From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (review)

The history of early American slavery sometimes seems long on generalization and short on personality. As Walsh argues, this literature seldom has much to say about the individuals who actually became slaves. That their lives are usually incorporated into aggregate statistical measures is not hard to discern. Intractable plantation ledgers discourage reconstruction of the kind of detailed stories for African-American slaves that we take for granted for white masters. To compensate for the absence of traditional biographical sources, scholars working in this field do the best they can, drawing on extremely fragmentary evidence to describe how typical slaves might have given meaning to their experiences in the New World. However well done, imaginative recreations of this sort cannot tell us much about African-Americans on a particular plantation or in a small neighborhood. At best, they provide generic interpretations of slave culture.

Walsh insists that historians of early American slavery can do better. She recognizes that we shall never know much about specific African-Americans, people who often left no more than a given name on a plantation document. By the same token, we need not settle for broad generalizations that ignore the context of local experience. Walsh believes that the solution to these problems can be found in what she labels “multigenerational group histories.” Instead of focusing on the lives of individual slaves, we should trace the evolution of clearly defined communities of African-Americans who co-existed for long periods, forming dense networks of kin and forging a shared sense of identity. According to Walsh, her methodology offers all historians of slavery “a promising middle ground between the general and impersonal and the rare and probably atypical individual” (226). What makes this approach appealing is its use of familiar sources—deeds and wills, marriage settlements, and records of the sale of slaves. Individuals dropped out of such narratives, but as Walsh contends, the group endured, creating its own memories and expectations and striving to maintain itself through adversity.

As one would expect, “multigenerational group histories” yield the best results in situations where the character of the local slave community was fairly stable over time. Such was the experience of the African-Americans owned by the Burwell family. Walsh concentrates specifically on the blacks who made up the labor force at Carter’s Grove, a large eighteenth-century tobacco plantation located about ten miles from Williamsburg. With remarkable patience, Walsh pieces together the story of the slaves whose lives were intimately bound up with various Burwells, a chronicle that begins in the 1650s and runs through the early years of the nineteenth century. Robert “King” Carter purchased most of the Burwell group from African traders before 1730. Within several decades these people had formed families, learned to survive, and constructed a meaningful African-American culture.

Walsh admits that nothing she found at Carter’s Grove challenges standard accounts of African-American history in the Chesapeake colonies. She complements, rather than revises, an accepted framework. Moreover, Walsh’s bold claims for a multigenerational group analysis seem unfulfilled. Even in her imaginative hands, the sources sometimes refuse to sustain her project, and she is forced repeatedly to adopt a language of honest equivocation—“probably,” “likely,” “surely,” “possibly,” and “may.” But about one point Walsh leaves no doubt: African-Americans at Carter’s Grove hated slavery. A thread running through the entire history of the Burwell group is a longing for freedom.