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Contents
General Introduction
The Southern Plantation as a Cultural Landscape: Black and White Perceptions
The Architecture and Material Culture of Slavery
Studies in Slave Family and Domestic Life
Slave and Free Black Communities
Studies in the Reconstruction South
Historical sites, like historical scholarship, are created during particular moments in history. They not only tell us about the past, they interpret it. Their interpretations, like those of scholarly books and articles, bear the imprint of the time in which they are created. Each generation asks questions of its history that are informed by contemporary concerns, a process which produces both new information and new interpretations. Thus it is crucial that historical sites periodically reexamine their interpretation so as to better understand this interpretation in the light of recent scholarship.
At several historic sites managed by the National Park Service, this dilemma is particularly clear. Interpreters are grappling with questions about how to tell the history of plantations which were homes to prominent Americans including George Washington and Robert E. Lee. While these sites were established to memorialize the famous men who lived there they were also homes to many others, including slaves. An ongoing question for the National Park Service is how to interpret the story of these inhabitants in exhibits and tours. How much of the site's story should be devoted to them? How can their stories be interwoven with those of their white owners? How can the National Park Service incorporate the new social history with existing sites to broaden the interpretive potential of each site?
One of the ways in which National Park Service historians are approaching these questions is by drawing on the academic specialization of faculty and graduate students at George Washington University in Washington, DC. The sites that participated in the project were Hampton National Historic Site in Towson, Maryland; Booker T. Washington National Monument in Hardy, Virginia; George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Washington's Birthplace, Virginia; and Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, in Arlington, Virginia
One of the main challenges for the American Studies team was to make a large body of scholarship useful to these sites which, although linked by the practice of slavery, differ widely in size and interpretive focus. They attempted this by tailoring specific aspects of the bibliographic essay directly to the sites; for example, general information about the architecture and landscape of plantations and farms in the South and Mid-Atlantic region was linked to specific buildings and landscape features at each site.They also discussed studies in material culture, slave family and domestic life, slave and free black communities, and Reconstruction in the South while making connections between the scholarship of these topics and each site's history. This approach illustrates the continuing effort of the National Park Service to develop professional partnerships with the community of academic historians to enhance historical interpretation at the National Park Service.
The essay which follows lays out some of the major changes and developments which have occurred in the scholarly interpretations of black communitities on plantations and other sites, and selectively reviews landmark works pertaining to this topic. It is important to understand the works in their context, the scholarly knowledge that came before, and the social issues that influenced intellectual debate because all of these factors affect the writing of history. A general understanding of the evolution of historical scholarship will provide staff interpreters with the background to relate historical materials on site to current intellectual and popular debates. This information is particularly useful because materials at historical sites are part of larger debates going on in both the scholarly and the popular worlds, regardless of the intentions of the site staff. The goal here is to provide an intellectual road map for historical plantation sites that will be useful in re-evaluating, updating, or expanding current site interpretations, particularly in developing recommendations laid out in the site assessment.
Scholarship before Mid-Century
Scholarship of the early twentieth century through World War II was rooted in the assumptions of a political system that condoned segregation and assumed the inferiority of African Americans. As segregation was challenged, first during World War II and then with the emerging Civil Rights movement, many Americans began to realize their views of the past had been constructed exclusively from a white perspective. Scholars began uncovering rich, new historical sources which presented the views of slaves and other African Americans, whose experiences had been ignored or misrepresented by earlier historians. This research has resulted in a much more complex view of the past than was the case earlier.
The point of view which informed most historical writing in the first half of the twentieth century was that blacks were inferior to whites, that races should be separated, and that therefore slavery was not so bad after all. This perspective is best typified by Ulrich B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918), a classic work which dominated the interpretation of southern history for the next thirty years. Phillips depicted a plantation system in which slaves were generally contented with their lot and unlikely to resist. Those rare occasions in which resistance did occur were more likely the result of slaves having lazy or criminal characters rather than any legitimate complaint about their conditions. Indeed, Phillips saw slavery as a system which was economically unprofitable but socially desirable--a civilizing institution necessitated by the racial inferiority of African Americans.
Similar social attitudes were at the root of early twentieth century scholarship on the various phases of Reconstruction--from the timid overtures of Andrew Johnson to the bolder strokes of the Radical Republicans. Many scholars writing during this period not only opposed racial integration, but also black voting rights. Thus they saw Andrew Johnson's extremely limited plans for rebuilding the South as those of a high minded constitutionalist. Conversely, they condemned the more radical phase of Reconstruction, pushed through by the Republican Congress in 1867. These scholars dismissed Radical Reconstruction as a period of massive corruption and government mismanagement caused by the newly won voting rights of black men and the election of black politicians to office. Order was only restored, these scholars contended, when "home rule" was reestablished--that is when segregation and white supremacy were reestablished in the South and Reconstruction came to an end.
Since the 1950s
Not all scholars accepted this view of slavery and reconstruction, but it remained the dominant one until the 1950s, when it began to be successfully challenged, particularly as the Civil Rights movement began to take off and new information about the slave experience began to be uncovered. Two of the most important books on slavery to challenge Phillips's view during this decade were Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1955) and Stanley Elkins's Slavery: A Study of American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), though the books made very different arguments. Stampp argued that plantation slavery, far from being a benign way of life, was a repressive labor system committed to making profits at the expense of slaves. Slaves resisted this exploitation in any way they could, be it running away, breaking tools, or simply not working. This behavior was not an indication of black laziness or racial inferiority, Stampp argued, but rather the same kind of response which might be expected of anyone placed in similar circumstances, black or white. Stampp's work was particularly important, and very much in line with the emerging civil rights movement, because he challenged racist assumptions about black inferiority which were built into Phillips' work, and asserted that blacks were no different from whites.
Elkins, on the other hand, did not see blacks and whites as just alike, because, he argued, the experience of slavery had been so horrible and infantilizing, that blacks had developed a particular personality type as a result, which carried through to the present. Elkins compared the experience of slaves to that of inmates in Nazi concentration camps, and argued that their survival techniques had undermined their abilities to form stable families, cultures, or minds. While Elkins successfully challenged Phillips' idea that slavery and plantation life constituted an idyllic retreat from the competitive world of capitalism, his portrait of slaves and their descendants as brutalized victims provoked tremendous controversy.
The next generation of historical writing, which began to emerge in the 1970s, not only continued the challenge to Phillips, but also to Elkins and even Stampp. Historians of this next generation continued to recognize the brutality and exploitation inherent in the system of slavery but also argued that it was not totally dehumanizing. African Americans were not simply victims. They had a noble African heritage and forged new traditions of which they could be proud, even if created in difficult circumstances. The scholarship which has evolved since that time has helped to define a new field of African-American studies in which researchers have demonstrated that the experience of African Americans in slavery and freedom was both complex and varied.
This scholarship has also helped to move questions of race into a central position in discussions about American history. As a result, scholars have recast the way they look at plantation culture, recognizing that it is no longer possible to talk about the white families who lived on plantations without also discussing their slaves. Both have contributed to our rich heritage, and their differences as well as their relationships are an important part of the historical record.
Scholars have been able to introduce these new perspectives by not only reading traditional sources such as diaries and plantation records with new questions; but also through the use of new sources. Slave narratives are now used extensively, as are material artifacts and architectural structures, to provide insight into the past.
The interpretation of southern plantations has historically emphasized the planter's mansion house. Buildings and the landscape surrounding the main house that lack fine aesthetic qualities have been seen as ancillary and of lesser importance, and thus of little interest to the public. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the emphasis of scholarship on the plantation south is changing that viewpoint, both in its history and in its approach to landscape, to architecture, and to artifacts. As James Oliver Horton and Spencer R. Crew point out in their essay "Afro-Americans and Museums: Towards a Policy of Inclusion" (1989), historians are giving increasing attention to African Americans; with regard to the plantation south, this means greater interest in the slaves who actually performed the work that made the plantation system possible, and their owners prosperous. This new emphasis on slave life is being incorporated into interpretive programs in museums and historic sites, such as the important exhibition "Before Freedom Came," developed for the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Monticello's interpretation of "Mulberry Row" in Charlottesville, and Meadow Farm's interpretation of slave life on a yeoman's farm outside of Richmond.
In the early years of settlement in the British colonies, systems of forced labor were somewhat fluid. One such arrangement was indentured servitude, wherein a person's labor belonged to someone else for a finite period of time. Many poor white British subjects immigrated to the colonies through the indenture system. A servant's passage across the Atlantic was paid for by someone else, in exchange for the servant's labor for a certain number of years. While there were restrictions on indentured servants' personal freedom, their positions were temporary and only their labor was owned by another person--not their physical selves.
The first Africans brought to Jamestown in the early seventeenth century were purchased as indentured servants, not as slaves. Some of them eventually received their freedom and acquired land. The system of American slavery developed and became codified beginning in the mid-seventeenth century; by about 1680, it was fully established. Under this system, a slave was chattel--an article of property that could be bought, punished, sold, loaned, used as collateral, or willed to another at an owner's whim. Slaves were not recognized as persons in the eyes of the law; thus they had no legal rights. Slaves could not legally marry, own property, vote, serve as witnesses, serve on juries, or make contracts. The offspring of female slaves also belonged to their owners, regardless of whom their fathers were.
Slavery was certainly not unique to North America, but during the eighteenth century slavery became more strongly linked to race then it was elsewhere, as Edmund Morgan argues in his book American Slavery, American Freedom (1975). Skin color became the justification of slavery; whites argued that dark skin denoted the inherent inferiority of African peoples. Laws regarding slavery varied from place to place, but in general grew more stringent up until the Civil War.
According to John Michael Vlach in his book Back of the Big House (1993), a plantation in the early eighteenth century was a "large agricultural estate"; the Oxford English Dictionary provides a 1706 citation defining a plantation as "an estate or farm producing a crop with servile labor" (Vlach, 2). By the middle of the eighteenth century, the term in America meant, in its ideal form, "a large, tastefully appointed country estate belonging to a prominent gentleman" (Vlach, 5). The usage of the term plantation, however, was fluid. As Sam Hilliard points out in his essay "Plantations and the Moulding of the Southern Landscape" (1989), in the late eighteenth century James Madison referred to his 3,000 acre estate at Montpelier as a "farm," while owners of smaller estates in the area called their properties plantations (Hilliard, 105).
Today, cultural geographers such as Hilliard distinguish antebellum plantations from farms by the following characteristics:
a landholding large enough to be distinguished from the family farm, generally over 250 acres; a distinct division of labor and management, with the latter primarily handled by the owner but often administered through an overseer; specialized production (monoculture), usually with one or two cash crops per proprietorship; location in the South in an area with a plantation tradition; distinctive settlement forms and spatial organization reflecting the centralized control; and finally, a considerable input of cultivating labor or power per unit of area (Hilliard, 106-07).
Many plantations were also responsible for some type of industrial processing of the crops before they were sold for export. Most importantly, plantations were run as profit-making operations; in addition to agricultural pursuits, some planters invested in industrial ventures that produced goods for export, such as iron works.
The term plantation connotes a unity that was often more fiction that fact. As Vlach states in his essay "Plantation Landscapes of the Antebellum South" (1991), Chesapeake plantations were often collections of farms which were not contiguous land parcels, so that "an overall unity of place was to the planter probably more a mental than a visual reality. A planter knew from maps, deeds, and other documents what was his, for he rarely was able to stand in one place and see all that he owned" ("Plantation Landscapes," 25).
In contrast, Southern farms were smaller parcels of land that were generally run at the subsistence level by families. Farmers grew a greater variety of crops than did most planters, and they consumed much of their harvests themselves. They also depended on smaller labor forces--generally family members and in some cases a few slaves. In contrast to a plantation, a farm was typically administered by the owner without an overseer, thereby blurring the delineation between management and physical labor (Hilliard, 106-07).
Scholars today define a planter as a landholder who owned twenty or more slaves--a relatively small group. Only twelve percent of all southerners in 1860 qualified as planters ("Plantation Landscapes," 21). By that year, when plantation agriculture was fully developed in the South, there were only 46,274 southern plantations (and close to half of these were still relatively small, with just twenty to thirty slaves). Even so, the plantation "manorial ideal" became commonplace throughout the South. This was so in large part due to the image that great planters created for themselves through the spatial organization and the architecture of their estates, and to the fact that small farmers generally aspired to the idealized images that planters created (Vlach, 7-8).
Great planters with very large holdings were a small minority among landowners. In 1860, only 2,300 planters (about five percent) owned 100 or more slaves. Thus the landscapes that they created were the exception rather than the rule in the antebellum South. Statistically, however, a significant percentage of slaves lived and worked on large plantations. As Vlach points out, "although the plantation was a source of economic and political power for white elites, demographically it was a black institution. That blacks living on plantations were gathered into such large groups explains, in part, how they were able to develop such strong family alliances and ultimately forge a distinct culture. . . . Through the first half of the nineteenth century the plantation was thus the crucible for a large portion of the black experience" ("Plantation Landscapes," 23).
When scholars speak of a plantation landscape, they do not simply mean a physical setting. Rather, the term denotes a "cultural construction" that includes all of the modifications made by humans to the natural environment. The plantation landscape includes buildings, gardens, field patterns, roads, paths, trash pits, and other features created by human beings. As Vlach argues, "Since the inhabitants of these landscapes also created their living spaces, it follows that these features collectively convey deeply entrenched ideas regarding social order and well-being, ideas often not expressed as forcefully or clearly in words. A survey of plantations can reveal both what the planter had in mind and how his slaves may have found within his plans the means to create a landscape of their own" ("Plantation Landscapes," 23).
Southern plantations differed by geographic location, size, types of crops and industries, and technological advances. These differences make it impossible to describe a "typical" example, though some patterns emerge in certain regions ("Plantation Landscapes," 23). Plantation buildings generally followed the customs of spatial planning and construction methods of their respective areas. In Tidewater Virginia, for example, barns were generally single crib, while in the Piedmont and Upland South they were typically double crib. In Maryland, planters tended to follow the customs of the Mid-Atlantic region (Vlach, 11).
In the Chesapeake, planters generally built their houses on the highest point of their landholdings, where they dominated the landscape and from where they could survey much of their property ("Plantation Landscapes," 25). The center piece of such a plantation was the planter's mansion house, which was often designed and furnished in high style (although much of the construction was often undertaken by slaves).
Such idealized plantations were laid out in accordance with the formal symmetry and rigid axes of Georgian design, an influence borrowed from English manorial estates. Planters aspired to the gracious lifestyle of landed British gentry, and they gleaned ideas from English country estates and architectural books as they designed their houses. As Vlach observes, "Guiding . . . planters in setting up their estates was a highly rational formalism. The world was, in their view, suitably improved only after it was transformed from its chaotic natural condition into a scene marked by a strict, hierarchical order. The planters' landscapes were laid out with straight lines, right-angle corners, and axes of symmetry, their mathematical precision being considered as a proof of individual superiority" (Vlach, 5).
The mansion house was typically surrounded by gardens and landscaped grounds that heightened the visual effect of the mansion's elegance and importance. Most also had a number of service areas and buildings close by. These included barns, stables, workshops, and dwellings and gardens for slaves who worked in the mansion and on the grounds surrounding it. Slave housing varied widely in size, construction, and quality; extant housing tends to misrepresent the "average" both in size and in quality. In general, as Dell Upton points out in his essay "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia" (1988), slave housing was representative of the living conditions of all poorer people, white and black (Upton, 358-61). For a more detailed discussion of slave housing and the material life of slavery, refer to the following section of this essay devoted to that subject.
The homesite, that is, the farm on which the planter's house was situated, was a complex cultural landscape in itself where whites and blacks lived and worked together in close contact. As Upton observes in his study of eighteenth-century Virginia plantations, "slave quarters were parts of two intersecting landscapes. They fit into a white landscape centered on the main house in one way and into a black landscape centered on the quarters in another. From the master's point of view, slave quarters were part of a working landscape that dictated to some degree their siting and location" (Upton, 361).
The spatial arrangement of the structures on the homesite varied a great deal. On some plantations, where slave housing was visible from the main house, the quarters were arranged as part of a larger ensemble and sometimes received some decorative treatment (Upton, 361). Quarters that were not visible from the planter's house were typically plainer, but still generally of better quality than those built for field hands and for other slaves who lived away from the homesite (Vlach, 20).
Upton uses the metaphor of the village to analyze the cultural landscape of the plantation. The plantation complex functioned as a center of commerce, governed by the "town hall" of the planter's mansion house. The plantation functioned as a social center, where dinner parties and balls were given, and where guests often stayed for extended visits. It also served as a school for white children, who were often instructed by private tutors (Upton, 362).
The importance of the plantation as a commercial and social institution is clearly reflected in the cultural landscape. As Upton argues, "the white landscape, or more precisely the great planters' landscape, was both articulated and processional" (Upton, 363). The entrance to a planter's house was often buffered by a series of "boundaries" calculated to have an intimidating effect on the visitor, thus serving as social "barriers." Such boundaries might include the rise of hills and terraces, parks, formal gardens, and a flight of steps leading to an impressive door. To heighten the imposing effect, many planters' houses in the Georgian and Federal modes had linear space plans, which made the structures seem even larger than they were.
Inside the mansion house were further physical barriers in the form of servants or slaves who monitored the entrances, doors to various rooms, and stairways to private spaces above. Depending on a visitor's social status, she or he might never be allowed into the house (at least not through the main entrance) or might be kept waiting in the hall. Those who were more fortunate might be invited into the drawing room, or even to dinner. As Upton illustrates with the example of Mount Airy, the Tayloe family plantation, "each barrier served to reinforce the impression of . . . [the planter's] centrality, and each in addition affirmed the visitor's status as he or she passed through it" (Upton, 364).
The effect that such a processional landscape had on slaves depended to some extent on their status. "Field hands" probably never saw the inside of their masters' houses, while house slaves spent most of their time there. As household workers, slaves had access to areas of the house denied to most visitors. While slaves typically used back doors and stairways that bypassed formal circulation spaces as they went about their work in the house, they had access to every room, from the most formal, elaborate spaces to the most private. Thus, as Upton observes, "in this kind of landscape, blacks could pass almost at will, while whites from outside had to observe the formalities" (Upton, 365).
Mechal Sobel argues in her book The World They Made Together (1987) that whites and blacks who lived and worked together inside the "Great House" became, in effect, members of the same extended "family" (although some scholars take a different viewpoint, stressing the tensions inherent in master and slave relationships). Even when slaves did not live in the mansion house, they were constantly at work in it, cleaning, cooking, serving, and caring for children. "Mammies" who raised white children could not help but introduce them to black speech patterns and sometimes to black folklore. White children often played freely with slave children. And on many plantations whites and blacks had children together, becoming literal families (Sobel, 134-51). For a detailed discussion of slave families, refer to section 3 of this essay.
Work yards were areas where slaves on the homesite performed much of their labor. In some cases the yard was a good distance from the mansion house. Some planters placed slave dwellings among various work sites, "treating them essentially as workplaces where the personal lives and the domestic chores of . . . servants merged into one seamless experience" (Vlach, 21). Structures surrounding the yard typically included wells, kitchens, dairies, wash houses, and smokehouses. Many large tasks were accomplished in the yard with slaves working together in teams, no doubt reinforcing a feeling of solidarity among them (Vlach, 34-35). The yard and nearby buildings were very busy places over which some slaves clearly felt some sense of ownership. Philip Fithian, an eighteenth-century tutor at the Virginia plantation Nomini Hall, recalled that slaves used the stables for their own after-hours diversions, and that he himself had been fined by slaves on a number of occasions for entering their work places without permission (Vlach, 15, 33).
Many Chesapeake plantations consisted of a group of farms which were not contiguous parcels of land and that were often located at some distance from the homesite. Such farms were sometimes referred to as Quarters (quarters with a lower-case "q" denoted dwelling houses). ("Plantation Landscapes," 25, n. 14). Examples of plantations with separate farms include Landon Carter's Sabine Hall, George Washington's Mount Vernon, and, further inland, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Smaller plantations in the Virginia Piedmont generally had land holdings that were more clustered than their Tidewater counterparts ("Plantation Landscapes," 25-26).
