Life, By the Numbers

IN this remarkable book, Richard S. Dunn compares the multigenerational experiences of enslaved people on Mesopotamia, a sugar estate in western Jamaica, and Mount Airy, a tobacco, wheat, and corn plantation in Richmond County, on the Northern Neck of tidewater Virginia. The study, which Dunn began in the 1970s, has all the hallmarks of the new social history. It features ordinary people, a search for demographic patterns, and an emphasis on comparative structural analysis, and it is based on a vast bedrock of evidence about 2,076 enslaved individuals, much of it displayed in charts, graphs, and tables contained in the internal appendixes and an external website that accompany the text.¹ Despite all of that data, this book is anything but a rote exercise “by the numbers.” To the contrary, it is biographically driven; from first to last, Dunn is focused on the experiences of enslaved people. A Tale of Two Plantations exemplifies the possibilities for reconstructing comparative life stories of individuals and families across generations living under slavery. This is the fundamental, indeed often breathtaking, achievement of Dunn’s project.

The significance of Dunn’s accomplishment is perhaps best measured by considering the nuts and bolts of this monumental study. In order to reconstruct life stories of enslaved people, he first expertly culled details about them from the plantation inventories, accounts, ledgers, and letters of the Barham and Tayloe families, the owners of Mesopotamia and Mount Airy, respectively. These particulars reflect the distinctive history of slavery in each region and measure the common phenomena that structured enslaved peoples’ lives: population fluctuations, importation and migration, labor and punishment, illness and mortality, reproduction and sexuality, diet and provisioning, violence and resistance, color and naming, to list just a few. The results of this painstaking collecting process then became the evidentiary scaffolding of Dunn’s study.

It is upon this framework of data that Dunn is able to assemble and compare the life histories of enslaved women and men who, he believes, are more representative than those, such as Mary Prince or Charles Ball, who are visible to us because they were remarkable or exceptional. The heart of the book, then, is the way in which Dunn transforms his collection of evidence into “skeletal biographies” (74). Importantly, he not only generates life stories of individuals but also situates them in the context of families, lineages, and generations and reflects on their relationships with one another as well as with white masters, overseers, and, in Jamaica, missionaries. He is therefore able to present dynamic portraits of life under slavery. This approach allows Dunn to go further than most in demonstrating how regional distinctions shaped the experience of enslavement. Most historians can identify the differences between the slave societies of Jamaica and Virginia: high versus low mortality, in-migration versus out-migration, more deaths than births versus a naturally replenishing labor force, and sugar versus tobacco. The brilliance of Dunn’s method is that he shows the experiential dimension of these differences and how they mattered to individual and family histories.

Two chapters in particular illustrate the success of Dunn’s approach to comparative life stories under slavery. Each is centered on a biography of an enslaved woman but also considers multiple generations of her ancestors and descendants. Because one of Dunn’s goals was to challenge the static portraits of the slave community that predominated in the literature when he began the book, each of these two chapters vividly exemplifies the constancy of change over generations of slavery. Beginning with women makes sense because under British American slavery the status of the mother determined that of her children, and enslaved children’s mothers are more likely to be identified or deduced from plantation records than are their fathers. In the absence of other information—only the Mount Airy enslavers identified enslaved fathers as well as mothers in their records—women are the key to reconstructing family relationships.

Each biography exposes the regionally distinctive experiences of enslaved men and women—the “life and labor” of the subtitle—over time. Sarah Affir (b. 1767), originally named Affy, marks the beginning of one Mesopotamia...