A note on language

Just four months after the fall of the Confederacy and the symbolic end of slavery in the United States, a convention of formerly enslaved people met in Alexandria, Virginia, to draft a statement in favour of equal treatment for all people regardless of race. While debating what wording to use the delegates agreed to an amendment proposed by William E. Walker of Petersburg ‘where the expression in the address read[s] – “our former masters”. Walker Proposed that the word “masters” be stricken out and the words “our former oppressors” be substituted therefor.’ Walker and the delegates understood all too well that the word ‘master’ encapsulated and legitimated the aspirations and values of the class of White men who had held them in bondage, and that it did so without in any way acknowledging as immoral and inhuman the ownership and brutalization of enslaved people upon which mastery had rested. The words used to describe enslavers and enslaved mattered, and Walker and his colleagues were determined to delegitimate two centuries of language that had normalized racial slavery.¹

It is essential that historians heed Walker’s call and carefully consider the language that we use to describe slavery, the enslaved and those who enslaved them. If we reproduce the language found in sources created by early modern White men and women we risk inadvertently echoing the racist assumptions of those who created and perpetuated racial slavery while dehumanizing the people who were enslaved. Thus, for example, to refer to one person as a ‘slave’ and another as a ‘master’ may be to use the terminology found in early modern documents, but these terms potentially reinscribe and implicitly normalize the notion of a legally sanctioned social system in which some people were chattel owned by other people. In this book I shall try to avoid such language, although I will use the word ‘master’ because in Restoration London this word was not racialized in the way that it was in the colonies. This can be seen clearly in such sources as the Old Bailey Proceedings, which contain a detailed record of court cases in the capital during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. These records demonstrate that employers, businessmen and women, and heads of households were commonly referred to as masters and mistresses by London’s tens of thousands of White servants, maids, apprentices and employees.² Thus both White and Black workers, whether employees or enslaved, referred to those who controlled their labour as master or mistress, and so these words were not freighted with the overtones of racial dominance implied by the term ‘master’ on plantations in the colonies. While London’s enslaved experienced very different lives from the city’s White population, the words ‘master’ and ‘mistress’ are not key to understanding those differences.

The words ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ were equally pervasive in Restoration London and were regularly used by employers and enslavers to refer to young working people regardless of their race and status. In the colonies the terms ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ could carry racist and derogatory meanings when used by enslavers to refer to enslaved children and adults. Once again, however, the Old Bailey records reveal that these terms were used by Londoners to refer to young people of all races.³ Moreover, regardless of their race, the young males who attended ships’ officers were commonly referred to as cabin boys: thus a White ‘Cabin-boy’ appears in the opening scene of John Dryden’s play The Tempest, while the Gloria Britannica detailed the pay and conditions of Royal Navy sailors ‘from a Captain to a Cabin-Boy’.⁴ Newspaper advertisements seeking young White apprentices, servants and maids contained the terms ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ as frequently as did advertisements for freedom-seeking people of colour. It was not the words ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ that defined the enslaved status that these freedom seekers sought to escape. In seventeenth-century London words such as ‘servant’, ‘master’, ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ related more to class than to race. I shall therefore continue to use words such as ‘boy’, ‘girl’ and ‘master’, suitably contextualized, but I shall endeavour to illuminate the conditions in which enslaved Black Londoners lived without echoing the racist attitudes and beliefs of those who held them in bondage.

Other words and terms are altogether more problematic, and finding new and unproblematic language is challenging for it requires that we jettison words such as ‘slave’, ‘slave-holder’, ‘slave-owner’ and even ‘planter’ to refer to people owning and exploiting enslaved people. I shall use the word ‘enslaver’ in some cases, for it conveys the sense that a White person who sought to retain control of an enslaved person was continually and actively working to maintain the bondage of the enslaved person. When using the words ‘White’ or ‘Black’ to refer to a person’s race and ethnicity I shall follow the increasingly common practice of capitalizing the terms.⁵

Of course, many words that appear problematic today were used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and will inevitably appear in primary sources quoted in the text. But they carry too much racist baggage for historians to use them in their own writing today, and readers deserve a text that tries to identify the beliefs and actions of those who enslaved people of colour without echoing the words and assumptions buried within them that were foundational to racism and racial slavery.⁶ I shall do my best to use language that acknowledges the freedom-seeking people of colour whom I have researched and written about as human beings, and those who held them in various forms of slavery and bondage as their oppressors.