Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia

Introduction

1 Introduction This book presents a view of antebellum North American slavery as experienced by the slaves themselves. Although it focuses on the state of Virginia, I believe most of its conclusions are suggestive for nearly all of the “Middle South” and for most of the “Deep South.”1 The book discusses how far slaves’ experiences varied depending on whether they had a “good” master or not; whether they lived in a city or not; and whether they were members of a privileged “third caste” or not. It attempts to define the nature and the extent of the slaves’ oppression, and to convey what that oppression meant to the lives of individual people. It assesses bondpeoples’ responses to their oppression—the nature of the slaves’ dissidence, the character of their religion, the effect of slavery upon their family lives, and the means by which some bondpeople sought to develop their individual talents. At the heart of the present book lies the question, What was the balance between the master’s power and the agency of the slaves?2 Modern writers, when dealing with this question of the slaves’ “agency,” have sharply reversed direction. They once treated slaves as the nearly defenseless victims of an oppressive system, but bondpeople later came to be seen as heroically resisting the constraints of a system that offered surprisingly many ways for the oppressed to create for themselves rich and vibrant lives. More recently, a compromise has emerged between these two approaches . But we still need a comprehensive assessment of where the balance lay between oppression and self-determination. One difficulty arises from the sources used by each school of historians. Those stressing oppression (e.g., Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution) have depended largely on plantation records 2 strategies for survival kept by white people, and on accounts published by white travelers— sources that offer only limited insight into the ways slaves responded to their oppression.3 Historians stressing the slaves’ self-determination (e.g., John Blassingame, The Slave Community) have sometimes relied substantially on memoirs published before 1861 by fugitive slaves—a heroic but unrepresentative group of former bondpeople who often wrote with abolitionist purpose.4 Other historians (e.g., Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll) have depended heavily on interviews conducted in the 1930s by mainly white interviewers with aged black survivors. The racial “etiquette ” of the time probably impelled many of these interviewees to dissemble . They flattered their white interlocutors that masters had often been kindly, and the slaves happy. This tendency aided the perpetuation of the view that American slavery was an essentially paternalist system.5 Reliance on interviews conducted by black interviewers might help to modify this view. In Virginia there has been preserved an extraordinarily rich set of interviews conducted by black Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewers , in 1937.6 Elsewhere in the South the great majority of the WPA interviewers were white. But nearly all of the 159 Virginia interviews were conducted by black people.7 The Virginia interviewees appear to have spoken much more frankly than they would have done to white interviewers. Their interviews can be supplemented by a variety of other sources. These include the testimony of eighteen Virginia slaves who escaped to Canada and were interviewed there by a sympathetic white interviewer in 1855.8 Several former Virginia slaves were interviewed in the years immediately after the Civil War; and a handful of former Virginia slaves published accounts of their bondage. By relying on these sources and others, one may be able to apprehend the slaves’ experience of bondage more successfully in Virginia than in any other state. To focus on Virginia may nevertheless seem a doubtful strategy. The principal cash crops in Virginia were tobacco and wheat, not the cotton that dominated the Deep South. It must indeed be acknowledged that Virginia’s system of slavery was marked by distinctive features. Slave plantations had been longer established in Virginia than elsewhere, and malaria did not drive rich Virginia planters away from their homes for six months each year (as it did Low Country South Carolina planters). Consequently, a regime developed that should have been more paternal- Introduction 3 ist than anywhere else in America. The relative proximity of free states (in contrast, say, to the situation in Mississippi) made the possibility of a slave’s escaping permanently to the North substantially greater than in the Deep South; and anxiety not to goad...