Lindsay M. Keiter, Stuart H. Marshall, Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, Gustave Lester, Rachel B. Herrmann
{"title":"Connubial Adventurers: Playing the Matrimonial Lottery in British America","authors":"Lindsay M. Keiter, Stuart H. Marshall, Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, Gustave Lester, Rachel B. Herrmann","doi":"10.1353/eam.2023.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2023.0000","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The connection between marriage and lotteries emerged with the first British state lotteries and persisted throughout the eighteenth century in British America, despite the well-documented rise of companionate marriage. Drawing extensively on newspapers rather than fiction or prescriptive literature, Keiter reveals a deep current of skepticism about these changing ideals. Lottery analogies and satirical lottery schemes circulated widely, showing a shared set of expectations and concerns in the young nation. These tropes emphasized the continued centrality of wealth to marriage while suggesting that marital happiness remained a gamble with unfavorable odds.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"51 2 1","pages":"1 - 121 - 122 - 165 - 166 - 199 - 41 - 42 - 86 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90073508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dividing the Carolinas: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the Prerevolutionary Boundary Dispute, 1763–1773","authors":"Stuart H. Marshall","doi":"10.1353/eam.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Between 1763 and 1773, North and South Carolina officials intensified their competition over their western backcountry when they attempted to resolve the boundary that had remained in question for decades. Historiography about this boundary has failed to recognize how common people in the Carolinas—Indians, colonists, and slaves—set the terms for the dispute and shaped the geography of early America. This boundary dispute offers a unique comparative glimpse of the Carolinas and exposes their most severe internal divisions—for North Carolina, the widespread Regulator movement that originated in disputes over western land, and for South Carolina, the heightened risk of slave revolts that accompanied the province's development. Catawba Indians occupied a central focus of the dispute, courted as an essential ally by South Carolina, while Cherokees hoped to halt the western expansion of both Carolinas. The boundary dispute determined the future of the diverging Carolinas, particularly in foreshadowing the tensions of state formation that manifested during the American Revolution. Indians, colonists, and slaves claimed their own spaces in between the imaginary lines of imperial power.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"2 1","pages":"42 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88350308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Émigré and the General: Denis Volozan's Portrait of George Washington in an Atlantic Context","authors":"Thomas Busciglio-Ritter","doi":"10.1353/eam.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In 1802, the French painter Denis Volozan (1765–1820) completed a posthumous portrait of George Washington commissioned by the legislature of Delaware for its State House in Dover. A recent immigrant to the United States, the artist had relocated to Philadelphia from the island of Saint-Domingue at the height of the Haitian Revolution. Once it was unveiled, however, the painting provoked widespread public dislike. Hidden from view, it was barely saved from destruction in the 1960s. Though the choice to entrust Volozan with such a project may have seemed like poor judgment to contemporary audiences, this article argues that his portrait illustrates the symbolic reinterpretation of Washington by transatlantic French diasporas in North America and the Caribbean, of which the painter was a part. Volozan was familiar with depictions of both European elites and figures of power like Toussaint Louverture, whom he had sketched in 1800. As such, his approach to American political portraiture was a result of greater dynamics of circulation in the Atlantic world. Celebrating a patriotic figure, his Delaware picture was nonetheless shaped by the political and cultural interactions between France, Britain, and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"25 1","pages":"121 - 87"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73718542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Land, Fur, and Copper: The Union of Settler Colonialism and Industrial Capitalism in the Great Lakes Region, 1815–1842","authors":"Gustave Lester","doi":"10.1353/eam.2023.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2023.0003","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and the rise of mineral-intensive industrial manufacturing in the United States. Land expropriated from Anishinaabe nations in what is currently the Upper Peninsula of the state of Michigan was one of the largest sources of copper for nineteenth-century U.S. industrial capitalists. The U.S. takeover of mineral-rich Anishinaabe land reflects the early union of settler colonial ambitions for the Great Lakes region with an emerging political economy of national self-sufficiency by way of continental supplies of raw materials typically imported from overseas. After the War of 1812, U.S. officials imagined the transformation of Anishinaabewaki into the material basis of an independent U.S. copper industry. Accordingly, they employed geologists to conduct fieldwork within Indigenous territories to help guide and facilitate the process of treaty making. However, the authority of the United States remained weak where they had little control over commerce and could not depend on the pressures of encroaching settler populations. Only by granting and enforcing a trade monopoly with the American Fur Company were U.S. leaders able to make inroads toward their goals of acquiring territorial control over the raw materials of industrial capitalism and dispossessing the Anishinaabeg.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"90 1","pages":"122 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85655065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Consider the Source: An 1800 Maroon Treaty","authors":"Rachel B. Herrmann","doi":"10.1353/eam.