In Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, it's the fourth of his autobiographies, and he elaborates upon a story that he tells in his first autobiography, The Life of Frederick Douglass. And it's where he meets up with Sandy, who he knows from the region as an African conjurer. Sandy is also a slave. He is also a slave who has been sent to the region of the Eastern Shore to be broken. But he is known in the slave community for not giving up the customs and traditions of Africa. And Douglass is a Christian, and the scene is, or the setting is that Douglass has just run away from Covey after being beaten by Covey, and he is fearful of who he hears walking in the woods, and it turns out to be Sandy. And he goes home with Sandy, and he is talking with Sandy about his problem about, "I don't want to be beat any more. I don't want to be put in a situation." And Sandy offers him a root as a talisman, he offers him some herbs from the woods, and it's a real symbol to Douglass of traditional African customs of "something from the earth gives you power." And Sandy encourages Douglass to put it in his pocket and assures him that when he goes back to Covey that Covey won't beat him, or if he does he will have the power to overcome Covey, and it works.

Or at least Douglass questions if it works because when he does go back, Covey is not successful in his second attempt to beat Douglass, and Douglass really struggles then with the confrontation of something African, traditional tribal—prevailed over his traditional, his accepted views of Christianity, and that's a real personal conflict for him.

Well, in his first autobiography, The Life of Frederick Douglass, which is probably the most commonly read, it's barely mentioned in passing. It's barely mentioned. He doesn't go into any kind of details about his own personal struggles with the talisman, about how the fact that he had it in his pocket challenges his own Christian beliefs. So he's thinking a little bit more later in life about who Sandy was, what Sandy represented on the Eastern Shore, how dramatically unique Sandy was from all the other slaves that Douglass encountered. Douglass was almost surprised later in life that the extent to which there could be one person who was still so African.

I think it's a great source to start inquiring about "to what extent have African customs survived the middle passage and the horrors of slavery?" I think the conversation is a natural one to have in the early years of slavery, obviously, but by the time Douglass comes around, slavery is already, the transatlantic slavery has already been cut off.

Slaves are not seen as imported any more, but yet it's a testament to the extent to which African customs and traditions and culture survives the institution, the trade, the trafficking, and the attempts, quite literally, to beat the Africans into submission, into slavery. So, it's a good document for asking those kinds of questions about how does this survive? What does its survival mean? What happens when an African American is confronted with African customs that they have rejected? That's a real internal personal struggle for Frederick Douglass, and it tells us a little bit about the character of the community in which African Americans are operating, that there is no one set definition of what slavery was, who was a slave, how did slaves live their lives, and all the facets that go into creating the African American community.

So, I really ask my students to kind of probe it on that particular level and the questions that come out of that document that lead them to discover a new sense and a new understanding of African Americans.

I usually use it with John Hope Franklin's book, In Search of the Promised Land, which is the story of a female slave who's owned by a Virginian but who lives in Nashville. So, she's allowed to live and exist almost as a free black woman with these tenuous connections to slavery, and it really shows in her life then, the kinds of things that can happen in those complex situations. Douglass's life is also very complex, and so I ask the students to think about this little story, this little snippet, in the larger story of his life.

Well, I hope that they'll try to find out the extent to which slaves were, in fact, either dominated by their master and not dominated by their master. Where are the margins within which slaves can control their own lives? I hope that they'll question their monolithic understanding of slavery because it seems to me that a lot of students come with such an understanding that all slaves lived on a large plantation, all slaves picked cotton, all male slaves were in the field, all female slaves were in the house. It's not the kind of story that gives us any kind of agency among the slaves. So, I really want them to examine that.

It's very important for them to read excerpts about the same event across the four different autobiographies of Douglass.

How did he change in the course of his life? Why did he expand upon the story in one of the narratives but not in the other narratives? Is it something he remembered? Is it something that gained greater importance as he went on in his life?

Those are the kinds of questions that you can ask of an individual, and we always need to get past, especially in slavery, we always need to get past the sense that we're looking for consistency and that individuals are not consistent, and we shouldn't expect that of our historical figures. Here's a slave who was taught to read against the law, and it's done openly. Here's a slave who passes through many masters; again, not the perception most students have of slaves. Here's a slave who does the unthinkable. He confronts a slave breaker. And so in that sense it gives them the hero story, but it also, it's building from a story about which they already think they know something, and I think that's real important that we start with things that they think they know and that they can then learn that there's more to that.

