Lucia Hodgson: “Locating S. M. Swenson and Swedish-Texans in the Plantationocene.”

Abstract

Conventional wisdom tells us that Svante Magnus Swenson, known as the first Swedish immigrant in Texas, was a reluctant owner of enslaved Black people. This story is belied by Swenson’s own extant letters. And it occludes a much different history in which Swenson not only purchased enslaved people before and after he inherited a group through marriage, but also actively encouraged other white men to become slaveholders themselves. In this presentation, I relocate Swenson from the Swedish-American immigrant success story in which he has been embedded into the Plantationocene in order to elucidate his role in the development of a slave plantation complex in the newly established Republic of Texas. I read an 1840 letter he wrote as an example of the genre of plantation promotion literature to argue that it illustrates Swenson’s mastery of the language and ideology of what we can call slaver settler colonialism. This reading allows us to see how Swenson’s advocacy for Texas slave plantation culture has literary and ideological roots in the promotion of the Province of Carolina in the seventeenth century that developed the attitudes toward land and labor that justified dispossession of Indigenous lands and enslavement of Black people. These justifications formed the basis of the subjectivity of the Southern gentleman planter who laid claim to land and people in the name of enlightenment and civilization. This subjectivity traveled with the slaveowners and would-be slaveowners from the Southern states who flocked to Texas in the 1820s and early 1830s, declared independence from Mexico in 1836, and built a slaveholder republic on stolen land.