The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Bhck Family in Shvery and Freedom, 1750-1925, by Herbert G. Gutman. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. Pp. xxviii, 664. $15.95.) In this major opus on the Afro-American family, Professor Herbert Gutman has made an original and highly significant contribution to the study of both the institution of the family and of the AfroAmerican experience, and has once again demonstrated his creative and seminal role as a scholar of American social history. This contribution has been achieved in the framework of certain ironic paradoxes. With his investigations conceived in a present-minded context—the Moynihan controversy of a few years ago—Gutman accepts Moynihan's exaggerations of the findings of E. Franklin Frazier regarding the extent of matrifocality in American black family life and engages in a spirited criticism not only of Moynihan but of that earlier classic on the family and the Afro-American experience , Frazier's Negro Family in the United States. Yet the Gutman volume, whatever its origins, actually is a major addition to the whole new school of scholarship in American Negro slavery—the school that has produced the new paradigm of slave historiography , which makes the slave community and its culture central to the discussion. Indeed the significance of The Bhck Family in Shvery and Freedom lies less in its contribution to the meretricious Moynihan controversy than in the way it supplements and reinforces the recent work of George Rawick, Lawrence Levine, Leslie Owens, John Blassingame, and Eugene Genovese. In fact, Gutman constantly stresses the importance of a viable family and kinship system as essential to the creation and transmission of a distinctive slave culture. Yet here again Gutman couches his discussion in a polemical mold, stressing his differences not only with earlier scholars like Frazier, Stampp, and Elkins, but also with Blassingame and particularly Genovese. In short, the value of Gutman's contribution depends not on its polemics. Rather, it is because of its extraordinary empirical investigation of the structure of the slaves' kinship system that this volume is a profound and seminal contribution . It may be that Gutman's researches originated in his questioning 84 of the work of other scholars, and the unusual way in which the book is organized suggests that the author is in effect taking the reader almost step-by-step through the process of his own voyage of discovery. Thus Gutman opens with a discussion of the midnineteenth century, presenting quantitative data that reveal a strong two-parent family prevalent in the immediate post-emancipation era. Given the nature of the surviving records, moreover, Gutman has focused principally on the ante-bellum generation and on the Eastern seaboard states. Having presented his findings for midnineteenth century Virginia and South Carolina, Gutman, utilizing more fragmentary materials, is then able to move his analysis both westward in space and back in time to the eighteenth century. The result is that he has successfully illustrated not only conditions in the ante-bellum generation, but like Ira Berlin in his study of the ante-bellum free people of color, and Lawrence Levine in his book on the development of Afro-American folk culture, has offered a description that reveals both change and continuity in the history of slave culture and Afro-American institutions. The real methodological breakthrough involved in all of this is the pioneering reexamination of relevant plantation records, and the creative use of them to actually reconstruct the slave kinship system. Only in a few cases do the data necessary for this kind of analysis exist, and even in these cases of surviving slave lists, only the author's imagination and skill have made it feasible to reconstruct kinship patterns. Starting with the Good Hope plantation in South Carolina, Gutman demonstrates not only the existence of a well-defined two-parent stable family system that lasted for many years, but even more significantly, he has shown that the patterns of kinship among the slaves had unique characteristics that revealed them to be a slave creation rather than an institution copied from their masters. This distinctiveness is demonstrated by the naming practices that slaves employed for themselves and their children; by the institutionalization of pre-marital...