Abstract

"“Charles Porter Phelps, Citizen of the United States”: Constructing Identity in the Transatlantic Trade"

Alison Russell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (abrussell@umass.edu)

Charles Porter Phelps spent 16 years as an international merchant in Boston, Massachusetts. Starting with no mercantile experience and few connections, he facilitated the sale of sugar, coffee, cotton, tobacco, indigo, and other products produced through enslaved labor to Europe. Experiencing his greatest success during the turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars, the Embargo of 1807, and the War of 1812, Phelps began to refer to himself as a “citizen of the United States” on his adventures and other trade documents. Examining this claim to citizenship in the context of Atlantic history, slavery, and capitalism, this paper will explore how U.S. identity was formed by those profiting from enslaved labor without directly confronting the institution. It connects a new, growing literature on capitalism and slavery in New England and historical work on the meanings of citizenship during this period. This intellectual history asks questions about how labor, seen and unseen, impacts larger ideologies of citizenship and nationalism.

Phelps is a unique case study in these larger historiographical trends for his connections to Western Massachusetts, his relatively brief but significant time in the business, and the range of available records. While Phelps’ family enslaved people on their farm in Hadley, Massachusetts when he was a child, the state ended the practice of slavery when he was eleven years old. Spurning a planned career as a lawyer and staying in Boston, Phelps considered his work as a merchant the most lucrative, if risky, way to support his growing family. From his memoirs, we know he thought extensively about his own labor in Massachusetts, but what is less clear were his thoughts about the labor and Atlantic slavery that made his profits possible. As Phelps shaped his identity as an American, how much did enslaved labor consciously and subconsciously shape that ideology?