Against things. And i think thats the kind of macro pattern what youre talking about fits into. All right, we are at times thank you for attending this session. Thanks for coming dr. Nunnally is associate professor of history with courses in Research Focus on the history of slavery, africanamerican woman and gender in history and the early republic and the American Civil War at Cornell University in ithaca. Her first book, at the threshold of liberty woman slavery and shifting. It ends in washington, d. C. , was published by North Carolina press in 2021, which reveals how africanamerican woman enslaved fugitive and free imagined new identities and lives beyond the repressive restrictions intended to prevent them from experiencing liberty, selfrespect and power. She consults a varied variety of 19th Century Newspapers and government documents as a way of thinking about it, pursuing the intellectual history and ideas of africanamerican women at the time. In her second book, the demands for justice in slave woman capital crime and clemency in early virginia, 1662 to 1865 is published again with North Carolina press and this book examines the clemency, the legal cases that involved enslaved woman accused of capital crime in early virginia. In these legal encounters, we not only see a system that worked to define and affirm a commitment to legal paternalism that upheld rule of law. But decades of responses made by countless enslaved woman accused of capital offenses. The demands for justice examines how these responses constitute the makings of an intellectual history of an, say, woman, womans articulation of justice. Shes published several articles with the journal southern history the william and mary. William and mary. Mary quarterly, the journal of womens history and the journal of american and legal history, as well as the journal of the civil war era. So todays questions are going to be speaking specifically about her second work, the demands for justice right here. Dr. Nunnally, my first question for you is, how did this project start and how do you define the capital crimes in this particular 17 century virginia . Absolutely. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you all for being here. After lunch, you know, i know thats no small feat. And so i appreciate your. So this book started i was doing archival research. I was working on my first book about black women in dc, which at the time required me to look at virginia cases too, because dc used to be also connected to alexandria right before retrocession and in 1846. So i looked at a lot of virginia records as well, and i started coming across a lot of cases that involved enslaved women who had murdered their enslavers. And then i also worked at the Prince William county Historic Preservation division, trying to restore the courthouse there. And we were trying to figure out how to tell a story about a woman named agnes, who was housed in the brownsville legal complex in the jail for murdering her enslaver. So i began to sort of think about these women. I was finishing up my first book, but i was kind of still always thinking about these other women in virginia more broadly. And i became i became interested in sort of what does all of this mean . You know, when you think about an enslaved woman who commits a Violent Crime against her in slavery, you automatically assume that shes going to die, right . Shes going to be executed. And what i found is actually that wasnt always the case that many of them were granted clemency. But whats interesting is that clemency didnt mean that you were free, you know, to free from slavery. Right. Free from your enslaver. Clemency meant that you were sold to the deep south at best. Right. And so if thats the case, what is clemency and also what is justice, right. Under this legal system . Right. And i began to sort of probe deeper into the origins of justice in our american legal system. So Flash Forward december. Of 2019, my students are preparing for their final exams and i have about a week in between exams and classes. And i said, you know, i should go back to virginia and collect the rest of those cases. And so i collected all of the cases i could from all the virginia counties and from the library of virginia and then i came home, right, celebrated the holiday, started the new semester and boom. March 2020 happens. Needless to say, i had a lot of time on my hands and i ended up writing this book on the porch and i wrote this book. I had an urgency when i was writing this book because this is also during a time when we began to see a lot of antiblack violence, Police Brutality with george floyd and Breonna Taylor and many of us were organizing and marching. And i was organizing marching in cleveland. And and part of me was kind of when i was marching, i was thinking to myself, what are we doing . What are we all doing here . Right. Part of me felt a little helpless, right . Because, you know, at the time, you know, there was a president in office, you know, who was kind of adding fuel to the fire. And i was trying to figure out we are all here because theres something insufficient about justice as it exists in our current legal system. Were marching because we want to realize a more fuller, expansive reach of justice and then i began to ask the question, how long have we been doing this . And then i, i assume that weve been doing this since we got here. And then i think my assumption was right. Right. And so as i began to write this history, i began to look at the actions of enslaved women who were committing capital crimes, not merely evidence of their violent behavior, not merely evidence of what slavery was, but also evidence of black women and girls, articulations of justice, that somehow, by their responses to their enslavers as they were acting upon their own economy, their own set of values around what was right and what was wrong. And so a lot of these women in this book were brought to sort of the brink of desperation, where they said, you know what, this is enough. We cant do this anymore. Right. And so these stories, for those of you who have read it, know that these stories are pretty, pretty heavy to think about, because it really shows sort of the more extreme cases of of sadistic violence that many of these enslaved women and girls experienced that kind of brought them to these violent responses. But what it also tells us is that clemency is not what we tend to think about when we think about clemency. Clemency was something different. Clemency was really about the American Government wrestling with its own limitations of justice. The people who made the laws knew that clemency wasnt sort of a purest form of justice. They knew. Right, that this form of clemency was serving the slave economy. And so historians have typically treated this as, oh, you know, these early legal folks were really preoccupy side with justice. And i was like, yeah, they were. But not in the way that we think they are. Right . They were within the context in which they were making laws. And a lot of that had to do with slavery and its in its significance in the local political economy. Thank you. Thank you. That leads beautifully into our next question. As you explored county court records. You focused your attention on unearthing the voices of enslaved women. What is revealed by recentering their voices, bringing their experiences to the forefront . You know, its really hard. To do that kind of work. And i dont know if i did it well or not, but i certainly tried. You know, these legal cases and these legal documents are problematic because there is a dynamic of power in their creation. So if a deposition is being taken, its taken by someone in power who has power in authority over the person whos being deposed. And that in and of itself is going to skew the kind of knowledge and information that we can get from that source. And one of the things i say in the book is that, you know, im going to use these court cases and try my best to really find and locate the voices of enslaved women and try to ponder and invite the reader to ponder what could have happened in this instance where there are gaps, where there are silences. What could have filled those gaps and silences without really being able to defend a definitively answer . What happened . And so i make it clear that these sources are violent in and of themselves, right . That they commit a particular kind of violence because they they are silencing black women. But i do my best to try to to not decide but to sort of invite the reader into an intellectual exercise of what could have been right, what could be at work here. Here are the possibilities. Heres the broader Historical Context in which this act is happening. These are the local dynamics on the ground, and this is what we know. So what do we take away from this right. And so in some ways, its very challenging. And it feels very unsatisfying sometimes because some stories appear more substantial with more detail and others appear more with just a name and an incident to write or charge. And so in that sense, those those court cases were very difficult to work with. But what was it specifically about virginia thats unique, that provides a unique historical study to think about lend leniency and clemency, particularly in relation to paternalism . Absolutely. I mean, virginias so interesting because virginia is this very elite southern space. It has tremendous significance politically during the early 19th century and throughout the 19th century. A lot of the laws that were enacted during that early period became a model for other states in the south. And so oftentimes virginia served as kind of a model Slaves Society for other Southern States in the union. So with the end, it has this long political lineage, right . With madison, with jefferson, with all of these sort of political elites. And so in that sense, it became really kind of an interesting test case to think about this struggle between how do we make real justice but accommodate the interests of slave holders. Because that is the thing to do politically, right . In the south and i think virginia captured that tension very beautifully. And like what you said, accommodate the interests of slave master slave holders while still kind of grappling with the limitation of the justice system. How do you see that tension reconciling or if it can be reconciled with clemency being used as a way to continue to maintain the institution of slavery . Mm hmm. I mean, i think that right. The the economic interest. Right. And the role of capitalism throughout the 19th century is really a powerful force in politics. And also in the law. And so a lot of the sort of legal technologies and innovations that we see in the south are connected to the institution of slavery in upholding the economic rights, the property rights, in particular, of of enslavers. And so these people who are enslaved dont have those same rights. And these sort of dueling theyre not really dueling interests. Right. Because this is the Interest Rate and enslaved women are seen as the property right. Of these enslavers. And so it became clear that the states function right was to to make sure that there was jurisprudence that reflected that interest in investment in end slavery. So specifically, how does demand for justice depart from the dominant legal is geography that historians in aground and think about in terms of as you mention, the state functioning its efforts to preserve, protect and continue. Hmm. You know, i think that many histories of virginia and the south have looked at the Legal Technology of clemency as evidence that there is sort of a almost sort of a legal period to the legal system. Right. That there is justice, there is room for justice. That justice is capacious. During this early period. And i think sort of my treatment of clemency, the really looks at, okay, whats the best case scenario, right. For an enslaved woman if we really think about that, then it becomes clear how, you know, the legal terrain of justice is not capacious. Actually, its quite narrow. Right. And its and its designated for a select privileged few. And so in that way, my book departs from the traditional scholarly literature. It also departs and how i read the sources right. And so i read the sources not with sort of the lawmakers at the center are not with those who are actually creating the documents at the center, which is traditionally how the history has been done. And im not