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Power and Agency in Antebellum
Slavery
William Dusinberre
a
a
Department of History , University of Warwick , Coventry, UK
Published online: 08 Sep 2011.
To cite this article: William Dusinberre (2011) Power and Agency in Antebellum Slavery, American
Nineteenth Century History, 12:2, 139-148, DOI: 10.1080/14664658.2011.594648
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2011.594648
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Power and Agency in Antebellum Slavery
William Dusinberre*
Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
This essay synthesizes conclusions about the agency of enslaved people drawn
from three books by William Dusinberre: Them Dark Days; Slavemaster President;
and Strategies for Survival.
Keywords: slavery; agency; rice; James K. Polk; Virginia
My purpose is to assess the balance between the masters power (legally almost
completely unlimited) and the slaves agency their ability to fashion their lives and
institutions in ways that alleviated the burdens of their situation.
1
I have written several books about antebellum slavery. One of them concentrated
on some rice plantations in the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry. The next book
focused on a single cotton plantation in Mississippi the one owned by President
James Polk. The third book discussed slavery in tobacco-producing Virginia, based
mainly on WPA interviews in 1937 by black interviewers with very old former
slaves.
2
Thus, the project considered disparate regions of the Old South and different
crop regimes. I want now to suggest several statements that might be valid for all of
these regions.
I shall make four assertions with conviction. Then I will consider four other topics
where I wish simply to pose questions.
First, I think it is obvious but nevertheless worth saying at the outset that
slavemasters held slaves for their own economic benefit and to secure and improve
their own social status. Thus, when in 1834, James Polk (who was then a
congressman) announced to his wife that he was shifting his plantation operations
from western Tennessee to northern Mississippi, he explained that he was doing so
for economic reasons in order to make more money or loose [sic] more.
3
When
Robert Allston a successful rice planter who later became governor of South
Carolina wrote in 1846 to James Hammond to congratulate him on the publication
of a proslavery pamphlet, Allston used the language of a proud entrepreneur: Allston
declared that he, as a planter . . . representing others who like himself, have half
their Capital invested in slaves . . . [sends to Hammond his] warm and grateful
acknowledgements.
4
Half their Capital invested in slaves: I think it is not necessary
for historians to assert that planters were capitalists that all depends on how one
defines capitalism; but I think it clear that these were businessmen who owned
*Email: wdusinberre@compuserve.com
American Nineteenth Century History
Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2011, 139148
ISSN 1466-4658 print/ISSN 1743-7903 online
# 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14664658.2011.594648
http://www.informaworld.com
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slaves, and invested in more of them, to enhance their own economic and social
position. No doubt many planters sought to explain their actions by wrapping
themselves in the robes of a paternalist ideology. But I think it is important to start a
study of slavery with what the masters were actually doing, not with the theories by
which they sought to justify what they were doing.
Next, in all of the principal crop regions the slave regime was terribly harsh
though for somewhat different reasons in each region. On an island in the Savannah
River, eight miles upstream from the city of Savannah, I found a rice plantation where
in the mid-nineteenth century the child mortality rate was 90%.
5
Ninety percent: of
every 100 children born there, 90 died before age 16. At any one time during the
1850s there were about 100 slaves on this plantation, and the adults died there too in
astonishing numbers. Over a nearly 30-year period about 150 babies were born, while
about 300 slaves died. The only way the owner Charles Manigault (who was from a
very prominent Charleston family) could keep the plantation going was to buy fresh
supplies of new slaves in Charleston, and to ship them often to early deaths to his
Savannah River plantation.
6
He continued to do this, despite the death toll, because
the profits on his capital investment (including even his investment in slaves who
died) averaged, over a 30-year period, more than 10% per year.
7
This plantation was
particularly deathly; but I believe child mortality rates throughout the rice kingdom
were even worse than those on Caribbean sugarcane plantations.
8
In Virginia, the mortality rate of enslaved children was less grim than in the rice
kingdom; but slaverys harshness in Virginia took an additional form. Many
thousands of Virginia slave families were broken up by the sale, or forced migration,
of husbands away from their wives and children, or of young children away from
their parents. When James Polk was secretly, during his presidency, buying more
slaves to work his Mississippi plantation, he required his agents to purchase for him
only bondpeople between the ages of 10 and 21 years. This requirement made it
impossible for the agents to buy any child with its parents. Polks agents bought for
him eight children aged 1013 years (as well as other children somewhat older).
9
It
was the existence in the cotton kingdom of this kind of demand for young slaves,
unencumbered by their parents, which led to the breakup of so many Virginia slave
families. No white man ever been in my house, a 91-year-old former slave in
Virginia told her black interviewer in 1937. Dont low it. Dey sole my sister Kate. I
saw it wid dese here eyes. Sole her in 1860, and I aint seed nor heard of her since.
Folks say white folks is all right dese days. Maybe dey is, maybe dey isnt. But I cant
stand to see em. Not on my place.
10
Planters were self-interested businesspeople, and the slave regime was harsh. My
third assertion is that the slaves discontent with this harsh regime expressed itself
mainly through nonviolent dissidence. Flight from the plantation for days, weeks, or
months in the local woods or swamps was common, whereas acts of violence were
not common. Violence was likely to lead to the death of the violent resister, and most
slaves wanted to stay alive. In the decade to 1861, at least 24 slaves fled temporarily
(several of them more than once) from Charles Manigaults Savannah River
plantation, but there were no recorded instances of violent resistance.
11
There may
possibly, however, have been two exceptions to this statement. In 1854, a slave named
140 W. Dusinberre
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Anthony fled from the plantation, and according to the terse note in the plantations
annual slave list, he died from it, died in Charleston. In the previous year the same
fate had befallen a fugitive named Joe.
12
Probably Joe, and then Anthony, died from
illness caused by exposure, or from snake-bite, when they were hiding in the swamp;
or perhaps they died from a severe whipping after they were captured; or possibly
they violently resisted capture and were shot by their pursuers. But even if one or
both of these slaves resisted violently, their fates help to explain why violent resistance
was so rare. I was surprised to find that on this plantation, where during the malaria
season there were about 100 bondpeople supervised by only one white overseer, the
overseer entrusted one of the slaves with a shotgun with which to scare away
the bobolinks rice birds that would otherwise have eaten the rice. What the
overseer was afraid of was that he might lose his crop to the rice birds, not that the
enslaved birdminder would turn his shotgun on the overseer. Overseers had a lot to
worry about, especially when a flood came roaring down the Savannah River from
Augusta, Georgia, threatening to inundate most of the island; but mutiny from the
enslaved laborers does not appear to have been, during peacetime, much of a worry.
13
Similarly, at James Polks cotton plantation, temporary flight was common, but
violent resistance rare. Polk held about 60 bondpeople on his plantation, and during
a 22-year period at least 18 of these slaves ran away temporarily.
14
Some of them fled
repeatedly, and altogether there were 50 recorded instances of flight, but only two
cases of violent resistance, neither with a lethal weapon.
15
In 1834, a middle-aged
slave named Chunky Jack fled from a particularly brutal overseer named Ephraim
Beanland, and the slave struck his pursuer with a stick. Beanland carried a knife, and
he stabbed Chunky Jack twice, bringing him down. Jack was lucky to survive his
wounds.
16
Six years later the plantations best worker, Henry Carter, submitted for a
while to what he thought an unjust whipping, but eventually Henry rebelled. The
flogging was inflicted by a fairly new, and not very imposing, overseer; and when
Henry naked and unarmed refused to be whipped any more, and began to run,
the unarmed overseer grappled with him, but Henry Carter escaped. During the next
10 days the fugitive acquired some clothes, and he travelled 110 miles (no doubt
walking at night); he then turned himself in, voluntarily, at a West Tennessee
plantation owned by Polks brother-in-law, to whom the fugitive complained about
the overseers conduct. Polk was at this time governor of Tennessee, ambitious to
embark on a national political career, and the last thing he wanted was publicity
about disorder on his plantation. Polk promptly sacked the overseer for failure to
govern the slaves properly; and a few years later President Polk took Henry Carters
young son to Washington as the only one of his slaves to join the rest of Polks
domestic staff in the White House. Here was an instance when violent resistance paid
off; but Henry Carter did not use a weapon at all; he and his family were favored
slaves; and he was confronting an incompetent overseer.
17
The fact remains that
instances of violent resistance were rare on this plantation, far outnumbered by the
cases of flight to the local woods. And as for Virginia, although I was mistaken about
slave violence in Richmond during the 1850s (because I overlooked decisive evidence
in James Campbells book), I nevertheless believe that the interviews and other
evidence confirm my view that violent resistance, during peacetime, was rare, while
American Nineteenth Century History 141
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nonviolent dissidence (especially by flight to the local woods) was virtually
ubiquitous.
18
I think we historians tend to expect that, even during peacetime, slaves ought to
have been willing to die in hopes of gaining their liberty; but this is demanding too
much of them. Of course, hundreds of slaves did take big risks every year to try to
escape permanently (especially from the Upper South), and Richard Blackett proves
that the number of such fugitives was even greater than what has been previously
believed.
19
But the number of bondpeople who fled temporarily to the local woods
was far greater than the number who sought permanent escape. Temporary flight was
one thing, and it might possibly be punished relatively leniently; but violent
resistance was something different, and it was likely to be punished with draconian
severity. We ought to respect the vast majority of slaves who chose to stay alive by
directing their discontent into nonviolent channels.
There existed, among some slaves, a tradition of individual self-development,
especially among skilled workers such as midwives, seamstresses, some female, and
some male house servants; and among carpenters, blacksmiths, and drivers. For
example, the former slave William I. Johnson, Jr. you can hear his family pride even
in his name testified in 1937 that, when the Civil War broke out, he had been a
young butler on a plantation near Richmond, Virginia. His master, and the masters
four sons, all joined the Confederate army, leaving the butler, William, in charge of
protecting the white women in the Big House. William performed this duty
faithfully for a couple of years, after which one of his masters sons (a Confederate
army officer) took William along to the front as a body servant. When opportunity
presented itself, William fled to the Union Army, where he was recruited for the rest
of the war into the Quartermaster Corps (presumably because of his skills as a
butler). In 1865 he returned to Richmond, became a bricklayer, was soon promoted
to foreman, and eventually set up his own building contracting business, by means of
which he prospered. He stated proudly in 1937 that he had educated his children
(including college for those who wanted it) and had helped to educate his
grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The Lord is just blessing me, thats all,
he concluded.
20
Here is one of the origins of the twentieth-century black middle class:
a slave who seized the opportunity to become a skilled house servant; who fled to
freedom as soon as a good chance presented itself; and who after developing an
artisans skills eventually became a successful businessman. The concept of cultural
autonomy does not fit William Johnsons career, because initially he depended on
his master to offer him training as a skilled butler, and he won the trust of his
masters family, before he fled to join the Union army.
A tragic variant of this story appears in the Manigault records. For seven years
before 1844, Charles Manigault elevated a slave named Robert to the privileged
position of being an upmarket house servant in South Carolina. But Robert was a
very determined bondman, by which apparently was meant that he had a mind of
his own; and Robert fell out with his master. Charles Manigault was a stern
disciplinarian, and he aimed to teach Robert, and the other slaves, a lesson by
deporting Robert to the Savannah River rice plantation, where Robert was demoted
to menial field labor and was separated indefinitely from his wife and child. Robert,
142 W. Dusinberre
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instead of sulking, set to work with a will. The overseer soon reported, with
astonishment, that Robert was doing amazingly well in the field, considering that he
had been accustomed to the relatively soft life of a house servant. Robert quickly
learned everything that was there to learn about raising a rice crop when to flood
the fields, when to drain them, and so on. After four years, Manigault rewarded
Roberts hard work and his self-development by making him driver of the plantation,
with managerial authority (under the white overseer) over the other slaves. Once,
when a new and relatively inexperienced overseer had been appointed, Manigault
expected this overseer to follow the advice about irrigating the fields that Robert (and
another trusted slave) could offer him; and when the new overseer failed to achieve
the desired output of rice, Manigault instituted an enquiry into whether the overseer
had been following the good advice available from Robert and the other trusted slave.
