Enfilade

First published in 2018 and now available in paperback from Penn Press:

M. Scott Heerman, The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730–1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-0812225174 (paperback), $25.

In this sweeping saga that spans empires, peoples, and nations, M. Scott Heerman chronicles the long history of slavery in the heart of the continent and traces its many iterations through law and social practice. Arguing that slavery had no fixed institutional form, Heerman traces practices of slavery through indigenous, French, and finally U.S. systems of captivity, inheritable slavery, lifelong indentureship, and the kidnapping of free people. By connecting the history of indigenous bondage to that of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, Heerman shows how French, Spanish, and Native North American practices shaped the history of slavery in the United States.

The Alchemy of Slavery foregrounds the diverse and adaptable slaving practices that masters deployed to build a slave economy in the Upper Mississippi River Valley, attempting to outmaneuver their antislavery opponents. In time, a formidable cast of lawyers and antislavery activists set their sights on ending slavery in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, Lyman Trumbull, Richard Yates, and many other future leaders of the Republican party partnered with African Americans to wage an extended campaign against slavery in the region. Across a century and a half, slavery’s nearly perpetual reinvention takes center stage: masters turning Indian captives into slaves, slaves into servants, former slaves into kidnapping victims; and enslaved people turning themselves into free men and women.

M. Scott Heerman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Miami.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Slavery and Freedom on the American Continent
1  Making the French Negroes
2  Another Law and Empire
3  Remaking the French Negroes
4  Contesting Bondage in the Slave North
5  Paths to Independence
6  Freedom Practices, Freedom Politics
Conclusion: North of Slavery, South of Freedom

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments