wood, peter - i did the best i could for my day

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"I Did the Best I Could for My Day": The Study of Early Black History during the Second

Reconstruction, 1960 to 1976Author(s): Peter H. WoodSource: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Apr., 1978), pp. 185-225Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and CultureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1921833

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"I Did the Best I Could for My Day":

The Study of EarlyBlack History during the

SecondReconstruction, 960 to I976

Peter H. Wood

EARLY a centuryago, not long after the end of Reconstruction,ayoung black scholarwith the auspiciousname of RichardWrightobtained a summer studentship to study history at Harvard.

Wright had graduatedfromAtlanta University n the dark centennialyear of

i876; he would go on to be president of Georgia State IndustrialCollege for

three decades and to attain the rank of majorin the segregatedarmed forces.

During his months in Cambridgehe had contact with such notablehistorians

as Justin Winsor and John Fiske, and at one point he asked Winsor why the

references "to the part Negroes played in American discoveries were someager" in his Narrative and Critical History of America. The Harvard

scholarreplied candidly that he had not regarded he Negro as an "historicalcharacter." "This riled me," Major Wright later recalled, 'and I deter-mined to get all the information and facts. I went to England and made

researches n the Bodleian Library at Oxford and in the British Museum. I

did the best I could for my day."'

Mr. Wood is a member of the Department of History at Duke University.' Richard R. Wright, "Negro Companions of the Spanish Explorers,"Phylon,

11 (941), 324-333, with notes by Rayford W. Logan, 334-336. In the course ofdiscussing Estavan, the black who had accompanied Cabeza de Vaca across theSouthwestin the I530s and then served as the guide and interpreter or Fray Marcosde Niza in searching for "Cibola," Wright took issue with the stance of his otherHarvard mentor (p. 33): "Fiske, in his Discovery of America, writes ratherslightingly, in our opinion, of this interesting episode of American history, layingparticular tress on the 'illo' or 'ico' in Estevanillo's, or Estevanico'sname. Althoughit would perhapsbe improper o charge so distinguisheda historianwith flippancy nhis reference to 'poor silly little Steve,' it would not, perhaps, be pretentious tosuggest that the terminationalluded to in Estevan's name does not warrant such areflection on the man." Fiske's own work, Wright contended, "would warrant theconclusion" that the black man's accomplishmentswere as worthy of recognitionandhonor as anything done by his Spanish companions. Cf. J. Fred Rippy, "The Negroand the Spanish Pioneer in the New World,"Journal of Negro History, VI (I92I),

I83-I89; James B. Browning, "Negro Companions of the Spanish Explorersin theNew World," Howard University Studies in History (Washington, D.C., I930); and



i86 WIILIAM AND MARY QtJART1IERId

The result of Wright's researcheswas a piece entitled, "Negro Compan-ions of the Spanish Explorers," published not in a history journal but in

American Anthropologist and reprinted a generation later by W. E. B.Du Bois in Phylon. When the article firstappeared n I902, the editorstatedopenly that "the interest in this paper is enhanced by the fact that it is theresult of researchby a nativeof the racewhich took such a prominentpartin

the discoveryand colonizationof the New World." Clearly Wright's essay,written on an unrecognizedtopic by a member of the black community,representedsomething of an anomaly. It was by no means unique; for

generations isolated scholars had pursued, and would continue to pursue,independentresearch nto the unknownplace of blacks as "historicalcharac-

ters" in the colonial past. But despite such individualefforts, little occurredthrough the entire first half of the twentieth century to alter the generalteaching of early American history with respectto the role playedby Afro-Americans.Booker T. Washington summarized he situation as early as i909

when he noted that "while the world hearsa great deal about 'the tragedyofcolour' and . . . the so-calledNegro problem,I have observedthat the world

hears little, and knows,perhaps, ess about the Negro himself. This is trueof

white peoplebut it is also trueof colouredpeople."2In an anecdoterecalling

the conditionsagainstwhich scholars such as Wright rebelled, Washingtoncontinued:

Some time ago, I had the privilege of meeting at Cambridge,Mass., agroup of about twenty-five young coloured men who were studying atHarvardUniversity.... They knew a great deal about the local historyof New England and were perfectly familiarwith the story of PlymouthRock and the settlement of Jamestown, and of all that concernedthewhite man's civilisation both in America and out of America. But Ifound that through their entire course of training, neither in public

schools,nor in the fitting schools,nor in Harvard,had any of them hadan opportunity o study the history of their own race. In regardto thepeople with which they themselveswere most closely identified, theywere more ignorant than they were in regard to the history of theGermans, the French,or the English. It occurred o me that this shouldnot be so....

Let me add that my knowledgeof the Negro has led me to believethat there is much in the storyof his struggle,if one were able to tell itas it deservesto be told, that is likely to be both instructiveand helpful,

not merely to the black manbut also to the white manwith whom he is

Rayford W. Logan, "Estevanico, Negro Discoverer of the Southwest: A CriticalReexamination," Phylon, I (1940), 305-3I4. See n. 34 below.

2 Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. WashingtonPapers, I (Chicago, I972),

406-407.



STUDY OF EARLY BLACK HISTORY i87

now almost everywhere, in Africa as well as America, so closelyassociated.

If the pursuit of colonial history failed to reflect this broadenedper-spective n subsequentyears,it was due not only to prejudices hroughoutthe

society but also to developmentswithin the field. While much of American

culture music, dance, sports, speech-was becoming increasingly in-tegrated, even Afro-Americanized, by the geographical and social move-

ments of the twentieth century,the study of early Americawas growing, if

anything, more narrowand insular. The writing of colonial history had of

course had a white northeasternmale bias from the start, but the Anglo-

Saxon chauvinismof FrancisParkman,William Prescott,and George Ban-croft instilled a certain imperial breadth of vision. Even among the next

generation, such diligent anglophiles as HerbertL. Osgood and CharlesM.

Andrews,preoccupiedwith the mercantile systemin the North Atlantic, stillpaid close attention to the British colonies in the Caribbean. But fewcolonialists could conceive of focusing their research at Mobile or NewOrleans (much less Santa Fe or Sitka), and as decades passed,there occurreda thorough New Englandizationof early North American history.

Through the powerful influence of such teachers as Samuel Eliot Mori-

son and Perry Miller, several generations of scholars became newly pre-

occupied with the exciting minutiae of Anglo-American settlement in thenortheast.When writing of Massachusettsthese historians called it NewEngland, and when speaking of New England they called it America. Someamong them wrote of white male Virginia periodically,referringto it as theSouth. It is not surprising,therefore, that when the new tools of historicaldemographyburst upon the American scene some twenty years ago, theywere tested first on a series of towns in New England. Harvard's Bernard

Bailyn, looking outwardperceptively rom the hub, summarized his cumula-tive imbalance n I959. "In fact," Bailyn told an audience at the Institute of

3 Ibid., 407. Although Harvardhad earlier bestowed an honoraryM.A. degreeon Washington and had granteda hard-earnedPh.D. to Du Bois (then engaged inestablishing the N.A.A.C.P.), it would be generations before that institution orothers like it could concedethe significanceof Afro-Americanhistory,discardingthemyth that Negroes in the New World had no usable or significantpast. When agraduate student at Harvard in the late I950S asked permission to offer Africanhistory and

early American history as "relatedfields" for his general examination,the request was denied on the grounds that the two fields were not sufficientlyrelated. Not until i967 (exactly 200 years after the 14-year-oldslave girl PhillisWheatley dedicatedher firstpoem "To the Universityof Cambridge")did HarvardCollege, underdirect pressurefrom the studentbody, offer a full yearhistory courseon "The Afro-AmericanExperience."Needless to say, Harvard is not singled outhere becauseit was exceptional; it is cited becauseit was so typicalof all universitiesin these matters.



i88 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Early American History and Culture, "so rich and extensivearethe writings

on seventeenth-centuryNew England culture, and especiallyon Puritanism,

that it has acquireda disproportionatemportance n the historyas a whole.In comparisonwe know little of what happenedin the south."4

What happened in the early South, simultaneous with the unstudied

decimation of the region'sdominant populationof severalhundredthousand

Native Americans,was the introductionof an unfree work force fromAfrica,

less by mistake or by chance than as an integral component of European

colonialism.And for severalreasons,despitethe socialand intellectual sound

and fury of 'the second reconstruction,"we still know remarkablylittle

about this crucialdevelopment.5 Firstof all, the new interest n blackhistory,

spurred by current events, spread backward through time. Rightly orwrongly, far greater attention was given to the most recent and accessible,

rather than to the most distantand formative,portionsof the Afro-American

past, and legalized race slaverycontinued to be considereda somewhat static

institution of the antebellum era. As with the works of U. B. Phillips,

Kenneth Stampp, and John Hope Franklinbefore them, the most prominent

of recent slavery studies (by Stanley Elkins, EugeneGenovese, Robert Fogel,

Stanley Engerman, John Blassingame, and Herbert Gutman, among oth-

ers), although greatly varied in vantage points, techniques, and level ofinsight, all say relatively little about the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-

turies. It took journalistAlex Haley's discoveryof his "furthest back"Afro-

American ancestor,KunteKinte, to drivehome the presenceof blacksin pre-

RevolutionaryAmerica in a public and dramatic way.6

4Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society. Needs and

Opportunitiesfor Study (Chapel Hill, N.C., i960), 75.

5 Considerthe following crudeindex. During the I7 years from the beginningofi960 to the end of I976, the

William and Mary Quarterly published407

articles.Only 26 of these articles, or a mere 6.4%,dealt directly with slavery, with racism, orwith blacks, even though Afro-Americansconstitutedmore than 20% of the popu-lation of the EnglishNorth Americancoloniesby the I770s. More articlesfocusedonslavery in Massachusettsthan in Virginia; in fact, over two-fifths of the 26 articlesrelated to the small black population north of Mason and Dixon's line while lessthan one-fifth concernedthe far largerenslavedpopulation to the south. Although adozen of the articlesdealt with Caribbean opics or with general issuesof slaveryandrace, none focused on the deep South regions Carolina,Georgia, Florida,Louisi-ana that later became central to the most extensivesingle plantationsystemin thehistory of the world.

Readers will notice that some of the same scholarlydistributionpatternsapply to this special issue of the Quarterly. (Incidentally,during the samei960-I976 period only I2 of 407 WMQ articles dealt directly with native Americansor with the attitudes of colonizers toward them, and emphasis again fell, notsurprisingly,on the northeasternregion.) I am indebted to Professor StevenGreiertfor these figures and for general bibliographicalhelp with this article.

6 Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery. A Problem in American Institutional and In-tellectual Life (Chicago, I959); Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of



STUDY OF EARLY BLACK HISTORY i89

Secondly,during the civil rights decades, even those scholarsconcerned

with questionsof race priorto i8oo were, like the white mainstreamculture

from which most of them came and to which most of them spoke, lessconcerned with blacks themselves than with white attitudes and responses

toward blacks. During the years of the most pronounced integration

struggle, the complex origins among European-Americansof egalitarian

abolitionistsentimentson the one hand, and deepseatedracist beliefs on the

other, became issuesof increasedrelevance.It is not surprising hatseveralof

the largest and most widely read books by historiansof the colonial era to

appear during the recent era, which has sometimes been designated the

second reconstruction,center on these topics.7 The impressive studies of

David Brion Davis and Winthrop D. Jordan constitutedrelated essays inEuropean-Americanntellectualhistory,dealingdeeplyand suggestivelywith

the evolution of importantwhite attitudes and institutionsfrom the seven-

teenth to the nineteenth century.8

Slavery. Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, i965);

Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made. Two Essaysin Interpretation(NewYork, i969); Genovese, In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations n SouthernandAfro-American History (New York, i968); Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll. The

World the Slaves Made (New York, I974); Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L.Engerman, Time on the Cross. The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston,I974); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community. Plantation Life in the Ante-bellum South (New York, I972); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slaveryand Freedom, 750-i925 (New York, I976); Alex Haley, Roots (New York, I976).

7 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery n Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.,i966); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black. American Attitudes toward theNegro, I550-i8I2 (Chapel Hill, N.C., i968). Jordan condensed his massive researchin The White Man's Burden. Historical Origins of Racism in the United States(New York, I974), and Davis extended his study in The Problem of Slaveryin the

Age of Revolution,I770-i823

(Ithaca, N.Y.,I975).

It is noteworthy that Edmund S.Morgan's sweeping study (American Slavery-American Freedom. The Ordeal ofColonial Virginia [New York, I975]) of tidewater Virginia's slave-based colonialculture revolves around the contrasting themes explored by Jordan and Davis.Morgan's work is, as the title implies, an examination of the evolving dialectic withinwhite settlers between ideas of race supremacy and notions of republican equality.Despite the suggestive use of economic, demographic, and anthropologicaldetail toexamine the lives of all inhabitants-red, white, and black-the action, and theanguish, continue to belong largely to Europeans; he "Ordeal of Colonial Virginia"remains for the most part a white ordeal.

8 These comprehensive studies were widely-and wrongly-assumed to bebooks about the Afro-American experience. The generation of Stanley Elkins, notwholly unlike the generation of Justin Winsor, still saw black history predominantlyin terms of white actions toward a passive people. To say, as liberal scholarsdid, thatwhite slave traders traumatized black migrants, that white plantersthen destroyedthe black families, and that white activists finally integrated the black-belt South,was merely to revise and extend the old story in which mastersgave Christianitytotheir workersand President Lincolnfreed the slaves. In a certainlimited sense, each



I90 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

And yet, despite these limiting tendencies, the second reconstruction aw

a noticable shift in both the qualityand quantityof researchregardingblacks

in early America. A great deal occurred in the decades after Bailyn'sobservation the independencemovement in Africa, the civil rights move-

ment at home, the reassessmentof colonialistand imperialistbehavior both

past and present-to prompt the deeper explorationof black roots.9What

had been clearto the RichardWrights of the world for generationsbegan to

becomeevident to mainstreamhistorians: hat the Afro-Americanexperience

is both vital and recoverable, hat much of it transpiredbefore the nineteenth

century, and that not all of it depended upon the thoughts and actions of

white folks. Surroundedby importantcontemporary acial currents,colonial

scholars ooked increasingly or related threads in early America, becominga

small partof the largereffort best described as "the boom in blackhistory."For more than a decade intellectual, political, and commercialmotives came

together productively; historical fact challenged televised fiction, and viceversa. The boom assuagedguilt for some and strengthenedconsciousness or

others; it questionedtraditionalassumptions,broadened horizons and lined

pockets. The explosion was aided substantiallyby the sheer leap in numbers

of doctorate-carrying istoriansduring the sixties and early seventies. But it

was aided by "demography" in another way as well. Particularly in thecolonialfield, the New Englandtown studiesmentionedearlierhad the little-

recognizedeffectof makingthe studyof all the people in a given populationseem legitimate, logical, even necessary.The obvious but radicalbottom line

of sounddemographicwork is that everybodycounts not only the sinnersaswell as the elect, but women as well as men, children as well as adults,

workersas well as those who live by their labor.

During the civil rights years the overall boom in black history fed upon

itself. Increased interest in the field promptedswift republicationof primary

and secondarysources ong out-of-print,a trend that usually encouraged but

of these observations contains some kernel of validity, but it is disconcerting torealize how thoroughly the past acts and assertions of European-Americans-theirbiases, their benevolence, their brutality-are still accepted as the moving force ofblack history.

9Cf. Michael Banton, "i960: A Turning Point in the Studyof Race Relations,"in Sidney W. Mintz, ed., Slavery, Colonialism, and Racism (New York, I974), 3I-

44. For a useful essay discussingfive "turning points" in the postwar historiographyof slaverysee David Brion Davis, "Slaveryand the Post-World War II Historians,"ibid., i-i6. (The distinguished colonial historian Wesley Frank Craven once told methat his interest in black colonists was aroused in part by students from newlyindependent African nations, participatingin a Princeton summer course on theAmerican Revolution during the early i96os, who asked searching questions regard-ing the attitudes of enslaved Afro-Americans toward the white struggle for inde-pendence.)



