Eric--

Was my thumbnail sketch of Elkin's argument inaccurate?  I am open to the possibility that it is, since I last read the book in seminar with Ira Berlin some twenty years ago, and am working from memory.  And likewise, in what sense was I implying a whiggish personal conviction, in the post?  You seem to be suggesting both.  Am I misreading you?

The term "slave" is of course not, or at least not merely, a theoretical abstraction imposed on a past people by contemporary analysts.  It is also a term embedded in the contemporary historical usage, and among other things had a legal meaning.   (Another way to say this is that the term slavery has both emic and etic components).  It strikes me as quite likely that its connotations have evolved over time, as the discourses for which the term performs work have changed.  Most of the people in the literature on which I have relied use the term, and do not imply passivity or erasure of agency by so doing.  My understanding of the history of slavery has been shaped most notably by Ira Berlin, Herbert Gutman, Edmund Morgan, Phil Morgan, Chris Tomlins, Eric Foner, Paul Finkelman, Walter Johnson, Eugene Genovese, Orlando Patterson, Rhys Isaac, Robin Blackburn, and David Eltis, among others.  While I disagree on occasion about smaller details, I would not wish to be construed as departing all that far from the broad thrust of their scholarship.  I would not describe most of these scholars, on the whole, as "whiggish," and I reject that characterization of my own thinking.

I am mystified what I have written that would induce you to imply that I view the present as the best of all times in history, or that history is somehow always moving in a unilaterally positive direction.  What have I written that would imply such a view?

More to the point of your comment, if we reject the term "slave" because it connotes passivity and whiggishness, with what do we replace it?

You seem to be taking especial aim at the ideas of Orlando Patterson, who famously described the condition of slavery as "social death."  Is that an accurate reading of your post?

All best wishes,
Kevin
___________________________
Kevin R. Hardwick
Associate Professor
Department of History, MSC 8001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
________________________________________
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Eric Richardson [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 11:55 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Peculiar Institution's End Without The Intervention Of The Civil War

Although I have hesitated to comment on this thread, the presumed passivity
of the enslaved people touches a very sore spot.  Freddie L. Parker's*
**Stealing
a Little Freedom: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in North Carolina,
1791-1840* and his *Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in North Carolina,
1775-1840 *both* *illustrate that running away was a negotiating position
within the institution of slavery or a way to pursue separated family
members.  This is active Labor, not passive hence the terminology
"enslaved."  Majority institutions still deploy the term "slave," which is
by definition passive & implies that the master/mistress owns body, mind,
and soul.  A more progressive view is that the enslaved person's labor was
possessed but not their entire being.  Therefore, if we continue to use
"slave," the argument must create a passive-aggressive psychology to
account for the confounding problem of terminology.  Enslaved people were
not passive and AGENCY becomes the operable term.  Then work slow-downs are
easily explained, running away to the woods and sending word to the master
about the grounds on which an enslaved person would return becomes
analogous to a Wild-Cat strike, and the institution of slavery comes under
the sub-discipline of Labor History.  Enslaved people were workers and
labor value theory then applies.  To continue to employ passive
constructions when dealing with enslaved people is about as racists as
relying on the Slave Narratives from Texas and Mississippi to form
conclusions about nostalgia for slavery from the Freedpeople.  Once again,
majority institutions perpetuate this Whiggish interpretation of the
institution because their Ibbotsen Curve must have a very low starting
point on the y-axis to sustain the argument that American history is a
constant upward progression.  As an African American and Native American
Historian, that premise is spurious; it depends on one's frame of reference
because from an African American perspective,  the 13th Amendment is a
peak, with a minor trough for Fusionism and a precipitous collapse during
Jim Crow (this does not include the horrendous impact of the Black Codes in
the antebellum Northern states) while from a Native American viewpoint,
Removal in 1820s & 1830s was the nadir, compounded by tribal genocide (the
word was used in Federal documents) of the Plains Indians under the Grant
Administration in the 1870s and allotment after the Dawes Act.  If we
accept that Bill Frehling is correct about the counterfactual argument here
and that colonization would function like Removal, then the conclusion
would be that it would be a failure like Removal: Removal did not remove
the Indians east of the Mississippi.  Saponi, Catawba, Eastern Band of the
Cherokee, Lumbee, Cheraw, Pee Dee, Waccamaw-Souian, Pamunky, Mattaponi,
Poarch Creek, Seminole, and a host of other tribal groups remain in the
Southeast today.

