Comparing Blassingame's The Slave Community And Culture

John. W. Blessingame, The Slave Community: The Plantation Life in The Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, Inc: 1972, 1979).

In closing, Eric Williams brings a new perspective, while balancing consistent and thorough insight to his analysis of the origins of Negro slavery. I agree with his thesis as it is supported by factual evidence from various sources. It was a well thought out, educated and biased but analytical reading about the institution of Negro

In 1928 Ulrich B. Phillips wrote an argumentative essay about the reasons for the massive support that slavery received from both slaveowners and Southerners who didn’t possess slaves. The essay was well-received and supported by critics in the 1930-s. However, closer to 1950-s critics started doubting the objectivity of Phillip’s writing. It’s important to note that Ulrich B. Phillips is a white historian from the South, writing from a perspective of a white Southerner. When he was writing his article he failed to step back from his bias and provide fully objective support for the main theme of his argument, setting a doubt to the reliability of his work.

In the book titled The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, author John Blassingame’s theme, focused on the history of African slave experience throughout the American South. After much research, the author said in the preface that most historians focused more on the planter instead of the slave. He also pointed out that most of the research on slaves by previous historians was based on stereotypes, and do not tell the real history of slave life and a slave’s inner self. Most of these historians, who focused on antebellum southern history, left out the African-American slave experience on purpose. Through much gathering of research, Blassingame hoped to correct this injustice to the history of African-American slaves, and show how slavery affected slaves, but also American life, culture, and thought.

Although forced servitude of African-Americans ended on plantations and in homes, many vestigials of a racially divided society remained and in the opinion of many critics, still do

Although Douglass and Jacobs' experiences support the "personal as political', their narratives further explore the residual effects of slavery: 1) to prohibit the identity of male and female slave, and 2) to marginalize the slave's presence in society.

Author Viktor Osinubi states in his article, “Privileging the African Metaphysics of Presence in American Slave Culture”, “American slavery, like many perverse institutions, developed a peculiar culture of fear and oppression, and thousands of slaves had to learn how to navigate this culture for their survival”.

African-American women have been neglected historical recognition during the primitive and the final stages of North American slavery. Historians like Stanley Elkins, John Blassingame, Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, Eugene Genovese, and Herbert Gutman have had a profound influence on research that uncovers the experiences of slaves in the antebellum South. Yet, these historians have only done so through the centered analysis of enslaved black men – this review will focus on two stereotypes and solidarity of women. Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White provides an examination of female slavery, in which, she analyzes the situation of the most vulnerable group of antebellum Americans: the uniqueness of African-American female crossroads that exercise two of the most well developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro (White, 26). The author places the context of such analysis in the speech “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” from former slave Sojourner Truth. In doing so, White hopes to reveal historical contributions by African-American women during slavery. Additionally, White strives to surface illustrations of unique struggles enslaved women encountered to evince the historic racism and sexism that structured womanhood in order to answer a confident and assertive “yes” to the persistent question: “Ar’n’t I a woman?” (White, 190) – White strives to prove her thesis, which states that an overdue examination of

The ability for an individual to withstand the crushing hand of slavery was nothing short of miraculous; to expect a slave family to remain together and unite despite distance, death, and sale is to expect the impossible. Through slave narratives and fictionalized accounts of life during and after slavery, as well as research based on real black families, the outstanding pressures on African American families are shown, and the visible effects of reducing humans to chattel give rise to debate on post-slavery black families. The slave narrative, made famous by African American writers like Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup, is one such account of life for blacks during slavery that demonstrates the fragility of slave family life. The slave

The issue of slavery in the United States has been hotly debated for centuries. Historians continuously squabble over the causes and effects of America’s capitalistic, industrial form of slavery. But two of the most heavily discussed questions are whether the institution of slavery destroyed African culture in America, and whether it reduced slaves to a child-like state of dependency and incompetence. Anthropologist Melville Herskovits, and historian Stanley Elkins both weigh in on this debate: Herskovits with, The Myth of the Negro Past, and Elkins with, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. In, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, Elkins asserts that African culture was all but destroyed by a repression of the slaves’ rights, at the hands of their masters. He claims that complete dependence on their masters and a lack of collective cultural identity and family bonds, reduced slaves to a child-like state of helplessness and ignorance, and childish behavior called the ‘Sambo’. Herskovits takes a different stance in this debate. In, The Myth of the Negro Past, he claims that African culture was not completely destroyed by slavery, and that the ‘Sambo’ stereotype was no more than a myth or at least a gross generalization. He uses slave revolts and the persistence of African culture in American in music, dance, and language as evidence to prove this.

Slavery has widely been considered to be one of the darkest periods in American history. However, many historians have a multitude of opinions and interpretations when it comes to how slaves reacted to their bondage. Such is the case when analyzing the works of Kenneth Stampp, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engermann, and Eugene Genovese. Stampp stated that slaves were complicite with forced labor, only on the basis that they did not know anything other. Furthermore, he states that once slaves tasted freedom in any capacity, they began to rebel against their masters. Fogel and Engermann describe how slaves enjoyed their work, mostly due to the fact that they divided their labor into “gangs”, which made work easier. Above all, Fogel and Engermann’s work has an overall tone that conveys the message that slavery benefited the American economy. Finally, Eugene Genovese states that slaves were regarded as lazy in Antebellum America. This was mostly due to their low social ranking and being subservient to the white man.

To enslaved black women, family was what their concept of freedom centered on. Harriet Jacobs’ painful story, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, focuses on her primary goal of attaining freedom for herself and her children, Benny and Ellen. To protect her children from Dr. Flint’s treatment, Linda, Harriet Jacobs’ pseudonym, hid for seven years in the small space between the ceiling and roof of her grandmother’s shed. While staying in the space, she suffered from pest infestation, illness, and extreme heat. She couldn’t even sit or stand (Jacobs 140-142). There was only one thing on

Many are often shocked to learn that historians have considered slavery as a step forward in the development of civilization. From the earliest times, it was customary

Modern American culture has largely forgotten the establishment of slavery and the disturbing, psychological pain that Africans and African Americans had to endure. The history of black people in America has been filled with traumatic experiences they faced during slavery, which has influenced their personalities and their connection with themselves and others. In order to overcome the trauma of slavery requires remembering the atrocities faced by slaves rather than forgetting them.

Arranged in three sections, the first section, ‘’Spotlights and Shadows’’ enhances records on colonial life in the south of the surviving Africans and African-Americans. Part one was the written and visual representations of enslavement. In Part two, ‘’The Turning,’’ explains how whites determine to call Africans ‘’Sensible Negros’’ vs ‘’New Negros.’’ Slaves identity were defined by these names. Lastly in part three, ‘’The creole Dilemma’’ explains more about being a ‘’sensible Negro’’ and the tensions slave endured in order to survive.