John and Alan Lomax first encountered Huddie Ledbetter at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in the summer of 1933, while they were recording songs for a book eventually titled American Ballads and Folk Songs. A year later, they recorded him again, including an appeal he made to Louisiana governor O.K. Allen. This chapter explores the history of Angola, conditions there during Ledbetter’s incarceration, and Ledbetter’s extensive efforts to achieve his own early release.

In many ways, the workhouse epitomized the brutality of urban slavery. Enslavers sent their slaves to the workhouse for punishment, most often in the form of whippings and paddling. Sometimes they had their slave labor on the treadmill, a dangerous contraption that often lead to injury, including permanent disability. The workhouse also served as a slave pen for slaves awaiting sale – a place for safekeeping slaves who might otherwise runaway before being sold away to New Orleans or some other strange place. In addition, the workhouse was a prison. Captured runaway slaves were lodged in the workhouse. Convicted slaves, like Nicholas, served the terms of their convictions there because the city council restricted the jail to whites and free blacks only.

Historians of violence in the French Empire have focused primarily on official agents of the state, such as soldiers, policemen, judges, and administrators. Violence perpetrated by non-state actors – that is, by European settlers, merchants, and travelers – remain far less explored in the historiography of French colonialism. In important ways, brutality perpetrated by non-state actors helped perpetuate the Manichean dynamics of colonialism so powerfully described by colonial and post-colonial critics alike. The prevalence of violence suggests that quotidian brutality was central to settlers’ sense of power and identity in regions where they felt under constant threat from larger non-European populations. This chapter examines how civilian mistreatment of colonial populations often differed starkly from the state’s efforts to legitimate its own use of violence in military, administrative, and judicial capacities. Indeed, such daily acts of violence were potentially threatening to the French power. They undermined administrative control of French citizens and destabilized what were often delicate balances of power between officials and subject populations. Equally important, uncontrolled violence jeopardized the central rhetorical claim that colonization brought rationalism and civilization to allegedly less-developed societies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

This chapter and the two that follow cover the period from 1838 to enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act in October 1850. The chapter begins with an examination of the covert networks that helped fugitives from enslavement traverse the Borderland in at least a dozen places between Quincy, IL, and Chester, PA. It then discusses the cultural roots of the violence of mastery, and dozens of incidents in which slaveholders and slave catchers brought the violence of mastery into the Borderland, rampaging through entire communities, breaking into homes, and on a few occasions killing and dismembering escapees who resisted. The chapter explores the impact of this violence on the lives of abolitionists, free blacks, and Underground activists in the Borderland and the manner in which the Underground Railroad adapted its operations to meet the challenge by embracing speed and stealth. Finally, the chapter discusses the dynamics of fugitive rescues in the Borderland, noting particularly the different dynamics of urban and rural rescues and the rarity of interracial cooperation in these efforts.