Content provided in partnership with
Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775. - book reviews
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1997 by Douglas Ambrose
North Carolina has received considerably less scholarly attention than have other mainland southern colonies of British North America. Its late settlement, diversified economy, and thin documentary record have made it less attractive to historians than the Chesapeake or the Carolina and Georgia low country. Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary seek to "close the gap left in the literature and to see how slavery in North Carolina differed from, or more likely, paralleled slavery in other southern colonies." (p. 2) Based on extensive research - the appendix is nearly worth the price of the book - Slavery in North Carolina goes a long way toward closing that gap. Thanks to Kay and Cary, we now know more about the demographic, economic, and legal aspects of slavery in North Carolina. But this valuable and important book suffers from a desire to be more revisionist than it is. Slavery in North Carolina is a book whose content would have been better served with a more balanced and judicious presentation.
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
The strongest sections of the book focus on the evolutionary character of colonial North Carolina's slave economy and society. Kay and Cary carefully illustrate the commercialization of the economy and how that process affected the slaves whose labor made the process possible. Kay and Cary delineate the ways in which "slaves engaged their masters in an ongoing dialogue regarding the proper amount of work that would be done," while "owners ... sought to induce steady labor by using ... positive motivational techniques," such as the task system. (p. 36) Some masters, they argue, granted slaves garden plots, since this "privilege might calm unrest ... and thereby make for more productive labor." (p. 37) In sections such as this, Kay and Cary present a world in which masters and slaves negotiated, albeit unequally, the conditions of labor and of life. "Masters," they conclude, "often sought to find a balance between economy and care sufficient to ensure a productive labor force, for they well knew that their slaves had the capacity to resist or to define limits." (p. 38)
The bulk of the book focuses on public records, especially statutory law, court actions, and newspaper accounts. And in their use of these records Kay and Cary move from portraying a world in which masters and slaves engaged in an "ongoing dialogue" to portraying one in which masters exercised "absolute control" over their slaves. Chapters on the law, on the "criminal" actions of slaves, and on runaways, although containing much that is useful, all too often become unnecessarily belligerent as Kay and Cary argue that masters demonstrated little if any interest in their slaves' lives and slaves, therefore, maintained their distinctly African culture.
The main target of Kay and Cary's attacks is the notion of "cultural hegemony." From the introduction onward, they assert "it is of little use to employ the Gramscian model of 'cultural hegemony'" in attempting to discern the nature of slavery in colonial North Carolina. (p. 2) But in this and subsequent references to this "Gramscian model of cultural hegemony," Kay and Cary cite only historians of twentieth-century America. They never point to any historian of colonial slavery who employs the model, nor do they deny that the model - which they never describe - may be applicable to the study of southern slavery in the nineteenth century. At one point the authors passionately insist that "to postulate a hegemonic culture for colonial North Carolina ... is to be teleological with an anachronistic vengeance." (p. 58) But since this bold, confrontational statement lacks a footnote, the reader is never quite sure who exactly does "postulate a hegemonic culture for colonial North Carolina." The authors single out Alan Gallay's work on paternalism in colonial South Carolina and Mechal Sobel's analysis of African-American religion as examples of studies that do not properly understand the degree of cultural autonomy among slaves in colonial America. But neither Gallay nor Sobel employs a "Gramscian model" nor does either contend that a "hegemonic culture" prevailed in colonial North Carolina or anywhere else in the colonial South.
Kay and Cary's discussion of the law is also problematic. They do a fine job portraying the ways the law served the interests of planters and reflected the resistance of many slaves to their enslavement. But in their analysis of "criminal justice" for slaves, they devote considerable attention to the dubious notion that once "freed of the need to shape the ameliorating policies required in a quest to establish cultural hegemony, masters denied slaves the normative system of criminal justice used for whites that joined procedural due process with a tendency to temper justice with mercy." (p. 6) But when did masters anywhere ever grant slaves "the normative system of criminal justice used for whites"? And it certainly does not follow that masters denied slaves due process because they were "freed of the need ... to establish cultural hegemony." Such legal niceties have never been a necessary element of cultural hegemony.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Autos
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »