Peter Kolchin - American Slavery, 1619-1877

Kolchin, Peter

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EX UBRIS

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AMERICAN

SLAVERY

1619-1877

ALSO BY PETER KOLCHIN

First Freedom: The Responses of Alabama s Blacks to Emancipation and Reconstruction (1972)

Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987), Winner of the Bancroft Prize for 1988

Consulting Editor: Eric Foner

HILL and WANG New York

A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright 1993 by Peter Kolchin All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd Designed by Fritz Metsch First printing, 1993

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Kolchin, Peter.

American slavery, 1619-1877 / Peter Kolchin ; consulting editor,

Eric Foner. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. SlaveryUnited StatesHistory. I. Title. E441.K64 1993 306.3'62'0973dc20 92-46358 CIP

For Michael and David

Preface ix

1. Origins and Consolidation 3

2. The Colonial Era 28

3. The American Revolution 63

4. Antebellum Slavery: Organization, Control, Paternalism 93

5. Antebellum Slavery: Slave Life 133

6. The White South: Society, Economy, Ideology 169

7. The End of Slavery 200

Appendix Statistical Tables 239

Notes 247

Bibliographical Essay 257

Index 293

The PAST QUARTER CENTURY has witnessed a huge outpouring of books and articles on American slavery. Scholars have probed it from a wide variety of angles, exploring new questions as well as old, in the process substantially revising our understanding of an institution that was a central feature of American history until 1865. One of the main foci of this research has been the slaves themselvestheir day-to-day behavior, family lives, religious practices, community organization, resistance, and social valuesbut virtually no topic has escaped historical attention. Scholars have interpreted and reinterpreted the economics of slavery, slave demography, slave culture, slave treatment, and slave-owner ideology; they have paid new attention to slavery in colonial America; they have explored variations conditioned by time and space, comparing slavery in different regions and countries as well as in different eras; and they have examined the abolition of slavery, debating the impact and consequences of emancipation. All history is subject to continuous revision, but few areas of historical study have seen the kind of extensive reworking that has transformed our understanding of American slavery. Indeed, the sheer volume of historical work on slavery has become so vast that keeping up with it is a task of herculean proportions even for experts in the field. For everyone else, it is simply impossible.

Despite the proliferation of this scholarly research, we still lack a volume that pulls together what we have learned to present a coherent history of slavery in America. Perhaps in part because of the enormous quantity of publications and in part because of the rapidity with which they have reshaped our understanding of diverse questions, no one has yet produced an account that satisfactorily synthesizes and makes sense of recent historical research on slavery.

I believe that it is time to step back and consider where we now standwhere historians agree and disagree, what we have learned and what remains to be learnedand on the basis of this consideration to present a short interpretive survey of American slavery. Hence this book, which I hope will be useful to a broad range of readers, from those who know virtually nothing about the history of slavery to those who know a great deal about it.

In writing this volume, I have had several goals in mind. First, I have sought to create an account of slavery that is at the same time substantive and historiographical. Because historical reinterpretation is a continuing process, any understanding of slavery requires coming to grips with the diverse and changing ways in which historians have treated the institution. I thus combine a primary focus on the evolution of slavery itself with frequent brief (and I hope unobtrusive) discussions of historical controversies over slavery. These controversies, some of which have been resolved while others remain active, provide a useful means of exploring both the nature of slavery and its meaning and significance to later generations of Americans. In dealing with historical controversies, I have tried to explain divergent positions fairly, but I have not shied away from offering my own reasoned judgments where they seem warranted. This is an interpretive history.

Second, I have aimed for a balanced approach that pays attention to the slaves, the slave owners, and the system that bound them together. For years, historians treated slaves primarily as objects of white action rather than as subjects in their own right, and largely ignored the behavior and beliefs of the slaves themselves. Reacting against this emphasis, many scholars have more recently focused on the slaves as actors, stressing the world they made for themselves rather than the constraints imposed by their owners. I believe that neither slaves nor slave owners can be understood in isolation from each other: a well-rounded study of slavery must come to grips with slaves as both subjects and objects and must consider slavery from