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Abstract
Growing up in extreme poverty in Massachusetts, Nancy Gardner Prince (1799–1859) experienced migrancy and dislocation from an early age. In 1824, she emigrated to Russia for nearly a decade, and later emigrated to Jamaica for a brief period. As an African American author who journeyed widely in the United States and abroad, Prince’s writings reveal the racial discrimination and regulation that she endured while traveling in the US, as well as the impact that such restrictions on her freedom of movement had on her conceptions of racial kinship and national belonging. This essay approaches the regulation of Black mobility as a crucial site of racial dominance, subordination, and exclusion, and theorizes that Prince’s writings strategically remap the racially uneven conditions that she experienced on her journeys to articulate a counternarrative of Black citizenship and belonging in the US. Prince not only flips the script by publicly exposing racist conveyance operators, her autobiography also forms a counterarchive that records her ancestors’ oral histories of dispossession and US patriotism. Through close readings and attention to her revisions, we see that Prince’s engagements with territorial concepts such as “country” and “place” contemplate the tensions inherent in African American identity during the antebellum nineteenth century, as they disclose the complex negotiations that shaped her travels and texts.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Additionally, the federal government customarily denied Black travelers’ passport applications. See Pryor, Colored Travelers, 103–125; Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free, 241, 318n5. Prince does not address being denied a US passport, yet she presumably did not have one since she indicates in Life and Travels that she traveled to Jamaica with Russian letters of protection. Prince, Life and Travels, 79. When citing Life and Travels, I reference the better-known second edition, unless otherwise noted.
2 Pryor, Colored Travelers, 46.
3 For more on the antebellum regulation of Black travel, see Pryor, Colored Travelers; Schoeppner, Moral Contagion; Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free.
4 Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free, 240.
5 I suggest here that Prince’s writings on emigration reveal both how she “imagined citizenship” and how she “practiced citizenship.” See Spires, The Practice of Citizenship.
6 Ibid., 9.
7 For examples of geographic and spatial inquiries in nineteenth-century literature, see, e.g., Eric Gardner, Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi; Judith Madera, Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006; Martha Schoolman, Abolitionist Geographies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
8 Carby describes Prince’s precarity as “an apt demonstration of economic racial discrimination; however hard the young Nancy and her family labored in the North, the fruits of that society were not granted to them.” Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 41.
9 Jane Vose, nḗe Wanton, is recorded in the archives variously as Jenny, Genna, and Jane.
10 In a significant act of refusal, Prince omits her grandfather’s slave name, “Backus,” or “Bacchus,” from her first edition, preferring “Tobias Wornton, who was stolen from Africa.” Prince, Life and Travels, 1st ed., 1. She reluctantly includes the name “Backus” in her later editions: “Tobias Wornton, or Backus, so called.” Prince, Life and Travels, 5. Bacchus had been enslaved by the prominent politician Winthrop Sargent and was well-known around Gloucester. Prince misspells the classical literary name, Bacchus, the name assigned by enslavers, reflecting her lack of access to a formal education.
11 When she was fifteen, Prince journeyed twenty-five miles on foot to Salem “to get more for [her] labor,” and found a position “with a respectable colored family.” Her mother did not approve and forced her to leave and work for a white family. Prince, Life and Travels, 10.
12 Ibid., 8.
13 The Gloucester archives hold the indenture records of Prince’s two younger half sisters, Mary Vose, dated 1812, and Lucy Vose, dated 1818. Prince writes that a half brother was intermittently supported by the town when he could not be cared for at home. Ibid., 16.
14 Ibid., 17–18.
15 Ibid., 20.
16 After her fraught second trip to Jamaica, this enabled Prince to lay over in New York while she waited to recover her lost belongings: “I took a room, and went to sewing.” Ibid., 82.
17 Ibid., 22.
18 See Grimshaw, Official History, 84. I cite Grimshaw’s biographical account of Nero Prince only to the extent that it relies on official freemason documents.
19 Ironically, Prince was “taken up in domestic affairs” only as an expat in Russia. Life and Travels, 38.
20 Several members of Prince’s church group in St Petersburg died in the winter of 1832. See Birrell, Life of Richard Knill, 189.
21 Prince’s burial site is located at Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett, Massachusetts.
22 Prince, Life and Travels, 41.
23 Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 384.
24 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 9 (citation omitted).
25 Prince, Life and Travels, 17.
26 Gunning, “Nancy Prince,” 40.
27 Madera, Black Atlas, 6.
28 After returning from Russia, Prince continued to identify with displaced individuals: “my mind was directed to my fellow brethren whose circumstances were similar to my own.” Prince, Life and Travels, 41.
29 See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 19. For more on routed identity, see, for example, Glissant, Poetics of Relation; Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism.