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In 1800, an exiled community of Jamaican Maroons migrated from Nova Scotia to the British antislavery colony of Sierra Leone. When they disembarked, Maroon captains met with Sierra Leone Company officials and rapidly negotiated and coauthored a treaty. This treaty is a composite manuscript document scattered throughout the National Archives at Kew (United Kingdom). The diplomatic customs that Maroons and British officials observed at the negotiation—including making speeches, reading script words aloud, and refusing to sign documents—marked the document as a treaty. This essay makes the case that the source is a treaty; explains and contextualizes the negotiation that occurred; and explores the themes of settlement, alliance, and antislavery that changed in Maroon treaties in Jamaica and Sierra Leone in the eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"54 1","pages":"166 - 199"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85187270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Brought from the Palenques\": Race, Subjecthood, and Warfare in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean","authors":"C. Schmitt","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article analyzes the intersection of racial status and subjecthood following the mid-seventeenth-century English invasion of Spanish Jamaica by focusing on the experiences of a group of Spanish Jamaican captives of African descent from the Porus region. By tracing the violent transformation of the Porus captives from individuals with claims to Spanish subjecthood into \"slaves,\" this article shows that the captives did not disappear or die out as historians have assumed; rather, they were forcibly removed. Bridging historiographic and archival divides reveals the alchemy of their erasure both at the time and in modern historical practice. In the end, the forced transportation of the Porus captives from Jamaica underscores the vulnerability of people of African descent in a Caribbean world shaped, if not yet by sugar and slavery, then certainly by enslavement and warfare.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"57 1","pages":"695 - 713"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79169899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Corruption of the Air\": Yellow Fever and Malaria in the Rise of English Caribbean Slavery","authors":"Justin Roberts","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:The yellow fever epidemic that struck Barbados in 1647 was a hinge point in the development of English slavery. European newcomers to the tropics were more likely than West Africans to succumb to the effects of both yellow fever and malaria, diseases that originated in Africa and became more prevalent in the Americas with the expansion of the slave trade. The \"Africanization\" of the Caribbean disease environment after 1647 hastened the transition to slave economies. The impact of the first Barbadian yellow fever epidemic and the spread of yellow fever and falciparum malaria through the sugar islands has been underemphasized in the specialist literature on the rise of slavery in English Caribbean. The change in the disease environment shaped many aspects of slave societies. It played a role in the trajectory of the sugar frontier, in the development of gang labor, in the rise of large integrated planation units, and in colonial debates about the classification and inheritance of slave property.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"34 1","pages":"653 - 672"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75177509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Not \"Beyond the line\": Reconsidering Law and Power and the Origins of Slavery in England's Empire in the Americas","authors":"H. Brewer","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0022","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This paper challenges Dunn's framing of the early Caribbean and the emergence of slavery as \"beyond the line\" of English laws or justice or even social norms. It situates his claims within a longer and more elaborate historiography that portrays slavery as emerging within colonies themselves and via the actions of independent colonists. Then it challenges the assumptions of that framing by investigating the extent of English involvement in their empire, via imperial officials and policies including war and treaties and legal strategizing. Exploring the connections between different colonies amid the early legal and political uncertainty during the first decades of English settlement in the Americas illuminates how and why imperial support for slavery was crucial to its development.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"92 1","pages":"619 - 639"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91259935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"Plantation,\" the Public Good, and the Rise of Capitalist Agriculture in the Early Seventeenth-Century Caribbean","authors":"Paul Musselwhite","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In sixteenth-century English colonialism the term \"plantation\" had carried entirely public connotations, but through the 1630s and 1640s English Caribbean settlers consciously muddied this definition and applied the term to private, profit-driven landholdings while seeking to retain its public connotations. This article traces the transformation of the term \"plantation\" in the region and highlights its implications for the ways that English colonists were able to organize and rationalize their exploitation of people and the environment. The article first charts the ways that the public definition of the plantation shaped early settlement. The next two sections consider the circumstances that drove definitional innovation. English settlers in the Antilles chain responded to the imposition of a proprietary property regime by claiming the public status of the plantation for individual estates. Conversely the Providence Island Company's rejection of private landownership led settlers to use the idea of the plantation to define their private stake in the venture. Ultimately the article's final section demonstrates that elite settlers embraced a new hybrid public private definition of the plantation because it offered them a way to legitimize their pursuit of private profit, and it helped to structure and justify their control over bound and enslaved people.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"42 1","pages":"597 - 618"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79065788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Sugar and Slaves after Fifty Years","authors":"T. Burnard, A. Games","doi":"10.1353/eam.2022.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eam.2022.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:A brief essay introducing a special issue devoted to exploring the scholarly legacies of Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English, 1624–1713, first published in 1972, upon the fiftieth anniversary of the work.","PeriodicalId":43255,"journal":{"name":"Early American Studies-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":"61 1","pages":"549 - 556"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82050803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}