American Poverty, American Freedom | Labour and Humanities Seminar with Christopher Florio, Ruth Alden Doan Assistant Professor of History, Hollins University

Abstract: This talk investigates a subject that was of critical importance during the era of the American Civil War: material aid for the formerly-enslaved black poor. Beginning soon after the Civil War’s outbreak in 1861 and continuing through the war’s end in 1865, American military officials and, especially, a range of American and British activists strove not only to extract labor from but also to provide assistance to African-American freedpeople. Previous studies have focused on the inadequacy of this assistance, recounting how fears of black dependence limited its scope. And yet, even as poverty was central to enslaved African Americans’ experiences of wartime, its relief was widely understood to be a prerequisite to their survival in freedom. My talk explores the history of the transatlantic struggle to distribute provisions to former slaves, and, in doing so, seeks to unpack the imaginative contents and practical consequences of wartime relief efforts. By tracing how many across the Anglo-American world came to reconceive of enslaved people as impoverished people, we begin to see how policymakers, aid workers, and African Americans themselves wrangled over the relationships between labor and livelihood, charity and entitlements, maintenance and freedom. Along the way we are able to consider anew the bounds of the nineteenth-century moral imagination, as we also begin to see how the black poor migrated for a time into the category of the worthy poor, and to what effect. Above all, we begin to see how connections between slavery and poverty – forged in debates over the needs of the emancipated black poor – unsettle the historical and historiographical boundaries of slavery and freedom."

Bio: Christopher Florio is a historian of the United States, with interests in cultural and intellectual history, transnational history, the history of slavery and emancipation, and the history of capitalism. Florio is currently at work on a book titled Poor Freedom: The Problem of Poverty in an Age of Slave Emancipation. On a transnational canvas that stretches from Philadelphia to London, from Barbados to Liberia, from Mississippi to Madras, Poor Freedom depicts how poverty left its mark on the world that slave emancipation made. In doing so, the book traces the historical relationship between slavery’s abolition and the emergent forms of racialized and global inequality that began to coalesce in slavery’s wake. An article stemming from this project received the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award from the Organization of American Historians. Before joining the Hollins faculty, Florio spent 2016-2019 as a member of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is also involved in efforts to provide educational opportunities to incarcerated students, and has taught courses at Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.