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Slavery in North Carolina: 1748-1775. - book reviews
Journal of Social History, Fall, 1997 by Douglas Ambrose
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.
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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.
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