Artifacts tell stories. Sometimes the tales are unclear
or even contradictory, and sometimes artifacts—not
unlike a dishonest diarist—can even lead the unwary
historian astray. But the material culture of enslaved
Americans, from buttons and beads to hammers and weapons,
can often reveal as much to modern scholars as the written
word. Especially for those people known as the “historically
inarticulate,” working men and women who did not
bequeath us a Jeffersonian cache of thousands of letters
to peruse, tangible material remains are often all that
historians or archaeologists have at their disposal as
they seek to reconstruct the lost world of the American
past. An almost endless supply of documents from a master’s
big house can tell us about the planter class, but other
kinds of information can help us to understand how African
Americans built their homes, cooked their food, dressed
themselves, and on occasion, resisted their enslavement
by picking up a sword.
Perhaps the one of the best examples of how scholars
can use material culture to help recover the past is
the artifacts discovered in New York City in 1991. As
construction workers excavated a building site, they
uncovered the remains of roughly 400 slaves, some of
them Africans. The way any society mourns its dead always
says much about its values, but the bones interred nearly
200 years ago reveal far more than the grief of loved
ones. Most of the bones, for example, indicate the hardships
faced by the black men and women who labored in post-Revolutionary
Manhattan, a port that was then the second most demographically
black city in the early Republic. (Only Charleston had
a larger percentage of black residents.) Half the bones
were from teenagers, and many more displayed torn ligaments,
enlarged muscles, and even broken neck bones. Brass
buttons, shoe buckles, and ceremonial objects also disclosed
what written documents from the 1790s rarely do: how
slaves dressed, what sort of shoes they wore, and how
African spirituality survived the long passage to the
Americas.
The material culture of slave life often exposes what
written documents obscure. It enables historians to
paint a more complete picture of the slave community
-- especially that part of slave life hidden from the
master -- by searching for evidence of what, say, slaves
ate, or even what sort of dolls they crafted for their
daughters. Those of us who write about slave rebellions
typically have less need for such artifacts, since enslaved
Americans who ran afoul of the law inadvertently created
the sort of paper trail that historians always hope
to find: newspaper reports, court documents, and written
commentary about the event from judges, mayors, governors,
and even presidents. Nevertheless, artifacts and material
culture can enrich the study of topics usually examined
through written documents.
Although written documents—letters, wills, government
papers—are customarily treated as sources that
are qualitatively distinct from material culture, in
some cases they may be treated as artifacts because
of how they appear, rather than what the words
on the parchment actually say.
(Click here for the Solomon documents) In this case
a slave named Solomon is on trial for the crime of conspiracy
and insurrection. On the face of it, the case appears
simple. Solomon, the brother of the slave rebel Gabriel,
had been arrested in early September, 1800 just outside
of Richmond, Virginia, and several other slaves who
lived on the plantation of Thomas Henry Prosser provided
testimony against him. Yet in the same way that a discarded
animal bone can tell us about the diet of a man like
Solomon, this brief document may be deconstructed so
that it speaks volumes about black rebelliousness, Virginia
law, and strategies of survival on the part of the enslaved.
As a classroom exercise, have your students read this
document. Contemporary court cases with high visibility
usually capture the public’s imagination, and
that was true as well in the early national period;
future Attorney General William Wirt reported that he
had to “fight” his way into the Virginia
courtroom to watch the trials of Solomon and Gabriel.
Students should read this document for content, but
ask them also what they see, just as if they are examining
tobacco pipes excavated from a Virginia slave cabin.
Several slaves testified against Solomon, but in whose
handwriting are the depositions? Under what conditions
are men like Daniel and Toby providing testimony? Would
we today call them hostile witnesses? Even if they are
telling the truth, can modern readers regard as legitimate
the testimony provided by terrified, enslaved men before
a court of powerful, vengeful whites? Ask your students
to gauge the length of the trial based upon this document
(and most likely, this was the entire court proceeding
in Solomon’s case). Twenty-first-century Americans
are accustomed to celebrity trials that last for months.
What does such a short artifact indicate about the sort
of justice meted out by Southern courts to rebellious
bondmen?
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