The experiences of enslaved women and girls in the wars of the United States has garnered increased scholarly attention, most recently with the publication of Karen Cook Bell’s Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (2021); and Thavolia Glymph’s The Women’s Fight: The Civil War Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020). Conventional military history has focused on those engaged in the planning and execution of the fighting, with occasional forays into the higher reaches of the political domain. Only relatively recently have scholars added the dimension of non-combatants—both by studying their perspective on warfare and the impact of conflicts on non-combatants. Beyond the study of war itself, questions regarding the consequences of war, including the impact of war and civil war on different sections of society, provide an important perspective on the experience of war.
As Vincent Brown has stated, anti-Black militarism as a practice reproduced over time made slavery a constant state of war. Frederick Douglass captures this fact succinctly in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) in which he recounts the “terrible spectacle” of the beating of his Aunt Hester. According to Saidiya Hartman: “Douglass establishes the centrality of violence to the making of the slave and identifies it as an original generative act.” She further states, “coeval with the brutality of beatings as a weapon of war, were the sale of women and girls on the auction block. In most cases, any refusal to disrobe on the auction block was met with a whip.” In addition, Hartman makes clear how “the practice of whipping served to make the enslaved ‘speak the master’s truth.’ Thus a key aspect of the manifold uses of the body was its facility as a weapon used against the enslaved…which can only be likened to torture.”
The evolution of a highly militarized plantation society in the southern colonies, whose social and legal character was underpinned by sustained and organized violence, meant that war was not an aberrant or temporary phenomenon in the history of U.S. slavery. The defense of a peculiarly exploitative form of racialized slavery as an institution were defining characteristics of the rapacious and unrestrained “first American way of war.” Forms of “internal war,” defined as “any resort to violence within a political order to change its constitution, [laws], or policies,” included marronage, insurrection, and covert political acts meant to subvert the geopolitical landscape of slavery.