Negro Slavery in Louisiana (review)

80CI V IL W A R H I STOR Y Negro Shvery in Louisiana. By Joe Gray Taylor. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Historical Association, 1963. Pp. xi, 260. $6.00.) We have at last been offered a general study of slavery in Louisiana and may rejoice that, if it has woeful shortcomings, it is on balance a useful book. Blending anecdote and illustration with broad description and analysis, Joe Gray Taylor has produced a small but comprehensive volume that is, at its best, a strong effort. Unfortunately, Taylor is often far from his best. His chapter on the economics of slavery barely gets beyond L. C. Gray's treatment and is little short of embarrassing in its superficiality. The failure to distinguish between cotton and sugar plantations, except in the fine sections on work routine, seriously reduces the value of the book. The interesting material on the differences between early French and later American slave law and practice lacks the focus that a discussion of the Tannenbaum thesis might have provided. (Tannenbaum, like Stampp, Conrad and Meyer, Aptheker, Elkins, and a great many others, is not cited.) Especially irritating is Taylor's misuse of sources. For example, his reliance on M. J. Herskovits for the opening chapter on the African background is unfortunate. Once again we are treated to the nonsense that "the culture of the slave coast and the adjacent inland areas, though nonliterate and nonmechanical, was 'comparable in many respects to Europe in the Middle Ages'" (Taylor quoting Herskovits). Taylor is able to imply a mortality range of 24 to 69 per cent for the French slave trade in the eighteenth century only by ignoring Père Dieudonne Rinchon's Le Trafic Négrier, which arrives at a carefully documented estimate of 13 per cent. In an especially sophomoric performance Taylor notes that Negroes were better adapted to slavery than Indians because they came from a higher culture and cites as his source Gilberto Freyre's The Masters and the Stages. How Freyre's contrast of the Tupi-Guarani with the largely Angolan-Congolese Negroes supports Taylor's implied contrast of Mississippi Valley Indians with the largely Guiñean Negroes is hard to see, except of course on the principle that all Indians, like all Negroes, are alike. Taylor means no such thing: in this, as in too many instances, he is simply careless beyond excuse. Yet, just when the reader is about to despair and conclude that the author is impossible, he is startled by evidence of a good mind at work. Taylor is uncommonly shrewd in showing how the humanitarian features of the code noir strengthened slavery; perceptive in his analysis of plantation labor incentives; strong in his review of social life on the plantation; admirable in his combination of tact and frankness in discussing miscegenation ; fresh and illuminating on the motivations of runaways; and good on other matters as well. The pedestrian and superficial sections of the book seem to have resulted from want of industry rather than from want of ability. It is bad enough that he ignored the manuscripts at Chapel Hill, but if he had to anchor himself in Baton Rouge, he might at least have taken a short bus 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...