Slavery

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Chapter 16

• Slavery

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How do you feel?

• Compose a short paragraph about your worse day in
  your life.
• How did you feel?
• What caused it?
• How did you get over it?
• Was it totally in your control?

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Think, Share, Pair

• Share your thoughts with a classmate next to you.
  
• Did you notice any similarities?

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Compare yourself with others
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Do they have it all?

• How do you feel not being like them?
• Do they have it all?
• Do they really have it all?

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Now how do you feel?
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What do we know?

• Now lets turn to what we know about what has
  been termed the peculiar institution.

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Slavery Historiography
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What do Historians do?
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Historiography

• Definition a body of historical literature.
• Historiography is the history of history

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Slavery historiography

• Today we are going to look at schools of thought
  about the institution of slavery.

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The first big question that historians of slavery
asked...

• Was slavery profitable? And if it was not then
  why did it persist for so long? Why fight a war
  over it?

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In 1908, U.B. Phillips published American Negro
SlaverySurvey of the Supply, Employment, and
Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the
Plantation Regime

• This book argued that slavery was an unprofitable
  system for slave owners, but worked as a
  civilizing force on African Americans.
• Phillips argued that slavery was maintained for
  racial and cultural reasons not self interest
  (i.e. profit).

Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
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Social Shifts

• The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of
  Education (1954) and at the beginning of the
  American Civil Rights Movement affected
  historians views on slavery.
• In 1956, Kenneth Stampp published The Peculiar
  Institution Slavery in the Ante- bellum South

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• Kenneth Stampp countered Phillips, arguing that
  slavery was not paternalistic (for the slaves own
  good), but a practical system of controlling and
  exploiting labor.
• Where Phillips had seen slavery as mild but
  inefficient, Stampp saw it as harsh but
  profitable.

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Soon after Stampp, Stanley Elkins published
Slavery A Problem in American Institutional and
Intellectual Life (1959)

• He was the first historian to look at the
  psychological impact of slavery rather than
  economics.
• Elkins compared the experience of Jews in Nazi
  concentration camps to the shock and brutality of
  slavery.

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• This comparison led Elkins to argue that the
  system of slavery had infantilalized slaves,
  making them sambos- reduced by brutality to a
  dependent, child-like status
• Although widely disproved now, this was a
  groundbreaking book for both its use of a
  comparative approach and use of psychohistory.
  
• Elkins was also important for bringing the issue
  of slave culture to the fore.

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• Elkins caused a generation of slave scholars to
  respond to the Sambo thesis by showing that
  slaves created culture among themselves. This
  slave community school examined the many roles
  that slaves played in creating their own distinct
  culture from whites.One of the most famous
  books on the slave community is Eugeune
  Genoveses Roll, Jordan, Roll The World the
  Slaves Made (1976).

Genovese
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• Genoveses interpretation argued that slavery was
  not for civilization or even for profit, but it
  was a way of life for southerners.
• Genovese saw that slaves had their own culture,
  which was independent from white culture. He
  showed that slaves were influential within the
  slave system.
• Part of this slave culture was slaves using
  passive resistance to attempt to control their
  lives.

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• Peter Kolchins Unfree Labor American Slavery
  and Russian Serfdom, written in 1987, signaled
  the end of the slave community school. Kolchin
  compared Russian serfs to American slaves and
  found that slaves were considered as both income
  and people needing care.
• The proximity of slaves to the master limited
  slaves freedoms and prevented them from
  developing a sense of belonging to a larger
  community.

Peter Kolchin
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• In the 1980s, as womens history gained
  recognition and influence, scholars begin to
  examine the slave experience for women.
• Deborah Gray Whites, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female
  Slaves in the Plantation South, published in
  1985, argues that slavery was very different for
  enslaved women than for men.

Deborah Gray White
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• Recently, studies in identity formation how
  people learn who they are - have scholars to
  consider how slaves identified themselves.
• Michael Gomez in Exchanging Our Country Marks
  The Transformation of African Identities in the
  Colonial and Antebellum South (1998), considers
  slave identity from the individual perspective of
  African Americans.
• Gomez argues that Africans who were brought to
  America as slaves retained their African ethnic
  identity, eventually merging it with white
  beliefs. Thus, Africans did lose all of their
  cultural identity when they were forced into
  slavery.

Michael Gomez
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• Since the breakdown of the slave community
  scholarship, the study of slavery has gone in
  many directions. Now scholars are breaking down
  the idea of a hegemonic (single dominant system)
  of slavery. Instead tracing out the origins of
  slavery, historians are now looking at how it was
  shaped differently in different regions.

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• In his most recent book Many Thousands Gone
  (2000), Ira Berlin examines how American slavery
  varied across time and space. Berlin examines of
  how slavery and slave culture evolved in three
  chronological eras in four distinct geographical
  regions.

Ira Berlin
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• Each new development in history (studying women
  for example) affects how historians view the
  past. As each generation of scholars learns more
  and creates new arguments based on their
  research, so the whole of history moves forward.