Ira Berlin Research Articles

Representations of Speech in the WPA Slave Narratives of Florida and the Writings of Zora Neale Hurston

BACKGROUND, RESOURCES, AND COMPARATIVE APPROACHES The vast collection of slave narratives, housed in Library of Congress, was compiled from interviews conducted between 1936-1938 by Federal Writers' Project field workers. The typescript consists of over 10,000 pages from more than 2,000 interviews with former slaves throughout United States. Nearly three percent of these interviews were conducted in Florida (Mormino 1988:405). George P. Rawick has published entire collection in an initial series of eighteen volumes and two supplement series. Seventy-two interviews are published in Florida's volume (1972a). Donald M. Jacobs has indexed entire collection to make it possible for scholars to conduct research on particular issues or geographic regions (1981), and Howard Potts has published a comprehensive name index (1997). Further audio-visual and online resources have made narratives still more accessible in recent years for classroom and scholarly use. Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, and Marc Favreau have published an anthology of narratives together with an audio-cassette that allows students to hear excerpts of original recordings (1998). An online version of Rawick's compilation can be searched by key word functions. In addition, site offers discussion forums and other resources, including private classrooms with discussion boards and posBible lesson plans that help teachers and students navigate collection more effectively (http://www.slavenarratives.com). Sites maintained by Library of Congress (http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/african/intro.html) and University of Virginia (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wpa/ wpahome.html) also offer background information, photographs taken at time of interviews, as well as text and sound files of selected narratives. Though narratives potentially have tremendous value in teaching and research, they also pose a number of challenges that must be taken into account before collections may be effectively used. For example, Rawick explains that certain systematic biases exist in narratives, which in many cases may give a slanted view of treatment of slaves. On matters concerning ... sexual exploitation of women, whipping and punishment, surviving versions of interviews may be heavily biased in direction of grossly exaggerating humaneness of institution (1997:xxxii-xxxiii). The slave narratives were often censored at state level before they were sent to Washington, and controversial topics may have been avoided during interviews or omitted in transcription.' The former slaves may also have felt inhibited discussing race relations because majority of interviewers were white while former slaves were blacks, almost invariably very poor and totally destitute, and often dependent upon public charity and assistance from white-dominated charities and public officials (Rawick 1997:xxxii). Jacobs explains further that economic climate of 1930s when interviews were conducted contributed to an almost nostalgic attitude towards slavery on part of many former slaves who could look back on their youth under slavery as a time when they at least managed to have something to eat (quoted in Rawick 1997:xxxii). All of these complications are compounded by discrepancies among interviewers in transcriptions of dialect, which interviewers were encouraged to preserve in their notes despite most field-workers' lack of linguistic training and, in many cases, lack of tape recorders. In introduction to supplementary volumes of his collection, Rawick cautions that the slave narratives do not generally provide a reliable source for those seeking to study black speech patterns and black English (1975:xxix). The vastly different methods interviewers employed in recording direct speech can be misleading because instructions to interviewers regarding dialect left much room for individual interpretation. …

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

In the late 1990s, most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the 19th century, after almost 200 years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. This text traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early-17th century through to the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of the nation. Labouring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African-Americans struggled to create a world of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry, to the Mississippi Valley, this text reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. The reader witnesses the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves - who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites - gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labour was the sole engine of their society, and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil.

Berlin's Two Concepts of Slavery

Thirty years ago, ambitious, doorstopper books on slavery concentrated on the antebellum era; today, they tend to focus on the colonial period. Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone joins Hugh Thomas's The Slave Trade (1997), Robin Blackburn's, The Making of New World Slavery (1997), and Philip D. Morgan's Slave Counterpoint (1998) in a recent spate of books about early slavery. These monographs take up the work pioneered by Winthrop Jordan and David Brion Davis to see how slavery and prejudice toward blacks were embedded in western European and then American culture. The shift away from the nineteenth century is evidence of the maturation of the field, in which origins of the peculiar institution and its global dimensions are of greater interest because they are still less understood than the forms of slavery which were dismantled during and after the Civil War. But this shift toward the early-modern period probably also represents a different generation's examination of slavery. During the era of the civil rights movement, comprehension of the racism that had survived the Civil War seemed to support an ideal of the radical transformation of American society toward racial equality. Now, because that transformation not entirely been achieved, scholars are looking more carefully at the early history of slavery, in order to understand why racial inequality may be so persistent. Berlin opens his book by addressing this concern: Of late, it become fashionable to declare that race is a social construction. The problem, Berlin points out, is that this scholarly contention has won few practical battles. Few people believe it; fewer act on it. The new understanding of race changed behavior little if at all (p. 1). Why have the scales not fallen from our eyes? To trace the tenacity of racism, Berlin's examination of slavery's genesis necessarily also to explain the emergence of racism. He therefore traces two patterns: how slavery came to be equivalent with enslavement of Africans, and how freedom did not guarantee racial equality. Berlin's goal is to demonstrate that, in early North America, slavery was a pervasive and

