ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Texas’ Trinity River to show how the South’s smaller rivers enabled the spread of plantation slavery in the final decades of the antebellum era. Unlike other histories of slavery that argue that the domination of slaves linked with mastery over cotton crops or a hydraulic landscape, on the Trinity the plantation landscape reflected planters’ lack of control over the river. Planters’ disinterest in mastering the environment on the wet frontier of slavery undermined their own class’s justifications for slavery, the possibilities for enslaved people’s resistance, and freedpeople’s experience of emancipation along unleveed and untamed rivers. Planters’ ability to profit without controlling the river derived from owning land in both the bottomlands and uplands while exploiting a large enslaved labour force, a reality that increased the amount of work they expected of their slaves. After emancipation freedpeople incurred their former masters’ environmental debts in the bottomlands with floods worsened from a legacy of land clearance and cultivation that overloaded the South’s smaller rivers with sediment. Forced to battle the river during slavery, freedpeople encountered an even more destructive river in freedom at the very moment their world changed from plantation to a single plot within that landscape.

摘要

本文重点介绍德克萨斯州的三位一体河，以展示南部较小的河流如何在战前时代的最后几十年促进种植园奴隶制的传播。与其他奴隶制历史不同的是，奴隶的统治与对棉花作物或水利景观的掌握有关，在三位一体中，种植园景观反映了种植者对河流缺乏控制。种植园主对在奴隶制潮湿的边界上掌控环境不感兴趣，削弱了他们自己阶级的奴隶制正当性，削弱了被奴役人民抵抗的可能性，以及解放人民在没有堤防和未驯服的河流上获得解放的经历。种植者在不控制河流的情况下获利的能力，因为他们拥有低地和高地的土地，同时剥削大量被奴役的劳动力，这一现实增加了他们期望奴隶的工作量。解放后，由于土地清理和耕作使南方较小的河流沉积物超载，洪水在低地地区承担了前主人的环境债务。在奴隶制期间被迫与河流作战，自由人民在自由中遇到了更具破坏性的河流，就在他们的世界从种植园变成该景观中的一个单一地块的那一刻。