Va-Hist Subscribers:

The following review and exchange between the book's author and reviewer
originally appeared on H-Net's electronic discussion list H-SHEAR (Society
of Historians of the Early American Republic). It will no doubt interest
many Va-Hist subscribers.

Please follow the letter and spirit of the coyright notice that appears at
the end of the review.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Visit the Library of Virginia's web site at http://www.lva.lib.va.us


-----Original Message-----
From: H-South Review Editor Ian Binnington [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 19 January, 2001 1:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Crosspost: H-SHEAR Review, Rothman on Heath, _Hidden Lives_ and
Reply


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (January, 2001)

Barbara J. Heath.  _Hidden Lives: The Archaeology of Slave Life at Thomas
Jefferson's Poplar Forest_.  Charlottesville and London: University Press
of Virginia, 1999.  vii + 81 pp.  Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and
index.  $12.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8139-1867-7.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Joshua D. Rothman <[log in to unmask]>,
Department of History, University of Alabama

Interpreting the Artifacts of a Slave Community

In 1993, archaeologists at the museum now housing what was once Thomas
Jefferson's Poplar Forest plantation made an accidental discovery.  While
digging a series of routine test holes before the planting of some new
trees, they uncovered the remains of what had once been a small dirt
cellar.  Filled with a wide array of artifacts ranging from buttons and
nails to animal bones and beads, the cellar clearly indicated that human
beings had once inhabited the site, but map research yielded no insight as
to who might have lived there.  Over the course of the next three
archaeological seasons, excavations at what came to be called the "quarter
site" revealed the "footprints" of three structures and their yards as well
as more than twenty thousand artifacts dated to the late-eighteenth and
early-nineteenth centuries.  Cumulatively, the archaeological record
strongly suggested that the site had housed part of Poplar Forest's
enslaved African-American population between the 1790s and sometime in the
1810s.

In _Hidden Lives_, Barbara J. Heath uses the information gleaned from the
quarter site in combination with the documentary record to piece together
the experience of the slaves who lived at Poplar Forest and the community
they forged.  Poplar Forest, which Jefferson inherited upon the 1773 death
of his father-in-law John Wayles, sits roughly ninety miles southwest of
Jefferson's home plantation at Monticello.  Because Jefferson sold land and
reorganized his enslaved labor force frequently through the middle of the
1780s, Heath suggests that the slave population at Poplar Forest did not
develop a stable community until sometime in the middle of the 1790s, at
which point members of seven different families lived on the plantation.
Many of these families were interrelated by marriage and kinship
networks.  Over time, these networks were further elaborated and extended
from Poplar Forest to incorporate enslaved families living on plantations
all across central Virginia.

Jefferson used slaves at Poplar Forest for diverse purposes. Slaves worked
tobacco, wheat, and hemp fields, and raised cows, pigs, sheep, and
horses.  Men and women alike learned trades and became carpenters, smiths,
and weavers.  But Heath is more interested in how African Americans at
Poplar Forest defined themselves, their families, their domestic spaces,
and their leisure time than she is in how Jefferson defined them in his
farm book.  To that end, she turns to the archaeological record for clues.

Heath herself concedes that "much of the story of the African-American
community living at Poplar Forest still remains buried in the ground" (66),
and she makes no pretenses to offering a full account of slave life on the
plantation.  Still, some of the evidence is tantalizing for scholars
looking to answer important questions about the daily lives of slaves.
Higher quality ceramics were found in one structure than in another, for
example, hinting perhaps at class differences within the slave
community.  All three structures had yards placed strategically so that the
view from the nearby overseer's house was partially obscured, which may
point to the ability of slaves to carve semi-private spaces out of the
landscape.  So too does the existence of the small cellars dug in the floor
of one of the quarters.  Found at slave sites across Virginia, Tennessee,
and South Carolina, these pits may have cultural origins in West
Africa.  The discovery of so many coins, buttons, glass beads, and buckles
suggests the involvement of slaves in an informal economy and the
importance they placed upon adorning otherwise drab wardrobes.  Other
artifacts like marbles and fragments of a writing slate hint at leisure
activities for children and at literacy.  The contents of garbage pits
reveal information about how slaves supplemented the diet Jefferson offered
them by hunting, trapping, and gathering.  Numerous locks and keys found at
the site may suggest that slaves used them to lock up their possessions and
thus had semi-recognized rights to private property.  One particularly
fascinating discovery was the largest and most varied collection of stone
pipes ever found in Virginia, and related artifacts indicate that African
Americans at Poplar Forest manufactured pipes in addition to using them to
smoke tobacco.

