Hampton Smith

How is craft skill integral to freedom? “Making against Slavery” examines how Black artisans harnessed their expertise in trades such as blacksmithing and carpentry to enact abolition as a communal process. Spanning the Haitian Revolution to Black Reconstruction, collaborative acts of making, such as transforming tools into weapons or molding bricks to build community institutions, were central to resisting slavery and the anti-Black social order that followed. This project traces how different techniques—toolmaking, ornamenting, building, and maintaining—posed structural threats both during slavery and its afterlife as racial capitalism. By situating Black artisans’ techniques within their social, environmental, and political contexts, this dissertation develops an “art history from below,” demonstrating how artisanal skill not only built the United States’ economy, but was also fundamental to the convergences of abolitionism and communal freedom.