George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Isaac J. Guzmán is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His dissertation, “Slavery and Power: Slave Drivers in Colonial and Antebellum South Carolina,” is a history of power in South Carolina slavery that spans the late seventeenth century up to the Civil War. Centering the experiences of slave drivers, enslaved Black men responsible for managing plantations alongside white slaveowners, overseers, and white mistresses, Guzmán examines how power was organized, negotiated, and reproduced under slavery. By reconceptualizing the driver as a slave with power, his scholarship complicates the themes of agency and resistance that shape studies of U.S. slavery, revealing how drivers both refused and reproduced the structures of bondage. His research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the South Caroliniana Library, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Social Science Research Council.