Use and Misuse of the Slave Community Paradigm

Useand Misuse of the Slave Con1munity Paradigm JohnBoles.Black Southerners, 1619-1869. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1981244+ xiipp. Walter J. Fraser,Jr., and Winfred B. Moore, Jr., eds.TheSouthern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class. andFolk Culture. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.240 + vi pp. Philip Foner.Risto,:\' o_lBlack Americans. Volume II: From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.656 +viiipp. Philip Foner.Histo1y of Black Americans. Volume III: From the Compromise of 1850to the Endof the Civil War.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.539 + viiipp. ~11chael Wayne. The Reshaping of Plantation Sociezv: The Natchez District, 1860-1880. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.226 + xii pp. PaulLachance Theconcept of the slave community underlies a fundamental reorientation ofthe history of slavery in the United States South. Attention has shifted fromthe impact of slavery on blacks to their response to enslavement, and fromthe master-slave relation to the relationships among slaves themselves. Howevermany blacks may have played the role of Sambo in the presence of whites,American slaves are now often said to have led an autonomous cultural andfamily life among their own kind. 1 This new perspective is not universally accepted. Peter Kolchin has convincingly argued that American slaves faced conditions much less propitiousto communal behavior than did Russian serfs and Caribbean slaves.2 ElizabethFox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese criticize the notion of cultural autonomy for going too far in its correction of the view of slaves as victims andfor failing to address the essential question of the mutual influence of mastersand slaves on each other. 3 Nevertheless, in a recent paper presenting theslave community as the dominant "paradigm" of black studies, August Meierand Elliott Rudwick cite no evidence that this notion is about to give wayto another perspective. 4 The works reviewed here provide a vantage point on the paradigm's sway inthe historical profession. John Boles and Philip Foner offer overviews of the black experience under slavery and in the years immediately following emancipation, revealing how the concept of the slave community has filtered Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1986,449-458 450 PaulLachance from monograph to general synthesis. Michael Wayne's study of the transition from slavery to freedom in the Natchez district allows for inquiry into whether or not black behavior during Reconstruction reflects the prior existenceof slave communities-a question that Wayne does not ask in so many words, but to which his book suggests an answer. The Southern Enigma isa collection of short essays on three facets of the South in the nineteenth century: race, class and folklore. It provides an impression of the extent to which the slave community has become a theme in recent southern, as distinguished from black, history. In Black Southerners, John Boles sets as his goal to recount the "total Black experience" (p. ix) from Africa through Reconstruction. As the title implies, he claims that blacks have as much right to be called "southerners'' as whites, not only because in the years covered in the volume the vast majority lived in the South where they constituted a sizable proportion of the population. but also because they had a distinctive culture comparable to that of the whites. This culture is presented as the autonomous expression of communities created by the slaves. The emergence of slave communities is related to changes in slavery over time. Prior to 1720, Boles argues, blacks were too few, too dispersed insmall numbers on isolated plantations, too disproportionately male, too exposed to high mortality, and too intermingled with white indentured servants to form separate communities. The "comparatively benign racial relationship" (p. 16) of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, he conjectures, facilitated the Europeanization of Africans. Development of an Afro-American culture was not yet possible. The eighteenth century, however, "revolutionized" race relations, leading to the formation of what Boles calls "proto-communities" (p. 39). As slave populations grew and the proportion of blacks to whites increased, the latter reacted by erecting rigid caste barriers that set blacks apart from white workers. Meanwhile, obstacles to the emergence of a sense of community among slaves-geographical dispersion and sexual...