RESISTANCE ON THE PLANTATION:

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF OWNING THE HUMAN SPIRIT

by

Anne J. Hartline

A Thesis/Project

Presented to

The Faculty of Humboldt State University

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Masters of Social Science

Emphasis in American History

May, 2005

RESISTANCE ON THE PLANTATION:

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF OWNING THE HUMAN SPIRIT

by

Anne J. Hartline

Approved by the Master’s Thesis Committee: Delores McBroome, Major Professor Date Gayle Olson-Raymer, Committee Member Date Rodney Sievers, Committee Member Date Delores McBroome, Graduate Coordinator Date MASS—Teaching American History ________________________________________________________________________ Donna E. Schafer, Dean for Research and Graduate Studies Date

ABSTRACT

RESISTANCE ON THE PLANTATION:

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF OWNING THE HUMAN SPIRIT

By Anne J. Hartline

As a girl growing up in suburban Southern California in the 60’s, I learned about

the horrors of American slavery as part of my studies of American history. I learned

about the cruelty, indignity, greed, inhumanity, and victims. I learned a bit about slave

revolts, but mostly about those that came to a terrible end with little positive result.

However, I never remember learning about how, in the words of Ira Berlin, “slaves never

relinquished the right to control their own destiny.” I never learned about the many ways

that African-American slaves, like all oppressed people, developed coping strategies

which helped them maintain their own unique culture and sense of personhood. While

not as readily available as information about slaves who endured silently and those who

ran away or led armed insurrection, ample evidence does exist to show that most slaves

actively asserted their right to some control through various means, including theft,

purposely (and clandestinely) becoming literate, poor performance on the job (to the

point of work stoppages), suicide, feigned illness, fighting back with overseers or other

disciplinarians, and finally surprisingly deft negotiation. Again, in the words of Ira

Berlin, “The slaves’ history—like all human history—was made not only by what was

done to them but also by what they did for themselves.” Eugene Genovese once wrote,

“slaves...rejected the essence of slavery by projecting their own rights and values as

iii

human beings.” Enslaved African Americans, living on plantations and in cities before

the Civil War, were survivors who struggled to maintain their dignity and the integrity of

their families and communities.

Central to the historical debate about slaves and their reactions/adaptations to life

under slavery is the perspective from which future generations view the events of the

past. For many years, in fact well into the 20th Century, white historians tended to view

the institution of slavery though the lens of the slaveholder, using documents generated

by those same slaveowners, but over the last 40 years, this perspective has shifted

dramatically. More recent scholarship turns the lens instead on the slaves themselves.

For the purposes of this discussion then, this evolution of historical research along a

continuum of changing perspectives from slaveowner to slave when viewing slave

resistance on the plantation will be discussed and analyzed at length.

In addition, a second key focus for this work will be the ways in which enslaved

Africans and African-Americans acted on their own behalf, as well as that of their family

and community, to transform their experience and somehow, against all odds, lead lives

with some level of dignity and control. This part of the discussion will focus on the

“demonstration of the beauty and power of the human spirit under conditions of extreme

oppression” found in analyzing slave actions on and around the plantation.

This evidence, found embedded in various forms of slave resistance, will be

explored here in detail and offered as an antidote to the bigotry, and underlying hate,

found in the apologist’s remaking of the past.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS.................................................................................................... v

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1

SCHOLARSHIP AND SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES ON SLAVE ADAPTATION TO THE “PECULIAR INSTITUTION” ................................................. 5

RESISTANCE ON THE PLANTATION ........................................................................ 25

Resistance through Cultural Institutions............................................................... 28

Resistance Through Deception ............................................................................. 32

Resistance Through Negotiation........................................................................... 39

CONCLUSION................................................................................................................. 42

ADAPTING TO LIFE UNDER SLAVERY: TEACHING AMERICAN HISTORY LESSON PLAN.............................................................................................. 45

Introduction........................................................................................................... 45

Lesson Timeline.................................................................................................... 46

Prior Content Knowledge and Skills..................................................................... 47

Assessment: “Connect Two” and “Two in One”................................................. 52

References............................................................................................................. 62

ENDNOTES ..................................................................................................................... 63

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................. 73

APPENDIX A Standards Addressed by this Lesson Plan ................................................ 78

APPENDIX B Vocabulary for unit readings .................................................................... 80

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TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued)

Page

APPENDIX C Graphic Organizer for Slave Interview Presentations .............................. 83

APPENDIX D Assessment Rubric: Slave Narrative Interview....................................... 85

APPENDIX E Final Assessment: Rubric For Collages.................................................... 87

APPENDIX F Traditional Final Assessment for Lesson: Adapting to Life Under Slavery .............................................................................................................................. 89

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INTRODUCTION

The issue of slave resistance on the American plantation is closely linked to a

number of key debates within academic, social, and political circles. In addition, the

topic of slavery, with its sister issues of racism, cultural roots, and most recently,

reparations continue to roil in American society 150 years after slavery’s abolition. For

almost a century, debates about the impact of the institution of slavery on the culture and

consciousness of the United States, along with the effect of slavery upon those who were

enslaved as well as their descendants, have raged throughout historical circles. Few 350-

year-old topics in American history touch upon such deep and clearly gaping cultural

wounds because at the roots of this discussion lie extremely ugly and painful themes:

violence, power, labor, racism, and racial subjugation.

Today, these issues are far from resolved. In fact, the necessity and urgency of

this continued discussion and scholarship is increasing as the Neo-Confederate

Conservative movement, as well as other hate-based, racist philosophies, attempt to

recreate an image of the antebellum South as a peaceful place in which masters and

slaves enjoyed close and mutually respectful relationships. (1) This damaging image,

which underlies racist policies and attitudes of superiority and hate, must be discussed in

academic, political, and social circles, and then purged completely, if America is ever to

recover from the terrible evil of 300 years of chattel slavery.

This historiography will look at the issue of slave resistance on the plantation with

two main foci: the evolution of scholarship on slave adaptation as well as the shift in

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2

perspective within that scholarship; and scholarship illustrating the various types of

resistance on the plantation. At this point it is appropriate to discuss the definition of

resistance (the noun) and to resist (the verb) which will be used throughout this

historiography. For our purposes, resistance will mean “an opposing, a withstanding”.

Resistance, then, does not necessarily imply physical resistance to slaveowners but

instead implies the “withstanding” of the condition of servitude and additionally,

“standing against” the demoralizing effects of enslavement. To resist will be defined as

“to stand against, to withstand, to oppose, to fend off, to withstand the action of.” (2)

Two important topics in the historical literature on resistance are beyond the

scope of this research but merit brief discussion: violent resistance in which enslaved

Africans participated and resistance through escape. The existence of armed rebellions

both on plantations and slave ships have been well documented and shatter the illusion of

the docile and happy slave. The risks taken by so many of the enslaved—the slaves on

board both the Amistad and the Creole, the actions and/or urgings of Nat Turner,

Denmark Vesey, Charles Deslondes, David Walker, and even Jacob Cowan (who

distributed Walker’s book)—attest to the desperate desire of many to seek an ultimate

escape, regardless of violent consequences. Most of these incidents are well researched

and have infiltrated the consciousness of most educated Americans. (3)

Violent resistance also took many, lesser known paths. Stampp claims, “Next to

theft, arson was the most common slave ‘crime’, one which slaveholders dreaded almost

constantly....More than one planter thus saw the better part of a year’s harvest go up in

flames.” (4)

3

Violent, spur-of-the-moment retaliation against cruelty or extreme situations also

attests to the fact that slaves were neither docile nor contented. Genovese cites an ex-

slave, Jerry Boyins, when he “recalled that his master did all the whipping on the

plantation because his slaves had killed two overseers for whipping cruelly.” (5) Camp

relates interesting stories of on-the-spot retribution, “Of course, they sometimes

retaliated, as Sylvia DuBois once did, striking her attacker with ‘a hell of a blow with my

fist’. One young girl filled her hair with sewing pins, ‘points up’, and the next time her

owner punched the child’s head, she got a fist ‘filled with pins.’” (6)

Even more telling, and more horrifying, are the stories of suicide and infanticide

as the ultimate method of escaping oppression. Horton and Horton tell the story of

Margaret Garner, a slave who escaped from Kentucky with her husband and family and

was subsequently caught in Cincinnati by slave catchers. Margaret was so desperate that

her children not live their lives in slavery that she decided death was a better option.

“She managed to killed her baby before the slave catchers stopped her from killing the

others. She later asserted that she would have killed all her children if she had had the

time.” (7)

The second aspect that fills the gap between rebellion and resistance but which

will not be discussed in this historiography at any great length is escape from slavery.

Much has been written about the daring escapes of Frederick Douglass, Henry “Box”

Brown, William and Ellen Crafts, and the brave leadership of Harriet Tubman along the

highly romanticized “Underground Railroad”. (8) While it is extremely difficult to

accurately determine how many slaves successfully ran away, let alone how many made

4

the attempt, it is estimated that at least 1,000 may have made it to freedom each year in

the 1840s and 1850s. (9) Surprisingly, by analyzing runaway slave ads in newspapers,

historians have ascertained that fewer than 10 percent were headed north, at least

according to their owners, and studies indicate that 75 percent of these fugitives were

never captured. However, the risks were huge, and consequences for capture were severe.

According to Horton and Horton, most runaways were unmarried men with ages ranging

from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties. (10) For slaves with family responsibilities,

especially women, permanently running away was not a viable option.

All of these examples, and the many more not cited here, attest to the fact that

slaves were not contented with their condition nor were they willing to passively accept

their fate. In addition, these examples also make it clear that slaves were not the pathetic

victims as often depicted in some historical perspectives.

SCHOLARSHIP AND SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES ON SLAVE ADAPTATION TO THE “PECULIAR INSTITUTION”

Scholarship on the nature of slavery, the relationship between master and slave,

and the reaction and coping mechanisms of slaves to enslavement have been far from

static over the last 150 years. Sweeping societal change including acceptance of Black

scholarship, publishing volumes of slave narratives and interviews, rising emphasis on

interdisciplinary studies, and the use of computers to compile and organize data have all

played a role in this shift. Central to the issue, however, is the overwhelmingly racist

attitude that predominated early scholarship on slavery —an attitude that was born in part

of a need to justify a system at odds with the principles on which the nation was

conceived. Allowing slave voices to be heard as valid sources of information has helped

to mitigate this methodological bias.

“The slave is central to the drama...For too long, scholars have taken the slaves’ legal status as chattel property and their social standing at the extreme of subordination as evidence that slaves stood outside history...Appreciating the ongoing struggle between slaves and slaveowners gives the lie to such assumptions.” (11)

It could be argued that the topic of slavery and its effects has been discussed since

the first Africans were brought to Jamestown in 1619. Certainly, the extensive writings

before the Civil War, by both slaveholders, non-slaveholders, abolitionists, and

occasionally the slaves themselves could attest to this. However, the voice of a critical

portion of the equation, the slaves themselves, was historically silent until the last 50

years. True, the analysis of historic data is made much more complicated due to the fact

that enslaved Africans rarely produced the types of evidence generally used by historians

5

6

as a basis of analysis and subsequent corroboration. Most of the individuals likely to

have had an understanding of what life was like for the enslaved, the bondsmen and

women themselves, could neither read nor write, and therefore left their evidence in the

challenging form of an oral history tradition. (12) Still, some escaped slaves did publish

narratives about their enslavement which were read with interest by many people in the

North. (13) White historians, when researching the written evidence of slavery during the

first half of the twentieth century, consciously chose to ignore the existent slave

narratives. Historians are now making much greater use of slave narratives, as well as

the material cultural evidence left by slaves, in order to obtain a more balanced picture of

life on the plantation. (Egerton) In addition, Berlin urges us to always keep in mind the

evolving nature of American slavery. For Berlin, the nature of slavery was made and

remade over the course of three centuries, depending on location, crop, type of labor

performed, and political climate. Berlin’s fascinating work will be discussed at length

later in this work. (14)

Foner argues that historians of slave history, white and black, have condemned

chattel slavery (Foner, page 3). However, early white historical writers promoted what

came to be known as the “contented slave” thesis based upon the belief that the Negro

race was inferior. One such writer was James Ford Rhodes who between 1892 and 1906

published a seven-volume history of the United States from 1850 –1877. Rhodes, a

businessman-turned-historian, stated as an irrefutable “scientific truth” that the Negro

was an inferior race. In addition, for Rhodes, the horror of slavery was “mitigated by the

fact that the sorrows of the Negro were only transient” (15) These views were

7

vehemently opposed by leading Black scholars of the time; George Washington

Williams, W.E.B. DuBois, and Carter G. Woodson, but their writings were largely

ignored and written off as not being objective. (16) Instead, Rhodes’ work remained the

dominant force in mainstream American thought throughout the first decade of the

Twentieth Century.

Just before the outbreak of World War I, a new twist on the “contented slave”

emerged: the idea that slavery had been beneficial to the Negro as opposed to repressive.

(17) Ulrich B. Phillips was a Southerner, the son of a Georgian merchant, and obviously

influenced by the dominant attitudes of his forefathers. In the dedication to his book, A

History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt, published in 1908, Phillips wrote

“To the Dominant Class in the South...who wrought more sanely and wisely than the

world yet knows.” (18)

Phillips was the first major historian of slavery to analyze the records kept by

plantation owners and their families, and his extensive research culminated in the 1918

publication of his most important work, American Negro Slavery. (19) A prolific writer

on the topic, Phillips cited only materials collected from the writings of slaveowners and

ignored existing authentic slave narratives which he claimed were inaccurate and riddled

with bias. Phillips concluded was that slavery was a benign institution and provided

specific examples drawn for planters’ journals, account books, and letters to prove his

point. He equated the master/slave relationship with the teacher/pupil relationship and

argued that life on the plantation was far superior to life for factory workers. “There was

clearly no general prevalence of severity and strain in the regime. There was,

8

furthermore, little of that curse of impersonality and indifference which too commonly

prevails in the factories of the present-day world” (20)

For Phillips, paternalism was the only feasible method of labor control on the

plantation. However, Phillips espoused the belief that there were limits to the extent of

paternalism because of the Negro’s inherent inadequacies. Phillips reasserted the earlier

views delineated by James Ford Rhodes and others when he claimed that Negroes were

naturally submissive and therefore suited for slavery. American Negro Slavery, with its

myth of the contented slave and view of the institution of slavery as a civilizing

institution for slaves, bolstered white supremacist attitudes and created a plantation

legend that held firm for several decades.

Phillips’ writings did not go unchallenged. In 1918, W.E.B. DuBois aptly pointed

out that Phillips’s sources were one-sided and maintained that a true picture of slave life

and slave reaction to captivity could never be determined without utilizing evidence

provided by slaves themselves. (21) Carter G. Woodson, in his review of American

Negro Slavery in 1919, also criticized Phillips’ methods: “Mr. Phillips has not exhausted

the study of plantation, for many of the records cited are those of the most enlightened

and benevolent slaveholders of the South...not of that class of slaveholders most

numerous in the South.” (22) However, the views of these, and other, black writers and

historians barely made a ripple in mainstream historical circles and thought at the time.

Within twenty years, white historians began criticizing Phillips and his research.

In 1931, Frederick Bancroft’s Slave Trading in the Old South rejected Phillips’

contention that blacks were meek and docile and contradicted many of Phillips assertions.

9

(23) For sources he used slave trading records, manuscripts, pamphlets, old newspapers,

slave narratives, and even conducted extensive interviews with confederate offices, old

farmers, traders, and ex-slaves. In one instance, Phillips relates a story of kindness in

which a master swears to the slave that is being sold that he will buy them back as soon

as his fortunes change. Instead, Bancroft counters with actual evidence from the slave

trade.

“The advertisements of the sale in ten newspapers from Richmond to New Orleans indicated where purchasers were sought. Butler could no more have known where all his slaves were going than he could have known how long they were to live; and no sane man, to say nothing of one near bankruptcy, could ever have expected to repurchase 400 slaves scattered over a broad region perhaps 1000 miles long.” (24)

Bancroft was the first white historian to actually draw on slave sources. In addition,

Bancroft criticized Phillips for not using slave narratives in his research.

Another important criticism of Phillips by white historians came from Raymond

Bauer and Alice Bauer’s 1938 article, “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery”. The article

delineated resistance in many forms on the plantation (to be discussed later) and used this

to bolster their claim that “the Negroes were not only very discontented, but...they

developed effective protest techniques in the form of indirect retaliation for their

enslavement.” (25) The Bauers go on to state,

“The material presented here suggests the need for a reconsideration of the concept of the slave’s easy adjustment to slavery. He was not a cheerful, efficient worker, as has been assumed. Rather, he was frequently rebellious, and almost always sullen, as any person faced with a disagreeable situation which he cannot escape will normally be.” (26)

10

It is also important to note that the Bauers, along with Bancroft, used the biographies and

autobiographies of slaves as sources of information. (27)

Another attack on Phillips was launched by Herbert n 1943 in his American

Negro Slave Revolts. (28) Aptheker argued that Phillips had presented wholly inadequate

and inaccurate data about slave revolts in order to further his generalizations about

slaves’ submissive nature and suitability for enslavement. In addition, Aptheker

criticized Phillips’ categorization of slave revolts as crimes, thus allowing him to

discount their importance. However, Aptheker’s work was discounted and largely

unheeded for many years due to his openly-Marxist political leanings. It was not until

30 years later with the publication of Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene D. Genovese that

Aptheker’s theme gained credence.

“He demolished the legend of the contented slave...Whatever Aptheker’s exaggerations and doubtful evaluation, his careful analysis, sharpened by that passionate commitment to the struggle for black liberation which has transformed his life’s work, unearthed much more evidence of insurrection, maroon activity, and other forms of physical resistance and compelled a new departure in the historiography.” (29) None of this criticism or counter-research served to dislodge the work of Phillips

or his stereotypes about slaves and slavery from the minds of the average white American

or historian. It wasn’t until radical political and ideological change came about in

America’s mainstream, non-academic realms that other viewpoints were seriously

considered. Eric Foner aptly sums the situation up when he writes:

“The emergence of the civil rights movement, the growing sense of racial pride and identity among blacks, and the recognition by whites of the full implication of racism in America, all eventually had their influence on the studies of slavery. In the 1950s, young scholars began vigorously to assail

11

Phillips’ interpretation of slavery and launched a restudy of the minority anti-Phillips position in historiography heretofore largely neglected in academic circles. All this combined to set the stage for the anti-Phillips synthesis of slavery offered by Kenneth Stampp.” (30)

In 1952, Kenneth Stampp published an important article “The Historian and

Southern Negro Slavery” in the American Historical Review, followed by a ground-

breaking book in 1956, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. (31)

Stampp criticized Phillips for his sweeping generalizations about plantation life based on

his biased and selective sources. He also attacked Phillips for his conclusion that blacks

were particularly suited for slavery by asserting that the Negro did not accept his lot and

actively demonstrated his discontent, all of which had been previously documented.

Finally, he stated the fact that the slaves appeared to accept slavery was not proof that

blacks were especially suited or content with slavery. “It merely proves that men can be

enslaved when they are kept illiterate, when communication is restricted, and when the

instruments of violence are monopolized by the state and the master class.” (32) Stampp

additionally asserted that slaves demonstrated their unwillingness to be broken by slavery

through continued acts of day to day resistance, as opposed to mass insurrection.

Stampp’s work did not go unchallenged. Followers of Phillips claimed that

though he used the same sources as Phillips, Stampp’s research was inadequate and

hasty. (33) Stampp also received sharp criticism from black scholars who took issue with

his idea of blacks as white men with black skin, claiming that through this assertion,

Stampp made “whiteness” the goal and further bolstered a position of white supremacy.

12

They additionally criticized him for not making use of black primary sources, since

Stampp also had ignored slave narratives. (34)

Regardless of the criticisms it received, Stampp’s book effectively ushered out

Phillips and American Negro Slavery. After the publication of The Peculiar Institution,

Phillips’ influence waned for a number of years.

In 1959, only three years after the publication of The Peculiar Institution, Stanley

Elkin’s research embroiled the academic world in a cyclone of controversy. Elkins

sought to change the discussion of slavery’s effects on those enslaved. For its time, its

methodology was truly unique, combining the disciplines of history with psychology and

sociology. According to Foner: “Its appearance marked a methodological breakthrough

and a turning point in American historiography, and, as a pioneering interdisciplinary

study, it was to influence all subsequent works on the institution of slavery.” (35)

Elkins admired Phillips for his scholarship but also took issue with his premise

that blacks were genetically inferior. Instead of being of basically inferior stock, Elkins

maintained that as a result of slavery the African had been reduced to a dependant child.

It was Elkins who introduced a stereotype still alive today, that of “Sambo”. The extent

of his efforts to infantilize the slave personality can be seen in the following description:

Sambo, the typical plantation slave, was docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing; his behavior was full of infantile silliness and by his talk inflated with childish exaggeration. His relationship with his master was one of utter dependence and childish attachment: It was indeed this childlike quality that was the very key to his being.” (36)

13

Elkins’ book was immediately embraced in many academic circles. Though he

produced no hard evidence, Elkins’ assertion of the widespread existence of “Sambo”

was taken as proof of the nature of the typical slave. Elkins even attempted to draw

parallels between the personality and character effects he saw as a result of American

slavery with what he called identical effects seen in Nazi concentration camp victims.

(37)

Elkins theories relied on earlier work by Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen,

published in 1946. (38) For Tannenbaum, the effects of slavery on individuals and

society in the United States stands in sharp contrast with results he saw in Latin

American countries because of the differences in the slave systems themselves.

Tannenbaum asserted that in Latin America the slave system was less harsh and

exploitative than North American slavery. Therefore, it afforded greater opportunities for

manumission and incorporation into the dominant culture, which resulted in a more

inclusive, less racist culture, and hence, fewer “Sambos”. Tannenbaum’s work also come

under attack in a variety of ways, especially his belief that Latin American slavery was in

some way benign.

Elkins’ book released a flurry of controversy. Once again, actual slave voices,

now readily available through a variety of sources, went unheard. Other critics pointed

out that Elkins, while disagreeing with Phillips, had basically come to the same

conclusion. For both, regardless of cause, the Negro had emerged as a child.

It is difficult to read Elkins’ premise and conclusions and not be filled with

contempt for what we now know to be such an offensive, stereotypical look at millions of

14

people. His bold and damaging statements, coupled with his lack of any research to

support them, are appalling. Still, it is important to note that Elkins did, at least, realize

that subservience carries the potential for hidden psychological damage, and bringing that

discussion to the forefront was an important step for subsequent psychological

discussions about the effects of enslavement.

In 1972 Eugene D. Genovese, in his seminal work Roll, Jordan, Roll put both

Phillips and Elkins in a more positive light when he linked them together in opposition.

Genovese wrote,

“Ulrich Bonnell Phillips was probably right in arguing that the American slaves were better treated than Caribbean or Brazilian, for he too was thinking of material conditions. Stanley M. Elkins was probably right in saying that American slaves were much worse treated, for he clearly was thinking of other matters.” (39)

While Genovese admired Elkins’ analysis, his main criticism was that some evidence for

“Sambo” exists in all slave societies. In addition, Genovese approached the problem

from the perspective that the slave system was based on a series of compromises between

blacks and whites, and that the planter’s power was not as absolute as Elkins had stated.

Eugene D. Genovese was an avowed Marxist with a distinctly Western

perspective who offered an amalgamation of paternalism (resurrected from Phillips) and

Marxian hegemony. Genovese melded this connection between Phillips and his analysis

of paternalism on the plantation with the theoretical framework of Marxism. (40) For

Genovese the definition of hegemony “implies class antagonisms; but it also implies, for

a given historical epoch, the ability of a particular class to contain those antagonisms on a

terrain in which its legitimacy is not dangerously questioned.” (41) Here he refers to the

15

political power held by the aristocratic ruling Southern class over the white lower class in

the antebellum South. Presumably, slaves also fit into this definition since, while some

antagonism was apparent to Genovese, he did not feel that slaves ever presented a serious

threat. Genovese then went on to reach the conclusion that plantation owners shaped

southern society and law in accordance with their own way of looking at the world. They

controlled all aspects of white southern life but this control hinged on at least the

appearance of a series of paternalistic relationships (42).

While this will not be a topic of extended discussion in this historiography, it is

important to mention that Genovese continued this line of reasoning to create a vision of

the plantation as a community, somewhat like an extended family, but also as a place

where two distinct classes met, interacted, and influenced each other. For Genovese, the

planters were a ruling class who rejected values of hard work, thrift and labor and instead

valued family, status and honor and therefore established a paternalistic relationship with

their slaves. To Genovese, the Southern social system was not based upon money or

profit, but upon a set way of life.

In his partial support of Phillips’ paternalism theories, Genovese garnered

weighty criticism. In the words of Philip S. Foner, “Ironically, it was the man who many

scholars hailed as the American Marxist, Eugene D. Genovese, who contributed most to

rescuing Phillips’ work from oblivion.” (43) This assessment, however, seems a bit harsh,

especially in view of Genovese’s later writings. Genovese could hardly be said to be an

ardent Phillips supporter, when he referred to Phillips as an “openly racist writer” (44)

and when he praised Aptheker’s demolition of Phillips’ “legend of the contented slave.”

