Gender and Slavery, Birth and Death on Atlantic Plantations

Abstract

A Tale of Two Plantations is many things. It is a detailed comparative history of slavery over time and space that engages most of the themes that drive studies of slave life: ethnicity; creolization; natural increase in North America; reliance on the slave trade to maintain populations in the West Indies; the relationship between cultivation and culture; the divisions between fieldwork, domestic work, and “skilled” labor; the role of Christianity; the consequences of the secondary slave trade and high mortality rates respectively on slave life in Virginia and Jamaica; and, finally, the experience of family formation. In Richard S. Dunn’s widely anticipated comparative study, he illuminates in microcosm the lived experiences of these broad themes at the core of life and death on plantations. For a scholar accustomed to reading the seventeenthand eighteenth-century histories of slavery, Dunn’s work is something of a revelation. The text (and the accompanying genealogical website) offers a layered and complicated vision of enslaved family life. Further, it illuminates in sometimes astonishing detail the lives and experiences of enslaved women. Indeed, A Tale of Two Plantations is an important, if not entirely straightforward, contribution to women’s history and to gendered studies of comparative slavery. Dunn introduces the study with an overview that details the sex ratios on the Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica and the Mount Airy plantation in Virginia as well as the consequences of women’s higher mortality rates on Mesopotamia and of their higher vulnerability to sale at the hands of the planter at Mount Airy. Importantly, he illustrates these dangers not with generalities but with particulars, as when he concludes his discussion of John Tayloe III’s efforts to maximize profits through moving enslaved people on and off the Mount Airy estate, a practice Dunn describes as both calculated and manipulative, by centering its impact on the family of Winney Grimshaw: “Winney’s family was not broken up; it was completely wiped out” (55). Indeed, Dunn organizes the entire study around the family lives of women—both Grimshaw on Mount Airy and Sarah Affir on