STUDY OF EARLY BLACK HISTORY I9I

occasionallypostponedor sidetracked)new scholarship.Valuable referenceworks and bibliographies appeared to assist in the intensified historicalsearch,10and new booksof documentswerecompiledto introducestudents othe field.1"Predictably,but regrettably, he routebackto the originalsourceswas made harder by the outpouringof new secondarymaterials;impressiveand/or controversialstudies spawned an ingrown and seemingly endlesschain letter of reviewsand critiques.In addition, new collections of excerptsand interpretiveessays flooded the shelves.'2From the start, a small portion

10See Elizabeth W. Miller, comp., The Negro in America. A Bibliography(Cambridge,Mass., i966); Erwin K. Welsch, The Negro in the United States. A

Research Guide (Bloomington, Ind., i968); Peter M. Bergman and Mort N.Bergman, comps., The ChronologicalHistory of the Negro in America (New York,i969); Darwin T. Turner,comp., Afro-American Writers (New York, I970); JamesM. McPherson et al., Blacks in America.' Bibliographical Essays (Garden City,N.Y., I97I); Earle H. West, comp., A Bibliography of Doctoral Research on theNegro, I933-i966 (New York, i969); the publicationsof Dolores C. Leffall at theMinority ResearchCenter in Washington, D.C.: BibliographicSurvey. The Negroin Print, Five Year Subject Index, i965-I970 (I97I); The Black Church.' AnAnnotated Bibliography (I973); and James P. Johnson, Black English.' An Anno-tated Bibliography (1973). A recent critical bibliography of particularvalue in the

studyof Old

World survivals s William B. Helmreich, comp., Afro-AmericansandAfricans.'Black Nationalism at the Crossroads(Westport, Conn., I977). See alsoJoseph C. Miller, comp., Slavery.'A ComparativeTeachingBibliography(Waltham,Mass., I977).

" During this period George P. Rawick and Norman D. Yetman worked toanalyzeand make available the massiveW.P.A. interviewswith formerslaves, whileArna Bontemps,LarryGara, William Katz, Gilbert Osofsky and othersrepublishedearlier slave narratives.See also Leslie H. Fishel, Jr., and Benjamin Quarles, eds.,The Negro American. A Documentary History (Glenview, Ill., i967); Philip D.Curtin,ed., Africa Remembered. Narratives by West Africansfrom the Era of theSlave Trade (Madison, Wis., i968); Dorothy Porter, ed., Early Negro

Writing,,I760-i837 (Boston, I971); RobertStarobin,ed., Slaveryas It Was.'The Testimony"ofthe SlavesThemselves While in Bondage (Chicago, I971); GerdaLerner, ed., #tackWomen in White America. A Documentary History (New York, I972); MichaelMullin, ed., American Negro Slavery. A DocumentaryHistory (New York, I976);

Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (NewYork, I976); and John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony.'Two CenturiesofLetters,Speeches, Interviews,and Autobiographies(Baton Rouge, La., I977).

12 For example, see the following books, several of which have gone into secondeditions: Melvin Drimmer, ed., Black History.'A Reappraisal (Garden City, N.Y.,I968); Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World.'AReaderin ComparativeHistory (EnglewoodCliffs, N.J., i969); Allen Weinstein andFrankOtto Gatell, eds., American Negro Slavery.'A Modern Reader (New York,i968); Richard D. Brown, ed., Slavery in American Society (Lexington, Mass.,I969); Irwin Unger and David M. Reimers, eds., The Slavery Experience in theUnited States (New York, I970); David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds.,Neither Slave nor Free (Baltimore, I972); Eugene 12).Genovese, ed., The SlaveEconomies. Volume I-Historial and TheoreticalPerspectives,Problems in Ameri-



I92 WILLIAM AND MARY QtJAR'IERLY

of this diversified boom in black history had direct bearingon the study of

early North America. Some of the work, put together hastily in the face of

academic, social and commercialpressures,added little to our understandingand is unlikely to survive the test of time. But much of it, when viewed

collectively, representsa substantivecontribution o the historiographyof the

colonial field.

This essay is an effort, no doubt premature,to survey that contribution.

What follows is not a complete bibliographicalreview of the literaturethat

has appearedwithin the lifetime of persons entering college today; nor is it

an exercise in awarding credit or blame to individual scholars. (It is my

assumption that, within the awesome constraints mposed by our inherited

cultureandour consciousnessas individuals,all of us who have writtenaboutblacks in early Americaduring recentyears have, like Major Wright, done

"the best we could for our day.") Instead, the essay suggests,more through

simple citation than elaboratediscussion,half a dozen of the patternsthat

have dominatedthe study of earlyblack historyduring the second reconstruc-

tion. The following section reviews colony-by-colony surveysof blacks and

scholarshipon the African diaspora.Then studies of the origins of colonial

racism and the "peculiar nstitution"areconsidered, as well as discussionsof

the evolution of Afro-American religion and culture. In addition, I havetouched upon analyses of early black resistance and treatmentsof blackresponses o the American Revolutionand related movements for emancipa-

tion.

The traditionalbuilding blocksof early American history, with its strong

political orientation, have been studies of single colonies or groups of

colonies. Even imaginative recent efforts by geographical historians have

taken their limits, somewhat paradoxically,more from political than from

social or ecological boundaries."' The same has remained true regarding

monographson blacks and slavery in early North America. Conceptually

prosaic but highly useful, this colony-by-colony picture has been filled in

significantly in recent decades. Consider Canada, for example, where the

can History (New York, I973); Stanley L. Engermanand Eugene D. Genovese, eds.,Race and Slavery n the WesternHemisphere. QuantitativeStudies(Princeton,N.J.,I975); Mintz, ed., Slavery, Colonialism, and Racism, Robert Brent Toplin, ed.,Slaveryand Race

Relations in Latin America, Contributionsn

Afro-American andAfrican Studies, No. I7 (Westport, Conn., I974); and Ann M. Pescatello, ed., OldRoots in New Lands. Historical and Anthropological Perspectiveson Black Experi-ences in the Americas (Westport, Conn., I977).

'3H. Roy Merrens, Colonial North Carolina in the Eighteenth Century. AStudy in Historical Geography (Chapel Hill, N.C., i964); Peter 0. Wacker, Landand People. A Cultural Geography of Preindustrial New Jersey. Origins andSettlement Patterns (New Brunswick, I975).



STUDY OF EARLY BLACK HISTORY I93

early chapters of Robin Winks' broad survey now provide an excellent

introductionto the primary and secondary literature."' Like Canada, the

early New England colonies had a low number and proportionof Negroes.The region east of the Hudson River Valley contained fewer than twenty

thousand blacks among nearly seven hundred thousand people at the time of

the Revolution,but their lives have been well documented.In I942 Lorenzo

Greene published The Negro in Colonial New England, a careful survey

which supercededa long but limited tradition of local scholarship.The book

was reprinted n i968 with a new preface by Benjamin Quarles,who pointed

out that "Greene's work remainsa pathbreaker" or "viewingthe Negro as

an actor as well as someone acted upon, a doer on his own."'5 The I955

doctoral dissertation of Lawrence Towner, portions of which have beenpublished, put Massachusetts slavery into its wider social context, and an

article twelve years ater, "Black Puritan: The Negro in Seventeenth-Century

Massachusetts" used legal records to depict black life in the early Bay

Colony.6

A higher proportion of blacks were located in New York than in any

other northern colony, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth century

most of them were enslaved and living in the town of New York or on the

large estates along the Hudson. (SojournerTruth, for example, was born onthe Hardenburgh estate in Ulster County, shortly before i8oo.) Their

situation and experiences have been outlined in a book by Edgar J.McManus. 7 As yet no similar volume deals with blacks in neighboringNew

Jersey, where slavery persistedfurther into the nineteenth century.Several

helpful bibliographies appeared during the mid-ig6os, and Peter Wacker's

14 Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada. A History (New Haven, Conn.,I971), and "The Canadian Negro: A HistoricalAssessment,"Jour. of Negro Hist.,LIII (i968), 283-300; ibid., LIV (i969), i-i8.

15 LorenzoJohnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York,

1968 [orig. publ. I942]), preface to the Atheneum ed., n.p. Cf. Greene's earlierarticles, "Slave-holding New England and Its Awakening,"Jour. of Negro Hist.,XIII (I928), 492-533, and "The New EnglandNegro as Seen in Advertisements orRunaway Slaves," ibid., XXIX (i944), I25-I46.

16 Lawrence W. Towner, " 'A Good Master Well Served': A Social History ofServitude in Massachusetts, i620-I750" (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University,

1955); Towner, " 'A Fondness for Freedom': Servant Protest in Puritan Society,"WMQ, 3d Ser., XIX (i962), 20I-2I9; Towner, "The Sewell-Saffin Dialogue onSlavery," ibid., XXI (i964), 40-52; Robert C. Twombly and Robert H. Moore,"Black Puritan: The Negro in Seventeenth-CenturyMassachusetts," ibid., XXIV(i967), 224-242; Roger N. Parks, "Early New England and the Negro," Paperpresentedto the Staff Seminar at Old SturbridgeVillage, Apr. 29, i969.

17 Edgar J. McManus, A History of Negro Slavery in New York (Syracuse,N.Y., i966). See also McManus'sbroader,more recentstudy,Black Bondage in theNorth (Syracuse,N.Y., I973).



I94 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

cultural geography contains a useful chapter on "European and African

Population Patterns."18Most recently, Frances Pingeon has completed a

Ph.D. dissertationfocusing on black life in eighteenth-centuryNew Jersey.She discussesthe impactof Afro-Americanson the culture and economy of

the Dutch townships n EastJersey,where slavesoften constitutedmore than

20 percent of the population. Pingeon examines the differences between

white attitudestoward blacks in the easterncounties settled by Dutch and

New Englandersand in the western counties settled by the Quakers. She

concludes by analyzing reasonsfor the continuationof legalized slavery in

New Jerseywell afterit had disappearedn New York and Pennsylvania.'9

A generation ago it was common to regard William Penn's Quaker

colony as a focal point of interracialharmony.But even Benjamin Franklin

did not hide his ethnic and racial prejudices,and in recent years historians

have given increasedattentionto Pennsylvania'sdemand for slave labor and

participationn the slave trade.20 In the year I973 alone GaryNash published

an essayon Philadelphiaslaves and slaveowners,Merle Brouwer completeda

dissertationon slavesand free blacks in the colony, Alan Tully producedan

article on patterns of slaveholding in two important counties, and Carl

Oblinger contributeda study of "The Making of a Black Underclass"after

I780 to a book of essayson Pennsylvaniahistory.21 In Maryland,recentworkby Russell Menard and Allan Kulikoff has been particularlydetailed and

18 Donald A. Sinclair, comp., The Negro and New Jersey. A Checklist of Books,Pamphlets, Official Publications, Broadsides and Dissertations, 1754-1964, in theRutgers University Library (New Brunswick, i965); BibliographyCommittee of theNew Jersey LibraryAssociation, comp., New Jersey and the Negro.'A Bibliography,1715-1966 (Trenton, i967); Wacker, Land and People, chap. 3 and Appendices i-8.See also the intriguing discussion in David Steven Cohen, The Ramapo Mountain

People (New Brunswick, N.J., I974), chap.2.

9 Frances D. Pingeon, " 'Land of Slavery': Blacks in New Jersey from i665 toi846" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, I977). Cf. Simeon F. Moss, "The Per-sistenceof Slaveryand InvoluntaryServitudein a Free State (i685-i866)," Jour. ofNegro Hist., XXXV (1950), 289-314.

20 See Darold D. Wax, "The Demand for Slave Labor in Colonial Pennsylva-nia," PennsylvaniaHistory, XXXIV (i967), 33I-345, and also his related articles inn. 64 below. These useful essays are derived from Wax, "The Negro Slave Trade inColonial Pennsylvania" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, i962).

21 Gary B. Nash, "Slaves and Slaveowners n ColonialPhiladelphia," WAIQ, 3d

Ser., XXX(1973), 223-256;

Merle G. Brouwer,"The Negro as a Slave and as a FreeBlack in Colonial Pennsylvania" (Ph.D. diss., Wayne State University, I973); AlanTully, "Patterns of Slaveholding in Colonial Pennsylvania: Chester and LancasterCounties, I729-I758,"Journal of Social History, VI ('973), 284-305; Carl Oblinger,"Alms for Oblivion: The Making of a Black Underclass in SoutheasternPennsylva-nia, I780-i860," in John E. Bodnar, ed., The Ethnic Experience in Pennsylvania

(Lewisburg, I973), 94-II9.




important.22 Both scholarshave drawnon, and added to, a growing body of

material-archival, bibliographic, even archaeological-concerning black

life in the Chesapeakeregion from seventeenthto the nineteenthcentury.23For Delaware, in contrast, it is still necessaryto go back to essayswritten

before i960.24

Since more Afro-Americanslived in the tidewater region than in any

other North Americancolony, their situation inevitablycame undercareful

scrutinyduring the second reconstruction.Winthrop Jordan and Edmund

Morgan were not the only ones to reexamine the sources of Virginia

enslavement n recentyears.25By no means all slavesworked in the tobacco

fields, as studies of black life in colonial Williamsburg and on the Chesa-

peake"iron plantations"made clear.26 And whatevertheiroccupation,manyfound the means for individualor collectiveprotest,so that a I972 study of

slave resistance revealed a great deal about the entire black minority in

22 See, for example, Russell R. Menard, "The Maryland Slave Population, i658to I730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties," WMQ, 3d Ser.,XXXII (0975), 29-54; and Allan Kulikoff, "Black Society and the Economics ofSlavery," Maryland Historical Magazine, LXX (0975), 203-2Io.

23See Frank A. Cassell, "Slaves of the Chesapeake Bay Area and the War ofi8I2," Jour. of Negro Hist., LVII (1972), I44-I55; Ross M. Kimmel, "Free Blacks inSeventeenth-CenturyMaryland," Md. Hist. Mag., LXXI (1976), I9-25; Nancy G.Boles, "Notes on MarylandHistorical SocietyManuscriptCollections:Black HistoryCollections," Maryland Historical Society, CVI (1971), 72-78; and Raphael Cassi-mere, Jr., "The Origins and Early Development of Slavery in Maryland, i633 toI7I5- (Ph.D. diss., Lehigh University, I971). Some unique work on early materialculture has been done by Cary Carson, George McDaniel and others under theauspicesof the St. Mary's City Commissionand the Smithsonian Institution.

24 Frank J. Klingberg, "The African Immigrant in Colonial Pennsylvania andDelaware," HistoricalMagazine of the ProtestantEpiscopalChurch,XI (I942), I26-

I53;John A. Munroe, "The Negro in Delaware," South Atlantic Quarterly,LVI

(0I957),428-444.2Robert McColley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia (Urbana, Ill., i964);

Robert S. Cope, Carry Me Back.' Slavery and Servitude in Seventeenth-Century

Virginia (Pikeville, Ky., I973), based on a Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, I950;and the numerousworks cited in nn. 75-78 below. Foran interestingspecializedessayseeJohn EdmundStealey III, "The Responsibilitiesand Liabilitiesof the Bailee ofSlave Laborin Virginia,"AmericanJournal of Legal History,XII (i968), 336-353\

26Thad W. Tate, The Negro in Eighteenth-CenturyWilliamsburg (Charlottes-ville, Va., i966); Ronald L. Lewis, "Slaveryon ChesapeakeIron Plantations before

the AmericanRevolution,"Jour. of Negro Hist., LIX (i974), 242-254; Lewis,1 The

Use and Extent of SlaveLabor in the ChesapeakeIron Industry:The ColonialEra,"Labor History, XVII (1976), 388-4I2; ?cf.Lewis's "Slaveryin the ChesapeakeIronIndustry,I716-i865" (Ph.D. diss., Universityof Akron, I974); and CharlesB. Dew,"Disciplining Slave Ironworkersin the Antebellum South: Coercion, Conciliation,and Accommodation,"Americah Historical Review, LXXIX (0974), 393-4i8.



i96 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Virginia.27 North Carolina'sblack minorityis similarlyrevealedin a smaller,

more recent monograph by Jeffrey Crow. His new study for the state's

Bicentennial Series outlines the growth of slavery in eighteenth-centuryNorth Carolina,and it will soon be augmentedby the briefgeneralsynthesis

of Raymond Gavins summarizingthe course of black history in the tarheel

state.28 Recent researchhas alreadymade it clear that while North Carolina

slaves managed to retain certainrights underthe statutesregulatingblacks,

their masterssucceeded n manipulating he punishmentsystemto their own

maximumbenefit.29

The vast, complexand neglectedregionto the southand westof Virginia

and North Carolina,describedwell by Verner Crane fifty years ago in The

SouthernFrontier,changed more slowly and along somewhatdifferent ines.

