Slaves of the State
Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4155174 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Aaron Hall (Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University and will be an assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota beginning in 2020, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 106 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 19-46 |
| Publication date | 2019-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaz166 |
| OpenAlex | W2947914456 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing." —James Baldwin "The American Dream and the American Negro," New York Times, March 7, 1965. The slaveholder Norborne Powell's frustrations were public knowledge around Macon, Georgia, in April 1832. As the spring days warmed and lengthened, Peter Johnson had slipped away to find his wife. Meanwhile, Tom seemed to have found illicit employment aboard a passing cotton boat. Handy had made for the coast, and "shrewd" London's whereabouts remained a mystery. These runaway slaves' defiance lay plainly on the pages of the Macon (Ga) Telegraph. Powell soon added an advertisement for Denis, suspected of a marital visit or otherwise "lurking about." In activating community surveillance, Powell was not another indignant planter stumbling over his slaves' resistance; he also served as superintendent of public hands for the western division of Georgia. The missing men, along with scores of slaves laboring under his purview, were public property. This administrative posture lay behind the warning that Powell, a prospering planter in private life, issued against "harboring, employing, trafficking or trading with the public hands," flagrant "abuses of the public interest" that he vowed to stop. The superintendent's demand that "good citizens of the State ... co-operate" carried authority beyond the slaveholder's personal stature. Georgia's slaves were everyone's concern.1
Business · Corporate governance · Genealogy · Political science · State (computer science · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · Finance · History
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,83 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2025 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |