Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret (review)

In this impressively researched and well-written book, Jeff Forret investigates violence among the enslaved on southern plantations. For the historian looking to find evidence that the black-on-black violence of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries originated in the community of slaves, this is not the book. Forret notes that although “the metaphorical ghost of violence continues to haunt contemporary discussions of the black community,” it is misleading to conclude that slavery forced African Americans to turn their violence inward (385). To Forret, such an interpretation fails to account for struggle inequality and the larger role of violence in society. Rather, Forret seeks to place black-on-black violence in a broad historical perspective, using “episodes of conflict between and among slaves as a window into slave life and culture in the American South” (1). His research reveals “no consistent pattern of elevated rates of violence” among African Americans over time (394). He relates acts of violence, from boxing matches among enslaved men for the leisure and entertainment of whites to physical altercations and questions of honor within enslaved households, and questions whether all acts of violence within a community challenge the cohesiveness of that community. Forret’s aim is not to completely overturn John Blassingame’s notion of a cohesive slave community; rather, like scholars such as Brenda Stevenson, Dylan Penningroth, and Anthony Kaye before him, Forret notes that the enslaved “community” was multifaceted. Slave against Slave traces violence in the enslaved community from the beginning and demonstrates how violence was perpetuated by the slave economy in the cotton, tobacco, and nonplantation regions of the South.

Forret’s nearly ten years of research in the archives of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas are evident in the qualitative and quantitative details he presents about violent interactions across varying regions of the South. He offers detailed contextualization by relying on the voice of the enslaved when possible; for instance, he makes ample use of local court records from South Carolina, in which bondmen and bondwomen could testify in “slave courts.” Yet Forret does not rely solely on narrative. When possible, he aggregates his findings within a larger context. His database on intraracial slave homicides in Virginia between 1777 and 1864 itemizes different types of violence and the ratios of particular acts to one another, and specifies the gender of the individuals involved. Evidently, many more enslaved men committed acts of violence than enslaved women. Forret notes, “They were more likely than female slaves to lash out physically and kill an adversary” (20). Forret paints an enslaved community built upon honor, ego, and protection—ironically drawn from paternalism and patriarchy. He is careful to note that, these characteristics notwithstanding, the actions of enslaved men did not parrot those of the slaveholding class.

Forret is equally careful to assert that the fact that there are fewer accounts of enslaved women in court records does not suggest that enslaved women were not violent. Forret found that, at a time when the enslaved female population in the United States exceeded 200,000, 39 women committed acts hostile enough to require court attention. In 85 percent of the cases, the same person owned both the assailant and her victim. Therefore, many of the violent acts of enslaved women occurred in spaces with people familiar to them. Given the nature of southern patriarchy and gendered violence against women, perhaps the court records are not the best place to find assailants; “in-house” acts of violence among slaves owned by the same master would not normally end up in court unless they posed an economic risk to the slave owner. Men would be tried for killing another slave, women for real and suspected acts of infanticide. Speaking specifically about records from Virginia, Forret notes that “shame, grounded in enslaved women’s own sense of gendered identity, provided another possible motivation for infanticide and child murder” (375...