The first source is by Frederick Law Olmsted, published in a collection called The Cotton Kingdom, in 1861. Olmsted was an eclectic man to be sure. He was an agricultural journalist, he was a landscape architect. He designed New York Central Park. But in 1853 he was commissioned by the New York Times to conduct a number of investigative tours through the American South and the slaveholding states of that region.

Over the course of the next 18 months he toured practically every part of the American South, compiling reports, sending them to the Times, and publishing them. And his intention was really to give Northern readers, who had no sense of the region of the Southern states and no sense of slavery, to give them an "authentic," in inverted commas, impression of what slavery was like.

The second source is by Solomon Northup, and Northup is an absolutely fascinating man. He was born free in Saratoga Springs, in New York, whose mother was of mixed-race origins, but importantly, Northup was a free man. In 1841 he is kidnapped, and he is sold into slavery in Washington, DC. He was transported south, and he was then sold to a number of different planters in central Louisiana, particularly on the Red River. Finally, after 12 years in bondage, Northup encounters a Canadian, a Canadian carpenter, who is anti-slavery himself, and it is that carpenter who writes letters north to—back to Saratoga to achieve and to require legal documentation that Northup was indeed a free man, and indeed, at that point he is finally liberated.

And one of the problems of writing history, and teaching history in point of fact, is: How do we recover the slave's voice? How do we recover those who actually were there? What did they think? What did they feel?

These products, these slave-written products, often published with the assistance of the abolitionists, represent one version of slavery. Olmsted represents another version of slavery. If we were to go to a plantation, archives in Georgia, Louisiana, across the American South, you'd read documents written by the slaveholders themselves. None of these versions are authentic in and of themselves. It is the task of the historian to essentially read against the grain of these documents, to push them back, to see what is probable, what is hidden, so that we assess these various documents in tandem, until collectively they represent a version that we might call the nearest to the facts of American slavery.

Both documents are suffused with 19th-century text. They're melodramatic, they're in one sense romantic. But they represent wholly different impressions, and this is really the nature of slavery. If you read, for example, Olmsted's account, it appears that the masters and the slaves seem to have a relatively good relationship. There's a sense of a kind of intimacy within the plantation world.

By contrast, if we pick up Northup's account, Northup's account is suffused with violence. It's suffused with the realities from the African American perspective, the realities of slaveholding, the realities of life in bondage.

When we look at Olmsted, we look at the way in which slaveholders manipulate the slave system. They provide the African Americans with absolutely nothing within the plantation and they make them use any money that they earn on Saturdays or Sundays to pay for the most modest of additional items: slightly improved food, plates, cups, the very raw products of life in a clapboard shack. Solomon Northup, of course, alludes to the fact that how significant this money becomes, that even though it is very small, the amount of money that is accrued by African Americans by Sunday trading, to those people in chains, the significance of purchasing cups, pails, calicos, of a very constrained commercialism, of a very limited commercialism, that for those people, that's enormously significant, the idea of ownership, of anything in a system that denies fundamental ownership.

If you put it in contrast to Olmsted, they look like completely separate regimes. They look like completely separate worlds, and it's the task of the historian to essentially place those two perspectives together and to tease out—Olmsted represents very much what planters wanted to think of the regime; Northup very much what slaves experienced of the regime.

We see a planter, Mr. R, he's probably [Mr. Andre Román], owner of a major plantation on Houmas Band on the Mississippi River in today's Ascension Parish. If we look at his description, Mr. R walks out onto the plantation. He's returned from illness, and he orchestrates this entire visual imagery.

So he marches out and he immediately inquires of the slaves: "Well, how are you girls?" he refers. "Oh"—and there's this immediate repartee between the enslaved and the enslaver, one that appears to be in a sense of mutual interest. But even at this earliest point, the planter is beginning to inscribe his authority.

This really gets to the core of how slaveholders thought of themselves. So he immediately inquires: "How are the children?" and he's very quick to make sure that the children, the sick children, are on the road to recovery. He begins to enforce a visual image of his authority as a slaveholder, and also, this sense that slaveholders had of themselves. And they often describe themselves as standing in pater familias, in replacement to the father.

