archives@tulane.edu / This dissertation argues that the public religious activism of free and enslaved women was essential to the growth of mainstream Protestant denominations in the late antebellum Gulf South. Women were not just a silent majority in the pews on Sundays and religious role models at home for their children. This project focuses specifically on the Gulf South of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana where from 1825 to 1861 women transformed the region from a frontier missionary field into the home of modern Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal denominations. They served as public fundraisers, advisors, instructors, and exhorters—championing the benevolent and evangelizing causes of their churches. Slaveholding women relied on enslaved female labor to fundraise for church projects and teach Sunday school in the mission to the enslaved. At the same time, some free and enslaved black women, even after Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion, found public spaces to speak, lead, and fund separate black churches. Women justified their activism by drawing on a combination of socially acceptable ideals including public motherhood, Christian benevolence, and the evangelizing duty of missionary Protestants. Ultimately, this dissertation maps a broader cultural geography of lived religion in the antebellum Gulf South. It adds new public spaces to the conversation, including classrooms, book depositories, benevolent societies, temperance rallies, and mission stations, and proposes a re-thinking of the southern home as more than solely a domestic space. Women turned their homes into sites of public religious practice. Likewise, planation chapels and slaveholder households were not just family or domestic spaces; they offered powerful and paradoxical identities for white women as benefactors, teachers, and oppressors. This project looks at biracial and segregated spaces, mixed-gender and female spaces, on and off plantations, and determines which spaces allowed Protestant women of color to speak or lead and which permitted white women but remained racially exclusive. This new map uncovers where Gulf South women found purpose, identity, and power through religious duty. / 1 / Emily H. Wright

ABSTRACT Charles W. Chesnutt captures the essence of the Post Civil War period and gives examples of the assimilation process for African Americans into dominant white culture. In doing so, he shows the resistance of the dominant culture as well as the resilience of the African American culture. It is his belief that through literature he could encourage moral reform and eliminate racial discrimination. As an African American author who could pass for white, he is able to share his own experiences and to develop black characters who are ambitious and intelligent. As a result, he leaves behind a legacy of great works that are both informative and entertaining.

An exploration of self-deception in proslavery arguments in the antebellum South. This work explores how proslavery theorists were able to support slavery despite overwhelming evidence that slavery was immoral. By using non-intentional self-deception, slavery supporters tested their hypothesis that slavery was good in a motivationally biased manner that aligned with their interests and desires.

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My objective with this thesis is to understand how racist stereotypes and myths compounded the sale of fair-skinned black women during and after the slave trade in New Orleans, Louisiana. This commodification of black women's bodies continued well into the twentieth century, notably in New Orleans' vice district of Storyville. Called "quadroons" (a person with ¼ African ancestry) and "octoroons" (1/8 African ancestry), these women were known for their "sexual prowess" and drew in a large number of patrons. The existence of "white passing" black women complicated ideas about race and racial purity in the South. Race as a myth and social construct, or as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains in her essay, African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race, a "metalanguage" exposes race not as a genetic fact, but rather a physical appearance through which power relations and status were to be conferred. My methodology uses race and gender theory to analyze primary and secondary sources to understand and contextualize how population demographics, myths, and liberal 18th century colonial laws contributed to the sale of black women's bodies. The works of Emily Clark, Walter Johnson, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and other historians who utilize Atlantic history have been paramount in my research. Emily Clark has transformed the "white-black" women from a tragic, sexualized trope into a fully actualized human being, while Hall has tackled the racist underpinnings inherent in the neglect of black women's history. The writings of bell hooks, particularly her essay Eating the Other, establishes the modern day commodification of black women vis-à -vis their representation in media, as well as through the fetishism of their bodies by a white patriarchal system. During slavery plantation owners could do virtually anything they wanted with their property, including engaging in sexual intercourse. By depicting black women as hypersexual jezebels, they could justify their rape, while establishing their dominance and place in the white male hegemony of that time period. For the right price a white male of a lesser class could achieve the same thing at a brothel down in Storyville at the turn of the twentieth century, for as Emily Clark argues in her book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon, these brothels were a great equalizer, allowing all white men to experience "…sexual mastery enjoyed only by elite planters before the Civil War." By democratizing white supremacy, the quadroon and others like her forged solidarity that bridge across all classes, while upholding whiteness and oppressing people of color at the same time.