This area between the Sea Islands and the grasslandsof Texas, from the

Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico, containedfewerthan five hundredblacks

in i685, but in little more than a century, their numbersrose, by I790, to

roughly one hundred eighty thousand. More importantly,during the half

centurypriorto the Revolution,blackresidentsoutnumberedwhitesnot only

in lowland South Carolina but throughout the deep southern region as a

whole.3 The harshandvariedcircumstances onfrontingthousandsof Afro-

Americanswho reachedthe New World at Charleston,Savannah,and NewOrleans still remain relativelyunknown, but much has been learned in the

pasttwo decades aboutthe adjustmentsand the impactmade by thesepeople.

Despite, or perhaps in reaction against, the New Englandizationprocess

described earlier, scholarshipconcerning South Carolina,3' Georgia32and

27Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion. Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York, I972). This work originated as a dissertation at

Berkeley directed by Winthrop Jordan."Jeffrey J. Crow, The Black Experience in Revolutionary North Carolina(Raleigh, I977); Raymond Gavins, Black Carolinians. A Profile (forthcoming). Cf.James H. Boykin, The Negro in North Carolina Prior to i86i, an HistoricalMonograph (New York, I958).

29 Ernest James Clark, Jr., "Aspects of the North Carolina Slave Code, I7I5-

i86o," North Carolina Historical Review, XXXIX (i962), I48-i64; Marvin L.Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary,

-'The Planters SufferLittle or Nothing': North

Carolina Compensationsfor Executed Slaves, I748-I772," Science and Society, XL

(1976), 288-306.

30 Verner W. Crane, The SouthernFrontier, i670-1732 (Durham, N.C., I929).Over the entire South, excluding Virginia and North Carolina, the African andEuropean populationsrose respectivelyfrom 26,ooo and I4,000 in I730 to I36,000

and io6,ooo in I775.

31 M. Eugene Sirmans, Colonial South Carolina.'A Political History, 1663-1763(Chapel Hill, N.C., i966); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority.'Negroes in ColonialSouth Carolina rom 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, I974). DanielLittlefield and Philip Morgan of the Program in Atlantic History and Culture at




Louisiana33has expandednotably in recentyears and given increasedatten-

tion to blacks.By contrast,the storiesof the eighteenth-centuryNegroes who

lived in Florida, and of the smaller numberswho found themselvesin whatwould become Alabama, Mississippi,Tennessee and Kentucky still remain

largely unexplored. The same must be said of scattered black slaves and

freemenliving in the diversifiedregion to the west of the lower Mississippi,

though a few scholarsduring the second reconstruction eturnedto the trail

exploredby Major Wright.34One, Fray Angelico Chavez, even managedto

uncover fascinatingevidence that Domingo Naranjo, the descendantof a

Spanish-speakingNegro and an Indian woman, played a crucial role in the

dramatic and successfulPueblo Uprising of i68o.35

The expansionof colony-by-colonystudiesof blacks in North America

gave immediate priority to another matter. As the significantpresenceof

Africans began to be more fully acknowledged,their origins and mode of

Johns Hopkins University have recentlycompleted doctoral dissertationson aspectsof slavery in early South Carolina.

32See the discussions of blacks and slavery in the recent general studies byKenneth Coleman, Harold E. Davis, and Phinizy Spalding, plus the following

articles: Darold D. Wax, "Georgia and the Negro before the American Revolu-tion," Georgia Historical Quarterly, LI (i967), 63-77; Douglas C. Wilms, "TheDevelopment of Rice Culture in Eighteenth CenturyGeorgia," SoutheasternGeog-rapher,XII (2972), 45-57; James R. Hertzler, "Slavery n the Yearly Sermons[173I-

I750] before the Georgia Trustees," Ga. Hist. Qtly., LIX (Supplement,I975), ii8-I26. The English scholar, Betty C. Wood of Cambridge University, author of"ThomasStephens and the Introductionof Black Slaveryin Georgia," ibid., LVIII

0974), 24-40, wrote her doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania

(0975) on the slaverydebate in Georgia prior to I750 and is currentlycompleting abook-length study on the colony.

3

To go beyond Joe Gray Taylor, Negro Slavery in Louisiana (Baton Rouge,La., i963), see James Thomas McGowan, "Creation of a Slave Society: LouisianaPlantationsin the Eighteenth Century"(Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, I976),

his subsequent article, "Planters Without Slaves: Origins of a New World LaborSystem," SouthernStudies,XVI (I977), 5-26 (formerlyLouisianaStudies), and thework of Daniel Usner, now in progress.Cf. CharlesB. Rousseve, The Negro in NewOrleans (New Orleans, i969); MarcusChristian, Negro Ironworkersof Louisiana,1718-1900 (Gretna, I972); Tommy R. Young II, "The United StatesArmy and theInstitutionof Slaveryin Louisiana: i803-i8I5," LouisianaStudies,XIII (I974), 20I-

222.

34Jack D. Forbes, "Black Pioneers: TheSpanish-SpeakingAfro-Americans

ofthe Southwest," Phylon, XXVII (i966), 233-246; Carroll L. Riley, "Blacks in theEarlySouthwest,"Ethnohistory,XIX (1972), 247-260; John U. Terrell, Estevanico,the Black (Los Angeles, i968); Alwyn Barr,Black Texans.'A History of Negroes inTexas, 1528-I971 (Austin, I973).

3 Fray Angelico Chavez, "Pohe-Yemo's Representativeand the Pueblo Revoltof i68o," New Mexico HistoricalReview, XLII (i967), 85-I26. Cf. Chavez's earlierarticle, "De Vargas' Negro Drummer," El Palacio, LVI 0949), I3I-I38.



i98 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARITERI V

arrivalbecame topics of increasinginterest. The centuries-longdispersalofthe peoples of Africa to other parts of the world, known as the African

diaspora,drew the renewed attention of growing numbers of scholars.36 Ifblacks had accompaniedColumbus andsubsequentEuropeanexplorersof theNew World, then it had to be asked,firstof all, whetherthey also couldhavereached America directly from Africa in the centuries before Europeancontact. It had long been speculatedby some that they could have, and did.In i854, MartinDelany and other blacksattending the National EmigrationConvention of ColoredPeople in Pittsburghissueda statement which main-tained that:

amongthe earliest and most numerousclass who found theirwayto thenew world, were those of the African race. And it has been ascertainedto our minds beyond a doubt, that when the continent was discovered,there were found in the West Indies and CentralAmerica, tribes of theblack race, fine looking people, havingthe usualcharacteristics f colorand hair, identifyingthem as being originallyof the African race.37

During subsequentgenerations scholarskept alive this speculation.38n I959

a respected Africanist noted that, "Omari, in the tenth chapter of hisMasalik al-absad, reproducesa story which suggests that Atlantic voyageswere made by marinersof West Africa in the times of the EmperorKankanMusa of Mali; and which roundly states that the predecessorsof KankanMusa embarked on the Atlantic with 'two thousand ships' and sailedwestwardand disappeared."39

At the beginning of the i960s, therefore, it was alreadyplausible, a fulldecade before Thor Heyerdahl's celebrated transatlanticcrossing on theAfrican-builtRa II, for authorsto be asserting he logic of an ancientAfricanconnection. In i96i the prolific black writer, Joel A. Rogers, published

Africa's Gift to America, and a year later The Crisisprinted"an account ofthe achievements and transatlanticvoyages of some West African king-doms."40 Revived interest in the general topic of pre-Columbiancontactsgave added impetus to these assertions, and by the late i960s articles were

36George Shepperson, "The African Abroad, or the African Diaspora," inT. 0. Ranger, ed., Emerging Themes in African History (Nairobi, i968); MartinKilson and Robert I. Rotberg, eds., The African Diaspora (Cambridge, I976).

3 Floyd W. Hayes III, "The African Presence in America before Columbus:ABibliographicalEssay," Black World, XXII (I973), 4-22, quotation is on p. 9.38See especially Leo Wiener, Africa and the Discovery of America, 3 vols.

(Philadelphia, I920-I922).

39 Basil Davidson, The Lost Cities of Africa (Boston, I959), 74.40Joel A. Rogers, Africa's Gift to America (New York, i96i); Harold G.

Lawrence, "African Explorers of the New World," The Crisis,LXIX (i962), 32I-

332. For a scholarly symposium see Carroll L. Rilev et a'.. eds.AMan across the




appearing under such titles as, "The Beginning of the African Diaspora:Black Men in Ancient and Medieval America?"4' Further implications

continued to be drawn forth from the examination of terracottapottery,monumentalsculpture and skeletal remains, so that a i975 article by IvanVan Sertima in the New York Times could be headlined, "Bad News forColumbus,Perhaps."42For Van Sertimahimself there is no "perhaps";hisnew survey of the evidence is entitled, They Came before Columbus. TheAfrican Presence in Ancient America."

Whether or not Africanshad sailed to the New World in shipsof theirown making before Columbus, after I500 many more would cross theAtlanticin shipsbuilt by Europeans.The enormousexpropriation f enslaved

blacks between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries looms as thecentralchapterof the Africandiaspora,and in recentdecadeshistorianshavebeen drawn back to reexamine and retell the story of this transatlantictraffic.44The crossingitself had been known as "the middle passage" to thewhites who set out from Europe and who, if they survived,would returnthere with substantialprofits. For Africans the transitwas a "middle pas-sage" in a much more profoundsense.None of them could expect to returnfrom the voyage or to profit from it; they were part of the most extensive,

painful and long-term forced migrationin the history of the human race.

Sea. Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts (Austin, Tex., I971). For a sample of

more recent speculations see James Bailey, The God-Kings and the Titans (New

York, I973); R. A. Jairazbhoy, Old World Origins of New World Civilization(Totowa, N.J., I974), and Ancient Egyptians and Chinese in America (Totowa,

N.J., I974); Barry Fell, America, B.C..- Ancient Settlers in the New World (NewYork, I976).

4' Legrand H. Clegg II, "The Beginning of the AfricanDiaspora:Black Men inAncient and Medieval America?" A Current Bibliography on African Affairs, N.S.,

II (i969), I3-32. Cf. Clegg, "Ancient America: A Missing Link in Black History?,"

ibid., V (1972), 286-3I9.

42Ivan Van Sertima, "Bad News for Columbus, Perhaps," New York Times,Dec. 4, I975. Cf. Alexander von Wuthenau, The Art of Terracotta Pottery in Pre-

Columbian Central and South America (New York, I970), 79, i87, and Unexpected

Faces in Ancient America (New York, I975).

43(New York, I977).

The general summariesappearing during the second reconstruction nclude:Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade. Precolonial History, 1450-1850 (Boston,i96i) (originally published as Black Mother. The Years of the African Slave Trade

[London, i96i]); Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes. A

History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865 (New York, i962); James Pope-

Hennessy, Sins of the Fathers. A Study of the Atlantic Slave Traders, 1441-1807

(New York, i967); Oliver Ransford, The Slave Trade. The Story of Transatlantic

Slavery (London, I971). But see also Philip D. Curtin, "The Atlantic Slave Trade,i6oo-i8oo," in J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, eds., History of West Africa, I

(London, I97I), 240-268.



200 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Just how extensivebecame the subjectof Philip D. Curtin'spioneeringdemographic survey, The Atlantic Slave Trade. A Census, published inI969. " The appearanceof Curtin'sbook, surely the most

importantscholarlywork of its generation regarding the diaspora, representedsomething of ahigh water mark for rational, revisionistresearchduring the second recon-struction. Broadly conceived and imaginatively executed, the study had alow-key title, a moderatetone and a statisticalbasis that limited its immedi-ate impact. But Curtinmanagedto demonstratecarefullyand convincingly,within the limits of his available data, that the net movement of enslavedAfricansacross the Atlantic during the courseof four centuries nvolved notthe traditionallyaccepted igureof overtwentymillionpersons,but a number

strikinglydifferent-yet still awesome-of closerto ten million. The under-lying message of the study was not that the trade in slaves was "lesssignificant"in any way than had been assumed, but rather this vast phe-nomenonwas still surroundedby gross ignorance,much of which might beovercomewith furtherstudy. Curtin'sbook both epitomized and encouragedthe tendencyto reexamine aspectsof the slave trade in detail.

For Curtin's fellow Africanists, questions of the extent of precolonialslaveryand the participationof black elites in the Europeanoverseas trade

have been as debatable historically and as controversialpolitically as thequestion of the slave trade's demographic scale. From the beginning ofcontact, it was in the interest of Europeans to portrayforced servitude inAfrican cultures as traditional,widespreadand cruel. Books written in thelate eighteenth century,when the moralityof the profitabletrade in humanbeings was under attack,stressed that slaveryand slave tradingwere deeplyrooted in West Africa and that transportation o ChristianAmericacould beregardedas a reprieveand an opportunity.46 The natureand scope of slaveryin West Africa, therefore, has been a delicate topic for recent historians.J. D. Fage wrotesweepinglyin I959 that "the presenceof a slave classamongthe coastalpeoples meant that there was alreadya class of humanbeingswhocould be sold to Europeansif there was an incentive. . . . So the coastalmerchantsbegan by selling the domesticslaves in theirown tribes."47But ten

45 (Madison, Wis., i969). Cf. J. E. Inikori, "Measuring the Atlantic SlaveTrade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey,"Journal of African History, XVII(I976), I97-224. Curtinbegan his studywith an historiographicchapter,"The SlaveTrade and the Numbers Game: A Review of the Literature,"

which traced thewayward totals for the transatlanticAfrican migration and provides a useful cau-tionarytale for all historians.

46See, for example, Robert Norris, Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahadee,King of Dahomey (London, I789), and Archibald Dalzell, A History of Dahomey(London, I793).

47J. D. Fage, An Introductionto the History of West Africa, 2d ed. (London,I959), 78.



STUDY OF EARLY BLACK HISTORY 20I

yearslater Fage concludedmore cautiously"that economic and commercial

slaveryand slave-tradingwere not natural features of West African society,

but that they developed . . . as a form of labour mobilizationto meet the

needsof a growingsystemof foreigntradein which, initially,the demandfor

slaves as tradegoods was relatively insignificant."He emphasizedthat "the

Europeandemand for slaves for the Americas,which reached its peak from

about i650 to about i850, accentuatedand expandedthe internalgrowth of

both slavery and slave trade."48The degree to which African societies,

whatever their slaveholding traditions, participated in the rising oceanic

trade and were effected by it-has been open to increasing study and

debate.

48J. D. Fage, "Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African

History," Jour. of African Hist., X (i969), 404, italics added. See also Walter

Rodney, "African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper

Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave Trade," ibid., VII (i966), 43I-

444, and Claude Meillassoux, L'Esclavage en Afrique Pre'coloniale (Paris, I975) (07studies presented at a seminar in Paris in the early I970s), as well as the essays in

Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson, Daniel M. Fox, eds., Key Issues in the Afro-

American Experience, I (New York, I971): Marion Dusser De Barenne Kilson,

"West African Society and the Atlantic Slave Trade, I44I-i865," 39-53; Basil

Davidson, "Slaves or Captives? Some Notes on Fantasy and Fact," 54-73; and PhilipD. Curtin, "The Slave Trade and the Atlantic Basin: Intercontinental Perspectives,"

74-93.49 See Norman R. Bennett, "Christian and Negro Slavery in Eighteenth-Century

North Africa," Jour. of African Hist., I (i960), 65-82; A. E. Gibson, "Slavery in

West Africa," Journal of the African Society, III (i963-i964), I7-54; Allan G. B.

Fisher and Humphrey J. Fisher, Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa. The

Institution in Saharan and Sudanic Africa and the Trans-Saharan Trade (London,

I970); Allan Meyers, "Slavery in the Hausa Fulani Emirates," in Daniel F. McCall

and Norman R. Bennett, eds., Aspects of West African Islam, Boston University

Papers in African History, V (Boston, I971), I73-i84; L. 0. Sanney, "Slavery, Islam,and the Jalhanke People of West Africa," Africa, XLVI (1976), 80-97; and Suzanne

Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa. Historical and Anthropological

Perspectives(Madison, Wis., I977).

