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 [log in to unmask] 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 [log in to unmask] To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html