On Slave Counterpoint

This is a really interesting book on comparative slavery that uses different parts of the United States as case studies, rather than comparing slavery in the US with other parts of the Americas. Because it takes a comparative structure, it almost resembles David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America more than Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, or David Davis’s Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.

While the text is too large to summarize here, there are some really interesting findings worth mentioning here.

First, there is a debate between scholars of the colonial South whether class or race was more important in defining the development of Southern society. T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes (Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676) seem to me to be the exemplars of those who argue that class was more important. Winthrop Jordan (White Over Black) tends towards race being the most important. While Morgan recognizes the importance of Breen and Innes’s work, he believes they take it too far, and that race was the ultimate factor that shaped the development of Southern societies (both in the Lowcountry and in the Chesapeake). I’m still not sure where I stand on this—Breen and Innes’s case seems compelling to me, but I also wonder if Northampton County, Virginia was “typical” or if it was really an exceptional region.

In terms of comparison, I expected the case to ultimately be “the Lowcountry was way worse than the Chesapeake” (which is obviously the sort of case that a serious historian would not make), and I was impressed by the subtlety in which Morgan dealt with this. He finds that racism as a social phenomenon generally was not quite as strong in the Chesapeake as it was in the Carolinas (which I expected—African slaves didn’t experience the solidification of the their status until the late 17th-early 18th century; before then, many married white partners, etc.), but he also argues that there was far possibility of social mobility for black slaves in the Lowcountry. Because South Carolina was demographically dominated by African slaves, there weren’t enough white people to fill in the “elite” (or quasi-elite positions), so these occupations were filled by slaves. Although they were still slaves, they existed on a class-spectrum in a way that wasn’t apparent in the Chesapeake Bay.

Moreover, Morgan finds that slaves in the Lowcountry generally maintained their pre-migration traditions from Africa and, because they took on skilled occupational positions, these traditions tended to appear in the artisanal and craft traditions of the Lowcountry in a way that they did not a bit further north. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I am. But, with this in mind, it does make sense that languages like Gullah exist in the Carolinas and Florida, but not in Virginia or Maryland, where they were more likely to “assimilate” (sometimes forcibly) to European ways of speaking.

While the American Revolution is lightly discussed here, it is not quite clear the impact that American independence had on shifts in the South’s slave societies or how these two Southern cultures expanded and transformed themselves throughout the 19th century. I’m really curious about the implications of this sort of history on the present—what can we learn from it that affects the way that we see the present? Sadly, I don’t really have an answer to that.

Still, this is an excellent study that compares two Southern slaves societies in order to get a better sense of what made either one distinctive (and what made them similar). It’s a must-read.