Before Cotton and Other than Sugar: How Tobacco and Rice Shaped the World of Eighteenth-Century Slaves in British North America

Abstract

About halfway through Philip D. Morgan's lengthy, comparative study of slavery in the eighteenth-century Lowcountry and Chesapeake, the author recounts David George's testimony of the violence inflicted on his family as slaves in Surry County Virginia: After he [George's brother] had received 500 lashes or more [for running away], they washed his back with salt water, and whipped it in, as well as rubbed it with a rag, and then directly sent him to work in pulling off the suckers of (p. 386). Several pages later, drawing on the work of Thomas Buckley, Morgan narrates the history of Thomas Wright, a Bedford County, Virginia planter and of a very woman, Sylvia, who was Wright's slave and with whom he lived openly as man and wife.1 Thomas and Sylvia had a mulatto child, Robert, who would eventually be freed and inherit the family estate. Thomas would also free Sylvia, as well as the children she had had with someone else. Robert would marry a white woman, in a union which, while illegal, was accepted by the community. It is one of the many virtues of Slave Counterpoint that such juxtapositioned snapshots continuously and purposefully destabilize Morgan's generalizations about slavery in the colonial South. These generalizations are the most carefully and firmly established we have to date about the eighteenth-century history of the peculiar institution. Three arguments provide the thematic unity for Slave Counterpoint. The first is that over the course of the eighteenth century black cultures in the Chesapeake (primarily Virginia) and Lowcountry (primarily coastal South Carolina) diverged from each other because the ecologies of the two regions supported distinctive staple economies, tobacco and rice. Tied to this is a