Freedom’s Currency: Slavery, Capitalism, and Self-Purchase in the United States

In the early United States, some enslaved people bought their freedom, and Julia Wallace Bernier’s study of that process exposes the inner workings of slavery’s capitalism through the ways the enslaved raised money, networked, and manipulated a market to accomplish self-purchase. Within a system in which “many American pockets were lined with money made by enslaved people’s labor and lives,” enslaved people managed to acquire the means to manumit themselves and their loved ones (51). They did so by using capitalist technologies that were becoming ubiquitous in the broader economy and, when successful, turned the tables on the processes that commodified their lives. Bernier historicizes this uncommon but important aspect of enslavement while exploring geographic differences and abolitionist debates about the morality of self-purchase. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 raised the stakes on self-purchase and led to a discussion of compensated emancipation. The process at the book’s core varied over time and place, and beyond its economic ramifications, self-purchase was a “gendered experience,” Bernier contends (40). In this way, Freedom’s Currency turns a seeming anomaly of American enslavement into a window on the process of enslavement itself.Freedom’s Currency’s leading contention is that “no matter what access enslaved people had to money and markets, they had to work toward mastery of their political and social worlds” (55). This ambitious contention comprises five parts, including “how enslaved people shaped self-purchase as a process, how they cultivated and depended on community networks and market practices to do so successfully, and what buying freedom can tell us . . . about the complex nature of the relationship between slavery and capitalism” (2). It explores “how the enslaved made sense of this relationship” between the freedom they sought and the economic system they accessed for the mechanism to do so (2). Freedom’s Currency also explores the relationship between law and the American economy as they relate to the sociality of self-purchase as a step toward freedom. Self-purchase was more than an individual act or strategy.In four tightly argued chapters, Bernier analyzes a coherent process that seems at first to be kaleidoscopic. States in the post-Revolutionary North passed gradual abolition statutes, the key word being gradual. Between 1780 and 1804, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island passed such laws; New Jersey’s was the most restrictive. In that context, “buying freedom could act as a compromise between the property rights of slaveholders and the rights of the enslaved in freedom” (22). Black northerners networked and overworked to buy out the time they supposedly owed enslavers under gradual abolition statutes. In the South, enslaved people worked against a rising market for their labors and lives as the cotton frontier created unheard-of demand for precisely those who were able to earn enough for self-purchase. Instead of time, enslaved southerners worked against distance as enslavers and slave traders threatened to uproot them and their loved ones. That made self-purchase a high-stakes strategy for enslaved subjects whose overwork or use of “special skills” was a race against markets for cotton and other commodities and enslavers’ interests (61). One had to rely on a network and not mere earning power, and “buying freedom was a precarious business” (69). Family members often devoted life savings to buying themselves or loved ones out of bondage, and as freedom seekers sojourned northward, they brought information of that predicament to abolitionists, who publicized “redemption or ransom” (84).Self-purchase became a hot topic within abolitionist circles. White abolitionists generally equated self-purchase with the coercion of goods in a “robbery” and argued that enslaved lives had a value that made any purchase a moral offense. Black abolitionists, by contrast, “had always demanded a willingness to improvise under force of circumstance” (85). A few Black abolitionists published autobiographies to aid their self-purchase, which “can be read as a trope within the genre,” while would-be self-purchasers’ ads in abolitionist publications appealing for help faced increasing obstacles because of restrictions on the press and on abolitionists’ mobility (90). That was particularly true after 1850, and the final chapter discusses the imperatives of self-purchase in a nation that increased federal police powers to capture fugitives from enslavement, which rendered many northern states unsafe for self-freed bondspersons. Some were so desperate to raise funds to purchase themselves or loved ones that they went without necessities. Others made fraudulent fundraising claims. But the politics and realities of enslaved fugitivity gave rise to a discussion of compensated emancipation and emigration.Freedom’s Currency contributes to a historiography of slavery and capitalism led by historians like Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman and responds to influential books on enslaved people’s participation in a capitalist economy by Justene Hill Edwards and manumission studies by scholars including Eva Sheppard Wolf. Bernier argues that “enslaved people’s participation in local markets gave them access to consumer goods, cash, and credit. Their market participation also allowed them to build connections and network with others in their community, and so African Americans entered networks of trust, credit, and exchange that would have been familiar to many in the period” (54). Bernier stops short of contending that the enslaved were petty capitalists, but Freedom’s Currency will appeal to labor historians who seek to better understand a forced labor regime that held out manumission as an incentive to overwork. Bernier contends that the enslaved discovered “ways to participate in their local economies to raise money to buy freedom . . . even though much of that economic activity was considered illegal” (59). The book could explore the ramifications of that illegal or quasi-legal activity in more detail to more fully illuminate the labor regimes that held out precious few opportunities to keep a surplus or earn on the side, but that is a small request for a superb book.