The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante Bellum South (review)

176CIVIL WAR HISTORY most of the portions of Africa which were involved in the slave trade, suggests that the trade was a by-product—but not a cause—of warfare among African peoples. Indeed one of the striking things about the book is the way in which it demonstrates how warfare among both European nations and African societies affected the slave trade. For historians of United States slavery one of the points of greatest interest will be Curtin's observation of a fact which should be all too obvious, but is usually ignored—that this country "was only a marginal recipient of slaves from Africa" with less than five per cent of the slaves, according to Curtin's estimates, being sent to areas within the present boundaries of the United States. This observation takes on added significance in view of the fact that the United States in 1950 had about one third of the total Afro-American population in the New World, while the Caribbean Islands which absorbed over 40 per cent of the slave imports, by the mid-twentieth century had only 20 per cent of the Afro-American population in the Americas. As Curtin notes, "At the end of the slave trade to St. Domingue in 1791, the slave input was more than twice that of the United States yet the surviving slave population was only 480,000, compared with a United States slave population of about 4.5 million in 1861." The implications of this kind of demographic analysis for the study of comparative slavery and race relations in the New World are obvious. Curtin's book is by no means the final word on its subject. Although the few studies which have appeared since his book was published modify his data in certain details, they do not disturb the thrust of his interpretation. Yet far more research remains to be done along the lines of his inquiry. On the other hand, in its conclusions and methodology, and in the kinds of questions it asks, this work will have a major impact on the direction of future historical study of epidemiology, of Africa, and of slave societies and race relations in the New World. Finally, it is to be hoped that other scholars will be stimulated by the remarkable way in which Curtin integrates the historical study of Europe, Africa , and the Americas. August Meier Kent State University The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante Bellum South. By John W. Blassingame. (New York: Oxford, 1792. Pp. xv, 262. $7.95.) This is the volume on American slavery that students are soon likely to find as required reading in place of Kenneth Stampp or Stanley Elkins. And this should come as no surprise, for Professor Blassingame's book is the inevitable outgrowth of more than a decade of intense historiographical and political debate over the role of the slave on the American plantation. Based almost entirely on printed materials—plantation records , travel accounts, slave narratives, and a variety of secondary sources, including the primers of social psychology—the study argues BOOK REVIEWS177 that plantation slaves were never so circumscribed that they could not maintain a semi-autonomous culture: indeed, a sense of community and a means of mutual support through which they resisted the physical and, more importantly, the psychological pressures of slavery. On a number of points the author has little to say that has not been said before. His opening chapter on African survivals adds nothing of substance to the findings of Melville Herskovits thirty years ago. Nor is there much in his chapter on "plantation realities" concerning day to day plantation management and the physical treatment of slaves that cannot be found in Stampp or in U. B. Phillips, for that matter. The strength of the book, however, lies not in the ground that it covers, but in the methodology that it employs. As a work in history, this is a relatively sophisticated study, steeped in the social sciences with an eye toward quantification, and it has the virtue of attempting to look at slavery from the inside (the black side) out through the lens of the slave narratives. Again, what emerges is not...