An underground railway to Pensacola and the Impending Crisis over Slavery

In June 1850, several months before the United States Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, a runaway slave from Pensacola, Florida, became embroiled in the growing sectional conflict. The bondsman\u27s name was Adam, and he was a twenty-one year old blacksmith at the Pensacola Navy Yard who snuck aboard the brig Mary Farrow just prior to its departure for New England. When the ship\u27s captain discovered the stowaway in the ship\u27s hold three days after embarking, he ordered a keelhauling, an archaic punishment whereby victims were thrown overboard and dragged by a rope underneath the boat\u27s keel; the crew refused to allow the ritual to take place, however, and Adam remained unharmed until the vessel landed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, several days later. Having already received a letter from Pensacola warning of Adam\u27s arrival, law enforcement officials waited at the dock where they planned to arrest the bondsman upon his disembarkation

Cwbr Author Interview: Aiming For Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves On The Atlantic And Southern Frontiers

Interview with Matthew J. Clavin, author of Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers Interviewed by Tom Barber Civil War Book Review (CWBR): Today the Civil War Book Review is happy to speak with Matthew J. Clavin, associate professor of history at the U...

Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad

Reviewer Matthew J. Clavin writes that abolitionist William Still has been overshadowed by prominent antislavery activists like “Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Tubman” and others. However, Andrew K Diemer’s Vigilance: The Life of William Still, Father of the Underground Railroad (Alfred A. Knopf) is a “well-written and deeply researched biography” that will ensconce Still’s among the most important abolitionists agitators. The book itself, Clavin writes, will similarly earned “a place on the shelf of new and important works on abolitionists, abolitionism, and the Underground Railroad.

Runaway Slave Advertisements in Antebellum Florida: A Retrospective

As the abolitionist minister\u27s observation suggests, enslaved African Americans were neither content nor happy. Indeed, rom day-to-day acts of covert resistance to brazen acts of open rebellion, slaves in the antebellum United States daily proved the lie of paternalism as even a cursory glance at the historiography of the South over the last half-century attests. Nevertheless, for anyone still unconvinced of the American slaves\u27 thirst for freedom, there is a large cache of historical records that obliterate the myth of black Southerners accepting their enslaved status passively. Published in independently owned newspapers in nearly every significant city and town in the antebellum South, runaway slave advertisements-which offered cash awards for the capture of fugitive slaves or notified slaveowners of the incarceration of suspected runaways-have changed the way students, teachers, and scholars understand slavery

Capturing the likeness of Henry I of Haiti (1805–1822)

This article explores the role played by representations of General Henry Christophe, later King Henry I of Haiti, in relations between Great Britain and the section of independent Haiti he led in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In these early years, when France threatened to try and recover its former colony by force, relations with Great Britain were essential to the survival of the new country. Led by those British merchants who had early built commercial ties with Haiti, Great Britain looked with a mixture of wariness and interest on Haiti at large and Henry in particular. This article argues that English representations of Henry in turn gave the Haitian leader cues as to how to portray himself for British audiences. In order to gain diplomatic recognition, Henry I of Haiti self-consciously made himself recognizable to British eyes, playing up those aspects of his persona most palatable to the English. Henry’s exchanges with England have often been seen as proof of genuine Anglophilia on his part; this article analyzes them as a strategic effort dedicated to swaying English public opinion in his support by portraying him as a product of English influence. The discussion of a lost portrait of the king – rediscovered in archival research – demonstrates that domestic representations of King Henry appealed to profoundly different expectations. Drawing on the latest works in Haitian Revolutionary Studies by Deborah Jenson and Chris Bongie, this article contends that with his portraits Henry of Haiti pieced together a complex, ambivalent political bid by which he hoped to gain the recognition of England while retaining that of the black world

“Sacred to the Hart”*: Identity and dignity as reflected in the memorial landscapes of postemancipation African Americans in Pensacola, Florida

This article broadens the discussion of 19th century monuments associated with the Lost Cause by exploring the monument landscapes of post-emancipation African American cemeteries and the people who are associated with them. Method. Exemplars from several cemeteries in Pensacola, Florida, are used to examine how the post-emancipation population maintained deep ties to their cultural roots while assimilating into society as free people. Results. The built environment of postemancipation African American cemeteries contains monuments reflecting black identity and dignity in life and in death. Conclusions. Examining a broader sample of memorial landscapes can be a starting point in expanding the national dialogue on our country’s history in a more inclusive fashion. Historic cemeteries, especially African American cemeteries established post-Civil War, offer an excellent means of doing this in a manner that almost all citizens can understand and respectJournal ArticlePublishe