The Material Bonds of Slavery Tamara J. Walker
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N The Material Atlantic, Robert S. DuPlessis has crafted a singular study of the patterns, uses, and mores of dress in the Atlantic world of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book draws upon inventories, commercial records, newspaper advertisements, travel accounts, and visual sources to understand how and why Europeans, Amerindians, Africans, and their descendants in the region acquired, wore, and understood clothing. In the process, the author makes a deeply convincing case for treating material culture and sartorial matters as inextricable parts of the social, economic, and cultural history of the Atlantic. An especially significant contribution of the book is the terminology it introduces. Foremost and most useful is “dress regimes” (50), which DuPlessis uses in two instances. The first refers to the diverse sartorial traditions, customs, and norms that prevailed in disparate communities in various parts of the world on “the eve of the shared Atlantic” (50). The second describes the sartorial confrontations, transformations, and innovations that eventually took shape in this shared Atlantic. The term provides a framework for comparative analysis as well as for considerations of change over time. The author’s analysis of dress regimes in slaveholding societies makes the book a welcome contribution to the history of slavery. The relationship between slavery and dress has captured the attention of a few historians, who have offered compelling snapshots of the importance of clothing and dress in Latin America, the United States, and the Caribbean. Herman L. Bennett, for instance, has illustrated the extent to which elegantly dressed slaves in seventeenth-century Mexico City formed key parts of their owners’ so-called “spectacles of ostentation.”1 For his part, Ira Berlin has shown how urban slaves in wealthy eighteenth-century Charleston who appropriated their masters’ styles of dress—from pocket watches to powdered wigs—roused the ire of whites who believed that they alone held claim to elegant self-presentation.2 Similarly, Stephanie M. H. Camp has detailed
Tamara J. Walker is an assistant professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. 1 Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington, Ind., 2003), 14–32 (quotation, 32). 2 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 79. William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 73, no. 3, July 2016 DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.73.3.0538
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the lengths to which plantation slaves in the eighteenth-century South, particularly the women among them, would go in order to attend dances and other events that offered opportunities to wear festive attire.3 Taken together, this scholarship (along with the work of Helen Bradley Foster, Silvia Hunold Lara, Dylan C. Penningroth, and others, including myself ) hints at just how much dress mattered to masters and slaves, to men and women, and to both urbanites and rural-dwellers throughout the centuries-long history of slavery in the Americas.4 But what we do not yet have is a comprehensive and comparative sense of the kinds of clothing slaves generally wore and how they tended to acquire it. Throughout the Atlantic world, DuPlessis writes, slaves’ dress emerged from a combination of “imposition and self-provision” (137). In the first instance, he shows how authorities in the region “intended slave status to be materialized in a remarkably consistent costume consisting of two loose-fitting, formless garments of cheap, coarse, often uncomfortable fabric, usually linen and/or, occasionally, woolen” (131). Consequently, owners were required by law to supply these basics, although they did so with varying degrees of diffidence and consistency (if they even bothered to do so at all). DuPlessis also notes examples of slaveholders supplying their human property with castoffs as well as gifts and favors of more fashionable clothing items such as calico petticoats, vests, hats, and fine linen ensembles, which they bestowed on slave drivers and chief housekeepers, in some cases “as a way to advance their goal of slave acquiescence, or at least quiescence,” and in others “in order to enhance masters’ power and slaves’ dependency” (133). In terms of self-provision, DuPlessis details how slaves in the Atlantic world acquired everyday and special-occasion clothing by stealing (from the free population as well as from fellow slaves), making purchases with money earned through sundry work and market vending, bartering (which for women at times included exchanging sexual services for clothing), or making it themselves. The latter included assembling entire outfits as well as adding ribbons, buttons, and colorful accessories to make them more festive. Furthermore, according to DuPlessis, “some bondsmen and 3 Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 60–92. 4 Helen Bradley Foster, New Raiments of Self: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (Oxford, 1997); Silvia Hunold Lara, “Customs and Costumes: Carlos Julião and the Image of Black Slaves in Late Eighteenth-Century Brazil,” Slavery and Abolition 23, no. 2 (August 2002): 123–46; Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003); Tamara J. Walker, “‘He outfitted his family in notable decency’: Slavery, Honor, and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru,” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 3 (September 2009): 383–402. See also Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New Haven, Conn., 2012).