Roberts chosen path was not that of autonomy, because his master had the power
to sack him from his privileged position as a house servant, and the only sure way
Robert could escape spending the rest of his life in mind-numbing drudgery, and
could exercise his intelligence and managerial skill, was to regain his masters good
will. But the story had a tragic ending, because in 1857 (after nine years as driver)
Robert suddenly died, pretty surely by suicide. Did he regain his masters respect at
the expense of losing his own self-respect?
21
A less unhappy variant of Roberts career of self-development but also sad in its
own way appears in President Polks records. At Polks fathers small plantation in
central Tennessee near Nashville there had been a skilled blacksmith named
Harry, who came into James Polks possession. Harry had an abroad marriage with
a woman who lived in the neighborhood; but her master removed her and her
children to northern Mississippi, threatening the permanent destruction of the
enslaved family. Harry prevailed upon Polk to let him go to Carroll County,
Mississippi, near his wife and children, but 35 miles away from Polks own plantation
farther north in Mississippi. Polk rented Harry, on an annual contract, to a white
man in Carroll County. Polk was willing to do this because Harry had become such a
skilled blacksmith that his annual rent was large; and blacksmiths were in greater
demand in newly settled northern Mississippi than in long-settled Tennessee: Harry
in Mississippi earned more money for Polk than he had done in Tennessee. The
arrangement secured a kind of independence for Harry (e.g., Harry was able to earn a
good deal of money for himself by working in his free time there); but everything
depended on Harrys retaining Polks good will, so that Polk would be willing to
renew Harrys rental arrangements from one year to the next. To keep Polk sweet,
Harry had letters sent to his master full of the most egregious flattery. Harry seems to
have associated with white men in Mississippi and to have placed bets with them on
the outcome of Polks election campaigns, with Harry of course betting that his
master would win. Harry had lost money when Polk was defeated twice for re-
election as Governor of Tennessee; but the blacksmith won his bets grandly when Polk
triumphed in the presidential election of 1844. Harrys magnificent winnings
included besides $25 of cash 11 pairs of boots, one barrel of flour, lots of
tobacco, and 40 gallons of whiskey. Harry seems to have arranged for most of the
whiskey to be distributed in advance of the election, by white allies, to influence the
American Nineteenth Century History 143
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voters. Harrys letter assured Polk that Harry had treated [the whiskey] all out in
Electionaring for you through my friends who stood by me in Electionaring Troble. I
tell you Master Jimmy that I made some big speaches for you and though an humble
negro I made some votes for you . . . . You may be assured my dear Master Jimmy
that I have done all in my Power for you. Harry was as eager to ingratiate himself
with the President-elect as the dozens of white would-be officeholders who addressed
similar letters to Polk at the same time. Yet, by 1848, Polk ended Harrys
independence, and required him to live henceforth on Polks own Mississippi
plantation, evidently breaking up Harrys marriage to his second wife and separating
him from his children.
22
Thus, for some slaves, a strategy for survival was to accept from a well-disposed
master the opportunity to develop ones skills as a house servant, or as an artisan, or
even to exercise ones managerial talents as a driver. This was not the path of a Nat
Turner, nor was it a route that secured a slaves autonomy from the white mans
world, though it might secure at least temporarily the sort of limited independence
that Blacksmith Harry tasted. This was a deep-rooted tradition among some of the
bondpeople. I cannot help feeling admiration for a person like the butler, and later
building contractor, William Johnson; I feel sorrow at the death of Driver Robert,
which suggested the cost of his regaining his masters esteem; and I find some
sympathy even for the transparent flatteries of Blacksmith Harry.
***
Now to mention briefly four areas where I want to pose questions.
