The Life of Bartholomew Fenton: A Story of Revolution, Transformation, and Violence in Early America

FAIN: FT-255126-17

Honor Sachs
Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder (Cullowhee, NC 28723-9646)

A book-length study about the rags-to-riches story of Bartholomew Fenton, whose life encompassed many of the complications of the American Revolution and early republican era.

This project follows the life of a man named Bartholomew Fenton in his passage through the Atlantic World during the Age of Revolution. Fenton was exiled from London in 1770 as a convict servant and transported to colonial Virginia on the eve of the American Revolution. When war broke out, he took up arms against the empire that banished him and made his way to Kentucky. There he forged new status fighting Indians in the frontier militia. He acquired land and slaves, and in 1792, Fenton was arrested a second time for brutally beating a female slave to death. Arrested and tried for murder, Fenton was acquitted on all charges. This book reconstructs Fenton's journey from London to colonial Virginia to early national Kentucky and traces the complex ways that violence, race, and status were historically contingent in the vast Atlantic upheavals of the late eighteenth century.

Associated Products

The Servant, the Soldier, and the Slaveholder: Race, Violence, and Manhood in Eighteenth-Century Border War (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Servant, the Soldier, and the Slaveholder: Race, Violence, and Manhood in Eighteenth-Century Border War
Author: Honor Sachs
Abstract: This paper tells the story of a man named Bartholomew Fenton (the subject of my next book) and explores the relationships between militia service, racial violence, and republican manhood during the American Revolution. In 1770, Fenton was a convict servant in Virginia, exiled from London for the crime of petty theft. By the outbreak of the American Revolution, Fenton had made his way to the contested territory of Kentucky. He mustered in the frontier militia during the war, fighting in the intense violence of 1777 and participating in the emergence of a discourse of “Indian hating” that would shape the intensity of western warfare. Fenton’s service earned him a land claim in Kentucky. He established himself as a freeholder in the new American republic and eventually purchased two female slaves. In 1792, Fenton was arrested for brutally beating one of these slave women to death. After he was arrested and tried, a jury acquitted him of all charges. Through Fenton’s story, we witness an ordinary man’s passage from colonial servant to republican citizen and gain intimate perspective on the role that racialized violence played in this transformation. Once a dependent servant with a criminal past, Fenton was reborn in frontier war as a man of status and privilege in a republic that shrouded its fetish for racial difference with the language of human equality. Crucial to that rebirth was a shifting understanding of what constituted legitimate violence and who possessed the right to wield it. In the context of the revolution, Fenton acquired a new and special destiny as a white male citizen of the American republic, an identity that was rooted in landed status, forged in the cauldron of Indian war, and secured in violent mastery over slave property.
Date: 11/3/17

Crime and Punishment in the Atlantic World (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Crime and Punishment in the Atlantic World
Author: Honor Sachs
Abstract: Course in development
Year: 2017
Audience: Undergraduate

---