Kevin,
No sir, I was not commenting on your thumbnail.  My understanding of
slavery comes from the same secondary sources as yours and traces back
further in the historiography to U. B. Phillips and the Dunning School
(with the linkages to the scholars you mention) from a majority viewpoint,
Charles H. Wesley, Herbert Apthecker, and Carter G. Woodson (among others)
from an African American, and Theda Perdue and Mike Green from a Native
American.  Even with the additional historiography, I can only know but a
fraction of the complexities of the institution and whenever I return to
the physical archives (we are doing Foucault in this exchange), I learn
something unexpected because I have learned to modify my queries because of
changes in semantics within the archives themselves.  You were correct; I
was not responding to you but to Patterson.  In general, I find American
History to be Whiggish but we have to be as a nation because we are so
young.  A Canadian Historian (whose name and article escapes me) recently
wrote about the phenomenon of why American, American Historians hold such
strong Whiggish views.  It skews the perspective and that was my issue with
Patterson because it was so broad and general.  I find you to be about as
level as any American Historian can be, and I include myself in my own
indictment.  Even Native American scholars display aspects of American
Nationalism and some (albeit slight) expectation of American
Exceptionalism.  I believe it goes back to society's role for Historians;
we have to make sense of the past for a modern context, correct?

As to etic & emic, since contemporary historical usage is a marker, should
we use "servant?"  Jefferson Davis uses only that term and he applies it to
Benjamin and Isiah Montgomery, whose accomplishments may warrant a special
term above enslaved. (Source *Pursuit of the Dream)*  Was the founder of
Mound Bayou (Isiah) Jefferson Davis' servant, slave, enslaved man, or "one
of Mr. Davis' free Negroes," as Davis' neighbors referred to them?  All of
the terms are historically accurate but enslaved has the sound of humanity
within it and given Isiah's achievements after Emancipation, and Benjamin's
before, should not our language reflect that humanity?  To both Davis & the
Montgomerys, they appear to have been emic, continuing to correspond until
the year of Davis' death.  Isiah even invites Davis to the MS Colored
Agricultural Fair because "I know you are interested in the progress of the
Colored People."  They appear to have a clear demarkation between Same &
Other that transcends the expected response from the secondary sources.
Like Eli's comment about Berlin, this does not make the secondary source
wrong, just there is now more context and exceptions.  The rule (with
regards to the racist nature of the "Free Negro" status), as laid down by
Berlin, still holds.

As to replacement of terms, what is wrong with "enslaved person" as opposed
to slave?  When we talk about an individual, the term "enslaved" implies
imperfect possession because they are held "in slavery" while "slave" has
overwhelmingly negative connotation of complete possession.  If we talk
about the law, the institution, or aspects thereof, then use "slave?"
Would it not entail but a simple definition at the beginning of class or
even in the syllabus?  Then, for example, the enslaved person who can read
and write is not exceptional (granted it is not common but literacy rates
across the South were abysmal as a whole) but displays that particular form
of agency like seen in Frederick Douglass, or Robert Smalls, Congressman
and the first African American commissioned Captain in the USN, was an
enslaved man, who hired out his time from his mistress, learned the trade
of harbor pilot, purchased his family's freedom, and absconded with the *CSS
Planter* (later the *USS Planter*).  When *Harper's Weekly *interviewed a
member of the crew and discovered he was literate, he was asked how he
learned.  "I stole it in the night" was his response.  He was held in
slavery but he does not appear to my mind to be a slave.  I acknowledge
that the issue is purely semantics but as you correctly state, we are
contemporary analysts, so does that preclude the use of a prefix?

I apologize if I appeared to give offense.  It was not my intention.

Eric

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 3:10 PM, Hardwick, Kevin - hardwikr <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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
>
> ______________________________________
> To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
> http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
>
> ______________________________________
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>



-- 
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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