Each plantation farm generally had its own resident slave work force. Slaves typically lived close to their work places in groups of cabins. Many cabins had adjacent gardens where slaves grew crops to supplement their allotment of food. Each farm or Quarter, then, consisted of spaces that served the master--fields, barns, and workshops of various sorts--and living space for slaves. Clearly slaves on such farms, often quite remote from the planter's mansion house on the homesite, were able to exercise a degree of autonomy in their homes and their private lives. As Vlach observes, such slaves "created a social circle with its own schedule of appropriate behavior. Thus while slaves were held captive on their own plantations, they still managed to find certain measures of independence because they were held so far away from the master's daily authority. . . . They developed a sense of ownership over their cabins, gardens, tools, and clothing even if these were provided by their owners. They formulated their own sense of place--one that the master could hardly imagine" ("Plantation Landscapes," 47). Some slaves even had locks on their doors that enforced their sense of personal ownership (Upton, 367).
The landscape of plantation slavery included fields and forests, where slaves could escape white supervision and join family and friends from other plantations. A network of paths, trails, and navigable streams and rivers enabled slaves to move from place to place undetected, forming what Rhys Isaac, in his book The Transformation of Virginia (1982), calls "an alternative territorial system" (Isaac, 53). This covert network helped to reinforce the links between slaves on different plantations, enhancing the sense of a widespread slave community. As Albert Raboteau points out in his book Slave Religion (1978), in their quarters and in the woods slaves were able to worship without disturbance, holding prayers in "hush harbors" with wet blankets and overturned pots to (magically) muffle the sounds of preaching, praying, and singing (Raboteau, 210-13). Forests were also the sites of slave festivities, such as barbecues (Vlach, 13).
Vlach argues that "the informal qualities of this kind of landscape, one established more by a set of behavioral associations than by material indications, may have reflected ... an ethnic choice. The loose, ad hoc scheme of preferred paths and gathering places was created incrementally by a series of improvisational responses to the given landscape rules of white masters. Because similar improvisational responses by black people to Anglo-American culture are known to have resulted in the creation of distinctive African-American forms of speech, music, and dance, it is not too farfetched to suggest a parallel development in their responses to their assigned environments" (Vlach, 13).
Thus, as Dell Upton, concludes, "Slaves formed neighborhoods, black landscapes that combined elements of the white landscape and of the quarters in a way that was peculiar to them and that existed outside the official articulated processional landscape of the great planter and his lesser neighbors" (Upton, 367). Vlach concurs: "In the process of laying claim to significant portions of their owners' land and buildings, slaves established defensible social boundaries for their communities in both pragmatic and symbolic terms.... the spaces that slaves claimed and modified for their own domestic purposes provided them with their own sense of place. In these locations they were able to develop a stronger sense of social solidarity, a feeling of community that would serve as a seedbed not only for further resistance but also for the invention and maintenance of a distinctive African American culture" (Vlach, 236).
Examining slave life on plantations is important because so many slaves spent their lives toiling for planters. Yet many slave holders owned only several slaves. As James Oakes points out in his study of American slave holders, The Ruling Race (1982), in 1850 half of all slave owners in the United States owned five or fewer slaves (Oakes, 39). Slaves living and working on smaller farms were a sizeable group, and it is important to consider their experiences. It is impossible to make generalizations about whether or not they received better treatment than did plantation slaves. Oakes makes the argument that "as on the largest plantations, the interracial relations on the smallest farms depended upon the personalities of individual owners, their immediate economic circumstances, the economic structure of slavery itself, and the willingness of slaves to cooperate" (Oakes, 54).
Being owned by a small farmer did have significant implications for a slave's life. A slave on a smaller farm lived and worked more closely with his or her master and his family, and in greater isolation from other slaves. Small farmers were more mobile than planters as they searched for economic opportunities; therefore, their slaves' families were more likely to be broken apart by sale or by movement to different locations. Thus it was more difficult for slaves on smaller farms to maintain a distinct cultural identity, to develop relationships with slaves on other properties, or to have a sense of control over their work or their environment.
While the majority of slaves in the South worked in agriculture, there were many other types of work in which slaves were involved. Many were skilled laborers, as the essays in The Other Slaves: Mechanics, Artisans, and Craftsmen (1978), edited by James Newton and Ronald Lewis, describe. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries southern industries employed large numbers of slaves, and a number of works have been published on this subject. Richard Starobin's Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1970) provides a broad overview of the topic in the period 1790 to 1861. Charles Dew's Bond of Iron (1994), a case study of Buffalo Forge in Rockbridge County, Virginia, and Dew's Ironmaker to the Confederacy (1966), a detailed examination of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, are also important works. Ronald Lewis's Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715-1865 (1979), a careful analysis of the iron and coal industries in the South, is particularly important because Lewis examines the everyday lives of slaves working in industry, and how they differed from those of agricultural slaves.
Before the American Revolution, Maryland and Virginia dominated the iron export market; after the Revolution, the Chesapeake remained the southern center of iron production. In Coal, Iron, and Slaves, Lewis argues that the relative lack of supervision and the ability to make money through the "overwork" (overtime with pay) system gave slaves in industry a measure of autonomy that was rare among agricultural slaves. Among enslaved ironworkers, who by necessity worked at remote locations, after-hours supervision was quite lax, and many had the freedom to pursue their own interests. Often slaves spent many hours working for overtime pay. Many of them used their money to purchase food and goods for themselves and their families to supplement their often meager rations (Lewis, 147-51).
The ability of industrial slaves to provide in this way for their families, Lewis argues, "greatly enhanced their self-esteem in the family and in the quarters" (Lewis, 148). Even unskilled workers such as wood choppers could earn a fair amount through "overwork." Iron works typically had company stores that provided necessary goods for their workers and for others living in surrounding rural areas. While the ability to purchase goods was an exercise of personal power, ironwork owners were also able to maintain control of slave workers through store credit (Lewis, 159-61).
Whether or not slaves belonged to the owner of their work site varied according to the type of industry. While coal workers were typically hired from other owners, ironmasters generally owned their slave workers (Lewis, 162). This difference had a tremendous impact on slaves' daily lives, because it meant that many ironworkers lived with their families at the work site. This was especially true for skilled workers.
Industrial slaves exerted greater influence on their employers regarding their working conditions. Lewis argues that "slaves pushed just . . . hard enough to win additional advantages, gain some life-space, and yet remain within acceptable (if unspoken) bounds. On the other hand, employers yielded without losing ultimate control, while slave owners attempted to protect and profit from their property at the same time" (Lewis, 82). Lewis's work is an important contribution to the subject of industrial slavery, but more research remains to be done about the cultural landscape of industrial slavery.
The cultural landscape of southern plantation agriculture and industry was experienced quite differently by slaves and their masters. As scholars such as John Vlach and Dell Upton argue, the cultural landscape of the antebellum South was clearly a contested terrain. Paying closer attention to a wide range of different viewpoints--those of great planters, small farmers, entrepreneurs, free laborers, indentured servants, and slave workers in agriculture, artisan trades, and industry--will continue to deepen our understanding of southern culture. In addition, we need to consider the material culture of African-American slaves, their family structures and domestic life, the types of communities they created, and the ways in which they interacted with free black communities. These topics are considered in the following sections of this essay.
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Horton, James O. and Spencer R. Crew. "Afro-Americans and Museums: Towards a Policy of Inclusion." In History Museums of the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989, 215-36.
Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.
Lewis, Ronald L. Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715-1865. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979.
Loth, Calder, ed. Virginia Landmarks of Black History: Sites on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.
McDaniel, George W. Hearth & Home, Preserving a People's Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.
Newton, James E., and Ronald L. Lewis, eds. The Other Slaves: Mechanics, Artisans, and Craftsmen. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.
Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Ownby, Ted, ed. Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Savage, Beth. African American Historic Places. Washington, DC: The Preservation Press, 1994.
Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Stanton, Lucia. Slavery at Monticello. Charlottesville: The Rectors and Visitors of the University of Virginia, 1993.
Starobin, Robert S., ed. Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves. New York: New Viewpoints, 1974.
Starobin, Robert S. Industrial Slavery in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
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Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Vlach, John Michael. "Plantation Landscapes of the Antebellum South." In Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South, eds. Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr. with Kym S. Rice, Richmond: The Museum of the Confederacy, 1991, 21-49.
Wade, Richard C. Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.
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Over the past twenty years, scholars have delved into the material worlds of slaves on colonial and antebellum southern plantations. The general focus of this work has linked architectural history and material culture. An important aspect of these recent studies has been the recognition that the worlds of slaves and slave-holders were different, despite their physical proximity. The prime focus has been on archaeological evidence, plantation records, contemporary newspaper advertisements and stories, and travel accounts. Several writers have indicated the need for more exploration in these sources.
The major emphasis of the most recent scholarship has been a recognition of different cultural worlds within the same landscape. An object or a building will have a different meaning for both whites and blacks, owners and slaves. A chamber pot or a spittoon will have a different meaning for the person who uses it than for the person who cleans it. Likewise, fields of tobacco might mean profits for the planter, but for the slave they mean hours picking off worms and tilling the earth. With these kinds of polarities in mind, writers of the past twenty years have begun to describe the material culture of the plantation as it existed behind the `big house.'
James Newton's "Slave Artisans and Craftsmen: The Roots of Afro-American Art" (1977) set an important standard for the study of African-American material culture. In this piece, Newton gives a brief synopsis of previous scholarship on the work of slaves as artisans and craftsmen, addressing the cultural implications of being a skilled worker in an unfree world. Part of his discussion is an acknowledgment of the controversy over which skills were carried over from Africa and which were transformed as enslaved Africans became enslaved African Americans. No longer able to create or have access to their traditional material culture, slaves turned to the immaterial. Newton argues that many skills and traditions which were a part of the African culture that slaves left behind were supplanted by dance and music which became the embodiment of the African inside them. Slave craftsmen began to create a product which was no longer African, but African American. This product resembled the material culture of the owner, though its level of refinement was considerably lower in most cases. To illustrate their range of talent, Newton briefly highlights the lives of various slave craftsmen. The paper is an excellent study in the discussion of Africanisms within the plantation and the social status of slave craftsmen.
A book worthy for its insights into the plantation world is James Breeden's Advice Among Masters (1980). A presentation of letters and articles from nineteenth-century southern agricultural journals provides a view of the popular notions of how slave life should be run as written by the planters. Breeden breaks these letters up into subject areas such as advice about working habits, food, housing, clothing, and social lives of slaves. He points out that the information was merely advice and we cannot estimate how much of the advice was actually followed, or whether it represents established regional or national practices. It does, however, give us an idea of the issues that were addressed by southern planters as they wrote for each other, and provides us with a view into the material world of the slaves through the eyes of their masters.
