Andrew Inchiosa
University of Chicago
I am a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Chicago. In my dissertation, “Found among the Papers of the Early Republic,” I examine the loose manuscripts that famous and ordinary men and women gathered together and saved in the early United States. I have received support for my research from the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Franke Institute for the Humanities. And I have presented my work at conferences organized by C19 and the Society of Early Americanists.
Andrew InchiosaEnglish Department, University of Chicago"About to Be Free: Paperwork and Emancipation"When the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September 2016, one of the objects exhibited on... [ view full abstract ]
Andrew Inchiosa
English Department, University of Chicago
"About to Be Free: Paperwork and Emancipation"
When the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in September 2016, one of the objects exhibited on its bottom floor was a small tin box. Joseph Trammell made this box, a kind of wallet, in Leesburg, Virginia, in 1852. That spring, when he was twenty-one, he went to his county courthouse, where a clerk wrote out a certificate describing his features and identifying him as a “free man of dark complexion.” Trammell fashioned his tin, folded up his freedom papers inside it, and brought it with him everywhere he went for more than a decade. Any morning or evening, someone could have asked to see those papers. At that moment, whatever account Trammell might have wanted to give of himself would have been interrupted, and made hard to hear, by the far more self-evident document in his wallet.
In my essay, I try to explain how freedom papers worked, on the page, in court, and on the road. Drawing upon both manuscript sources and published narratives, including Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, I follow the steps taken by newly manumitted people and black men and women who had been born free to register and prove their liberty – only to have to register and prove it again and again. Although freedom papers marked a joyous event, their content and their sheer existence threatened to have the opposite effect, too. These documents could make their bearers feel estranged, even in places they’d lived their whole lives.
