The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South

Introduction: Agency, Diversity, and Slave Families

Introduction Agency, Diversity, and Slave Families Almost a century and a half have passed since the fiery collapse of slavery and the emancipation of over four million African Americans held in bondage in the American South. In recent years a vast outpouring of research has rightfully salvaged slavery from the margins of American history and thrust it into the spotlight; yet despite the publication of hundreds of books and articles on the subject, our understanding of many aspects of enslaved people’s social lives remains clouded by disagreement among contemporary scholars. The nature of slave family life has proved to be an especially thorny issue, and a general consensus among historians regarding the daily experiences, structure, and stability of families in bondage has been slow in coming. A survey of the historical literature suggests that two specific issues lie at the root of this disagreement. First, scholars have long disagreed over the extent to which slave family life was shaped by either external forces (the economy, slaveholders, the law) or slave agency (the actions of enslaved people themselves). Most historians have tended to emphasize one view to the exclusion of the other. Second, scholars of antebellum slavery in particular (roughly the period 1800–1860) have long underestimated geographic differences among slave families and continue to disagree over which characteristics of slave family life can be considered “typical” for the South as a whole. Indeed, despite the acknowledgment of a traditional overemphasis on slave culture in the cotton South—which led to a wave of regional studies among the past generation of scholars, many of which illuminate slavery in various marginal communities of the non-cotton South—many recent studies still draw very generalized conclusions from localized research, and few have employed an intraregional comparative approach. In short, many 4 / Part I. Rethinking the Experiences of Slave Families studies have tended to take an exclusive, rather than inclusive, approach to slave culture and slave families. By emphasizing agency to the exclusion of external factors, for example, or presenting family life in one region as “typical” for the entire South, historians have often underestimated the dynamics and diversity of both slave family life and the antebellum South.1 Focusing on the experiences of slave families in the non-cotton South, this book provides a reinterpretation of enslaved people’s family lives, namely, by formulating a middle ground in the historical debate over slave agency and by redefining slave family life in plural form. First, this work argues that the varied nature of regional agriculture in diverse southern localities was the most important underlying factor in the development of slave family life—not because it dictated the experiences of slave families from above per se, but because it confronted them with a basic framework of boundaries and opportunities with respect to family contact, child care, family-based internal production, marriage strategies, and long-term stability . Second, this book underscores the diversity of slave family life in different agricultural regions of the nineteenth-century South. A comparative study that examines the importance of time and place for slave families, it aims to advance a pluralist view of families’ experiences in bondage, positing that regional differences between slave families were the rule rather than the exception. Specifically, this book examines how the nature of regional agriculture affected “simple” slave families (consisting of couples, whether co-residential or not, with or without children, or singles living with their children) in three very different parts of the non-cotton South: northern Virginia, lowcountry South Carolina, and southern Louisiana. In the following, this study will be placed within a broader historiographical context and its approach and methodology further explained.2 Boundaries and Opportunities: The Extent of Agency One of the aims of this book is to suggest a new way of thinking about the extent of agency in shaping slave culture and especially family life. As such, it builds upon more than a century of scholarship, during much of which a top-down perspective of slavery—and at best only a scant interest in slave culture and family life—prevailed. Prior to the 1970s scholars generally viewed the slave family as a catastrophic failure, and historians tended to attribute enslaved people virtually no agency (or indeed even interest) in trying and establishing anything approaching stable or cohesive families. Introduction: Agency, Diversity, and Slave Families / 5 Explanations ranged from the racist (roughly until World War II) to...