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10 results

Brooding over Bloody Revenge
  • Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance
  • Nikki M. Taylor
  • Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023
  • From the colonial through the antebellum era, enslaved women in the US used lethal force as the ultimate form of resistance. By amplifying their voices and experiences, Brooding over Bloody Revenge strongly challenges assumptions that enslaved women only participated in covert, non-violent forms of resistance, when in fact they consistently seized justice for themselves and organized toward revolt. Nikki M. Taylor expertly reveals how women killed for deeply personal instances of injustice committed by their owners. The stories presented, which span centuries and legal contexts, demonstrate that these acts of lethal force were carefully pre-meditated. Enslaved women planned how and when their enslavers would die, what weapons and accomplices were necessary, and how to evade capture in the aftermath. Original and compelling, Brooding Over Bloody Revenge presents a window into the lives and philosophies of enslaved women who had their own ideas about justice and how to achieve it.

  • Introduction

  • Nikki M. Taylor, Howard University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Brooding over Bloody Revenge
    Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023, pp 1-21
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  • Summary

    The introduction presents an overview of the book’s argument and the theoretical framework that guides the project. It also lays out the contributions the book will make to the historical literature of slave resistance. The argument is that enslaved women resisted slavery with lethal force and when they did so, their own ideas about injustice were a central motivation. A new Black feminist theory is introduced and outlined: the Black feminist practice of justice. The core tenets of this philosophy includes the women prioritizing their perspective and how they defined justice, understanding the stark lack of justice in the judicial system, Black women’s rationality and prior planning, proportionality, a concept of “just deserts,” and their resignation to accept their fates for exercising lethal force.

  • 3 - Cloe

  • Nikki M. Taylor, Howard University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Brooding over Bloody Revenge
    Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023, pp 66-86

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the case of a teenaged term slave named Cloe who used her hands to strangle her owners’ young daughters a week apart in rural early nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.

  • 7 - Lucy

  • Nikki M. Taylor, Howard University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Brooding over Bloody Revenge
    Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023, pp 161-174

  • Summary

    The final chapter covers the life of Lucy who killed her mistress with a blunt instrument and threw her body down a cistern in Galveston, Texas, in 1858.

  • 4 - Rose Butler

  • Nikki M. Taylor, Howard University, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Brooding over Bloody Revenge
    Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023, pp 87-112

  • Summary

    This chapter centers on the actions of Rose Butler, a teenaged term slave in New York. Rose and her accomplices set her owners’ home on fire in 1818 to avenge her mistress’s poor treatment.

  • 38 - The Testimony of Lamine FilalouA Young Man’s Experience of Enslavement and His Struggle for Freedom in French West Africa

  • from Part Seven - Recorded Encounters with the Enslaved: Christian Workers in Africa
  • Edited by Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene, Cornell University, New York, Martin A. Klein, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade
    Published online:
    05 April 2013
    Print publication:
    13 May 2013, pp 437-444

  • Summary

    For most of the nineteenth century, British control of the Gambia River was limited to a number of small enclaves. Slave labor was crucial both to the household economy and the expansion of commercial groundnut cultivation, which had boomed along the river in the second part of the century. This chapter describes the nature of slavery and slave-dealing in Gambia. It presents the testimonies of Yahling Dahbo, Dado Bass, and Maladdo Mangah in light of the particular vulnerability that enslaved women experienced. Yahling, Dado, and Maladdo together provide detailed recollections of their life in slavery. Domestic slavery could indeed have a benign face that mitigated the intrinsic vulnerability of having being enslaved. Legal abolition did not completely erase the social boundary between former slaves and masters, as slave origins still carry significance in contemporary Gambian social life.