A Historiographical Response to Jennifer Glancy

Biblical Interpretation Biblical Interpretation 15 (2007) 212-221 www.brill.nl/bi

Response

The Slave Still Appears: A Historiographical Response to Jennifer Glancy

J. Albert Harrill Indiana University

In his American Negro Slavery of 1918, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877– 1934) redressed what he saw as an imbalance in the history of the Old Dominion. As a result, he became the era’s foremost authority on the antebellum South. The monumental research and felicitous style of his book established perhaps the greatest consensus ever achieved by a single American historian—the “plantation legend.”1 This idyllic picture of the magnolia plantation neutralized the reports of harsh slave life by North- ern abolitionists like Frederick Law Olmstead (1822–1903) as biased. “In the actual régime severity was clearly the exception, and kindness the rule.”2 To Phillips, the contrast with the heartlessness of Roman slavery could not have been more obvious. Southern slavery was Dixie’s “peculiar institution,” incomparable to any other slave system in world history. Phillips’s documentary evidence—plantation archives, manuals, journals, letters, and miscellaneous records of individuals—seemed un- impeachable source material for doing history. American Negro Slavery

1) Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (1918; repr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), drawing mostly on plantation manuals (pp. 261–90); and idem, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1929), pp. 188–217. 2) Phillips, American Negro Slavery, p. 306, and pp. 341–43 on the contrast between Southern plantations and Roman latifundia.

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stood unchallenged for nearly half a century.3 Well into the late 1970s the account still reigned as objective fact in the North Carolina high school in which I was a student. A new generation of historians set out to denounce Phillips’s account as a racist, post-Reconstruction apology for the Lost Cause. Richard Hofstadter attacked Phillips’s misleading sampling of data, which drew largely from planters’ manuals, essays, and instructions to overseers, as products of the slaveholders’ ideology. Phillips conceived “the Negro slave as a singularly contented and docile ‘serio-comic’ creature,” a picture that merely perpetuated the “Sambo” myth endemic to the Southern literary imagination.4 Kenneth M. Stampp, who wrote his The Peculiar Institution in the context of the modern civil rights movement, absorbed Phillips’s docile serio-comic Negroes into what Jennifer Glancy and Shelly Matthews might call textuality.5 The Sambo, argued Stampp, was an artificial stock type, not a historically accurate depiction of enslaved African Americans, who in fact lived in persistent conflict and rebellion against their masters’ reductionism of them.6 Stampp exploded an entire edifice of Southern history as racist ideology. After the debris cleared, Stanley Elkins revised the story once again. His Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional Life of 1959 (and two subsequent editions) argued that the slave experience itself had the psychological impact of a “total institution.” Elkins found the best analogy to be the Nazi concentration camp. His use of analogy as historical evidence, a hermeneutics similar to what Sheila Briggs uncomplicatedly

3) Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Histori- cal Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 80, 229–30; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1974), pp. 223–32. 4) Richard Hofstadter, “U. B. Phillips and the Plantation Legend,” Journal of Negro His- tory 29 (1944), pp. 109–24. 5) Shelly Matthews, “Thinking of Thecla: Issues in Feminist Historiography,” JFSR 17 (2001), esp. pp. 46–51. 6) Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961); see also idem, “The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery,” AHR 57 (1952), pp. 613–24; and David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 6–7.

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