Architecture
Plantation architecture is characterized by variety. Most buildings that were found on the plantation were vernacular structures built at the command of the planter, though certain customary conventions often dictated how large or what type of material was used in constructing certain types of buildings. Scholars who have studied plantation architecture over the last twenty years have attempted to synthesize some of the information that can be found through archaeological investigations, personal records and memoirs, and newspapers and letters. While their findings are quite helpful in beginning a discussion of plantation architecture, several will readily admit that more work needs to be done on the subject. With that in mind, one can still learn a great deal through an examination of certain works.
For a quick reference on issues involving architecture of African Americans, the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989) has an entry which considers architecture as both a means of black expression and identity. The section on black architecture is mostly about black architects, but recognizes the contributions of early slave craftsmen and later free builders. A lengthier discussion which spans colonial times through the end of the nineteenth century is George McDaniel's Hearth & Home: Preserving a People's Culture (1982). His study focuses on housing of black slaves, tenants, and landowners as interpreted through extant structures throughout southern Maryland. Included in this study is a detailed description of house types, a description of house furnishings, and the activities and lifestyles associated with them. To illustrate the differences between housing types across racial and class lines, McDaniel provides the reader with case studies and examples of various buildings. His later chapters focus on the difference between the material culture of land owning and tenant farming free blacks after emancipation.
Camille Wells, in "The Eighteenth-Century Landscape of Virginia's Northern Neck" (1987), provides another perspective on plantation architecture. She emphasizes the importance of recognizing that "the few remaining early buildings [of the colonial Chesapeake] are not very reliable representatives of the vast quantity that have been lost." What Wells and other writers like Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach have stressed is that the historian must be cautious of information that has been readily assumed and accepted about plantation architecture. Through close examination of a variety of sources, including existing buildings, we can establish some principals which were used in the region.
Wells's architectural analysis of Virginia's Northern Neck covers both the countryside and the architecture of the region. The landscape of the northern neck was "virtually an island," with plantations that depended upon water for travel broken up into plots of land both large and small, with buildings which "ranged in quality from unpretentious comfort to ramshackle misery." Of these buildings she has much to say using newspaper articles, photos of existing buildings, and plantation letters and accounts to describe a variety of dwellings types.
Dell Upton's essay "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia" (1988) is another essay that explores the material landscape of eighteenth-century Virginia plantations and its effect on whites and blacks. The theoretical arguments put forward by Upton are discussed in the preceding section of this essay on plantation landscapes. For our purpose, Upton's essay is important because of his discussion of the different types of slave quarters and planters' houses found on the Virginia plantations. Within these many styles, he stresses, the experience for slave and owner were quite different. The article is a valuable source for studying both the architecture of the plantation yard and the effects it had on those who lived and worked there.
John Michael Vlach has written extensively on the architecture and material culture of plantation slave life and goes even deeper than the analyses given by Wells and McDaniel. His essay "Not Mansions...But Good Enough: Slave Quarters as Bi-Cultural Expression," in Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Ante-bellum South edited by Ted Ownby (1993), speaks of the slave quarter as "a kind of dueling ground upon which the relative strengths of black and white cultural values was tested." For slaves and their white masters, the quarters served different functions. Planters often took a paternalistic view of their slave housing. They were concerned with good construction of the quarters, a good appearance for the overall plantation, and the happiness of slaves, which they believed would make the slaves into better workers. For slaves, the autonomy within the area of the slave quarters allowed them to "construct their own associations" within the landscape and their role as slaves. Slave craftsmen could often have a large hand in the design and construction of their own quarters, the training for which might later benefit them if they became free. One of the important strengths of Vlach's article is his ability to analyze the social meanings for slaves who built quarters and slaves who lived in them by talking about the quarters themselves. In addition to the symbolic analysis, Vlach also provides a discussion of different slave housing types which could be found throughout the South.
Vlach is not without critics. Brenda Stevenson's article in the same volume commends Vlach's work for his discussion of the different types of slave housing, but then questions his notion that slaves would consider some wretched quarters a "home." Her focus is on the miserable and unhealthy conditions that some slaves were forced to endure. Stevenson forces us to consider, using the material culture of slavery, just how destructive an institution it was. Both writers provide an insightful look into the meaning of housing to slaves.
For a more comprehensive discussion of the plantation's built environment, Vlach's Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (1993) is an essential work. Through the use of photographs and architectural drawings of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and oral interviews with former slaves, Vlach explores a variety of plantation outbuildings providing a commentary often told through the words of those who lived and worked in similar spaces. Again, his emphasis is on the actions of slaves who took "advantage of numerous opportunities to assert counterclaims over the spaces and buildings to which they were confined." His book is divided into the different types of structures that were found in the HABS drawings which pertained to plantation slavery. These include "Big House Quarters," yards, kitchens, smokehouses, barns, quarters for field slaves, overseers' houses, buildings for slave welfare, and miscellaneous outbuildings. He concludes that despite attempts by white owners to control every aspect of the built environment, slaves often undermined these plans by refusing to acknowledge this dominance.
One of the best sources for the study of eighteenth-century Virginia architecture is the Virginia Gazette. In her article "The Planter's Prospect: Houses, Outbuildings, and Rural Landscapes in Eighteenth Century Virginia" (1993), Camille Wells offers a well documented analysis of the information which may be taken from the pages of this eighteenth-century newspaper. Wells is able to count 919 dwelling houses which were advertised in the paper offering a variety of descriptions to help the architectural historian get a better picture of what plantation buildings looked like at the time. Through both statistical and qualitative analyses, she is able to provide information on different types of outbuildings, building plans, room use, and construction materials. The essay includes an analysis of 134 different advertisements which make reference to slave quarters as well as hundreds of other mentions of different plantation outbuildings. Through a statistical analysis, Wells is able to provide a general picture of what several plantation outbuildings looked like. For those scholars looking for a general description of the plantation landscape and its buildings, it is an essential study.
Material Culture
Thomas Schlereth has defined material culture as "the study through artifacts (and other pertinent historical evidence) of the belief systems--the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions--of a particular community or society, usually across time." In his anthology Material Culture Studies in America (1982), he has brought together a collection of essays that are essential to the serious scholar of material culture. What we get from the work of such writers as Henry Glassie, Kenneth Ames, and Fred Kniffen are models for using material objects to interpret the past. Though not specifically related to African-American material culture, this collection of essays provides an important introduction to the study of artifacts in understanding history.
In the study of African-American material culture, several writers have contributed studies which address specific types of objects as well as traditions which have their roots in African cultures. The focus has generally been on identifying what the African-American tradition is and on highlighting those crafts which have been particularly notable within the black community. The emphasis is not necessarily on the differences between white and black material culture, but on the relevance of certain forms within the black community. An important recognition in some works is the identification of `Africanisms' that may be found in African-American culture.
An early work on the material culture of African Americans is John Vlach's book The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (1978, reprint 1990). Research for this book comes out of a traveling exhibit which was developed at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1978, featuring the traditional arts and crafts of black Americans and their links to African practice. Topics covered include basketry, musical instruments, wood carving, quilting, pottery, boatbuilding, blacksmithing, architecture, and funeral decoration. The book is filled with photos and diagrams which help to trace the development of an African-American style throughout black history in the Americas. The introduction of the reprinted volume provides a good synopsis of scholarship since the first printing and indicates where more research is clearly needed.
William Ferris's edited volume Afro-American Folk Art and Crafts (1983) is a collection of several different essays which discuss various types of African-American craft. Subjects include quilt makers, sculptors, instrument makers, basket makers, builders, blacksmiths, and potters. The essays are written by such notable scholars as John Michael Vlach, William Ferris, Robert Farris Thompson, David Evans, and others. Thompson's piece, "African Influence on the Art of the United States," is a reprinting of his 1969 essay, which had a tremendous impact on the direction of later scholarship as it examined African and African-American art together.
Another article by John Vlach focuses on a broader view of the material culture of slave life using plantation records. In "Afro-American Domestic Artifacts in Eighteenth Century Virginia," (1987) he describes "the material aspects of the domestic routine of the eighteenth-century slave in Virginia and to suggest, more broadly, what that experience reveals about black culture during the period." The primary source of material is the records of Landon Carter, who documented the accounts of his Richmond County, Virginia plantation in his diaries from 1752 to 1778. By combining Carter's records with several other plantation records and travelers' accounts, Vlach is able to reconstruct specific details on slave clothing, foodways, furniture, tools, and musical instruments. He concludes that the material culture of African-American life in Virginia was a result of a mixture between African, European-American, and African-American influences which resulted in an ambiguous landscape for the Virginia slave. He acknowledges that some of his findings are speculative because of a lack of sources. He ultimately suggests that more archaeology be done in areas which were known to have been settled by slaves to provide more material for analysis.
Historical archaeology has provided a wealth of information about colonial and antebellum plantation life. On particular analyses of archaeological artifacts found in African-American sites, Eric Klingelhofer provides some notes in his article, "Aspects of Early Afro-American Material Culture: Artifacts from the Slave Quarters at Garrison Plantation" (1987). Though the Garrison Plantation site was not as carefully excavated as most professionals consider proper, the artifacts found can give us some clues on plantation life. The presence of decorated spoons, ritual objects and items of the `lithic industry' (that is, those relating to industries dealing with stone) point to African influences and values among an adopted assemblage of artifacts.
A work which is useful both for its insights on interpretation and in analytical methods is Historical Archaeology on Southern Plantations and Farms, edited by Charles Orser, Jr. (1990). The papers presented in this volume attempt to explain several different aspects of early southern plantation and farm life based on archaeological data. The analysis of the material culture is a way of approaching significant issues of race, class, and ethnicity in the rural South. Specific topics include discussions of context with regard to the use of artifacts in different communities, racism, as revealed through archaeology, an analysis of tenant farms through archaeology, and an examination of material culture and ethnographic collection.
Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619-1864, by James Deetz (1993), pulls together over twenty years of archaeological research from the Flowerdew Hundred site along the James River. The book is useful for its interpretation of this one important site over a period of two hundred and fifty years. Main topics include seventeenth and eighteenth-century impermanent architecture, economic diversification on the plantation, and local manufacture of tobacco pipes. Also included is a comparison of trash disposal techniques in nineteenth century Virginia and South Africa, and a discussion of slave diet on antebellum plantations. Though some of his findings are controversial and certainly will be challenged by other archaeologists in the future, he provides us with a great description of the material culture found at his site.
In Uncommon Ground (1992), Leland Ferguson focuses on the material culture of early African Americans on the Atlantic coast, highlighting archaeological remains of pottery and housing in early colonial times. In his analysis, he points out that though many remains offer suggestions of European American and Native American influences, certain elements exist which were brought from Africa by slaves into their new culture in the Americas. Though his findings are primarily based on archeological findings in South Carolina, his work is relevant to the entire mid-Atlantic region and helps shed some light on African-American material culture, especially with regard to making pottery, preparing food and building structures. Ferguson concludes that these elements served as symbols which empowered slaves against the oppression imposed upon them by their masters.
Dennis Pogue's treatise on his archaeological findings in King's Reach and 17th Century Plantation Life (1990) is helpful for his discussion of artifacts of the time period studied. Pogue focuses on the relevance of post holes and midden piles to the landscape and what we can determine from them. Using the information available, Pogue lays out the landscape of the main house and the outbuildings and uses chemical analysis to discuss types of items which were burnt or dumped. Of particular note is his analysis of artifacts for their link to different classes of dwellers. Pogue recognizes that King's Reach, and plantations like it, undoubtedly had classes of servants, planters, and possibly black slaves, but in the final analysis is unable to specifically identify particular artifacts that he may definitely say are of African slave relation.
One other study of note is Anne Elizabeth Yentsch's A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves: A Study in Historical Archaeology (1994). Yentsch begins with the recognition that historical archaeology is "at the interface of history and anthropology." Through an interdisciplinary evaluation of archaeological findings at an Annapolis site, she gives us a window into the cultural life of the Chesapeake Bay area. Her discussion covers the material culture and social culture of the Calvert family and their slaves as determined by the artifacts they left behind. Yentsch's evaluation of this assemblage provides a good description of what eighteenth-century Annapolis life might have looked like. Though primarily a study of urban life, her evaluation of artifacts is relevant to any other study of eighteenth-century material culture because of the details it provides and its model for using artifacts.
Conclusion
Trying to determine the architecture and material culture at a given historical site has been made easier by the works of the authors mentioned above. Each has come one step closer to a general description of material life ?behind the big house.' Historic sites that use this information need be cautious, however, remembering that some qualities mentioned are site specific and less relevant to a majority of plantation sites in the Chesapeake area. The benefit of general descriptions provide us with a starting point from which to study other individual sites using existing records. These works offer not only specific information on plantation slavery, but also provide models for other studies which may be conducted at other sites.
In focusing on the material culture of slave life, we should keep in mind that different levels of experience existed for both whites and blacks on plantations as these writers have shown. Slaves often did not use the landscape as the planter had designed it to be used in accomplishing the duties required of them. They often had to move in and out of controlled space in an unrestrained manner out of necessity for their duties and in seeking some form of resistance. This resistance manifested itself in the slaves' ability to preserve an African form in material culture that dominated art or craft on the plantation landscape. As we analyze plantation life, we must acknowledge the myriad cultures that have contributed to it: African, African American, Native American, European American, and European. Otherwise, we have not given a complete interpretation. In addition the study of architecture and material culture, we also need to consider studies of family structure and domestic life which are discussed in the following section of this essay.
Bibliography
Breeden, James O. Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Deetz, James. Flowerdew Hundred. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
Ferguson, Leland. Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 1650-1800. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
Ferris, William and Charles Reagan Wilson. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Ferris, William. Afro-American Folk Art and Crafts. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1983.
Klingelhofer, Eric. "Aspects of Early Afro-American Material Culture: Artifacts from the Slave Quarters at Garrison Plantation, Maryland." Historical Archaeology
21, 2 (1987): 112-119.
McDaniel, George. Hearth & Home: Preserving a People's Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.
Newton, James E. "Slave Artisans and Craftsmen:The Roots of Afro-American Art." Black Scholar 9 (November 1977): 35-44.
Orser, Charles. Historical Archaeology on Southern Plantations and Farms 24 (1990).
Pogue, Dennis. King's Reach and 17th-century Plantation Life. Annapolis: Maryland Historical & Cultural Publications, 1990.
Upton, Dell. "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia." In Material Life in America, 1600-1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George. Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1988, 357-68.
Vlach, John Michael. "Afro-American Domestic Artifacts in Eighteenth Century Virginia," Material Culture 19 (1987).
Vlach, John Michael. The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Vlach, John Michael. "Not Mansions...But Good Enough: Slave Quarters as Bi-Cultural Expression." In Black and White: Cultural Interaction in the
Antebellum South, ed. Ted Ownby, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.
Wells, Camille. "The Eighteenth-Century Landscape of Virginia's Northern Neck." Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine 37 (1987).
Wells, Camille. "The Planter's Prospect: Houses, Outbuildings, and Rural Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia." Winterthur Portfolio 28 (Spring 1993).
Yentsch, Anne Elizabeth. A Chesapeake Family and Their Slaves: A Study in Historical Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Current scholarship has asserted to varying degrees the autonomy, vitality and complexity of slave culture, family, and community. The major scholarly debates concerning the slave family have revolved around issues of family structure, gender roles, and the agency of African Americans in creating a valid culture and nurturing community. This essay will selectively review the significant scholarship pertaining to studies in slave family and domestic life.
The laws of slaveholding states did not allow slaves to be legally married and slaves had no legal rights over their children. As many as one third of all slave families were broken apart as individual members were sold either to the deep South or further West. Nonetheless, slave families existed, slaves performed marriage ceremonies, and slaves raised their children. Slave family structure, while not always "traditional," created strong kinship ties despite the oppressive system which denied legal recognition of slave "marriages" and which prevented slave parents and "spouses" to protect each other from abuse and separation. The slave family and the extended family of the slave community provided individuals with a sense of identity and purpose independent of the master and white society.
Historical development of the scholarship
The earlier works of historians Kenneth Stampp (The Peculiar Institution, 1956) and Stanley Elkins (Slavery, 1958), while making very different arguments about the nature of slaves, both emphasized the harsh and inhumane conditions of slavery. Along with the conclusions of sociologists E. Franklin Frazier (The Negro Family in the United States, 1949) and Gunnar Myrdal (The American Dilemma, 1944), a general notion persisted into the 1960s that an African-American culture was a pathological imitation of white practice and custom. Based on the existing historical documentation and sociological findings, the sweeping conclusions of Daniel P. Moynihan, in the government policy document The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), had determined that the contemporary "crisis" of the modern black family--in which instability and fatherlessness fostered anti-social behavior--could be traced to the conditions that had shaped the slave family. In reaction to the use of history to create federal policies, social historians produced new studies in the 1970s to show that the slave family was indeed stable and nuclear insofar as was possible within the limits of their enslaved condition.
The primary works of the 1970s which have established the current scholarly views on slavery and shaped the nature of slave family studies include John Blassingame's The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972). Blassingame uses records of the Freedman's Bureau and statistics from the federal census to show that, contrary to the claims of earlier scholarship, most slaves lived in two parent households. He argues the significance of the nuclear slave family, however precarious or short-lived, as a survival mechanism against the dehumanizing treatment of slavery. Slave parents were able to perform the "traditional" function of child-rearing, and therefore were able to instill values and a frame of reference apart from the master. Out of sight of the white master and in the privacy of their quarters, Blassingame asserts, slaves exhibited their true personality traits serving as models of behavior to their children.
Other important works that profoundly influence current scholarship are Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) by Eugene Genovese, and Herbert Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1977). Genovese provides an extensive description of slave plantation life covering "marriage" patterns and sexual mores, family relations, and religious practices. Regarding family life, Genovese concludes that many slaves were able to set norms that were transferable to their lives in freedom. Slave men did provide for their families as much as they could by hunting and fishing to supplement rations, and by protecting their families from punishment when possible. Slave men and women recognized the sanctity of their "marriage" relationships even if the law or their masters did not. Like Blassingame, Genovese indicates that the strong affectionate ties among fathers, mothers, and children were a source of strength. Genovese emphasizes that these achievements were limited by the constraints of the slave system, but that they were all the more impressive under the circumstances.
Gutman, in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, uses census data, Freedman's Bureau records, and plantation records from Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana to show that despite the lack of legal recognition of slaves' marriages, they indeed established such unions and valued marriage and family life. Gutman offers extensive evidence of the complex relationships and kinship networks providing the slave family with a sense of cohesiveness despite the outside forces that could separate them: extended kin, such as uncles, aunts and cousins, were an important part of familial identity. On various plantations throughout the South, patterns of slave behavior and a common slave culture are documented. Gutman demonstrates the collective and effective resistance to oppression by slaves' maintenance of family ties.
Scholars of women's history have pointed out the heavy male-oriented bias in the works of Blassingame, Genovese, and Gutman. The emphasis on the black female matriarch was central to the analysis of Frazier and Moynihan. The emasculation of black men in slavery, they asserted, was exacerbated by the economic and familial dominance of women within the black family. Thus, the refutations of Blassingame, Genovese, and Gutman focus on demonstrating the dominance of the male in the slave family: proving that most (not all) slaves lived in two parent households. They suggest further evidence of male dominance by focusing on male slave status within the community, recognition of men as head of the family group by masters, and the heavy labor activities of men. The works of Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (1985), and Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? (1985) question what scholars establish as the norm for slave families. They also assert that the respect and recognition of women's work with the black family cannot be equated with dominance in the political or socio-economic sense that was implied by Moynihan. They argue that the slave family was indeed matrifocal, or mother-centered (rather than matriarchal, or female-dominated), but that the roles for mother and father in the slave household were complementary; one did not necessarily maintain a dominant position over the other.