16

(45) True, he did refer to “the Phillips tradition in southern historiography” but only in

the sense that this tradition had “waned.” (46)

Despite the various controversies over Roll, Jordan, Roll, Genovese’s book

shaped a new view—that of the plantation as a hegemonic organization in which there

was considerable room for give and take between slaves and slaveowners. Wyatt-Brown

summed up this viewpoint in his review of Roll, Jordan, Roll:

“Instead, intellectual Marxism inspires but never orchestrates the central thesis: the interrelatedness of black accommodation and resistance in the authoritarian framework. Rather than serving as points of paradox or faint irony, slave acquiescence and self-assertiveness move rhythmically together.” (47)

In Roll, Jordan, Roll, Genovese maintained that the need of slaveowners to see

themselves as being paternalistic created a tension because paternalistic relationships

hinge on humanity. Hence, the innate humanity of slaves was validated by the existence

of the paternalistic community.

“For the slaveholders paternalism represented an attempt to overcome the fundamental contradiction in slavery: the impossibility of the slaves’ ever becoming the things they were supposed to be...But, the masters’ need to see their slaves as acquiescent human being constituted a moral victory for the slaves themselves. Paternalism’s insistence on mutual obligations—duties, responsibilities, and ultimately even rights—implicitly recognized the slave’s humanity.” (48)

Genovese went on to add: “But masters and slaves, whites and blacks, lived as well as

worked together. The existence of the community required that all find some measure of

self-interest and self-respect.” (49)

For Genovese, successful paternalism required acceptance on both sides of the

relationship. He concluded that slaves had used this contradiction, this moral struggle

17

inherent in the institution of slavery, this requirement of acquiescence, as a means to

strengthen their own distinct culture and community.

“The slaves impaled their masters on the central point of slaveholding hegemonic ideology—the dependency relationship...The slaves had turned the dependency relationship to their own advantage. Their version of paternalistic dependency stressed reciprocity... Out of necessity they had made an uneven agreement...The slaves’ acceptance of paternalism, therefore, signaled acceptance of an imposed white domination within which they drew their own lines, asserted rights, and preserved their self-respect.” (50)

Genovese extracted what he considered to be valuable in the works of Phillips—the view

of a paternalist slaveholding community and that of Aptheker—the idea of slaves being

neither content nor inherently suited for enslavement—and melded them together into a

powerful new thesis envisioning slaves as individuals successfully jockeying for power

and self-respect within a decidedly lopsided power structure.

Genovese also illustrates how Christian-based, unique slave religion became a

resistance tool for slaves. When speaking of Christianity he writes, “When the black

slaves of the New World made it their own, they transformed it into a religion of

resistance—not often of revolutionary defiance, but of a spiritual resistance that accepted

the limits of the politically possible.” (51) However, Genovese also continued that it was

this religious resistance, along with the acceptance of the paternalistic relationship that

was inherent in the antebellum South and that helped slaves make peace with their

inability to take more direct political action. It was around this idea, that of slaves being

politically inactive, that Genovese received the most criticism for Roll, Jordan, Roll.

“In the end, however, Genovese believes the slaves learned to ‘cohere as a people’ in the space provided by paternalism, but that the process tended

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to deny the people the tools necessary for liberating themselves. This, as we shall see, was a one-dimensional, static interpretation of slavery.” (52)

Other critics felt that Genovese had romanticized the slave South. “Genovese too often

romanticizes the underclass, finding overtly abstract purposes in opportunistic black

participation in a still savage culture.” (53)

Still, Genovese’s use of multiple sources, including the Works Project

Administration narratives, runaway slave accounts, and folklore materials, represent an

important departure from the slaveholder-based perspective of the majority of white

historians who had come before him. In addition, Genovese’s contribution to a more

realistic understanding of the many ways slaves altered and negotiated the nature of their

enslavement paved the way for more modern, multi-faceted approaches to the study of

slavery.

By the mid-1970s, historians increasingly branched out into specialized areas of

research with more varied outcomes each of which examined slavery from different

perspectives. Scholars debated profitability of the plantation, the slave personality, the

need for reparations, and many other topics. Into this environment of specialization

Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman published Time on the Cross in 1974—a study

that proposed to consolidate all previous research. (54) Time on The Cross is especially

worthy of note because of the notoriety it received in circles far wider than previous

academic works on slave history. Major popular magazines like Time and Newsweek

featured articles about its release and the authors even appeared on television talk shows,

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an unusual occurrence for historians. (55) In their interpretation of slavery, the authors

used new computer technologies:

“The subject matter of slavery was of great interest and would have generated a fair amount of attention; the ‘cliometric’ methodology was still somewhat new and would have elicited some additional interest; and the combination of the two, the application of quantitative methods to a morally-laden topic, would have sparked some controversy.” (56)

Fogel and Engerman made a variety of claims, some considered extremely

surprising and/or controversial. Based on the data they chose to include, the authors

maintained that the destruction of the slave family as a result of slavery was a myth, that

the living conditions of slaves were not worse than those of free industrial workers, that

slave labor was economically feasible because slaves were very productive workers, and

that slaves were productive because they generally were well compensated for their labor.

Finally, the authors pronounced that the sad state of blacks after the Civil War was not

the result of the cruelty of slavery, but instead resulted from the worsened conditions of

blacks after slavery ended. Summed up, it could be argued that Fogel and Engerman

proposed that freedom was more detrimental to blacks than was slavery. They even went

so far as to hold critics of slavery responsible for this result:

“It is one of the bitterest ironies of history that the antislavery critics who worked so hard to break these chains probably did as much as any other group, perhaps more, to fasten the spikes that have kept blacks in the agony of racial discrimination during their century of freedom.” (57)

Ostensibly, the authors of Time on the Cross sought to show, contrary to what

they saw in past historical interpretation, that slaves were not devoid of culture and

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family bonds, and that they were not the pathetic, lazy and helpless victims other

historians had portrayed.

“We have attacked the traditional interpretation of the economics of slavery not in order to resurrect a defunct system, but in order to correct the perversion of the history of blacks—in order to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without development for their first two hundred and fifty years on American soil.” (58)

The authors continued: “We have tried to show that this false portrait of black history

was originally the consequence of a debate between critics and defenders of slavery, a

debate which rested on the racist premise that blacks were biologically interior to

whites.” (59) It is hard to read this statement, embedded in the Epilogue of Volume I,

and not infer the authors’ direct denial of the negative aspects of slavery. Are we to

believe that the authors actually hold antislavery critics responsible for the rampant

racism evident after the Civil War and continuing into the present?

The debate swirling around Time on the Cross was furious, and according to

Foner, spawned an era of more intense research and discussion on the effects of slavery

than had been seen in the past. (60) Two main concepts from this debate are especially

important for the purposes of this historiography. First, Fogel and Engerman once again

neglected to include the voices of slaves themselves, choosing only to include numbers

and statistics, valuable in some aspects, but lacking in real insight as to slaves themselves

and their lives. The numbers used were generally drawn from antebellum census data,

hardly a balanced source from a slave perspective. Second, the authors assign a static

nature to slavery by comparing and combining data from 1720, 1800, and 1860, three

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very different times in American slave societies. All of these errors might have been

mitigated if the voices of slaves, and the numbers and statistics embedded in their

narratives, had been taken into account.

Fogel and Engerman also criticized historians who attempted to assert that

“although the cruelty and repression of the slave system were unbounded, blacks were

stronger than the repression.” (61) They go on to state

“But in the absence of evidence of massive resistance, the argument was hardly convincing. The most that proponents of this view were able to conjure up were a handful of abortive conspiracies and ineffectual attempts at ‘day-to-day resistance.’ Thus, blacks were made to be failures even at resistance—sympathetic failures, but failures nevertheless...While white America produced heroes of the struggle against tyranny who were honest, courageous, and industrious, the refurbished interpretation offered black rebels whose greatest achievements were such proficiency at stealing, shirking responsibilities, and feigning illness—and who were possessed of such sly capacity for lying—that they could trick their masters into believing they were contented.” (62)

This slant on day-to-day resistance seems to denigrate the daily negotiations and power

plays that provide the academic nature of this historiography. It seems short sighted that

such actions, often undertaken by traditionally the least powerful of all members of most

societies—woman and the young—under circumstances fraught with terrible risk, should

be couched in such derogatory terms.

While much scholarly research has been undertaken since the 1970s on a variety

of aspects related to slavery, most fall beyond the scope of this work. However, the work

of three influential historians merit inclusion. John Blassingame made extensive use of

various slave narratives to fully describe the slave family in The Slave Community,

published in 1972. (63) Blassingame identified numerous “slave personalities” in

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antebellum literature, including Elkins’ “Sambo.” He urged that all slave stereotypes be

analyzed critically with attention given to psychology and comparative literature. He

also criticizes Elkins’ premise that, because so many writers describe a “Sambo”

character, this fact alone makes him a reality. “There is too much distortion in people’s

perception, observation, and interpretation of the behavior of other individuals for

historians to rely solely upon their reports.” (64) Blassingame rejected Elkins’ premise

that slave testimonies lacked objectivity and went on to say that there was no substitute

for the slave perspective. “If historians seek to provide some understanding of the past

experiences of slaves, then the autobiography must be their point of departure; in the

autobiography, more clearly than in any other source, we learn what went on in the minds

of black men.” (65) He urged historians to use slave narratives but with a critical and

sophisticated eye.

Herbert Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom published in 1976

demonstrated the existence of strong, stable black families within the slave quarters and

urged historians to examine the growth of a strong, separate black culture. Gutman

sought to counter claims made by previous historians that the Negro family had been

destroyed by slavery as evidenced in the absence of both the father and extended family

relations, and all as a result of the broken will of the Negro people. (66) Gutman looked

at census data from before and after the Civil War, Freedman’s Bureau Records, slave

birth registers, slave naming practices, and “the literary record left by other northern and

southern whites dealing with southern blacks during and after the Civil War” as well as

the research of those before him including Stanley Engerman. (67) In addition, his book

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is filled with quotes from slave narratives and interviews. He concluded that previous

studies had “underestimated the adaptive capacities of the enslaved” and that “Long-

lasting slave marriages and families derived their inner strength from a cumulative slave

experience with its own standards and rules of conduct. Common slave marital rules and

intensive naming for slave blood kin are found on all plantations.” (68) He begins his

first chapter with an illustrative quote from W.E.B. Du Bois:

It is difficult to get a clear picture of the family relations of slaves, between the Southern apologist and his picture of cabin life, with idyllic devotion and careless toil, and that of the abolitionist with his tale of family disruption and cruelty, adultery, and illegitimate mulattos.” (69) Ira Berlin’s two important works, Many Thousand Gone (1998) and Generations

of Captivity (2004) explore the idea of viewing the history of slavery in a non-static way.

(70) Berlin’s premise is that the nature of slavery varied dramatically across time and

location, and can best be understood by dividing the years of North American slavery

into generations: Charter Generations, Plantation Generations, Revolutionary

Generations, Migration Generations, and Freedom Generations. In each generation, and

in specific locations within those generations, the nature of slave life and the relationship

between slave and slaveowner varied dramatically. For Berlin,

“Slaves were not politically inert, and their politics—even absent an independent institutional basis—was as active as any. The ongoing contest forced slaveowners and slaves, even as they confronted one another as deadly enemies, to concede a degree of legitimacy to their opponent, No matter how reluctantly given—or, more likely, extracted—such concessions were difficult for either party to acknowledge...for as power slipped from master to slave and back, the terms of slavery were negotiated and then renegotiated.” (71)

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Berlin takes issue with Stampp’s assertion that, “The rigid and static nature of

ante-bellum slavery, 1830 –1860, makes it possible to examine it institutionally with only

slight regard for chronology.” (72) For Berlin, the history of slavery must be divided into

distinct parts which he calls “generations” and any discussion of slavery which assumes

consistency through all of these generations fails to grasp the changing, very complex

nature of slavery and the ensuing relationships. The accumulated force of changes in

“agricultural practice, domestic relations, manumission, material culture, plantation

architecture, religious conventions, slave hire, underclass resistance, westward,

migration, and dozens of like subjects... has yet to be measured” (73) Berlin maintains

that slavery must be looked at in a much more fluid way, taking into account the

changing relationship between master and slave. For Berlin, these changes were the

result of many factors, including a variety or subtle and not so subtle negotiations stating:

“..as power slipped from master to slave and back, the terms of slavery were negotiated

and then renegotiated.” (74) According to Berlin, early works, like those of Stampp and

others, are too simplistic in their generalizations.

Thus, main focus for Ira Berlin, is “the beauty and power of the human spirit

under conditions of extreme oppression.” (75) While subtle, nowhere is this beauty and

power more evident than in the constant and daily efforts of average slaves to resist

oppression and retain their humanity.

RESISTANCE ON THE PLANTATION

As discussed earlier, in 1942 Bauer and Bauer used evidence of slave resistance to

contradict scholarship which assumed that slaves were docile and contented. The Bauers

revealed the following patterns of resistance to slavery: “deliberate slowing up of work;

destruction of property, and indifferent work; feigning illness and pregnancy; injuring

one’s self; suicide” and the final “possibility that a significant number of slave mothers

killed their children.” (76) However, such views are largely ignored because of the

problem of illiteracy enforced by Genovese’s patriarchal hegemony, an unwillingness to

view slave accounts as reliable, and a paucity of alternate sources of information. The

recent use of material evidence, as well as narratives, oral histories and even the journals

and diaries of slaveowners provide exciting new evidence and attest to an active culture

of resistance and/or negotiation on the plantation. (77)

Thus, one of the most exciting trends that emerges from more recent scholarship

is the idea that almost all slaves, during all periods of American slavery, resisted in some

way the dehumanizing effects of enslavement. While most chose not to run away or

violently revolt, subtle, non-violent weapons became the norm. “Relationships to family

and community, humor, and music all became weapons of resistance.” (78) Even though

denigrated by Phillips and later by Fogel and Engerman, day-to-day resistance on the

plantation represents much more than simple failure to actively rebel or to obtain a large-

scale political voice. As Camp illustrates, it was day-to-day resistance, that gives

immediate testimony to the lie of docility and Samboism”:

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“It was, after all, the existence of slave resistance and the study of it that helped move American scholarship on slavery from the plantation nostalgia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the “Sambo” theses of mid-century to the impassioned “accommodation versus resistance” debate of the past few decades.” (79)

Day-to-day resistance shows the daily, on-going struggle for control and dignity by the

enslaved in its most human and empowering light. “Everyday resistance occupied, as

political scientist James Scott has argued, the wide terrain between consent, on the one

hand, and open, organized opposition, on the other.” (80)

It is here that the idea, proposed by James Scott and continued by Stephanie

Camp, of hidden and public transcripts comes into play. (81) Scott’s research into the

power relationships between dominant and subordinate peoples supports Genovese’s

concept of hegemony and makes a distinction between hidden—private and seen only by

one’s most trusted family and friends—and public transcripts. For Scott, “public

transcript is a shorthand way of describing the open interaction between subordinates and

those who dominate.” (82) Scott goes on to say, “The public transcript, where it is not

positively misleading, is unlikely to tell the whole story about power relations.” (83)

Camp takes this a step further when she maintains that slaves, “lived multiple lives...Side

by side, public and hidden worlds coexisted in the plantation South.” (84) Therefore, in

order to accurately view slave resistance one must look beneath the surface of public

behaviors to see the private ways in which slaves maintained their vigilance against

oppression. Camp goes on to assert:

“Theories of everyday forms of resistance, those small acts with sometimes outsize consequences, have opened enormous possibilities for understanding the meanings of actions that might otherwise appear to be

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little more than fits of temper. Theft, foot dragging, short-term flight, and feigning illness were commonplace acts in the Old South and are widely understood to be everyday forms of resistance—hidden or indirect expressions of dissent, quiet ways of reclaiming a measure of control over goods, time, or parts of one’s life.” (85)

Additionally, it is worth noting that the existence of strict laws in the South

controlling every aspect of slave life, including daily movement and communication with

other slaves bears witness to the real fear held by slaveowners of slaves’ rebellion and/or

resistance. As Horton and Horton demonstrate, this restrictive life and the associated fear

kept slaveowners in a type of bondage as well: “Holding millions of Africans in bondage

required a virtual police state.” (86) Further evidence can be seen in laws discouraging

manumission in Virginia in 1806 because of fears of a large free black population and the

potential for slave revolt led by free blacks, fears which intensified dramatically after the

publishing of David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles in 1829 and Nat Turner’s

insurrection in 1831. (87) Other evidence of white fear of slave rebellion and resistance is

illustrated by the desire for stricter Fugitive Slave Laws in 1818—ultimately defeated in

the Senate—and The Negro Seaman Act—declared invalid by the Supreme Court in

1824. Such fears would seem unreasonable if slaveowners truly believed that slavery

was a benefit to slaves and that slaves were contented, loyal, and grateful. (88)

The academic literature of resistance falls into three categories: resistance

through cultural institutions, resistance through deception, and resistance through

negotiation. It is really only since slave narratives and oral accounts have become

incorporated into the historiography that the voice of slave resistance can truly be heard.

Additionally, recent scholarship into the networks formed by women slaves has provided

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new insights into the influence and power of the female voice—traditionally

underrepresented because of gender within a group traditionally underrepresented

because of ethnic bias. (89)

Resistance through Cultural Institutions

Ira Berlin goes to great lengths to nullify the view of slaves as politically inert

beings. He goes on to cite cultural adaptations unique to slaves themselves as evidence,

however atypical, of this political activity. For Berlin, this activity moves along a

constantly fluctuating continuum in time and space. “Over time, slaves transformed their

experience—drawn from, among other things, work habits, musical style, and religious

belief—into a culture that joined them together as a class and distinguished them from

their owners.” (90) Hence, the powerful slave-generated institutions of a unique religion,

an innovative musical style, a rich oral history tradition, and a strong extended family

structure are all aspects of a rich cultural tradition which formed the backbone of slaves’

resistance to the oppressive nature of their situation.

For Genovese, slave religion was the most powerful of the slaves’ defensive

weapons against oppression.

“The slaves formed weapons of defense, the most important of which was a religion that taught them to love and value each other, to take a critical view of their masters, and to reject the ideological rationales for their own enslavement...The slaves, drawing on a religion that was supposed to assure their compliance and docility, rejected the essence of slavery by projecting their own rights and value as human beings.” (91) Originally, slaves were exposed to Christianity through lessons delivered by their

masters, or at least with their masters’ acceptance. While some slaveowners were

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originally indifferent or adamantly opposed to their slaves becoming Christians,

evangelical persuasions, along with the fervor of the Great Awakening caused most

slaveowners to determine that a religion of their choosing would serve the dual purpose

of separating slaves from their African roots and indoctrinating slaves into a belief in

hard work and servility as justified by the Bible.

“Slaveholders were quite selective in the Christianity they taught their slaves. They often attempted to use religion as a means of asserting control. In the master’s church the most important thing that was preached to them ‘was how to serve their master and mistiss,’ an Arkansas slave recalled.” (92)

Many slaves quickly took Christianity and made it their own. Slave religion took

the image of Jesus and melded it with the image of Moses, obtaining in this combination

a religious leader famed for leading his people out of bondage and into redemption and

freedom. Hence, the Christian religion of the slaves was not one of acceptance but rather

one of resistance and hope for freedom, whether in this life or in the afterlife. “When the

black slaves of the New World made it their own, they transformed it into a religion of

resistance—not often of revolutionary defiance, but of a spiritual resistance that accepted

the limits of the politically possible.” (93) For slaves, their religion offered hope and

assurance of freedom which lifted the heaviest burdens of captivity. As Blassingame

demonstrates, sometimes religion helped slaves conquer fear and take the next step

toward outward rebellion:

“Religious faith often conquered the slave’s fear of his master. The more pious slaves persisted in attending religious services contrary to the order of their masters and in spite of floggings. In this test of wills the slave asserted that his master could inflict pain on his body, but he could not harm his soul.” (94)

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The fact that slaveholders sometimes sought to limit and control slave religion is

evidence of the power they understood to be present in slave’s religious beliefs.

This religious tradition amongst slaves quite naturally grew into a musical

tradition as well. As part of their religious ceremonies, slaves adopted traditional songs

of Christianity and infused them with African rhythms and their hope for freedom. As

Horton and Horton argue, the spiritual was created—a creation wholly original to slave

Christianity. “Old Testament stories of deliverance from bondage and the triumph of

good over a powerful evil often provided the themes for slave songs.” (95) Spirituals

also reflected the daily life experiences of the slaves, including their troubles and hopes

of emancipation. Sometimes, however, spirituals also served as secret means of

communication. The words of spirituals might tell the astute listener where a clandestine

meeting or dance might be held that night, when and where a secret barbecue might be

taking place, and even warn of the approach of an overseer to workers. According to

Blassingame, spirituals also set the pace of work for gangs toiling in the fields, allowing

the slowest workers opportunities to keep up with the rest and avoid punishment while all

worked at the same pace. (96). Horton and Horton echo this sentiment: “With the entire

gang moving in unison to the steady cadence of a work song, slaves both controlled the

pace of work and appealed to white people’s assumptions about their contentment.” (97)

Spirituals often contained symbols which were necessary when whites present,

offering slaves an opportunity to share sorrows and fellowship. According to

Blassingame, occasionally slave songs would even give information about escape plans

or opportunities. (98) As expressed by Horton and Horton: “A song urging slaves to

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‘Steal away to Jesus’ could alert listeners to an upcoming secret meeting, while ‘Swing

low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home’ might tell of the possibility of rescue

from bondage.” (99)

Since slaves were generally prohibited from learning to read and write, oral

storytelling traditions became extremely important ways of continuing slave culture and

continuity across generations and between plantations. For Rose, “Telling a pointed story

is the mildest form of resistance available to the oppressed, especially if it is told in the

third person, with a passable remoteness from specific persons.” (100) Slave oral

folktales took on many forms including humorous legends and trickster stories in which

slaves regularly best the master, legends which explained natural or social phenomena, or

legends which told of important events in black history like Nat Turner’s Rebellion or the

accomplishments of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. In addition, according to

Joyner, slaves developed “tall tales (or improvements on reality, with smart slaves

smarter, bad weather worse, and bid crops bigger), outrageous falsehoods narrated with a

straight face in the sober tones of truth.” (101) All of these tales served to unite slaves

with a common culture and shared tradition, along with outlets that allowed them to

escape the boredom and denial of humanity inherent in slavery.

One final way in which slave culture flourished and which served as a tool for

resistance was the development of a strong extended family within the slave quarter.

Camp demonstrates that love of family gave slaves opportunities to assert their humanity

and thwart the numbing effects of enslavement. (102) A commitment to extended family

ties helped slaves overcome the terrible loss of separation when loved ones were

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separated because of the internal slave trade. Serial monogamy was commonplace in the

quarter even when marriages were not sanctioned by the master and helped slaves

recover when spouses were sold to owners far away. In this way mothers and fathers, left

to care for their children alone, were able to find help and companionship. Children were

often named for absent family members, serving to keep alive the memory of those who

were gone. The acceptance of an extended family also helped slaves adapt to the

devastating personal loss of separation. (103)

In these ways, resistance through cultural institutions enabled slaves to maintain a

sense of personhood and control within an institution that sought to minimize both. As

Deborah Gray White claims: “Historians have shown that the community of the quarters,

the slave family, and slave religion shielded the slave from absolute dependence on the

master; that parents, siblings, friends and relatives served in different capacities as buffers

against the internalization of infantile roles.” (104)

Resistance Through Deception

The concept of resistance through cultural institutions embodies aspects of both

the hidden and public transcripts discussed earlier. However, the use of a wide variety of

deceptive strategies was equally important to slave resistance, this time in a purely hidden

arena. Deception strategies covered a broad spectrum of slave life, and included

truancy, theft, illegal parties, feigning illness, property damage, “eye service”, use of

racial stereotypes to the slaves’ advantage, and maintenance of secret networks of

communication. (105)

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As Horton and Horton argued, escape was a means of release from the trials of

slavery but that this was a choice that seems to have been largely limited to young males.

(106) “However, sometimes escaping for a short time was a means of psychic survival,

and many who ran away did so without intending more than a temporary respite.” (107)

Camp described truancy as “an intentionally temporary escape” and maintained

that, “Many people in enslaved communities recognized absenteeism for what it was:

social protest in which many bondpeople participated collectively for political and

personal reasons.” (108) Camp researched and discussed the topic of truancy at great

lengths in her 2004 book, Closer to Freedom, Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance

in the Plantation South. Camp chose to specifically address the issue of resistance as it

relates to slave women, and argues that truancy was more common for women than was

long term escape. For Camp, truancy was often a very personal, spur-of-the-moment

response to unfair treatment, but it was also political in that truants relied on the

assistance of the slave community at large for food and sometimes shelter. “The reasons

bondspeople ran away—violence, exhaustion, humiliation—resonated with the wrongs

others had suffered or could, at any moment, be made to suffer.” (109) In terms of

truancy, the extended family described in the previous section thus had an additional,

very important role. Camp also described the “push” factors of labor disputes, violence

and terror, alongside the “pull” factors of reconnection with family and community when

explaining the need to become truant. (110) Sometimes, truants were motivated by a need

to gather medicinal herbs for spiritual use. Thus, spiritual power of the individual is

heightened while the social power of the slave society was reduced. (111)

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In addition to truancy, theft as a means of enhancing the meager slave diet and/or

exerting covert control was a common method of slave resistance. While early historians

would have categorized theft simply as slave crime, Genovese provides a deeper

understanding that makes theft seem less of a crime and more a form of resistance.