The Slave Family in Arkansas

THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY is central to the history of the United States and especially the South. As Ira Berlin recognizes in his recent study, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, slavery shaped Americans'definition of race. Since race remains a major force in our society today, understanding the basis of our racial thought continues to be critical. The earliest scholars of slavery tended to look at it as an institution the slaveholders made, but in the last thirty years researchers have turned toward understanding slavery from the perspective of the slaves themselves. What might be called revisionist historians have examined in detail the development of the various social dimensions of the slave community.1 This new scholarship, however, has had little impact on our understanding of slavery in Arkansas. Orville Taylor's Negro Slavery in Arkansas remains the standard work and was exemplary for its time. Published in 1958 before recent research developments, it contributes little to the current discussion of the nature of slave life.2 This study seeks to rectify that deficiency with a look at one aspect of the slave community, the family. The slave family has been of particular interest to scholars, since understanding it has been considered critical to explaining the basic dynamics of the master-slave relationship and thus the character of the institution. Serious scholarly study of the slave family began with the work of one individual, E. Franklin Frazier, who published The Negro Family in Chicago in 1932 and The Negro Family in the United States in 1939. Frazier, concerned with what he considered to be the instability of the African American family in the 1930s, located the roots of that instability in slavery. He concluded that the slave family was little more than an accommodation to the institution. It never had the capacity to tie together households into units of common interest and purpose. The reason for this failure, Frazier hypothesized, was that the slave family could not be protected by its adult members and, often dispersed by owners, seldom existed over any length of time.3 Later historians, such as Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins, followed in Frazier's wake, agreeing with him that even where the slave household existed it lacked cohesiveness. The frequent breakup of families by masters prevented the development of strong bonds among family members. In the end, Stampp and Elkins concluded, as Frazier had, that the slave family reflected little more than the slave owner's desire to create stability within the plantation community. These conclusions became the textbook history for a generation and even the basis for public policy. Daniel P. Moynihan's book, The Negro Family in America: The Case for National Action, published in 1965, integrated this analysis into his explanation of modern problems of the African American family and his proposal for their solutions.4 Scholarship in the 1970s, by looking at the slave family from the viewpoint of the slaves, developed a different and revisionist interpretation. Examining new sources that ranged from the reminiscences of ex-slaves to plantation records, historians found an institution not simply shaped by the interests of the master but also by the interests of the African American slave community. They discovered stability rather than instability. The idea that slaves sought to create two-parent nuclear families that then became the vehicle for the formation of a larger and uniquely African American culture first appeared in 1972 in John Blassingame's Slave Community. It received subsequent support in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's controversial Time on the Cross and Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll. Herbert Gutman carried the idea further in his Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, concluding that the two-parent family was the norm among slaves.5 By the 1990s the revisionist model had displaced that of Frazier, Stampp and Elkins. …

Slavery and the Defining of Arkansas

SLAVERY WAS RARELY, IF EVER, what struck visitors about antebellum Arkansas. In 1818 and 1819 Henry Schoolcraft romanticized a near savage population of hunters in the Ozarks while Thomas Nuttall found only incipient agricultural activity along the more settled banks of the Arkansas River. Traveling down the Southwest Trail in the mid-1820s, Joseph Meech worried about robbers and murderers. George Featherstonhaugh, in an oft quoted comment of 1834, described Arkansas Territory as a crude and violent place whose population consisted of debtors, gamblers, forgers, horse thieves, and murderers; all of them immigrants from the East attracted by Arkansas's flexible attitude toward such fundamental points as religion, morals, and property. A few years after statehood, Friedrich Gerstacker experienced the place as a vast wilderness, made up largely of swamps and forest, filled with game, and sparsely populated, mostly with subsistence farmers. As late as 1860 Henry Merrill marveled at the poverty-stricken and uncivilized mountain folk of Polk County in the Ouachita Mountains, making them sound like a fallen version of Schoolcraft's noble woodsmen of three decades earlier.1 While Orville W. Taylor published a comprehensive survey of in Arkansas in 1958, most recent scholars have de-emphasized that institution. Among modern interpreters, Malcolm J. Rohrbough saw Arkansas as a product of frontier and western influences; Lonnie White, Margaret Ross, and James M. Woods stressed the importance of politics; Michael B. Dougan was impressed with the lack of economic development, while this author argued for the importance of ambition and opportunity. Carl H. Moneyhon is an exception to this trend, but his work begins with the 1850s, when the significance of is more obvious. The general lack of attention, however, is neither surprising nor entirely unwarranted; was less dominant in Arkansas than in other states where planters and plantations were better established.2 In his recent and magisterial work, Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin distinguishes between societies with slaves and slave societies. In the former, slaves were simply one source of labor, and had a relatively small impact on society; in the latter, slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations. With slaves representing only 26 percent of its population in 186-the second smallest proportion in the Confederate states and only I percent above Tennessee, which was the bottom dweller-Arkansas did not fit Berlin's definition of a slave society, except perhaps in the plantation-dominated region of the south and east. Yet the influence of was pervasive. It established prerequisites for wealth and power, structured the law to meet its own imperatives, and shaped the relationship between Arkansas and the Union. Slavery was not the only definer of Arkansas, but it was a crucial one.3 The growth of in Arkansas was linked closely to the region's broader economic development. In 1820, a year after Arkansas had become a territory, agriculture was in its infancy. Slaves were only 11 percent of the population, and they were not concentrated geographically. Hempstead County on the Red River in the southwest had a population that was 21 percent slave, the highest in the territory. Delta counties like Arkansas and Phillips on the Mississippi River had only 14 percent and 12 percent respectively. Highland counties, Lawrence County in the north and Clark County in the southwest, had 9 percent and 7 percent respectively. By 1840 things had begun to change. In that year the census recorded that slaves were 20 percent of the population. Instead of being slightly more than one in ten persons, they were now one in five. Moreover, a geographic pattern had emerged as the slave population began to concentrate in the Delta and the Gulf Coastal Plain. …

