The Sambo and Nat Turner in Everyslave: A Review of Roll, Jordan, Roll

THE SAMBO AND NAT TURNER IN EVERYSLAVE: A Review of Roll, Jordan, RoU Charles B. Dew In his insightful and still valuable essay on "Depletion and Renewal in Southern History," first published in 1967, the late David M. Potter suggested that slavery was one of the areas of historical investigation that had "been worked to a point where diminishing returns now seem about to set in." Citing the general studies of the institution by U. B. Phillips, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Stanley M. Elkins and the existence of individual monographs on slavery in every southern state, he offered the opinion that few historians "would encourage a graduate student to embark on further intensive study" of the American slave system.1 Professor Potter, by any measure a brilliant student of the past, did not slip up very often, but in this instance he was clearly wide of the mark, as he would be the first to acknowledge were he alive today. The slavery field is currently one of the most active and exciting areas of American historical scholarship. Within the past two years, an extraordinary outpouring of major works on slavery and closely related topics has occurred,2 and the end is not yet in 1 David M. Potter, "Depletion and Renewal in Southern History," in Edgar T. Thompson (ed.), Perspectives on the South: Agenda for Research (Durham, N.C., 1967), pp. 78-79. 2 In addition to the book under review here, Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974. Pp. xxii, 823. $17.50), the list of significant studies published in 1974 and 1975 would include: Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (2 vols. Boston, 1974); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, I770-I823 (Ithaca and London, 1975); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974); Robert S. Starobin (ed.), Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves (New York, 1974); Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese (eds.), Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, 1975); Elinor Miller and Eugene D. Genovese (eds.), Plantation, Town, and County: Essays on the Local History of American Slave Society (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1974); Duncan G. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (Cambridge, London, and New York, 1974); Ira Berlin, Sfoves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974); Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven and London, 1975); and Herbert G. Gutman's extended critique of Time on the Cross in The Journal of Negro History, LX (January, 1975), 53-227, scheduled for publication in book form under the title Slavery and the Numbers Game by the University of Illinois Press in August 1975. See also the spring 1974 issue of Daedalus, devoted to essays on "Slavery, Colonialism , and Racism," and the April 1975 issue of Agricultural History, which is devoted exclusively to articles dealing with slavery and nineteenth-century southern agriculture . 261 262 ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL sight.3 When historians have had a chance to read and digest this mountain of scholarship, to weigh the relative merits of their frequently conflicting interpretations, and to assess their contributions to our understanding of the South's peculiar institution, Eugene D. Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll will almost certainly take its place as one of the commanding works in the historiography of American Negro slavery. In his preface, Genovese states that his primary goal in undertaking this study was "to tell the story of slave life as carefully and accurately as possible"; his focus is on "the black struggle to survive spiritually as well as physically" within the confines of their bondage, "to make a livable world for themselves and their children within the narrowest living space and harshest adversity" (p. xvi). The key to understanding Genovese's interpretation of "The World the Slaves Made" lies in his analysis of what he brilliantly describes as a complex process of accommodation and resistance "by which the slaves accepted what could not be avoided and simultaneously...