And again we begin to see this relationship develop as he goes on into the plantation, and he goes out viewing the slaves and goes out making reference to the work. But herein lies the essence of the relationship. He goes to the [fence] he goes to a lad driving a cart, and he pulls out and he pulls up to him. He says, "Well, I'm getting on all right. But If I don't get about and look after you, I'm afraid we shan't have much of a crop. I don't know what you're going to do for your Christmas money."

And this was a tradition very common in south Louisiana, that to make a slave essentially work exceptionally hard, they were rewarded at Christmas, at the end of the harvest, with a small financial token relative to the proportionate size of the crop that they'd cultivated. The planter enforces this idea of his generosity.

But the slave is nonplussed. He's not fooled by this charade that the slaveholder has orchestrated, the showy display of authority that we have just seen with the slave women, now this rather ostentatious expression on the relationship with the young lad in the cart, because the slave returns and says, "Oh, well, you just go on. You just go and look down the field somewhat, and you just go and see what's there." And of course, what the slave is reporting and pointing to is a fine stand of cane in the distance and, importantly, by implication, that the slaveholder will pay the Christmas money and this time, a substantial amount of it.

Slavery is a relationship built on force. It's built on the ownership of one person by another. It's built on the power to compel that work—compel it by extreme physical violence. The slaveholders also knew that under these circumstances they had to combine it with elements of waged work to create what they needed at the end. What they needed was the cane cultivated, the cane cut, the cane ground and processed.

However objectionable slavery is, the slaveholders truly believed this image of themselves. It was a charade. It was deeply objectionable. But it was a way to justify holding other people in bondage. And it's important to say that these are amongst the last slaveholders in the new world. They're standing against time. They're standing against modernity. Only Brazil, only the Spanish Empire, and only the United States by the middle of the 19th century, are slave-holding powers.

Olmsted, however, interviews a African American and what occurs within this context is, we're stripped away from the planter's charade. Instead, we have a one-on-one conversation with a slave by the name of William.

So we learn at the very first instance that he comes from Virginia, and like so many of his compatriots of those slaves who resided in south Louisiana, they were part of the inter-regional slave trade, a movement of slaves from Virginia, Maryland, to the deep south. Hence the expression "sold down the river."

He wants, above all, to return to his family. When he's finally released and he asks "If I was free, if I was free," he indicates one, that he wanted to return to Virginia to see his mother. Secondly, he says what kind of a world he wants to live in, and he says what he wants to do is raise some crops on a little farm, a little land, but land of his own, independent land. And he says he wants to trade them down in New Orleans.

But ultimately, that's his vision of freedom: a restoration of family and independent land ownership. And those things ring absolutely true with what we know of African Americans as they come out of slavery and into freedom, through the Civil War years, and immediately on into the immediate aftermath of reconstruction and emancipation.

So Northup, as we've made reference to, offers almost an entirely opposite perspective to that presented by Olmsted. Olmsted looked at it in terms of these economic incentives, this Sunday money, etc., as a way to cajole the slaves to work even harder. Northup explodes that image here. As Northup observes, in this way only are they able to provide themselves with any luxury or convenience whatsoever.

"When a slave, purchased, or kidnapped in the North, is transported to a cabin on Bayou Boeuf, he is furnished with neither knife, nor fork, nor dish, nor kettle, nor any other thing in the shape of crockery, or furniture of any nature of description. He is furnished with a blanket before he reaches there, and wrapping that around him, he can either stand up, or lie down upon the ground, or on a board."

"To ask the master for a knife, or skillet, or any small convenience of the kind, would be answered with a kick, or laughed at as a joke. Whatever necessary article of this nature is found in a cabin has been purchased," he says, "with Sunday money. However injurious to the morals, it is certainly a blessing to the physical condition of the slave, to be permitted to break the Sabbath."

Here lies the slave's perspective in its rawest form. Here lies not a planter class who is offering some kind of added benefits like better housing, some food, some money or the like, as some kind of generosity. Here it's a cynical, abusive planter class, that essentially denies their slaves every single thing, and makes them—makes the slaves pay for any object.

