Slaughter, Thomas P.

English

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

ESSAY REVIEWFrom Slavery to "Freedom":A Review EssayTobacco and Slaves: The Development oj Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake,1680-1800. By ALLAN KULIKOFF. (Chapel Hill and London: Uni-versity of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early AmericanHistory and Culture, 1986. xviii, 449p. Maps, figures, tables, index.$30.00.)Forging Freedom: The Formation oj Philadelphia's Black Community\ 1720-1840. By GARY B. NASH. (Cambridge, MA and London: HarvardUniversity Press, 1988. xii, 354p. Illustrations, maps, index. $28.95.)Not a single literary fragment survives today that was written by a personof African ancestry in either Philadelphia or Prince Georges County, Mary-land, prior to the American Revolution. Reconstructing the black experiencein those two places from the ink and paper remains of wealthy white menis, therefore, a creative act commanding the skills of archaeologist, culturalanthropologist, historical demographer, and, perhaps most importantly, nov-elist. Discovering what "really" happened, in the quantifier's sense, is aprodigious task; communicating an understanding of how the principalsexperienced that "reality" is an awesome endeavor demanding a separateset of talents and skills.In the 1970s, Eugene Genovese and the late Herbert Gutman establishedframeworks for social historians of the Afro-American past who would faceanew such problems of evidence and interpretation.1 They suggested thatthe same approach could, and should, be used to study the black experiencein slavery and freedom; they insisted that people impoverished and oppressedby an unconscionable labor system and a legacy of racial bigotry were notjust victims, but played decisive roles in their own lives and in the creation1 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974);and Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York,1976).T H E PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHYVol. CXIII, No. 1 (January 1989)90 ESSAY REVIEW Januaryof an autonomous culture; and they advised framing studies of Afro-Amer-ican history over long sweeps of time to minimize gaps in the historicalrecord and to discern better the relationships among continuities and subtlechanges that cumulatively reflected black consciousness across generations.Both of the books reviewed here are profoundly influenced by the theoreticalreconceptualization of Afro-American history in the 1970s; both share inthe accomplishment of the goals set by recent theoretical innovators in thefield.Allan Kulikoff is a committed quantifier. Indeed, it is difficult to imaginethat there is much left to count in the records of Prince Georges Countythat bears in even a remote way on his subject—although his samplescertainly could be expanded and multiplied, and the data could be manip-ulated in a variety of ways to reach strikingly different conclusions.2 Whetherwe need, for example, nine pages of data (pp. 54-63) and seven charts tosustain the contention that "the rate of household formation declined duringthe eighteenth century . . . because the supply of inexpensive land di-minished"—a point long known and uncontested by historians of othereighteenth-century colonies—is a question of judgment and balance, butclearly Kulikoff's book stands as an abridged encyclopedia of demographicinformation about the peoples—black and white—of Prince GeorgesCounty, c.1680-1780.Tobacco and Slaves is essentially a work of creative synthesis, which "ex-tends" (p. 14) the existing literature on the social history of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake into the next century, filters it through a historicalmaterialist prism that grants demography and economy a "privileged role"(p. 16) in causation and change, and generalizes from KulikofPs researchin one county, and that of other researchers and model-builders for thesame and other counties, to the eighteenth-century Chesapeake as a whole.The scholarship of Lois Carr, Paul Clemens, Rhys Isaac, Gloria Main,Russell Menard, and Lorena Walsh provides some of the research bricksand most of the theoretical mortar with which KulikofPs edifice is built.32 See, for example, Jean Butenhoff Lee, "The Social Order of a Revolutionary People:Charles County, Maryland, 1733-1786" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1984); Lee,"The Problem of Slave Community in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake," William andMary Quarterly 43 (1986), 333-61; and Anita H. Rutman, "Still Planting the Seeds ofHope: The Recent Literature of the Early Chesapeake Region," Virginia Magazine of Historyand Biography 95 (1987), 3-24.3 Paul G.E. Clemens, The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern Shore: FromTobacco to Grain (Ithaca, 1980); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790(Chapel Hill, 1982); Gloria L. Main, Tobacco Colony: Life in Early Maryland, 1650-17201989 ESSAY REVIEW 91This is not to say that the book is only derivative. Indeed, KulikofPscharacterization of social relations and change is not compatible with mostof the best recent work on the eighteenth-century Chesapeake. It is not atall clear that his findings for Prince Georges County apply across the boardto the Chesapeake places and peoples written about by Richard Beeman,Timothy Breen, Jean Lee, Edmund Morgan, and Anita Rutman and DarrettRutman.4 In any event, we should probably take seriously KulikofPs warningthat many or most of his findings should be seen as "tentative" (p. 14),especially, but not exclusively, as he seeks to apply them outside PrinceGeorges County. And the book's title is not to be taken literally; it reallyis not about "culture" at all, adds only detail to existing understandings ofthe tobacco trade, and has a research base that really ends about twentyyears earlier than the title suggests. Indeed, if the story really was carriedthrough the Revolution to 1800, free blacks might be expected to receivemore than cursory treatment in an epilogue.The half-century before the Revolution is the central focus of the book;and its argument is that "the kind of familial, class, and race relations foundin the antebellum South first developed in the Chesapeake region between1720 and 1770" (p. 14). For blacks, virtually all of whom were slavesbetween 1700 and 1775, Kulikoff discerns a three-stage process of change,beginning with a period of "deterioration" between 1660 and 1690, whichwas marked by stringent racial laws, rapid growth in the black population,and direct importation of slaves from Africa. This was followed, c.1690-1740, by an era of heavy slave imports, which in turn disrupted life withinthe black community and resulted in heightened social conflict among blacks.(Princeton, 1982), Russell R Menard, "Population, Economy, and Society in SeventeenthCentury Maryland," Maryland Historical Magazine 79 (1984), 71 92, Lois G Carr andRussell R Menard, "Immigration and Opportunity The Freedman in Early ColonialMaryland," in Thad W Tate and David L Ammerman, eds , The Chesapeake in theSeventeenth Century Essays on Anglo American Society (Chapel Hill, 1979), 206-42, Menard,"The Tobacco Industry in the Chesapeake Colonies, 1617 1730 An Interpretation," Researchin Economic History 5 (1980), 109-77, Menard, "Immigrants and Their Increase TheProcess of Population Growth in Early Colonial Maryland," in Aubrey C Land, et al,eds, Law, Society, and Politics in Early Maryland (Baltimore, 1977), 88 110, Lois G Carrand Lorena S Walsh, "The Planter's Wife The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth Century Maryland," William and Mary Quarterly 34 (1977), 542 714 Richard R. Beeman, Cavaliers and Frontiersmen The Cultural Development oj LunenburgCounty, Virginia, 1746 1832 (Philadelphia, 1984), Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H Rutman,A Place in Time Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (New York, 1984), Edmund SMorgan, American Slavery, American Freedom The Ordeal oj Colonial Virginia (New York,1975), Timothy H Breen, Tobacco Culture The Mentality oj the Great Tidewater Planters onthe Eve oj Revolution (Princeton, 1985)92 ESSAY REVIEW JanuaryFrom about 1740 to 1790 importation of slaves declined, and the lives ofblacks improved materially.According to Kulikoff, the harshness of slavery was mitigated for slavesby the patriarchal values of their masters, improved gender ratios, the creationof an Afro-Chesapeake culture that included synthesis of African and evan-gelical religions, establishment of comparatively stable family relations, andenhanced black autonomy on increasingly large plantations. Unfortunately,his sources furnish Kulikoff little insight into the values, beliefs, and emo-tional perceptions of the slaves he studies. Even runaway advertisements,of which almost half offer clues to the motives for escape, really attest tothe master's, rather than the slave's, perception of why someone would runthe risks of fugitive status. Perhaps the steady increase in escape attemptsafter 1745, simultaneous with what Kulikoff identifies as improving con-ditions for the enslaved, provides the best testament to the mental worldof Prince Georges County blacks. Such lust for freedom despite the realand imagined tribulations of running away; the prospect of abandoningconjugal relations, kin, and life-long friends; and the very real limitationsof "freedom" in the North—all conform nicely with Gary Nash's depictionof Afro-American mentality in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuryPhiladelphia, and contribute to the establishment of a historical context forthe Afro-Philadelphian culture studied by Nash.The central plot-line of Nash's story—from slavery to freedom to op-pressive racism over a period of about 100 years—is well known for theNorth in general and for Pennsylvania in particular, but not specificallyand in detail for Philadelphia. This oversight is striking because of theuniversally acknowledged centrality of Philadelphians to the larger stories,but it is brilliantly rectified in Forging Freedom. Not only does Nash con-tribute an essential chapter in the chronicle of Afro-American life, but hecasts the tale in ways that provide innovative twists on and novel insightsinto previous portrayals of the black quest for freedom in North America.Undeterred by the fact that "not a single document remains to informus how Philadelphia's slaves and free blacks might have viewed their worldas the colonial era drew to a close" (p. 36), Nash makes black consciousnessa central focus of the book. He utilizes records generated by criminal courts,census-takers, tax collectors, ministers, overseers of poor relief, newspapereditors, and philanthropists to reconstruct not only the collective demo-graphic and economic realities of black life, but to compose plausible accountsof how individuals comprehended their experiences. Nash's creative artistryin breathing life into shadowy figures so long buried beneath historiographicaleulogies to a handful of white Philadelphians—Franklin, Paine, Peale,Rush, Wilson—is awesome.Among the writers of the past two centuries whose work on northern1989 ESSAY REVIEW 93blacks has led them to postulate group consciousness, Nash's contributionis distinctive not just for its artistry and detail about Philadelphia. It carriesa line of interpretation to an extreme unmatched in any previous accountpublished during the eighteenth century or since. Where others—includingeighteenth-century officers of abolition societies, late nineteenth-centuryblack writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, and