Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virgina (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975).
Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982).
The American historical profession experienced something of a revolution in the 1960s. As historians gradually came to a general consensus that historical scholarship should be more inclusive of Indians, blacks, and women, they also disagreed sharply on the form of that inclusion. For some, it was a way to “speak truth to power”; for others, a way to reconstruct a more precise picture of the past. Many historians of these marginalized groups at first depicted their subjects as victims of brutal oppression, then corrected that depiction by attempting to show that the marginalized had “agency”: control over their lives and their oppressors.
Historians soon encountered a dilemma. Can the powerless wield power? Do structures – major events and forces – or struggles – everyday lives of ordinary people – deserve the most attention? How does one write history that avoids what Peter Novick calls “overdrawn portrayals of lower-class militancy,” on one hand, and studies of the “minutiae of everyday underclass existence” on the other?
Take the case of colonial Virginia. Clearly the history of the region cannot be told without reference to slavery, the institution described as the “central paradox” and “great transforming circumstance” of American history. But what of slaves themselves? Should they be studied for their own sake or for the impact they had on the broader society? This paper will discuss how three leading historians of early America use African-Americans in their narratives of colonial Virginia and, in turn, what African-Americans themselves contribute to the story. Each is a masterpiece, and each author’s approach makes a vital contribution to the historiography – Philip Morgan’s comprehensiveness, Edmund Morgan’s emphasis on class conflict, and Rhys Isaac’s imaginative methodology – but ultimately Isaac’s study shows the most promise. Slaves in his account present themselves as human beings with crucial connections to the rest of society.
Slave Counterpoint
Philip Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint is the most obvious place to start. The title, the cover, the table of contents – the whole book is about African and African-American slaves, and other social groups only enter the narrative to fill out the picture. Morgan is not as interested in the political or economic impact of slaves as he is in their humanity, so he tells their story “as comprehensively as possible.” At seven hundred pages, the reader is not likely to quibble with that claim. But behind this impressive accumulation of information is a distinctive philosophy of history. It is “not just the actions of the ruling groups,” Morgan intones, “it is the sweat, blood, tears, and triumphs of the common folk.” His goal, accordingly, is to “bring history closer to the central concerns of people’s lives.”
Thus Slave Counterpoint is bursting with details of slave’s everyday existence: their work, housing, clothing, diet, music, dance, religion, and so on. By sheer descriptive weight, Morgan forces the reader to acknowledge the three-dimensionality of the slaves’ world. They may have lived under relentless oppression, but their lives had particular shapes and rhythms. Some slaves exhibited remarkable horticultural skills; others displayed their pride in their gestures and styles of walking.
But Morgan goes beyond the encyclopedic to show slaves “forcing masters to recognize their humanity.” That masters regularly resorted to harsh discipline, that they lived in fear of slave revolt, that they routinely gave audience to slaves’ pleas for clemency – these actions reveal that masters understood African-Americans’ capacity for resistance and their desire for liberty. Some slaves were able to win the respect of their masters; many found ways to manipulate them; and in one extraordinary case, a slave named Peter partnered with his master to defraud other owners. Slaves demonstrated their agency, then, in these creative, cunning relationships with their oppressors.
Still, Morgan situates this agency by comparison: showing how slaves adapted to different environments, staple crops, and labor systems. Indeed, there was a certain irony in the way the two societies diverged: “to be treated brutally was to have more latitude.” Thus, in the South Carolina Lowcountry, where work and punishment were generally harsher, African-Americans developed a more vibrant and autonomous culture. In short, Morgan argues, slaves worked with what they had. Their struggles cannot be seen apart from the structures put in place by the landscape and the planter class.
In the end, though, Slave Counterpoint is a tribute to the struggles. Throughout, Morgan celebrates the ability of slaves to create “a coherent culture,” what he calls “the most significant act of resistance in its own right.” We are to see in the slave experience “a freedom of the soul, of words, of play, and of the body . . . a freedom of the spirit, an irrepressible and unquenchable human spirit.” In other words, Philip Morgan does not use African-Americans in his story – they are the story. Their contributions are everywhere; their humanity, creativity and tenacity are inescapable. Yet in its sheer quantity of information and topical organization, Morgan’s study tends to obscure exactly how slaves shaped the broader society. Slave Counterpoint is a fine portrait, but not much of a story.
American Slavery American Freedom
The reverse is true in Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery American Freedom, at once an intriguing explanation of how slavery and freedom came to coexist in American society and a riveting story. Slavery is of course central to this narrative. But slaves themselves are rather quiet. They are merely used in the conflict between the main protagonists, the white gentry and freemen.
American Slavery is the story of a dilemma and its resolution. Virginia’s ruling class needed workers to grow their cash crop (tobacco); they also needed to keep these workers from open rebellion. At first their laborers were mostly European indentured servants who became poor freemen after their term of service. As life expectancies rose and this free white population grew, the big planters realized that the freemen would become competing tobacco-growers or landless malcontents – a problem in either case. So the planters bought up as much land as they could, extended terms of service, and generally squeezed the freemen and servants for every ounce of labor and money they possessed. The freemen, naturally, grew in bitterness as they grew in number. Finally, thousands of freemen joined Nathanial Bacon’s rebellion of 1676, a conflict that, for Morgan, almost prophetically suggested that “resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class.”
Enter the Africans. In African slavery, Morgan tells us, Virginia’s ruling class found the solution to the persistent social threat posed by these “terrible young men.” Not only did slave labor make additional indentured servants unnecessary, their color provided a convenient means of dividing the lower classes and thereby consolidating the power of the gentry. Initially, Morgan argues, members of Virginia’s upper class viewed slaves with the same contempt they had had for the poor in England. Official racism was only introduced when they perceived the danger of cross-racial revolt, to “separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt.”
According to Morgan, the tactic worked. Gradually, as the planters’ prosperity “no longer depended on wringing the last possible penny” from freemen, whites of all classes found a common identity in their race. The “vicious traits of character” ruling whites had attributed to the poor in general were applied exclusively to blacks, and Virginia’s gentry suddenly found it possible to preach class equality. Racial hostility trumped class warfare. In Morgan’s account, African-Americans serve to emphasize the conflict and hegemonic consensus between Virginia’s whites.
At times we catch glimpses of how blacks might have contributed to this process by their own actions. By feigning sickness, running away, and working slowly, the slave magnified “a part of his life that he could call his own”; by converting to Christianity he forced whites to “build a wall between conversion and emancipation”; by his willingness to compete for white women he prompted laws against interracial sex. But throughout Edmund Morgan’s argument, the attitudes and actions of whites remain front and center. African-Americans are important as they are perceived and used by whites, and contribute little to the narrative. He is not telling their story.
The Transformation of Virginia
At first blush, it seems that Rhys Isaac likewise minimizes the contributions of African-Americans in colonial Virginia. The Transformation of Virginia, after all, is about the evolution of religious and political thought from 1740, and Isaac makes no Morgan-esque claims about the centrality of slavery. Yet the story of Afro-Virginians supplies a subtle but crucial counter-narrative to the tale of gentry and small planters. And of the three, Isaac’s methodology is the most successful in evoking sound from the historically silent world of eighteenth-century slaves.
The Transformation of Virginia is an ambidextrous effort. With one hand, Isaac argues that the transition from communalism to individualism, from social hierarchy to social compact, was driven by conflict between the established Anglican Church and dissenting Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. With the other hand, Isaac seeks to translate the past, to chart a “means of access to the alien mentalities of a past people.” The book, then, has as much to do with method as it does with content.
Although the prerogatives and anxieties of Virginia’s “big men” form the broad path taken by Isaac’s narrative, African and Afro-Virginian culture represent an alternative path, a counterpoint to the dominant melody. At first the two cultures inhabited the same world, united by the patriarchal authority of the gentry. By 1790, however, their paths diverged. For whites, individualism supplanted the hierarchical “consensus that was expressed in land boundaries, tobacco warehouses, courthouses, and [most importantly] churches.” Blacks, who had “remained largely outside this system of persuasion,” became even more community-oriented. The slave quarter had always represented Afro-Virginians’ active preference for communal living and the planters’ tacit acceptance of their distinct social system, but by the 1790s “the shape of the slaves’ homeplace clearly indicated the consolidation of a communal pattern from which the masters’ increasingly individualized way of life was diverging.” For Isaac, then, slave culture provides welcome relief from the “principal of individual autonomy” which came to dominate American life.
In Isaac’s Virginia, it is not economics but ideas expressed in socio-religious practices that cause change. And so he argues that, aided by the upheaval of the Revolution, religious dissent effectively removed the Anglican Church from the center of local community; aided by Enlightenment republicanism, it also recast participation in public life on a contractual basis. But it is puzzling that brute economics does not play a larger role in the narrative. Compared with Edmund Morgan’s tale of relentless, ruthless scrambles for cash, Isaac’s Virginia is almost playful, and his argument is consequently a little diluted.
Still, Isaac is on to something. One reason the quiet role of slaves in his story is so compelling is the method he employs to bring them to life. His key assumption, Isaac explains in “A Discourse on the Method”, is that “society is not primarily a material entity” but a “dynamic product of the activities of its members.” Practically, this means that since historical characters do not routinely explain to us their worldviews, their “actions must be viewed as statements.” Historical episodes are seen as stage plays.
With this in mind, Isaac takes us to the journal of Landon Carter, a major planter with a famously hot temper. Using a wide range of approaches, Isaac teases out a three-dimensional social world of slaves and master. He shows, for example, that slaves from different quarters were often rivals who sought to use the master’s power to settle their own disputes. He also illustrates how Carter’s domineering ways belied insecurity about his power over his slaves: his slave Bart’s “claim to independent social personality” infuriated Carter. In both cases, no “attribution” of agency to African-Americans is necessary. Their agency is evident.
Thus, even though Isaac is not concerned with slavery per se, his use of African-Americans in his narrative is compelling. He does not give them the attention that Philip Morgan does, nor are they as central in his argument as they are in Edmund Morgan’s. But African-Americans are just as human in his story as they are in Slave Counterpoint, and their connections to the wider society are revealed as they are in American Slavery. In his methodology, moreover, Isaac leaves his reader with a tantalizing glimpse of how we might reconstruct the world of African-Americans together with the world of all Virginians.
Conclusion
At a basic level, to claim agency for the marginalized is to state the obvious. Human beings try to shape their own lives; it is one of the markers of our species. But historians who acknowledge the agency of the oppressed usually mean much more. They want – or are obliged – to show that oppressed people subverted the authority of the oppressors and impacted some broader historical narrative. To write a history of the “big men” only is no longer praiseworthy in the academy, if it is even permissible.
The difficulty with “agency” is suggested by the word itself: an agent is defined by a particular function, a societal role. Focusing on that function can obscure the agent’s life story, just as focusing on the life story can obscure the agent’s societal role. In dealing with this difficulty, each author makes a contribution.
Philip Morgan shows with breathtaking detail that African-Americans created space for themselves under slavery. Edmund Morgan argues most persuasively for the centrality of African slavery in American society. Isaac, however, comes closest to resolving the dilemma, for in his story slaves are both human and connected to the larger events of the world in which they lived.
Good lit review, I'm looking forward to doing more writing about America.