“The slaves made a distinction: they stole from each other but merely took from their masters. Their logic was impeccable. If they belonged to their master—if they were in fact his chattels—how could they steal from him? Suppose they ate one of his chickens or hogs or some of his corn? They had only transformed his property from one form to another, much as they did when they fed the master’s corn to the master’s chickens.” (112) Hence, slaves maintained a strong sense of personal responsibility to the members

of the slave community but allowed themselves a way to retain self-respect and enhance

their diet at the same time. Some masters attempted to redirect this reality when they

actually encouraged their slaves to steal from other farms or plantations. According to

Genovese, when this tactic was successful it had an unexpected positive result for the

slaveowner: it served to strengthen the idea of the plantation as a distinct community of

whites and blacks, separate from other plantation communities of whites and blacks.

(113) Genovese takes this one step further when he argues that when the slaveowner,

unable to curtail the occurrence theft on his own plantation, decided to look the other

way, he actually strengthened his own self esteem and “sense of commanding a moral

social system.” (114)

However, Bertram Wyatt-Brown views theft as having a more important place in

the maintenance of a cohesive slave community and slave self esteem. He connects

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trickster stories about theft from the master to their lessons regarding the need for slave

subterfuge.

“Thus, even thievery from the master, particularly the appropriation of food, served as an implicit rejection of master’s honor and slave’s dependency on one level and a practical answer to hunger on another—without the insupportable risk that conspiracy to rebel involved.” (115) In addition to theft and truancy, a recent line of research has analyzed the import

contribution of illegal parties to the maintenance of a cohesive slave community in action

against the master. Camp focuses on the role of the body in slave/master relationships.

“Brutality did not constitute the whole of the slaves’ bodily experience. For those who

encounter oppression through the body, the body becomes an important site not only of

suffering but also (and therefore) of enjoyment and resistance.” (116). Camp goes on to

describe a system of covert slave parties in which slaves, both men and women, routinely

slipped away from the quarter and attended gatherings “where such sensual pleasures as

eating, dancing, drinking, and dressing were among the main amusements.” (117) These

gatherings, as far from the master’s eye as was humanly possible, took place wherever

the local terrain would provide a suitable location—usually swamps, woods, and almost

always in spaces declared off-limits by the plantation owners.

“Together, enslaved women and men ran to abandoned outbuildings, woods or swamps where they enjoyed music, dancing, the company of others and a shared secret...More than men, women indulged in fancy dress...and men, more than women, delighted in drinking alcohol.” (118)

In this way, slaves took control of their bodies even though for a short portion of their

daily existence. Camp goes on to describe three slave bodies: the site of domination, the

“vehicle of feelings of terror, humiliation, and pain” and “the slaves’ third body: a thing

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to be claimed and enjoyed, a site of pleasure and resistance.” (119) For Camp, this third

body became a political entity since it served as a vehicle for resistance through these

illegal parties.

Feigning illness and property damage were two additional ways that slaves fought

the lack of control that is epitomized by slavery. For Genovese, these acts were the result

of an understanding on the part of the slaves about their material, if not personal, value to

slaveowners: “Since the slaves understood their economic value they sometimes struck

at a masters’ pocketbook. Feigning illness, a favorite tactic, especially recommended

itself to the slaves, and masters and overseers complained loudly about its frequency.”

(120) It’s hard to accurately gauge the extent of this practice since it is probable that

slaveowners and overseers would bemoan slave illness whether or not it was feigned. In

addition, this tactic would only have been successful over the long term if it did not

negatively impact the slave community. More successful in preserving slave identity and

self worth were the collective types of group action like slowing down work—sometimes

through the use of slave songs—or even damaging property. As Genovese claimed,

slaves could kill or maim livestock without jeopardizing other slaves, and they could

sabotage the weighing of cotton by wetting it or slipping rocks into the bags. (121)

Again, however, these actions were more important to the community than they were for

the individual. “The collective form of this kind of resistance imparted a sense of

community strength and taught the rudiments of organization in a way that individual

acts of resistance, no matter how courageous or admirable, rarely could.” (122)

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In Willie Lee Rose’s collection of primary source documents, A Documentary

History of Slavery in North America she discusses an additional form of resistance that

she calls “eye service.” “The phrase for work done badly where an individual laborer’s

responsibility cannot be readily discerned was ‘eye service’ indicating that a particular

slave performed well only so long as he or she was closely watched.” (123) Rose cited a

letter from a general manager to an owner in which he describes a slave action to

discredit an unpopular overseer: “The negroes attempted in a very friendly way in May

to make Carter lose the crop.” He goes on to describe how the slaves “slighted their work

by covering up the grass lightly and not cutting it up when small.” (124) In this case, the

manager perceived the plot and negotiated with the slaves that they would do the job

right and earn a barbecue or do the job badly with resulting consequences. The pleasant

way in which the manager describes his interaction with the slaves about their plan is

almost amusing, but it underscores how effectively slaves used Scott’s hidden and public

transcripts.

Slaves also resisted by coming to understand and then taking advantage of whites’

racial stereotypes about blacks. Certainly, the use of hidden messages in slave songs

which slowed work or conveyed escape routes confirms this. Here, the slaves used the

stereotype of the happy, simplistic slave to pass important information directly under the

noses of white supervisors or overseers. In other cases, as in the case of John Quitman, a

Mississippi planter whose many letters to and from family members were evaluated by

Robert E. May, slaveholders had so much at stake in believing that slaves were contented

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that they failed—or refused—to see the evidence of slave resistance. Slaves capitalized

on this.

“Quitman and his family (mercifully for their private sanity) were so misled by their own racism that they had no inclination to investigate the implications of slave misbehavior...Given such a myopic and simplistic perception of the black personality, it was intellectually impossible for any of the Quitmans to come to terms with those instances of black resistance they confronted.” (125)

May describes a slave named Harry who had ostensibly the best and most positive

relationship with the Quitmans of all their slaves as probably “putting on ole massa” in

his compliant behavior all the while “confirming the family’s convictions about the

benevolence of their role.” (126) One slave, John, took ultimate advantage of the

family’s misconception of slave contentment when he escaped to freedom while with the

family in Boston. It was impossible for the family to believe that John had actually

chosen freedom over enslavement with their family and Quitman’s wife and son actually

“surmised that he had been drugged and kidnapped and would return if given the

opportunity.” (127) Obviously, John understood his masters a lot better than they did

him!

A final way that slaves resisted through deception was through the establishment

of clandestine communication networks with slaves on other plantations as well as with

escaped slaves and free blacks in other areas. Many of the long range message networks

involved black seamen and boatmen who worked on whaling crews, ocean trading boats

and riverboats. In many shipping centers in the North, such as New York, Boston, and

Cincinnati, many free blacks were also employed on the docks. Many black sailors were

39

even able to put ashore in ports in the South where they spent time in local black

communities. There they could exchange news and communication to specific people.

The Negro Seaman Act in South Carolina was clearly a response to the threat these illicit

communication networks posed to slaveowners. (128)

Resistance Through Negotiation

Another category of resistance, made possible by the shifting realities of

slaveowner and slave relationships, was that of negotiation. Slaves recognized that the

work they did was vitally necessary for the efficient functioning of the plantation, and

they actively used this knowledge to assert their own form of control. Specifically, slaves

sometimes successfully negotiated their own punishments, their safe return from truancy

episodes, and even their own purchase. (129)

Camp demonstrates that sometimes truants negotiated with owners regarding their

return after a period of truancy, a reality made easier by slave community support: “They

sometimes refused to return until they received ‘da word’ from their owners that they

would not beat them if they returned by the next workday.” (130) Camp describes a

specific incident in which Bertcha, a truant slave, was able to negotiate her own return to

the plantation after a three week hiatus.

“Bertcha protected herself from possible betrayal by arranging only dropping-off points with the people who helped her, but her husband and her mother knew how to find her. It was to them that her owner, Charles Manly, appealed after she had been gone for three weeks. Bertcha’s mother ‘got word to her’ that Manly had an offer: come home now, and she could hire herself out in the neighborhood. While it could not determine planters’ responses, collective action strengthened truancy’s

40

sustainability and, in some cases, mitigated the brutality of planters’ retaliations.” (131)

In some cases, as Genovese illustrates, slaves negotiated their punishment by

refusing to accept them: “A surprising number of slaves refused to submit to the whip.

As Frederick Douglass asserted, overseers ‘prefer to whip those who are most easily

whipped.’ ” (132) While the risks of refusing to submit were high, many slaves still

determined that resistance and a stance of strength was worth the risk.

Slaves were often asked about their backgrounds when owners were considering

their purchase, and often slaves used this conversation as an opportunity for negotiation.

Horton and Horton delineate the negotiations of George, a slave who had recently

married, in an attempt to have the new owner buy his wife as well: “Thus, even in the

most dire circumstances, as their lives were shattered by the trade in human cargo, slaves

might try to shield themselves and their loved ones from further harm as best they could.”

(133)

This concept of negotiation is a central to Ira Berlin’s premise. Throughout all of

his research, Berlin seeks to link the changing nature of America’s slave societies, and his

resultant “generations” of the enslaved, to evolving negotiations between slaves and

masters. (134) For Berlin, slaves constantly strove to maintain a sense of balance and

dignity in their lives through exercising their ability to negotiate their living situation.

Berlin discusses various generations of slaves negotiating issues of time: time to work on

their own crops, time off, time to go to market to sell goods they and their families have

produced, time to visit relatives and loved one on other plantations, time to worship. He

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also delineates slaves negotiating working conditions and living conditions. Berlin’s

research and synthesis demonstrates that slaves, throughout the generations of slavery in

North America, negotiated space in which they could develop the family and culture

described in this historiography already. (135)

CONCLUSION

A recent article in a small town paper in Northern California outlined the details

of an exciting archeological dig on an island off the Georgia coast that uncovered some

slave cabins that are largely intact. As Georgia state archeologist, Dave Crass, explained:

“It is easily one of the most important African-American slave sites in the

Southeast...Normally it’s a big, white-columned plantation house that’s still there. And

the people who made the place work, their houses are long gone...Since most records on

slaves were kept by their owners, “you’re seeing their world through white eyes,” Crass

said. “You need archeology to put a face on these very abstract ideas about what slave

life was like." (136)

Clearly, the subject of slave life and resistance to its potentially debilitating

effects is still of great interest to us in the 21st Century. Especially insightful is Crass’

reference to the abstract nature of assuming anything about anyone’s life. While this is

certainly part of the historian’s job, the pitfalls are clearly seen when evaluating the

historiography of slavery and slave resistance. One challenge lies in the fact that, when

looking at slave lives, we are looking at real flesh and blood people, each one of whom

varied completely from all others because of myriad factors including genetics,

environment and history. To make sweeping assumptions about four million people is

short-sighted, and yet the historiography repeatedly shows historians doing just that. This

work has chronicled the evolving trends in scholarly research on slave adaptations and

reistance, beginning with literature that focused on the myths of “the contented slave”

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43

and slavery as a “benign institution”, followed by revisionist literature which challenged

these two assumptions. Finally, this work has focused on more recent research, which,

using new sources—especially slave narratives—has added fresh perspectives to the

century-long debate.

Obviously, the path toward understanding what it was like to live the life of a

slave and how slaves resisted those effects has been subjected to many different analyses

over the last 200 years. The racist preconceived notions of the past, born of the need to

justify the institution of slavery itself, were the first major hurdles in understanding slave

culture and resistance. The availability of primary sources in the words of the slave,

narratives and interviews, was alone not able to change historical perspectives;

acceptance of these materials as actual historic record was also required before this voice

could be heard. More recently, research combining disciplines and data sources along

with the material evidence still being uncovered continue to help historian patch together

the total picture of slave life.

African American slaves emerge from this controversy as survivors, many of

whom formed strong families, a powerful and liberating religion and culture, and

mechanisms of negotiation and soul-saving deception which enabled them to not be

broken by what seems to us today an impossible situation. Their stories are inspiring,

heart rending and horrifying, yet they are the stories of America. They comprise an

important portion of the patchwork that makes up American culture today. Racist

revisionists must not be allowed to erase the struggles and contributions of these

survivors or take us back to the damaging and inaccurate views of white historians of the

44

past. Still, those historians are part of the puzzle, and understanding the origins of their

research, their perspectives on slavery as an institution, and the results of their scholarly

endeavors help to illuminate the research of the future.

The angst of Ralph Ellison echoes throughout this debate:

Prefabricated Negroes are sketched on sheets of paper and superimposed upon the Negro community; then when someone thrusts his head through the pages and yells ‘Watch out there, Jack, there’s people living under here,’ they are all shocked and indignant.” Ralph Ellison (137)

ADAPTING TO LIFE UNDER SLAVERY:

TEACHING AMERICAN HISTORY LESSON PLAN

By Anne J. Hartline

Introduction

This two-week lesson plan is designed for an Eighth Grade classroom in which at

least one fifty-minute period is available each day for this topic. While it is particularly

suited to the California Eighth Grade standards, the topic: “Adapting to Life Under

Slavery” could also easily adapted to the fifth or eleventh grades. Because of the amount

of reading and writing contained in this lesson, these activities would be especially

pertinent in an integrated Language Arts/History classroom; hence, the applicable

standards for Language Arts are listed in the appendices, along with the social Studies

Standards for Eighth Grade.

