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

The centrality of violence to the institution of slavery has received considerable scholarly attention in the last half century, and Jeff Forret’s Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South makes a significant contribution to the field. This well-researched book provocatively traces the history of intraracial violence among those enslaved from approximately 1795 to 1865, focusing on Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. Forret adeptly uses violence as a lens to examine interpersonal relationships between enslaved people, the institution of slavery, and the emotional trauma that was part of their everyday experiences. In doing so, Forret successfully demonstrates that intraracial violence exposes the agency that existed within enslaved communities across the South.

Forret uses a variety of sources. He has mined an abundance of court records to show how enslaved people were often not executed in manslaughter and other criminal cases in order to preserve slaveholders’ investments. Forret also observes that because enslaved people had no legal access to the courts, many slaves used violence to protect their property from theft, to recover debt, to defend themselves, and to settle disputes between real and fictive kin. Baptist church records reveal new ways that enslaved men operated as proxies to white authority by participating in colored conferences where they resolved conflict within their communities, functioning much the same as secret societies in West Africa. The need for love and affection, despite the brutality of chattel slavery, generated the emotional commitments depicted in the many slave narratives Forret uses. Forret powerfully demonstrates how black men and women used violence to preserve marriages, to protect their children, and to assert their gendered identities.

The inclusion of proslavery writers like Charles Colcock Jones, James Henry Hammond, and George Fitzhugh, who argued that black people were inordinately violent and little more than savages, is somewhat problematic in my view. Fitzhugh, Hammond, and Jones are not credible witnesses to the lived experiences of those enslaved. Moreover, I would be careful in assigning this book to classes. At times the reader is led to believe that the enslaved were what white southerners said they were—that black women, for example, lived “outside the boundaries of respectable womanhood” (p. 334). This was not how enslaved women saw themselves. Forret later clarifies this point, but not with the vigor it deserves. Nor were black men exceptional in their domestic abuse and violence toward black women and children, which again Forret later acknowledges. Although a central goal of this work is to examine violence and its causes from the enslaved point of view, one does not get any real sense of their humanity until chapter 4. Thereafter, the book comes alive with rich examples from the enslaved perspective of what was at stake and the circumstances that caused violent behavior.

In the epilogue, Forret asserts that intraracial violence did not increase until the late nineteenth century, the period after Reconstruction that Rayford W. Logan called “the nadir” of the black experience, when white violence was at its height in the American South (The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 [New York, 1954]). Furthermore, Forret’s claim that modern-day black-on-black crime has nothing to do with the prior condition of enslavement is difficult to understand. Certainly violence is part of the human experience, but if Forret’s work does nothing else, it sheds light on how oppression and pervasive violence shaped the behavior of those enslaved in ways that were destructive and harmful to their communities. Certainly modern-day racism, an institutional construct emanating from more than 350 years of chattel slavery, continues to do just that.