New Directions Volume 4 | Issue 4 Article 10 10-1-1977 Book Review: The lB ack Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 Lewis Suggs Follow this and additional works at: http://dh.howard.edu/newdirections Recommended Citation Suggs, Lewis (1977) "Book Review: The lB ack Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925," New Directions: Vol. 4: Iss. 4, Article 10. Available at: http://dh.howard.edu/newdirections/vol4/iss4/10 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Howard @ Howard University. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Directions by an authorized administrator of Digital Howard @ Howard University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Suggs: Book Review: The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 TH[ ART~ Books 28 The Black Family Scholars have long debated the Frazier- arguments over slavery. They failed. Moynihan thesis. Historian Carter G. In Slavery and Freedom, Woodson launched the most successful No scholarly work published in this 1750-1925 attack in the 1940s when he published century has agitated the intellectual lengthy histories of several Black community as much as Time on the By Herbert Gutman families in the Negro History Bulletin. Cross, by Robert Fogel and Stanley Pantheon Books, New York Still the myths endured. John Blas- Engerman. Their work is an example ri. 644 pp., $15.95 singame's The Slave Community, "climometrics" or "econometric Reviewed by Lewis Suggs published in 1972, convincingly refuted history," which uses sophisticated -point by point-Elkins' thesis. mathematical techniques that depend Whatever else the civil rights movement Blassingame described a plantation heavily on the computer for manipulaz- of the 1960s may have accomplished or community in which slaves resisted the ing quantitative data. Time on the failed to accomplish, it at least liberated psychological impact of the master. He Cross painted a picture of the slave Afro-Americans from historical invisi- maintained that strong family ties system different from the customary bility. Clearly no single area in the persisted, despite the frequent break-ups one; it said that slavery was profitable. American past has received more resulting from the slave trade. Never- slaves were hard workers with an attention, aroused more passions, and theless, major questions remained about economic stake in the system, and thaz generated more debate and controversy how precisely this slave community their living conditions were not as bad among serious scholars in recent years developed, maintained itself over time, as was believed. Fogel and Engerman than the institution of slavery. and adjusted to the realities of white contended that the overwhelming power and dominance. Still, the critical typical family pattern was mother an Twentieth century scholars of American father and children living together; history have offered two basically issue of the slave family was not con- clusively resolved. The slave family's moreover, they say, these unions were different interpretations conceming the stable. effect of slavery on the Black family. relationship to the dominant white Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier argued family structure, and ways in which But Herbert Gutman's The Black Famir: persuasively in his 1939 classic, The freed men and women adapted, trans- in Slavery and Freedom, which was Negro Family in the United States, that formed, retained, or rejected older forms published in 1976, breaks sharply wi slavery destroyed the Black family. of family life remained unanswered. tradition and signals perhaps a new ern in the study of Black institutions. Fundamental economic forces and The next major work on slavery is material interests, he said, shattered Bombarding the reader with a constam: Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll, even the toughest bonds of Black fa- stream of statistics and 106 tables and published in 1974. "Blacks were milial sentiment and parental love. charts, Gutman mounts a massive struggling," Genovese wrote,"with attack on the popular myths about the considerable, if not fully defined success Supporting Frazier in the 1959 com- Black family. His work may force a to establish a pattern of family life for parative analysis, Slavery: A Problem in rethinking of the slave experience an themselves." To put it simply, Blacks American Intellectual and Institutional its meaning to contemporary Afro- avoided being degraded and dehuman- Life, historian Stanley M. Elkins, who American families. is white, listed four reasons for the ized by accepting what their masters destruction of the Black slave family: offered and making it their own. Thus a The book's thesis is that two-parent sexual exploitation, separation, mis- "paternalistic" compromise between families were the rule in slave society cegenation, and restrictive legal codes. master and slave enabled Blacks to and that a stable family pattern con- In an examination of the urban South, develop a distinctive culture and tinued among freedmen after Emanci- historian Richard C. Wade