Three overall course themes are particularly suitable for this particular two-week

unit:

• Human beings constantly strive to preserve their own humanity, even under

circumstances of terrible oppression.

• Struggle has been a consistent factor in the pursuit of freedom in America.

• Personal point of view dramatically affects how each person understands history.

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These three themes should be posted around the classroom and students should also be

given copies of the themes to enter at the beginning of this section of their social studies

journals.

Lesson Timeline

As mentioned, this particular lesson should take approximately two weeks to

complete. The following is a rough break-down of the unit timeline:

Day 1: Hook

Day 2: Activity: Vocabulary Development for the unit.

Day 3: Finish Activity: Vocabulary Development for the unit.

Assessment: “Connect Two” and “Two in One”

Day 4: Activity: Overview of Attitudes by Scholars about Slave Adaptation to

Slavery

Activity: Map Evaluation

Day 5: Read/discuss “The Blessings of the Slave” by Solon Robinson

Day 6: Read/discuss “The Faces of Slavery” by Frederick Douglass

Day 7: Activity: Getting Ready to Read Slave Narratives.

Day 8: Activity: Looking for Evidence of Slave Adaptation Options/Reading

Slave Narratives

Day 9: Continue Activity: Looking of Evidence for Slave Adaptation Options

with Interview and Graphic Organizer as Assessment

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Day 10: Activity: Discussion of slave life as seen by slaveowners as opposed to

slave life as seen by slaves

Assessment: Collage of Slave Life: Seen and Unseen

Prior Content Knowledge and Skills

This lesson plan will be embedded within a U.S. History course which has already

covered topics involving slavery. Students will already be familiar with the horrors of

the Middle Passage and the realities of triangular trade. The existence and nature of

slavery in the British colonies will have been covered, and the issues swirling around

slavery at the Constitutional Convention will have been discussed in detail.

In addition to the content area knowledge delineated above, students must have

had prior opportunities to practice certain skills. Students must have access to a social

studies journal and be familiar with writing in their journals in response to prompts and

readings. Students should be fairly experienced in reading maps and possess the skills

involved in pulling important content information from maps. They should also be

somewhat adept at reading primary sources and adapting their reading strategies to fit the

language encountered in reading primary documents from 19th Century America.

Finally, students must have had some prior exposure to interviewing techniques and must

be able to present information orally to a group in ways which facilitate the exchange of

information.

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Description of Content “Hook”

The lesson begins with a “hook” activity which is intended to spark student

interest in the material to be learned and to create an anticipatory set. To prepare for the

hook activity, print the following scenarios on slips of paper and distribute to students as

a journal entry. DO NOT tell students that the slips contain slightly different scenarios.

Scenario 1:

“It is 1820. You are a slave in the South Carolina, and you live on a plantation

not far from Charleston. You have a family (a spouse, two children and a living parent)

who all live on your plantation. You were born on this plantation, and have always been

a slave. Your parents were born slaves, as was your spouse. You do not like being a

slave and you would like things to change, but you do not want to do anything to

endanger your family. A slave friend on a nearby plantation tells you that he will escape

the next night and asks you to go with him. Write a journal entry discussing what you

will tell your friend and why.”

Scenario 2:

“It is 1820. You are a slave in the South Carolina, and you live on a plantation

not far from Charleston. You have no living family that you know of. You were born on

another plantation and were brought to this plantation as a child. You do not like being a

slave and you would like things in your life to change. A slave friend on a nearby

plantation tells you that he will escape the next night and asks you to go with him. Write

a journal entry discussing what you will tell your friend and why.”

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Scenario 3:

“It is 1820. You are a slave in the South Carolina, and you live on a plantation

not far from Charleston. You have a family (a spouse, two children and a living parent)

who all live on your plantation. You were born on this plantation, and have always been

a slave. Your parents were born slaves, as was your spouse. Recently you have been put

in charge of one of the work groups of slaves, and you realize this might be a way for you

to make things better for your friends and family. Your brother, who lives on your

plantation, tells you that he will escape the next night and asks you to help him get away.

Write a journal entry discussing telling what you have decided to do to help your

brother.”

Scenario 4:

“It is 1820. You are a slave in the South Carolina, and you live on a plantation

not far from Charleston. You have a family (a spouse, two children and a living parent)

who all live on your plantation. You were born on this plantation, and have always been

a slave. Your parents were born slaves, as was your spouse. You do not like being a

slave and you would like things to change, but you do not want to do anything to

endanger your family. Recently the beatings on your plantation by the overseer have

gotten much worse, and you have noticed that your spouse and friends on the plantation

have become very depressed and discouraged. Some are starting to get sick. You want

to do something that will help the slaves around you to take heart, but you do not want to

make things worse for slaves. Write a journal entry discussing what you will do to make

things better and how you will go about doing these things.”

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Hook Activity Description:

Allow the students to read and respond to their prompts for 10 minutes. Then

begin a “whip-around” class discussion with each student summarizing their plan and

explaining why they chose it. Record answers on chart paper. Once all students have

responded, have the students help you group the responses into categories. Hopefully,

between all four scenarios student responses will include running away, fighting back,

resisting in non-violent ways (including helping others to escape, sabotage, collective

resistance, turning to religion based on freedom for slaves), or accepting the situation.

Discuss why responses were different and why the different categories surfaced. Ask the

class for additional options to make sure all the above are mentioned. Be sure that

students come away with an understanding that situations for slaves varied greatly and

that the ways that slaves adapted to slavery varied according to those differences. Post

the chart paper on the wall throughout the unit.

Finally, discuss with students how this “hook” relates to the three themes posted

on the classroom walls and in their social studies journals. Be sure that, from the

discussion, the idea surfaces that this activity reinforces the themes by emphasizing the

struggle inherent in the pursuit of freedom as well as the need for slaves to balance their

individual situation with their desire to preserve their own humanity. Be sure that

students’ attention is now focused on the fact that not all situations for slaves were the

same, and that each individual was confronted with different challenges.

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Lesson Content:

Activity: Vocabulary Development for the Unit using the Strategy “Word Expert Cards”

Remind students about the slave situations and alternatives discussed during the

hook. Explain that in order to further delve into the reality of slave life, and in order to

truly “see” what slaves were experiencing and to hear their voices, they are going to be

reading some examples of what slaves actually said and wrote about life under slavery.

At this point, a brief discussion about the differences between primary and secondary

sources should ensue, concluding with student understanding of the value of primary

sources in enabling historians to really analyze past situations.

Remind students that, when reading interviews and writings of people at a certain

time, it is important to have an understanding of some of the important and unusual

vocabulary they may encounter in their reading. Students should know ahead of time that

reading primary sources can be difficult but very rewarding, and that a good

understanding of key vocabulary greatly enhances their ability to comprehend what is

being said.

Prior to this lesson, teachers should skim through all the reading they will be

using and extract 15 to 20 key terms to review with students. Teachers should write

down the word and the context sentence in which it appears in the unit. A sample list is

included as Appendix B.

Issue each student a half sheet of paper on which is written the word and its

context sentence. Depending on the number of words selected and the number of

students in your class, between one and two students will be assigned each word.

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Students should look up the definition and part of speech in the dictionary and write it on

the half sheet of paper they have been given. In addition, students will write their own

definition of the word that matches the context sentence and write an original sentence

using the word on the half sheet of paper.

After teacher approval of definition and sentence, each student will create a card

for his/her word. Issue students a piece of construction paper folded in half. On the

inside of the paper students write the approved definition, part of speech and original

sentence. On the front of the card students are to write the word, the context sentence

and draw a simple picture which illustrates the word.

When all cards have been approved and finished, students will use their cards to

teach each other the words in pairs, using the “inner-outer circle” strategy. A member of

the first pair shows the front of his/her card to partner and asks for guesses of meaning

based on picture and context sentence before revealing the inside with the definition.

Then, roles are reversed. After about 5 – 7 minutes, all members of the inner circle move

one person to the right and the process begins again. The inner circle continues to rotate

so that each student gets exposure to each word. While every student may not memorize

the definition of, experts are now available when reading the narratives and every student

is at least somewhat familiar with every word.

Assessment: “Connect Two” and “Two in One”

Connect Two: Make a two column list of all the vocabulary words discussed in

the previous activity. Here, the task for students is to find similarities between pair of

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words, one from each column. Ask students to pick a word from each column and write

down some sort of connection between the two words. If this will not be a formal,

individual assessment, it might be useful to have students work in pairs or triads to

discuss connections between the words together. The student (or group) must find a

word in column two to connect in some way with each word in column one. A whole

class discussion of the various words and connections will give the teacher a good

indication of how well these concepts have been mastered by students.

Two In One: Here, students must work independently to write sentences in which

they must use two or more of the vocabulary words discussed in ways that show

understanding of the concepts. If the “Connect Two” activity has been done in pairs or

triads, the “Two in One” activity makes a great individual assessment of content

knowledge.

If you have chosen these key words/concepts well, students should have adequate

prior knowledge to be successful with the rest of the unit.

Activity: Overview of Attitudes by Scholars about Slave Adaptations to Slavery

Ask students: If historians in 100 years in the future want to understand what it is

like to be a teenager growing up in California in 2005, where should they go for

information? Be sure the idea of journals and writings of students comes up. Now ask:

What might be missing from their understandings if historians only looked at the journals

of teachers? Parents? Law enforcement officers?

Remind students about what was discussed at the conclusion of the Hook

(response to scenarios and categorization of options). Discuss the early historical

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viewpoint espoused by Ulrich B. Phillips that slaves were happy and contented. Ask

student to guess: how could historians in the early 1900s have come to this point of

view? Explain to the students that early historians refused to look at slave narratives as

possible sources of information, and instead, looked to the journals and diaries of

slaveholders as their source of information about slave live. Discuss: In what ways

might this information be correct? In what ways might this information be incorrect?

Activity: Map Evaluation

For this activity, go to the Slavery in America website

(www.slaveryinamerica.org) and go to the geography section. Print up enough of the

maps entitled “Slave Insurrections”, “Underground Railroad”, and “Slave Populations in

the Southern States” so that each group of three students has a set of maps. An

alternative would be to have students, in pair, go to the website to view the maps and

complete the activity.

In their groups, students should respond to the questions below. These questions can

be written on the board or overhead, or printed up onto worksheets.

Discussion/response questions for the three maps:

• In which areas did the bulk of slaves live in 1860?

• Where were slaves trying to go when following the Underground Railroad?

• In which four states did the highest number of slave insurrections take place? In

which four states were there the fewest number of slave insurrections?

• What information could be missing from the Underground Railroad and Insurrection

maps?

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After the groups have answered all of the questions, conduct a whole group

discussion of these same questions. Student groups should share their answers with the

class, allowing an opportunity for the teacher to correct misunderstandings and

informally assess knowledge.

When the review is completed, pose two final questions to be discussed in table

groups of 3—5 students. After discussion, each student should write the questions and

responses in their social studies journals. The final questions are:

• How do these maps prove or disprove Phillips’ view that slaves were happy and

contented?

• In what ways do these maps provide specific evidence for at least one of the unit

themes?

Activity: Read and discuss “The Blessing of the Slave” by Solon Robinson.

This reading can be found easily through an internet search or on the website

albanyacademyforgirls.org/Academics/HaasWeb/us-11assignmentsheet4.html

While this reading may utilize language that would be hard for some middle

school students to understand on their own, it is approachable enough for a whole class

reading approach. Distribute a handout of the reading to each student as well as a

highlighter pen. Review the meanings of the following vocabulary words by having the

“experts” for these words restate their meanings: wretchedness, avaricious, overseer,

notorious, temperate, and flogging. Ask students during the reading that will follow to

raise their hands when they come to one of these words.

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Together, read the article and have the students highlight the key points or

arguments in favor of slavery made by the author. Discuss all sections, stopping

regularly for students to paraphrase the author’s message. When students raise their

hands as they arrive at the vocabulary words, direct attention to the way in which the

author is using the word.

After you have finished the reading, have the students summarize the author’s

main points on the left side of a folded piece of lined notebook paper. The left side of the

paper should be labeled “Observations of Slave Life by Whites”. Students should keep

this note sheet for use on upcoming assignments.

As a final assessment, and as a way to remind students of the meaning of the

vocabulary words, ask students to complete “exit slips” (slips of paper on which are

written their names and a quick response to questions) for the following questions:

• Who is Robinson implying is “wretched”?

• Would Robinson describe slaveowners as avaricious or temperate?

