Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston's Urban Slave Society (Blacks in the Diaspora)

"[A] stunning, deeply researched, and gracefully written social history." —Leslie Schwalm, University of Iowa This study of women in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, looks at the roles of women in an urban slave society. Cynthia M. Kennedy takes up issues of gender, race, condition (slave or free), and class and examines the ways each contributed to conveying and replicating power. She analyses what it meant to be a woman in a world where historically specific social classifications determined personal destiny and where at the same time people of color and white people mingled daily. Kennedy’s study examines the lives of the women of Charleston and the variety of their attempts to negotiate the web of social relations that ensnared them. Cover 1 Contents 10 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction 16 part one: the place, the war, the first reconstruction 24 1. The Place and the People 26 2. Disorder and Chaos of War 45 3. Rebuilding and Resisting 68 part two: defining women, defining their braided relations 90 4. Marriage and Cohabitation within the Aristocratic Paradigm: Wealthy White Women and the Free Brown Elite 92 5. Marriage and Cohabitation outside the Aristocratic Paradigm: Slaves and Free Laboring Women 110 6. Mixing and Admixtures 126 7. Work and Workers 142 8. Leisure and Recreation 172 9. Women and the Law 189 10. Illness and Death 205 Conclusion 227 Appendix 1. Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-WarrantApplications 236 Appendix 2. South Carolina Court System and the Case Universe 238 Abbreviations 242 Notes 244 Bibliography 296 Index 318 Discussing the roles of women in an urban slave society, this book takes up issues of gender, race, condition (slave or free), and class and examines the ways each contributed to conveying and replicating power. It analyses what it meant to be a woman in a world where historically specific social classifications determined personal destiny. Annotation How women of diverse color, condition, and wealth sustained power relations in urban slave society