SLAVERY AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH This page intentionally left blank Slavery and the American South Essays and Commentaries by ANNETTE GORDON-REED PETER S. ONUF JAMES OAKES WALTER JOHNSON ARIELA GROSS LAURA F. E DWARDS NORRECE T. JONES, JR. JAN LEWIS ROBERT OLWELL WILLIAM DUSINBERRE STERLING STUCKEY ROGER D. ABRAHAMS Edited by WINTHROP D. JORDAN UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI Jackson www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2003 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 4 3 2 1 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Porter L. Fortune, Jr. History Symposium (25th: 2000: University of Mississipi) Slavery and the American South : essays and commentaries / by Annette Gordon-Reed . [et. al.] ; edited by Winthrop D. Jordan. p. cm — (Chancellor’s symposium series ; 2000) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57806-581-X (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Slavery—Southern States—History—Congresses. 2. African Americans—Southern States—History—Congresses. 3. Southern States— History—Congresses. I. Gordon-Reed, Annette. II. Jordan, Winthrop D. III. Title. IV. Series. E441.P68 2003 306.3Ј62Ј0975—dc21 2003002100 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix ANNETTE GORDON-REED Logic and Experience: Thomas Jefferson’s Life in the Law 3 Commentary: Peter S. Onuf JAMES OAKES The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery 29 Commentary: Walter Johnson ARIELA GROSS Reflections on Law, Culture, and Slavery 57 Commentary: Laura F. Edwards NORRECE T. JONES, JR Rape in Black and White: Sexual Violence in the Testimony of Enslaved and Free Americans 93 Commentary: Jan Lewis ROBERT OLWELL The Long History of a Low Place: Slavery on the South Carolina Coast, 1670–1870 117 Commentary: William Dusinberre STERLING STUCKEY Paul Robeson and Richard Wright on the Arts and Slave Culture 147 Commentary: Roger D. Abrahams v Notes 177 Contributors 213 Index 215 vi Acknowledgments The Porter L. Fortune, Jr. Symposium in History at the University of Mississippi is sponsored by the Department of History, with the assis- tance of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The Symposium is supported by the generosity of Elizabeth Fortune and other mem- bers of the family of the former Chancellor, Porter L. Fortune, Jr. His and their interest in history has meant a very great deal to its ongoing success. The History Department at the University has long been a remark- ably collegial group of people. For this occasion, special thanks go to Nancy Bercaw, Ellen Wright Douglas, Betty Harness, Robert Haws, Bryn McDougall, John Neff, Harry Owens, Michelle Palmertree, Charles Ross, David Sansing, and Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez. Most of all, gratitude and appreciation go to Kevin D. McCarthy, who is embarking on such a promising career in history. He took over much of the work on the Symposium when illness rather suddenly pre- vented my doing it. He also greatly forwarded completion of this col- lection of essays. The enterprise would have collapsed had it not been for his great energy, efficiency, skill, and grace. I am very grateful to him as a friend for all he has done. His accomplishments deserve much more than mere pro forma words of appreciation and thanks. vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction The essays in this book derive from the twenty-fifth annual Porter L. Fortune, Jr. Symposium on History, held at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 2000. This particular symposium celebrated the first one, which was held in 1975. In that earlier year the History Department at the University of Mississippi offered its first national symposium, successfully gathering a small group of distinguished scholars from across the country. The Department decided to plunge directly into a topic which carried a special import at the University— slavery in the United States. It had been only a dozen years since the “Meredith riot” at Ole Miss, the crisis over admission of the first black student, which resulted in two deaths and massive federal interven- tion. The little town of Oxford then had a population of about five thousand, with the university having a similar number of students. Edgy federal authorities sent thirty thousand troops to back up the court-ordered integration. These dramatic events received massive coverage in the nation’s news media and confirmed in the minds of many outsiders (even in such bastions as Virginia) that Mississippi remained hopelessly mired in a brutal system of race relations that was becoming increasingly out of step with the nation as a whole. During the next few years, as is well known, the reactions of white officials to civil rights marches, as well as the murders of civil rights workers, further solidified the state’s notoriety. A dozen years later the ghost of that crisis still lingered at the Uni- versity. Though the Oxford public schools had finally been racially inte- grated two years before, a great deal had not changed. Outsiders at the Symposium in 1975 were warmly greeted, but some of them sensed that many University administrators thought the topic of slavery egregiously unsuitable and likely to lead, if anywhere, to a race riot. Busloads of stu- dents from Mississippi Valley State College, a “Negro” institution, were rumored to be coming—and actually came and listened and debated and left peacefully. Today, the enrollment of African Americans at the ix x Introduction University is large enough to permit a far more relaxed atmosphere, though of course not entirely free from interracial tensions and incidents. A telling symptom of the numerical change is that African-American students at Ole Miss no longer all know each other personally. For the Symposium of 2000, the History Department decided to tackle a twenty-five-year retrospective of the historical field of slavery in the U.S. South. Participants were chosen with the deliberate intention of excluding certain important developments that have taken place dur- ing the fissiparous enlargement of knowledge and definition of the field. Thus this Symposium deliberately ruled out important arenas of closely related historical developments, including slavery in the northern states, the abolitionist movement (both U.S. and trans-Atlantic), and the development of slavery in the entire Atlantic world. This latter field, including the Atlantic slave trade, has since the 1990s shown many signs of being the cutting edge of present and future scholarship, and it will soon be connected with a burst of studies of slavery and the slave trade in eastern Africa and the lands bordering the Indian ocean. Recog- nizing the limitations of a short symposium, and out of mercy for its participants and readers of this book, we have parochially retained the focus of the original Symposium held in 1975, for even within that field there have been profound changes in both accumulated knowledge and historical perspectives. The essays in this book reflect only some of the developments that have occurred in a field that even in 1975 historians sensed was downright exploding, a field that was at the time (as one European historian put it) “the hottest field in historical scholarship.”1 One reason why the field erupted is that for so many years it had been neglected or marginalized by most people in the community of professional historians. Not only was Africa still a “dark continent” but, according to prevailing assumptions, Negroes had no worthwhile his- tory of their own in the United States or, indeed, anywhere. Many read- ers will recall that the first person to tackle this problem was George Washington Williams, a “Negro” himself, who published his two-volume History of the Negro Race in America in 1882–83. Williams had served in the Union army; later he became a Baptist minister, a lawyer, and even- tually the first colored member of the Ohio legislature.2 He wrote in a Introduction xi mode similar to the earlier George Bancroft and to the then popular John Fiske, and publication of his book roughly coincided with the beginnings of the professionalization of historical study in the United States. His work appeared at a time when the bookshelves of thousands of middle class parlors displayed multivolume paeans to the triumphal progress of American history, and his two volumes sold more copies than the press runs of most historical monographs today. Williams’s work appeared at a time when a community was begin- ning to develop among historians, with the beginnings of formal grad- uate study at American universities and the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884. The new graduate schools required apprenticeship in seminars, and several universities published the results of the required dissertations in their own separate series. Beginning in the late 1880s, several such studies dealt with some aspect of slavery, particularly in an individual colony/state.3 These published dissertations were, by today’s standards, rigidly institutional, often relying heavily for source material on colonial and state statutes. They now seem woe- fully dated. Yet they did offer one dimension that the historical profes- sion managed to ignore (largely) until about 1970—the fact that slavery existed in all thirteen original colonies for a full century prior to the American Revolution and, indeed, for a century and a half before the “classic” era of the institution in the antebellum period, from 1830 to Emancipation. Williams’s own volumes had covered all of American history, starting not with Jamestown or slavery but the magnificent achievements of African civilization in Egypt. Ironically the most enduring of these published dissertations was by an African-American scholar who today is not commonly associated with the professional- ization of history in the United States: W.