saying that thats a wrong thing to do. And in fact, they probably think that ive done the wrong thing because ive read a lot into the actual actions. And in the crimes that enslaved women were charged with to to recreate their world and to reconsider their world and to center them in that work is requires some intellect, full risk that is not always certain. Thats not always. Supported substantially by the source base because nobody is deposed enslaved women, because they care about what they think. Right. And so if we know that, then my aim to try to center their voices, this is going to be very complicated. Absolutely. So one comparing enslaved woman who served, who were able to sue for their freedom with women and girls who were charged with capital crimes. You assert that an intellectual histories needed to understand this intersection between race, gender and law. Mm hmm. How so . How do we think about the intimacy between those connections in a way that damages ravi doesnt necessarily address . You know, i think the historiography does do a good job, particularly black women historians who have really thought carefully about the reproductive lives of enslaved women. Slavery was inherited through the bodies, through the wombs of enslaved women from a law passed in 1662. In virginia. And that very much altered their sexual lives and also informed a lot of the violence that we see in the book. And so if if thats the case, right, gender then creates another sort of mode of analysis for understanding why how these systems work to continue to extract labor from from enslaved women, their reproductive labor, their physical labor, their mental labor. And so if we began to look at what their lives really looked like and we look at how they responded. What we can get is a completely different way of understand what slavery was and a completely different way of understanding what the south was. And in that way, i think that these cases help us begin to locate an intellectual history that has been articulated by enslaved women who said enough. Absolutely. So what would you like people to take away from reading the demands for justice . If you could take two things concretely, definitively, what would they be . Youre asking a historian to do that we are not concise, as youll read. My hope for the book is that it will spark conversation. I am not the kind of historian that feels like i need to have the last say. I hope that it triggers some conversation and some questions. I hope scholars after me will build upon or completely trash the work and do something better. More than anything, i just wanted to really center the conversation in on enslaved women and girls and kind of shift the focus a bit to see what we could come up with. Can you give me a little bit more . But she said, you wanted me to be concise. But as i think about the way you recenter their voices, their experiences as a way to understand the way they endured and experienced slavery. But again, that you talked about a little bit more about how we then see that through the use of clemency as a way that limitations of the state, the state and laws have created. Mm hmm. Theres a tension that emerges between this articulation for justice and autonomy and selfrespect. Mm hmm. In relation to then what the state and how slaveholders demand and expect to receive. Mm hmm. So, as you think about or as you situate the scholarly work within the larger discourse. What do you see as being foundational, instrumental to that process . I think whats foundational to that process is questioning the purity of american law. I mean, if you look at the lives of black people, we are we been on a constant liberal struggle since we got here in and in that liberation struggle, we have intellectually been trying to expand the reach and access of justice because theres something insufficient about our legal system as is as it exists right. And so thats thats kind of the foundational premise of it. Beautiful. All right. So i have a couple of questions about your writing process and your experience in writing. What was one of your greatest accomplishments during the writing process . And a couple of your greatest struggles . The greatest accomplishment is that its done. Now on to the struggle. I, i mean the struggle. Well, the struggle is. You know, in full transparency, the struggle is being a descendant of enslaved people and having to every day revisit the horror and the trauma, the violence and the pain that people have endured under this system. When thats your lifes work, you kind of need some lighter stuff on, you know, in your life, too. And so in that way, it was challenging to kind of keep it together. And the reason why i say that is because if if sometimes you dont kind of take a breath, it impacts your ability to read the sources, you know, and it impacts your ability to to really kind of consider that time and place for what it was. Right. So in that sense, i struggled. I also struggled with sources. Right. Like i said, nobody cares about what black women feel and what they think in those moments. And so i take a lot of intellectual risk in posing questions. Perhaps this person might have felt this way and they could have thought this way, or maybe this shaped their decision. And so theres lots of that language in there, lots of uncertainty which may or may not be frustrating for the reader. So, yeah, there are lots of struggles, you know, theres lots of tension in it and i think im okay with it though, right . Because, you know, when youre when youre writing and when youre producing work, its kind of a lifelong process, right . You know, and so thats why i say i hope future generations come and just tear the whole thing up in do something better. Or how about build upon what they can build . Or they, you know, i may not have anything to build on, right . You know, and i and im excited about young people and the kinds of questions that they have about this time period. Thank you. All right. Now we have about 20 minutes for questions. Please walk up to the microphone and speak directly into the microphone so we can hear you. One, i want to congratulate you on having the courage to write this book. It had to be extremely painful and hurtful. Mm hmm. To read