The Slave Community - Historiographic Background

Historiographic Background

Before 1972, the history of slavery in the United States largely ignored the testimony of the enslaved. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips wrote the first major historical study of the 20th century dealing with slavery. In American Negro Slavery (1918), Phillips refers to slaves as "negroes, who for the most part were by racial quality submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited paternalism rather than repression." American Negro Slavery is infused with racial rhetoric and upholds perceptions about the inferiority of black people common in the southern United States at the time. Although African American academics such as W. E. B. Du Bois criticized Phillips's depiction of slaves, the book was considered the authoritative text on slavery in America until the 1950s.

Phillips's interpretation of slavery was challenged by Kenneth M. Stampp in The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956) and Stanley M. Elkins in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1958). Stampp's study lacks the racist interpretation found in American Negro Slavery and approaches the issue from the position that there is no innate difference between blacks and whites. He questions the reality of plantation paternalism described by Phillips: "the reality of ante-bellum paternalism ... needs to be separated from its fanciful surroundings and critically analyzed." Elkins also dismisses Phillips's claim that African American slaves were innately submissive "Sambos". He argues that slaves had instead been infantilized, or "made" into Sambos, by the brutal treatment received at the hands of slaveowners and overseers. Elkins compares the process to the infantilization of Jews in Nazi concentration camps.

Like Phillips, Stampp and Elkins relied on plantation records and the writings of slaveowners as their main primary sources. Stampp admits that "few ask what the slaves themselves thought of bondage." Historians dismissed the written works of slaves such as the 19th century fugitive slave narratives as unreliable and biased because of their editing by abolitionists. Scholars also ignored the 2,300 interviews conducted with former slaves in the late 1930s by the WPA Federal Writers' Project. As historian George P. Rawick points out, more weight was often given to white sources: the "masters not only ruled the past in fact" but also "rule its written history."

The 1970s, however, witnessed the publication of revisionist studies that departed from the traditional historiography of slavery. Focusing on the perspective of the slave, new studies incorporated the slave narratives and WPA interviews: George Rawick's From Sunup to Sundown: The Making of the Black Community (1972), Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (1974), Leslie Howard Owens's This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (1976), Herbert G. Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976), and Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977). One of the more controversial of these studies was John W. Blassingame's The Slave Community.