Enslaved, Indentured, Free: Five Black Women on the Upper Mississippi 1800-1850, by Mary Elise Antoine

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'Enslaved, Indentured, Free' by Mary Elise Antoine

Middle school U.S. history lesson: Under the Northwest Ordinance (1787), slavery was prohibited in the frontier territory of the Upper Midwest, Wisconsin included.

In Wisconsin historian Mary Elise Antoine’s latest book, we learn that it wasn’t that simple. Enslaved, Indentured, Free reconstructs the lives of five Black women in Prairie du Chien in the early 19th century. Courtney and Rachel were brought into Wisconsin by their slaveholders who counted on the authorities to look the other way; Mariah and Patsey came under the legal fiction of being “indentured.” Marianne was free and owned a small farm. “Marianne likely made an impression on Mariah, Patsey, Courtney and Rachel. Each of them would go on to fight for and obtain freedom before the end of her life,” Antoine writes.

Likely is the operative word. Despite the slender record keeping for America’s Black residents at the time, Antoine assembles a plausible picture of the lives of the five women from a puzzle with many missing pieces. The four women in bondage probably circulated around Prairie du Chien with relative freedom of movement when compared to Southern plantation life, yet they weren’t free, and the settlement was remote enough to make escape daunting. Where could they run?

Marianne, a “free person of color,” came from the French-Spanish colony of Louisiana, whose Code Noir governing Black life was more liberal than regimes elsewhere in what became the United States. It was easier for slaves to purchase or even sue for their freedom. Nonetheless, free Blacks lived in the U.S. in precarious circumstances. The fact of enslaved women living in ostensibly “free territory” gives proof to the lax enforcement of such rights that Black people were given in the U.S. at the time.