The first is religion. Everyone agrees that the slaves religion was an African
American amalgam. The question remains about the balance between these two
elements. In the Carolina and Georgia lowcountry the African elements were
conspicuous. But by 1860 fewer than 5% of Southern slaves lived in the Carolina and
Georgia lowcountry, and too much weight may have been placed on the distinctive
situation there.
23
In Virginia, I was surprised to find how far the antebellum slaves
religion appeared to be suffused with conventional Christian doctrine. The Christian
promise of salvation on Judgment Day offered hope to slaves who had all too little to
hope for in this world. Its doctrine of turning the other cheek helped to impel some
bondpeople to make the compromises that, though unpalatable, were usually
necessary for survival. Christianitys implication that there might be a higher law
than that of man emboldened many bondpeople to acts of nonviolent dissidence
embarked upon with confidence that a just God would approve, and that brave slaves
would surely be rewarded in heaven, whatever the outcome of their earthly
enterprises. Slaves drew their own conclusions from these Christian doctrines, but
the tenets themselves appear to have been similar, to a surprising degree, to the
doctrines held by evangelical white Southerners. How far, we might ask, did the
slaves religion, by 1860, resemble the contemporary evangelical religion of Southern
white people?
24
Secondly, the bondpeoples family lives have been much scrutinized. There appear
to have been two strong family institutions among antebellum slaves: a vigorous
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nuclear family model, which coexisted with a subordinate, yet substantial, matrifocal
model (i.e., one where the family was centered on the mother). Many of the Virginia
interviewees had grown up in nuclear families and had cherished strong emotional
attachments to their fathers as well as to their mothers. But many other interviewees
virtually never mentioned their fathers, who at best appear to have been shadowy
figures in their lives. Abroad marriages (where the husband lived on a different
plantation from his wife) were numerous in Virginia. If the husband lived very near
his wife and children, these marriages might function like a nuclear family. But
usually an abroad husband lived so far from his wife that authorized visits could
occur no more often than once a week. Many of these marriages were likely to have
functioned somewhat like a matrifocal family, placing extra responsibilities for child-
rearing on the mother, and perhaps lessening some fathers sense of responsibility for
their children. At slave sales the standard family unit on offer was a woman
accompanied by a young child or children, but seldom by the childrens father.
Southern legislators by never legalizing slaves marriages, and thereby failing to
provide legal support for the slaves nuclear family institutions weakened those
institutions.
25
Emily West has argued forcibly that in South Carolina abroad
marriages worked well, while other writers have declared that uncles or fictive kin
could adequately compensate for absent fathers in matrifocal families.
26
Recently,
Anthony Kaye using records of the U.S. Pension Bureau has thrown new light on
the slaves family customs, and on how bondpeople tried to protect their nuclear
families.
27
The last word may not yet have been written about the slaves family lives.
We might continue to ask: How far did the slaves successfully resist the forces tending
to weaken their family institutions?
Thirdly, I want to consider the issue of community solidarity. In the book about
rice plantations, I argued that Charles Manigaults Savannah River slaves were all in
the same boat, with no firm divisions between field hands and privileged slaves.
28
But while that may have been true at that plantation, I now suppose that the situation
there arose because the plantation was absentee-owned, with no resident planter
around whose dwelling a group of privileged slaves could be clustered. The Virginia
interviews indicate that the lives of some privileged slaves differed substantially from
those of ordinary slaves. While there is nevertheless clear evidence of community
solidarity across class lines, I am now more struck than I used to be by the class
divisions within the black community.
29
Just as two distinct traditions of nuclear
families and of matrifocal families coexisted, so also two distinct traditions of
community solidarity but also of class division appear to have coexisted. We might
continue to ask: How far did the slaves successfully resist the forces that tended to
divide some privileged slaves from the other bondpeople?
Finally, how may one assess the slaves morale? In the book about Virginia I have
stressed the slaves resilience: in the face of oppression, they kept up their spirits
reasonably well, sustained by their religion, by their vigorous culture of dissidence, by
their family loyalties, and by the tradition of self-development cherished by some.