In addition see Herbert J. Foster, "Partners or Captives in Commerce? The Role

of Africans in the Slave Trade," Journal of Black Studies, VI (1976), 42I-434;

Albert van Dantzig, "Effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Some West African

Societies," Revue francaise d'histoire d'outre-mer, LXII (0975), 252-269; Philip D.

Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa. Senegambia in the Era of the Slave

Trade (Madison, Wis., I975), chap. 4; Walter Rodney, "Upper Guinea and the

Significance of the Origins of Africans Enslaved in the New World," Jour. of Negro

Hist., LIV (i969), 327-345; Richard Bean, "A Note on the Relative Importance of

Slaves and Gold in West African Exports," Jour. of African Hist., XV (I974), 35I-

356; Walter Rodney, "Gold and Slaves on the Gold Coast," Historical Society of

Ghana, Transactions, X (i969), I3-28; Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade.

An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle, Wash., i966 [2d ed., i968]); Dov

Ronen, "On the African Role in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Dahomey,"

Cahiers d'etudes africaines, XI (i970), 5-I3; Peter Morton-Williams, "The Oyo




Intensified interest in the large-scale black deportationshas not been

confined to Africanists; others have subjectedaspectsof the slave trade to

increasinglyclose study. For example, ever since Eric Williams,Trinidad's

remarkableblindpolitician-scholar,publishedhis provocativeCapitalismand

Slaveryin I944, historianshave been forced to reexaminethe trade's"profit-

ability."50 Likewise, conditions aboard ship and rates of mortality (for

Europeansailorsas well as African captives)have becometopicsof increased

study; whether or not the middle passage proved healthy for capitalistsin

Europe andAmerica,it wasdistinctlyunhealthyfor all those obligedto make

the trip." Some attention, though by no means enough, has also been given

to the recurrentphenomenon, against staggeringodds, of shipboardresis-

tance and revolt.52Other articles have dealt with individual personagesor

Yoruba and the Atlantic Trade, i670-I830," Journal of the Historical Society of

Nigeria, III (i964), 25-45; Rosemary Harris, "The History of Trade at Ikom,

EasternNigeria," Africa, LXII (0972), I22-I39; E. A. Ayandele, "Observationson

Some Social and Economic Aspects of Slavery in Pre-ColonialNorthern Nigeria,"

NigerianJournal of Economic and Social Studies, IX (i967), 329-338; RichardD.

Graham, "The Slave Trade, HumanSacrifice,and Depopulationin Benin History,"

Cahiersd'e'tudes africaines,VI (i965), 3I7-324; Michael Mason, "PopulationDen-

sity and 'Slaveraiding'-the Case of the Middle Belt of Nigeria,"Jour. of AfricanHist., X (i969), 55I-564; and David Northrup, "The Growth of Trade among the

Igbo before i8oo," ibid., XIII (1972), 2I7-236. See also, Milfred C. Fierce, "The

Atlantic Slave Trade: A Case for Reparations,"Negro History Bulletin, XXXV

(0972), 44-47; and Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators,Black Slavers, and the African Elite (New York, I975).

50 (Chapel Hill, N.C., I944); Stanley L. Engerman, "The Slave Trade and

British CapitalFormationin the Eighteenth Century:A Commenton the Williams

Thesis," Business History Review, XLVI (1972), 430-443; Roger Anstey, "The

Volume and Profitabilityof the British Slave Trade, I76i-i807,- in Engermanand

Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery,3-32,

and Anstey, "Capitalismand Slavery-ACritique,"in The TransatlanticSlave Tradefrom West Africa (Edinburgh, i965),

I3-29; Robert Paul Thomas and Richard Nelson Bean, "The Fishersof Men: The

Profitsof the Slave Trade,"Journal of EconomicHistory, XXXIV 0974), 885-9x4;Simon Rottenberg, "The Business of Slave Trading," So. Atlantic Qtly., LXVI

(i967), 409-423.

51 Marie-ClaireChiche, Hygiene et sante6 bord des navires ne'griers u X VIIIe

siecle (Paris, I957); David L. Chandler, "Health Conditionsin the Slave Trade of

Colonial New Granada," in Toplin, ed., Slavery and Race Relations in Latin

America, 5I-88; Philip D. Curtin, "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade," Political

Science Quarterly,LXXXIII (i968),I90-2i6;

K. G. Davies, "TheLiving and the

Dead: White Mortality in West Africa, i684-I732," in Engerman and Genovese,

eds., Race and Slavery, 83-98; William D. Piersen, "White Cannibals, Black

Martyrs: Fear, Depression, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide Among New

Slaves,"Jour. of Negro Hist., LXII (I977), I47-I59.

5Darold D. Wax, "Negro Resistance to the Early American Slave Trade,"

Jour. of Negro Hist., LI (i966), I-I5; Raymond Mauny, "Revoltes d'esclaves aGoree au milieu du XVIIIe siele d'apres Pruneau de Pommegorge," Notes afri-

caines, CXLI (1974), 11-12.



STUDY OF EARLY BLACK HISTORY 203

ships.53And even the literary and artistic ramificationsof the trade have

come under consideration.54For the most part, however, studies of the slavetrade have been pursued

along geographic lines. Recent monographshave concerneddistinctive areas

of export such as East Africa, important centers of import such as the

Caribbean slands, and points of contact and competitionin the trade."5But

the most common categorization involves the nationality of the European

power that kept the profits,and the records. Slowly language barriershave

been overcome not only with respectto sourcesin Franceand Spain, but in

Holland, Denmark and Portugal as well.56 Still, the most important and

"Wax, "A Philadelphia Surgeon on a Slaving Voyage to Africa, I749-I75I,"PennsylvaniaMagazine of History and Biography, XCII (i968), 465-493; P. E. H.

Hair, "The Enslavementof Koelle's Informants,"Jour.of African Hist., VI (i965),I92-203; Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell, eds., TheJournal of a Slave Trader,I750-I754, with Newton's "Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade" (London,i962); Tom Hernderon Wells, The Slave Ship Wanderer (Athens, Ga., i967); PeterH. Wood, "Luck of the Fly," Sandlapper.The Magazine of South Carolina(Dec.I971), 49-57. Cf. n. 64 below.

54See, for example, William Heffernan, "The Slave Trade and Abolition in

Travel Literature,"Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXIV

(i973),i85-208.

55See Matilde Zimmerman, "The French Slave Trade at Mopambique, I770-I794" (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, i967); Edward A. Alpers, The EastAfrican Slave Trade (Nairobi, i967), and his essay,"The FrenchSlave Trade in EastAfrica, I72I-i8io," Cahiers d'etudes africaines, X (1970), 80-I24; Virginia Bever

Platt, "The East India Companyand the MadagascarSlave Trade," WMQ, 3d Ser.,XXVI (i968), 548-577; Leslie Imre Rudnyauszky, The Caribbean Slave Trade.Jamaica and Barbados, i680-I770 (South Bend, Ind., I973); RichardB. Sheridan,"Africa and the Caribbean in the Atlantic Slave Trade," AHR, LXXVII (1972), I5-

35; HerbertS. Klein, "North American Competitionand the Characteristics f theAfrican Slave Trade to Cuba, I790 to I794," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXVIII ('97'), 86-

I02. Cf. D. C. Corbett, "Shipmentsof Slaves from the United States to Cuba, I789-I807," Journal of Southern History, VII (i94i), 540-549.

56 On the Dutch see Johannes Postma, "The Dutch Participation n the AfricanSlave Trade: Slaving on the Guinea Coast, i675-I795" (Ph.D. diss., Michigan StateUniversity, I970), "The Dimension of the Dutch Slave Trade from WesternAfrica," Jour. of African Hist., XIII (1972), 237-248, as well as A. F. C. Ryder,

"Dutch Trade on the Nigerian Coast during the SeventeenthCentury,"Jour. of theHist. Soc. of Nigeria, III (i965), I95-2io, and Pieter C. Emmer, "The History of the

Dutch Slave Trade, A BibliographicalSurvey,"Jour. Econ. Hist., XXXII (1972),

728-747. On the Danish see Sven ErikGreen-Pedersen,"The Historyof the Danish

Negro Slave Trade, I733-i807: An Interim Survey Relating in Particular to its

Volume, Structure,Profitability, and Abolition," Revue francaise d'histoired'outre-

mer, LXII (i975), i96-220. On the Portuguese see Herbert S. Klein, "The Portu-guese Slave Trade from Angola in the Eighteenth Century,"Jour. Econ. Hist.,XXXII (1972), 894-9i8, and also Joseph C. Miller, "The Congo-Angola Slave

Trade," in Kilson and Rotberg, eds., African Diaspora, 75-II3. See also DavidBirmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola. The Mbundu and Their Neighbours

under the Influence of the Portuguese, I483-I790 (Oxford, i966); Phyllis M. Martin,




accessiblerecordsfor those studyingblackmigrantsto colonialNorth Amer-

ica concernthe English, and the dimensionsand innerworkingsof England's

slave trade have become better known in recent years. K. G. Davies'sstandardbook on The RoyalAfrican Company,reissuedat the height of the

black studiesboom, has been supplementedby worksconcerningthe origins

of the trade, its commercialstructure,and its eventualdemise.57

Scarcelyone out of every twenty deported Africans reaching the New

World arrived in North America. Even for English-speakingtraders, the

Caribbeanpredominatedover the mainland market.But it is the connections

between the continental colonies and the vast Atlantic trade that must

ultimatelyconcernthe scholarsof early Afro-Americanhistory.No one has

understood heseconnectionsor the sourcesof their studyso well as ElizabethDonnan, the Wellesley College economics professor who compiled four

volumesof slavetradedocumentsduringthe I930s. 58Studies done within the

past generationhave depended heavily upon her pioneeringlabors, and the

time has not yet arrivedfor a narrativesynthesisof Donnan'sandsubsequent

work." But it is worth noting the recent localized studies (some no doubt

"The Trade of Loango in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,"in Richard

Gray and David Birmingham, eds., Pre-ColonialAfrican Trade. Essayson Trade inCentral and EasternAfrica before i900 (London, I970), and Martin, The ExternalTrade of the Loango Coast, I576-i870.- The Effects of Changing Commercial

Relations on the Vili Kingdom of Loango (Oxford, I972).5 (London, I957); Ronald Pollitt, "John Hawkins's Troublesome Voyages:

Merchants, Bureaucrats,and the Origins of the Slave Trade," Journal of BritishStudies, XII (May I973), 26-40; Richard B. Sheridan, "The Commercial andFinancial Organization of the British Slave Trade, I750-i807," Economic HistoryReview, 2d Ser., XI (I958-I959), 249-263; Roger T. Anstey, The Atlantic SlaveTrade and British Abolition, I768-i8i0 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., I975); SuzanneMiers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade(New York, I975); PeterC. Hogg,

The African Slave Trade and Its Suppression London, I972). For a general surveysee Richard N. Bean, The British TransatlanticSlave Trade, i650-I775 (New York,I975), based on a Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, I97I. For an earlier shortsummary see John D. Hargreaves, "The Slave Traffic," in Alex Natan, ed., SilverRenaissance.Essays n Eighteenth-CenturyEnglish History (London, i96i), 8i-ioi.

58 Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of the SlaveTrade to America, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C., I930-I935 [reprinted, i965]). For anappraisal welcoming the collection's republication see Bruce Catton, "Reading,Writing, and History: Horror Taken for Granted," American Heritage, XVI(i965), 46-48. Also reprinted during these years was Helen T. Catterell,JudicialCasesConcerningAmerican Slavery, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C., I926-I937).

5 For short general essays see Arnold Whitridge, "The AmericanSlave Trade,"History Today, VIII (1958), 462-472, and the Hoover Library Pamphlet of PeterDuignan and ClarenceClendenen, America and the African Slave Trade (Stanford,Calif., i963). Recent topicalarticlesof value include Wax, "Preferences or SlavesinColonial America,"Jour. of Negro Hist., LVIII (i973), 37I-40i, and Roger Anstey,"The Volume of the North American Slave-CarryingTrade from Africa, i76i-




spurredby the i965 reprintingof Donnan'scollection) that will influenceanyfuture overview.

The patternsof forced migration of blacks to andthrough the deep Southcolonies Florida, Georgia and Louisiana have as yet been only partiallyglimpsed.60SouthCarolinahas receivedgreaterattention,both fromDonnan

and more recentwriters, lending substance o the view that colonial Charles-

ton (and more specifically Sullivan's Island, where a pest house for the

quarantineof newcomerswas located in the eighteenth century)can rightlybe regarded as the Ellis Island of black America.61 Less is known about the

coastal trade and overland marches that brought black immigrants into

eastern North Carolina,a fertile lowland cut off from overseas shippingby

the hazardousOuter Banks. "Great is the loss this Country has sustained nnot being supply'd by vessells from Guinea with Negroes," wrote North

Carolina'sgovernorin I733; ". . . as none come directly from Affrica, we are

under a necessity to buy, the refuse refractory and distemper'dNegroes,

brought from other Governments."62

The Chesapeake, n contrast,offereddirect accessto Atlantic vessels,and

i8io," Revue francaise d'histoire d'outre-mer, LXII (0975), 47-66. Eventually,

broaderstudies from Darold D. Wax, John M. Hemphill, and others may deepenunderstandingof this topic.60Frances J. Stafford, "Illegal Importations:Enforcement of the Slave Trade

Laws Along The Florida Coast, i8i0-i828," Florida Historical Quarterly, XLVI

(i967), I24-I33; Kenneth F. Kiple, "The Case against a Nineteenth-CenturyCuba-Florida Slave Trade," ibid., XLIX (I97I), 346-355. On Georgia and Louisi-

ana see nn. 32 and 33 above.

61 Elizabeth Donnan, "The Slave Trade into South Carolinabefore the Revolu-

tion," AHR, XXXIII (I928), 804-828; Wood, Black Majority, xiv, I3I-i66 and

AppendixC. The most work on this topic has been done by W. RobertHiggins, who

plans to publish a general study of "The Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina."His previouswork includes an essay in Kilson and Rotberg, eds., African Diaspora,II4-I3I, plus "CharlesTown Merchantsand FactorsDealing in the ExternalNegro

Trade, I735-I775," South Carolina Historical Magazine, LXV (i964), 205-2I7;

"The Geographical Origins of Negro Slaves in Colonial South Carolina," So.

Atlantic Qtly., LXX (I97I), 34-47; and "The South Carolina Negro Duty Law,

I703-I775" (M. A. thesis, University of South Carolina, i967). Other unpublished

master's heses areJeromeJ. Nadelhaft, "South Carolinaand the Slave Trade, I783-

I787" (Universityof Wisconsin, i96i) and CarlHarrisonBrown, "The Reopeningof

the Foreign Slave Trade in South Carolina, i803-i807" (University of South Caro-

lina, i968). See also PatrickS. Brady, "The Slave Trade and SectionalisminSouth

Carolina, I787-i808," Jour. So. Hist., XXXVIII (1972), 60i-620, and Daniel

Littlefield,"PlanterPreferences:A Study of Slaveryand the SlaveTrade in ColonialSouth Carolina" (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, I977).

