Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775. - book reviews

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.

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.

The problems of extrapolating from statutory law and court actions the nature of master/slave relations plague Kay and Cary's work in other ways. The law may tell us much about the creation of a system of "judicial terror ... used to establish absolute control by the state and slaveowners over their slave chattels," (p. 94) but the authors directly belie such hyperbolic statements when they acknowledge that the vast majority of slave "crimes" and "misdemeanors" never became "public" cases but were instead resolved on the plantation, where the master dispensed justice according to his own discretion. This process, in which masters did "balance terror with co-optation," affected most slaves directly, and, as Kay and Cary revealingly point out, it enabled "slaveholders in their day-today dealings with slaves" to "roughly [work] out the parameters of each system of slave justice." (p. 74) Such a process not only meant that each plantation varied from every other one in terms of the degree and severity of "terror" and "control," but, as Kay and Cary also maintain in their determined campaign to deny any cultural sharing between slaves and slaveholders, masters "granted slaves ... enough space to ensure their viability as producers," which "necessarily also provided the space for slaves to control significant areas of their personal lives." (p. 95) Thus, rather than a system of "absolute control" that a narrow reading of the criminal law might suggest, the actual lives of slaves - and masters - were more nuanced and complex. To claim later that "reciprocity between rulers and ruled was rendered meaningless by the unremitting claims by masters of their absolute power over slaves, who, in turn, were stripped of their legal rights and protection" (pp. 105-106) is to elevate statutory law above social practice. The authors fail to appreciate that law represented the infrequent and extraordinary means employed when "the parameters of justice" on an individual plantation were egregiously violated. Although the law does often reflect the collective will of the ruling class, it does not reflect the day-to-day realities of a social order. The laws of colonial North Carolina regarding slavery do testify to the severity and brutality of the system, but they do not describe nor did they determine the ways in which masters and slaves lived.

Although Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775 concentrates on a specific colony during a rather short span of time and wisely suggests that historians should "shorten our brush strokes" in order to produce greater "richness of detail," (p. 5) it seeks to engage debates that lie outside its narrow focus and to which its limited evidence contributes little. Kay and Cary's impressive research and generally persuasive discussions of naming patterns, language, and religion demonstrate that the slaves of North Carolina in the generation before the Revolution relied on their African heritage and cultural backgrounds. But, they concede, that reliance faded over time as creoles replaced African slaves, biblical names replaced some African-based names, English displaced pidgin languages, and Christianity became dominant in the quarters. In short, Kay and Cary do not substantively revise what other historians have suggested about African-American culture in the middle of the eighteenth century. It is regrettable that so extensively researched a book about a little known area of the colonial South insists on attacking nonexistent interpretations as a means of inflating its own valuable contributions to our knowledge and understanding of colonial North American slavery.

Douglas Ambrose Hamilton College

COPYRIGHT 1997 Journal of Social History
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