So I think the first question the students would ask is, "Why are they so different? Why are these accounts so different?" Because they are, and they're not. They describe the same phenomenon, but from two sides of the telescope, if you like. The planter's side in Olmsted, and then the slaves' side—although Olmsted, as we pointed—tries to give this conversation with the slave William as well. So where does reality lie between this image that slaveholders have and this experienced reality that Northup gives?

I think another question that students should want to ask themselves is, "By reading this document, how can we best understand the system of slavery, both as a racial system, as an economic system, and as a system of power?"

Slaveholders wanted to inscribe that authority time and time and time again. Slaves, by contrast, generally speaking, wished to reject that authority. How, then, by reading these documents, do we begin to understand how people thrown together in the American south of the 19th century, both lived and experienced slavery.

The average plantations numbered about 75 slaves. Most plantations numbered much less. The largest number of slaveholders in the American south, the largest number of slaveholders, owned one slave, one or two slaves.

Ultimately, what defines slavery in the American south is a very uneasy, uneasy compromise. An uneasy compromise where unfortunately power does lie, and laid very firmly with the slaveholders, and as Solomon Northup indicates, it rests also with the compulsion of the power of the whip and the power of the slaveholders to enforce their will by violence when they so wished.

Both texts provide a way of understanding this very, very complex, and often extremely violent relationship between blacks and whites in the American south. The texts offer us a way to understand how slavery ultimately worked as a system, how it ended up becoming so profitable as it did.

I think the texts also provide us with a way of examining how American racism will ultimately impinge upon the visions and aspirations of African Americans as they go from slavery into freedom.

The source comes from the Cherokee Nation's Supreme Court Records. In 1833, a lady named Molly Hightower claimed that a woman named Chickaua, who is the primary person mentioned in the document, that Chickaua and her sons belonged to Molly Hightower. And this claim was based on a transaction between another man named Sam Dent, to Molly Hightower's father. Sam Dent had been married to a Cherokee wife some time prior to the Revolutionary War, and he actually beat and killed his Cherokee wife. According to the Cherokee Law of Blood, the Deer clan sought revenge on Sam Dent for the death of their family member, because his wife had been a Deer clan member. And instead of subjecting himself to Deer clan punishment, he purchased a slave named Molly, who then became Chickaua, our main character in this document, to replace his dead wife. So, he gifted the Deer clan with the slave that he had purchased as a way of meeting his obligation for killing his wife.

The Deer clan adopted the slave named Molly, gave her the name Chickaua and, as the document says, she has by herself and descendants, been ever since recognized by said Nation, the Cherokee Nation or clan, the Deer clan, as a Cherokee. That's what allowed her sons to then also be members of the Deer clan and full-fledged members of the Cherokee Nation.

So, then later on, in 1833, Molly Hightower comes into the picture and says that Sam Dent sold Chickaua to her father, and that she actually owns Chickaua and Chickaua's descendants, Chickaua's sons. As the document says, "Her father was also an Indian trader who lived many years near the descendants of Chickaua and who never advanced or set up any claim to Chickaua and her son, Cunestuta," who is also called Isaac Tucker in the document. And this document is interesting, because it has a number of different names. You have English names, you have Cherokee names, you have a variety of different identities that are represented in the one document, in addition to this interesting transaction over slave property.

The Deer clan objected to Molly Hightower's claim, and decided to petition the Cherokee Supreme Court to prevent the return of Chickaua and her son, Cunestuta, to slavery. The Deer clan petitions them to, "Resist this oppression and illegal wrong attempted to be practiced on our brother and sister by the Hightower, Molly Hightower, in carrying into slavery two of whom have ever been and considered Native Cherokee." So, what that particular statement represents is an affirmation by the Deer clan that Molly is their kin, that Chickaua, Molly-slash-Chickaua, is their kin and belongs to them. It's really an affirmation of the adoption process and how seriously the Cherokees took their Law of Blood to bring in someone who had been an outsider to their community, and adopting them, making them full-fledged family members and not wanting them to return to the condition of slavery.

Ultimately, the document indicates that the Supreme Court sided with the Deer clan, saying that since Chickaua's adoption she has, quote, "continued in the Nation and enjoyed the liberty of freedom and that her two sons, Edward and Isaac Tucker, were born at the beloved town called Echota on the Tennessee River"—that was one of the main towns of the Cherokee Nation, what they call their beloved town—"and has ever been free and resided in the Nation."

