Martha Washington set countless precedents as first lady—including the use of enslaved labor in the Washingtons’ presidential household. One-third of America’s first ladies were born or married into slave–owning families, making it an important but often overlooked part of their identities and actions in the White House and beyond. The relationship between first ladies and race goes far beyond the subject of slavery. Throughout history, these women have used their platform to bring attention to issues affecting Americans, champion causes, and encourage the president to act. As unelected participants in an administration, first ladies have sometimes been able to pursue civil rights with more freedom and flexibility than their spouses, speaking out against lynching, segregation, and other concerns facing the Black community. This chapter will explore the complex role of first ladies in the fight for equal rights using case studies from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As he rose to leadership of the Spencean Philanthropists in 1817, Robert Wedderburn wrote and published six issues of Axe Laid to the Root, an inexpensive weekly periodical for working-class readers. Axe Laid to the Root instructed its white audience about the radical potential of African-Jamaican land and food-based liberation. The provision grounds, plots set apart from the plantation for enslaved people to grow their own food, were a source of resistance to plantation capitalism, providing food sovereignty and communal identity. The ecological knowledge of the Jamaican Maroons was another source of resistance to plantation economies. Finally, Wedderburn’s writing in “cheap” periodicals aspired to cultivate a transatlantic alliance between the English lower classes, the colonized Irish, and free and enslaved people in Jamaica. The chapter concludes by discussing George Cruikshank’s The New Union Club, which features Wedderburn as a central figure within abolitionist circles.

The South has never been a real space in the imaginations of authors from colonization-forward. From early works from the colonial era to the wave of Afrofuturist texts of the past several decades, the South has been a space of alternative realities, a site of speculation upon which authors projected imagined presents and futures. The “otherness” of the South has always lent the region a speculative bent in the United States and global imagination. This essay examines literature from the antebellum South itself, the supposedly geographically fixed monolith of plantation culture. Written by a majority white, proslavery authorship, southern imaginative writing before the Civil War always speculated on the “South” and shaped it as a cultural identity. To understand the endurance and widespread influence of the dominant versions of “South,” it is necessary to examine their literary origin point and not just the aftershocks and reverberations. Like writing about the South, writing from the South during the nineteenth century was always a speculative exercise, made especially evident when focusing on works by those invested in continuing an idea of “South” that lay the foundation for ideologies circulating long after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War.

This chapter explores Schopenhauer’s views of the political systems in North America, Europe, and China. Schopenhauer understood the United States as a modern republic geared toward maximum individual freedom. He also took note of its high levels of interpersonal violence. Importantly, he repeatedly returned to US slavery as the most egregious example of institutionalized exploitation and brutality. In his treatment of the United States, he then connected republicanism to slavery and concluded that they were tightly associated. Schopenhauer’s argument against American republicanism does not, however, suggest that he endorsed traditional European monarchies. Against both North America and Europe, Schopenhauer instead held up the example of China as an advanced state that was hierarchical and imperial and yet resolutely nontheist. For Schopenhauer, China combined political stability and peacefulness with a philosophically sound atheism and thus demonstrated the realization of his political and his philosophical ideals.

The nineteenth century was the first era of “big data” in the modern world, and American literary texts published during this time, such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), offer an aesthetic reframing of how individuals and institutions within a culture of data use information at scale to claim authority over knowledge and, by extension, power over people. Moby-Dick also gestures toward the ways that African and African American bodies were subjected to the most brutal regimes of quantification that the nineteenth century had to offer in the form of the transatlantic and intra-American slave trade. One of the major problems facing American literary studies and digital humanities today is the question of how to excavate and explicate the quantitative turn of earlier centuries as we seek to better understand the cultures of data we live in today. The best initial response to this problem is not to begin with a specific digital tool per se, but to build a set of guiding principles for how to critically approach data, media, and power from within a context that recognizes the distinctive contributions of literary texts as aesthetic objects. This essay models one such approach to do so.