30 Prince, Life and Travels, 5.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 6.
33 Ibid., 7.
34 Ibid., 51.
35 Ibid., 5.
36 Ibid., 7.
37 Madera, Black Atlas, 7.
38 Like Prince, Martin Delany infused oral histories into his text. In The Condition, Delany articulates his wish to reach Black readers through “comprehensible language” (51).
39 Spires, The Practice of Citizenship, 10–11.
40 For more on the pamphlet form in transnational antislavery print networks, see, for example, Boutelle, “Manifest Diaspora.”
41 Prince, The West Indies, 14–15.
42 Ibid., 15.
43 Garrison, “State of Things.” Whereas Garrison had publicly disavowed the colonization movement in 1831, this marked his disavowal of West Indies emigration.
44 Ray continued, “we would repeat to our people, that the emigration scheme is a delusive one … We should like to have a copy of the book.” Ray, “The Emigration Scheme.”
45 Prince, The West Indies, 12. Citing scripture, Prince compares the emigrants to prodigal children who are unable to make a repentant return to their parents’ lands.
46 Fish, “Journeys and Warnings,” 235.
47 Delany, The Condition, 48.
48 Prince, Life and Travels, 51 (emphasis added).
49 Delany, The Condition, 66.
50 Pryor, Colored Travelers, 124; Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393, 403 (1856).
51 See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. at 531, 576.
52 Prince, Life and Travels, 1st ed., 14; 2nd ed., 20; 3rd ed., 20.
53 Delany, The Condition, 203.
54 Prince, Life and Travels, 3rd ed., 87. The final page of each edition of Life and Travels contains a psalm titled “The Hiding Place,” which prays for refuge in “heaven, my hiding place.” 1st ed., 88; 2nd ed., 89; 3rd ed., 89.
55 Pryor, Colored Travelers, 69.
56 Ibid. The mainstream press viewed these matters differently—for instance, accusing James Barbadoes of “put[ting] on airs incompatible for his station” when he resisted his removal from the passengers’ dining room of a ship. “Unkind Treatment” (quoting the New York Commercial Advertiser).
57 Liberator, April 5, 1834. Paul and Prince participated in antislavery and temperance causes together.
58 Prince writes that Silvia had been “deluded away.” Prince, Life and Travels, 12.
59 Prince, Life and Travels, 1st ed., 10.
60 Prince, Life and Travels, 3rd ed., 16.
61 Liberator, September 17, 1841. Prince also describes the incident in Life and Travels: “I intended to have gone by the western boat, but by mistake got on board Captain Comstock’s, and was exposed on deck all night in a damp east wind, and when I arrived at the landing I could not assist myself” (56).
62 Liberator, September 17, 1841.
63 Whittier, “Prejudice and Cruelty.”
64 “An Act Relating to the Rights of Rail-Road Passengers,” Commonwealth of Massachusetts, February 22, 1842. The Liberator published Remond’s testimony before the Massachusetts House of Representatives. See “Remarks of Charles Lenox Remond.”
65 Walker, Walker’s Appeal, 183.
66 See, for example, “An Act to Prevent the Future Migration of Free Negroes or Mulattoes to This Territory, and for Other Purposes,” Acts of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Florida, February 10, 1832.
67 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 405.
68 In her chapter on the Negro Seamen Acts, Wong discusses numerous cases of northern travelers who report escaping capture in the South. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free, 183–239.
69 Prince, Life and Travels, 75.
70 Quigley and Zaki, “The Significance of Race,” 200. The Negro Seamen Acts were highly controversial laws adopted by the southern coastal states beginning in the 1820s to block the entry of free Black laborers working on merchant ships, both foreign and domestic.
71 Ibid., 198.
72 Prince, Life and Travels, 77. The spectators said, “we shall watch you like the [devil] until you go away; you must not say anything to these negroes whilst you are here” (78).
73 Ibid., 77.
74 Ibid., 78.
75 Ibid., 78–79.
76 Ibid., 79–80. The captain summoned Prince from her cabin to an outside deck, where he “placed something for me to stand on, that I might see the awful sight, which was the vessel of slaves laying at the side of our ship; the deck was full of young men, girls and children, bound to Texas for sale!” (80).
77 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 416–417.
78 Ibid., 417. In addition to freedom of movement, Taney feared that citizenship “would give [African Americans] the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went” (Ibid.).
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Ali Tal-mason
Ali Friedberg Tal-mason is an attorney and a PhD candidate in Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University, focusing in nineteenth-century narratives in law and literature. She holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Miami School of Law, where she was an editor of the Inter-American Law Review. Her interdisciplinary work combines analysis of legal history and multiethnic literature to explore the colonial roots of structural inequality in the US, with attention to disparities concerning land, labor, migration, incarceration, and citizenship. She has published essays in the Wisconsin International Law Journal, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Slate. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation—a study of the life and writings of nineteenth-century author, educator, and activist Nancy Gardner Prince.