Research

As a historian and researcher, I find myself drawn again and again to the intertwined histories of gender and race. My master’s thesis examined the lives of enslaved midwives in the long-eighteenth-century Chesapeake and their steady appropriation of plantation healthcare throughout the colonial and early republic periods. Moving nearly 200 years into the future, my recently published article, “By Girls and For Girls: Women’s Community and Racialized Performances in the Early Years of Rice Institute,” investigated the role of blackface performance in the creation of female belonging at Rice University. Though I have also researched topics outside of gender—for example, I have an article under review on several freed men who were reenslaved by the Overseers of the Poor in Accomack County, Virginia, in the 1820s—my dissertation, “The Virginian Atlantic: Enslaved Reproduction and the American South in the British Imagination,” follows this personal trend and works broadly to understand the intertwined roles of Virginia and enslaved reproduction in British abolitionist rhetoric, from the fight to abolish the transatlantic slave trade to well-beyond full British West Indian emancipation in 1838.

The transatlantic slave trade, and the British West Indian plantations that depended on it, came under intense scrutiny in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1780s and 90s, the House of Commons investigated the slave trade and in doing so heard hundreds of witnesses from the West Indies, the coast of Africa, and, importantly, the newly formed United States testify to their experiences with slavery and the slave trade. Virginia by this point was well known for its rapidly reproducing white and Black populations, and to British abolitionists this relatively unique quality made Virginia the perfect foil for the West Indies. Where Virginia’s populations flourished, the West Indies’ diminished; where Virginia outlawed the slave trade in 1788 and ceased relying on it decades earlier, the West Indies continued to rely on the importation of Africans. Virginian slaveowners, and to a lesser extent all slaveholders in the United States, were seen by British abolitionists to have mastered “slave breeding” as a comparably humane means of continuing the system of slavery without the slave trade. Because of this, Virginia was leveraged again and again by abolitionists to critique Caribbean slaveowners and their reliance on “the buying system.” However, as the nineteenth century wore on Virginia’s exemplary image in the minds of British abolitionists quickly deteriorated. I show that this fall from grace was sparked by Virginian slaveowners’ eager participation in the American domestic slave trade. Virginia had, in essence, perverted the abolitionist logic that enslaved reproduction meant the end of the slave trade and the eventual and gradual abolition of slavery. Importantly, however, British abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century continued to use the image of Virginia, though in drastically different ways than they had fifty years earlier.

Notwithstanding this drastic shift in public image, British abolitionists’ continued to use Virginia as an example to further their agendas, which reveals the continued importance of enslaved reproduction to British abolitionist and antislavery rhetoric, even after emancipation and the end of West Indian apprenticeship in 1838. In making this argument, my research makes two important scholarly interventions. First, I challenge the historiographical assumption that Virginia held little to no influence in the wider Atlantic. Historians have for decades detailed how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Virginia was deeply influenced by the rest of the Atlantic world but implicitly maintained that Virginia was not itself a source of influence. I, however, argue that in the late-eighteenth century, when enslaved reproduction became critical to the amelioration and continuation of West Indian slavery, Virginia gained considerable influence, which was intrinsically tied to enslaved women’s ability to reproduce children. Going further, I am deeply interested in the hyper-self-consciousness elite Virginians felt in relation to the mother country, and how desperately they desired to be a part of enlightenment discourses circulating the Atlantic. My dissertation explores how these men may have felt in this moment, when they were finally recognized; when Virginia’s image crumbled, however, my research shows that slaveholding Virginians became irate. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, my dissertation makes a crucial contribution to the historiography on British and transatlantic abolitionism. Building on the work of historians such as Sasha Turner and Katherine Paugh, my dissertation highlights the importance of enslaved reproduction in British abolitionism. However, while Turner and Paugh ended their works with British emancipation and the end of the apprenticeship system in 1838, my project continues through the 1850s and concludes on the eve of the Civil War. In doing so, I reveal how enslaved reproduction, and enslaved women and their bodies, remained at the crux of transatlantic abolitionism throughout the nineteenth century, even as efforts for gradual abolition fell away and immediatism took hold. Much of this historiography has been defined by change and evolution; the movement from moral to political abolitionism, from amelioration and gradual emancipation to immediatism, and from the British Atlantic to a global scope. In looking at a longer period of time and through the lens of Virginia, however, we are actually left with a profound sense of continuity. Reproduction, and the bodies and embodied abilities of enslaved women, remained at the very heart of both slavery and the fight for its abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic world.

“The Virginian Atlantic” is comprised of five chronological and semi-thematic chapters that trace the rise and fall of Virginia’s image in the British imagination from the debates over the closure of the transatlantic slave trade to the role of Black American abolitionist lecturers traveling Britain in the 1850s. Chapter 1, “‘Their Increase is So Great’: Virginia and the American South as Reproductive Exemplars,” reveals the importance of Virginia as an example of supposed mild treatment resulting in rapid reproduction during the British debates over the closure of the transatlantic slave trade. Chapter 2, “Ghost in the Plantation Machine: Enslaved Reproduction, Virginia’s Looming Image, and West Indian Anger,” moves away from the abolitionist perspective and instead focuses on West Indian slaveholders as they struggled to increase enslaved reproduction in Virginia’s increasingly frustrating shadow. Chapter 3, “‘The Breeding System’: Slave Breeding, British Abolitionists, and Virginia’s Shifting Image,” traces the terminology of “slave breeding” from the debates over the slave trade, during which it’s seen as a positive, to the 1830s, when it is becoming increasingly connected to Virginia’s role in the American domestic slave trade. Chapter 4, “An American Slavebreeder in London: The O’Connell-Stevenson Affair Across the Atlantic,” builds on chapter 3, focusing on an 1838 international scandal wherein MP Daniel O’Connell publicly questioned whether Andrew Stevenson, the American ambassador in London and a Virginian, was not only a slaveholder but “also a slave breeder.” Finally, Chapter 5, “The Image Undone: Virginia, the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, and Black Abolitionists,” looks at the 1840s and 1850s to see how Virginia’s image had become publicly cemented in the British imagination as a “slave breeding state.”