Remembering Slavery (review)

?? B S ' JfLt Remembering Slavery Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, Steven Miller, editors The New Press (Norton), 1998, 352 pp. + cassette, $49.95 For the past quarter century, historians of the Old South's "peculiar institution" have examined the slave experience not through the white filter of the slaveholders' perspective, which was once the accepted practice , but from the bottom up, through the experiences of the slaves themselves . The source material for this groundbreaking historiographical shift was not the famous nineteenthcentury narratives of exceptional ex-slaves such as Frederick Douglass (which once served the abolitionists' cause and consequently were somewhat suspect) but written transcripts of interviews with former slaves conducted by oral historians of the Federal Writers' Project in the late 1930s. These little-known narratives had long been tucked away in the Library of Congress and were seldom accessed by the lay public. Drawn exclusively from this unique collection, Remembering Slavery is a book-and-tape set of transcripts and recordings of historic interviews with former slaves who vividly recount their own experiences in bondage as weU as their personal thoughts on Emancipation and the meaning of freedom. For the first time the general public is introduced to the poignant voices of the last Uving victims of the institution that has most shaped American history. During the Depression, interviewers from the Federal Writers' Project spoke with hundreds of elderly exslaves about their lives in slavery and even managed to record a smaU number of them on tape. The interviewers, including such notable figures as Zora Neale Hurston and John Lomax, asked ex-slaves about everything from daily routines and ways of life to their relationships with their former masters and with other slaves. Both taped and written interviews document almost every aspect of slave life; they reveal how slaves were born, their living arrangements, what they ate, wore and thought, their relationship with the land and their daily triumphs and frustrations. Of particular interest is the way they also illuminate the subtle dynamics behind the development of a distinct slave culture and community; we see how bondsmen created and preserved their culture in the face of oppression. We see, too, their everyday forms of resistance—survival techniques that helped them to maintain a sense of control and dignity in the face of hardship. 210 · The Missouri Review As expected, the narratives underscore the cruelty ofAmerican slavery and the bitterness of its victims. One woman teUs how an abusive mistress crushed her head under a rocking chair, deforming her face for life. Others tell stories of serving as beasts of burden and of the excruciating ordeal of witnessing a family member or friend sold to another master. But there are also stories of happiness —of marriage and family, religious experiences, celebrations such as com shuckings, of bonding together and looking out for one another, of outwitting masters and overseers and of escaping or helping others to escape. We hear Civil War stories from a unique perspective— experiences by slaves behind Confederate and Union lines. Finally, we hear Emancipation described—and freedom defined—by the people who endured the worst oppression in American history. (BR) The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore Oxford U.P., New York, 1999, 286 pp., $25 The word "même" was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins , author of the controversial theory that the gene, not the organism , is the unit of selection (The Selfish Gene, 1976). Dawkins argued that DNA is not the only conceivable medium in 'which Darwinian evolution can occur. He posited the existence of mêmes, nonbiological units of replication and competition that produce cultural evolution. Mêmes are abstract units of culture—concepts, images, instructions, stories, facts (or myths), jokes—anything that can be copied and spread. Susan Blackmore's new book, The Meme Machine, explores the possibility of a full-blown theory of memetics. With a blend of caution and boldness (she duly notes several fundamental problems in defining the nature of the même but then sidesteps these obstacles to pursue larger game), she applies memetic theory to some of the most controversial issues in evolutionary psychology and consciousness, including the origin of language, sexual attitudes, altruism, and the proportionately enormous...