An important aspect of White's analysis is the influence of African traditions that shaped slave family customs. The works of Blassingame, Genovese, and Gutman recognize and discuss the slave's cultural process of adapting African practices and European customs to their unique situation in American slavery, called syncretism. Naming practices, burial rituals, marriage ceremonies, and the blending of Christian beliefs with African religion created a unique American slave culture. For instance, scholars show that slave marriages, although illegal, were often conducted in Christian churches. They were also often followed by the "jumping the broomstick" ceremony (the exact meaning of which scholars interpret differently). Focusing on gender roles, White compares slave culture with West African practices and reveals similarities in familial relationships and work roles: female work and domestic activities--such as child rearing, laundry, and sewing as well as field work--were recognized within the slave community as central to their survival.
Both Jones and White also argue that black women's confidence in themselves as workers enabled them to build a "culture of resistance" and a sense of identity apart from the roles imposed upon them by slavery. Likewise, in Within the Plantation Household (1988), a comparative study of white and black female experience in the antebellum South, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese finds that slave women took pride and satisfaction in their work skills even though their production primarily benefited their white owners. Fox-Genovese asserts that while essentially experiencing different statuses as free and enslaved women, both groups acquired self-conscious identities through their labor activities as it related to their distinct families and communities. All three scholars demonstrate ways in which culturally dominant conventions of family relations and gender roles are not transferable to the slave community. Thus, women's historians revise the language of scholarship that has focused on the roles and experiences of male slaves and portray slavery as a culturally adaptive process in which the norms of white society did not necessarily apply.
In the most recent work on the subject, Brenda E. Stevenson's Life in Black and White (1996) directly challenges the 1970s scholarship that portrayed the nuclear slave family structure as the norm. Stevenson studies the cultural practices and family structures of white planters, poorer white farmers, free blacks and slaves in Loudon County, Virginia, during the early nineteenth century. She finds that neither monogamous "marriages" nor nuclear families characterized slave family norms. More significant to the slaves' experience were matrifocal families, "spouses" living on separate plantations, and extended family groups. Stevenson asserts that slaves' ideals of marriage and family were neither reflective of nor sanctioned by the dominant white culture. Ultimately, slave marriage and family structures are too diverse to provide a typical characterization, but by its very multiplicity the slave family demonstrates its adaptability and speaks to the slave family's survival.
Another very recent work is Wilma King's Stolen Childhood (1995), which focuses on the experience of children during slavery. While all of the works discussed above touch upon children in slavery--such as work roles and treatment by masters and mistresses--none give the child's experience the singular importance that King asserts. King argues that enslaved children were deprived of a childhood because they started work early and were subject to the same atrocities and abuse as adult slaves. The author equates the condition of slavery with being in a state of war, and compares the intense suffering of children in war and slavery due to their inability to protect themselves from devastation.
Sources in Slave Scholarship
Blassingame's work has been hailed as a major turning point in slave studies, successfully challenging Elkins' Slavery which had previously dominated the scholarly representation of slavery. Blassingame reinterprets the nature of the slave community as one imbued with dignity, humanity, and self-determination. He does so not only with the hard evidence of statistical data, but also with the words of slaves themselves through ex-slave autobiographies. However, criticism of The Slave Community points to the vast number of slave testimony sources that were not used and questioned Blassingame's use of psychology to interpret slave accounts (Al-Tony Gilmore, ed. Revisiting Blassingame's The Slave Community, 1978). For instance, George P. Rawick uses the slave interviews from the Federal Writer's Project (FWP) narratives to discuss slave experiences from their own vantage point in From Sundown to Sunup (1972), which is volume 1 of the collectively published interviews, The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, a forty-one volume set. Of particular interest to the Booker T. Washington and Arlington House sites is volume sixteen of The American Slave, and Weevils in the Wheat, edited by Charles L. Perdue et.al (1976), as well as the FWP publication The Negro in Virginia (1940) which provide interviews with people who had been enslaved in Virginia.
In Weevils in the Wheat, Perdue collects all of the extant Virginia Writer's Project (under the aegis of the FWP) interviews of ex-slaves, including the interviews conducted by the all-black unit of interviewers previously published in The Negro in Virginia. The introduction to Perdue's collection provides an excellent background to the development of the FWP: Perdue discusses the problems with the recording and transcription of interviews and the effects of bias and censorship which are inevitable in the interviewing and editing process. A serious problem recognized by all scholars using the interviews is that many FWP workers were white southerners, sometimes even the descendants of former owners, whose presence no doubt affected the response of former slaves. For the most part, the problem of interracial interviews is avoided in the Virginia interviews because the majority of the interviewers were African American.
In a more recent work, Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave (1990), Norrece T. Jones, Jr. makes the observation concerning the use of the FWP interviews that slaves were probably reticent in relating the harsher aspects of slavery. Also, editors of the interviews deleted some of the most brutal descriptions. More revealing to the thoughts and feelings of slaves, he suggests, is black folklore, as Lawrence Levine has argued in Black Culture, Black Consciousness (1977, see section 4). Jones portrays the physical, psychological, and spiritual resistance by slaves while emphasizing the harsh and cruel environment of slavery. Using South Carolina the plantations as a case study, the author depicts the world of slavery as a "state of war" in which masters exerted mechanisms of control--such as reward and punishment or the threat of sale--and slaves, in various ways and degrees, resisted, retaliated, and survived.
Conclusion
We can identify general trends in the scholarship of slave studies and in the interpretation of slave family and domestic life. In the 1970s, scholars interpret evidence of an autonomous slave culture and forms of family structure that carried over into freedom. In the 1980s, scholars reinforce the assertion of an autonomous slave culture with the interpretation of female slave experience and the significance of family structures in sustaining slave communities. The essays collected in Women and the Family in a Slave Society (1989) provide the work of scholars discussed here and other significant scholarship in article form. Also useful is Peter Parish's Slavery: History and Historians (1989), which presents the scholarly debates and social contexts of slave studies in detail. Most recent studies of the 1990s continue to scrutinize the nature of slave family and domestic life and tend to emphasize the harsh and debilitating conditions of slavery which make the persistence of the African-American family all the more significant.
Historians continue to revise and expand our understanding of slave culture. What modern studies have in common is a belief in the humanity of slaves and recognition of the complex nature of slave communities. The scholarship of today reveals that the slave experience cannot be simply depicted as either the suffering or the non-suffering victim of oppression. By portraying the multiplicity of adaptive processes to survive a life of slavery, historians present slaves as people instead of typecast characters. As the historian Thomas Holt has stated, there is a consensus among historians of slavery that despite the harshness of the system, slaves were able to create "institutions and cultural ethos that were functional to their needs, that enabled them to survive the rigors of slavery and bequeath a legacy of resistance to their posterity" (Holt, 215).
Bibliography
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Finkelman, Paul, ed. Women and the Family in a Slave Society. New York: Garland, 1989.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.
Gilmore, Al-Tony, ed. Revisiting Blassingame's The Slave Community: The Scholars Respond. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978.
Gutman, Herbert. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925. New York: Random House, 1977.
Holt, Thomas C. "African-American History." In The New American History. ed. Eric Foner, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Jones, Norrece T., Jr. Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina. Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1984.
King, William. Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture, Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.
Parish, Peter J. Slavery: History and Historians. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Perdue, Charles L., et.al. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-slaves. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976.
Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Westport: Greenwood Pub., 1972.
Stevenson, Brenda. Life in Black and White. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
White, Deborah Gray. Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.
Writer's Program. The Negro in Virginia: Compiled by Workers of the Writer's Program for the Work Projects Administration. New York: Hastings House,
1940; Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969.
Introduction: Definitions, Historiography, Relevance
The concept of "community" can prove vague and ambiguous in a general conversation on the subject. In this context "community" refers to the construction of organized social interaction. In antebellum black society "community" specifically consists of social institutions such as church, family, school, communal clubs or orders, and social and political movements. Unfortunately, due to the racial prejudice inherent in American society, scholars first had to prove that such "community" existed among slaves and free blacks before examining the organizational and functional details of those communities. The process of proving and then exploring early African-American communities has its own history.
As in general studies of African-American history, the trend in the interpretation of slave and free communities has developed from works positioning African Americans as passive victims of circumstance to studies identifying them as real players in the formation of their own communities and their world. In the earliest works an effort was made to prove that slave and free populations had very little, if anything, in common. This movement hoped to prove that "freedom" was the answer to the atrocities of slavery.
Later studies that focus on community make-up are the foundation of modern scholarly interpretation. These works attempt to determine the amount of freedom and agency afforded to black populations and how those populations negotiated the restrictions placed on their lives. These investigations reveal that freedom meant something different than assumed when the group in question was black and not white. Studies tended to idealize antebellum black communities in order to show that blacks' existence constituted more than mere reaction to circumscription and violence. The texts mapped out communities, their organizational elements, and the way that they functioned emphasizing unity and communal support. Works by Herbert Gutman, Lawrence Levine, and Leon Litwack are good examples of this type of scholarship.
The current trend is to examine antebellum black populations with greater scrutiny, looking at conflict as well as unity within slave and free communities. This trend is seen in the works of James Horton, Jacqueline Jones, Shane White, and Deborah Gray White. These scholars are examining the human complexity within communities and the specific differences between communities noting how specific circumstances and regional environments and values affected their development and operation. These monographs weave African-American history into the larger fabric of American history as a whole.
Close study has revealed that slaves and free blacks existed along a spectrum of freedom. Slaves and free blacks in America experienced levels of freedom that were different from each other but always less than that afforded to white people. Texts exploring slave and free communities show where certain populations fall on this spectrum and how members of those populations dealt with their circumstances. While providing compelling accounts of specific communities in specific regions of the country, more recent texts all illustrate that black communities, slave and free, were able to carve a rich existence for themselves out of the constricted opportunities available to them in spite of the racial hatred that faced them at every turn.
Recent studies about slavery are less concerned with examining the institution itself or the relationship between blacks and whites than with discovering the inner life of slave communities. These works teach us how slaves lived and interacted in the fields and in the quarters, before the master, and especially behind the master's back. Some texts even attempt to delve into the values and thought processes of slave populations. The ability to describe the workings of slave communities is essential in understanding African-American and American history. Without a clear picture of the complexity of black life during this early stage of history the propensity exists to continue to marginalize and dehumanize the slave population and consequently the African-American population of the past and today. The view that recent studies provide of the plantation slave community enriches our knowledge of American history and takes a step towards regarding slaves as more than supporters of white planter lifestyles.
There were many similarities between and interactions among slave and free black communities, as both faced discrimination and were denied American citizenship. The mechanisms utilized to cope with this reality and to establish community shows the strength and character often demonstrated by oppressed peoples.
