The Slave Community - Revised Edition

Revised Edition

After the 1976 Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History meeting and the publication of Revisiting Blassingame's The Slave Community in 1978, Blassingame produced a revised and enlarged edition of The Slave Community in 1979. In the new preface, Blassingame asserted that the book had to be revised because of George Bentley, an enslaved, pro-slavery Primitive Baptist minister from Tennessee who pastored a white church in the 1850s. Blassingame wanted to "solve the myriad dilemmas posed by George Bentley", but he also wanted to answer the questions, challenges, and critiques raised by scholars since the publication of The Slave Community.

Blassingame explains that he incorporated the suggestions published in Revisiting Blassingame's The Slave Community "without long protestation or argument". The most significant changes made to the text involve further discussion of African cultural survivals, slave family life, slave culture, and acculturation. Blassingame added a chapter titled "The Americanization of the Slave and the Africanization of the South" where he draws parallels between the acculturation of African American slaves in the American South, African slaves in Latin America, and European slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. He compares the conversion of slaves in the southern states to Protestant Christianity, European slaves in North Africa to Islam, and African slaves in Latin America to Catholicism.

Blassingame addresses the historiography of slavery published between 1972 and 1978 in the revised edition. For instance, he challenges Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's economic and statistical study of slavery in Time on the Cross. Blassingame writes:

Contemporaries often have a greater appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of statistics than do the scholars who utilize them decades after they are compiled. 'Numbers' and 'accuracy' are not two interchangeable words: Statistical truths are no more self-evident than literary ones. In fact, statistical analyses rely so heavily on inferences that one must carefully examine the data bases to evaluate the conclusions based on them. Whether compiled by planters, doctors, clergymen, army officers, or census takers, statistics on slavery mean little until combined with literary material. The dry bones of historical analysis, statistics acquire life when filtered through the accounts left by eyewitnesses.

Reviewing the revised edition in the Journal of Southern History, Gary B. Mills suggests, "All controversy and revision aside, The Slave Community remains a significant book, and the author's position that the bulk of both slaves and slaveowners lay between the stereotyped extremes proves durable. Their exact location on a scale of one to ten will always remain a matter of opinion."