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| The Slave Community | |
|---|---|
| Name | The Slave Community |
| Author | Oscar Handlin, Eugene D. Genovese, Herbert Aptheker |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Slavery, African American history |
| Genre | History, Sociology |
| Publisher | Vintage Books |
| Pub date | 1972 |
| Pages | 320 |
The Slave Community is a landmark scholarly work that examines enslaved African American life in the antebellum United States through social, cultural, and institutional lenses. The book sparked intense debate among historians, sociologists, and activists by challenging prevailing narratives about family, resistance, and accommodation within slavery. Its arguments influenced scholarship in African American history, Southern studies, and the interpretation of slavery in the United States.
Published in 1972, the book engaged with debates involving figures such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Sojourner Truth, and institutions like Monticello, Tuckahoe Plantation, Walnut Grove Plantation as case studies. Critics and supporters invoked historiographical authorities including E. Franklin Frazier, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope Franklin, Eric Foner, and C. Vann Woodward in assessing its claims. The work intersected with movements represented by Black Power, Civil Rights Movement, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and organizations like NAACP, SNCC, and National Urban League in reshaping public understanding of bondage and resistance.
Set against the backdrop of the Transatlantic slave trade, the book situates enslaved people within regions such as Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama and links to plantations like Mount Vernon, Belle Grove Plantation, and Kingsley Plantation. It interacts with legal frameworks including the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, and debates preceding the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Sources referenced in debates around the book draw on archives from collections such as the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, Smithsonian Institution, and university repositories at Harvard University, Yale University, University of Virginia, and Howard University.
The book analyzes labor regimes linking enslaved experience to systems on plantations exemplified by Cotton Kingdom operations, rice culture at Lowcountry South Carolina, Sugarcane cultivation in Louisiana and urban slavery in Charleston. Comparative studies evoke figures like Planter elite leaders such as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Zebulon B. Vance, and slaveholders documented in records like the Slave Schedules of the United States Census. Debates reference social scientists and writers including Ashley Montagu, Melville Herskovits, Frantz Fanon, Albert Murray, and James Baldwin to contextualize daily routines, overseer regimes, and household dynamics.
Examining kinship, the work confronts analyses by scholars such as E. P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, Christopher Hitchens (as contemporary critic), and Afrocentric scholars including Molefi Kete Asante. It treats extended families on plantations, the role of institutions like Mother Emanuel AME Church, St. Augustine Church (Richmond), African Methodist Episcopal Church, and community leaders including Nat Turner (leader reference), Denmark Vesey, and local figures recorded in plantation ledgers. The book’s assertions provoked responses from historians like John Blassingame, Ira Berlin, Stephanie Camp, Edna Greene Medford, and Daina Ramey Berry who re-evaluated marriage, paternity, and household autonomy.
Arguments about resistance engage narratives involving rebellions such as the Haitian Revolution, Stono Rebellion, Nat Turner Rebellion, and conspiracies linked to Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey. The book situates everyday resistance—work slowdowns, sabotage, and flight—with runaways seeking refuge in places like Fort Mose, Spanish Florida, and networks like the Underground Railroad and activists such as John Brown, Harriet Tubman (conductor reference), and abolitionists in American Anti-Slavery Society.
Religious life is examined via congregations and movements including African Methodist Episcopal Church, Baptist Church (African American), Ring shouts, and revival traditions paralleled with leaders such as Richard Allen, Cyrus Pitt Grosvenor (abolitionist context), and Lott Cary. Educational aspirations intersect with clandestine schools, literacy struggles addressed by laws like those in South Carolina Slave Codes, and figures such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Cultural expressions draw from musical and oral forms connected to artists and collectors like Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk), and literary echoes in works by Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright.
The book’s legacy is traced through debates in journals and institutions such as The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, American Historical Review, and conferences at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Subsequent scholarship by Ira Berlin, John Blassingame, Stephanie Camp, Kathleen Brown, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Lois Brown and public history initiatives at museums like the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Whitney Plantation and heritage sites including Montpelier and Poplar Forest continued reassessment. The controversies influenced pedagogy at universities like Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, Duke University, and Howard University and sparked further research into slavery’s social worlds, memory, and cultural survival.
Category:History books