The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (review)

Penningroth's beautifully written book uncovers two important stories within African-American Southern history. The first story examines property and the informal networks of property ownership among enslaved and free nineteenth-century African-Americans. Penningroth explores the complexity of the law and social custom during the turbulent decades before and after the Civil War. By exploring the impact of social relationships in the construction of property ownership, Penningroth uncovers the ways in which people conceptualized property in their everyday lives, clearly demonstrating how "white and black rural people's understanding of property contrasted with legal principles, and what happened when the two systems of understanding collided" (11).

The second story embedded within Penningroth's narrative focuses upon family and community. By examining kinship networks and social ties, The Claims of Kinfolk argues that social ties helped to "make" property and that property "made" social ties. Following emancipation, African-Americans wrestled with new understandings and conflict over the claims of property and how newly freed black Americans would relate to one another and negotiate in a world with new boundaries. Penningroth ambitiously includes a comparative analysis of slave property ownership along the Gold Coast in West Africa, demonstrating clear differences and similarities between slavery in Africa and the United States. By including the discourse of African studies, Penningroth demonstrates that within both the United States and the Gold Coast, "ownership often included multiple, overlapping, and sometimes competing claims. People who transferred property did not always give up all claims to it" (41). Secondly, the author reveals that in the wake of emancipation, "ordinary people" were forced to confront a new legal system that appeared ready to reconfigure familiar legal practices. In both regions however, disfranchised blacks found themselves at a clear disadvantage following the abolition of slavery. Although slavery ended differently in the United States than on the Gold Coast, with wildly divergent understandings of freedom, the comparative analysis offered by Penningroth is unique.

At the heart of The Claims of Kinfolk, Penningroth explores the widespread property ownership among enslaved blacks throughout the antebellum South. Slaves negotiated their opportunities to own property with their masters via an informal system of recognition that was accepted by both blacks and whites alike. These negotiations of property ownership shaped kinship and community ties while demonstrating the importance of property for other reasons. Penningroth's investigation of the Southern Claims Commission records clearly demonstrates that although "slaves had long participated in a cash economy, they valued property in part for its social and personal significance" (130).

Emancipation, however, ushered in tremendous change, moving ex-slave families to reunite themselves, redefining the meanings of kinship and property. "Ex-slaves argued with one another in the 1860s and 1870s not in spite of property's links to kinship but because of them" (164). Penningroth demonstrates that with freedom came new forms of negotiation, transforming black-on-black social networks. This book is of tremendous importance for anyone engaged in the study of African-American history.