On Accountability

The stakes of studying the law of slavery in the early modern period hardly requires emphasis. At the center of my research is a consistent consideration of accountability both on behalf of those legislators responsible for the development of racial slavery in the English Atlantic who stood to profit from its voracity but also on behalf of myself as the historian. As a white female scholar in the area of early American history, Atlantic world and slavery studies, it seems all the more pertinent to actively address my purpose as a future historian and the role I hope my work will play in the field of legal history. While I, nor any historian, can fully comprehend the experiences of those who were enslaved or the intergenerational impacts of its dehumanizing effects, I endeavor to commit my life, my research, and my energy to studying the histories that have long been purposefully ignored and whose legacy lives on in our institutions, communities, and the experience of childbearing among women today. However, this is a history which requires immediate attention, and while I may not be its ideal messenger, I uphold the conviction that this work must be done in order for the scholars and messengers of the future to take it on as a point of departure. In a phrase, I aim simply seeking to contribute a verse to what I already know is and will become a vital point of inquiry for the way we consider studying and teaching the development of racial slavery in the English Atlantic. Furthermore, my work purposefully centers the scholarship of primarily Black women scholars from the fields of history, art history, and comparative literature, in an effort to draw attention to the burgeoning collection of works which should command the canon.

I joined the field of Black Studies as a community college student in 2016 after having read Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. At the time, I was an injured professional equestrian looking to study history and early America through a few community college courses, online lectures, books, and podcasts as a distraction from being unable to compete. Along the way, however, I began asking questions of the past, my political beliefs, and how I interacted with race and gender in the world around me. I had been enamored by the subject of the American Revolution since childhood and Gordon-Reed’s book was my first introduction to histories which centered the lived experiences of Black people in the 18th century. In the midst of a turbulent time in US History, with the election of Donald Trump, I recognized the urgency of studying African & African American History and made a commitment to focusing my future studies and research on their experiences, rather than the ancestors of mine who were directly complicit in settler colonialism, enslavement, and immigrant disenfranchisement.

I come to this field as a student with my mind open and a willingness to actively engage with the archive in ways made possible by frameworks pioneered by Saidiya Hartman, Marisa Fuentes, Brenda Stevenson, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Daina Ramey Berry, and others. It is the work of Black Women Historians that I have revered and sought to engage with, which act as my compass. They are my mentors and my inspiration, therefore I seek simply to contribute to the conversation by offering questions, and sometimes answers, to the already rich discourse which considers the lives of free & enslaved Black men, women, and children as central to studying early America.