The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America

by Terri L. Snyder

The history of slavery in early America is a history of suicide. On ships crossing the Atlantic, enslaved men and women refused to eat or leaped into the ocean. They strangled or hanged themselves. They tore open their own throats. In America, they jumped into rivers or out of windows, or even ran into burning buildings. Faced with the reality of enslavement, countless Africans chose death instead.

In The Power to Die , Terri L. Snyder excavates the history of slave suicide, returning it to its central place in early American history. How did people—traders, plantation owners, and, most importantly, enslaved men and women themselves—view and understand these deaths, and how did they affect understandings of the institution of slavery then and now? Snyder draws on ships’ logs, surgeons' journals, judicial and legislative records, newspaper accounts, abolitionist propaganda and slave narratives, and many other sources to build a grim picture of slavery’s toll and detail the ways in which suicide exposed the contradictions of slavery, serving as a powerful indictment that resonated throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world and continues to speak to historians today.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Race, Politics, American History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published July 22, 2015

Reviews

[Dana Miranda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Snyder relies too much on defining "suicide" as self-destruction even as her resources on Africana cosmology and legality complicate such a reading. On the one hand, this does not discredit the good historical scholarship that thoroughly depicts how slave suicide was disarticulated from the process of enslavement and the institution of slavery. On the other hand, Snyder completely forgoes sustaining an argument of why actions that led to their actual-death should be defined as suicide or self-destruction for enslaved Africans. In particular, her reticence to speak about resistance or freedom in terms of slave suicide was disappointing since suicide is never explored as "freedom" but simply just a justified alternative. In summation, if the politics of death is simply the power to die then Snyder's conception of politics is lacking.

[Chenoa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The topic is important. The execution is lacking. This book is SO repetitive - it could be half (or less) its current length and still get all the ideas across. If the author needed to make the book a certain length (which is how it felt), she could have given us more quotes from source material instead of repeating herself so much.