62 Gov. George Burrington to Lords of Trade and Plantations, in William L.

Saunders,ed., The ColonialRecordsof North Carolina,III (Raleigh, i886), 430. "It

is hoped," Burrington added, "some Merchantsin Englandwill speedilyfurnish this

Colony with Negroes, to increasethe Produce and its Trade to England."




the thousands of workers brought to Maryland and Virginia during the

eighteenth century (such asJob Ben Solomon, OlaudahEquiano,and Kunte

Kinte) landed at small ports and riverfront docks rather than a singleimportant harbor. Particularlyin Virginia, where numberswere high and

recordswell-kept,the patternsof blackarrivalover space andtime have been

studied carefullyin recentyears.63 Furthernorth, especiallyin Pennsylvaniaand Rhode Island, research has focused (perhaps inevitably) more on the

careersof individual white merchants.64One interesting exception to this,however, is the historiographicnote of Gilman M. Ostrander,"The Making

of the TriangularTrade Myth," published in I973.65

If it was logical duringReconstruction I to explorethe black presence neach colony and to examine the external featuresof the holocaustknown asthe slavetrade,it was equally logical and farmore necessary or whites to

explore the Europeanmindset that prompted this removal and perpetuatedthe systemof exploitationaroundwhich it grew. A sizable historicallitera-ture evolved surveying the tangled thicket where material interests, racial

assumptionsand moral convictions all intertwined.Much of this literaturefocusedon the colonial period. Indeed, a good deal of it focused on a single

plantationin eighteenth-centuryVirginia, the much-studiedJefferson estateat Monticello. 6 When the Frenchman,the comte de Volney, visited Thomas

63 See, for example, Darold D. Wax, "Negro Import Duties in Colonial

Virginia: A Study in British Commercial Policy and Local Public Policy," Virginia

Magazine of History and Biography, LXXIX (I97i), 29-44, and Herbert S. Klein,

"Slaves and Shipping in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," Journal of InterdisciplinaryHistory, V (975), 383-4I2. Two related master's theses at the College of William

and Mary are Elizabeth Louise Suttell, "The British Slave Trade to Virginia, i698-

I728" (i965), and Charles Lintner Killinger, "The Royal African Company Slave

Trade to Virginia, i689-I7I3" (i969).

64 See the useful articles of Darold D. Wax, "Quaker Merchants and the Slave

Trade in Colonial Pennsylvania," PMHB, LXXXVI (i962), I43-I59; "Robert Ellis,

Philadelphia Merchant and Slave Trader," ibid., LXXXVIII (i964), 52-69; "Ne-

gro Imports into Pennsylvania, I720-I766," Pa. Hist., XXXII (i965), 254-287; and

"The Browns of Providence and the Slaving Voyage of the Brig Sally, I764-I765,"

American Neptune, XXXII (1972), I7I-I79; plus Virginia Bever Platt, " 'And Don't

Forget the Guinea Voyage': The Slave Trade of Aaron Lopez of Newport," WMQ,

3d Ser., XXXII (0975), 6oi-6i8, and an earlier article by Kenneth Scott, "George

Scott: Slave Trader of New Port," Am. Neptune, XII (1952), 222-228.65

WMQ, 3d Ser., XXX (i973), 635-644.

66 On Jefferson, see the works of Julian Boyd, Thomas Fleming, Dumas Malone,

and Merrill D. Peterson, as well as Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate

History (New York, I974), and Page Smith,Jefferson, A Revealing Biography (New

York, I976). See also, Erwin Betts and James Bear, Jr., eds., The Family Letters of

Thomas Jefferson (Columbia, Mo., i96i); James A. Bear, ed., Jefferson at Mon-

ticello (Charlottesville, Va., i967); Marvin Meyers, ed., The Mind of the Founder




Jefferson in June I796, he was dismayed to find his Revolutionary friend,

short whip in hand, surveyinghis fields of unpaidblack workers. But white

Americans in the Kennedy and post-Kennedy years became fascinated,almost obsessed, by the split image of their country's eading philosopher.If

anything,Jefferson's ambivalenceas a proponentand violator of the rights of

man, a lover and exploiter of blacks, made him seem more accessible andmore emblematic to many contemporaries.Stories of miscegenation,manu-

mission, and violence in the Jefferson family allowed another generationof

writers and readers to externalize and in some ways legitimize continuing

uncertaintiesabout race without sacrificing he culture's preoccupationwith

one of the Great White Fathers.67For all their efforts, historians seemed

unable fully to transcend or dismiss the notion that early black historycenteredon the thoughts and acts of the Monticello slaveholder.And yet,

while the author of the Declaration of Independenceremained an irresistible

symbolfor suchprominentcolonial historiansas EdmundMorgan, David B.

Davis, and Winthrop D. Jordan, their work drew upon, contributed o, and

inspired a recent body of scholarship on English attitudes toward Negroes

that goes well beyondthe biographical.8 Indeed, a steadyflow of workssince

i960 has dealt with the development of racial thought in the New World

generally and in North America particularly.69

(Indianapolis, I973). On the families of enslaved workers at Monticello see the

projectedarticle of Ira Berlin, Herbert Gutman, and Mary Beth Norton.

67Charles Callan Tansill, The Secret Loves of the Founding Fathers. The

Romantic Side of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,GouverneurMorris, Alexander Hamilton (New York, i964); Fawn M. Brodie,

"Thomas Jefferson's Unknown Grandchildren: A Study in Historical Silence,"

American Heritage, XXVII (I976), 28-33, 94-99. Cf. William Cohen, "Thomas

Jefferson and the Problemof Slavery,"Journal of American History, LVI (Dec.,

i969), 503-526; David Brion Davis, Was ThomasJefferson an Authentic Enemy of

Slavery? (Oxford, I970); Boynton Merrill, Jr., Jefferson's Nephews. A Frontier

Tragedy (Princeton, NJ., I976); John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears.

Thomas Jefferson and Slavery (New York, I977).

68 For discussionsof racismin Europeancivilizationsee KatherineGeorge, "The

Civilized West Looks at Primitive Africa, I400-I800: A Study in Ethnocentrism,"

Isis, XLIX (1958), 62-72; Dante A. Puzzo, "Racism and the Western Tradition,"

Jour. Hist. of-Ideas, XXV (i964), 579-586. On the black experience in England see

James Walvin, Black and White. The Negro and English Society, I555-I945

(London, I973).69 The first and perhapsmost provocativeof these studieswas William Stanton,

The Leopard'sSpots. ScientificAttitudes toward Race in America, i8i5-i859 (Chi-

cago, i960). See also Thomas Gossett, Race. The History of an Idea in America

(Dallas, Tex., i963); Marvin Harris,Patternsof Race in the Americas (New York,

i964); Louis Ruchames,ed., Racial Thought in America. Vol. I. From the Puritans

to Abraham Lincoln (Amherst, Mass., i969); Gary B. Nash, "Red, White, and

Black: The Origins of Racism in Colonial America," in Gary B. Nash and Richard




The generation witnessinga culmination of the civil rights struggle was

obliged to ask difficult questionsabout the relationshipbetween intellectual

racism (prejudice) and institutionalracism (slavery, peonage, segregation).In I959, Carl N. Degler argued in his essay "Slaveryand the Genesis of

American Race Prejudice" that "the status of the Negro in the English

colonieswas worked out within a frameworkof discrimination"and "thatas

slavery evolved as a legal status, it reflected and included as part of its

essence, this same discriminationwhich white men had practicedagainstthe

Negro all along."70Three yearslaterJordanconcurred hat "slaverywas not

an isolated economic or institutionalphenomenon; it was the practical facet

of a generaldebasementwithout which slaverycould have no rationality."'"

Both authors were challenging the long-standing line of argument, that hadbeen put forth most recentlyand imaginativelyby Oscarand Mary Handlin

in I950, that race slavery was not an inherent aspect of England's mainland

colonies at the start, but evolved graduallyover the seventeenth centuryin

response to American economic conditions.72The broad background and

general outlines of the subsequentdiscussion are thoroughly reviewed in

Raymond Starr'sessay, "Historiansand the Origins of British North Ameri-

can Slavery."73

Even as the importantchicken-eggdebate on racial prejudiceand chattelslaverytook its inconclusivecourse,monographssiftingold andnew evidencecontinued to appear.74While they varied in geographic focus, by far the

Weiss, eds., The GreatFear. Race in the Mind of America (New York, I970), I-26;

David D. Anderson and Robert L. Wright, The Dark and Tangled Path. Race inAmerica (Boston, I97i); David M. Reimers, Racism in the United States. AnAmerican Dilemma? (New York, I972).

70 ComparativeStudiesin History and Society, II (959), 49-66, quotation is on

p. 52.71 Winthrop D. Jordan, "Modern Tensions and the Origins of American

Slavery,"Jour. So. Hist., XXVIII (i962), i8-30, quotationis on p. 30. Jordan wenton to remind his readers parenthetically that "prejudice, too, was a form ofdebasement, a kind of slavery of the mind" (ibid., 30).

72 Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, "Origins of the Southern Labor System,"WMQ, 3d Ser., VII (1950), I99-222, reprinted n OscarHandlin, Race and Nation-ality in American Life (Boston, 1948).

Historian, XXXVI (I973), i-i8.

74 Winthrop D. Jordan, "AmericanChiaroscuro:The Status and Definition ofMulattoes in

the British Colonies," WMQ, 3d Ser., XIX(i962),

i83-200 (reprintedin Foner and Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World, i89-20I); M. EugeneSirmans, "The Legal Status of the Slave in South Carolina, i670-I740," Jour. So.

Hist., XXVIII (i962), 462-773; Emory G. Evans, ed., "A Question of Complexion:

Documents Concerning the Negro and the Franchise in Eighteenth-CenturyVir-ginia," VMHB, LXXI (i963), 4II-415; Joseph Boskin, "The Origins of American

Slavery: Education as an Index of Early Differentiation,"Journal of Negro Educa-tion, XXXV (i966), I25-I33; Oscar Renal Williams, Jr., "Blacks and Colonial




largestnumber dealt with early Virginia, as epitomizedin Paul C. Palmer's

i966 article, "Servantinto Slave: The Evolution of the Legal Status of the

Negro Laborer in Colonial Virginia."75Precisely who lived in Virginiaduring the entire course of the seventeenthcentury,and underwhat condi-

tions, became central themes in valuable new books by Frank Cravenand

EdmundMorgan.76 On one hand specialattentionwas turnedto the earliest

periodof colonization,the half centurybefore i630, duringwhich blacksfirst

reachedVirginia.77And on the other hand, renewed attentionwas given to

the later era, the half centuryafter i66o, when race slaverywas solidifiedin

law and then perpetuated hroughthe emergenceof a steady importtradein

unpaidblack workers.78While these recentVirginia studies did not resolve

Legislation in the Middle Colonies" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, i969);

Jonathan L. Alport, "The Origins of Slavery in the United States; The MarylandPrecedent,"Am. Jour. of Legal Hist., XIV (1970), i89-22I; Edmund S. Morgan,

"Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,"JAH, LIX (1972), 5-29. Most

recently, see William M. Wiecek, "The StatutoryLaw of Slaveryand Race in the

Thirteen Mainland Colonies of British America," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXIV (i977),258-280 (and the subsequent etter to the editor fromJeffreyJ. Crow, ibid., 695-697).

7 So. Atlantic Qtly., LXV (i966), 355-370. Cf. Adele Hast, "The Legal Statusof the Negro in Virginia,

I705-I765," JOur.of Negro Hist., LIV (i969), 2I7-239. For

each published article there have been numerous unpublished essays. See, forexample,StephenSturdevant ennings, "The Originsof Racial Castein Seventeenth-

Century Virginia" (M.A. thesis, Case-Western Reserve Univ., i968); WilliamTerence Martin Riches, "Race, Slavery,and Servitude:Virginia, i607-I705" (M.A.thesis, University of Tennessee, i969); Betty W. W. Coyle, "The Treatment ofSlaves and Servants in Colonial Virginia" (M.A. thesis, College of William andMary, I974); and the recent Ph.D. dissertationof Timothy E. Morgan, "Turmoil

in an OrderlySociety:ColonialVirginia, i607-I754" (Collegeof William andMary,

'977).76Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black.' The Seventeenth-Century

Virginian (Charlottesville, I97'); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery-Ameri-can Freedom. For a brief survey, using documents,see Joseph Boskin, Into Slavery.'

Racial Decisions in the Virginia Colony (Philadelphia, I976). For a more extensive

generaldocument collection see Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the

Seventeenth Century.'A Documentary History of Virginia, i606-i689 (Chapel Hill,N.C., I975).

7 See the early chapters of Morgan's book, incorporating his imaginativeresearchon Roanoke and Jamestown, as well as Wesley Frank Craven, "Twenty

Negroes to Jamestown in i6i9?" Virginia QuarterlyReview, XLVII (i97i), 416-

420; and Alden T. Vaughan, "Blacks in Virginia: A Note on the First Decade,"

WMQ, 3d Ser., XXIX (1972), 469-478.78 On this period, andparticularlyon the significanceof Bacon'sRebellion in the

i670s see not only Morgan's volume and the article of T. H. Breen, "A Changing

LaborForceand Race Relationsin Virginia, i670-I7Io,"Jour. Soc. Hist., VI ('973),3-25, but also the little-known essay of Theodore Allen, " '. . . They Would Have

Destroyed Me': Slavery and the Origins of Racism," RadicalAmerica, IX (i975),

41-63.



2IO WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

the question of the relationshipover time between white racism and black

enslavement, they helped make clearer the number of variables involved in

the origins of American slavery.

Among the varietyof factorsat work in shaping the slave labor system-

existing trade patterns, changing labor demands, conditions of climate,

considerationsof disease, to name only a few none has been more widely

discussed from colonial times to the present than that of religion. Did

European religious creeds assist the master or the slave in early plantation

society,or both, or neither?The time-honoredquestionof whetherorganizedreligion has been a deadening opiate, a benevolent moderating force, or a

base for survivaland resistance ook on renewed interestduringthe church-

orientedstrugglesof the civil rightsperiod.79New worksappeared omparing

the historical responses to race slavery among Protestants,Catholics and

Jews.80 And within the dominant Protestantismof the early South the

various positionstaken were reexaminedboth generallyand in detail.81 Some

of these studies followed the well-established formula of church-related

scholarship emphasizing patterns-limited as they were-of "conversion"and "education."82 Others gave consideration o more obvious waysin which

79See, for example, David M. Reimers,White Protestantismand the Negro(New York, i965); Gary T. Marx, "Religion: Opiate or Inspirationof Civil RightsMilitancy amongNegroes?"AmericanSociologicalReview, XXXII (i967), 64-72.

80 For example, see Herbert S. Klein, "Anglicanism,Catholicism and the NegroSlave," Comparative Studies in Soc. and Hist., VIII (i966), 296-327; BertramWallace Korn,Jews and Negro Slaveryin the Old South, 1789-i865 (Elkins Park,Pa., i96i). This essay was delivered as the PresidentialAddress at the Fifty-NinthAnnual Meeting of the American Jewish Historical Society, Feb. i8, i96i, and

reprintedfrom the March i96i issue of its quarterlyPublication.81 Lester B. Scherer, Slavery and the Churches in Early America, 1619-1819

(GrandRapids, Mich., I975); Kenneth K. Bailey, "Protestantismand Afro-Ameri-cans in the Old South: Another Look," Jour. So. Hist., XLI (I975), 45I-472. Cf.Donald B. Touchstone, "Planters and Slave Religion in the Deep South" (Ph.D.diss., Tulane University, I973), and Jimmy Gene Cobb, "A Study of WhiteProtestants'Attitudes toward Negroes in Charleston, South Carolina, I790-I845"

(Ph.D. diss., Baylor University, I977).

82 Kenneth L. Carroll, "Religious Influences on the Manumission of Slaves inCaroline,Dorchester, and Talbot Counties,"Md. Hist. Mag., LVI (i96i), I76-I97;

Jerome W. Jones, "The EstablishedVirginia Church and the Conversionof Negroesand Indians, i620-I760," Jour. of Negro Hist., XLV (i96i), I2-23; George WilliamPilcher, "Samuel Davies and the Instruction of Negroes in Virginia," VMHB,LXXIV (i966), 293-300; Oliver W. Furley, "MoravianMissionariesand Slaves inthe West Indies," CaribbeanStudies, V (i965), 3-i6. For varied examples of theearliertraditionsee Marcus W. Jernegan, "Slaveryand Conversion n the AmericanColonies," AHR, XXI (i9i6), 504-527; James Bolan Lawrence, "Religious Educa-tion of the Negro in the Colony of Georgia," Ga. Hist. Qtly., XIV (1930), 4I-57;



STUDY OF EARLY BLACK HISTORY 2II

church doctrine and behavior servedto bolster "the peculiar institution."83

Whatever the stand of a particulardenomination, Anglicans and Presby-

terians, Methodists and Baptists, Lutherans and Quakers all come in forrenewed consideration in the scholarshipof the second reconstruction.84

It is a fine line-a line familiar to anyone who has puzzled over the

"boundaries"of black history in North America between what Christian-ity did to Afro-Americans and what Afro-Americans did for Christianity.

