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• Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross
• Robert Colby

Scholars seeking to understand the ties between slavery and race in the New World have long found critical evidence in the array of laws that colonies and states passed linking African descent and servility. Increasingly, however, legal historians have demonstrated that these laws' impact was not predetermined. Instead, local officials and ordinary people established the laws' functional meanings by adhering to or ignoring top-down mandates and by permitting extralegal traditions and interpersonal relationships to shape the laws' application. Enslaved and free people of color played a critical role in this process. Though everywhere excluded from many of the rights guaranteed to citizens, enslaved and free people of color nevertheless took advantage of legal openings to liberate themselves, structure their families, and impose distance between themselves and bondage. In this slim volume, Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross probe how negotiations between enslavers, African-descended peoples, and the law shaped race, freedom, and belonging in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Through a close examination of African Americans' and Afro-Cubans' encounters with racialized legal structures, de la Fuente and Gross demonstrate how these men and women used opportunities embedded within each system to fend off slaveholders' consistent efforts to render servitude and Blackness indistinguishable.

The laws governing Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia had dramatic (and sometimes unexpected) effects on Africans' and African Americans' place in these three societies. In Cuba, preexisting Iberian practice marked Africans as slaves from the outset. But this system, originally constructed on nonracial premises, also included mechanisms (such as coartación, a system of self-paid manumission) through which Afro-Cubans could mitigate their bondage or even free themselves. Across generations, escapes made through these legal hatches produced a sizable—and increasingly essential—class of free people of color. Their numbers, increasingly formalized abilities to claim rights, and critical place in the Spanish imperial project shielded them from enslavers' efforts to equate Blackness and bondage despite a surging early-nineteenthcentury plantation economy.

Colonial Louisianans borrowed heavily from Caribbean slave codes and carefully policed Africans' efforts to win freedom. Four decades of Spanish rule in Louisiana, however, opened avenues to liberation similar to Cuba's. These opportunities, combined with the mass arrival of refugees from Saint Domingue, created a sizable free Black community in the colony-turned-state. The Americans [End Page 325] who took over after the Louisiana Purchase significantly tightened African Americans' chances for freedom, but enslaved and free people of color nevertheless drew on these legacies to protect themselves amid the onset of the Cotton Kingdom. An initially porous Virginia code, meanwhile, briefly accommodated Black freedom alongside enslavement. From the late seventeenth century onward, however (save for a brief moment after the American Revolution), Virginia's lawmakers fought to eliminate the contradiction that free people of color represented for a slave society and to remove them as a threat to the slave regime. Black men and women regularly won reprieves in local courts, but in Virginia, as in Louisiana, the law's overarching aim was to foreclose their claims to belonging and to preserve a society built on bondage.

Blending careful archival work with seamless distillations of the secondary literature, de la Fuente and Gross effectively depict the structural forces looming over people of African descent and the legal havens they constructed in the shadows. Vivid anecdotes give a deeply human complexion to what could easily have been an antiseptic description of evolving codes of laws. This compact yet comprehensive study, moreover, provides a welcome reminder that critical mechanisms within slave societies appear with greater clarity when presented in contrasts. De la Fuente and Gross have provided a useful handbook for historians of all three regions who seek to understand the law's effect on regimes of racial exploitation—and the worlds that people of...

审核人：

• 成为自由，成为黑人：古巴，弗吉尼亚和路易斯安那州的种族，自由和法律，作者：亚历杭德罗·德拉·富恩特（Alejandro de la Fuente）和阿里拉·格罗斯（Ariela J. Gross）
• 罗伯特·科尔比

试图了解新世界中奴隶制与种族之间关系的学者长期以来在一系列法律中找到了重要证据，这些法律表明殖民地和各州通过了将非洲人后裔与奴役联系在一起的法律。但是，越来越多的法律历史学家证明，这些法律的影响不是预先确定的。相反，地方官员和普通百姓通过坚持或忽略自上而下的命令并允许法外传统和人际关系来影响法律的实施，从而确立了法律的功能含义。被奴役和自由的有色人种在这一过程中发挥了关键作用。尽管到处都有许多公民享有的权利被剥夺，但被奴役和有色人种自由的人仍然利用合法的机会解放自己，建立家庭，并在自己和束缚之间施加距离。在这本狭小的书中，亚历杭德罗·德拉·富恩特（Alejandro de la Fuente）和阿里拉·J·格罗斯（Ariela J. Gross）探讨了奴役者，非洲裔人民和法律之间的谈判如何影响古巴，弗吉尼亚和路易斯安那州的种族，自由和归属。通过仔细研究非裔美国人和非裔古巴人与种族化的法律结构的接触，德拉富恩特和格罗斯证明了这些男人和女人如何利用每个系统中嵌入的机会来抵御奴隶主的一贯努力，以使奴役和黑人无法区分开。

管辖古巴，路易斯安那州和弗吉尼亚州的法律对非洲人和非洲裔美国人在这三个社会中的地位产生了巨大（有时是出乎意料）的影响。在古巴，伊比利亚已有的习俗从一开始就标志着非洲人是奴隶。但是，该系统最初是在非种族前提下构建的，还包括一些机制（例如coartación（一种自付费用的交易系统），非洲裔古巴人可以借此减轻束缚，甚至解放自己。在各代人之间，通过这些合法的孵化场逃脱产生了相当大的，并且越来越重要的，有色人种自由阶级。尽管19世纪初的人工林经济风起云涌，但他们的人数，日趋形式化的要求权利的能力以及在西班牙帝国项目中的重要地位使他们免受奴役者为等同于黑人和奴役的努力。

路易斯安那殖民地从加勒比奴隶制代码中大量借用，并严密监管非洲人争取自由的努力。然而，西班牙在路易斯安那州统治了四十年，为古巴打开了类似于古巴的解放之路。这些机会，再加上圣多明各（Saint Domingue）难民的大量涌入，在由殖民地转变为该州的情况下，创造了一个庞大的免费黑人社区。美国人[结束页325]在路易斯安那购买之后接手的人大大加强了非裔美国人的自由机会，但被奴役和自由的有色人种仍然利用这些遗产来保护自己，因为他们是在棉花王国爆发期间保护自己的。同时，最初是弗吉尼亚州的一个渗透性法规，短暂地兼顾了黑人自由和奴役。然而，从十七世纪后期开始（在美国独立战争后不久保存），弗吉尼亚州的立法者们努力消除矛盾，即有色人种代表奴隶社会，并消除了他们对奴隶政权的威胁。黑人和白人经常在地方法院赢得缓刑，但在弗吉尼亚州（与路易斯安那州一样），该法律的首要目标是取消对拥有权的主张，并维护建立在奴役基础上的社会。

de la Fuente和Gross结合了认真的档案工作和对次要文献的无缝提炼，有效地描绘了笼罩在非洲人后裔和他们在阴影中建立的合法避难所的结构性力量。生动的轶事给人以深刻的肤色，这很容易成为对不断发展的法律法规的消毒描述。此外，这项紧凑而全面的研究提醒人们，在对比之下，奴隶社会中的关键机制显得更加清晰。德拉·富恩特（De la Fuente）和格罗斯（Gross）为所有三个地区的历史学家提供了有用的手册，他们希望了解法律对种族剥削制度的影响，以及世界上...