Henry:  People also need to read between the lines when they consult Washington's or anyones diaries.  There are hints there of people visiting families back and forth if you know what I mean.  Also oral histories are a great help in research of this type.  Jane.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Henry Wiencek <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Aug 21, 2008 9:36 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Slave culture re: marriages, Virginia
>
>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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Lillian Jane Steele

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