likewise community of their own. Both Blas- pation. In this extraordinary work, concluded that, "For a slave, no matter singame and Genovese emphasized the Gutman successfully challenges the where he resided, a house was never a slave family as an owner sponsored traditional view that slavery virtually home. Families could scarcely exist in device to reproduce the labor force and destroyed the Afro-American family. bondage: The law recognized no to maintain "social control." Still the Slaves, Gutman writes, developed the::- marriage." Writing in 1965, Daniel question remained: "What did slavery own cultural patterns, often indepen ~ Moynihan echoed Frazier's views and do to Afro-Americans?" In 1974, two of their masters. Blacks had an explicit asserted that the pathology afflicting Harvard historians took a decidedly awareness of kinship ties: children "\~ the Black family was one of the quantitative approach in order to "tell named after blood kin, and cousins Publishedlegac byies Digital of slavery Howard. @ Howard University, it like it was" and to lay to rest the were included in the incest taboo.Slave1 New Directions, Vol. 4 [], Iss. 4, Art. 10 women, he says, frequently bore According to Gutman, in 1780 about Reconstruction slave families, the 29 children to one or more fathers before 26,000 Africans and their descendants federal census manuscripts for 1880, settling down into long marriages. lived in the North American colonies, 1900, 1905, and 1925 are not statistically Gutman concludes that no stigma was 7 out of 10 in Virginia and Maryland. evaluated or scientifically analyzed as attached to children born out of wedlock Moreover, Maryland's Black population in previous chapters. He makes no and that marriage was marked by was more than doubled between 1748 systematic attempt to follow individual strong fidelity. and 1782 and Virginia's increased from families from one census to another. about 42,000 in 1743 to 259,000 in With the exception of New York City, Plantation owners, he argues, facilitated 1782. These comparative statistics serve he does not compile statistics for the slave marriages in order to circumvent to locate what Gutman calls,"the same place over an extended period of flight and rebellion. The slaves had moment when the greatest number of time. great respect for their elders. They used Africans underwent 'reluctant fictive kin titles ("Aunt," ''Uncle'') as adaptation. "' Yet, he uses the Bennehan The war and emancipation funda- terms of respect for non-relatives and -Cameron plantation records in North mentally changed the context that had in order to convert non-kin into a Carolina to demonstrate how an limited the slave's behavior. Major "symbolic slave adult network" with adaptive culture developed among 18th questions remained. Had the typical mutual obligation. Kin obligation sur- century Africans and Afro-Americans. ex-slave internalized the "Sambo" vived enslavement and was charac- But he does not explain what happened mentality? Was there widespread social terized past reconstruction by long to the records of Virginia and Maryland and cultural disorganization? How did marriages, naming patterns and com- which had a larger indigenous slave estate sales and the sexual exploitation munal care for orphans. population. One must ask: Can the of the slave women by whites affect the records from a single North Carolina slave family? Too little evidence is In the century prior to emancipation, plantation scientifically and demo- devoted to the slave family's health and Gutman believes that slave domestic graphically reveal the distinctive diet. Nor does Gutman seriously analyze the relationship between arrangements and kin networks drew character of the 18th century slave upon an adoptive Afro-American slave family? docility and poor diet-and more culture and family "model" born before importantly, when both were possibly me invention of the cotton gin and the Gutman leads us to believe that his "real" and possibly "alleged." American Revolution. Not all slaves book is a statistical and historical ac- More importantly perhaps, Gutman conformed to that "model," he notes. count of the 18th century Black family. does not place the slave family within Nevertheless, the values that flowed It is not. Except for the North Carolina the context of the total culture. For :rom these primordial ties contradicted Bennehan - Cameron slaves and those example, he did not attempt to apply in behavior, not in rhetoric, the power- slaves who left with the British in 1783, the tenets of psychiatry to master-slave ill ideology that viewed the slave as a "systematic data on the 18th century relationships in the old South and their perpetual "child" or a repressed Afro-American slave have not been effects on the slave family. However, savage." considered in this study," Gutman he does admit "that nearly as much writes. needs to be learned about whites who Gutman takes head on the controversial enslaved Africans between 1740-1780 :hesis (models) of such able scholars Moreover, the title of the book is as about the Africans themselves.