30
But in the book about rice plantations I argued (based largely on the Journal of the
English actress Frances Kemble) that the rice slaves morale was battered. For
example, Kemble became well acquainted with a privileged slave named Israel a
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wagon driver whose father knew how to read; but Israel himself had never learned
to read. Kemble asked him why he had never got his father to teach him. Israel cried
out, Missis, what for me learn to read? me have no prospect. Israels self-confidence
was undermined: he felt he was in a hopeless situation, where there was no point in
his striving to improve himself.
31
Can both things have been true? Can a good deal of
resilience have coexisted with widespread low morale?
Perhaps the answer is Yes. Persuaded by Kembles first-hand account, I may have
underestimated the slaves capacity to endure, without their suffering devastation to
their spirits. But considerable resilience may have coexisted with a substantial
weakening of many bondpeoples morale. We might continue to ask: How far did the
slaves maintain strong morale against the forces tending to undermine it?
Here, then, is a way of looking at antebellum slavery that although not
comprehensive is I hope reasonably coherent. The masters were businessmen and
women, who held slaves for their own economic and social benefit. In every major
crop region of the South the regime was dreadfully rigorous. (Surely Richard Follett
and Michael Tadman would agree that this was also true of Louisianas sugarcane
region.
32
) The slaves culture of resistance found expression primarily through
nonviolent dissidence, especially through flight, sometimes destined to achieve
permanent freedom, but much more often aimed simply at gaining the respite of
several days, weeks, or months in the nearby woods or swamps. Among some slaves
there flourished a tradition of self-development that obliged participants (such as the
butler William Johnson, Driver Robert, and Blacksmith Harry) not to seek cultural
autonomy, but rather to depend on offers of special privilege from their masters.
In most parts of the South, the slaves religion, while distinctive in significant
ways, was nevertheless a recognizably Christian doctrine that comforted and inspired
many of its adherents. Two different family institutions coexisted among the slaves,
the nuclear family tradition being more common, but the matrifocal model being
also pervasive. Similarly, two strong, somewhat contradictory traditions coexisted,
that of community solidarity and that of something like class differentiation between
ordinary workers and a much smaller group of relatively privileged bondpeople. The
resilience of the slaves against their oppression was great, yet low morale may have
been widespread. The slaves agency was substantial, and stories of their valor and
strength were abundant. But the masters power was great, and the scars left by
slavery were ineradicable.
Notes
1. This talk was given at the annual BrANCH conference in Liverpool, England, October 9,
2010.
2. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days; Dusinberre, Slavemaster President; Dusinberre, Strategies for
Survival.
3. James Polk to Sarah Polk, September 26, 1834, in Slavemaster President, 15.
4. Robert Allston to James H. Hammond, July 24, 1846, Easterby, South Carolina Rice
Plantation, 95, in Them Dark Days, 301.
5. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 506.
6. Ibid., 4952 (esp. Tables 5 and 6); also 5683.
146 W. Dusinberre
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7. Ibid., 1224 (esp. Table 1, column g).
8. In the lowcountry rice kingdom, during the mid-nineteenth century, the child mortality
rate (to age 15) was about 66% (Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 537). In Jamaica, early in
the nineteenth century, it appears to have been only about 52% (Fogel, Estimating the
Undercount, 289 [Table 42.2]). In the lowcountry rice kingdom, during the mid-
nineteenth century, the annual number of births probably only slightly exceeded the
annual number of deaths (Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 41016). Part of the explanation
is that enslaved women in the lowcountry rice kingdom were less fertile than those
elsewhere in the American South (ibid., 415, 536 [note 78]).
9. Polk instructed his agents to purchase slaves aged 1221 years, but the agents calculated
(correctly) that the president would not complain if they bought younger slaves; and in
fact, among their purchases were one child aged 10 years and two aged 11 years. Hence my
statement that Polk required only bondpeople between the ages of 10 and 21 years.
Among the eight children aged 1013 years, I include the 13-year-old Calvin, whom Polks
agent immediately sold for more than his purchase price, crediting the prot to Polks
account. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 1622.