In his Journal of a West India Proprietor, Matthew Lewis documented numerous encounters with the people he enslaved. Guided by Wedderburn’s argument that the provision grounds must be guarded “above all” for Black liberation, this chapter argues that tensions over provision grounds permeated Lewis’s encounters. After granting an additional day per week on the provision grounds as “a matter of right,” Lewis documented that enslaved people were growing poisons, unleashing fires, harboring crowds of destructive livestock, and providing sustenance for self-liberated Black people. Despite noticing these dangers, Lewis wrote to William Wilberforce detailing a plan for emancipating the people he enslaved by giving them his plantation, a proposal feared to be “dangerous to the island.” Lewis’s Journal recorded that his plantations were undermined, not by overt rebellion, but rather by the success of the Black ecological project: The botanical and animal ecologies of the provision grounds were anticipatory abolitionist commons that would be drawn upon in the coming emancipation.

Robert Wedderburn was deeply influenced by his enslaved mother and grandmother, who raised him in Jamaica. After migrating to London, he became a key figure in ultraradical circles and was prosecuted by the British government for blasphemous libel. Wedderburn’s vision for abolition from below sought to forge a transatlantic alliance between English agrarian radicals and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Wedderburn’s influence was documented in Robert Cruikshank’s caricature, A Peep in the London Tavern, which depicted him challenging the proto-socialist Robert Owen. After a review of existing scholarship that places Wedderburn within ultraradical circles or focuses on his mixed-race identity, the Introduction argues that understanding Wedderburn’s advocacy for land-based insurrection requires dialogue with scholarship in Black geographies. Wedderburn’s insights about place-based resistance to slavery are then illustrated in a reading of James Hakewill’s Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica.

This chapter addresses developments in Late Antiquity, which witnessed a partial shift to more land-based conceptions of both ownership and rulership. The prior literature has pointed to two explanatory factors: the decline of classical polis culture amidst the deurbanization of Late Antiquity, and the rise of Christianity. The chapter draws together the threads of this literature, in order to develop an account of late antique cultural change. Classical Roman property law, it argues, had its context in classical cities. The relative decay of urban dominance and the rise of Christianity tended to undermine the classical foundations of the law of both ownership and rulership. The Empire was reconceived in more territorial terms, while classical conceptions of elite power faltered. The resulting shifts did not result in any decisive and thoroughgoing transformation of the understanding of ownership and rulership, but they set the stage for later developments of great significance.

This chapter discusses archaic Roman property law, whose symbolism and terminology show a striking orientation toward the ownership of living creatures, human and animal. That symbolism and terminology was seized upon by many of the leading thinkers of the past, who believed it offered clues to the origins of human society. It was also seized upon by both Communist and Fascist ideologues. Today, by contrast, its significance is generally dismissed. Modern scholarship has been heavily dedicated to reconstructing the socio-economic realities; scholars often deploy their learning to dispel the “myths” in the sources, among them the myths in the archaic Roman sources. Yet the myths matter; “idioms of power” cannot simply be written off. The chapter brings the anthropology of property law to bear on the interpretation of these mysterious sources, and describes the long intellectual and political history of their interpretation and ideological use.

This chapter discusses the early modern transformation of the law. By the end of the eighteenth century, the law of ownership was firmly centered on land and the conception of the state was becoming firmly territorial, while the nineteenth century witnessed the abolition of the lawful private ownership of human beings. The chapter traces the rise of an early modern conception of property, which held that acquisition was primarily acquisition of land, and that it was established through cultivation rather than mere occupation. It shows how the venerable law of use rights found a home under a new doctrinal rubric, eminent domain, and discusses the transformation of the ancient law of enslavement through war. The chapter draws on the work of historians of the state who study the rise of a territorial understanding of sovereignty. It emphasizes the long legal history behind the disappearance of lawful private enslavement.

This chapter discusses the early modern transformation of the law. By the end of the eighteenth century, the law of ownership was firmly centered on land and the conception of the state was becoming firmly territorial, while the nineteenth century witnessed the abolition of the lawful private ownership of human beings. The chapter traces the rise of an early modern conception of property, which held that acquisition was primarily acquisition of land, and that it was established through cultivation rather than mere occupation. It shows how the venerable law of use rights found a home under a new doctrinal rubric, eminent domain, and discusses the transformation of the ancient law of enslavement through war. The chapter draws on the work of historians of the state who study the rise of a territorial understanding of sovereignty. It emphasizes the long legal history behind the disappearance of lawful private enslavement.

