Theodore Parker was one of the leading intellectuals and militant abolitionists of the antebellum era who has been largely overlooked by modern scholars. He was a leading Transcendentalist intellectual and was also one of the most militant leaders of the abolitionist movement. Despite his fervent abolitionism, his writings reveal an attitude that today we would call racist or white supremacist. Some scholars have argued that Parker's motivation for abolishing slavery was to redeem the Anglo-Saxon race from the sin of slavery. I will dispute this claim and explore Parker's true understanding of race. How he could both believe in the supremacy of the white race, and at the same time, militantly oppose African slavery. Parker was influenced by the racial "science" of his era which supported the superiority of the Caucasian race. Conversely he also believed that everyone, including African slaves, had human dignity.

This thesis examines abolitionist support for interracial marriage. It demonstrates that far from being a marginal viewpoint within the movement, support for interracial marriage was widespread among both black and white abolitionists. Many abolitionists stated they personally did not recommend interracial marriage at present due to the backlash couples would face, while also denying that it was unnatural or immoral. A few abolitionists eschewed such a disclaimer. A few also married people of different races themselves. To a considerable extent, defense of interracial marriage was part of a larger push for racial integration and equality. This thesis also looks at British abolitionists who criticized the American stigma against interracial marriage, and children and grandchildren of abolitionists who defended interracial marriage, the most prominent being the famous, controversial lawyer, Clarence Darrow.

This thesis examines newspapers and correspondence of public men in the era of the Mexican war to provide some answers to pertinent questions regarding the South's role in the Mexican War. It attempts to reveal to some degree whether Southerners uniformly supported the war, whether their support arose from an expansionist sentiment or a desire to extend the area of slavery, whether any strong opposition to the war existed in the South, and why they supported or opposed it.

The major concern of this study is an attempt to analyze the attitudes.of Henry Clay, United States Congressman and Senator from Kentucky, 1807-1852, and three time presidential candidate, concerning the institution of slavery by examining its effects upon his political career from 1798 to 1850. The major conclusions of this study are that early in his life Clay made an intellectual commitment that slavery was wrong and maintained this abstract view of the institution until his death. However, Clay never took an active stand against slavery for three reasons: he believed that an antislavery stand would destroy his political career; he realized the explosiveness of the slavery issue as early as 1799, and his misguided love for the Union forced him to attempt to suppress the issue; and Clay was a racist who did not wish to see the United States populated with a sizable number of free blacks.

This thesis examines the ancestor figure in African American women writers’ neoslave narratives. Drawing on black feminist, critical race and whiteness studies and trauma theory, the thesis closely reads neo-slave narratives by Margaret Walker, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison and Phyllis Alesia Perry. The thesis aims to reconsider the ancestor figure by extending the definition of the ancestor as predecessor to include additional figurative and literal means used to invoke the ancestral past of enslavement. The thesis argues that the diverse ancestral figures in these novels demonstrate the prevailing effects of slavery on contemporary subjects, attest to the difficulties of historicising past oppressions and challenge post-racial discourses. Chapter 1 analyses Margaret Walker’s historical novel Jubilee (1966), identifying it as an important prerequisite for subsequent neo-slave narratives. The chapter aims to offer a new reading of the novel by situating it within a black feminist ideological framework. Taking into account the novel’s social and political context, the chapter suggests that the ancestral figures or elderly members of the slave community function as means of resistance, access to personal and collective history and contribute to the self-constitution of the protagonist. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Walker’s novel fulfils a politically engaged function of inscribing the black female subject into discussions on the legacy of slavery and drawing attention to the particularity of black women’s experiences. Chapter 2 examines Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1978), featuring a contemporary black woman’s return to the antebellum past and her discovery of a white slaveholding ancestor. The chapter introduces the term “displacement” to explore the transformative effects of shifting positionalities and destabilisation of contemporary frames of reference. The chapter suggests that the novel challenges idealised portrayals of a slave community and expresses scepticism regarding its own premise of fictionally reimagining slavery. With its inconclusive ending, Kindred ultimately illustrates how whiteness and dominant versions of history prevail in the seemingly progressive present. Chapter 3 discusses Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975) and its subversion of the matrilineal model of tradition by reading the maternal ancestor’s narrative as oppressive, limiting and psychologically burdening. The chapter introduces the term “ancestral subtext” in order to identify the ways in which ancestral narratives of enslavement serve as subtexts to the descendants’ lives and constrict their subjectivities. The chapter argues that the ancestral subtexts frame contemporary practices, inform the notion of selfhood and attest to the reproduction of past violence in the present. Chapter 4 deals with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998) exploring complex ancestral figures as survivors of the Middle Passage and their connection to Africa as an affective site of identity reclamation. The chapter identifies the role the quilt, the skill of quilting and their metaphorical potential as symbolic means of communicating ancestral trauma and conveying multivoiced “ancestral articulations”. The chapter suggests that the project of healing and recovering the self in relation to ancestral enslavement are premised on re-connecting with African cultural contexts and an intergenerational exchange of the culturally specific skill of quilting.

