About the Presenter
Kelly Houston Jones is Associate Professor of History and Graduate Program Director at Arkansas Tech University. Research for her first book, A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas, led her to the topic she will explore as a fellow at Mount Vernon—vigilante murders of enslaved people from the colonial era through the Civil War. Slavery’s violence loomed as an undeniable reality in George Washington’s world. Exasperation at runaways and fear of rebellion linked whites in plantation communities. Sometimes the control of enslaved people involved whites other than enslavers or their overseers in altercations that could turn deadly, especially when incentivized by laws like Virginia’s “outlawry” statute. An untold number of enslaved people suffered lethal group violence outside the law for generations before the Civil War. Jones will comb the collections at Mount Vernon for the relationship between order and violence in plantation society, enslavers’ invitation/toleration/rejection of non-slaveholding whites’ involvement in policing the regime, and what enslaved people’s actions in resistance suggest about how they understood the role of the public in this context.