Project Description & Summary Findings

This thesis re-examines colonial newspapers’ coverage of enslaved resistance, using text data from the South Carolina Gazette and Virginia Gazette between the 1730s and 1770s to investigate how black unrest intersected with grammar. Computational analysis of grammatical features, alongside slave trade data and colonial legislation, uncovers how colonial rhetoric shaped conceptions of enslaved resistance. Treating the structure and repetition of language as a technology of racial slavery, colonial identity, and nation-building reveals how at the same moment enslaved black men and women rendered themselves (through acts of resistance) comprehensible and archivally legible, that white authors, and colonial newspapers by extension, in turn manufactured a grammar of their resistance that distorted enslaved Africans and their descendants’ actions as fungible.

As a preliminary investigation into the utility of text mining for historical analysis of the colonial rhetoric of collective enslaved resistance, this study illustrates how, even with small amounts of text data, digital methods afford nuanced perspectives on the dynamic relationship between language structure and contemporary events, ideologies, and political climates.

The integration of digital methods and traditional modes of historical inquiry suggests that the emerging pattern of linguistic distinctions between “our slaves” and “such rebellious Negroes” in reports that referenced forms of black political violence reflected colonial authors cognitive work to reconcile evidence of black capacity with their own dependence upon and proximity to forced black labor. Unlike colonial reports that included phrases such as “our slaves” or “our negroes” in the first two decades of the South Carolina Gazette and Virginia Gazette’s publishing, phrases such as “the rebellious Negroes” only occurred in instances where black political violence came to fruition. The perspective afforded by computational analysis of possessive pronouns and modifying adjectives in Corpus One and Corpus Two, thus, supports the idea that from their earliest years of publication the arbiters of information in Williamsburg and Charleston mobilized grammar and word choice to propagate linguistic descriptions of black unrest that reproduced enslaved men and women as outside the category of kin and property.

Analysis of text data from the latter half of the eighteenth century indicates that where white colonists’ linguistic qualities of defiance could be rationalized within the frameworks of white supremacy and Western rationalism, narratives in the colonial press that emphasized black insurgents’ rebelliousness foreclosed white enslavers conceptions of their social and financial value. Although computational analysis of linguistic patterns, such as frequency of pronouns, do not illustrate a clear emergence of white authors’ use of “we” within the contexts of the rhetoric of collective enslaved resistance and the American Revolution, they do suggest that during the late 1760s and 1770s white authors more consistently employed third person pronouns to describe enslaved insurgents and conspirators—delineating the qualifications of social and political belonging. Yet, computational analysis of passive and active voice constructions in articles from the Virginia Gazette published in the 1770s, suggests that the slight resurgence in the use of active voice reflected white colonial authors contemporary prerogatives to reframe themselves as active participants in the violent suppression of enslaved resistance.

Digital methods highlight linguistic patterns in newspaper reports on enslaved resistance, offering insight into the social and psychological processes that sustained racial slavery. This research engages with postcolonial scholarship, data science, data feminism, computational linguistics, literary studies, and digital humanities.

By analyzing colonial grammar in reports of enslaved resistance, this thesis illustrates how collective actions by enslaved individuals shaped white socio-linguistic strategies. Even with limited text data, digital methods reveal broader patterns in how the South Carolina Gazette and Virginia Gazette portrayed resistance over time. As a pioneer of digital history methods, the scholar Jo Guldi’s acknowledged that all digital history projects must reckon with the question, “What is the fit between the methods of data science, the questions of philosophy, and the historical records that we have today?”

This project acknowledges that computational methods are not final or exhaustive but offer new ways to analyze historical records. Counting words like “rebellious” risks reinforcing oppressive structures, but within historical inquiry, these methods illuminate how language was wielded by colonial authors to control narratives.

In 2014, Katherine McKittrick urged scholars to rethink the black archival presence, noting that “The slave’s status as object-commodity… reveals that a black archival presence not only enumerates the dead and dying, but also acts as an origin story.” This project applies digital history to “count it out differently,” using text analysis to historicize black resistance’s influence on colonial language. It demonstrates how data reflects not just “what happened” but also “what else happened.”

By analyzing the grammar used by white enslavers, ship captains, and planters, this study uncovers how language diminished black agency. Patterns of omission made visible through computational methods reveal how enslaved resistance disrupted colonial narratives. The scholar Jennifer Morgan describes data as “the prisons of meaning enslaved people struggled against.” This project shows that computational methods can highlight these patterns, but context remains essential. Small datasets on slavery and resistance require historical interpretation. Historians, skilled in contextual analysis, are uniquely positioned to apply data science to recover hidden transcripts.

The language of colonial newspapers persists today, shaping media portrayals of protest and reinforcing systemic injustices. Nathan Robinson highlights how passive voice remains “the favorite rhetorical tool of propagandists worldwide, who ‘regret the mistakes that were made’ without having to admit who made them.” This research acts as a reminder that by engaging with interdisciplinary methods to locate the consolidations and adaptations of the grammars of collective enslaved resistance, we can chart—and further dismantle—the structural legacies of colonial newspapers’ representations of black political violence.

Although the primary focus of this study is on the text published in the colonial press, I employ the term “political violence” in order to reflect the complex reality that resistance to slavery in the Americas was often a continuation of warfare from West Africa. Moreover, this transnational and diasporic framework has afforded historians new insights into how what was happening in West Africa among ethnic groups such as the Mande, Bullom, Temne, Vai, and Kru, shaped the trajectories of men and women’s enslavement before arriving to the Carolinas and the Chesapeake regions. Scholarship of historians such as Marcus Rediker and Vincent Brown highlight the centrality of Africa polities to the development of Atlantic warefare, enslaved resistance, and European Atlatic Empires. Witin the colonial North American press, printers also included articles and advertisements that highlighted enslaved people’s methods of everyday resistance such as escape, work slowdowns, sabotage, and community cultivation. However, the language used to describe these facets of enslaved resistance are generally excluded from textual data examined in this project—but it is crucial to keep in mind that methods of black political violence and enslaved resistance in the eighteenth century were never mutually exclusive. In addition, I employ the term black within this study in the same vein as scholars such as Jennifer Morgan and Katherine Mckittrick, who use the term to refer not only to people from Africa and their descendants, but also to reflect the idea of the Black Atlantic. Both Morgan and Mckittrick’s scholarship explore how contested conceptions of historic blackness emerged in the early modern Atlantic, charting new historiographic paths forward for the study of racial slavery and black diasporic experience.

As a case study, this project engages with contemporary discussions at the forefront of interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersections between studies of early modern slavery, enslaved resistance, colonialism, race, and capitalism and digital history, digital humanities (particularly critical black DH), and data science. However, as an experiment it remains hyper-focussed on the possibilities of close historical contextualization of even the smallest patterns that emerge through computational inquiry.