51 pages • 1 hour read
Closer to Freedom
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Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses—often in graphic detail—slavery, white supremacy, killing, sexual assault and rape, torture, surveillance, and other forms of violence. Source materials also include racist and sexist language.
The Introduction begins with an assessment of slavery studies over the last hundred years. Stephanie M. H. Camp notes that the study of enslaved resistance gained sustained attention among scholars at the end of the 20th century and helped move historical research away from earlier nostalgic, apologist approaches to slavery. At first glance, this scholarship seems to approach the lives of enslaved people through inquiries that assume an either/or approach of accommodation or resistance: Scholars wonder if enslaved people identified with their enslavers or created their own identities, for instance, or if enslaved people accepted their positions as enslaved, or refused it. These either/or questions, however, dissolve upon closer inspection, and many contemporary scholars explicitly explore the dissolution of these supposed dichotomies, investigating the ways that enslaved people were “both agents and subjects, persons and property, and people who resisted and accommodated” (1).
Nonetheless, studies of resistance to enslavement are often accused of being naïve—of placing too much emphasis on the ability of enslaved people to resist the system of slavery. At the same time, however, these studies simultaneously reveal the immense range of mechanisms enslavers employed to subjugate people, thus underscoring the extreme violence under which enslaved people lived and often necessarily resisted.
Camp proposes that the methods behind the study of resistance must change. She concedes that there will probably not be many new sources revealed, so the ways of reading these sources must be “innovative.” Camp’s focus is on “everyday resistances.” These include “foot dragging, short-term flight, and feigning illness” (2), which have long been understood as ways to gain some temporary control. Camp is interested in how these seemingly small acts—what might “otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper” (2)—might have a larger significance. These acts lie between open resistance and accommodation, and in the context of slavery, where enslaved people did not generally have recourse within formal institutions such as legal or political systems, everyday resistance was particularly important.
The most commonly studied form of slave resistance is the spectacular, organized, almost exclusively male, insurrection, such as Nat Turner’s. However, examining women’s resistances does not just add to the study of resistance, but it changes that study, moving away from “the visible and organized to the hidden and informal” (3). In describing this look at the proverbial other side of the coin, however, Camp reiterates that one of the main themes of the book is its own “attenuation of dichotomies” such as “private/public, personal/political, organized rebellion/everyday resistance” (3), introducing her scholarship through familiar and sometimes helpful frameworks so that she can then also revise these frameworks.
Camp is specifically interested in women’s bodies and the spaces in which women live as sites of both “domination and resistance” (4), and the second, broad theme of the book is “the spatial history of American slavery” (5). Unlike other studies on which Camp builds, she pays more attention to the ways that enslaved people moved within spaces and less attention to the built environment that fostered stability. In considering this movement within controlled space, Camp adopts postcolonial theorist Edward Said’s term “rival geography,” which refers to the ways the colonized use space to resist colonization, dispossession, and occupation. Unlike Said, whose rival geography focuses on the “repossession of land in the face of dispossession” (7), Camp’s rival geography is defined by “mobility in the face of constraint” (7). This rival geography does not aim to achieve permanence or physical stability, as the enslavers’ geography did—with its domineering architecture and infrastructure of the plantation—but, instead, is defined by motion.
Camp’s analysis of space, slavery, race, and gender focuses on the antebellum era (1830-1861) in the southern United States but also considers earlier articulations, going back to the 1600s.
Sources range from enslavers’ diaries, correspondence, and journals; legislative records; 19th-century slave narratives; and late 19th- and early 20th-century interviews of formerly enslaved people. Camp notes that each of these sources is inherently problematic, with most historians focusing on interviews as the most reliable sources. Camp describes her methodology as one that works with consistencies across texts as well as with inconsistencies, which can themselves yield insights.
Chapter 1 examines why enslavers insisted on pervasive and detailed control of enslaved people. Chapters 2-4 focus on barely perceptible “everyday resistance” to this control, concentrating on truancy, illegal parties, and enslaved women’s displays of abolitionist imagery in domestic spaces. Chapter 5 examines the opening up of the rival geography in enslaved people’s flights to Union camps during the Civil War and the integration of Union soldiers into this rival geography.
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Geography of Containment: The Bondage of Space and Time”
Chapter 1 provides information about enslavers’ “geographies of containment” of enslaved people (16). Camp begins by positioning enslaved persons as “captive losers in a battle for power” that began hundreds of years ago (12). Europeans who traveled the Atlantic world viewed Africans as “fundamentally enslaveable.” Once enslaved, they were treated as prisoners of war.
Enslavement as a form of permanent containment and captivity is most entrenched in the 19th-century, antebellum southern United States (or “Plantation South”). While slavery denied a wide range of freedoms, this denial of the freedom of mobility is Camp’s focus.
Many enslaved people themselves defined slavery as imprisonment and the inability to move; this facet of slavery began to develop in the colonial period, with Virginia passing laws regarding enslaved mobility as early as the 1600s. The 1680 slave law regarding insurrection prevented enslaved people from possessing weapons and also from leaving their designated locations. In the mid and late 1700s, the Virginia Assembly passed laws prohibiting both “outlying” (truant, or temporary abandonment) and “outlawed” (fugitive, or permanent abandonment) activity. Truancy was ruled punishable by dismemberment and death.
