Cromwell Article Prize to Whiting

Each year, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation makes a series awards, targeting graduate students and early career legal historians, on the recommendation of committees of the American Society for Legal History and announced at the ASLH's annual meeting.  The first we’ll notice is the Cromwell Article Prize, awarded to Gloria McCahon Whiting, “Race, Slavery, and the Problem of Numbers in Early New England: A View from Probate Court,” William and Mary Quarterly 77, no.3 (2020): 405-440.  Here is the citation:

Gloria McCahon Whiting’s “Race, Slavery, and the Problem of Numbers in Early New England: A View from Probate Court” is a creative, brave, and rigorous exemplar of legal history scholarship. Through an insightful, imaginative analysis of tens of thousands of probate court transactions in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, from 1639 to 1769, Whiting shows how historians can use legal archives to analyze both the structural contours of coercive institutions and the qualitative experiences of the individuals who strove to make lives within them.

Whiting’s use of legal archives makes an important intervention in slavery studies, where recent debates have questioned the reliance on such materials for their potential to repeat the violence that the law once rendered against enslaved persons. Using these archives can affirm the vision of those in power, dehumanizing the enslaved by representing them only through aggregation and abstraction. Whiting, however, shows the utility of these materials.  In her hands, aggregation does justice to historical subjects by accurately rendering the systems of power they endured. With careful counting, she upends conventional assumptions about the practice of slavery in colonial New England, demonstrating that enslaved persons of African descent quickly replaced indentured European labor and that Native Americans were never a significant source of bound labor in the region. She also uses the records to reveal qualitative insights into enslaved persons’ efforts to shape their own lives: to form families, make claims on owners and their heirs, hold property, engage in commerce, and seek freedom. Whiting excavates the persuasive talents of a bondsman name Titus who convinced the heirs of a slave owner to draft manumission papers. She writes about a girl in bondage named Rose who learned to read, studied religion, and convinced an owner that his claims to property in her were illegitimate. She traces kin relationships and documents property holdings of enslaved persons. She asks readers to imagine the world map that hung above the bed of an enslaved man named Philip and to consider what he might have imagined and remembered as he gazed at it. This article, modest and measured in tone, is an understated, yet vitally important and courageous piece of scholarship that uses law to understand the dynamics of power and the humanity of the powerless.

–Dan Ernst