Well, it's a very rich document on a number of levels. The primary thing that strikes me about it is the confusion over names. When you read it the first time, you're not sure who's who and who's talking about who. There's two Mollys. There's sort of what I think of as the first Molly, who was bought by Sam Dent, the trader, and then given to the Cherokee Deer clan. Her name then becomes Chickaua, and that's how she's referred to throughout the rest of the document. The next Molly is Molly Hightower, she who claims that her father actually owns Chickaua and Chickaua's descendants.

But there's—the fact that Chickaua obtains her name after her adoption into the Cherokee Nation, also means that her personal name is a marker of affiliation with a state, with a nation and a state, the Cherokee state. So, it's a great example of how names can mean many different layers of identity.

Another thing that we see in the document is how racial identity is shifting. We think of slaves as being of African descent, and we don't know, of course, that Molly, who became Chickaua, was not of African descent. In fact, we presume that she was. So, her identity shifts from being a black slave to an Indian free person, although obviously she herself does not change. It reminds us of how racial identity is constructed, how it has a history by itself that's worth examination.

Clan membership in Cherokee society, in many southeastern Native societies, was matrilineal, so you were only affiliated with the group through your mother's line. It's that matrilineal line that affirms everything about Cherokee identity and also Cherokee law.

This Law of Blood was based on the idea that clan members could avenge the deaths or other incidents happening to their kin, and women often made the decisions about how those deaths were to be avenged. And it was a way of making sure that people in Cherokee society lived in harmony with one another, because it was very clear what the consequences would be if you committed such a violent act.

Just because Chickaua escaped re-enslavement here doesn't mean that she was forever secure, because 1833 was a very critical time in the history of Indians in the southeast and well, indeed the whole nation. What we now know of as the old South, the sort of cotton culture of the antebellum South, would not have been possible without Indian removal, and the race relations, the intensity of black/white relations that developed prior to the Civil War, would have been very different had Indians remained in the southeast. This case is coming at a critical time, not just for the Cherokee Nation, but for questions of racial formation in the United States.

You don't understand very much about Cherokee removal from this particular source, but when you look at the date that Molly Hightower makes this claim in 1833 (October 18, 1833, is when the Supreme Court ruled on it), that date by itself triggers for the historian, a whole set of associations around the tensions of Cherokee removal, and the kinds of decisions that Congress was making, that President Andrew Jackson was making, that the Cherokee principal Chief John Ross, and the Cherokee General Council were making, around these issues of removal.

Because it is a fairly complex document, I introduced it to the students simply by asking them to identify the different names and to do a little genealogy of who the players are and how they're related to one another. So, on the one side they have Molly Hightower, they have Molly Hightower's father. On the other side, they have Sam Dent. They have his Cherokee wife. They have his purchase of Molly, the slave. Molly the slave then becomes a Cherokee.

The idea of tribes and nations that we operate with today when we talk about Native Americans, didn't always exist in its current form. What we see in this document is a world in which family, clan membership, kinship affiliation, was kind of the dominant logic of the society, and to understand that dominant logic you have to understand the names, and you have to understand the relationships. So, it's sort of a window into not only the time period, but also a method of doing history that speaks to the power of history itself, how it helps us understand another society that's different from our own.

I think students, they ask, they assume that because Sam Dent was a white man that he would have felt no responsibility to the Deer clan, that he would have felt no sense of loyalty or allegiance to the Cherokee Nation. But, I think what they need to understand is that the reality at this time was very different. Sam Dent made his living off of trading with Cherokee people, and under—most English traders understood that in order to trade with an Indian Nation, you had to have a kinship affiliation with that Nation. So, that's probably why Sam Dent married a Cherokee, was that his marriage to that woman enabled him, in fact, to make a living.

And one of the things that we feel we understand about American society is that whether right or wrong, European Americans have held the balance of power firmly in their hands over time, and this document is an example of a time period in which European Americans were not holding the balance of power. In fact, Cherokees at this time and place, certainly the time and place in which Sam Dent made these decisions, were holding the balance of power. This document reminds us how the Cherokee Supreme Court was alive and well. It was doing its job and acting on behalf of the Cherokee Nation, without regard to the United States and to the property laws of the United States that might have legitimized Sam Dent's sale to Molly Hightower's father.