UCLA

This dissertation examines the multiple and myriad ways White women living in nineteenth-century New York sought to extend the logics of enslavement into the state’s post-emancipation era, and the diverse methods Black New Yorkers utilized to fight back. It tracks the period from the culmination of New York’s gradual emancipation act in 1827 through the American Civil War. Toggling between New York City and the larger state, this work argues that White women utilized the law, enforcing some, while ignoring others, to actively control, discipline, and harm the region’s Black communities. In doing so, these women frequently reinforced the period’s prevailing notions and privileges of White womanhood. As bondholders, White women exploited the legalized system of indenture in order to continue the same cruelty and surveillance that had flourished under New York slavery. Later, as the state introduced new legislation to begin construction of the first women’s prison at Sing Sing, an act rooted in White fears about Black unfitness for freedom, White women embraced their positions as matrons, inflicting rigid and violent forms of discipline on incarcerated Black women. Still other women continued their involvement in the legal and illicit slave trade well into the 1860s, perpetuating the system of enslavement in its most tangible form. Finally, in 1863, White female New Yorkers, alongside their male counterparts, wreaked brutal financial and physical violence on the city’s Black community in protest to the first federal conscription act. In the months following, White women would marshall the courts to their advantage, evading accountability for their vicious acts. Still, at every turn, New York’s Black men and women challenged these attacks on their lives, families and livelihoods. Through self- and community aided emancipation, carving out space for laughter, beauty, and joy, and by contesting the claims of White women to assert control over their families, finances, and lives, Black New Yorkers demonstrated the limits of White women’s power. In doing so, this analysis encourages scholars to reorient our understanding of the diverse gendered manifestations of slavery’s afterlives, shifting our focus both northward and backwards in time.