Heath's approach throughout _Hidden Lives_ is to take objects found in the
ground (and indeed, the impressions left in the ground itself) and to
suggest not only how they may have been used, but to offer possibilities
for their significance and their larger meanings for the lives of slaves
and the slave community.  In general, her interpretations are insightful,
although the implications she sees in those interpretations sometimes
invite questioning.  Heath argues, for example, that although the
documentary record reveals forms of resistance ranging from violence to
running away to theft, "the archaeological record best reflects more subtle
forms of day-to-day resistance to the dehumanizing influence of slavery"
[66].  She offers no explanation, however, of just how "resistance" is
defined here.  Is the simple reality that slaves had some independence of
action to shape their own lives and landscapes and to collect items they
could call their own a form of "resistance"?  If, as Heath suggests,
Jefferson recognized the rights of his slaves to property and some privacy
[64], then to what extent exactly does the exercise of those rights
constitute resistance?  To ask this question is not to underestimate the
significance of the evidence Heath presents, but rather to suggest the need
for further elaboration of the point.

Occasionally, Heath's presentation also begs for more thorough historical
contextualization of the archaeological evidence.  We never learn, for
example, just how many slaves there were at Poplar Forest in the period
when the quarter site was inhabited. Moreover, _Hidden Lives_ is amply
illustrated and includes several maps, but we never see where exactly the
slaves lived who were not housed in one of the three structures at the
quarter site.  Nor for that matter are we told just how many acres the
plantation itself comprised.  All of these issues would seem to be helpful
if not critical in assessing the shape of the larger slave community at
Poplar Forest.

These criticisms aside, Barbara Heath has offered us a valuable window into
what is all too often the dark room of the material lives of slaves, and
made an important contribution to understanding how slaves shaped and
controlled the material world to meet their needs and desires.  Reports of
further discoveries and research at Poplar Forest ought to be eagerly
anticipated.

Copyright (c) 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved.  This work may be copied
for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and
the list.  For other permission, please contact [log in to unmask]
____________

Date:    Wed, 17 Jan 2001 08:38:46 -0600
From:    Stacey Robertson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Barbara J. Heath responds to review of _Hidden Lives_

Reply to Joshua Rothman, by Barbara J. Heath

Joshua Rothman's review provides an accurate assessment of my goals and
findings presented in _Hidden Lives, The Archaeology of Slave Life at
Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest_, and I thank him for his fair evaluation.

During the 1990s, archaeologists excavated a c.1790-1812 quarter at
Jefferson's Bedford County plantation.  While neither written nor
cartographic evidence pinpointed slave cabins at this site, early maps did
show that an overseer's house and a barn stood nearby during this period.
The material remains of occupation at the site--including architectural and
landscape features--revealed the location of three cabins, fence lines,
middens and a possible garden, while the artifact assemblage from the site
pointed to households occupied by people of relatively modest means.
Together, this evidence strongly suggested that the site had been occupied
by several of the enslaved families living on the property in the early
nineteenth century.

Historical contextualization is key to the approach I took in _Hidden
Lives_, and Rothman raises some valid criticisms about my shortcomings in
this respect. Although the slave census of 1805 (p.14) and the 1790 map of
the property (p.6) provide relevant information on the size of the enslaved
population and of the plantation, Rothman is quite right in pointing out
the omission of this information from the text and the usefulness of it. To
set the record straight, Poplar Forest consisted of approximately 3,500
acres of land by the early nineteenth century, and was comprised of two
quarter farms, Tomahawk and Bear Creek. In April of 1810, there were 57
men, women, and children living on the Tomahawk farm. This part of the
property included the site of the excavated quarter.  An additional 28
people lived at Bear Creek.

Rothman adds that the book does not include a discussion of where other
slaves lived on the property.  This omission is not an oversight. With a
single exception, we simply do not know where other members of the enslaved
community were housed during the period under discussion. That exception is
enslaved headman Jame Hubbard's house, shown on an early nineteenth-century
map (p.17).  Hubbard's house, if it has survived the suburbanization that
is sweeping the surrounding area, is on land that is not part of the
current Poplar Forest property. Through continued archaeological and
documentary research, it is our hope to locate and excavate additional
sites that allow us to examine the not only contemporary quarters, but the
entire continuum of slavery from the mid-eighteenth century, when the first
slaves arrived at Poplar Forest, through Jefferson's death and into the
period of subsequent property owners. We have made a start towards this
goal by investigating a quarter dating to the 1770s and 1780s, and have
recently located the site of another potentially early quarter site

Beyond pointing out some omissions of fact, Joshua Rothman also asks for
further elaboration of my point that that enslaved men and women used
day-to-day strategies to resist the dehumanizing influence of slavery (p.
64). He questions whether or not "the simple reality that slaves had some
independence of action to shape their own lives and landscapes and to
collect items they could call their own" qualifies as resistance,
especially if Jefferson sanctioned these actions.  I would argue here,
though I did not do so explicitly in the book, that these "simple
realities" do indicate forms of resistance.

By law, slaves were chattel, and slave owners held all but absolute
life-or-death control over them. In _Slave Counterpoint_, Philip Morgan
effectively summarizes the position of eighteenth-century slaves in the
Chesapeake and the South Carolina Lowcountry. "The slaves' status as
chattel was at the root of the callousness and dehumanization they faced,
setting them apart from other compulsory laborers. Slaves experienced a
more encompassing denial of rights than did other forced laborers. The
slave suffered not only loss of control over labor-power but also loss of
control over person.  This deprivation of freedom was so extreme as to be
qualitatively distinct from all other forms of unfreedom.  Further, the
slave was an outsider. Uprooted from one society and introduced into
another, slaves were denied the most elementary of social bonds. . . .  If
brutality in human relations is common and if societies always inflict
gross injustices on those who have nothing to offer but their labor, what
singles out slaves is the sheer nakedness of the exploitation to which they
were subjected (p. 261)."  He goes on to argue that this legal status was
somewhat mitigated by ongoing negotiations between enslaved people and
slave owners.

Although slave owners had become more paternalistic in the early nineteenth
century, Morgan's essential argument still holds relative to the period I
discuss in _Hidden Lives_.  While Jefferson's philosophy of slave
management favored incentives over threats, and an overall approach that
was more humane than that of many of his contemporaries, he was not adverse
to selling individuals away from their families and separating spouses when
work demands required it, or to using physical force to punish slaves who
were rebellious or habitual runaways.  Enslaved men and women at his
plantations were constantly involved in a series of negotiations with him
and his representatives to carve out "rights" that allowed independence of
action, lessened work loads, or improved their material standards of
living. I would argue that Jefferson recognized the rights of his slaves to
property and privacy at least in part as a result of these ongoing
negotiations. Multiple, ongoing conflicts between Jefferson's economic and
managerial interests and the interests of individual men and women for time
or resources resulted in a give and take that would not have been possible
had these conflicts not emerged.

Did overseers initially allow slaves to buy padlocks and lock their houses
or storage areas, or did slaves take the initiative to purchase the locks,
and by their actions force the overseer to decide whether this was an
action worth the effort to oppose?  Did Jefferson or overseers Bowling
Clarke or Jeremiah Goodman allow residents of the Quarter to work and
socialize outside of plantation surveillance while at home, or did they
design their landscape around this notion and challenge managers and owner
to oppose it? Obviously, these can become "chicken and egg" questions, but
they are important ones.

Whether over the difficulty of processing hemp, the requirement to work on
a day customarily free of labor, the unhappiness of a thwarted marriage,
the desire for a private space to gather and work, or the wish to
individualize a set of clothing, events and desires within the lives of
slaves prompted reactions that in many cases resulted in improvements to
their daily lives. In the sense that they were resisting the status of
chattel put upon them by law, and asserting their humanity, these acts,
large and small, defied the premise of institutionalized slavery.

Rothman's review also contained a few inaccuracies, arising out of
unfamiliarity with the material, that I'd like to address.  In addition to
tobacco, wheat and hemp, field hands at Poplar Forest raised corn, rye,
oats, barley, beans and pumpkins for consumption on the plantation, and
cotton and flax for cloth production.  Marbles were used by both children
and adults in gaming.  Finally, the stone pipes found at the site
represent, to my knowledge, the largest and most varied collection of stone
pipes found on an historic site, in an historic context, and made in the
post-contact period in Virginia.  Stone pipes were more commonly produced
by native peoples, and undoubtedly have been found in greater numbers at
prehistoric sites.

These quibbles aside, I thank Joshua Rothman for his thorough review, and
look forward to sharing more of our work at Poplar Forest in the future.

Barbara J. Heath
Director of Archaeology
Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest
[log in to unmask]
____________

Date:    Wed, 17 Jan 2001 08:39:40 -0600
From:    Stacey Robertson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Joshua Rothman's rejoinder

Just as a brief point of clarification, I do not and did not question in my
review of _Hidden Lives_ that slaves used a wide variety of strategies to
resist their enslavement on an everyday basis.  Nor would I argue that a
slaveowner who employed a so- called 'paternalistic' approach in his
dealings with those he owned could make slave resistance any less common or
important, or that such an approach might alter the fact that slaves were
ultimately property.

My only quibble with the issue of 'resistance' as it is raised in _Hidden
Lives_ is that the term itself is used largely without explanation of its
meaning and significance in the context of life at Poplar Forest.  As
Barbara Heath's response demonstrates, the question of resistance is a
complex and multifaceted one that requires full exploration of its
implications.  Heath's well-stated elaboration bodes well for future
publications as the research continues.

Joshua D. Rothman
University of Alabama
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