Madison Ogletree is an MCEAS Consortium Dissertation Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University. Her dissertation “Law, Free People of Color, and the Making of the Old South, 1760-1860," examines the problem of freedom in slave society, the everyday lives of free Afro-Americans, and the law in the nineteenth-century American South.
Q: How did you become interested in your dissertation topic?
Ogletree: The South is often considered the source of all social and political ills in this country, steadfast in its inability to change. Being from the South myself, I knew just from living there it is a place where change happens, sometimes in fits and starts and at other times, sweeping in all at once. But that didn’t stop my disenchantment with the region during my high school and early undergraduate years. The election of 2016 and white nationalist rallies held on college campuses across the nation, mine included, compounded my frustration.
My history and English literature courses helped lift me out of my disillusionment with not only the South but the entire American project. My African American literature courses taught me to hope again. My courses on the indigenous people of the southeast, the American Civil War and emancipation, and the civil rights movement illuminated the importance of studying the American South in all its facets. Those courses helped me appreciate that history happened there, that good and evil came from this place.
Through historical research, I was able to transform my anger into an avenue of inquiry. I remember being enthralled by scholarship about slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. I became obsessed with questions of how the slave society of the antebellum United States developed. What rules, formal and informal, undergirded this society? Why were some people of African descent free and the majority were not? What were the conditions of their freedom? How did free Afro-Americans, particularly those living in plantation districts, navigate slave society? These events and questions were foundational in shaping my dissertation project, which examines law and the everyday lives of free Afro-Americans in rural areas of the slave South.
Q: If you could see or visit any historical artifact or site, what would it be and why?
Ogletree: This historical site is not related to my research, but I would love to visit Cahokia and Moundville, two of the largest urban centers of the Mississippians. The Mississippians were a collection of indigenous chiefdoms bound by a culture of earthen mound-building, urban centers with tributary towns, continental trade networks, maize agriculture, and common religious practices. They populated a vast stretch of the continent, around and east of the Mississippi River between 800 and 1600.
I grew up in Alabama near the Georgia state line, where mounds are part of the region’s landscape. I have visited the Ocmulgee mounds in Georgia, but somehow, I’ve never made it to the western part of my home state to see Moundville. Witnessing and remembering the ancient history of the Americas is important to me. I always make it a point to have my students reflect on the Mississippians and their contribution to American history and culture when I teach survey courses.
Q: What do you find the most rewarding about the research process?
Ogletree: I find the “eureka” moment so rewarding. I work mostly with local court records, which require sifting through boxes upon boxes of loose papers with no indexes or finding aids. It makes all the days and hours of finding nothing worth it. Coming across something you didn’t expect to, or finally locating a person of interest, thrusts you right back into why historians do this in the first place.
Q: What is the primary source you’ve most enjoyed using in your research?
Ogletree: Definitely the local court minutes. They reveal so much about the rules that govern a society that you can’t get just by reading state statute books. Sometimes a decision recorded in the minutes contradicted state law, sometimes they supported it. They can reveal a range of problems faced by a county from the quotidian to the extraordinary. I was surprised to find that the most common criminal offenses in the nineteenth-century South were selling liquor without a license and surveyors of the road being indicted for not keeping the roads well-maintained. And I was delighted to find more evidence of the lengths free black southerners and their loved ones went to protect their freedom in these records as well.
Q: What are you most enjoying about your Fellowship at the McNeil Center?
Ogletree: I am most enjoying learning from the other fellows, affiliated professors, and the broader McNeil community. I have learned so much from them already, be it from a thought-provoking question or comment, new ways of thinking about a historical question, book recommendations, or simply hearing more about their research. The McNeil Center is among the most supportive environments I’ve been a part of in higher education—the open office doors, the chatter between fellows about the center, and its atmosphere of collaboration not competition has been quite special.
Madison Ogletree is an MCEAS Consortium Dissertation Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University. Read more about her dissertation on her bio page.