Walter Johnson’s article in the Journal of Social History, “On Agency,” raises important questions about the limits of using agency as a lens to study enslaved peoples. One of his biggest contentions is that agency has often been inextricably linked to any type of enslaved resistance and to proving the preservation of their “humanity.” Johnson argues that resistance, humanity, and agency need to be disentangled in order to see beyond enslaved status. Slaves existed outside of their enslavement and were human in ways that do not have to be related to resistance. Agency and resistance are not, and should not be, synonymous. Thus, Johnson calls for scholarship that distances itself from this tendency in order to shed light on the daily experiences of slaves.

Johnson suggests, “[p]osing the question as a question about the condition of enslaved humanity (rather than as a search for evidence of that humanity as indexed by the presence of acts of self-determination) seems to me to open up a new way of thinking about slavery.” He goes on to explain that “enslaved humanity” in this sense would allow scholars to “imagine a history of slavery which sees the lives of enslaved people as powerfully conditioned by, though not reducible to, their slavery.” Johnson is correct in suggesting this alternative frame of reference because it allows for a renewed understanding of agency and opens the door to new perspectives on enslaved peoples.

Sharla Fett’s Working Cures is an example of a monograph that does not equate resistance with agency and instead, moves toward this newer independent idea of agency. Fett analyzes health culture in the antebellum South and shows that slaves were hardly dependent on white health care. Slaves fostered their own ideas and methods to cope with illness, healing, and death in their communities. Fett argues slaves “maintained a relational vision of health that fundamentally diverged from slaveholder notions of slave soundness” (6). They did not share mutual health interests with their enslavers and therefore had differing priorities when it came to caring for their physical and mental state. Healing was a process that occurred as a part of extended social relationships and communities.

While Fett’s larger argument focuses on the independent nature of slave health, she also goes on to argue that by “creating a sacred health culture grounded in notions outside the control of the planter class and a vision of health that transcended the parameters of soundness…they transformed the struggle in the arena from a contest over the needs of the body to a wider conflict over the value of African American lives” (200). In this sense, she links agency and resistance in the exact way that Johnson cautions against. However, I do not find this problematic because her argument goes beyond stating that slave health practices were meant to resist white authority. Indeed, they did resist white health care but it was not for the sole purpose of challenging their masters’ authority—they had other cultural motives related to their religious and spiritual beliefs.

Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage and Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom are two other monograph’s that examine black agency outside the realm of bondage. Glymph explores the transformation of the plantation household before and after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her central actors are white mistresses and black women—both of whom are affected by Emancipation. Black women discovered how they wanted to organize and run their household through their experiences in the households of their white mistresses. Camp analyzes ways that enslaved women resisted their status on a daily basis by contesting the geographic boundaries enforced by their masters. They found ways to exist outside of their bondage despite their masters’ attempt to control all their actions, day and night.

Johnson’s “On Agency” argument definitely holds merit in the today’s scholarship but I do not think “agency” as a frame of reference has become obsolete in the way he criticizes. If one can discuss agency independent from resistance and still link certain actions as connected to overt resistance, they are continuing to contribute to the field. Caution must only be taken when scholars begin using agency and resistance synonymously. Something else worth exploring is how Johnson’s “On Agency” argument can be applied to women or other marginalized groups. Are analyses of women as agents limited because they are framed in the context of their gender and not as a part of a larger whole?