Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865 by William L. Andrews (review)

To one of William L. Andrews’s slave-owning ancestors, slave narratives were such “nefarious publications” that he helped organize an antiabolition vigilance committee to halt their dissemination (ix). For Andrews himself, however, slave narratives have been the wellspring of a distinguished scholarly life. He has written or edited more than forty books. He curated the North American Slave Narratives collection for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Documenting the American South website, making antislavery texts publicly accessible in ways his great-great-grandfather could never have envisioned. His latest book, Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865, offers an intriguing but discomfiting analysis of how antebellum and Civil War–era slave narrators discussed social distinctions within slave society, especially divisions among slaves. Whether readers are persuaded by his argument, Andrews’s rich evidence and unapologetically assumption-rattling conclusions will challenge and engross new and seasoned scholars of slavery alike.

Andrews argues that distinct classes existed among slaves in the ante-bellum South. He bases his contention on an analysis of more than sixty famous and obscure mid-nineteenth-century slave narratives, those published during the national and international heyday of this remarkable genre. Class, as Andrews defines it, refers to social differences among slaves based on their variable access to and control of material resources such as property, money earned for hiring out their labor, family status on the plantation, literacy, and even the “high privilege of living in a cabin” (157). In considering the class hierarchy within antebellum slavery, Andrews sees himself entering into conversation with historians Ira Berlin, John Blassingame, Michael Gomez, Deborah Gray White, and Steven Hahn. His work also intersects with Jeff Forret’s on slave-on-slave violence, Jessica Millward’s on enslaved and free black women in Maryland, and Dylan Penningroth’s on slaves who owned property.

“Higher-echelon” slaves, who often performed skilled work or lived in urban areas, had relatively more privileged existences under slavery than “lower-echelon” enslaved field-workers, Andrews argues. Their “peculiar advantages” bolstered their aspiration for freedom (141). An insight from Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) influenced this particular thread of Andrews’s argument: “Give [a slave] a bad master, and he aspires to a good master. Give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master” (66).

It is no coincidence, Andrews maintains, that many authors of mid-nineteenth-century slave narratives were men and women who enjoyed certain privileges. In chapter 2, “Work, Status, and Social Mobility,” Andrews writes a work biography of many of his narrators. He pays close attention to the role their work played in how they viewed themselves, how they viewed other slaves, and what they aspired to do with their lives. Andrews argues that slaves who engaged in supervisory roles and “skilled work” held a higher status than slaves who worked in the field (although, as Daina Ramey Berry has argued, slave owners prized certain enslaved field-workers’ agricultural knowledge and discernment as well). Likewise, Andrews contends that enslaved domestic workers derived certain material benefits from their positions but also faced the constant threat of sexual violence and cruel punishment at the hands of slave-owning men and women. Nevertheless, he insists, narrators who performed domestic work and other nonagricultural roles found avenues for “social mobility” in the context of slavery. For instance, he points to Aunt Sally Williams of Fayetteville, North Carolina, who persisted in finding ways to hire her time out as a dressmaker and baker in order to improve her economic status. Andrews also uses the narratives to show that higher-echelon slaves had strong views about the laziness and idleness of slave owners, and about the exploitation of lower-class white workers.

Andrews clearly establishes that mid-nineteenth-century slave...