Abstract/Summary

This article examines violent confrontations between enslaved women and white overseeing men, exploring how enslaved women opposed overseers through the weaponization of objects and fixtures on sites of enslavement across the antebellum South. Few studies have explored enslaved women’s weaponized resistance and how they shaped the landscape of the US slaveholding South for their own violent purposes. Guided by judicial records, fugitive narratives, and the testimony of the formerly enslaved, the cases included in this study illuminate how enslaved women radically re-interpreted violence for their own use, highlighting the complexity of their actions in slavery to include physical acts which occurred within and beyond the remit of self-protection. In creating a counter-conceptualization of armed violence, “Challenging the Overseer” considers the possibilities for, and uses of, enslaved women’s armed resistance against male overseers and underscores that female militance existed alongside the armed resistance of enslaved men, as more commonly portrayed in abolitionist materials. This examination aims to create a broader conceptualization of violence, one that diverges from the established focus on violence against women to open new discussions surrounding enslaved women’s own agentic use of physical force.