Was the Emancipated Slave a Proletarian?

Was the Emancipated Slave a Proletarian? Alex Lichtenstein (bio) Over three decades ago, James McPherson wrote in The Negro’s Civil War (1965) that “The Negro was not merely a passive recipient of the benefits conferred upon him by the war. Negro orators and writers provided leadership in the struggle for emancipation and equal rights. Blacks were active in the movements to bring education, suffrage, and land to southern freedmen. And perhaps most important of all, the contribution of Negro soldiers helped the North win the war.” Conspicuously absent from this list of African-American contributors to freedom, however, were the slaves themselves.1 Following the lead of historians of slavery, who during the 1960s and 1970s returned those in bondage to center stage in accounts of the peculiar institution, American historians over the past two decades have begun to take a fresh look at the role of slaves in the Civil War and the process of emancipation. This reevaluation of the transition from slavery to freedom has been closely allied with the ongoing effort to rewrite the social history of Reconstruction. Two scholarly projects in particular have set the tone for the new work in emancipation studies. The benchmark for nearly all recent practitioners in the field remains Eric Foner’s magisterial study of the social and political transformations wrought by black freedom, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). Based on nine years of research, this work laid to rest once and for all the unquiet ghost of the Dunning school and a once deeply influential Reconstruction historiography that portrayed emancipated African Americans as manipulated dupes of vindictive Northerners, utterly unprepared for the tasks and responsibilities of freedom. Indeed, this work placed black agency—especially that of the former slaves—at the very center of the momentous social upheaval that accompanied African-American freedom at its birth. 2 Foner’s Walter Fleming lectures, published as Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983), brought a comparative perspective to bear on the study of emancipation as a social process for the first time. Radical Reconstruction in the American South stood out from all other emancipations in an era that saw many, for only there did former slaves “enjoy universal manhood suffrage and a real measure of political power.” 3 [End Page 124] At the same time, however, Foner’s work has demonstrated how “Reconstruction emerges as a decisive moment in fixing the dominant understanding of freedom as self-ownership and the right to compete in the labor market, rather than propertied independence.” Few historians have done more than Foner to use the drama of slave emancipation to illuminate the narrowing conception of freedom in a society increasingly devoted to the market as its arbiter, or to portray the freedpeople themselves as full and worthy human participants in this drama. “In being forced to deal with freedom as a matter of concrete policy,” Foner proclaimed in his 1994 Presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, “Americans were compelled to recognize how thoroughly their own society had changed” during the course of the nineteenth century’s market revolution. 4 Complementing Foner’s oeuvre is the collective endeavor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP), begun in 1976 and published so far in four volumes as Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (1982–1993). 5 Housed at the University of Maryland and overseen by historians Ira Berlin and Leslie Rowland, this genuinely collaborative project has drawn on the talents of a diverse array of scholars who have helped shape the field with a small library of their own articles and monographs. 6 Together they have produced a multi-volume work that lends enormous documentary weight to the emerging interpretation of emancipation as a process generated by the actions of slaves as much as by Abraham Lincoln, the Union Army, or black and white abolitionists. Both Foner and the FSSP, in turn, trace their legacy back to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). In that work, ignored by the historical profession at least until the 1960s, Du Bois began his chapter on the Civil War, entitled “The General Strike,” with this provocation: “When...

Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775 (review)

Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775 By Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1995 402 pp. Cloth, $45 Reviewed by Timothy J. Lockley, lecturer in early American history at die University of Warwick. Completed at Cambridge University in 1996, his dissertation explores race relations between African Americans and nonslaveholding whites in die Georgia low country between 1750 and 1830. Marvin Kay and Lorin Cary's new book is an important study of die system of slavery in colonial North Carolina. As the authors correcdy point out, most monographs on slavery concentrate on the antebellum period, often focusing exclusively on the last twenty years of southern slavery. This bias in the scholarship frequendy results in historians drawing conclusions about colonial slavery from antebellum evidence. This practice overlooks the peculiarities of colonial slavery, and Kay and Cary have done a great service by reminding us of diat distinctiveness . Their work is even more welcome considering that diere are few studies of colonial slavery that focus so exclusively on the eighteenth rather than the seventeenth century. The basic conclusion ofthis book is that colonial slavery was primarily African in character, in contrast to antebellum slavery, which was largely Creole. The African heritage ofthe first generation ofslaves influenced every aspect ofblack life in colonial North Carolina. Slave naming practices, resistance patterns, religion, family life and marriage rituals were largely based on African approaches. The authors ' knowledge of African customs is impressive and enables diem to offer substantive revisions ofthe work ofearlier scholars. They argue, for example, that many slave names previously thought to have been given to slaves by their owners were in reality Anglicized corruptions of African names. If this concept is correct, then Africans retained more of their individuality in die Americas than previously thought. I stress "if" because, as the audiors themselves acknowledge, there is no way ofbeing certain how many ofthe names now seen as English were in reality African or vice-versa. This scholarship proposes to make us reconsider our viewpoint in this matter—and that is surely a good thing. The most controversial part of Kay and Cary's argument deals with the theme of hegemony, or the ways in which owners exercised control on the plantation. 8 2 Reviews During the 1970s the question ofhegemony on the plantation became a hot topic among American scholars. Eugene Genovese, for instance, described die practices ofpaternalism throughwhich planters sought to acculturate their slaves, and dirough which both masters and slaves laid claim to customary rights and responsibilities . Kay and Cary believe that the idea of paternalism has been overstated for the colonial period. They posit a different relationship between masters and slaves, especially when the slaves were African-born. Instead of bringing slaves into white culture, and establishing control over them by acculturation, colonial owners preferred to marginalize slaves from white society and separate them from white culture. The evidence offered is interesting, especially with regard to religion. The authors note that a majority of planters throughout the colonial South resisted attempts to evangelize their slaves, and that African American Christianity only took off in the years after the American Revolution. Kay and Cary spend considerable time discussing the treatment of slaves by the court system, and their data on the prosecution of slave criminals is informative and extensive. It is surprising, however, that they give comparatively litde attention to the informal economic activities of slaves in North Carolina. Twenty years ago our knowledge of that subject was extremely limited, but work by Philip Morgan, Ira Berlin, and Betty Wood has in the last ten years substantially revised our understanding of slaves' market-related activities. It would have been interesting to see how the African heritage, otherwise so visible in eighteenthcentury slave life, affected die informal economy. Did slaves produce African foodstuffs to trade witii other slaves, were their handicrafts based on African models, and were the marketing strategies they pursued based on African practices ? This sort of inquiry would have enriched Kay and Cary's examination of the colonial slave experience. Kay and Cary note that slaves traded with poor whites and diat slaves and poor whites often worked alongside each other, yet...

Slavery, Work, and the Geography of the North Carolina Naval Stores Industry, 1835-1860

THE METHODS EMPLOYED IN HARVESTING TURPENTINE COMBINED WITH geography of southeastern North Carolina pine forests created special difficulties for mid-nineteenth-century naval stores producers and even more daunting challenges for their laborers. The expansion of naval stores production after 1830, various procedures involved in harvesting turpentine, size and location of turpentine forests, and ways that these three factors affected slave management practices created a unique work and ... manner of life for laborers in naval stores industry. Although nineteenth-century observers and twentieth-century historians have remarked that workers commonly preferred labor in turpentine forests to that in plantation fields, in fact, labor force of naval stores industry, which was composed predominantly of slaves, endured harsher working and living conditions than bondsmen on a typical agricultural plantation and, as a result, resisted their treatment. The experiences of laborers in turpentine forests and camps therefore represent a unique facet of slave experience. An analysis of slave labor in naval stores industry supports Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan's argument that the legacy of slavery cannot be understood without a full appreciation of way in which slaves worked.1 These historians maintain that, because slavery was above all an institution of forced labor and slaves spent most of their time at work, studies that focus on slave families, religion, and culture while important, describe only a portion of bondsman's life. If

