693
- Deposit date:
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2025-01-30
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Emily West
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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