All over the South the existence of free blacks was deemed an ideological and practical threat to slavery; whites feared that slaves would be inspired to desire freedom by seeing others of their race free. That blacks could earn wages and support themselves not only proved slavery's paternalism unnecessary, but also undermined its rationale. Common thought also assumed that free blacks would help slaves to escape. Thus the actions and behaviors of free black people in slave states were as controlled as the slaves, if not more so since free blacks posed a threat to the racial ideology that supported the slave system. Being free was not easy. One must remember that even though free, all blacks were subject to the rigid social codes that dictated their behavior and demeanor as members of an "inferior" race.
We learn more from studying the interaction between free blacks and slaves as well as free blacks and whites, as none of these populations existed in a vacuum. The presence and activities of each group affected all of the others. It is especially enlightening to consider that communities of slaves on plantation sites were existing simultaneously to those of free people. Indeed, escaped or manumitted slaves joined free communities or were brought to them. There is also evidence that the infrastructure of antebellum free communities paved the way for African-American political activity and group development after emancipation as well as set the pattern for white black interaction in the "new" post-bellum America.
`Although a Slave...': Historiography and Context of Scholarship
As one of the first texts concerning slave communities following the Civil Rights movement, Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) recognizes the constraints and influences imposed by the dominant white culture and the slave system, yet asserts slaves' active participation in shaping an African-American culture that was distinct from the white one. Genovese identifies religion as the focal point of the slave community. He argues that Christianity was used by slaves both in its accommodationist capacity to sanction acceptance of the slave system, and its revolutionary capacity to justify resistance. Religion brought spiritual comfort and relief to the individual slave and sustaining power to the slave community.
Dealing expressly with religion, Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (1978), identifies not only the organization, but also the content and form of religion as vital to the slave community. Raboteau asserts that slave religion inspired a powerful sense of community and created leaders and spokespersons for that community. Slaves' practice of religion allowed for organized interaction and the establishment of spiritual leadership to the community. Raboteau elaborates upon Genovese's assertion that slave religion represented a major force in slave communities; he sees slave religion as a creation of slaves' inner culture and community to a greater extent than does Genovese. The doctrine of deliverance, faith, and love helped slaves to maintain their belief in eminent freedom in the supernatural and earthly world in spite of "past sufferings, present uncertainty, and the anticipation of future trouble." Religious practices provided slaves with the opportunity to meet and to express themselves together and in their own manner without white supervision.
Realizing that in addition to religion and social organization the mainstay of any community is its family relations, Herbert Gutman emphasizes family structure and function in slave communities. Responding to scholarship that was attacking the black family, asserting its pathology rooted in the experience of slavery, Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976) establishes the structure and stability of the black family. The work demonstrates that blacks in America maintained a family structure that was suited to the reality of their lives at particular times and according to particular conditions. Gutman uses quantitative data as well as personal testimony to trace the dynamics of family interaction and development.
Focusing on another aspect of slave community development and tradition, Lawrence Levine's Black Culture, Black Consciousness (1977) highlights the development of African-American oral culture, including spirituals, work songs, folk tales, and jokes. The work succeeds in establishing a unique black American culture and cultural thought. Levine explores the complexity and richness of African-American culture that at once results from the oppressive forces of racism and the liberating elements of the human capacity to adapt and survive. Levine also argues and provides evidence of the retention of an African cultural style that persists in oral expressions.
In Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community (1978) Thomas Webber focuses on the socialization as well as the education of slaves in a plantation community. The text demonstrates how slaves were educated and socialized to inhabit two worlds: the white world that was closely monitored by masters and the general white community in which the slave was trained to be the "perfect" industrious, non-resistant, ignorant, and demonstrably racially inferior "servant"; and the black world in which the child encountered family, religion, and social inclusion. The socialization that slaves received in the slave community from family, church, peers, elders, and songs and stories taught them how to accept lessons from the dominant culture and how the world should be viewed and understood.
While recognizing the restrictions imposed by whites' values and control, Webber demonstrates that slave populations constituted their own communities grounded in African traditions that imparted values, beliefs, and survival skills to its members. Webber focuses upon the intellectual and social autonomy inherent in human existence that provide one with the opportunity to create and interpret one's world. He attempts to depict the nature of life under slavery as it was understood by the slaves themselves, instead of through the perspective of a population that existed on the outskirts of slave existence.
John Blassingame's The Slave Community (1979) also carefully establishes the existence and stability of slave community including slave religion, social organization, and family. Through these assertions, Blassingame challenges the assumption that the slave system was a closed system, as expressed in Elkins's Slavery that positioned slaves solely as victims. In the tradition of his contemporaries, Blassingame asserts that despite the harshness of oppression, the plantation was a place of work and life. Slaves took part in creating the existence as opposed to having it constructed for them.
Blassingame also highlights the interaction of cultures that took place between Africans and Europeans in the slave society, and the impact that this interaction held for the overall development of black and white culture. The Slave Community illustrates the boundaries between communities were not impermeable. Blacks and whites learned from each other. Blassingame's perspective also implies that both groups suffered from the scars and bruises imparted by a nationally condoned system of human bondage.
With the works of Litwack, Webber, and others like them, scholars not only established the existence and the nature of slave communities, but also began to explore the subtle textures of slave life and culture. Through continued research, scholars have added depth and breadth to our knowledge of human experience in America by addressing areas that have been previously ignored or silenced. Greater complexity surfaced as idealized interpretations reflecting pure, harmonious, and united slave communities were no longer valid. For instance, African as well as European influences on African-American life began to be explored. In addition, women came to be viewed as legitimate members and contributors to slave communities.
Charles Joyner's Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (1984) takes the concept of shared culture even further than Blassingame. He provides a case study of a particular community in order to reveal the various aspects of slave folklife, particularly the "creolization" process. This process, denoting the convergence of two or more languages to form a new native tongue, is applied to the wider scope of cultural adaptations. Hence, a "creolization of culture" is articulated. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Joyner explores the material as well as the verbal culture of the community and its development to highlight the mixture of cultures (African, African American, European and Native American) that united to shape the culture of the slave community.
Delving into the role of women in the slave community, Jacqueline Jones's Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women Work and the Family from Slavery to Freedom (1985) presents the labor of black women as significant to our understanding of labor history, and especially to the development of black working families. Their position in the slave economy and wage labor force reinforced their subordinate status as women and as blacks. Nonetheless, black women worked hard to maintain their families and to improve their community's quality of life. This family role represented an alternate source of respect and control for black women.
In Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), Deborah Gray White also diverges from the predominant focus on male involvement in community to investigate women's roles and lives in slavery. While not asserting that slavery was worse for female slaves than for male slaves, White argues that it was nonetheless different and examines how the system of slavery affected women in particular. She notes that female work, living, and social patterns that were separate from men created a community among women that supported the general slave community. Women's work and their childbearing and childcare responsibilities tied them more closely to the plantation or farm than men and, consequently, to greater supervision and control. White asserts that in order to offset these difficulties slave women established what White calls "the female slave network" that was based upon female development, maturity and rites of passage, and served as a support system to the community of female slaves as well as the greater slave community.
Especially with more recent works, historical investigation into slave communities begins to access the inner lives of slave populations and reflect the complexity of slave life. The large number of internal and external factors that influenced slave community development (and generally tend to influence all human community development) become clear through a broad knowledge of the scholarship to date. The diversity of slave experience also becomes evident as scholars articulate the existence of many types of slave communities that differed in number, gender composition, locale, and types of labor. Nevertheless, another form of community existed, that of free blacks, a knowledge of which is essential to understanding labor, political movements, and race relations in the antebellum United States.
`Freedom Like Mine': Historiography and Context of Scholarship
In North of Slavery (1961), one of the first modern examinations of antebellum free black populations, Leon Litwack maps Northern black existence from the inception of freedom and emancipation through the turbulence and complexity of antebellum white and black abolition movements. One of the major contributions of Litwack's text is its refutation of the antebellum North's status as a mecca of equality and opportunity for free blacks. Litwack establishes that, while antislavery Northern whites were not necessarily social integrationists, Northerners believed that America was politically, socially, and economically "a white man's country." The rampant racial segregation and exclusion that was coded into law proves this fact. Litwack also demonstrates that while the North afforded more opportunities in terms of education, self-expression, job opportunity, and political agency, these opportunities were negligible in relation to the opportunities afforded "full" white citizens.
Litwack asserts that the "more free" environment in the North produced different kinds of action, thought, and leadership than did that of the South. He characterizes these differences in the form of the major antebellum black leaders that the regions produced, Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner. The varying "degrees of freedom" available in the free North and slave South made for differing possibilities of activism. The intellectual nature of Douglass's leadership was impossible for slaves and free men in the South, who were denied education and free speech. The severity of the condition of slavery in the South and the restrictions on thought and social activity produced a leader like Nat Turner to encourage social and political change.
As one of the first monographs following studies that positioned blacks as victims in society, it is important to note the tone and perspective that North of Slavery adopts: it investigates the agency and organization invested within antebellum free black communities. Litwack recognizes the humanity of the free black community by exploring groups' own efforts to improve their own lives as well as by examining these efforts with respect to whites' actions and views. Litwack also attempts to balance description of the proscription and injustice meted out to the free black population with description of free black's attempts to shape a positive existence out of a oppressive situation.
Berlin's Slaves Without Masters (1974) is a work that sets the parameters of the debate. It is a comprehensive study of the formation and development of free black communities in the South that vary according to size, wealth, origination, color, and region. Berlin directly addresses earlier scholarship by dealing with free blacks in the South, revising much of the equivocal and unclear information concerning free blacks' social life. Berlin asserts that, though able to develop a rich community life, free blacks in the South enjoyed very little more "freedom" than did slaves.
Berlin identifies the development of black church, school, and fraternal and mutual aid organizations as the stalwarts of the free black community. He argues that the majority, if not all, of community life, activism, and organization grew out of the church. The establishment of the free black church represented a milestone in the development of a free black community. Free black congregations, along with slaves, started schools to facilitate the attainment of highly valued education and fraternal associations to protect, serve, and strengthen the free Black community. All of these activities were illegal and barely tolerated by a controlling and faultfinding white population.
