Professor Jeff and His Undying Passion for the History of Slavery, The South, and Race Relations
Honestly, I had no clue as to who Dr. Jeff Forret was prior to his newly released book entitled Williams Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and His Cargo of Black Convicts landed on my doorstep. So as an enterprising journalist, I did a little research on who this man is. Here’s what I discovered:
A Professor of History at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas
An author of several books on Slavery, Race, and the South
A white guy who knows far more about slavery than I ever will as a Black American
Late last year I began pouring through his 482-page book published by Cambridge University Press. And I have to say that it’s pretty damn interesting.
In it, Jeff explores the legal dynamics associated with a world that is unsympathetic toward enslaved people outside of their value as property. He offers an in-depth look at the deeper financial, governmental, and societal systems that fueled slavery and allowed it to flourish. All in all the book delivers a scorching account of the exploitation of human beings for capitalistic purposes in the U.S.
Jeff Forret
I had the opportunity to personally ask Jeff a series of questions about his evolution as a historian and how this research lead to his book. Here’s what he had to say:
Jeff, can you share a bit about your journey in academia, specifically your focus on the history of slavery, the South, and race?
Like a lot of historians here in the United States, I was initially fascinated with the Civil War era. It probably took me until my senior year as an undergrad before I got dialed into social history. One of my history professors clued me in on the fact that it’s not just presidents, generals, kings, or queens but regular people, too, who make history.
How did that shape your journey into academia?
This same professor encouraged me to go to graduate school and to leave home to do it, to live in a different part of the country. So I started graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In my first semester, I had a seminar on the Old South and did a paper on southern industrialization. That was the seed for my master’s thesis on North Carolina’s antebellum gold mining industry.
What else did you discover from your studies?
I found myself intrigued by the research on enslaved people who worked in the gold mines. I’d never heard of such a thing, and it didn’t seem like something an owner would trust an enslaved person to do. But it was a single source I found while doing that research that turned me definitively into a historian of slavery and race.
Interesting. Can you share more here?
I came across an incredible slave runaway ad in an old Charlotte newspaper called the Miners’ & Farmers’ Journal. It was about the offering of a reward for the return of a fugitive named Jeff, whom the owner believed was lurking about the gold mines surreptitiously mining gold with a poor white friend named Underwood. This raised a whole series of questions in my mind and led me to my dissertation topic focusing on relations between the enslaved and poor whites in the Old South.
How has your own upbringing informed the work that you’re doing?
Looking back, I was a pretty unlikely candidate to become a historian of slavery, the South, or race. I grew up in the North, in rural Iowa — not the most diverse place in the world. Black people didn’t live closer than thirty miles from where I did and were not part of my social reality growing up.
What was that like?
I have this distinct memory of a time we went to “the city” when I was maybe four years old and a Black man spoke to me for the first time. It was so unusual, my mind registered it as a major event and marked it for permanent storage. I seriously did not know any Black person personally, by name, until I went to college. But even someone from a background like mine can recognize moral wrong and racial injustice when they see it, assuming they’re raised right and not taught to hate.
What was the main impetus behind your decision to write “Williams’ Gang.”
I did not set out with an agenda and had no specific goal in mind when I embarked upon Williams’ Gang. I was just trying to solve a mystery — to piece together the connection between two sources I found in two different archives in two different states. While I was researching a previous book, Slave against Slave, I looked at Louisiana State Penitentiary records to see if any enslaved inmates were confined there for committing crimes upon another enslaved person.
What did you find?
Under the “Crime” column, there were several years in which the Board of Control reports listed ten prisoners, by name, as “Williams’ Negroes,” from Virginia. I had no idea what that meant, but since it wasn’t a murder or assault, I set it aside, since it didn’t have any immediate bearing on the book I was writing at the time.
And then?
I might have let it go altogether, but then, while researching the same book at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, I stumbled across a list of enslaved convicts sold out of the Virginia State Penitentiary in 1840, and the names sounded familiar. Sure enough, they were the same names as the ones listed as “Williams’ Negroes” in the Louisiana records. So I knew of this small group of enslaved people who had spent time in not one but two state penitentiaries. I knew there had to be a real story there, and I wanted to write it.
What was the most surprising discovery from your research?
There are lots of specific surprises in the book, in terms of what historical figures pop up and the different plot twists the story takes. But for me, I think the biggest surprise would be the pervasiveness of the domestic slave trade in antebellum American life. It affected not only the economy but society and politics and culture as well. This is where you can view the entire era refracted through the lens of the slave trade.
What major theme or message do you hope to convey to readers of your book?
Emotionally, I want Williams’ Gang to be a real gut-punch. I want readers to walk away with an understanding of the sheer callousness and brutality of the trade and of the oppression of slave society. The major theme is one of long-standing racial injustice.
You have argued that the slave trade of black convicts was a launching point for the high incarceration rates of Black America that we’re seeing today.
Yes, historians have long observed that Black incarceration rates ratcheted up significantly at the end of slavery. Southern whites began using the legal system as a substitute for slavery, to impose racial, social, and economic control over free people. Williams Gang focuses a lot of attention on Louisiana.
There, on the eve of the Civil War, two-thirds of all inmates in the state penitentiary were white. In 1868, two-thirds of all inmates in the same institution were Black. The numbers had flipped, in just eight years. That was no accident or coincidence, but the product of conscious choices.
Can you elaborate a bit further on this?
Sure. The modern mass incarceration of Black Americans is tied to two developments with roots in the 1980s: the war on drugs and the emergence of private, for-profit prison systems. I do point out in the epilogue to Williams’ Gang the parallels between the modern prison-industrial complex and the domestic slave trade of the antebellum decades.
What was the ultimate impact of the domestic slave trade?
The domestic slave trade commodified Black people, leading to their forcible relocation to wherever the prospects for profit were highest for white owners. You can say the same of inmates today, who are disproportionately Black people and other persons of color. They get shipped to facilities that need warm bodies, they toil away, and their labor is exploited for others’ benefit. There are individual corporations making billions of dollars in profits off convict labor today. It truly is the modern variant of slavery.
There have been calls among some black leaders for the systemic impact of slavery to be addressed through reparations. Can you discuss the potential impact of this on the historical fabric of American society if such an initiative were enacted?
While I elected not to engage the reparations debate explicitly in the pages of Williams’ Gang, it’s hard to deny the book’s implicit message that Black people today are indeed owed something in restitution for slavery.
It doesn’t matter the yardstick you use to measure — income, total accumulated wealth, homeownership, healthcare outcomes, incarceration rates, graduation rates, etc., etc. — there are very real statistical differences in these categories when broken down by race, and it’s whites who invariably come out ahead.
How in your mind does this reconciliation begin?
The what and the how are huge questions for policymakers to answer, but it’s been exciting to see this issue re-emerge as a topic for discussion during the Democratic campaign process this cycle and, more generally, since Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay came out in the Atlantic a few years ago.
All this being said, I do briefly cover “reparations” in Williams’ Gang when discussing the April 1862 emancipation of enslaved people in the District of Columbia, for which Congress appropriated a million dollars. The problem was that those payments went to D.C. slave owners who liberated their enslaved property, not to the formerly enslaved. I’ll be dealing with that general issue more extensively in my next book.