• In Robinson’s view, are overseers notorious for flogging?

Activity: Read/Discuss “The Faces of Slavery” by Frederick Douglass.

This reading can be found easily through an internet search or on the website

albanyacademyforgirls.org/Academics/HaasWeb/us-11assignmentsheet4.html

Begin the class session by discussing yesterday’s “exit slips” and sharing with

students some of the more insightful comments. Then, follow the same procedure as

described above.

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Distribute a handout of the reading to each student as well as a highlighter pen.

Review the meanings of the following vocabulary words by having the “experts” for

these words restate their meanings: human chattel, peculiar, philosophy, impunity,

divested, brute, wretched, and flog. Ask students during the reading that will follow to

raise their hands when they come to one of these words.

Together, read the article and have the students highlight the key points or

arguments in favor of slavery made by the author. Discuss all sections, stopping

regularly for students to paraphrase the author’s message. When students raise their

hands as they arrive at the vocabulary words, direct attention to the way in which the

author is using the word.

After you have finished the reading, have students highlight the main points that

Douglass makes in describing his views on slavery. Next, have students summarize the

key ideas from this reading on the right side of yesterday’s notesheet. This side of the

page should be titled “A Slave’s View of Slavery”.

As a final assessment, and as a way to remind students of the meaning of the

vocabulary words, ask students to complete a social studies notebook journal entry

addressing the following questions:

• Who is Douglass implying is “wretched”?

• Would Douglass describe slaveowners as avaricious or temperate?

• In Douglass’s view, are overseers notorious for flogging?

• Who might Douglass describe as a “brute”?

• Why are the two perspectives so different?

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Have students compare answers in small groups and then whole class. Discuss the

unit themes, especially the third theme “Personal point of view dramatically affects how

each person understands history” and then pose the following question for whole group

discussion:

“If you were alive at the time these two pieces were written and you were trying to

get a picture of what slavery was really like and you only read the white observer’s

comments, what assumptions about slavery would you come away with?”

Activity: Getting Ready to Read Slave Narratives.

Print the article “Reading the Narratives” from the following website:

xroads/virginia.edu~hyper/wpa/reading.html. Explain to students that, in order to get real

information about what slave life was like, they will be reading excerpts of interviews of

former slaves taken in the 1930s. Explain the information found in the article and tell

them that they first need to have exposure to the sound of these narratives read aloud.

Next, have students go to computer lab and then to the “Slavery in America”

website and listen to the excellent audio narratives found on that site. Students should

read along with the narratives silently as they are read aloud by the actors to get a feeling

for pronunciation, inflection, and general comprehension strategies. Students should

make note of any words they still don’t understand after reading and listening to the

narrative excerpts.

Back in class, discuss with students the challenges they faced when trying to

comprehend what the narratives were saying. What phrases or ideas are still unclear?

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• Finally, what overall impressions did the students get from the readings/audio

presentations about slave life? Did these sound like people who remembered slavery

as a positive and rewarding experience?

Again, review why this was not the view held by Phillips and other historians in the

early to mid 1900s. Finally, ask students to connect their learnings in this activity to the

three unit themes. Lead them through a discussion of ways in which these narratives

provide specific evidence for at least one of the unit themes.

Activity: Looking for Evidence for Slave Adaptation Options

by Reading Slave Narratives

Remind students about the hook activity and refer back to the chart paper notes

taken during that discussion. Explain that students will now have the opportunity to

evaluate slave writings in written form in order to gather information about how slaves

responded to life under slavery. Form students into pairs. Each pair of students will be

given a copy of a narrative from either the “Slavery in America” website or the “Xroads”,

University of Virginia website. Both resources have narratives that are relatively short

and comprehensible. If these online resources are not available, many published books

contain collections of slave narratives collected during interviews by the WPA in the

1930s. (138)

Instruct students that their task is to read the narrative aloud together twice, the

first time to pull out meaning in general, and the second time to highlight examples of

adaptations to slavery (resistance in many forms, rebellion, escape, resignation) seen in

the narrative.

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Once the students have read the narrative and understand the adaptations

mentioned within, they are to prepare a brief interview in which one student will take the

role of the former slave and one student will be the interviewer. Students should be

instructed to specifically address the themes of the unit and to prepare questions and

responses that will give listeners a clear picture of how this individual maintained a sense

of personal dignity amidst oppression. Be sure to discuss with students the use of dialect

within the narratives. Address the issue of disrespect and talk to the students about the

need to respectfully portray these individuals as uneducated but not stupid. Inform the

students that if they are uncomfortable with the dialect to feel free to put the language

into more modern-day speech for their presentations.

Finally, these interviews can be videotaped and later viewed by the class, or

presented live to the classroom audience. Student observers should take notes on the

graphic organizer (see Appendix C).

The teacher should assess the interviews for Oral Speaking Techniques (Language

Arts Standards) as well as for content addressing the themes and social studies standard.

(See Appendix D). The students’ graphic organizers can also serve as informal

assessment tools.

Activity: Discussion of Slave Life as seen by Slaveowners

as Opposed to Slave Life as Written About by Slaves.

Using the graphic organizers filled out by students during the oral interviews as

well as the two column notes from the earlier reading of Robinson and Douglass, discuss

the differences between what slaveholders probably saw and felt about their slaves’ lives

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and adaptations versus how the slaves themselves talked about their situation. Ask

students; What discrepancies did you find within the narratives? Did any narrative

contain information that seemed to contradict itself? Discuss why, even during the

1930s, blacks might have been hesitant to discuss slavery negatively in light of the fact

that the family of their former master may well live in the same community.

Assessment: Seen and Unseen Collages

Students will use their organizers, information from the internet sites visited, and

the narratives they studied to construct a collage of images and words about slavery and

how slaves responded and adapted. The focus of the collage should be to answer three

questions based on the unit’s three themes:

• How did African Americans, living under the oppression of slavery, constantly strive

to preserve their own humanity?

• How was struggle a consistent factor in the pursuit of freedom in America for African

American slaves?

• How does personal point of view affect how each person understands history?

One half of the collage should reflect what slaveowners said and probably felt and

imagined about life as a slave. On the other side, students should collect images and

words about what the slaves said, did, and probably felt about life as a slave. On the back

of the collage or on a separate sheet of paper, students should answer the three theme-

based questions and discuss how their collage depicts their response. Collages can be

assessed using a rubric. (see Appendix E)

62

Final Formal Assessment:

If the teacher feels that a more formal assessment would be desirable, a traditional

test can also be constructed. A sample test is shown in Appendix F.

References

www.xroads/virginia.edu~hyper/wpa/reading.html.

www.slaveryin america.org

Richek, Margaret Ann. 2005. Words are wonderful: Interactive, time-efficient strategies

to teach meaning vocabulary. The Reading Teacher, 58(5), 414—423.

ENDNOTES

1. Beirich, Heidi and Mark Potok. “Little Men.” The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report 118 (Winter, 2004): 23 –31.

2. Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, 2nd Edition. 1983.

3. Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 1943.

Franklin, John Hope and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the

Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 4. Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.

New York: Vintage Books, 1956, page 127. 5. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York:

Vintage Books, 1972, page 14. 6. Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday

Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, page 43—44.

7. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, page 130. 8. Ibid., pages 121—122, 127—141.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Dover Publications, 1995.

Franklin, John Hope and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the

Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of the Life of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswomanof

Olden Time, With a History of Her Labors and Correspondence. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

63

64

9. Davis, Ronald L.F.“Slavery in America Historical Overview”, www.slaveryinamerica.org.

10. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, page 129. 11. Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.

Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, page 4. 12. Gordon-Reed, Annette. When the Past Speaks to the Present: A Cautionary Tale

about Evidence. American History Online. Available from http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/historian3.html. Accessed 15 Dec 2005.

13. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York:

Dover Publications, Inc., 1995. Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of the Life of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of

Olden Time, With a History of Her Labors and Correspondence. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

14. Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.

Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, page 5. 15. Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton

Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, page 3.

16. Du Bois, W.E.Burghart. “American Negro Slavery. A Survey of the Supply,

Employments and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime”. The American Political Science Review. Vol.12, No. 4 (Nov. 1918): 722-726.

17. Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton

Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, page 4.

18. Ibid., page 4.

19. Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. New York: Peter Smith, 1952.

20. Ibid., page 20.

65

21. Du Bois, W.E.Burghart. “American Negro Slavery. A Survey of the Supply, Employments and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime”. The American Political Science Review. Vol. 12, No. 4 (Nov. 1918): page 722.

22. Woodson, Carter G. “Review of American Negro Slavery, by U.B. Phillips.”

Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol.5 (1918—19): 480—82.

23. Bancroft, Frederic. Slave Trading in the Old South. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1931, page x.

24. Ibid., page 235.

25. Bauer, Raymond A. and Alice H. Bauer. “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery”. The Journal of Negro History Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct., 1942): page 389.

26. Ibid., page 418.

27. Idib., page 390.

28. Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 1943.

29. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York:

Vintage Books, 1972, page 588. 30. Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton

Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, page 10.

31. Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.

New York: Vintage Books, 1956. 32. Ibid., page 617.

33. Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, page 12.

34. Ibid., page 12.

35. Ibid., page 15.

66

36. Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959, page 82.

37. Ibid., page 103 –115.

38. Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen. Boston: Beacon Press, 1946. 39. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York:

Vintage Books, 1972, page 57. 40. Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton

Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, page 18.

41. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York:

Vintage Books, 1972, page 26. 42. Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton

Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, page 18.

43. Ibid., page 18.

44. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1972, page 309.

45. Ibid., page 587.

46. Ibid., page 353.

47. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5(Dec.1988): page 240.

48. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York:

Vintage Books, 1972, page 5. 49. Ibid., page 6.

50. Ibid., page146—147.

51. Ibid., page 51.

67

52. Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, page 22.

53. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the

Old South.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5(Dec.1988): page 241. 54. Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman. Time of the Cross: The

Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974.

55. Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton

Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, page 27 and Weiss, page 1.

56. Weiss, Thomas. “Review of Time on the Cross: The Economics of American

Negro Slavery”. Project 2001: Significant Works in Twentieth-Century Economic History. Available from http:’’www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/weiss.shtml. Accessed 21 February 2005, page 1.

57. Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman. Time of the Cross: The

Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974, page 263.

58. Ibid, page 258.

59. Ibid., page 258.

60. Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983, pages 25—27.

61. Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman. Time of the Cross: The

Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974, page 259.

62. Ibid., pages 259—260.

63. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

64. Ibid., page 226.

68

65. Ibid., 367.

66. Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750 – 1925. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976, page xvii.

67. Ibid., page xx.

68. Ibid., page xxi—xxii.

69. Ibid., page 3.

70. Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North

America. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. 71. Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.

Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, pages 4—5. 72. Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.

New York: Vintage Books, 1956, page 28. 73. Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.

Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, page 16. 74. Ibid., page 5.

75. Ibid., page xvi.

76. Bauer, Raymond A. and Alice H. Bauer. “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery”. The Journal of Negro History Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct., 1942): page 417.

77. Blight, David W. The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source. American History

Online. Available from http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/historian3.html. Accessed 15 December 2004.

Egerton, Douglas R. The Material Culture of Slave Resistance. American History

Online. Available from http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/historian3.html. Accessed 15 December 2004.

78. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. page 131.

69

79. Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday

Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, page 1.

80. Ibid., page 2.

81. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

82. Ibid., page 2. 83. Ibid., page 2.

84. Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, page 2.

85. Ibid., page 2.

86. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, page 120.

87. Ibid., page 91.

88. Ibid, pages 92—113. 89. Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday

Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

White, Deborah Gray. Arn’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South.

New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1985. 90. Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.

Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, page 5. 91. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York:

Vintage Books, 1972, page 6—7. 92. Joyner, Charles W. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984, page 63.

70

93. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1972, page 254.

94. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum

South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, page 147. 95. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, page 125. 96. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum

South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, page 134—141. 97. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, page 125. 98. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum

South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, page 143. 99. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. page 125. 100. Rose, Willie Lee, ed. A Documentary History of Slavery in North America. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1976. page 249. 101. Joyner, Charles W. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984., page 72. 102. Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday

Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, page 44.

103. Ibid., page 44.

104. White, Deborah Gray. Arn’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985, page 141.

105. Bauer, Raymond A. and Alice H. Bauer. “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery”. The

Journal of Negro History Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct., 1942): 388-419. 106. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, page 129. 107. Ibid., page 131.

71

108. Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, pages 10 and 51.

109. Ibid., page 51.

110. Ibid., page 51.

111. Ibid., page 46.

112. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1972, page 602.

113. Ibid., page 605.

114. Ibid., page 608.

115. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5(Dec.1988): 1228 –1252, page 1242.

116. Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday

Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, page 62.

117. Ibid., page 61.

118. Ibid., page 62.

119. Ibid., page 68.

120. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1972, page 620.