This chapter discusses the formation of high classical Roman property law, which displays what Orlando Patterson calls a master/slave “idiom of power.” It focuses on the emergence of the term dominus, “master,” as the ordinary word for “owner.” The rise of the dominus was once the topic of extensive analysis and controversy, and it figured prominently in the ideologies of Communism and Fascism. It has, however, been forgotten by contemporary scholars. The chapter sets out to revive this forgotten topic. Drawing on Roman social history, the chapter argues that the appearance of the new terminology of the dominus in classical law can be linked to important social changes in the nature of Roman elite power. The chapter closes by arguing that Roman property law bore a kinship to classical Greco-Roman religion, which was marked by the “symbolism and ideology of the paradigmatic hunter.”

This chapter discusses the most famous hypothesis about the development of property law: that Western social evolution was determined by a passage “from slavery to feudalism,” from the ownership of humans in the slave economies of Antiquity to the ownership of land in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. That hypothesis was embraced by Marx, Weber, Bloch, and many others, but has been rejected today, because it rested on claims about economic history that have been proven dubious. The chapter argues that there was truth in the classical hypothesis, but that it should be reinterpreted as an account of transformation in the legal imagination. The chapter investigates the origins of the classic theories, and makes the case that the classic thinkers erred by mistaking the imaginative orientations in the legal sources for the economic realities.

This chapter challenges the idea that the classical Roman jurists were “pioneers of human rights.” The jurists had no doubts about the legitimacy of the hunt for human prey in war. Quite the contrary: they thought of the capture and enslavement of enemies as a paradigm of just acquisition. It is crucial that we come to terms with this ancient belief system: We must recognize that the classical jurists did not see any need for justification for slavery beyond the fact of victory in battle or in the sack of cities. The use of theories like Aristotelean natural slavery or the teaching that slavery arose out of the consent of the victim date only to the early modern period. The chapter closes by discussing how the jurists used the model of the hunt for human and animal prey as the basis for analogical reasoning.

This chapter examines the nature of slavery, and particularly chattel slavery, in the trans-Atlantic region in the modern period in order to structure the analysis of freedom to follow in subsequent chapters.

“Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations” is by far the longest of Hume’s essays. Although it does not always receive the attention it merits, it is a very important text not only in relation to Hume’s political thought as a whole but also for a full understanding of the intellectual history of the long eighteenth century as it partook in a set of wide-ranging conversations about the causes of demographic growth in which T. R. Malthus, amongst others, became engaged. This chapter first revisits Montesquieu’s position on the issue of the relative populousness of ancient and modern nations to show not only the true nature of the Frenchman’s views and that of the dispute between him and Hume but also the extent to which Hume’s reading of Montesquieu provided the basis for the Scot’s reflections on republics, liberty, the status of women and slavery in that essay and elsewhere. It underscores the centrality of demography to political debates of the period.

This chapter explores the many forms of bondage in the early English tropics, showing how difficult it can be to even define slavery from a global perspective, especially over the course of the seventeenth century. There was a blurry line between slavery and other conditions of bondage or subjugation, but the English gradually developed a more consistent approach to non-European enslavement across the tropics. By the 1680s, one particularly inflexible and brutal genus of racial slavery – forged in the Caribbean – had outcompeted most other forms of slavery and became the default in the English empire. This chapter highlights the difficulty in defining slavery and shows overlapping elements in bondage systems in the English tropics. It argues that one of the reasons that English slavery became more draconian and permanent than most other forms of slavery was that the English took steps in the comprehensive slave codes passed in the Caribbean to deny the subjecthood of the enslaved.

This chapter traces the developing English empire across the global tropics. Like their European rivals, English colonists, traders, and governors turned to forced labor and migration to maintain the tropical empire. As they forged this empire, English investors experimented with a wide variety of different colonial models. The early empire was not so neatly divided into territorial expansion in the West and commercial settlement in the East. English colonial architects tried to extend plantation agriculture beyond the Americas to West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and they tried to bring the spices and peppers of the East Indies to the West Indies to grow. They became both imitators and innovators, modeling the successful endeavors of European rivals but also carving their own path. Many of their overseas ventures were utter failures. Yet, slave-produced goods and factories constructed and maintained by forced labor ensured profit margins that would be high enough to continue to attract investors. By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery had become the defining feature of the English tropical empire, and there were slave majorities at most English sites in the tropics.