more recent historians includingEdward Turner and Leon Litwack—have been reserved or even negativeabout the mixed meanings of "freedom" for blacks during the Revolutionaryera, Nash is optimistic to a fault.5 Where others have tended to see the cupof liberty for northern blacks in the late eighteenth century as half empty,Nash always finds it half full. No doubt this tendency reveals somethingabout the comparative personalities of the authors in question and a thingor two about the politics of writing about race at the various times eachinterpretation was generated. More important, though, is the way it atteststo Nash's heroic attempt to transcend anachronisms and appreciate theexperience of emancipation on the terms of those who lived through it.The bottom line to Nash is that in the face of severe limitations onfreedom—poverty, discrimination, thwarted opportunities for self-realiza-tion—not a single soul ever asked to be re-enslaved. However constrictedthe achievements of Revolutionary-era emancipation may appear to us froma historical perspective that comprehends the resurgent racism of the nine-teenth century, the horror of black poverty in the twentieth century, andthe fitful progress made since the 1950s, those are not contexts within whichblack Philadelphians perceived their world. The only truly meaningfulcontext for them was the immediate past of their lives as slaves. And torecently emancipated Philadelphians, according to Nash, freedom was un-equivocally a blessing, undisguised and unmitigated by the very real limi-tations and problems of freedom.There are other clues, neither ignored nor dismissed lightly by Nash,that the transition to freedom caused severe emotional distress for some,but it is unclear how many. Rising numbers of suicides, a strong tendencyto re-indenture oneself (and one's children!) for extended terms, and thenecessity for many to solicit poor relief at least part of the time—all implyconditions in which it must have been difficult to appreciate freedom, atleast every day. As Nash rightly observes, the custom of indenturing blackchildren until age twenty-eight in most cases could be, and by implication5 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; rpt. ed., New York,1967); Edward R. Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania: Slavery-Servitude-Freedom 1639-1861(Washington, 1911); Leon F. Litwack, North oj Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961).94 ESSAY REVIEW Januarycould have been, viewed as tantamount to re-enslavement for a significantminority of "free" blacks. According to Nash, "if George Bryan, the leaderof the wartime movement to legislate slavery out of existence, was correctin believing that only one in three black children survived to the age oftwenty-eight, then this was primarily a system of providing cheap labor forwhite masters rather than a means for training youths for citizenship" (p.77). If Nash is correct that many blacks "leaped the boundary separatingslavery from freedom and never looked back," it is also clear, as he tellsus, that "others . . . had to bide their time" (p. 78). Perhaps Nash is rightto question whether the Pennsylvania Abolition Society exaggerated howmany blacks were "governed by fear" (p. 115) in the late eighteenth century,but fear, insecurity, and at least episodic depression are not unwarrantedreactions to the conditions that Nash describes. Perhaps Nash projects hisown values and optimism onto the hypothetical ragman, "who made dailydecisions with existential meaning that we can only guess at—which streetsto walk, when to set out, when to quit work. Though he had to endurepoverty, the ragman did not have to withstand the insulting comments ofa boss, maintain a schedule set by somebody else, and face layoffs duringan economic downturn" (p. 153). Maybe. I certainly hope the ragman sawhis life that way; but if he did, the ragman shared an ethic—about absenceof bosses and layoffs, and setting your own schedule in trade for a lowerstandard of living—that may be more common among late twentieth-centuryacademics than working-class people of the eighteenth century.There can be no doubt, however, about the optimism reflected in theaccomplishments of black Philadelphians in the decades following the Rev-olution—including the establishment of churches and other institutions, thestrides in self-education, and the growth of a black middle-class community.There is no more comprehensive and readable account of this process ofaccomplishment in print; nor, in light of the limitations imposed by thesurviving documentary record, is it likely that a better one is on the horizon.The decision to take the story through two transitions—out of slavery andthen into the racial conflict of the antebellum era—was a wise one, whichnecessarily supersedes any attempt to delineate the lives of black Philadel-phians in slavery and freedom—in the colonial and early national eras—as separate episodes rather than as part of a continuous historical process.The portrayal of black Philadelphians as people of competence and im-pressive achievement reflects not only the reality of their history, but helpscorrect tendencies to see oppressed peoples exclusively as victims. Likewise,the presentation of black history as an integral part of the other "histories"of America, which incorporates analyses of politics, culture, race, gender,and social structure, makes this a model book by one of our most talentedand accomplished historians of early America.Rutgers University THOMAS P. SLAUGHTER

From Slavery to "Freedom": A Review Essay

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From Slavery to "Freedom": A Review Essay

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Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography