English and History

for their willingness to enlighten me on subjects that they know more intimately than I do. I am extremely grateful to Exeter Cathedral Librarian Peter Thomas and the Archives staff for allowing me access to the Exeter Book. I also wish to thank my family for their endless support and encouragement during this process; I am beyond lucky to be part of the Jaran family. Furthermore, I would like to thank the friends I made during this program for the help and support they have given. Specifically, thank you to Rebecca Fox Blok, Alisa Heskin, Jacob Stephan, and Tre Goodhue for letting me talk at them about various issues and helping me to ferry books to and from the library. Thank you to Pete Dobek for reading the earliest, and roughest, versions of this thesis, and then giving brutally honest feedback. Finally, a massive thank you to Austin Setter, who spent weeks in coffee shops and libraries helping me refine and polish this project. I am forever in your debt, friend.

Nineteenth-century exslave narratives allow us to understand the way in which freedmen, freedwomen, and runaways experienced and enjoyed liberty. In such narratives, liberty, naturally enough, it seems, is the opposite of slavery. Once free, one was no longer a slave. Yet we should view this understanding of slavery and freedom as a problem in itself, as a rhetorical and time-bound use of the notions of enslavement and liberty. This article argues that an early exslave narrativist, John Jea, articulated a dichotomous, unrealistic, yet characteristically American, notion of the relationship between slavery and freedom: that anyone who is not a slave is free. Expressed in evangelical Protestantism, liberal individualism, and laissez-faire economics, this notion was a staple of nineteenth-century American ideology. It is no longer a convincing notion, since it obscures not only the variety of the experience of slaves, freemen, and freewomen, but also the forms of bondage that accompani...

This essay attributes an 1815 condemnation of fornication, published in Vermont, to Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833). Redressing a deficit of scholarly attention to sexuality in early African American print culture, it contextualizes Haynes's document within a spectrum of similar texts, and notes the variety of print culture instruments available to early African American authors, including anonymous publication, financial subscription, and publishing under a white author's name.