Black Politics Under Slavery: A Jailhouse Archive

This paper explores how jails facilitated the circulation of subversive strategies, antislavery politics, and geopolitical knowledge in the antebellum South. It narrates that circulation through a microhistory of the men confined together within a New Orleans jail during the winter of 1840-1841, amid a slave rebellion panic and subsequent mass-roundup of “suspicious” Black people. Drawing on prosopographical analysis, the paper reconstructs these men’s backgrounds, relationships, work histories, and networks to ask what kinds of information, tactics, and political imagination could be generated through forced cohabitation. By foregrounding circulation within and through the jail, the paper reframes the prison not only as a technology of immobilization but also, paradoxically, as an infrastructure that helped produce and transmit the very forms of resistant strategizing it sought to suppress.