As to ships for the transportation, perhaps one should look at Marcus
Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (the largest African
American organization in American history) that proposed that all African
Americans should return to Africa.The Black Star Line purchased its first
ship in 1919 when the African American population was significantly larger
than in 1860.  If we are still using W.E.B. DuBois as the source critic for
Garvey's "Back-to-Africa" movement, then we need to address the
Black-on-Black racism in evidence between these two men.  DuBois referred
to Garvey as "a monkeyman" and evinced contempt for Garvey because of the
size of UNIA relative to DuBois' NAACP; Garvey attracted tens of thousands
to hear him speak, while DuBois would attract hundreds.  If our presumption
is a single-minded colonization population of formerly enslaved people,
once again it fails because of human realities.  Like the Osages under
Removal, there has been no discussion so far about how the Ibo or
Sengalese-Gambians would have responded to an invasion of foreigners, if
transportation had been arranged.  If the initial colonists had faced
violence upon arrival from their neighbors, the plan would have failed.  An
example of this type of problem comes from the brother of Thomas Day. a
free person of color from Milton, NC, who married Aquila Wilson from
Halifax, VA (a connection to VA history).  Jonathan Day went to Liberia
under the auspices of the American Colonization Society and once in
country, he discovered it was not to his liking.  He returned to the US.
If our counter-factual presumes manumission first and colonization second,
we are back to agency and human nature.  Colonization, like Removal, is
predicated upon passivity and Day illustrates that he was not passive.  The
plan would have failed not due to the lack of money--Lincoln reportedly
told Alexander Stephens at the Hampton Roads Conference in 1865 that there
was "tens of millions" of dollars for compensated emancipation even at that
late of a date--or transportation but simply from the formerly enslaved
people being set free as a necessary and sufficient causality to
colonization.  See Elizabeth Freeman (nee Mumbet) case for freedom from the
state of Massachusetts in 1781 (Mumbet famously said she was not a "dumb
critter" when she retained Theodore Sedgwick as her attorney, even though
he was a slaveowner) in the case of *Brom & Bett v. John Ashley, Esq.


Eric Richardson
North Carolina Central University**


*
On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Hardwick, Kevin - hardwikr <[log in to unmask]
> wrote:

> This is a tad off topic, but hopefully does not do too much violence to
> Lyle's stimulating and interesting thread:
>
> Stanley Elkins, in his classic work SLAVERY:  A PROBLEM IN AMERICAN
> INSTITUTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE (the third edition was published by the
> University of Chicago Press in 1976; the first edition was published in the
> late 1950s, presumably by the same press), advanced the thesis that the
> experience of slavery was psychologically debilitating to those who lived
> through it.  ("Classic," of course, can mean in practice "an old book that
> no one reads anymore.")  Elkins' thesis drew considerable attention, and I
> don't think anyone now believes it holds, at least in the form that he
> initially advanced it.  He famously relied on psychological studies of
> survivors of Nazi concentration camps, for example, to sustain his analysis
> of the psychological deformations of character inflicted on the
> personalities of slaves.  Most people now would argue that the analogy is
> flawed--that the psychological situations were not comparable.
>
> On the other hand, there is ample evidence from contemporaries in the
> 1860s and 1870s that many people believed at the time that slavery did in
> fact disrupt the character of slaves.  Much of the force of Booker T.
> Washington's arguments, for example, derived from such an analysis of the
> effects of slavery.  Belief and reality are two different things, and we
> should not minimize the importance of ideology in construction of
> contemporary beliefs.  But there is often a connection of some sort, as
> Gordon Wood has so eloquently argued for a very different historiographic
> context.
>
> I am unaware of any recent scholarship that has tried to develop Elkins'
> insights, or to modify the analogies from which he reasoned.  I am quite
> sure I will benefit from comments on this, should anyone have them.  Is
> there recent work along these lines with which I should be familiar?
>
> Many thanks!
>
> All best wishes,
> Kevin
>
>
> ___________________________
> Kevin R. Hardwick
> Associate Professor
> Department of History, MSC 8001
> James Madison University
> Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
> ______________________________________
> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
> http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
>



--
Eric J. Richardson
Master's of Arts in History
Master's of Arts Candidate in English
North Carolina Central University
Durham, NC 27707
[log in to unmask]
(336) 202-7341

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