THE AMERICAS

European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. By Anthony PagdenSettlements in the Americas: Cross‐cultural Perspectives. Edited by Ralph BennettThe ‘Underclass’ Debate: Views from History. Edited by Michael KatzThe American Stage: Social and Economic Issues from the Colonial Period to the Present. Edited by Ron Engle and Tice L. MillerThe Lincoln Persuasion: Remaking American Liberalism. By J. David GreenstoneChildren in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900. By Karin CalvertThomas Holme 1624–1695: Surveyor General of Pennsylvania. By Irma CorcoranNew England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century. By Virginia DeJohn AndersonSojourners in the Sun: Scottish Migrants in Jamaica and the Chesapeake. By Alan L. KarrasJonathan Carver's Travels through America, 1766–1768: An Eighteenth‐Century Explorer's Account of Uncharted America. Edited by Norman GelbEmblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology. By Lester C. OlsonThe Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution. By John E. CrowleyPatriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation. By Richard Norton SmithRedeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution. By Roger H. BrownThe American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. By Kerry S. WaltersEnd of an Era: The Last of the Great Lakes Steamboats. By David PlowdenUnfinished Business: The Railroad in American Lift. By Maury KleinMasters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers. Edited by Sanford M. JacobySocialism in America: From the Shakers to the Third International. Edited by Albert FriedStrained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti‐Slavery Society. By Debra Gold HansenEvangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. By Richard J. CarwardineHunting Lieutenant Chadbourne. By Jim W. CorderAntebellum Natchez. By D. Clayton JamesVictorian America and the Civil War. By Anne C. RoseTumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy. By Winthrop D. JordanWilliam Howard Russell's Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862. Edited by Martin CrawfordGrant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship. By J. F. C. FullerLetters Home: Henry Matrau of the Iron Brigade. Edited by Marcia Reid‐GreenNelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army. By Robert WoosterCharles Jonas (1840–1896): Czech National Liberal, Wisconsin Bourbon Democrat. By C. Winston ChrislockWales in America: Scranton and the Welsh, 1860–1920. By William D. JonesBetween Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860–1965. By Marilyn HalterWhen Bosses Ruled Philadelphia: The Emergence of the Republican Machine, 1867–1933. By Peter McCafferyOur American Cousins: Being Personal Impressions of the People and Institutions of the United States (1883). By W. E. AdamsGender and American History since 1890. Edited by Barbara MeloshAn Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895–1898. By John L. OffnerOf Law and Limitations: An Intellectual Portrait of Louis Dembitz Brandeis. By Stephen W. BaskervilleAmerica's Century: Perspectives on US History since 1900. Edited by Iwan W. Morgan and Neil A. WynnA Bloc of One: The Political Career of Hiram W. Johnson. By Richard Coke LowerThe Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies. By Tom CopelandAmerican‐Soviet Relations: From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism. By Peter G. BoyleAnxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920–1941. By Michael E. ParrishControlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and US Foreign Policy in Asia. By Ronald McGlothlenThe Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas. Edited by Ira Berlin and Philip DThe Penguin History of Latin America. By Edwin WilliamsonRegion and State in Latin America's Past. By Magnus MornerMaximilian and Juárez. By Jasper RidleyAguirre: The Re‐creation of a Sixteenth‐century Journey across South America. By Stephen MintaSociety, Economy and Defence in Seventeenth‐century Peru: The Administration of the Count of Alba de Liste (1655–61). By Peter T. BradleyTrade, War and Revolution: Exports from Spain to Spanish America 1797–1820. By John FisherMariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory. By Marc BeckerLand without Evil: Utopian Journeys across the South American Watershed. By Richard Gott

Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas. Edited by Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1993. viii plus 388pp.)

Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas. Edited by Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1993. viii plus 388pp.)

Border State Terror and The Genesis of the African-American Community in Deer Lodge and Choteau Counties, Montana, 1870-1890

So long as de shadder oh gret house falls acrost you, you aint't gwine ter feel lake no free man, an' you ain't gwine ter feel lak no free 'oman. You mu's all move - you mus move clar away from de ole places what you knows, ter de new places what you don't know, whey you kin raise up yore head douten no fear o' Marse dis ur Marse Tudder(1) Despite the wide diversity of studies on the twelve-year period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, the connection between Reconstruction and westward movement remains relatively unexplored.(2) Reconstruction was a particularly violent period for African Americans in the South, and we may look to the attempts of freedpeople to escape this violence as a crucial link between Reconstruction and westward migration. The particularly hostile and stifling environment for blacks in the border states of Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri may well have been what motivated many to go west during this period.(3) I think that it is safe to hypothesize that blacks' realization that emancipation from slavery would not protect them from the economically, psychologically and physically violent environment in which this institution flourished is likely to have caused many to seek a more liberatory freedom in the seemingly untarnished frontier West.(4) The environment of Reconstruction-era Kentucky epitomizes the lack of actual freedom felt by blacks after emancipation, as this was an area in which most blacks continued to be denied protection from physical violence as well as opportunities for economic or social advancement. That there was a bold effort made to escape these conditions is indicated by the 1870s settlement of a small but significant population of Kentucky blacks in Deer Lodge and Choteau counties, Montana. Although the history of black westward movement has been largely ignored and generally excused by the assumption that the relatively small number of blacks who migrated west does not warrant scholarly attention, Kenneth Wiggins Porter points out that some of the few Negroes who reached the region [Montana and Idaho] during the period of early settlement played a positive role - probably more important in proportion to their numbers than on any other comparable frontier.(5) The American frontier, being a supposed hotbed of economic opportunity, may have been especially attractive to blacks of the poverty-stricken South, where there seemed to be little chance of economic advancement for anyone.(6) In examining the probable link between Reconstruction-era violence and African-American westward migration, it is useful, I think, to also consider black westward movement in a more traditional context. That is, while asking whether black migration was motivated by wholly different reasons than white migration, we may also look at the possibility that blacks sought the very same kind of democracy as did white migrators, a democracy described by Frederick Jackson Turner as based on the family.(7) Recent historians such as Ira Berlin, Leon F. Litwack, Eric Foner, Catherine Clinton and others emphasize the importance of reforming kinship ties and strengthening familial relationships among freedpeople during Reconstruction. Foner contends, Emancipation allowed blacks to reaffirm and solidify their family connections, and most freedmen seized the opportunity with alacrity. . . . Black men and women shared a compassionate commitment to the stability of family life as a badge of freedom and the solid foundation upon which a new black community could flourish.(8) Might westward-moving blacks have imagined that along with the freedom from violence would come a freedom to create families and communities in which they could thrive? In turn, did the development or strengthening of black frontier families contribute to a truer form of democracy than that of the Reconstruction-era South? By examining blacks' settlement in the Montana territory as both an escape from the violence of Kentucky as well as an effort to build a democratic community in which not only their survival was guaranteed, but in which they could flourish, I hope to develop a greater connection between African-American and frontier history. …

