18
economically profitable space that allowed for slaveholders to oversee their enslaved labourers and exploit them. 33 Michel Foucault has argued that there can be a‘ central point’ to architecture and space where bodies can be surveyed, disciplined and punished accordingly. 34 Along similar lines, Brian Thomas has demonstrated through archaeology and material culture that“ the mansion was the symbolic seat of power and authority on the plantation” and this power dispersed from the house into the fields, slave cabins, quarters, and even neighbouring plantations. 35 Thomas states that Andrew Jackson’ s Hermitage plantation and other plantations in the antebellum period had renovations where bricks replaced the wooden buildings on the plantation. Thomas argues that brick as more of a durable material, reinforced permanent surveillance, control, and power over the enslaved, and reminded them of their permanent position on the plantation. 36 Whilst Thomas’ s archaeological approach demonstrates slaveholders’ dominance over their enslaved, Thomas does not use formerly enslaved narratives as a key methodology to uncover how they maintained control over enslaved bodies within those spaces and how slaveholders faced the challenges of resistance.
Slaveholders restricted the mobility of enslaved women to maintain control over them. Not only did slaveholders restrict enslaved women to the perimeters of the plantation but restricted the use of spaces on the plantation to certain times. Born in Alabama, formerly enslaved, Ank Bishop stated that,“ all de women on lady Liza’ s place had to go to de fiel’ ev’ y day an’ dem what had suckerlin’ babies would come in‘ bout nine o’ clock in de mawnin’ an’ when de bell ring at twelve an’ suckerlin em”. 37
33
See, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South( Yale University Press, 2019) and Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household( Cambridge University Press, 2008) Also see, Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery( W. W Norton, 1989).
34
Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison( Penguin Classics, 2020), 173.
35
Thomas, Brian W. " Power and community: The archaeology of slavery at the Hermitage Plantation," American Antiquity 63, no. 4( 1998): 536-540
https:// link. gale. com / apps / doc / A53972731 / AONE? u = keele _ tr & sid = bookmark-AONE & xid = f0f14b32
36
Thomas, Brian W. " Power and community: The archaeology of slavery at the Hermitage Plantation," American Antiquity 63, no. 4( 1998): 540
https:// link. gale. com / apps / doc / A53972731 / AONE? u = keele _ tr & sid = bookmark-AONE & xid = f0f14b32
37
Ank Bishop, Federals Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 1 Alabama, Aarons-Young, 36.