There is no question that Europeansguardedly made available abridged

versions of the Protestant ideology long before i8oo, and that they failed in

efforts to conceal the richer and more radical strainswithin the faith. It is

equallyclearthat black workersrespondedcreatively o this dubiousprospect

and began to shape their own forms of Negro Christianity during theeighteenth century. But exactly whom and what was "converted" in this

process?We have just begun to study in adequate depth the early stagesof

Luther P. Jackson, "Religious Development of the Negro in Virginia from I760-

i86o," Jour. of Negro Hist., XVI (I93I), i68-239; Mary F. Goodwin, "Christian-

izing and Educatingthe Negro in Colonial Virginia," Hist. MAag. f the ProtestantEpiscopalChurch, I (1932), I43-I52. Previous works on South Carolinamissionizing

include Susan Markey Fickling, Slave-Conversion n South Carolina, University ofSouth Carolina, Bulletin (Columbia, Sept. I924); FrankJ. Klingberg, An Appraisalof the Negro in Colonial South Carolina.A Studyin Americanization(Washington,D.C., I94I); and Annie Hughes Mallard, "Religious Work of South CarolinaBaptists among the Slaves from I78I to I830" (M.A. thesis, University of South

Carolina, I946).

83 See, for example, LelandJ. Bellot, "Evangelicalsand the Defense of Slaveryin Britain's Old Colonial Empire," Jour. So. Hist., XXXVII (I97I), I9-40. Cf.

George Breathett, "Religious Protectionism and the Slave in Haiti" (i635-i860),

Catholic Historical Review, LV (i969), 26-39.

84 Denzil T. Clifton, "Anglicanism and Negro Slavery in Colonial America,"Hist. MAag.of the Protestant Episcopal Church, XXXIX (1970), 29-70; GeraldFrancisDe Jong, "The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in ColonialAmerica," Church History, XL (I97I), 423-436; W. Harrison Daniel, "Southern

Presbyteriansand the Negro in the Early National Period,"Jour. of Negro Hist.,LVIII (I973), 29I-32I; T. Erskine Clarke, "An Experiment in Paternalism: Presby-teriansand Slaves in Charleston, South Carolina,"Journal of PresbyterianHistory,LIII (I975), 223-239; Donald G. Mathews, Slavery and Methodism. A Chapter in

American Morality, 1780-1845 (Princeton, N.J., i965); Durward Long, "The Meth-

odist Church and Negro Slavery in America, I784-I844," Wesleyan Quarterly

Review, III (i966), 3-I7; Stephen J. Stein, "George Whitefield on Slavery: SomeNew Evidence," Church Hist., XLII (0973), 243-256; W. Harrison Daniel, "Vir-

ginia Baptists and the Negro in the Antebellum Era," Jour. of Negro Hist., LVI

(y970), i-i6, and "Virginia Baptists and the Negro in the Early Republic," VMHB,

LXXX (1972), 60-69; Douglas C. Strange," 'A CompassionateMother to Her PoorNegro Slaves': The Lutheran Church andNegro Slaveryin EarlyAmerica,"Phylon,XXIX (i968), 272-28I; Peter Kent Opper, "North Carolina Quakers: Reluctant

Slaveholders," N.C. Hist. Rev., LII (0975), 37-58.



2I2 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

selection and rejection, cooption and transmutation that allowed Afro-

Americansto develop religious forms that were deeply Christianand decid-

edly black. It maynot be an exaggeration o argue,as Michael Bradleydid in

a recentnote on blackreligionin the Chesapeakeregion,"thatthe formation

of the Negro church is the key to the beginning of Afro-Americancommu-

nity and culture."85

While general historiesof American religion gave only slightly greater

attentionto blacksin recentyears,86new effortsweremadeduringthe second

reconstructionto look at what Leonard Haynes had called "the Negro

communitywithin AmericanProtestantism."87Besides a numberof studies

by black scholarson Afro-Americantraditionsof thought and worship,88a

few historicalmonographs,varied in depth and imagination,began to shedlight on the origins of early black churchesand religious practices.89 ome

authorsextendedtraditionalresearch nto the lives of strongleaders90 ndthe

85 Michael R. Bradley, "The Role of the Black Church in the Colonial Slavery

Society," La. Studies, XIV (I975), 4I3-42i, quotation is on p. 4I5. Cf. Donald G.

Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago, I977), chap. 5.

86See Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment.' The Shaping of Christianity in

America (New York, i963); Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America (New York,

i965); and Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People(New

Haven, Conn., I972).

87Leonard L. Haynes, The Negro Community within American Protestantism,

1619-1844 (Boston, I954); Liston Pope, "The Negro and Religion in America,"

Review of Religious Research, V (9I64), I52-I56; Robert T. Handy, "Negro

Christianity and American Church Historiography," in Jerald C. Brauer, ed.,

Reinterpretation in American Church History, Essay in Divinity (Chicago, i968), 9i-

II2.

88 Earl E. Thorpe, The Mind of the Negro.' An Intellectual History of Afro-

Americans (Westport, Conn., i96i); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in

America (NewYork, i964); Joseph R. Washington, Jr., Black Religion (Boston,

i964); Washington, The Politics of God (Boston, i967); Washington, Black Sects

and Cults (Garden City, N.Y., I972); James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black

Power (New York, I959); Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia,

I970).

89 See Carol V. R. George, Segregated Sabbaths.' Richard Allen and the Emer-

gence of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840 (New York, I973); Milton C.

Sernett, Black Religion and American Evangelicalism.' White Protestants, Planta-

tion Missions, and the Flowering of Negro Christianity, 1787-1865 (Metuchen, N.J.,

I975); and Albert Jordy Raboteau, " 'The Invisible Institution': The Origins and

Conditions of Black Religion before Emancipation" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University,

I974).

90 Henry J. Young, Major Black Religious Leaders, 1755-1940 (Nashville,

Tenn., I977). Compare John W. Davis, "George Liele and Andrew Bryan, Pioneer

Negro Baptist Preachers," Jour. of Negro Hist., III (i9i8), II9-I27, and Charles H.

Wesley, Richard Allen.' Apostle of Freedom (Washington, D.C., I935) with Ellen

Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York, I976), I3-I7. For another vantage

point see James H. Stone, "Black Leadership in the Old South: The Slave Drivers

of the Rice Kingdom" (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, I976).



STUDY OF EARLY BLACK HISTORY 2I3

formation of early congregations.9'But at the same time others began to

reexamine specific themes, such as the style and role of the black preacher92

and the degree to which "Africanisms"carriedover from the Old World

became co-mingled with European Christianity, even before the first Great

Awakening.93While comparative material on Africa and the West Indies

has grown steadily,94detailed studieson early transferenceso North Amer-

ica remain scarce.95Hopefully, historical and anthropological nsights that

apply to the shaping of black religion will eventually lead to, and be

reinforced by, further knowledge of the evolution of other elementsof the

enduring, changingAfro-Americanculture everythingfromspeech, music,

crafts, dance and design to work forms, story lines, body language, social

codes and family patterns.96

" Compare James M. Simms, The First Colored Baptist Church in NorthAmerica (Philadelphia, i888); Edgar Garfield Thomas, The First African BaptistChurch of North America (Savannah, Ga., I925); or the articles of Walter H.Brooks: "The Evolution of the Negro Baptist Church,"Jour. of Negro Hist., VII(I922), II-22; "The Priority of the Silver Bluff Church and Its Promoters," ibid.,I72-i96; with Jay Harris, "State Was Birthplace of the Negro Church," TheMorning News (Wilmington, Del.), Feb. I9, I97I. For the interestingstoryof a igth-century foundation see Robert F. Durden, "The Establishmentof CalvaryProtestantEpiscopalChurch for Negroes in Charleston,"S.C. Hist. Mag., LXV (i964), 63-86.

92 In addition to the earlier work of William H. Pipes, Say Amen, Brother! Old-Time Negro Preaching.'A Study in American Frustration(New York, I951), seeHenry H. Mitchell, Black Preaching (Philadelphia, I970); Charles V. Hamilton,The Black Preacher in America (New York, I972); and Eugene D. Genovese,Black Plantation Preachers in the Slave South," La. Studies, 11 (972), I88-214.

9 See LeonardBarrett, SoulForce.'African Heritagein Afro-American Religion(Garden City, N.Y., I974); Johnson Ajibade Adefila, "Slave Religion in the

Antebellum South: A Study of the Role of Africanisms in the Black Response toChristianity" (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, I976); and Alfloyd Butler, "TheBlacks' Contributionof Elements of African Religion to Christianity n America: ACase Study of the Great Awakening in South Carolina"(Ph.D. diss., NorthwesternUniversity, I975); and the research in progressof Scott Strickland (University ofNorth Carolina).

9 Marcel Griaule, Conversationswith Ogotemmeli.'An Introductionto DogonReligious Ideas (London, i965); John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophies(New York, i969), and The Prayers of African Religion (Maryknoll, N.Y., I975);

Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York, I972 [orig. publ. I959]); Michel S.

Laguerre, "The Place of Voodoo in the Social Structureof Haiti," CaribbeanQtly.,XIX (I973), 36-50.

9 See Robert Tallant, Voodoo in New Orleans (New York, i962), and, mostrecently,John Vlach, "Graveyardsand Afro-AmericanArt," Long Journey Home.'Folklife in the South, special issue of Southern Exposure (I977), i6i-i65.

96 For useful backgroundsee Sidney W. Mintz and RichardPrice, An Anthro-

pological Approach to the Afro-American Past.' A Caribbean Perspective, ISHIOccasional Paper, No. 2 (Philadelphia, I976). An example of a recent survey from



2I4 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

No topic was more heavily researched or heatedly discussed during

Reconstruction I than that of slave resistance.White vigilantismduring the

early yearsof desegregationand ghetto uprisings n the late i96os promptedrenewed attention to the historical roots of interracialconflict, especially

during slavery time.97At first resistancewas defined in the narrowterms of

overt rebellion, and debate (based on oversimplified readings of StanleyElkins's suggestivebut potentially misleading study) centeredon whether the

dominant "slave personality"was an irrepressiblerebel or an unarousable

sambo.98Unfortunately, the significant earlier work on slave revolts by

Herbert Aptheker and others had been largely ignored,99and impatient

newcomers ound their search for a blackSpartacus ess simplethanthey had

hoped or expected. In i966 their frustrationover the intractablequestion ofblack resistancesurfaced in the widespreaddebate over novelist William

Styron's fictional account of the Southampton slave revolt of i83I.100 Ten

the musical field is Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals.' Black Folk Music

to the Civil War, Music in American Life (Urbana, Ill., I977).9 See Robert M. Fogelson, "From Resentment to Confrontation: The Police,

the Negroes, and the Outbreak of the Nineteen-Sixties Riots," Political Sci. Qtly.,LXXXIII (i968), 2I7-247; H. Jon Rosenbaum and Peter C. Sederberg, "Vigil-

antism:An Analysis of EstablishmentViolence," in Rosenbaum andSederberg,eds.,Vigilante Politics (Philadelphia, I976), 3-29; Corrie S. Hope, "The Social Psycho-logical Determinants of Minority Uprisings: A Comparisonof the Nat Turner SlaveRebellion (1831) and the Newark Riot (i967)" (Ph.D. diss., University of Massa-chusetts, I975). Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, in her forthcoming study of Jessie DanielAmes and the Women's Anti-Lynching Movement (New York, I978), points out

rightly that "there is a wealth of literature on slave revolts and slave conspiracyscares, but little comparablework has been done on the post-emancipationpanicswhich gave rise to lynchings and pogroms against the black community."

98 Mary Agnes Lewis, "Slaveryand Personality:A FurtherComment," Ameri-

can Quarterly, XIX (i967), II4-I2I; Eugene D. Genovese, "Rebelliousness andDocility in the Negro Slave: A Critique of the Elkins Thesis," Civil War History,XIII (i967), 293-314; Mina Davis Caulfield, "Slavery and the Origins of Black

Culture, Elkins Revisited," in Peter Rose, ed., Americansfrom Africa (New York,i969), I7I-I9I; Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate over Slavery.' Stanley Elkins and His

Critics(Urbana, Ill., I971); Kenneth M. Stampp,"Rebels and Sambos: The Searchfor the Negro's Personality n Slavery,"Jour. So. Hist., XXXVII (i97i), 367-392.

99Joshua Coffin, An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, . . .

during the Last Two Centuries (New York, i86o), in Anti-Slavery Tracts, Negro

Periodicalsin the United States, 2d Ser. (Westport, Conn., I970); OrvilleJ. Victor,

History of American Conspiracies.' A Record of Treason, Insurrection, Rebellion etc.in the United States from 1760 to I86o (New York, i863); James Hugh Johnson,

"The Participationof White Men in Virginia Negro Insurrections,"Jour.of NegroHist., XVI (I93i), I58-i67; Harvey Wish, "American Slave Insurrectionsbeforei86i," ibid., XXII (i937), 299-320; Joseph Cephas Carroll, Slave Insurrections nthe United States, i800-M865 (New York, I938); Herbert Aptheker, American Negro

Slave Revolts (New York, I943).100William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York, i966); John




years before black authorAlex Haley could be acclaimedfor writing about

the slave experiencefrom the inside, The Confessionsof Nat Turner, created

by a white southerner, won wide attention froman

anxious and race-consciouspublic. Despite its much-discussed hortcomings,Styron'sbestseller

served an intriguingtwo-fold function. Firstof all, it portrayedrationaland

radical thoughts in the mind of a black protagonistand forced America's

white majority to view events throughan enslavedperson'seyes, confronting

the fact that exploitation places a mask between oppressorand oppressed.

And secondly, the debate fostered by the controversialbook helped spur a

broader understandingof the complexities of resistanceunder a totalitarian

regime.

The definitive study of Afro-Americanresistancehas yet to appear,and anew overall interpretation uch as Vincent Harding's projectedtwo-volume

"Historyof the Black Strugglefor Freedomin America"is naturallyawaited

with eagerness. But already,in the decade since Styronwrote and his critics

raged, much has been done to deepen understandingof black oppositionto

the slavery regime."' Studies from other regionshave assisted n this, for in

the years since C. L. R. James published his book on the successfulHaitian

Revolution, there have been innumerable essays on resistance efforts

throughout the Atlantic slave system. 02 Many of these works have focused

Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron's Nat Turner. Ten Black Writers Respond(Boston, i968); Eric Foner, ed., Nat Turner, Great Lives Observed (EnglewoodCliffs, N.J., I97i); J. B. Duff and P. M. Mitchell, eds., The Nat TurnerRebellion.The Historical Event and the Modern Controversy(New York, I971); Henry 1.Tragle, "The SouthamptonSlave Revolt" (Ph.D. diss., Universityof Massachusetts,I971); Randolph Werner, "An Inquiry into Some Aspects of Nat Turner'sRebel-lion" (M.A. thesis, College of William and Mary, I97i); Stephen B. Oates, The

Fires of Jubilee. Nat Turner'sFierce Rebellion (New York, I975).101 ChristopherLasch and George Frederickson,"Resistanceto Slavery," CivilWar Hist., XIII (i967), 3I5-329, reprintedin Bracey, Meier, and-Rudwick, eds.,American Slavery, I78-I92; Joanne Grant, ed., Black Protest. History, Documents,and Analyses, 1619 to the Present (New York, i968); Marion D. deB. Kilson,"Towards Freedom: An Analysis of Slave Revolts in the United States," Phylon,XXV (i964), I75-i84; William F. Cheek, ed., Black Resistance before the CivilWar (Beverly Hills, Calif., I970); and also Mary FrancesBerry,Black Resistance/White Law. A History of ConstitutionalRacismin America (New York, I971). Animaginative recent book, regrettablyalreadyout of print, is Jonathan Katz, Resis-

tance at Christiana.The FugitiveSlaveRebellion, Christiana,Pennsylvania,Septem-ber ii, I85I (New York, I974).102 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins. Toussaint l'Ouverture and the San

Domingo Revolution, rev. 2d ed. (New York, i963); Monica Schuler, "Ethnic SlaveRebellions in the Caribbean and the Guianas,"Jour. Soc. Hist., III (I970), 374-385, and "Akan Slave Rebellionsin the British Caribbean,"Savacou,I (I970), 8-29;Ralph H. Vigil, "Negro Slaves and Rebels in the Spanish Possessions, I503-I558,"Historian,XXXIII (i97i), 637-655;Ronald H. Chilcote, ed., Protest and Resistance



2i6 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

on the conceptof maroonage (particularlynJamaica)103 and have provideda

comparativecontext in which to reassesscertain resistanceefforts in North

America. 04As yet there have been no successful ongitudinalstudies,analyz-ing periodsof intensifiedslaveresistance hroughoutthe Atlanticcommunity,

such as the late I730S or the early I790s, but the attentiongiven to certain

uprisingshas increased. Besides the i83i Nat Turner revolt and the i8oo

Gabriel Prosser insurrectionin Virginia, the two liberation struggles to

attractthe most scholarlyattentionin recentyearsare the I74I conspiracy n

New York and the i822 conspiracy n South Carolina.Both were presumed

to be elaborateplots; they evoked extensive legal proceedings,and records

relatingto each case have recently been published in paperbackform.105

in Angola and Brazil (Berkeley, Calif., I972). See also Frederico Brito Figueroa, Las

Insurrecciones de los esclavos en la sociedad colonial venezolana (Caracas, i96i); and

David Barry Gaspar, Bondsmen and Rebels: Slave Resistance and Social Control in

Antigua, I700-I763" (unpublished ms).103See especially Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies. Rebel Slave Commu-

nities in the Americas (Garden City, N.Y., I973); and also A. E. Furness, "The

Maroon War of I795," Jamaican Historical Review, V (i965), 30-49; RobinsonCarey, The Fighting Maroons of Jamaica Jam., i969); Orlando H. Patterson,

"Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War,i655-I740," Social and Economic Studies,XIX (1970), 289-325; Elain White, "TheMaroon Warriors ofJamaica and Their Successful Resistance to Enslavement," Pan-

African Journal, VI (I973), 297-3I2.

