Many Thousand Gone: The Ex-Slaves' Account of Their Bondage and Freedom (review)

BOOK REVIEWS81 trip to Tulane to look at the Samuel Walker Diary, among other items. His failure to consult the files of the Journal of Negro History and a vast amount of secondary literature is incomprehensible. His unwillingness to dig into the anthropological and sociological literature on Negro life in Africa and America cost him dearly. His writing style, too, varies from crude to ordinary until every so often, as in his discussion of runaways on page 175, he shows that he can write with eloquence and power when he condescends to. Taylor has written an uneven book that we may welcome as a needed contribution while we deplore the spectacle of so able a man's contenting himself with an effort so short of his capability. Eugene D. Genovese Rutgers University Many Thousand Gone: The Ex-Shves' Account of Their Bondage and Freedom. By Charles H. Nichols. (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1963. Pp. xvi, 229. Glds. 24.) This is the first publication in a new series, "Studies in American Literature and History," issued under the imprimateur of the American Institute of the Free University of Berlin. The Studies will focus on American problems, including those growing out of American-European relationships, in the context of history, literature, and the social sciences. Many Thousand Gone is a description of Negro slavery taken from the published narratives of escaped and freed slaves and the standard works of Olmsted, Kemble, and other observers of the Peculiar Institution. Quite properly, Mr. Nichols warns that some of the narratives might not be accurate, but he believes that he has weeded out the fiction and used those which are faithful in spirit if not in letter. He recognizes that some of the narratives were ghosted but suggests that the abolitionists who undertook the task of writing down these stories for escaped slaves were honest and wary enough not to embroider the truth. He is aware, too, that those slaves whose narratives were published were unusual people, but he believes that their stories were indicative of the rigors of slavery. Protected by these precautions, Nichols proceeds to dissect the institution of slavery. He finds it totally evil. Masters were crude and cruel, slaves were restricted and repressed, and the common civilizing decencies like monogamy, literacy, and mutual respect were for the most part absent. Drawing largely from the narratives, Nichols examines the slave trade, the master-slave relationship, work habits, and escape attempts, and offers brief vignettes of some of the narratives' authors: Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb, Milton Clarke, Frederick Douglass, and others. His conclusions about Negro slaves are routine: they gave loyalty in proportion to rewards, they led difficult lives, they were not "peculiarly 'African' or 'inferior,'" they sought freedom where possible and they suffered deep personality scars because of their status. 82CIVIL WAR HISTORY In short, the book adds little to what has been written, since others have used slave accounts with good effect. Nichols acknowledges the work of Stampp, Furnas, and Franklin but fails to recognize Litwack and Bardolph . He overlooks recent works on slavery in separate states like Taylor on Arkansas, Sellers on Alabama, and Mooney on Tennessee. He places great emphasis on the psychological wounds of slavery yet nowhere does he cite Elkins. These gaps would be understandable, given the limited library resources in Berlin, yet the author apparendy consulted some of the best American libraries. The final three chapters of the book are no more than an afterword, an impassioned polemic about the sordid legacy of an evil institution. Nichols barrels into the post-bellum period and races right up to the present with such generalizations as "The Freedman's Bureau was merely a kind of emergency soup kitchen dispensing inadequate charity," and "until recently . . . , by and large, American historians have gathered their 'facts' about slavery from the planter class and have promulgated a new series of apologetics about slavery. . . ." This latter barb pricks "recent" historians like Schouler (1906), Phillips (1918), Basse« (1925), and Randall (1937). He runs his lance through Francis P. Gaines (1925), and John H. Nelson (1926), quoting Nelson as if that individual were speaking in 1963: "Yet Nelson feels that the Negro today represents 'a...