In urban port centers in the deep South, particularly Charleston and New Orleans, prosperous groups of light-skinned blacks created communities that more closely emulated white society than those created by poor freemen or slaves. These groups enjoyed significantly more freedom than poor free blacks--or slaves--largely due to their skin color. This privilege resulted from the status conferred upon mulattoes by a white population that valued whiteness over blackness. Thus the development of a light-skinned black "upper" class is a direct result of the dominant notion of white supremacy. The development of color-coded class stratification proves that American cultures do not exist in a vacuum, but affect each other greatly.
Occupying a middle ground between slave and free, black and white, they created a flourishing network of schools, churches, and other organizations that had very little in common with the slaves around them. While relatively "unconnected to the poorer Black population during the antebellum period", this free elite became an important force in the turbulent politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction (Berlin, 1974).
Jane and William Peases' They Who Would Be Free (1974) takes a very different and rather pessimistic look at free black communities. The text also adopts a negative view of the elite and non-elite leadership that Berlin recognized as essential to the future of emancipated blacks. The text argues that free African Americans in the North were powerless, their efforts to effect change largely futile, as they operated in a milieu of racism, factionalism, and apathy.
They Who Would Be Free examines the black abolition movement and determines that it was a failure. The failure is attributed to external forces that prevented black efforts from being effective and attributes the failure to inherent problems in black leadership. The Peases assert that the leaders were more interested in advancing their own interests and status than in freeing the slaves. In making this point the text reflects the pessimism of its post-Civil Rights era context and rails the division and self interest of the black leadership of the antebellum period interpreting its division in terms of the crisis in black leadership during the 1970s.
The Peases' work is important in its willingness to forgo the idealization of the antebellum free black community in order to expose the complexity of black ideas and interaction. Other historians, however (such as Robert Cottrol, Barbara Jeanne Fields, and Leonard Curry), abandon this negative perspective. These authors recognize the strides taken by black leaders (both elite and non-elite in different contexts) in helping to develop black communities both before and after emancipation. Monographs published subsequent to the Peases' work are similar in-depth case studies of specific communities in specific places. The texts analyze the ways in which particular environments affected various issues in free black life such as work, religion, gender roles, and community organization.
In The Afro-Yankees (1982), Robert Cottrol studies the social and political life in antebellum black Providence, Rhode Island. His work reinforces the pattern of community activism and organization among free blacks found in other cities. His extensive treatment of unlikely interracial political alliances struck during the period is instructive and suggests that historians should pay greater attention to issues of race and class in attempting to understand the dynamics of community life. Here region was a critical factor in accessing the options open to black people in creating a community support apparatus.
In Slavery and Freedom in the Middle Ground (1985), Barbara Jeanne Fields explores Maryland's black population that consisted of nearly equal numbers of free people and slaves. Fields explores the revolutionary consequences of freedom upon a society dominated by a slave system. Fields demonstrates that even before emancipation Maryland was coping with the existence of two competing and ideologically conflicting systems of labor and citizenship. The author points out the social impossibility of a group of powerless individuals (free blacks) to bring about change in the economic, political, and social system. Free blacks, slaves, and whites were all part of and affected by the slave system. The free status of many individual blacks in Maryland did not erode the foundation of slavery; instead, the slave system defined and limited the status of blacks. Although free blacks in Maryland (called "conscript slaves" by Fields) supported themselves, they were not truly free from systemic bondage until after the Civil War.
Free blacks were subject to random violence, threat of legalized re-enslavement, and forced expulsion from the state. The existence of this mixed population also had impact on the quality of black life itself. "The middle ground imported an extra measure of bitterness to enslavement, set close boundaries on the ostensibly free, and played havoc with bonds of love, friendship, and family among slaves and between them and free black people."
In Freedom at Risk, Carol Wilson illustrates that freedom was a tenuous and dangerous position for African Americans. Wilson not only recognizes and decries the reality and injustice of the kidnapping of free blacks, but also identifies patterns in what abolitionists referred to as "manstealing."
Leonard Curry's The Free Black in Urban America (1988) demonstrates that free blacks faced a precarious and difficult existence due to legal restrictions of employment, advancement, and living opportunities. The political and social violence committed against blacks in all areas of life was rampant and continuous. Curry argues that in spite of and because of these conditions, free blacks formed a strong community with consisting of cohesive organizational forces that united community members and facilitated the expression of political and social discontent. Blacks continuously protested and petitioned for relief and agitated for suffrage and equal political rights. As the title implies, the ideological starting point for Curry's text is the notion that nineteenth-century free blacks shared the same goals for individual achievement as did whites. Curry demonstrates that in spite of adhering to the dominant ideology, free blacks were still primarily shut out from larger society and found themselves chasing the "shadow" of the American dream.
Gary Nash's book, Forging Freedom, (1988) highlights the significance of leadership, organizational development, communal interdependence, and economic independence in the early formation of a free black community in Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary America. Since Philadelphia was one of the early havens for free blacks, its free black population grew quickly, providing opportunities for leadership, community development, and social consciousness. Nash also explores the barriers to independence and autonomy that blacks faced at every turn. In some cases free blacks faced sanctions on religious and meeting practices, in other instances free blacks were barred from equal participation in the job market. In all instances, free black life was circumscribed by white racism, resentment, and hatred.
While attuned to the tragedy of the history of free blacks, Nash gives more attention to the "internal history" of a people striving to create the best possible lives for themselves that their inner resources and external circumstances allowed. Nash traces the emergence of a gifted black leadership in Philadelphia and an organizational infrastructure that supported a rich and diverse community. Nash follows the development and changes in elite black leadership throughout the social and economic upheavals that plagued blacks during the turn of the century, and through the rising prevalence of anti-black violence in the late 1830s and early 1840s.
Similar to the argument in Forging Freedom, Harry Reed describes a black population agitating to change and improve the conditions of their lives. In Platform for Change (1994), Reed challenges the Pease argument asserting that antebellum African Americans were empowered through the development of community and the creation of an active group of leaders. He argues that church, social organization, newspapers, national conventions, and the development of a philosophy of emigration constitute African-American expressions of "empowerment." Reed asserts that free blacks exercised this "power" through aggressive self-determination and by agitating and petitioning for the attainment of political goals.
In Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (1990), Shane White grounds a discussion of emancipation and free black life in New York in an enlightening discussion of slavery before widespread manumission or emancipation. White shows that slaveholding in New York was a widespread practice among the middle and upper classes, revealing the presence of a large slave population during the post-revolutionary period. White's identification of these patterns facilitates a comparison between the lives of slaves and free blacks in an urban setting. He demonstrates that by 1810 growing numbers of free blacks had built an impressive community, including a varied and highly skilled occupational structure derived from the largely artisanal and industrial nature of urban slavery.
White notes that for a brief moment, while slavery was gradually ending in the North, free blacks flourished--attending the African Free School and African Church, making a difference in local elections, and rising to the ranks of skilled craftsman and petty proprietors. After this short period, however, with the development of wage labor the strong hand of racism served to circumscribe new found opportunity. Somewhat More Independent attests to the creativity and stamina of thousands of previously ignored African slaves and ex-slaves who forged a free culture in a slave society.
James Horton's book, Free People of Color (1993), explores many important aspects of the antebellum free black community in a manner that emphasizes issues of community cooperation and values, of gender, and of color. Unlike many studies, this text examines African-American life according to specific issues. In dealing specifically with issues of community building and interaction, the text highlights the importance of organizations and associations in uniting the population and organizing their ideals and values. This approach illuminates not only the formation and functioning of a community, but the tensions and complexity that characterize every human society.
Free People of Color explores unity as well as conflicts within free black society that arose through ideology, over courses of action and racial priorities, issues of migration and assimilation, gender, and color. The text deals with many issues that concern us today from a historical perspective thus opening up discussion for very difficult subjects in the black community and in the wider society.
Bibliography
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Joyner, Charles W. Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Webber, Thomas. Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community. New York: Norton, 1978.
White, Debra G. Arn't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.
Cary, Francine. Urban Odyssey. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.
Berlin, Ira. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
Cottrol, Robert. The Afro-Yankees: Providence's Black Community in the Antebellum Era. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982.
Curry, Leonard. The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850: The Shadow of A Dream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Slavery and Freedom in the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
Green, Constance M. The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967.
Horton, James O. Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community. Washington: Smithsonian University Press, 1993.
Litwack, Leon. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
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The scholarly literature analyzing the aftermath of the Civil War of the United States is vast. The Civil War and Reconstruction continue to raise difficult questions about the meaning of democracy, freedom, and justice in America that are yet to be resolved. Thus, historical interpretation of the period goes to the very heart of the way we interpret America.
As in studies of slavery and free black communities, historical interpretation of Reconstruction has evolved from portraying a simplistic, exclusively white point of view to the representation of an era that epitomizes both the promise and failure of freedom for all Americans. Modern scholarship explores issues interior to the African-American community of how newly freed slaves coped with the new status of freedom, as well as the general issue of how a nation begins to transform its own social, economic, and political culture. This essay will briefly discuss major events of Reconstruction and selectively review scholarship that shapes our understanding of Reconstruction and the history of Americans.
The Facts of Reconstruction: A Brief Overview
Although the exact dates demarcating Reconstruction are not universally agreed upon, Eric Foner indicates the years 1863 to 1877: the period from the Emancipation Proclamation to the year that the ideal of Reconstruction to protect the fundamental rights of all citizens gave way to southern "Redemption" and "home rule," the equivalent to white rule. (Still others might point to 1883 as the end of Reconstruction, the year the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.) By law, at least, African Americans made significant gains for their rights as citizens during Reconstruction. Racism prevailed however, and once "Southern Redemption" took hold by the 1880s, racist policies continued and proliferated. Federal laws, Supreme Court decisions, and presidential initiatives would vacillate between furthering and hindering the civil rights of African Americans.
Following the Civil War, Congress amended the Constitution in ways that confirmed American democracy and raised the hopes of African Americans for attaining equality. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of 1865 and 1867 ended the institution of slavery and guaranteed equal protection under the law regardless of race, respectively. The adoption of restrictive "Black Codes" by southern states however, sought to secure white supremacy and keep blacks as a laboring class. President Andrew Johnson's moderate policy supported the concerns of the South and did little to advance blacks' civil rights. Nonetheless, Congress passed bills to ensure civil rights and enforce Reconstruction in the South with the passa