Africans, Creoles, and Rumoured Rebels: New Readings of American Slavery

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 33, no. 3, 2003 American Studies in Review Africans, Creoles, and Rumoured Rebels: New Readings of American Slavery Review by Tatiana van Riemsdijk Gomez, Michael. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial Era and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 370 pp. 10 Tables, 4 maps, bibliography, index. Bontemps, Alex. The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001. x + 224 pp. Index. Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. x + 292 pp. 5 maps, appendix, index. Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1999. xxiv + 248 pp. Illustrated, appendix, index. Wayne, Michael. Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 257 pp. 10 illustrations, 6 tables, 4 appendices, index. In less than three months, late in 2002, nine young black men died in gang-related shootings in Toronto. As newspapers and the CBC amplified this story, the finger pointing began; it was drugs, racial profiling by police, and a Jamaican community living on the economic margins. In a more sympathetic telling, black participation in Canadian Review of American Studies 33 (2003) 268 alternative economies (crime) was a seen as a high-risk strategy for securing survival and short-term material improvement. Read another way, through the lens of black history, gang activity provided a bullet-ridden vote of political exasperation with systemic poverty, racism, and exclusion from the promises of “Toronto the Good.” Scholars interested in black history have identified clues to the presence of politics by other means. In the colonial and antebellum Southern states, for example, slaves who refused to subscribe to the laws of the land expressed their fury through a spectrum of choices, which included impertinence, theft, running away, murder, insurrection, and suicide. But how do these strategies take shape? From what cultural repertoires did slaves draw their resistance schemes? Why did certain slaves hatch plots, others betray them, some quietly do nothing, and thousands more leave nothing for us in the historical records? In this cluster of recent monographs, new approaches to understanding black responses to slavery elaborate on the Atlantic diaspora of African ethnicities, Caribbean cultures, and generational changes in the American South. An additional approach involves looking more deeply within a specific slave community for a fine-tuned reading of slave behaviour in a local context, such as Gabriel’s plot in Richmond , Virginia, or a murder in Kingston, just southeast of Natchez, Mississippi. In the long shadow cast by Eugene D. Genovese, many historians of slavery carve out their niche, either refining or disputing his model of planter paternalism, a system of class power that contained slave resistance, preventing serious insurrections in the United States. “The wonder, then,” says Genovese, “is not that the United States had fewer and smaller slave revolts than some other countries did, but that they had any at all” (50). His research questions still form a backdrop to research on slave rebellions in the South. In the late 1970s, mid-way through the hey-day of comparative histories of slave economies, Genovese asked why there were so few slave revolts in the South compared to in the Caribbean or South America ? His answer was a list of conditions, including, among others, large slaveholding units, residential masters, minimal direct interference in slaves’ lives, a high black–white ratio, large numbers of African-born slaves, and divisions within the ruling class (11–2). Another scholar interested in slave politics, Peter Kolchin, proposed a corollary explanation for the paucity of slave revolts in the American South (“Re-evaluating”). In an influential essay comparing ante- Revue canadienne d’études américaines 33 (2003) 269 bellum slavery with Russian serfdom and Caribbean slavery, Kolchin observed that the term “slave community” often overstated African-American social cohesiveness and collective consciousness. In comparison with other unfree populations, American slaves had less communal autonomy in the realms of economic self-sufficiency, internal governance, and resistance to...