The Struggle for Black Freedom before Emancipation

Civil has recently become a hot ticket. movie Glory, the PBS series The Civil War by Ken Burns, and James McPherson's recent Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the conflict have all dramatized the continuing relevance of the war as a defining experience for a people and a nation. These stories, however, have often neglected an important part of that defining experience: the role of black peo ple in securing their own emancipation. Most accounts of war date emancipa tion from Lincoln's famous procla^^^ mation and the military campaigns that followed. Even Glory, which traces the heroic deeds of black soldiers from Massachusetts, portrays slaves in the lowcountry of South Carolina as incompetent and ineffectual, persons who simply waited for Northern free black liberators to march South and rescue them from bondage. However, even this relatively en lightened view of the role of black people in their own emancipation is historically inaccurate. As Ira Berlin and his colleagues have shown in their monumental multi-volume series, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, slaves throughout the South squeezed free dom in dribs and drabs from their own local

Reviews and Short Notices: The Americas

Reviews and Short Notices: The Americas

The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas. Edited by Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan. London: Frank Cass, 1991. Pp. 213. £25.00.

The Slaves' Economy: Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas. Edited by Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan. London: Frank Cass, 1991. Pp. 213. £25.00.

Herbert G. Gutman as labor historian

A word or two of explanation of my participation in this sympo? sium seems appropriate. Arthur Vidich sent me a copy of Herbert Hill's critique of Gutman and asked me to comment. It was obvious from a quick reading that I could add nothing to Hill. But I have long felt a certain unease about Gutman. I had never read him systemati? cally. Several friends had urged me to read particular pieces and I had done so. These were not edifying experiences. He gave me no valid insights; his style was pretentious; he was disorganized; and his language was imprecise. Perhaps I had caught him on bad days. I offered to review all his work on labor history and Vidich agreed. Gutman's output was not extensive. He really wrote only one book, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (1976). If it were about slavery as a system of labor, it would, of course, be labor history. But, as the title indicates, it is about the institution of the slave family and should be classified, I suppose, as social his? tory. If Gutman is to have any enduring reputation, I suspect that it must come from this volume. There is no book on labor history; not even Gutman's doctoral dissertation was published as a whole. All of his work consists of essays. He collected seven of them into a volume entitled Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (1976). Ira Berlin, Gutman's collaborator, put together eleven others following Gut? man's death in a book called Power and Culture, Essays on the American Working Class (1987). This volume includes a biographi? cal sketch by Berlin and an interview by Mike Merrill. While there are other minor pieces, there can be no doubt that everything of consequence is in these two books. The writing of history almost invariably imposes two duties on the author?to tell a story within the strictures of the clock and the calendar and to analyze its significance. A remarkable fact about Gutman's historical work (both the labor history and the slave fam? ily book) is that he shunned narrative. Since readers like stories, this automatically limited the size of his audience. There is one excep? tion: the long essay entitled "Labor in the Land of Lincoln: Coal Miners on the Prairie," a richly detailed account of the mining

History making and politics

When my first graduate school research paper was done, I sent a copy to Herbert Gutman. Although he knew me not at all, he returned a spirited, brilliant and wide-ranging critique within a week. His letter used the term "mawkish" to describe the overly sentimental historical writings he disliked. Perhaps for that reason I have been slow to accept the characterization by critics of Gutman's own work as soft and sentimental. Such charges, applied to the whole of his writing, are not, on balance, convincing.1 But in this long essay, Herbert Hill establishes that in "The Negro and the United Mine Workers," Gutman's most extended work on race and the labor movement, sentimentalism shaped his conclusions, his choice of evidence and even his periodization. In trying to explain Gutman's failing in this particular area, we can hardly blame a general lack of historical craftsmanship on his part. Gutman was a consummate historian in terms of gathering and using evidence. He was perhaps the most penetrating student of periodization among U.S. labor historians of his time. His conceptu? alization of working-class history was surpassingly broad. As Ira Berlin has recently written, "For Gutman, . . . study of the Afro American family was not a detour on the road to a history of the American working class, but the center lane on the main highway."2 Gutman's failure to transcend a sentimental endorsement of Black white unity and to offer a critical examination of race relations within the working class is not an individual failing but one shared by most American historians of labor. Indeed, one might say that Gutman, by at least trying to discuss both white and Black workers together, did better than most labor historians, who generally ignore issues of race and racism.3 The problem of how to write about the history of workers and racism is a difficult one. Clearly most left and anti-racist scholars will want to devote sympathetic attention to past advocates of class unity across racial lines. They should do so. But, and here is where Gutman's essay on the UMW flounders, there is a political obliga? tion to discuss not only Black-white unity but also the limits ofthat