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bondswomen developed various forms of self-provisioning, best known in terms of food but also for apparel, and they might acquire not only basic necessities but also additional items, leading, paradoxical as it may seem, to complaints about ‘slave luxury’” (128). Yet, regardless of how this self-provisioning happened or what kinds of material outcomes it yielded, it was nonetheless made possible “by taking on a yet more excessive workload, by foregoing some of their own food supplies, and/or by enduring still harsher and more degrading exploitation of their bodies” (137). The Material Atlantic also gives careful attention to the ways in which slaves’ appearance and access to dress varied according to geography, gender, and other factors. To that end the author makes innovative and compelling use of Ira Berlin’s distinction between slave societies and societies with slaves.5 According to DuPlessis, in slave societies such as South Carolina, Jamaica, and Saint Domingue, where slavery was central to economic production and slaves formed a majority of the population, slaves had limited wardrobes that easily marked them as slaves (and visually separated them from indentured servants and free laborers). These customs were upheld by sumptuary laws that restricted the wearing of finer fabrics or more opulent costumes. By comparison, in societies with slaves such as Philadelphia, where slavery existed alongside free labor systems and slaves formed a minority of the overall population, DuPlessis argues that slaves had more varied and greater amounts of “ordinary apparel” (160) than their counterparts in slave societies. In part this owed to climate variations throughout the year in the mid-Atlantic compared with the slaveholding South and the Caribbean, but also to the absence or loosening of legal restrictions on what enslaved people could or could not wear. Another factor was their greater exposure to free populations, in whom they may have found stylistic inspiration. DuPlessis’s comparative framework facilitates an invaluable sketch of regional parallels and variation across the Atlantic world. A more nuanced and complete detailing of slave dress in the Atlantic, however, requires moving beyond the “imposition and self-provision” binary. Might owners have gifted slaves with fashionable or fancy clothing without seeking to reinforce a particular power dynamic? Moreover, was it possible for slaves to acquire clothing on their own without enduring additional degradation or exploitation, perhaps with help from enslaved and free contacts outside the master-slave dynamic? It is difficult to answer such questions, but asking them makes room for the consideration of genuine affective ties between masters (or mistresses) and slaves, as well as for the possibility of studying slaves outside of their relationships with the people who owned or sought 5 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
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to control them.6 Put another way, these kinds of questions invite us not only to explore the complex range of relationships that existed between masters and slaves but also to consider the kinds of experiences slaves cultivated that enabled them—however briefly—to live and think of themselves as fully human. There are hints of the above in various parts of the book. For example, although DuPlessis treats enslaved and free people of African descent as distinct groups with divergent experiences (largely confining, for example, his analysis of slaves to chapter 4 and that of free people of color to chapter 5), he also acknowledges that many free people of color appeared alongside slaves in sources from the era. In Italo-English artist Agostino Brunias’s paintings of eighteenth-century Dominica, DuPlessis writes, free women of color were often posed in the company of enslaved female personal servants. Given that—in slave societies and societies with slaves alike—parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and other social intimates often stood on different sides of the law, with some family members being free while others remained enslaved, it is possible that the women in these images were related to one another. Perhaps the free women handed down clothing items or accessories to their slaves as tacit acknowledgments of the familial bonds between them. In addition, DuPlessis’s discussion of slaves’ special-occasion dress hints at a sharing economy, in which clothing items and accessories were recycled among enslaved men and women, thereby giving the appearance of variety even in the context of scarcity. This is not to romanticize relationships between masters and slaves, or even relationships within enslaved populations themselves. To be sure, free people of color could be as vicious and mercurial in their treatment of slaves as white slaveholders, and the demands of slavery could certainly make slaves prioritize the pursuit of individual survival over all other considerations. Nonetheless, thinking about the affective weight of clothing opens up myriad interpretive possibilities. For example, in his discussion of slaves’ special-occasion dress, worn on Sundays and holidays, DuPlessis argues that “enslaved men and women distinguished themselves from their workaday personae, asserting thereby not the inexistence of bondage but their dignity within it” (159). But even the most ordinary pieces of workaday attire could confer dignity and self-regard depending on who they came from. 6 On affective ties between Spanish mistresses and slaves in Peru, see Michelle A. McKinley, “Till Death Do Us Part: Testamentary Manumission in Seventeenth-Century Lima, Peru,” Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 3 (September 2012): 381–401. On (nonmarital) relationships between enslaved women and white men in late colonial New Orleans, see Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2013), 98–100.
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In other words, if we are to fully understand how slaves acquired and wore clothing—in the Atlantic world as well as in other slaveholding societies—we must examine their social worlds much more closely. This means paying attention to the complicated intimacies they forged with their owners, the relationships they nurtured with other slaves, and the ties they created to free people of various colors and classes. In the process, we can learn not only about the range of circumstances that shaped slaves’ access to clothing but also the range of meanings they assigned to it.