121. Ibid., page 621.

122. Ibid., page 621.

123. Rose, Willie Lee, ed. A Documentary History of Slavery in North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

124. Ibid., page 254.

72

125. May, Robert. “John A. Quitman and His Slaves: Reconciling Slave Resistance with the Proslavery Defense.” The Journal of Southern History. Vol. 46, No. 4 (Nov. 1980), page 566.

126. Ibid., page 569.

127. Ibid., page 566.

128. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, page 129.

129. Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday

Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, page 49.

130. Ibid., page 49.

131. Ibid., page 49.

132. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1972, page 619.

133. Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, page 105. 134. Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves.

Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. 135. Ibid.

136. “Researchers dig into one of the South’s best preserved slave sites.” Eureka Times-Standard, 27 February 2005, sec. C, p. 7.

137. 1964 Ralph Ellison in Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and

Freedom, 1750 – 1925. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976, page 3. 138. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York:

Dover Publications, Inc., 1995. Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of the Life of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of

Olden Time, With a History of Her Labors and Correspondence. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alford, Terry. Prince Among Slaves. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1977.

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 1943.

Bancroft, Frederic. Slave Trading in the Old South. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1931.

Bauer, Raymond A. and Alice H. Bauer. “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery”. The Journal of Negro History Vol. 27, No. 4 (Oct., 1942): 388-419.

Beirich, Heidi and Mark Potok. “Little Men.” The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report 118 (Winter, 2004): 23 –31.

Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Blight, David W. The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source. American History Online. Available from http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/historian3.html. Accessed 15 December 2004.

Bontemps, Alex. The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Camp, Stephanie M. H. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Campbell, Edward D. C. Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.

Carroll, Joseph Cephas. Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800—1865. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1938.

Cheek, William F. Black Resistance Before the Civil War. Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1970.

73

74

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995.

Du Bois, W.E.Burghart. “American Negro Slavery. A Survey of the Supply, Employments and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime”. The American Political Science Review. Vol 12, No. 4 (Nov. 1918): 722-726.

Egerton, Douglas R. The Material Culture of Slave Resistance. American History Online. Available from http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/historian3.html. Accessed 15 December 2004.

Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman. Time of the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974.

Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman. Time of the Cross: Evidence and Methods—A Supplement. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974.

Foner, Phillip S. History of Black Americans: From the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom to the Eve of the Compromise of 1850. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Foner, Philip S. ed. The Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States, 1797 – 1971. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.

Franklin, John Hope and Loren Schweninger. Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Friedheim, William. Freedom’s Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry Into the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: The New Press, 1996.

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.

Gordon-Reed, Annette. When the Past Speaks to the Present: A Cautionary Tale about Evidence. American History Online. Available from http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/historian3.html. Accessed 15 December 2004.

Gutman, Herbert G. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750 – 1925. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.

75

Gutman, Herbert G. Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975.

Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and the Making of America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Johnson, Charles, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research Team. Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1998.

Joyner, Charles W. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Joyner, Charles W. Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Katz, William Loren. Eyewitness: A Living Documentary of the African American Contribution to American History. New York: Simon And Schuster, 1995.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. 1977.

May, Robert. “John A. Quitman and His Slaves: Reconciling Slave Resistance with the Proslavery Defense.” The Journal of Southern History. Vol. 46, No. 4 (Nov. 1980): 551-570.

Mellon, James, ed. Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember. An Oral History. New York: Grove Press, 1988.

Morton, Patricia, ed. Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Nash, Gary and Jean R. Soderlund. Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath. New York: Oxford University Press. 1991.

Northrup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

Ownby, Ted, ed. Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. New York: Peter Smith, 1952.

76

“Researchers dig into one of the South’s best preserved slave sites.” Eureka Times-Standard, 27 February 2005, sec. C, p. 7.

Rose, Willie Lee, ed. A Documentary History of Slavery in North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Schneider, Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider. An Eyewitness History of Slavery in America From Colonial Times to the Civil War. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001.

Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1985.

Stampp, Kenneth M. “The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery”. The American Historical Review Vol. 57, No. 3 (April, 1952): 613-624.

Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.

Sterling, Dorothy, ed. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984.

Steward, Austin. Twenty-Two Years and Slave and Forty Years a Freeman. Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1969.

Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen. Boston: Beacon Press, 1946.

Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of the Life of Sojourner Truth; A Bondswoman of Olden Time, With a History of Her Labors and Correspondence. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, 2nd Edition. 1983.

Wax, Darold D. “Negro Resistance to the Early American Slave Trade”. The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Jan., 1966): 1 – 15.

Weiss, Thomas. “Review of Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery”. Project 2001: Significant Works in Twentieth-Century Economic History. Available from http:’’ www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/weiss.shtml. Accessed 21 February 2005.

77

White, Deborah Gray. Arn’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1985.

White, Shane and Graham White. Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Woodson, Carter G. “Review of American Negro Slavery, by U.B. Phillips.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol.5 (1918—19): 480—82.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5(Dec.1988): 1228 –1252.

Yetman, Norman R. ed. Voices From Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.

APPENDIX A

Standards Addressed by this Lesson Plan

78

79

California History/Social Science Content Standards

8.7.1 Students analyze the divergent paths of the American people...with

emphasis on the South, in terms of the origins and development of the

institution of slavery and its effects on black Americans.

English--Language Arts Content Standards

8.1.3 Organization and Delivery of Oral Communications: Organize

information to achieve particular purposes by matching the message,

vocabulary, voice modulation, expression, and tone to the audience and

purpose.

8.2.1 Speaking Applications: Deliver narrative presentations

A. Relate a clear, coherent incident, event, or situation by using well-

chosen details.

8.3.3 Literary Response and Analysis: Students compare and contrast

motivations and reactions of literary characters confronting similar

situations or conflicts.

8.3.7 Literary Criticism: Students analyze a work of literature, showing how it

reflects the heritage, traditions, attitudes, and beliefs of its author.

APPENDIX B

Vocabulary for unit readings

80

81

Systematic: “It was commonly believed that a systematic, and well-organized “Underground Railroad” assisted fugitives slaves throughout the South to escape slavery.” Abolitionists: “Few received any help from abolitionists until they made it into a free state.” Agricultural: “These enslaved people worked as agricultural laborers growing cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, and hemp.” Wretchedness: “Free them from control, and how soon does poverty and wretchedness overtake them!” Avaricious: “Instead of a cruel and avaricious master being able to extort more than a reasonable labor from him, his effort will produce a contrary effect.” Overseers: “These facts are well understood by all observant maters and overseers.” Notorious: “The fact is notorious that slaves are better treated now than formerly, and the improvement in the condition is progressing; partly from their masters becoming more temperate and better men." Temperate: “The fact is notorious that slaves are better treated now than formerly, and the improvement in the condition is progressing; partly from their masters becoming more temperate and better men." Flogging: “I did not see or hear of but two cases of flogging.” Human chattel: “Master Hugh was astounded beyond measure, and probably for the first time proceeded to unfold to his wife the true philosophy of the slave system, and the peculiar rules necessary to be observed in the management of human chattels.” Peculiar: “Master Hugh was astounded beyond measure, and probably for the first time proceeded to unfold to his wife the true philosophy of the slave system, and the peculiar rules necessary to be observed in the management of human chattels.” Impunity: “He may work him, flog him, hire him out, sell him, and in certain contingencies kill him with perfect impunity.” Divested: “The slave is a human being, divested of all rights—reduced to the level of a brute...”

82

Brute: “The slave is a human being, divested of all rights—reduced to the level of a brute...”

APPENDIX C

Graphic Organizer for Slave Interview Presentations

83

84

Adaptation Method

Slave:

Slave:

Slave:

Slave:

Rebellion

Resistance (be

specific)

Running Away

Other

APPENDIX D

Assessment Rubric: Slave Narrative Interview

85

86

8.7.1 History/Social Studies Content Standard Student shows advanced ability to analyze the effect of the institution of slavery on black slaves.

4

Student shows proficient ability to analyze the effect of the institution of slavery on black slaves.

3

Student shows progressing ability to analyze the effect of the institution of slavery on black slaves.

2

Student shows beginning ability to analyze the effect of the institution of slavery on black slaves.

1

Student did not participate in this assessment.

0

8.1.3 English--Language Arts Content Standards: Organization and Delivery of Oral Communication Student demonstrates advanced ability to organize information to achieve particular purposes by matching message, vocabulary, voice modulation, expression, and tone to the audience and purpose.

4

Student demonstrates proficient ability to organize information to achieve particular purposes by matching message, vocabulary, voice modulation, expression, and tone to the audience and purpose.

3

Student demonstrates progressing ability to organize information to achieve particular purposes by matching message, vocabulary, voice modulation, expression, and tone to the audience and purpose.

2

Student demonstrates beginning ability to organize information to achieve particular purposes by matching message, vocabulary, voice modulation, expression, and tone to the audience and purpose.

1

Student did not participate in this assessment.

0

8.2.2 English—Language Art Content Standards: Speaking Applications Student demonstrates advanced ability to relate a clear, coherent incident, event, or situation by using well-chosen details.

4

Student demonstrates proficient ability to relate a clear, coherent incident, event, or situation by using well-chosen details.

3

Student demonstrates progressing ability to relate a clear, coherent incident, event, or situation by using well-chosen details.

2

Student demonstrates beginning ability to relate a clear, coherent incident, event, or situation by using well-chosen details.

1

Student did not participate in this assessment.

0

APPENDIX E

Final Assessment: Rubric For Collages

87

88

8.7.1 History/Social Studies Content Standard Student shows advanced ability to analyze the effect of the institution of slavery on black slaves and to connect this learning to the unit’s three themes.

4

Student shows proficient ability to analyze the effect of the institution of slavery on black slaves and to connect this learning to the unit’s three themes.

3

Student shows progressing ability to analyze the effect of the institution of slavery on black slaves and to connect this learning to the unit’s three themes.

2

Student shows beginning ability to analyze the effect of the institution of slavery on black slaves and to connect this learning to the unit’s three themes.

1

Student did not participate in this assessment.

0

8.3.4 English—Language Arts: Literary Response and Analysis Student collage and response demonstrate advanced ability to compare and contrast motivations and reactions of literary characters confronting similar situations or conflicts.

4

Student collage and response demonstrate proficient ability to compare and contrast motivations and reactions of literary characters confronting similar situations or conflicts.

3

Student collage and response demonstrate progressing ability to compare and contrast motivations and reactions of literary characters confronting similar situations or conflicts.

2

Student collage and response demonstrate beginning ability to compare and contrast motivations and reactions of literary characters confronting similar situations or conflicts.

1

Student did not participate in this assessment. 0 8.3.7 English—Language Arts: Literary Criticism Student collage demonstrates advanced ability analyze a work of literature, showing how it reflects the heritage, traditions, attitudes, and beliefs of its author.

4

Student collage demonstrates proficient ability analyze a work of literature, showing how it reflects the heritage, traditions, attitudes, and beliefs of its author.

3

Student collage demonstrates progressing ability analyze a work of literature, showing how it reflects the heritage, traditions, attitudes, and beliefs of its author.

2

Student collage demonstrates beginning ability analyze a work of literature, showing how it reflects the heritage, traditions, attitudes, and beliefs of its author.

1

Student did not participate in this assessment 0

APPENDIX F

Traditional Final Assessment for Lesson: Adapting to Life Under Slavery

89

90

This is an open note assessment in which the student may use all unit readings, notes, and graphic organizers. True/False Section: For each statement below, indicate whether it is true or false. Then, offer proof from your readings and notes: Prove why it is true or Prove why it is false. 1. Most slaves were happy and contented with their condition. True False Proof: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 2. Slave revolt was impossible in the Antebellum South. True False Proof: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 3. Northerners were well informed about the realities of slavery. True False Proof: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

91

4. Few options existed for slaves who were unhappy. True False Proof: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 5. All historians since the end of the Civil War have viewed slavery as a very bad thing

for slaves. True False Proof: ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Essay Questions: Answer the two questions below on a separate sheet of lined paper. A. Two of the unit themes are: “Struggle has been a consistent factor in the pursuit of freedom in America” and “”Personal point of view dramatically affects how each person understands history.” Using all of the evidence studied over the last two weeks, take the perspective of a slaveowner, a slave, or an abolitionist and describe the struggle that took place on the plantation over the issue of slavery and the question of slave contentedness. Be sure to provide ample evidence to support your case. B. Compose a letter to Ulrich B. Phillips in which you discuss at least three of the

following points: • The use of slave narratives as sources of information for historical analysis. • The validity of using differing points of view in writing historically • The truth or fallacy in his main tenets as discussed in class • Provide Phillips with evidence that supports the first unit theme: “Human beings

constantly strive to preserve their own humanity, even under circumstances of terrible oppression”. Discuss how his scholarship and his decision to not include slave narratives in his research might have affected race relations in the 20th Century.

• Compare and contrast the two viewpoints of Robinson and Douglass as evidence that perspective provides different people with very different ideas about the past.