Matthew J Clavin's Books

Aiming for Pensacola

Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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Aiming for Pensacola

Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers

By: Matthew J. Clavin

In the decades before the Civil War, the small number of slaves who managed to escape bondage almost always made their way northward along the secret routes and safe havens known as the Underground Railroad. Offering a new perspective on this standard narrative, Matthew Clavin recovers the story of fugitive slaves who sought freedom by—paradoxically—sojourning deeper into the American South toward an unlikely destination: the small seaport of Pensacola, Florida. Geographically and culturally, across decades of rule by a succession of powers—Spain, Great Britain, and the United States—Pensacola occupied an isolated position on the margins of antebellum Southern society. Yet as neighboring Gulf Coast seaports like New Orleans experienced rapid population growth and economic development based on racial slavery, Pensacola became known for something else: as an enclave of diverse, free peoples of European, African, and Native American descent. Farmers, laborers, mechanics, soldiers, and sailors learned to cooperate across racial lines and possessed no vested interest in maintaining slavery or white supremacy. Clavin examines how Pensacola’s reputation as a gateway to freedom grew in the minds of slaves and slaveowners, and how it became a beacon for fugitives who found northern routes to liberation inaccessible. The interracial resistance to slavery that thrived in Pensacola in the years before the Civil War, Clavin contends, would play a role in demolishing the foundations of Southern slavery when that fateful conflict arrived.

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263

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Harvard University Press

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ISBN 10

0674088255

ISBN 13

9780674088252

Symbols of Freedom

Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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Symbols of Freedom

Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War

By: Matthew J. Clavin

How American symbols inspired enslaved people and their allies to fight for true freedom In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal,” Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty, or give me death!,” and Francis Scott Key’s “star-spangled banner” waving over “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” were anthemic celebrations of a newly free people. Resonating across the country, they encouraged the creation of a republic where the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was universal, natural, and inalienable. For enslaved people and their allies, the language and symbols that served as national touchstones made a mockery of freedom. Deriding the ideas that infused the republic’s founding, they encouraged an empty American culture that accepted the abstract notion of equality rather than the concrete idea. Yet, as award-winning author Matthew J. Clavin reveals, it was these powerful expressions of American nationalism that inspired forceful and even violent resistance to slavery. Symbols of Freedom is the surprising story of how enslaved people and their allies drew inspiration from the language and symbols of American freedom. Interpreting patriotic words, phrases, and iconography literally, they embraced a revolutionary nationalism that not only justified but generated open opposition. Mindful and proud that theirs was a nation born in blood, these disparate patriots fought to fulfill the republic’s promise by waging war against slavery. In a time when the US flag, the Fourth of July, and historical sites have never been more contested, this book reminds us that symbols are living artifacts whose power is derived from the meaning with which we imbue them.

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285

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NYU Press

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ISBN 10

1479823252

ISBN 13

9781479823253

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War

The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War

The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution

By: Matthew J. Clavin

At the end of the eighteenth century, a massive slave revolt rocked French Saint Domingue, the most profitable European colony in the Americas. Under the leadership of the charismatic former slave François Dominique Toussaint Louverture, a disciplined and determined republican army, consisting almost entirely of rebel slaves, defeated all of its rivals and restored peace to the embattled territory. The slave uprising that we now refer to as the Haitian Revolution concluded on January 1, 1804, with the establishment of Haiti, the first "black republic" in the Western Hemisphere. The Haitian Revolution cast a long shadow over the Atlantic world. In the United States, according to Matthew J. Clavin, there emerged two competing narratives that vied for the revolution's legacy. One emphasized vengeful African slaves committing unspeakable acts of violence against white men, women, and children. The other was the story of an enslaved people who, under the leadership of Louverture, vanquished their oppressors in an effort to eradicate slavery and build a new nation. Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War examines the significance of these competing narratives in American society on the eve of and during the Civil War. Clavin argues that, at the height of the longstanding conflict between North and South, Louverture and the Haitian Revolution were resonant, polarizing symbols, which antislavery and proslavery groups exploited both to provoke a violent confrontation and to determine the fate of slavery in the United States. In public orations and printed texts, African Americans and their white allies insisted that the Civil War was a second Haitian Revolution, a bloody conflict in which thousands of armed bondmen, "American Toussaints," would redeem the republic by securing the abolition of slavery and proving the equality of the black race. Southern secessionists and northern anti-abolitionists responded by launching a cultural counterrevolution to prevent a second Haitian Revolution from taking place.