10. Perdue, Weevils, 128, in Strategies for Survival, 77.
11. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 123, 14258 (esp. 144).
12. Ibid., 143.
13. Ibid., 76, 103, 1612.
14. At Polks West Tennessee plantation he held (18321834) six slaves whom he did not move
to his new Mississippi plantation. At the Mississippi plantation there were 56 slaves in
1849. Thus the total number of potential fugitives was about 62. Dusinberre, Slavemaster
President, 32; 184, column j.
15. Five slaves ed from the West Tennessee plantation, and at least 13 from the Mississippi
plantation, making a total of at least 18. As explained in the book, this record includes
seven years (18501856 inclusive) when the plantation was owned by Polks widow; Polks
overseer John Mairs continued in his post during these years. Dusinberre, Slavemaster
President, 2748 (esp. 33).
16. Ibid., 31.
17. Ibid., 357, 25.
18. Although James Campbell has demonstrated that, in Richmond, slave violence against
white people was greater during the 1850s than previously, the situation appears to have
been different in the rest of Virginia. During the 1850s the average annual number of
slaves, per 100,000 slaves, convicted in that state of murdering white people (0.66) was
smaller than the average annual gure, per 100,000 slaves, from 1790 to 1850 (0.76).
Campbell, Slavery on Trial, 827; Dusinberre, Strategies for Survival, 645, 224 n 45; see
also 15362, 14353.
19. Blackett, Dispossessing Massa.
20. Perdue, Barden, and Phillips, Weevils, 16570, in Strategies for Survival, 1934, 2014
(quote at 203).
21. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 95, 979 (quote at 97), 1701, 1945.
22. Dusinberre, Slavemaster President, 11015 (quote at 114: Harry to James Polk, November
28, 1844).
23. In 1860 the enslaved population of 15 lowcountry counties (two in North Carolina, seven
districts in South Carolina, and six coastal counties in Georgia) was 188,000. The total
U.S. slave population was 3,954,000. U.S. Census, 1860, Population. The counties (or
districts) were: (North Carolina:) Brunswick, New Hanover; (South Carolina:) Beaufort,
Charleston, Colleton, Georgetown, Horry, Marion, Williamsburgh; (Georgia:) Bryan,
Camden, Chatham, Glynn, Liberty, McIntosh.
24. Dusinberre, Strategies for Survival, 12140.
25. Ibid., 7384, 168, 1709.
26. West, Chains of Love, esp. 4379.
American Nineteenth Century History 147
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27. Kaye, Joining Places, 5182.
28. Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 178201.
29. Dusinberre, Strategies for Survival, 1549, 1806, 192204.
30. Ibid., 2079, 121204.
31. Kemble, Journal of a Residence, 314; Dusinberre, Them Dark Days, 24881 (quote at 271).
32. Follett, The Sugar Masters; Tadman, Demographic Cost.
References
Blackett, R.J.M. Dispossessing Massa: Fugitive Slaves and the Politics of Slavery after 1850.
American Nineteenth Century History 10 (2009): 11936.
Campbell, James M. Slavery on Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum
Richmond. Virginia. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996.
* ***. Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003.
* ***. Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2009.
Easterby, J.H., ed. The South Carolina Rice Plantation, as Revealed in the Papers of Robert F.W.
Allston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945.
Fogel, Robert William. Estimating the Undercount of Births and Deaths below Age Three. In
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery: Evidence and Methods,
ed. Robert W. Fogel, Ralph A. Galantine, and Richard L. Manning, 28691. New York:
Norton, 1992.
Follett, Richard J. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisianas Cane World, 18201860.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Kaye, Anthony E. Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Kemble, Frances Anne. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 18381839. 1863.
Reprint, ed. John K. Scott, New York: Knopf, 1961.
Perdue, Charles L., Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds. Weevils in the Wheat:
Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976.
Tadman, Michael. The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural
Increase in the Americas. American Historical Review 105 (2000): 153475.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. Eighth Census, 1860: Population. Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Ofce, 1864.
West, Emily. Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2004.
148 W. Dusinberre
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