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This study is an examination of the legal basis of slavery in New Jersey from 1665 to 1865. It traces the laws concerning slavery in the colony from the proprietor period until abolishment in 1865. The purpose of this study is to show how slavery was legally developed in this northern state and to prove that slavery was more than a national issue, but was also a state issue. New Jersey was cut in half on the issue of slavery for the same reasons that the country was split in half, which is why this study is so very important. Although no state of war took place, all the underlining issues surrounding slavery were present. Slave labor was more profitable in East Jersey, with its large farms, than in West Jersey, where the farms were family operated. Since East Jersey tended to have more slave labor, it also passed more laws prohibiting the movement of slaves in an effort to discourage slave revolts. The New Jersey Society for the Abolition of Slavery and the Society of Friends (Quakers), who tended to favor the abolition of slavery, were concentrated in West Jersey, where the need for slave labor was less prevalent. The Quakers played a very large role in the enactment of anti-slavery laws and the gradual abolition of the institution of slavery in New Jersey. Most of the research for this study was done at Stockton State College in Pomona, New Jersey the South Jersey reservoir for primary documents such as the Abstracts of Wills and advertisements. The New Jersey Archives located in Trenton, New Jersey, provided original copies of maps, pamphlets and the minutes of various groups and their constitutions. All the laws discussed in this study were found in the Atlantic Municipal Court Law Library in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Thesis advisor: Kevin Kenny / Immigrants in a Time of Civil War: The Irish, Slavery, and the Union, 1845-1865 Ian Delahanty (Kevin Kenny, adviser) Irish Americans' involvement in the national conflict over slavery that engulfed the United States from 1845 to 1865 reflected the international perspective of an immigrant group. Many Irish first encountered the issue of American slavery in Ireland, where nationalists and abolitionists clashed over Ireland receiving aid from America during the Irish potato famine. Irish nationalists decried abolitionism as harmful to national unity and neglectful of Irish poverty, an argument that the famine immigrants brought with them to America and adapted to Irish Americans' circumstances. At the same time, many Irish Americans saw their adopted country as a sanctuary for the oppressed and as a future ally for an independent Ireland. They were loath to see the nation divided, and in the sectional crisis of the 1850s, they blamed antislavery agitators for pushing America to the brink of civil war. Irish immigrants' antebellum support for slavery resulted from these transatlantic strains of anti-abolitionism and Unionism. When the Civil War began in 1861, Irish Americans rallied to the Union cause in order to preserve and perpetuate the United States as an immigrant haven and as a model republic. Many soon feared that Republicans' antislavery war policies were not only prolonging the war but also weakening the position of immigrant labor. Yet other Irish immigrants, especially those in the army, learned from the progression of the war that emancipation would facilitate the Union's restoration. Crucially, wartime developments--including British foreign policy, emigration from Ireland, and a rejuvenated Irish nationalist movement in Ireland and America--sustained the notion that the Union's survival had a tangible and particular importance to the Irish. By the end of the conflict, many Irish immigrants who had once defended slavery were advocates of emancipation. Countless northerners underwent a similar change. But the Irish-American story shows that immigrants' backgrounds in their homeland and their unique status in America combined to give them a singular perspective on the internecine conflict over slavery. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Magister Artium - MA / This mini-thesis, ‘Exhumation, Reburial and History Making in South Africa’, is concerned with an analysis of the practices of exhumation and reburial through discussing the case studies of the Iron-Age archaeological site of Mapungubwe, the Vergelegen Wine Estate in Somerset West and the reburials carried out by the Missing Persons Task Team (MPPT) from the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), particularly its unsuccessful attempt at exhumations at the Stikland Cemetery, in an attempt to understand how they form part of the production of history. These case studies conceive of the times of the precolonial, slavery and apartheid, and are all linked temporally to an envisaged future through ideas of nation building and nationalism. As narratives produced through these exhumations and reburials, they contribute to the notion of making the post-apartheid by remaking history and reconstituting nation. Each of these case studies are significant as they in some way have been utilized in a manner that is relevant to us in the new democratic South Africa. This mini-thesis aims at rethinking the role of archaeologists, the exhumation and reburial processes, the construction of ethnicity, how the dead are used to construct narratives of struggle against apartheid and in general the implications each of these have on the re-making of history. It also thinks about what the practices of exhumation and reburial mean conceptually and how they relate to the concept of missingness, which I refer to as the process of making absence or invisibility. Thinking about exhumations and reburial in this way has allowed reflection on the purpose of the practices, in terms of who it’s for and how it’s perceived by the stakeholders involved in each case. Through dissecting each of these issues one may be able to trace how the remains to be reburied become missing. Therefore, the question of exhumation and reburial is essential in thinking about what it does for the human remains and how their identity is either shaped or lost. This thesis mainly argues that the remains in each of the case studies go through various phases of missingness and that their reburials and memorialization, or in the case of Stikland the spiritual repatriation, inscribes them further into narratives of the times that they emerged from.

This dissertation tells the story of the abolition of chattel slavery in Colombia, currently the country with the third largest population of African descent in the Western Hemisphere (after the United States and Brazil). In Colombia, as in the vast majority of Latin American nations and the northern United States, the abolition of slavery occurred through a gradual emancipation law. Enacted in 1821 in the aftermath of the Wars of Independence against Spanish colonial rule, this law banned the international slave trade, established local civic councils to manumit “deserving” slaves, and included a Free Womb law that declared the children of slave mothers to be born free, yet bonded them to their mothers’ masters until the age of adulthood. My project unravels the struggles over freedom and bondage during this protracted process of gradual emancipation in the households, courtrooms, streets, and gold mines of the Pacific Coast of Colombia, the region with the highest concentration of slaves and the gold mining center of the former Spanish Empire. "To The Mine I Will Not Go" fundamentally rethinks the nineteenth century project of emancipation by arguing that the freedom generated through the gradual abolition of slavery constituted a modern form of rule that paradoxically birthed new forms of racial domination while consolidating de facto slavery.