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A few years ago, a press asked me to write an annotated bibliography on crowds and crowd violence. But one of the instructions struck me as odd. The editors asked me not to include anything on uprisings or revolts that were led by, or that involved, enslaved people or Black inhabitants of early America. One of the reasons was pragmatic. The editor had already asked someone to write a bibliography that covered slave revolts. But even that decision, while reasonable, highlighted historical thinking that held that crowds of Black people were almost always thought of by rulers as revolts, not crowd actions, and rulers treated crowds that contained Black participants as treasonous. Thus, people, both historical and historian, considered riots and crowd actions that included, or were run by, enslaved people, or Black people, as different.

And that got me thinking. When she wrote about Black Abolitionists, and again in her new book, Kellie Jackson Carter explained that, often, historians embrace the divisions made by their Anglo-European subjects and, as a result, too often study their subjects within the context of their subjects’ relationship to slavery. As a result, historians who characterize “Black violence” as illegitimate, or as a revolt instead of a crowd action, minimize the racism and violence inherent in the social and political institutions their subjects built and then preserved. Those structural legal and cultural institutions pushed inhabitants of the early Americas to divide crowds along lines of cultural heritage and skin tone. In the process, officials who did so gave some crowds a kind of credibility while they erased the legitimacy of other crowds. As a result, I think it is time to at least try redescribing and analyzing crowd action in colonial British North America in a way that avoids dividing crowds based on cultural and geographic heritage. Doing so will, I hope, provide a more nuanced perspective of crowd actions and of the communities in which people used violence to redress their grievances. At the same time, by interrogating how people built institutional and cultural power structures in colonial North America, looking at crowd actions will help uncover how people made race in the eighteenth century. 

In late 1835, a group of anti-Catholic activists, ministers, and publishers encountered a young woman named Maria Monk. A new mother and alone at just nineteen-years-old, she claimed that she had been a nun in a Montreal convent where she had been raped and witnessed the murder of women and infants. To some, her story was too fantastical to believe. But these increasingly dogmatic activists saw something different: the personification of their fears, a beautiful, sympathetic face, the possibilities of a persuadable public, and, an untapped commercial market. As Maria Monk tried to control her own fate, these men propelled the project forward despite compelling counter testimony, allegations of sexual impropriety in their ranks, double-crossing, and an unpredictable—and occasionally truant—“escaped nun.”

This chapter explores the fateful events that led to the publication of Monk's bestselling book, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu in January 1836. As such it tells two stories. First argues that the years between 1830 and 1835 saw a significant transition in American culture and politics when anti-Catholicism developed more currency and more urgency, with the focus on women and convents. In these few years, a circle of ministers and activists built the components for broad-based, vitriolic anti-Catholic movement. They created institutions to connect like-minded people; they founded newspapers and held public meetings to extend to new audiences; and they honed their messages to appeal to a broader audience. At the same time, they radicalized their messages. These immediate and practical supports for this newly energized popular anti-Catholicism catalyzed with longer-term cultural developments, such as a redefinition of the poor as strangers rather than neighbors, and the changing demographics of the US. These short- and long-term supports are important to map, not only because they uncover the building blocks of this popular movement, but also because they complicate the easiest notions of cause and effect found in some history texts, namely that Catholic immigration led to widespread anti-Popery. It is important to demystify that. Certainly anxiety about immigration was present the emerging movement in the 1830 and would come to play a substantial role a few decades later. At the same time, an overreliance on the explanation of immigration makes this worldview seem more “logical” or at least more transactional than it was. This matters because this new anti-Catholicism was built through institutions and a public repetition of perceived dangers. That message was attached to Irish Catholic immigrants; it was not the other way around. 

Second, the chapter uncovers the strange negotiations that lead to—and almost derailed—the publication of Monk’s book, revealing the gendered and sexual politics that left Monk in a position where controlling her body was her primary negotiating tool. In doing so it uncovers how legal and economic structures, as well as sexual politics, restricted marginalized women’s options during this era. Arriving to New York City with nothing but a compelling story, Maria Monk joined the legions of poor women who were marginalized within the economy and the legal system. She was a remarkably entrepreneurial woman, who worked aggressively to shape her circumstances. Monk had relatively few options to affect her circumstances. She flirted, shifted alliances, and dispensed information very strategically. She used ideas about female propriety to improve her situation and employed cunning and deceit as willingly. But her plans were often overwhelmed by men who made use of the legal system and business practices to prioritize their own gains and limit hers. Excluded from conversations and contracts, made a ward of one of the enterprising men, Monk’s primary resource over her story became control over her own body. Through her intimate negotiations and her penchant for running away, she exerted what power she could, but with little meaningful success.

“Critical Bodies: Disability and Slavery in Early Republic Virginia” argues that disabled enslaved people were not disposed of in the economic system of slavery. Because enslaved people with disabilities were critical bodies in maintaining the wealth of enslavers, and thus the creation of the United States, their varying degrees of able-bodiedness, had to be lawfully considered. As such, white enslavers created laws and financial policies to account for their disabilities and continue to extract the labor of enslaved people with disabilities to maintain and enhance their wealth. This dissertation examines petitions to the Virginia legislature, coroner records, and narratives of formerly enslaved people to examine how enslavers and enslaved people navigated disabilities in and on enslaved people’s bodies and minds from 1778 until 1850. 

“Critical Bodies” focuses on the life cycle of enslaved people and their encounters with enslavers and the law to define their disabilities within the complex and fluid interpretations of their bodies and abilities in Virginia. An analysis of enslaved peoples’ disabilities and enslavers’ responses enriches our understanding of gender, law, slavery, and capitalism by focusing on the appearance of disability that incorporates age, mental illness, and reproductive labor. “Critical Bodies” sheds light on the experiences of disabled enslaved people in Virginia and enriches scholarship on the relationships, institutions, and trauma created in slavery. 

Debt and morality go hand in hand. The notion ‘one has to repay one’s debts’ is not an economic statement, but a moral judgement. The ways in which these judgements are made in relation to social and cultural norms — both in the past and in the present — remains unclear. This paper will provide the preliminary findings of the first stage of a larger research project which focuses on the conceptualisation of debt in early modern America. By analysing commercial cases litigated in the New York court of Chancery, the paper will reveal the criteria used by early modern people to judge what they deemed to be respectable and credible actions when repaying debts on the one hand, and fraudulent and criminal activity on the other. By paying close attention to the changes in narrative which occur through the different stages of the legal process, the paper will demonstrate how the language surrounding debt came to rely not just on an understanding of economic stability, but on a combination of social, community, and religious values of the period. As the concept of debt is undoubtedly one of the great topics of contemporary society, the paper will provide new evidence of the language of credit, debt, and failure inherited by modern American — and even Western — society. Ultimately, this will provide lessons from the past and will have wider ramifications for how we treat indebtedness in modern society, allowing us to remove aspects of shame and the stigma surrounding debt and debt recovery. 

This introduction sets the stage for a comparative biography of five ardent opponents of the rebel movement that created the United States. While their strong stance as loyalists unites these individuals, they were otherwise very different from one another in their social positions and geographic locations. They range from a colonial governor in New England and an Anglican minister and poet in New York, to a Mohawk woman in Iroquoia, an enslaved man in North Carolina, and a female enslaver in Georgia. Each is relatively well known (at least to specialists) in their own right, but considering them in relationship to one another yields new insights about a formative era of change. All five left the new nation after the defeat of the British, but the study emphasizes understanding loyalism through its colonial context and wartime violence, fundamental aspects of the American Revolution that have been downplayed, if not ignored, in patriot-centered accounts of the period.