Book Review: Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South

Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South. By Jennie Lightweis-Goff. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025. Hardcover, 224 pp. $44.95.

Reviewed by Jonathan A. Noyalas

Eleven years after Frederick Douglass escaped slavery, the Anti-Slavery Office in Boston published his Narrative. Undeniably the most well-known of the freedom narratives, Douglass offered a powerful assessment of the conditions for enslaved people in rural areas as compared to urban ones. “I observed a marked difference, in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed the in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation… There is a vestige of decency,” Douglass claimed.[1] While Douglass’ observation has informed much scholarship on urban slavery, this study challenges his perspective and provides a thoughtful commentary on slavery’s legacy in urban environments.

Although this volume’s author, Jennie Lightweis-Goff, a lecturer in English at Texas A&M University, freely admits that this book “is not a history of urban slavery,” it does offer useful perspectives about the reality of life for enslaved people in cities, particularly women. (35)

By juxtaposing Douglass’ Narrative with the stories of enslaved women, such as Louisa Picquet, who was once enslaved in New Orleans, the author compellingly argues that these women did not perceive cities as places where they could experience any form of freedom. Whether enslaved in Columbia, South Carolina, Mobile, Alabama, or New Orleans, these cities were merely sites “of her oppression.” (43) The only places Picquet believed she could experience freedom were in parts of the United States where slavery did not exist or in “Heaven.” (47)

This book is valuable not only for those curious about how enslaved individuals viewed urban spaces but also for those exploring the connections between slavery, urban settings, and historical memory. For example, Lightweis-Goff explores how officials attempted to recognize the horrific ‘truths’ of slavery and its legacies in the wake of the massacre at Charleston’s Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church. (69) As commendable as the author finds the actions of Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans, to acknowledge the city’s role as ‘America’s largest slave market,’ a city ‘where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold, and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor or misery, rape, and torture,’ Landrieu failed to mention the horrors of slavery for the enslaved people who remained in the Crescent City. The author emphasizes that Landrieu’s inability to fully address the slavery’s complexities in New Orleans presents the city as a “starting point… or an endpoint” for enslaved individuals rather than a place of suffering for enslaved people such as Louisa Picquet.(69) This “meditation,” like others throughout the book, offers a useful reminder about the power of words. Sometimes, what is not said or written can have as much influence, or more, on shaping how people think about a place’s relationship with slavery.

Finally, this book will be valuable to anyone interested in deepening their thinking about how slavery and resistance to it might be commemorated. “Transient memorials,” such as copies of speeches delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., placed at the base of the Confederate Memorial in Oxford, Mississippi, seem “more responsive to human need,” the author asserts, than a traditional monument. While not everyone may find this agreeable, it illustrates the various forms that commemoration can take, especially in locations where slavery’s past continues to haunt.

Lightweis-Goff’s important volume offers an intriguing blend of history and ruminations about slavery, its legacies, and the urban environment. Anyone interested in slavery and historical memory will find this book informative, powerful, and thought-provoking.

[1] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1849), 34.

 

Jonathan A. Noyalas is director of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute and a professor in the history department at Shenandoah. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including most recently, Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era (University Press of Florida, 2021) and “The Blood-Tinted Waters of the Shenandoah”: The 1864 Valley Campaign’s Battle of Cool Spring (Savas Beatie, 2024).