Slavery in Antebellum Georgia

If you are a graduate student just starting out on a research topic that includes gender, slavery, or Georgia, then this book can be highly recommended. If you are not an academic but you would like to know more about how enslaved people lived their lives in two different parts of Georgia, then this book is also for you. However, if you are a practicing academic, familiar with the vast literature on enslaved women, on slavery more generally, or with the history of antebellum Georgia, you risk coming away from this book feeling that you have not learned a vast amount that is new about any of those subjects.

Daina Ramey Berry sets out to shed new light on the importance of gender on slave plantations in two distinct parts of Georgia: Glynn County on the coast, dominated by large rice and sea-island cotton-producing plantations; and Wilkes County west of Augusta, characterized by smaller cotton-growing plantations. On the face of it these choices seem perfectly adequate. Two counties in different parts of the state provide sufficient contrast for the author to make some interesting comparisons, while also being manageable in research terms. Yet by sticking fairly rigidly to her two counties, Ramey sometimes overlooks or ignores data from neighboring regions that might have been relevant to her discussions. Some interesting comparisons with elsewhere in Georgia, or the rest of the South, that are tucked away in the endnotes might fruitfully have been included in the main text. The decision to focus on gender immediately interested me since gender has hardly been absent from the historiography of slavery for the past thirty years. In 2004 alone three great monographs on the subject appeared: Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004), Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004), and Emily West’s Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (2004). Vast numbers of specialized books, articles, chapters in books, as well as broader studies that included significant analysis of gender among slaves, have been published and continue to be published—Rebecca J. Fraser’s Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina (2007) is just one example that immediately springs to mind. Is there really more to say about this topic that has not already been said? The answer turns out to be a very cautious rather than an overwhelming “yes.”

Throughout this book Ramey has a tendency to make sweeping statements about the existing state of the historiography that does not square with my own understanding of the field. For example, Ramey claims that “much historical writing on slavery” accepts that household work was skilled while field labor was unskilled (p. 2). Yet reading works by William Dusinberre, Mart Stewart or most recently S. Max Edelson, as well as any work on the technical demands of rice culture, would tend to confirm the impression that field labor was highly skilled, and that planters greatly prized workers who had mastered these skills. Ramey is in broad agreement with these other scholars but does not situate her work as explicitly as she might in the context of a wider historiography. To suggest that slaveholders used their slaves in the most suitable location according to their perceived skills and experience is not to say anything particularly new (p. 16). Slaveholders were, generally, rational men seeking to make the most money possible out of their human property. Factors such as gender and age were always of secondary concern to the issue of ability. Ramey claims that her work is giving a new recognition to the skills and importance of female slaves among the workforce. Yet it seems to me that Betty Wood’s Women’s Work, Men’s Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia, 1750– 1830 (1995) did pretty much the same thing. If there is a...