Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America (review)

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 compromise between his innate savage traits and those new influences which have been cast around him.'" (Italics added.) There are important studies yet to be made about the impact of slavery on the twentieth century, but the subject needs more care and less acid than Nichols' afterthought provides. The idea of a center for the study of American history and literature in West Berlin is a challenging one for the western world and it is fitting that the inaugural volume should project a reexamination of American slavery. Unfortunately, the firstborn is unremarkable and marred by the pitfalls of special pleading and die distraction of innumerable typographical errors. The history of the Negro in the United States, and the Free University of Berlin, both deserve better. Leslie H. Fishel, Jr. State Historical Society of Wisconsin Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America. By William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease. (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963. Pp. ix, 204. $4.00.) America likes to think of itself as an unequaled land of freedom and opportunity. But that freedom and that opportunity have not been the birthright of all. Particularly has this been true of the Negro—a fact that has long troubled American consciences. This concern manifested itself over a century ago in the Negro communities that sprang up in the United States and Canada. These experiments to uplift the Negro receive BOOK REVIEWS83 the careful attention of William H. Pease and his wife, Jane, in an interesting little volume entiüed Black Utopia. Their study covers the years from the relatively unplanned, paternalistic experiments launched by slave owners in the early part of the nineteenth century to the more organized efforts at Port Royal during the Civil War. The tide of the book is somewhat of a misnomer, and the authors indirectly admit as much. For the word "Utopia" found its most accustomed application in communal attempts to seek a perfect society along the lines of socialism and pre-Marxian communism. These Negro communities , to the contrary, arose out of an American middle-class philosophy. Their purpose was to provide a haven in which Negroes could live apart and learn to compete successfully in a world dominated by the white race. These goals seldom achieved realization. Education, though given an essential role, was often not geared to the needs of the people. Not surprisingly , one after another of the communities failed, succumbing to the ravages of poor planning, factionalism, egotism, and even fraud. Many of the more complex Negro organizations took root in Canada, where race incurred no legal liabilities. In the 1830's the Wilberforce community attracted attention, only to collapse before the disruptive forces of ineptitude, jealousies, and chicanery. The authors claim no significant venture appeared in Canada for another decade but belie their statement...