This series is offered in conjunction with America 250 and is cosponsored by the following units:
- Center for Latin American Studies
- College of Arts and Sciences
- Department of African American and African Studies
- Department of Political Science
- Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Panel 2: Challenging Unfreedom & Political Violence In the Age of Revolutions
Panelists:
- Paul Barba, Bucknell University
- Leila Blackbird, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, Brown University
Moderator:
- Chris Nichols
"All Who Cannot Be Taken Had Better Be Shot By the Creek Indians: Muscogees, Marronage, and the Contested Meanings of the American Revolution"
Abstract:
On March 14, 1776, just four months before Continental rebels signed their declaration of independence from the British Crown, Col. Stephen Bull worked feverishly to curtail a parallel movement for autonomy among a group of two-hundred or so fugitive slaves congregated on Tybee Island. “The matter is this,” he wrote to South Carolina Council of Safety President Henry Laurens. “It is far better for the public and owners, if the deserted negroes on Tybee Island… be shot, if they cannot be taken.” This was, as far as Bull was concerned, the only measure the Continentals could take if they wanted to prevent “our own money or property” from enlisting among the enemy British. But he also added an extra wrinkle to his plan: “all who cannot be taken, had better be shot by the Creek Indians, as it perhaps, may deter other negroes from deserting.” In other words, Bull saw the Tybee crisis as an opportunity to solidify Continental rule within the boundaries of South Carolina and well beyond. Who were these “willing and desirous” Muscogees? How prevalent was their slave hunting within the Revolutionary Era? And what do their experiences and actions reveal about the larger meanings of the American Revolution—of the pursuits of freedom, autonomy, and independence—across and beyond Native country? This presentation thus explores how Indigenous histories often complicate and disrupt both popular and scholarly representations of the American Revolution.
About Paul Barba:
Paul Barba (Ph.D., U.C. Santa Barbara) is an associate professor of history and affiliate faculty of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. He is the author of the prize-winning book, Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), and the editor of Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries, 1700-1860: Bonds of Rebellion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). He also is co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press series Borderlands and Transcultural Studies and the Bloomsbury Publishing series Understanding Marronage: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Engagements.
"Reproducing Empire: Gender, Political Ecologies, and Indigenous Slavery in the Revolutionary Gulf South"
Abstract:
In the winter of 1765–66, two French traders trafficked Indigenous captives from Pawnee territory down the Red River into the lands of the Atakapa, including a young girl of eleven years and five months of age. By the time she arrived, Angélique's small body was visibly pregnant—a consequence of her captivity. Although she did not survive, her daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren remained enslaved through Louisiana's transition from French to Spanish rule and its incorporation into the nascent United States. What does the history of one enslaved family reveal about the larger meanings of the American Revolution in the Gulf South?
The enslavement of Indigenous women and girls was central to the reproduction of empire. As ecologies were remade through captive-taking, plantation expansion, and the redrawing of imperial borders, colonial regimes simultaneously sought to reorganize Indigenous kinship and land through racial reclassification and the hereditary transmission of enslaved status. Political, environmental, and gendered violence were not separate processes but, instead, mutually constitutive projects meant to secure colonial claims to land, labor, and sovereignty. This presentation argues that, when viewed from the Gulf South, the American Revolution appears less as the birth of a nation than as an imperial transition that reproduced colonial power through the remaking of Indigenous political ecologies and kinship, revealing how political, environmental, and gendered violence became lived and embodied across generations.
About Leila K. Blackbird:
Leila K. Blackbird (Ph.D., Univ. of Chicago) is the Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History at Brown University, where she is currently working on her first book, Embodied Violence: Slavery and Settler Colonialism on America's Third Coast. Her research reinterprets the intertwined histories of settler colonialism and slavery in the Gulf South and has been featured in The Cambridge History of the American Revolution, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood, and What Is History, Now?, as well as in the journals Eighteenth-Century Studies, Scholarly Editing, and The William and Mary Quarterly. Her article, “‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages’: The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769–1803,” received the Omohundro Institute’s New Voices Award.