Mobility was monitored more than any other enslaved activity that could be seen as potentially facilitating independence. In tandem with legislation restricting movement, geographies of containment were developing, which functioned both metaphorically and literally, with physical space designed around social place. Enslaved people had to stay “in place,” both socially and geographically.
Many of the earliest enslavers in South Carolina came from Barbados, and they established a system for monitoring slave mobility based on a “ticketing” system in Barbados. Enslaved people were only allowed to move off plantations after having been given a ticket stating names, an intended destination, and the time to be spent at this destination. There was a fine for the first offense of being caught without a ticket; the second offense was punishable by whipping, burning of the face, and slitting of the nose; and the third offense was punishable by death. By the early 1700s, any enslaved person caught without a ticket could be killed.
After the Revolutionary War, proslavery rhetoric supporting geographies of containment shifted from patriarchal to paternalistic. In the colonial era, patriarchal enslavers did not attempt to convince enslaved people of the morality of enslavement; this hierarchy was generally considered unequivocal, and patriarchal enslavers did not care whether enslaved people shared these views. By the antebellum era, however, slaveholding ideology became paternalistic, in part because the Revolution had triumphed over the hierarchy of colonial rule.
Paternalistic slavery was grounded not only in containing enslaved people’s movement but also in controlling their time. Time had become increasingly regulated and measured by the antebellum period, so that by the 19th century, the agricultural workday was as much determined by tools of time-tracking as it was by natural rhythms. The sonic landscape of enslavement became populated by bells and horns to designate time and thus dictate labor.
With paternalistic enslavement, slave patrol activity became organized and ubiquitous and not dependent on individual enslavers, and these patrols circulated the most when enslaved people were in motion the most, such as on holidays or at the end of harvest. Enslavers, as well as white overseers and Black drivers, were also informally involved in slave patrolling. Many drivers were punished alongside enslaved people when they were found outside their relegated space.
Labor that required enslaved people to leave the plantation, such as moving goods and correspondence, was generally the purview of men. In “abroad” marriages, in which spouses lived on different plantations, men were also usually the ones allowed to visit, though tickets—or what came to be known as “passes”—that allowed for overnight stays were rare. Even with a ticket or pass, movement was dangerous, as it depended on the whims of the slave patrols, who made money off catching fugitives. Nonetheless, enslaved men traveling to visit their partners and wives were an ordinary sight during the 19th century. Women were generally not issued tickets or passes and were much less mobile than men and therefore much more conspicuous whenever in public spaces.
Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis
Camp positions her own study of enslavement within the current state of slavery studies, underscoring the ways that the field has moved away from either/or analysis and into an “attenuation” of the dichotomies that previously assumed enslaved people were either complicit or rebellious, as if there were only two opposed ways of living within slavery. Camp argues that the study of resistance, in particular, must change to reflect this attenuation. Camp’s focus on “everyday resistances” enacts the methodological innovation that she calls for: She explores the ways in which actions that historians had previously dismissed as temperamental eccentricities or poor judgment may have been “everyday resistances.” These resistances were not always necessarily unpleasant but were sometimes deeply pleasurable, such as the experience of illegal parties and the creation of “fancy” clothing.
While Camp places her own historical work within the Attenuation of Dichotomies in Slavery Studies, her specific interest in space relies on the work of postcolonial studies and, specifically, Edward Said’s postcolonial theory of “rival geography.” Camp revises Said’s focus on the colonized struggle to repossess the land that colonialism has occupied to consider enslaved people’s struggles to move through the plantation spaces that enslavers surveilled and controlled. Rather than a rival geography claiming possession and stability on land in the face of dispossession, enslaved people’s rival geography attempted to move through geographies of containment as well as live within these geographies by moving resistant materials into them.
This definition of mobility as the determining principle of the rival geography aligns enslavement with imprisonment. Unlike other specialties within slavery studies, such as economic focuses that explore the history of capitalism’s commodification of enslaved life and the subjective pain of that commodification, Camp approaches slavery studies through a geographical framework, focusing on the pain of restricted movement as well as the pleasures of mobility and also stasis, when desired.
The first chapter, unlike subsequent chapters, is concerned with the “geography of containment” that enslavers enforced. Camp reads the desire for containment in the pattern of laws that emerged in the 1600s in the South. This analysis is less difficult than the analysis that follows in the rest of the book, which teases out the contours of the rival geography via “innovative” readings of source materials. The source materials of enslavers, on the other hand, do not conceal geographies but instead articulate them in detail. Camp thus traces, rather than imagines, how the geographical desires of enslavers—their domination of space and human lives—are explicit in a range of laws as well as the built environment.
By the 1800s, American slaveholding society became increasingly concerned with the mobility of enslaved people, even as the ideological framework of enslavers shifted from a patriarchal domination to the paternalistic “soft” violence that sought enslaved people’s “consent” to subjugation. While antebellum enslavers sometimes were “humane” and provided enough food, adequate shelter, and entertainment, they increasingly surveilled enslaved people, clamping down on movement outside their own specific realm of surveillance through the organization of slave patrols. While paternalism may have increased the quantity and quality of essentials, it is also increased the constriction of mobility, and these simultaneous shifts reveal an inherent quality of American slavery as well as modern forms of slavery, which may not commodify an individual but do seek to control movement. Though Camp does not discuss 21st-century slavery, her work is relevant to current studies of modern slavery, where “human traffickers” are defined by their movement (trafficking) of those who are refused mobility. Camp’s work is grounded in the 19th century, but her work can be expanded to illuminate the features of modern human slavery.
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