I've always had a problem with Brenda Stevenson's book. I think her
research was fundamentally flawed, which led her to questionable
conclusions about the nature of the African-American family in
slavery. She argues for the prevalence of a female-focused family,
with fathers largely absent. She used George Washington's records as
one template for her argument. I think she read Washington's records
correctly, but in a limited way. Washington systematically separated
husbands and wives on his five farms because he needed the skilled
males at his home farm, Mount Vernon, and he relegated the women and
children on his four outlying farms. Much of the menial field labor on
the outlying farms was done by women and children. However, much of
what went on in the enslaved community was invisible to the
masters/mistresses or beneath their concern.  So Washington's records
cannot and do not show how strong the nuclear family connections among
the slaves might have been. So Stevenson builds an argument based on
half a picture. Then there is Stevenson's flawed reading of Loudoun
County records from the 1840s and 1850s. When you look at these
documents you'll find the owners recording the names of female slaves
and the children born to them, which gives the impression that there
were few marriages, few stable mother-father-children families. My
problem with her research is that she never looked at any post-1865
documents, such as Freedman's Bureau records, deeds, marriage records,
Cohabitation Registers, death records, and other court records, where
you can readily find lots of evidence of long-term, stable marriages
and nuclear families that had existed invisibly in slavery time for
decades. You need to look at the post-1865 records to find evidence of
these family structures, because the owners had little or no interest
in recording them. I think Stevenson was trying to build an argument
that modern weaknesses in the African-American family have their roots
in slavery. I don't reject that argument but I don't quite buy it
either. It's one of the big questions of American history. Stevenson
gave an interview to NPR in which she expressed this argument more
forcefully than she does in her book. Somewhere in my files I have a
column William Raspberry wrote in the Washington Post in the mid-1990s
in which he cited research showing that in the early 1950s
African-American nuclear family rates were higher than among white
people, and that the nuclear-family rates began to fall after 1960,
leading to the situation we have now. Raspberry's argument was that
the problems in the African-American family are modern, not rooted in
slavery or segregation. I have a feeling he's right, but I have not
researched this; and it's a question that deserves a hard, objective
look.  Herbert Gutman's research on the African-American family, which
shows strong family structures, is some of the best work we have, but
his research is 40 years old. We have a lot more raw material to dig
into now.

Henry Wiencek
Charlottesville

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