In defense of gutman; The Union's case

The historical profession, much like late capitalism, experiences frequent spurts of production and consumption of specialty items. The appetite for such history "fads"?in the form of myriad reviews, articles, and books on a particular subject, individual scholar or approach to the past?at times resembles a school offish in the midst of a feeding frenzy. Herbert Gutman's scholarship and his role in inspiring a new generation of social and labor historians have been subjected of late to just such a feeding frenzy. Gutman's work of course has been much commented upon and criticized over the past decade, as befitted his major contributions to historical scholarship. But with Gutman's death in 1985 and the publication in 1987 of Power and Culture, a final collection of his previously unpublished essays accompanied by Ira Berlin's magnificent introductory essay, the chorus of com? mentators on Herbert Gutman has notably swelled. While much of the recent criticism has been favorable, even laudatory (e.g. the Summer 1988 issue of Labor History), many scholars have used the occasion of Gutman's death as an opportunity to offer sharp criti? cisms of his work. These criticisms have often extended beyond the man himself to encompass an overall attack on the "new" social and labor history Gutman helped bring into being. Some historians, such as Michael Kazin, criticize Gutman (and indirectly social his? tory) for being dewey-eyed and romantic, lacking sufficient theoreti? cal rigor in analyzing 19th century working class culture and poli? tics. Others, such as Melvin Dubofsky, have offered gratuitous insults about Gutman's writing ability. In the opening pages of "Myth Making As Labor History," Her? bert Hill consciously situates his essay squarely in the midst of this recent wave of Gutman-criticism. Hill's charges, however, are far more damning and serious than those offered to date, going well beyond complaints of poor writing or romantic interpretation. First, Hill argues that Gutman's work is ideologically motivated: it "pro? vided the basis for a revived populist neo-Marxism that advances the ideology of working class consciousness and solidarity against the social realities of race." Next, Gutman's writings (and by exten? sion those of Gutman's acolytes in what Hill calls "the New Labor

Strange Career Critics: Long May they Persevere

Without the persistent attention of critics over the thirty-four years since its publication, The Strange Career ofJim Crow would have long since been forgotten. Lacking the demands for correction made by the flaws they discovered and the new findings they brought forth, I should have been hard put to justify the numerous revisions and new editions that have periodically helped revive interest in the subject. All along, of course, it has been the subject, rather than the book on the subject, that has explained the protracted attention and interest. I am nevertheless profoundly indebted to the critics for keeping the book alive along with the subject. I very much hope they will persevere. I promise to return to questions raised by some of the more recent critics.1 First, however, I should like to enter the fray myself. If the best defense is offense, perhaps the analogous strategy for criticism is self-criticism. At any rate, I have a good bit of self-criticism bottled up that might be offered here on that theory. Some of it may answer or duplicate, and some may forestall, the criticisms of others, but I hope none of it will discourage or slow the continued flow of criticism. Briefly stated, my main point is that work on this subject got started off on the wrong foot and that I bear heavy responsibility for the mischief. I am referring particularly to the question of racial segregation and its origins. What I did was to put the question when before the questions where and how, giving to time priority over circumstance and placing the chronology before the sociology and demography of the subject. I understand why I placed the issue of chronology foremost when I did. I believed then, and still do, that this ordering of priorities served a necessary and essential purpose. The fact remains that the approach did the historiography of the subject a disservice by giving it a wrong direction at the start. I should have been persuaded to make these admissions earlier by the nature of evidence presented in other contributions to the controversy, notably those of Leon F Litwack, Richard C. Wade, Ira Berlin, and Howard N. Rabinowitz. Each of them

Afro-American Families in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom

Research Article| October 01 1988 Afro-American Families in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom Ira Berlin; Ira Berlin Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Steven F. Miller; Steven F. Miller Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Leslie S. Rowland Leslie S. Rowland Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (1988) 1988 (42): 89–121. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1988-42-89 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, Leslie S. Rowland; Afro-American Families in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom. Radical History Review 1 October 1988; 1988 (42): 89–121. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1988-42-89 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsRadical History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © September 1988 by MARHO: The Radical Historians' Organization, Inc.1988 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Feature Articles You do not currently have access to this content.