104 See, for example, Jack D. L. Holmes, "The Abortive Slave Revolt in Pointe

Coupee, Louisiana, I795," La. History, XI (1970), 34I-362; John D. Milligan,

"Slave Rebelliousness and the Florida Maroon," Prologue, VI (0974), 5-i8; Ray

Granade, "Slave Unrest in Florida," Fla. Hist. Qtly., LV (0976), i8-36; and Freddie

L. Parker, "Slave Protest in North Carolina, I775-i835" (M.A. thesis, North

Carolina Central University, I976).

105

On i83I see n. 99 above. On i8oo see William J. Kimball, "The GabrielInsurrection of i8oo," Negro Hist. Bull., XXXIV (I97I), I53-I56, and William J.

Ernst, "Gabriel's Revolt: Black Freedom, White Fear" (M.A. thesis, University of

Virginia, i968).

On I74I see Ferenc M. Szasz, "The New York Slave Revolt of I74I: A Re-

examination,"New York History,XLVIII (i967), 2I5-230; ThomasJ. Davis, "The

New York Slave Conspiracy of I74i as Black Protest," Jour. of Negro Hist., LVI

(1971), I7-30; ThomasJ. Davis, ed., The New York Conspiracy by Daniel Horsman-

den (Boston, I971). Related articles are Kenneth Scott, "The Slave Insurrection in

New York in I712," New-York Historical Society Quarterly, XLV (i96i), 43-74;

Leo Hershkowitz, "Tom's Case:An Incident, I74," N.Y. Hist., LII

(I97I),63-71;

and Don C. Skemer, "New Evidence on Black Unrest in Colonial Brooklyn,"

Journal of Long Island History, XII (I975), 46-49.

On i822 see John M. Lofton's suggestive but little-known study Insurrection in

South Carolina (Yellow Springs, Ohio, i964); as well as his earlier articles:

"Denmark Vesey's Call to Arms,"Jour. of Negro Hist., XXXIII (1948), 395-417;

"The Enslavement of the Southern Mind: I775-i825," Jour. of Negro Hist., XLIII

(1958), I32-I39. Also see Richard C. Wade, "The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration,"

Jour. So. Hist., XXX (i964), I43-i6i, reprinted in Bracey, Meier, and Rudwick,




Increased attention to varieties of resistance prompted greater sophisti-

cation among historians.The rebel-sambodebateelicited, but then gave way

to, more subtle discussionof such things as (a) the options facing plantation

prisoners, (b) the inspirationalbonds available to resisters,and (c) the level

of fear in the white community.Malingering, deception,poisoningand arson

were all reviewed as forms of covert resistance,but special attention wasgiven to runaways.While maroonage never became widespread n the North

American colonies, running away (briefly or forever, singly or in groups)

now appears to have been a more frequent, more complicated and more

politically significant act than was once imagined.106 Whatever form resis-

tance took, it seems likely that shared religious commitmentsoften provided

the heightened degree of inspirationand solidarity necessary o contemplatedesperate acts. Research has begun to suggest that both African and Euro-

pean beliefs frequently played a role in crystalizing and sustaining overt

opposition. 07 Most recently there has been a tendency (perhapsan off-shoot

eds.,AmericanSlavery,I27-I4I; Sterling Stuckey,"Remembering DenmarkVesey,"Negro Digest, XV (i966), 28-4I; Robert S. Starobin, "Denmark Vesey's SlaveConspiracyof i822: A Study in Rebellion and Repression,"in Bracey, Meier, andRudwick, eds.,American

Slavery,I42-I57;

Starobin, ed., Denmark Vesey. The SlaveConspiracy of 1822, Great Lives Observed (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., I973); and John0. Killens, ed., The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey (Boston, I973).

106 For discussionsee Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, Wood, Black Majority, andJohn W. Blassingame, "Black Majority: An Essay Review," Ga. Hist. Qtly., LIX

(I975), 67-7I. Other related works are Ronnie C. Tyler, "Fugitive Slaves in Mexico,"

Jour. of Negro Hist., LVII (I972), I-I2; Richard K. Murdoch, "The Return ofRunaway Slaves, I790-I794," Fla. Hist. Qtly., XXXVIII (I959), 96-II3; John J.TePaske, "The Fugitive Slave: IntercolonialRivalryandSpanishSlave Policy, i686-I764," in Samuel Proctor, ed., Eighteenth-CenturyFlorida and Its Borderlands(Gainesville, I975), I-I2; Daniel E. Meaders, "South CarolinaFugitives as Viewedthrough Local Colonial Newspapers with Emphasis on Runaway Notices, I732-

i8oi,"Jour. of Negro Hist., LX (I975), 288-3i9; Lathan A. Windley, "A Profile of

Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from I730 through I787" (Ph.D.diss., University of Iowa, I974); and Martin Grey, "SlaveFugitivesand Slave Com-munity: Patterns of Flight in Southern Maryland, I745-I800," (unpubl. seminarpaper,Johns Hopkins, I975). Cf. Daniel Littlefield's work, n. 6i above.

107 Studies include Jean Price-Mars, "Puissance de la foi religieuse chez lesnegres de Saint-Domingue dans linsurrection des esclavesde I79I a I803," Revuefran~aised'histoired'outre-mer, XLI (I954), 5-I3; Vincent Harding, "Religion andResistance among Ante-Bellum Negroes, i8oo-i86o," in Meier and Rudwick, eds.,

Making of Black America, I, I79-I97; William C. Suttles, Jr., "African ReligiousSurvivalsas Factorsin American Slave Revolts,"Jour. of Negro Hist., LVI (1971),

97-I04; GeraldMullin, "Religion, Acculturation,and AmericanNegro Slave Rebel-lions: Gabriel's Insurrection," in Bracey, Meier, and Rudwick, eds., AmericanSlavery, I60-I78; James N. Mitchell, "Nat Turner: Slave, Preacher, Prophet, andMessiah, I800-I83I: A Study of the Call of a Black Slave to Prophethood and to the

Messiahship of the Second Coming of Christ" (divinity school diss., VanderbiltUniversity, I977); and the work in progress of anthropologistJohn Szwed.



2i8 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

of the sambo discussion) to discount black motives and initiatives for

resistanceand to reemphasize he depth and functionalpurposeof Caucasian

paranoia. 08 Little attention has been given to the aftereffectsof resistance-the climate of distrust,punishment, submission,and bribery in which the

spurioussocial contract of enslavementwas renegotiatedtime after time.The era of the secondreconstruction,ike the first,drewto a close in the

shadow of a national anniversary.Literatureon the Revolution, alwaysthe

central topic of early American history, increasedmany times over as the

country'stwo hundredth birthday approached.Indeed, it was bicentennial

writing,morethan anyotherpopularhistoricalgenre,which servedto eclipse

the boom in black history, though not before a good deal had been written

about blacks in the Revolutionary period. Benjamin Quarles published his

judiciousand pathbreakingstudyof The Negro in the AmericanRevolutionas far back as i96i.109 Building upon Quarles, subsequentwriting raisedserious questions about the true nature and reigning interpretationsof the"freedom struggle" in which the colonial bourgeoisie gained its economicand politicalindependence.The mysteriousabsence of blacks fromthe entire

story of the nation's birth was brought under review, despite strong mis-

givings and apprehensionsamong the professionalelite.

In i968, for example, the President of the Organization of AmericanHistorians warned that African-Americans,"a newly formed hyphenategroup, . . . are now understandably lamoring for historicalrecognition...insistingon visibility, if not overvisibility, n the textbooks." In his Presiden-tial Address, Thomas Bailey cautioned that this "belatedrecognition"couldbe "fraughtwith danger,'" and he illustratedhis general warningwith a

108 See Howard A. Ohline, "Georgetown, South Carolina:Racial Anxieties and

Militant Behavior,i802,"

S.C. Hist. Mag., LXXIII (1972), I30-I40; Charles B.Dew, "Black Ironworkersand the Slave InsurrectionPanic of i856,"Jour. So. Hist.,XLI (0975), 32I-338; Dan T. Carter,"The Anatomy of Fear: The ChristmasDayInsurrectionScare of i865," ibid., XLII (1976); and two papersdelivered at theannualmeeting of the Organizationof AmericanHistoriansin Atlanta, Apr. 7, I977:

Scott Strickland,"The 'Great Revival' and InsurrectionaryFears: North Carolina,I8oI-I802," and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Slave Insurrection Scares as Southern

Witchhunts: The Caseof Virginia, I8o2."Cf. MarkJ. Stegmaier,"Maryland'sFearof Insurrectionat the Time of Braddock'sDefeat," Md. Hist. Mag., LXXI (1976),

467-483, andJames H. Dormon, "The PersistentSpecter:Slave Rebellion in Terri-

torial Louisiana," La. Hist., XVIII ('977), 389-404.109(Chapel Hill, N.C., i961). Cf. Wiley J. Carathan,"AmericanNegro Slavery

during the Revolutionary Era" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, I949).110Thomas A. Bailey, "The Mythmakers of American History," JAH, LV

(i968), 7-8. The presidentialaddresscontinued:"Pressure-grouphistoryof anykindis deplorable,especiallywhen significantwhite men are bumped out to make roomfor much less significant black men in the interestsof social harmony. If this kind ofdistortiongets completely out of hand, we can visualizewhat will happenwhen the




reference o CrispusAttucks. The nearly anonymousvictimof British gunfire

has held a controversialand tenuous place in Revolutionary conographyfor

two hundred years. In the late eighteenth century, printers supposedlydebatedwhether to suggesthis partially-Africanancestry n color reprintsof

the Paul Revere engravingdepicting his death, and in the late nineteenth

century,renewed efforts to honor him aroused hot debate."' To Bailey themost recent "apotheosisof CrispusAttucks" seemed revealing but reprehen-

sible, for the victims of "the so-called Boston Massacre" in his view were

simply "guilty of hooliganism that night." "This determination to stand

American history on its head, so characteristicof minority groups, may

stimulatepride among Negroes," he concluded,"but it can win little support

from true scholarship.The luckless African-Americanswhile in slaverywereessentiallyin jail; and we certainlywould not write the story of a nation in

terms of its prison population."1'

Debates over Attucks'splace in the textbooks, like arguments over the

character of Nat Turner or the relation of Sally Hemings to Thomas

Jefferson, have obvious symbolic significance, but they are also prime in-

dicators of the relative ignorance which still prevails with respect to the

complexityof the early blackpast. It is only justbecoming clear that the late

eighteenth century, the generation half way between the establishmentofrace slaveryand the antebellumera, occupies a particularlycrucial place inthe evolution of Afro-American history. As yet scholars have only scratchedthe surface, but varied recentworks suggest that resourcesfor further studyare both accessible and important. ' Building on earlier work, studies haveappeared,for example, dealing with the military participationof blacks inthe imperial conflicts of the era."4 In addition, a number of essays have

Negroes become the dominantgroup

in all ourlargest cities, as they alreadyare inWashington, D.C. Coexistencemay end, and we may even have hard-backedNegro

histories of the United States, with the white man's achievements relegated tosubsidiarytreatment."

"'. Dennis P. Ryan, "The CrispusAttucks Monument Controversyof i887,"

Negro Hist. Bull., XL (I977), 656-657. On Nov. I4, I977, I4 black students fromPennsylvaniawere attackedby 6 white men with bats and clubsduring a visit to theBunker Hill Monument. Four students and their teacher required hospital treat-ment.

112 Bailey, "Mythmakers,"JAH, LV (i968), 8. For a differentperspectivesee

Jesse Lemisch, On Active Service in War and Peace (Toronto,I975),

II2-II3 andpassim."1 Besides the works of Gutman, Morgan, Mullin, and others cited earlier,

see Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution,1770-1800 (Washington, D.C., I973), and DuncanJ. MacLeod, Slavery, Race andthe American Revolution (New York, I974).

"'Larry G. Bowman, "Virginia's Use of Blacks in the French and IndianWar," Western Pa. Hist. Mag., LIII (1970), 57-63; RobertJ. Gough, "Black Men




begun to explore more closely the economic and social situation of black

slaves enmeshed in a white revolution."' The complexitiesof their position

can be seen throughrecent examinationsof the adventuresandtribulationsof

numerousblack loyalists."6Inevitably, much of the recent scholarshipsurroundingthe Revolution

has dealt with the general topic of abolition."' Attention has focused

especially on Massachusetts"8and Virginia,"9 though articles and docu-

and the Early New Jersey Militia," New Jersey History, LXXXVIII (1970), 227-

238; Pete Maslowski, "National Policy Toward the Use of Black Troops in theRevolution," S.C. Hist. Mag., LXXIII (1972), I-I7. Earlier works include W. B.

Hartgrove, "The Negro Soldier in the AmericanRevolution,"Jour. of Negro Hist.,

I (ic9I6), IO-I32; Luther P. Jackson, "Virginia Negro Soldiers and Seamen in theAmerican Revolution," ibid., XXVII (0942), 247-287; and Rayford W. Logan,

"The Negro in the Quasi-War, I798-i800," Negro Hist. Bull., XIV (95I), I28-I3I.

115 Ira Berlin, "The Revolution in Black Life," in Alfred F. Young, ed., TheAmerican Revolution. Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (De-Kalb, Ill., I976); Richard B. Sheridan, "The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in theBritish West Indies during and after the American Revolution," WMQ, 3d Ser.,XXXIII (1976), 6I5-64I; Jerome H. Wood, Jr., " 'There Ought to be no Dis-

tinction': The American Revolution and the Powerless," in The American Revolu-tion. the Home Front, West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, XV

(I976), 9i-io6; Peter H. Wood, " 'Taking Care of Business' in Revolutionary SouthCarolina:Republicanismand the Slave Society," in Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry Tise,eds., The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.,I978). Cf. David M. Zornow, "A Troublesome Community: Blacks in Revolu-tionary Charles Town, I765-I775" (sr. honors thesis, Harvard College, I976), and

Howard Dodson, "The Political Economy of Race in South Carolina, I783-i830"(Ph.D. diss. in progress, University of California, Berkeley).

116 Benjamin Quarles, "Lord Dunmore as Liberator," WMQ, 3d Ser., XV(1958), 494-507; Mary Beth Norton, "The Fate of Some Black Loyalists of the

American Revolution,"Jour. of Negro Hist., LVIII (i973), 402-426; James W. St.

