Complexity, Change, and the Historiography of the Old South

While these two volumes differ in nature, they both reinforce the growing emphasis on complexity in the historiography of the Old South. Along with much other scholarship in recent decades, they challenge the view, whether in antebellum proslavery treatises or twentieth-century history, of the Old South as a stable, monolithically proslavery, agrarian order. Both at the level of ideas and politics in Ford's extended monograph, or in the ground-level conflicts highlighted by Schweninger's edition of court documents, readers will catch a view of a slave South that was far from simple or unchanging. Both books also center around Southerners speaking to other Southerners, which imposes some limits—especially on Ford's analysis—but has the virtue of stripping away the polemical glosses in which defenders of the slave South wrapped their message to the outside world.

The 180 petitions in Schweninger's edition (out of more than 14,500 gathered for the larger project, on microfilm) were the product of a wide array of types of cases, and thus they touch on slavery in a variety of ways. But the petitioners are all bent not on bolstering an external defense of slavery, but rather on winning their respective cases. This lends weight to Schweninger's argument that these documents not only "provide direct, firsthand accounts about specific events," but do so "with remarkable candor" not exceeded by any other kind of source (pp. 3-4). Because the slaveholding petitioners spoke so directly and unequivocally in cases concerning the property value of their slaves, "the petitions reveal, in stark and graphic ways, what it meant for the slave-owning class to possess people as property" (p. 12). These sources thus confirm the growing historiographical emphasis on the aspects of American slavery that treated African Americans primarily as fungible assets. And those masters whose petitions spoke frankly of freedom as the ultimate reward for faithful slaves, and otherwise expressed qualms as to the justice of slavery (see, for example, pp. 98 and 134), bolster the interpretations of scholars—including Ford—who dwell on Southern whites' tortured ambivalence about Southern bondage rather than on the unyielding logic of "positive-good" theoreticians.

But the parts of Schweninger's introduction emphasizing the variegated within Southern slave society are themselves in tension with other interpretations he advances and, to my mind, with some of the documents themselves. The petitions for divorce from white slaveholding women, he argues, "reveal the harsh realities of plantation life, providing details" of tyrannical husbands and masters, details often "excluded from diaries, letters, recollections, and many other sources." The world they "reveal" to the courts is one of "adultery, interracial sex, alcoholism, violence, brutality, abandonment, incest, and insanity" far in excess of non-slaveholding societies (p. 6; see also 27-28). On the strength of these and other types of petitions, Schweninger also dismisses the work of "some historians" who have portrayed the master-slave relationship as one involving negotiation and compromise. "Petitions," he states directly, "provide very little evidence that such was the case" and much evidence of "the savage nature of human bondage" (p. 9). And if the petitions depict masters as brutal despots, they depict slaves as engaged in "a constant struggle" for their freedom (p. 10). The documents following the editor's introduction give the reader no reason to question this characterization of the frightful world they reveal.

The question is how representative the documents are. The fact that these are legal documents would seem to mean that they would represent, by their very nature, the extremes of both masters and slaves. The less brutal slave drivers among the whites, and the less committed freedom fighters among the blacks, would be exponentially less likely to...