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  • Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia by Karen Cook Bell
  • Peter A. Coclanis
Claiming Freedom: Race, Kinship, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. By Karen Cook Bell (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 2018) 161 pp. $39.99

In no part of the U.S. South is the historiography regarding slavery and emancipation as rich, deep, and impressive as in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. For decades, scholars have worked assiduously on this region, which comprises the outer coastal plain of these two South Atlantic states, along with numerous barrier islands adjacent to the coast. Although the region was more diverse than is sometimes believed, the standard depiction of the area during the time of slavery as a region dominated by large capitalistic plantation enterprises with large numbers of African and African-American slaves—producing sizable quantities of rice, supplemented early by indigo and later by Sea Island cotton, mainly for sale in foreign and extra-regional markets—is generally sound. So, too, is the view that after the demise of slavery, the area's plantation sector declined dramatically before collapsing altogether.

What followed this collapse is more difficult to explain succinctly. Most scholars would probably agree, however, that another economic regime gradually emerged in the low country. This regime was still largely agricultural; it was characterized not by size and scale but by tiny productive units, operating under a bewildering complex of landholding patterns and labor arrangements. For a variety of reasons—ranging from productive inefficiency to political repression to some of the population's partial to almost total withdrawal from commercial activities—the regime so constructed left the still largely African-American population of the region in parlous economic straits for generations after slavery's death.

Such is the region and the historiography that Bell engages in Claiming Freedom. At a general level, her approach and argument are unobjectionable. She uses (some) standard sources and conventional historical methods to make the now-standard and conventional case for African and African-American agency both under slavery and during the transition to freedom. In so doing, she argues that, despite the horrors of bondage, enslaved African and African-Americans in coastal Georgia successfully retained and developed cultural traditions originating in Africa, and that through language, religion, kin relationships, and property accumulation and assignment, they were able to gain some autonomy and to establish viable and surprisingly enduring communities on the area's rice and cotton plantations. Indeed, such communities—and the cultural complexes inspiring them—provided the foundations needed by African Americans successfully to navigate through the difficult shoals of emancipation and the emergence of new forms of economic organization in the postbellum decades. However much they struggled economically after the Civil War, African Americans in the low country, who had often "claimed" their own freedom during the [End Page 680] war itself, succeeded in retaining and expanding the spheres of autonomy and independence that they had carved out even while enslaved.

As the above description suggests, Bell attempts to cover a lot of (low country) ground in Claiming Freedom, the text of which is only ninety pages. Unfortunately, the book's "thinness" extends to its coverage and grasp of both historiography—many important books and articles on the history of the region are missing—and source materials. For example, why use Elizabeth Donnan's outdated numbers for slave imports into Georgia rather than the (larger) figures available in the justly praised Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (http://www.slavevoyages.org/)? The study is further marred by its meandering mode of presentation, opaque language—"diagetic, layered backstory" and "ontological praxis" are two cases in point (29, 19)—and factual errors, some of them minor (Daniel Heyward rather than Duncan Heyward as the author of Seed from Madagascar [Chapel Hill, 1937]) and some of them major. Contrary to Bell's assertion, the Georgia low country was not "the principal area for antebellum rice production" (7). Georgia accounted for 18.1 percent of U.S. rice production in 1849 and 28 percent in 1859; South Carolina accounted for 74.3 percent in 1849 and 63.6 percent in 1859.1

Bell has lit...

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