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248

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812201612

ISBN 13

9780812201611

The Battle of Negro Fort

The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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The Battle of Negro Fort

The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community

By: Matthew J. Clavin

The dramatic story of the United States’ destruction of a free and independent community of fugitive slaves in Spanish Florida In the aftermath of the War of 1812, Major General Andrew Jackson ordered a joint United States army-navy expedition into Spanish Florida to destroy a free and independent community of fugitive slaves. The result was the Battle of Negro Fort, a brutal conflict among hundreds of American troops, Indian warriors, and black rebels that culminated in the death or re-enslavement of nearly all of the fort’s inhabitants. By eliminating this refuge for fugitive slaves, the United States government closed an escape valve that African Americans had utilized for generations. At the same time, it intensified the subjugation of southern Native Americans, including the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles. Still, the battle was significant for another reason as well. During its existence, Negro Fort was a powerful symbol of black freedom that subverted the racist foundations of an expanding American slave society. Its destruction reinforced the nation’s growing commitment to slavery, while illuminating the extent to which ambivalence over the institution had disappeared since the nation’s founding. Indeed, four decades after declaring that all men were created equal, the United States destroyed a fugitive slave community in a foreign territory for the first and only time in its history, which accelerated America’s transformation into a white republic. The Battle of Negro Fort places the violent expansion of slavery where it belongs, at the center of the history of the early American republic.

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263

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NYU Press

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ISBN 10

1479811106

ISBN 13

9781479811106

The Black Radical Tragic

Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution

By: Jeremy Matthew Glick

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The Black Radical Tragic

Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution

By: Jeremy Matthew Glick

2017 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award presented by the Caribbean Philosophical Association As the first successful revolution emanating from a slave rebellion, the Haitian Revolution remains an inspired site of investigation for a remarkable range of artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora. In The Black Radical Tragic, Jeremy Matthew Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines of literature, philosophy, and political thought, The Black Radical Tragic explores work from Lorraine Hansberry, Sergei Eisenstein, Edouard Glissant, Malcolm X, and others, ultimately enacting a speculative encounter between Bertolt Brecht and C.L.R. James to reconsider the relationship between tragedy and revolution. In its grand refusal to forget, The Black Radical Tragic demonstrates how the Haitian Revolution has influenced the ideas of freedom and self-determination that have propelled Black radical struggles throughout the modern era.

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283

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NYU Press

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ISBN 10

1479885665

ISBN 13

9781479885664

The Black Romantic Revolution

Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery

By: Matt Sandler

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The Black Romantic Revolution

Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery

By: Matt Sandler

During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism - lyric poetry, prophetic visions - to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and U.S. imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery’s sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe’s stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics’ cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.

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307

Publisher

Verso Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1788735455

ISBN 13

9781788735452

Symbols of Freedom

Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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Symbols of Freedom

Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War

By: Matthew J. Clavin

In the early United States, the language and symbols of American freedom inspired enslaved people and their allies to wage a real and revolutionary war against slavery"--

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285

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NYU Press

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ISBN 10

1479823244

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9781479823246

The Battle of Negro Fort

The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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The Battle of Negro Fort

The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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263

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NYU Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1479811106

ISBN 13

9781479811106

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War

The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War

The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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248

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0812201612

ISBN 13

9780812201611

Aiming for Pensacola

Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers

By: Matthew J. Clavin

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Aiming for Pensacola

Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers

By: Matthew J. Clavin

Before the Civil War, slaves who managed to escape almost always made their way northward along the Underground Railroad. Matthew Clavin recovers the story of fugitive slaves who sought freedom by paradoxically sojourning deeper into the American South toward an unlikely destination: the small seaport of Pensacola, Florida, a gateway to freedom.

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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263

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674088220

ISBN 13

9780674088221

Book's by Matthew J Clavin

Aiming for Pensacola

Aiming for Pensacola

Symbols of Freedom

Symbols of Freedom

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War

The Battle of Negro Fort

The Battle of Negro Fort

The Black Radical Tragic

The Black Radical Tragic

The Black Romantic Revolution

The Black Romantic Revolution

Symbols of Freedom

Symbols of Freedom

The Battle of Negro Fort

The Battle of Negro Fort

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War

Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War

Aiming for Pensacola

Aiming for Pensacola

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