G. Walker, "Blacks as American Loyalists: The Slaves' War for Independence,"Historical RefJections/RJflexions Historiques, II (I975), 5i-67. See especiallyWalker's The Black Loyalists. The Search or a PromisedLand in Nova Scotia andSierra Leone, 1783-i870, Dalhousie African Studies Series (London, I975), and

Wilson's Loyal Blacks.117 In addition to David B. Davis's works seeJerome Nadelhaft, "The Somersett

Case and Slavery: Myth, Reality, and Repercussions,"Jour. of Negro Hist., LI(i966), I93-208; Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery.'The Crusade or Freedom inAmerica (New York, i966); Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation. TheAbolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, i967); Don B. Kates, Jr., "Abolition,

Deportation, Integration: Attitudes toward Slavery in the Early Republic,"Jour. ofNegro Hist., LIII (i968), 33-47; and RichardK. MacMaster, "Anti-Slaveryand theAmerican Revolution: A Crack in the Liberty Bell," History Today, XXI (i97i),

7I5-723.

118 William S. J. O'Brien, "Did theJennison Case Outlaw Slaveryin Massachu-setts?" WMQ, 3d Ser., XVII (I960), 2I9-24I; John D. Cushing, "The CushingCourt and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts: More Notes on the 'Quok



STUDY OF EARLY BLACK HISTORY 22I

ments have also appearedconcerningother states. 20 Individual antislavery

leaders, such as John Woolman, have been noted,but most of all it is the

Founding Fathers and the political, economicand moral logic of their "three-fifths clause" in the Constitution that have undergone renewed if in-

conclusivescrutiny.22 Just as the aftermath of slave revolts has gone unex-

plored, no one as yet has examined sufficiently the mixture of bitterness,resignation and resolve that black Americans absorbed as their inheritance

Walker Case,' " Am. Jour. of Legal Hist., V (i96i), ii8-144; Arthur Zilversmit,

"Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slaveryin Massachusetts," WMQ,3d Ser., XXV (i968), 614-624; and Elaine MacEacheren,"Emancipationof Slavery

in Massachusetts:A Re-examination, I770-I790," JOur. of Negro Hist., LV (1970),289-306. In addition see Joseph L. Arbena, "Politics or Principle?Rufus King andthe Opposition to Slavery, I785-i825" Essex Institute Historical Collections, CI(i965), 56-77, and William D. Piersen, "Afro-American Culture in Eighteenth-Century New England" (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, I975).

119Keith M. Bailor, "John Taylor of Caroline:Continuity,Change, and Discon-tinuity in Virginia's Sentiments toward Slavery, I790-i820," VMHB, LXXV (i967),

290-304; James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in

the South, 1776-1860 (Amherst, Mass., I970); Richard K. MacMaster, "Arthur

Lee's 'Addresson Slavery':An Aspectof Virginia's Struggleto End the Slave Trade,

I765-I774," VMHB, LXXX (I972), I4I-I57; Frederika Teute Schmidt and BarbaraRipel Wilhelm, "Early Pro-Slavery Petitions in Virginia," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXX

(i973), I33-I46. Cf. Richard D. Buehler, "Virginia's Attitude toward Slavery, I776-i8oo" (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, i964).

120 See Gwendolyn EvansLogan, "The Slave in Connecticutduring the Revolu-tion," ConnecticutHistoricalSociety, Bulletin, XXX (i965), 73-80; Philip S. Foner,ed., "A Plea Against Reenslavement," Pa. Hist., XXXIX (1972), 239-24I (letterfrom "Cato," "a poor negro," to the editor of Freeman'sJournal, Sept. 2I, I780);

Kenneth S. Greenberg, "RevolutionaryIdeology and the ProslaveryArgument: TheAbolition of Slavery in Antebellum South Carolina,"Jour. So. Hist., XLII (1976),

365-384; and Crow, Black Experience.121 Phillips Moulton, "John Woolman's Approach to Social Action-As Ex-

emplified in Relation to Slavery," Church Hist., XXXV (i966), 399-4Io; JohnWoolman, Some Considerationson the Keeping of Negroes (New York, I976).

'22JayA. Sigler, "The Rise and Fall of the Three-FifthsClause," Mid-America,XLVIII (i966), 27I-277; Staughton Lynd, ClassConflict,Slavery,and the UnitedStates Constitution. Ten Essays (Indianapolis, i967); Frederick M. Binder, TheColor Problem in Early National America, As Viewed byJohn Adams, Jeffersonand

Jackson (The Hague, i968); Matthew T. Mellon, Early American Views on NegroSlavery.From the Letters and Papers of the Founders of the Republic (New York,

1934); Donald L. Robinson, Slavery n the StructureofAmerican Politics. 1765-1820(New York, I971); Howard A. Ohline, "Republicanismand Slavery: Origins of theThree-Fifths Clause in the United States Constitution," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXVIII

(i97i), 563-584; William W. Freehling, "The Founding Fathers and Slavery,"AHR, LXXVII (1972), 8i-93. Cf. Charles H. Wesley, "Negro Suffrage in the

Period of Constitution Making, I787-I865," Jour. of Negro Hist., XXXII (i947),I43-i68; Peter A. Wallner, "The ContinentalCongressand the Negro" (Ph.D. diss.,Pennsylvania State University, I970).




from the disappointingRevolutionary era.'23For most of them colonialism

did not end in I776; the celebrationof independencewould come at a much

later time.124

These six trends in recent scholarship-treatments of separatecolonies

and of the African diaspora,studiesof colonial racismand of Afro-American

religion, discussionsof slave resistanceand of black responses o the Revolu-

tion-are by no means the only ones discernable. (Such topics as health

conditions among enslaved workers'25and the situation of free blacks'26

123 In a paper on "Ideology and Popular Protest," read at the Wilfred Laurier

University, Waterloo, Canada, Oct. 2I, I974, George Rude concluded:

One final question remains. What happens to popular ideology once therebellion or revolution is over or suppressed?Does it disappearso that it has tostart all over again? Or does it go underground and reemerge in a morefavorablesituation? If we take the most richly documentedexample of all, theexampleof France,it would seem amplyproventhat the secondquestionpointsto the right answer. In the successionof revolutions that followed the first, thetraditionsof I789 and I793 can clearly be seen to have survived in i830, i848

and i87I (some would add, and with some justice, in May i968 as well). But

the recipientsof the message and tradition in these new revolutions are nolonger the same as before. . . Thus with each generation a new set of derivedideas become superimposedon those of the generation before.

Historical Rejlections/Reifexions Historique, III (I976), 76. In this context seeThomas 0. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789-I804 (Knoxville, Tenn., I973).

124William H. Wiggins, Jr., " 'Lift Every Voice': A Study of Afro-AmericanEmancipationCelebrations,"Journal of Asian and African Studies, IX (I974), i8o-

i9i; Wendy Watriss, "CelebrateFreedom: Juneteenth," Southern Exposure (issue

entitled Good Times and Growing Pains), V 0977), 80-87.125 See, for example, Stephen L. Wiesenfeld, "Sickel-cell Trait in Human

Biological and Cultural Evolution," Science, CLVII (i967), II34-II40; Thomas C.Parramore,"Non-Venereal Treponematosisin Colonial North America," Bulletin

of the History of Medicine, XLIV (1970), 57I-58i, and "The 'CountryDistemper'inColonial North Carolina,"N.C. Hist. Rev., XLVIII (I97I), 44.52;John M. Hunter,

"Geophagy in Africa and in the United States: A Culture-NutritionHypothesis,"Geographic Review, LXIII (I973), I70-I95; Todd L. Savitt, "Smothering and

Overlayingof Virginia Slave Children:A SuggestedExplanation,"Bull. of the Hist.of Med., XLIX (I975), 400-404; Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. Kiple, "SlaveChild Mortality: Some Nutritional Answers to a Perennial Puzzle," Jour. of Soc.

Hist., X (I977), 284-309, and two other articlesby the same authors:"BlackTongue

and Black Men: Pellagra and Slavery in the Antebellum South," Jour. So. Hist.,XLIII (I977), 4II-428, and "Black Yellow Fever Immunities, Innate and Acquired,as Revealed in the American South," Social Science History, I (I977), 419-436. Inaddition to the Kiples' forthcoming book (The African Connection.'Slavery,Dis-ease, and Racism) and the current work of Richard Sheridan on the medicaltreatmentof slaves, see also Todd L. Savitt, "Sound Minds and Sound Bodies: TheDiseases and Health Careof Blacks in Ante-Bellum Virginia" (Ph.D. diss., Univer-sity of Virginia, I975), Julie Yvonne Webb, "SuperstitiousInfluence-Voodoo in




have receivedpersistentattention; localized communitystudies127and expio-

Particular-Affecting Health Practices in a Selected Population in Southern Louisi-

ana' (Ph.D. diss., Division of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, School of Medicine,Tulane Univ., I974), and the dissertation in progressof Diane Canala, "Patient andPractitioner: The Practice of Medicine in Eighteenth-Century South Carolina"(The Johns Hopkins University). A revised version of Savitt's work will soon appearas a book: Medicine and Slavery.' The Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Vir-ginia (Urbana, Ill., I978).

126 See Leon Litwack, North of Slavery.'The Negro in the FreeStates, 1790-I860

(Chicago, i96i); Jerome S. Handler, The UnappropriatedPeople.' Freedmenin theSlaveSocietyof Barbados(Baltimore, I974); and Ira Berlin, Slaveswithout Masters.'The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, I974), based in part on

"Slaves Who Were Free: The Free Negro in the Upper South, I776-i86i" (Ph.D.diss., University of Wisconsin, I970). Recent articles include Donald E. Everett,"Free Persons of Color in Colonial Louisiana," La. Hist. (i966), 2I-50; LauraFoner, "The Free People of Color in Louisiana and San Domingue," Jour. Soc.Hist., III (1970), 406-430; Edmund Berkeley, Jr., "Prophet without Honor: Chris-

topher McPherson, Free Person of Color," VMHB, LXXVII (i969), i80-i90; C.Ashley Ellefson, "Free Jupiter and the Rest of the World; The Problems of a FreeNegro in Colonial Maryland," Md. Hist. Mag., LXVI (197I), I-I3; Daniel Perlman,

"Organizationsof the Free Negro in New York City, i8oo-i86o," Jour. of NegroHist., LVI (i97i), I8I-I97; John D. Duncan, "SlaveEmancipation n Colonial South

Carolina,"American Chronicle,A Magazine of History, I (1972), 64-66; WarrenM. Billings, "The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status ofBlacks in Seventeenth-CenturyVirginia," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXX (i973), 467-474;and Ross M. Kimmel, "Free Blacks in Seventeenth-CenturyMaryland," Md. Hist.Mag., LXXI (1976), I9-25. Barry Gaspar is preparinga study of free blacks in hishome island of St. Lucia (i800-i834). Unpublishedworks includeJulie Ann Lisenby,"The Free Negro in Antebellum Florida" (M.A. thesis, Florida State University,

1967); Roger Raymond Van Dyke, "The Free Negro in Tennessee, I790-i860"(Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, I972); and George August Levesque, "BlackBoston: Negro Life in Garrison's Boston, i8oo-i86" (Ph.D. diss., SUNY Bing-

hamton, I976).127 Edward W. Phifer, "Slavery n Microcosm: Burke County, North Carolina,"

Jour. So. Hist., XXVIII (1962), I37-i65, reprinted n Elinor Miller and Eugene D.Genovese, eds., Plantation, Town, and Country.'Essays on the Local History ofAmerican Slave Society (Urbana, Ill., I974); Clarence L. Mohr, "Slaveryin Ogle-thorpe County, Georgia, I773-1865," Phylon, XXXIII (2972), 4-2I; Alan D. Wat-son, "Society and Economy in Colonial Edgecombe County," N.C. Hist. Rev., L

(973), 23I-255; Edward M. Steel, Jr., "Black Monongalians: A Judicial View ofSlavery and the Negro in Monongalia County, I776-i865," West Virginia History,XXXIV (I973), 33I-359; John C. Edwards, "SlaveJustice in FourMiddle Georgia

Counties," Ga. Hist. Qtly., LVII (I973), 265-273; Royce Gordon Shingleton, "TheTrial and Punishment of Slaves in Baldwin County, Georgia, i8I2-i826," SouthernHumanitiesReview, VIII (i974), 67-73; Philip Africa, "Slaveholdingin the SalemCommunity, I77I-i85I,- N.C. Hist. Rev., LIV (i977), 27I-307. See also Tommy L.

Bogger, "The Slave and Free Black Community n Norfolk, I775-i865" (Ph.D. diss.,Universityof Virginia, I977), and the dissertations n progressof Rachel Klein andCarolWasserloos at Yale Universityand of George Terry at the Universityof South

Carolina, plus that of Scott M. Wilds at the University of Pennsylvania.




rations of women's roles'28 have emerged more slowly.) Nor are these

patternsself-conscious;with certain exceptionsthey have developed largely

unperceivedand unanalyzed.But what strikesme most is the way in which

each of these themes relates, more deeply and suggestivelythan has beenrealized as yet, to a rich traditional vein of colonial scholarship.Just as

colony-by-colonystudiesof blackscan be tied to scholarshipon the individual

European settlements, so data on the middle passage have bearing for

existing work on both imperialcommerceand transatlanticmigration.Stud-

ies of the evolutionof racistattitudesand institutions n the coloniesconnect

not only to standard intellectual history, but also to current studies of the

evolution of labor conditionsand class divisions among whites. By the same

token, investigationsof Afro-American culturalcarry-oversand adaptationsfit directly into traditional research regarding the sea-change worked on

European religious and cultural patterns by the New World. Similarly,

studies of slave resistance and of blacks during the Revolution reinforce

broader nquiries nto the sourcesof colonial violence and the significanceof

the Revolutionaryera as a political and social turning point.

Such simpleconnectionsare merely suggestive.Other scholarswill sense

different and more elaborate ways in which new work cited here can beinterwovenwith topics of long-standing interest.For we have scarcelybegunto consider how these recent studies in early black history could inspire,oralter, future work on obviously related subjects. It has been the historio-graphic achievement of the era since i960 to draw forth a mass of detailedmonographicmaterial on earlyAfro-Americansthat far exceeds all previous

work combined. While these studies, some of which continue to appear,represent a considerableaccomplishment in their own right, they pose an

even largerchallenge for the years ahead. The task now at hand-a difficult

one intellectually and politically for all concerned involves integrating

newly detailedevidence on Afro-Americanbeginnings into the broader storyof colonialism in America.

128 Black writer Zora Hurston once called Negro women "the mules of theworld," but as yet remarkablylittle has appearedon the work and world of earlyAfro-Americanwomen. For example, the oldest document in Lerner'scollection onBlack Women in White America (see n. ii above) is dated i8ii. But see SusanCavin, "Missing Women: On the Voodoo Trail of Jazz,"Journal of Jazz Studies,III (I975), 4-27, and the useful comments on White over Black in Susan Brown-

miller, Against Our Will. Men, Women, and Rape (New York, I975), i65-i66.Related essaysincludeSudie Sides, "Women andSlaves: An InterpretationBased onthe Writings of Southern Women" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina atChapel Hill, i969), and Dolores Egger Labbe, "Women in Early Nineteenth-Century Louisiana" (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, Icy5), plus, more directly,Lissa Muscatine," 'Waiting for God to Call': SlaveWomen in America" (sr. honorsthesis, Harvard College, I976).




If done well, this integrationprocesscould alter the contoursof the early

American field in several striking ways. For the first time we would have

knowledgeableaccessto the bottom of the social hierarchyas well as the top,

direct involvementwith non-Europeanmigrants as well as Europeans, andmeaningful commitmentto the evolutionof American culture in the South as

well as in the North. Of course, regression and distortion are fully as

plausible as advancementand synthesis,but at present the prospectfor new

syntheses remains. "We do the best we can," ImmanuelWallerstein stated

recently, "and go forward from there.'"129Major Wright would understand

entirely.

129 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. CapitalistAgricultureand the Origins of the European World-Economy n the Sixteenth Century,Studiesin Social Discontinuity (New York, I974), 8.