“Accidentally on the Levee": Atlantic Networks, National Identities, and Law in Black Sailors' Freedom Suits in the Nineteenth-Century Circum-Caribbean

• In Event: Daily Life and Death in Port Cities of the Colonial Circum-Caribbean

Abstract

This paper explores the close relationship between legal claims to freedom and imperial and national belonging in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. Specifically, this research examines freedom petitions from the antebellum US South initiated by illegally enslaved black sailors from the circum-Caribbean. In local courthouses in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Mississippi, black sailors from places like Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, and Curaçao petitioned for their freedom and provided rich narrative testimonies about their lived experiences across the Atlantic World. Taken together, their petitions reveal important details about how black sailors used the law to gain their freedom - specifically through Atlantic networks comprised of fellow sailors who served as their witnesses, assisted in legal aid, and provided character references for petitioners. These freedom suits reflect the lived experiences of Atlantic black sailors in local courts in the antebellum US South as petitioners and their witnesses told stories about freedom, captivity, and illicit trade in the circum-Caribbean. Further, notions and rhetoric of imperial and national belonging were important to their narratives and connected their petitions to nineteenth-century ideas of black subjecthood and citizenship. As a result, their freedom suits reflect some of the ways in which free and enslaved black sailors envisioned themselves as subjects and citizens within imperial and national projects across the Atlantic World. Ultimately, this paper frames black sailors as active individuals who shaped evolving definitions of imperial and national belonging across the Atlantic legal world.

Author

• Jessica S Fletcher, Vanderbilt University