Robert Desrochers

Robert Desrochers, Assistant Professor (B.A., University of New Hampshire, 1993; M.A., The Johns Hopkins University, 1995; Ph.D., 2001). American Revolution; Early America and the Atlantic World; African American; slavery and freedom; black Atlantic. Articles include “Not Fade Away: The Narrative of Venture Smith, An African American in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History (1997), reprinted in Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, eds., A Question of Manhood: A Reader in Black Masculinity in the United States (Indiana University Press, 1999); and “Slave For Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704-1781,” William and Mary Quarterly (2002), awarded the Richard L. Morton Award by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

My first book project, “Every Picture Tells a Story: Slavery, Print, and Identity in Eighteenth-Century New England,” began with a simple question: what did slavery mean to black and white New Englanders in the decades before the American Revolution? As I pondered possible answers to that initial query, two thoughts recurred, one historiographical, the other methodological. First, I quickly came to regard the received wisdom that New England slavery was too insignificant to merit close scrutiny as a deeply unsatisfying and exaggerated claim that stood in the way of an integrative understanding of slavery’s ubiquity, variety, and adaptability in the early modern Atlantic world. At the least, such an anachronistic view did not square with the story told about the magnitude and dynamics of New England slavery by the thousands of printed advertisements offering slaves for sale in the public prints. Clearly, then, a developmental model would better suit my intention to show how, why, and the conditions under which New Englanders did, in fact, make slavery work. Accounting for change over time in this way led me, in turn, toward a reassessment of how in the era of the American Revolution politics, economy, and ideology fit into the causal pattern that helped bring down slavery in Massachusetts – the only major slaveholding state in the north that did not adopt gradual emancipation, and for a variety of reasons perhaps the one most anxious to forget that slavery had ever happened.

Not content with writing an institutional history, I began to think more about the constitutive relationship between slavery and print. If New England slavery really was small potatoes, why did slaves constitute such a visible presence in the print discourse? On one level, the phenomenon made it possible first, to examine the mutually reinforcing roles of slavery and print in the structure of racial and social authority in eighteenth-century New England, and second, to consider the attitudes, assumptions, and expectations about slavery, race, empire, and identity that both informed and attempted to regulate those structures from the top down. At the same time, refracting my initial question about slavery’s meaning through the social and cultural matrix of print got me thinking about the wide variety of advertisements, anecdotes, and other “stories” white New Englanders told about slavery in the commercial press in new ways; namely, as mental maps that ritually connected them to each other and to the rhythms of a larger English Atlantic world. Imagining slavery through print, white New Englanders envisioned and invented a role for themselves within rather than without the slaveholding mainstream of late-colonial American culture, a process that gave rise to a regional identity later generations of New Englanders would renounce and deny ever having fostered. In other words, I argue, the intersection of slavery and print culture transformed New England slavery into a social and cultural referent that both reinforced and rivaled slavery’s economic role in the eighteenth century. In the end, though, the print culture of slavery spoke also to myriad fears and anxieties that undermined rather than inspired confidence in the system, demonstrating time and again that white mastery of print, and over slaves, had limits. Anchored by chapters on slavery and freedom in the pioneering autobiographical narratives of Briton Hammon (1760) and Venture Smith (1798), the book ends with a discussion of this tension between white control and the ability of black New Englanders to forge expansive identities, cultures, and communities of their own out of the tools – linguistic and otherwise – of oppression.

My next project, tentatively called “Close to the Fire: Fiddlers and Freedom in the Black Atlantic,” focuses on the collective experience of cosmopolitan black fiddlers, whose portable and always-in-demand musical skills help explain why they counted second only to sailors among New England runaways. Pete Seeger used to tell an old folk tale about a no-nonsense fiddler who, asked how he came to play, explained that fiddlers always got to stand close to the fire. For black fiddlers that may have been true in more than just the literal sense. My study seeks to understand how enslaved and free black fiddlers shaped the contours of the black Atlantic in the eighteenth century.

Curriculum Vitae