The Making of African America (40 page)

17
Ira Berlin,
Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves
(Cambridge MA, 2003), 170-71.

18
Baptist,
Creating an Old South,
63-65. Susan O‘Donovan's recent work makes evident the transience of the slave population, not only through sale but also through the system of hire and self-hire and in the nature of the slave's work, which allowed—even required—that they move from place to place. “Trunk Lines, Land Lines, and Local Exchanges: Operationalizing the Grapevine Telegraph,” courtesy of the author.

19
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger,
Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation
(New York, 1999), 225, 398; Rawick, comp.,
American Slave,
ser. 2, vol. 16, pt. 1: 116; Charles Ball,
Fifty Years in Chains, or, The Life of an American Slave
(New York, 1859), 130-2.

20
Ball,
Fifty Years in Chains,
chaps. 1-3, quoted on 141-42.

21
Rawick, comp.,
American Slave,
supp., ser. 1, vol. 5: 284-85, 320-21; Dunaway,
The African-American Family,
33-36; Gudmestad,
A Troublesome Commerce,
93-84, 100-101; Tadman,
Speculators and Slaves,
68-70, 237-38, 298-300. After more than a century of decline, the slave mortality rate began increasing in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Robert William Fogel,
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
(New York, 1989), 127-28, 142-48.

22
Tadman, “The Interregional Slave Trade,” 126.

23
Deyle,
Carry Me Back,
111, 187, chap. 4, esp. 231, 240; William Wells Brown,
Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave
(Boston, 1847), chap. 6.

24
Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,' ‘Fancy Maids,' and ‘One-Eyed Men': Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,”
American Historical Review
106 (2001), 1-55; quoted in John Brown,
Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings
,
and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave,
F. N. Boney, ed. (Savannah GA, 1972), 95; Deyle,
Carry Me Back,
126-27; Tadman,
Speculators and Slaves,
125-27; Johnson,
Soul by Soul,
113-115, 154-55.

25
Jesse Torrey, Jr.,
A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States,
2nd ed. (Ballston Spa MD, 1818), 55-56, 61, 67; Rawick, comp.,
American Slave,
supp., ser. 2, vol. 7B: 24-64; Brown,
Narrative of William W. Brown,
45; Ball,
Fifty Years in Chains,
30; E. S. Abdy,
Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States,
3 vols. (London, 1835), 2: 179-80; Carl David Arfwedson,
The United States and Canada in 1832, 1833, and 1834,
2 vols. (London, 1834), 2: 429. One Arkansas planter found her slaves were deeply depressed and “so dissatisfied that they lost all ambition for almost anything” quoted in Donald P. McNeilly,
Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society
(Fayetteville AR, 2000), 51; Abraham Lincoln,
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,
Roy P. Basler, ed., 9 vols. (New Brunswick NJ, 1953-1955), 1: 259-61.

26
Anthony E. Kaye,
Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South
(Chapel Hill NC, 2007), 65.

27
Deyle,
Carry Me Back,
253-69; Phillip Troutman, “Grapevine in the Slave Market: African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841
Creole
Revolt” in Johnson, ed.
The Chattel Principle,
203-233; Edward D. Jervey and C. Harold Huber, “The Creole Affair,”
Journal of Negro History
65 (1980), 196-211; Howard Jones, “The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the
Creole
Slave Revolt,”
Civil War History
21 (1975), 28-50; J. Winston Coleman,
Slavery Times in Kentucky
(Chapel Hill NC, 1940), 173-75; Charles S. Sydnor,
Slavery in Mississippi
(New York, 1933), 149-50; George William Featherstonhaugh,
Excursions through the
Slave States (New York, 1844), 37; Gudmestad,
Troublesome Commerce,
chap. 6.

28
Quoted in Ball,
Fifty Years in Chains,
48-49.

29
Baptist,
Creating an Old South,
78-79.

30
Mrs. George P. Coleman, ed.,
Virginia Silhouettes
(Richmond VA, 1934), Oct. 24, 1842; Rawick, comp.,
American Slave,
supp., ser. 2, vol. 1A: 319; ser. 2, vol. 1: 14, 354-55: ser. 1, vol. 12: 335; Ulrich B. Phillips,
Life and Labor in the Old South
(Boston, 1929), 212; Stevenson,
Life in Black and White,
179; James Williams,
Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave
(Boston, 1838), 32-33; Nehemiah Adams,
A South-side View of Slavery
(Boston, 1854), 73; Charles Lyell,
A Second Visit to the United States of North America,
2 vols. (New York, 1849), 1: 209-10. Also see Blassingame, ed.,
Slave Testimony,
13-14.

31
Rawick, comp.,
American Slave,
vol. 18, 156-57, 288; also ser. 1, vol., 7, 302.

32
Daina Ramey Berry, “‘We'm Fus' Rate Bargain': Value, Labor, and Price in a Georgia Slave Community” in Johnson, ed.,
The Chattel Principle,
54-55; Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds.,
Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation
(New York, 1998), 149-51.

33
Coleman, ed.,
Virginia Silhouettes,
Oct. 24, 1842; Blassingame, ed.,
Slave Testimony,
96-97.

34
Todd H. Barnett, “Virginians Moving West: The Early Evolution of Slavery in the Bluegrass,”
Filson Club Historical Quarterly
73 (1999), 221-23, 239-43.

35
Blassingame, ed.,
Slave Testimony,
22-23; Robert S. Starobin, ed.,
Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves
(New York, 1974), 58; Rawick, comp.,
American Slave,
ser. 1, vol. 6: 72-73; ser. 2, vol. 15: 248-49; Hawkins Wilson to the Chief of the Freedmen's Bureau at Richmond, 11 May 1867, enclosing Hawkins Wilson to Sister Jane, Letters Received, ser. 3892, Bowling Green VA Assistant Commissioner, RG 105, National Archives.

36
Mary Furguson, Dec. 18, 1936, Born in Slavery Collection, Library of Congress (
http://memory.loc.gov/
).

37
Quoted in Michael Mullin, ed.,
American Negro Slavery: A Documentary History
(Columbia SC, 1976), 214-16; Joan E. Cashin,
A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier
(New York, 1991), 70 (quoted), 74, 116; Starobin, ed.,
Blacks in Bondage,
57.

38
Starobin, ed.,
Blacks in Bondage,
57.

39
Quoted in Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds.,
Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-slaves
(Charlottesville VA, 1976), 206.

40
O'Donovan, “Trunk Lines, Land Lines, and Local Exchanges,” 21.

41
Richard H. Steckel, “The African American Population of the United States, 1790-1920” in Haines and Steckel, eds.,
Population History of North America
(Cambridge UK, 2000); also see Richard Follett, “Heat, Sex, and Sugar: Pregnancy and Childbearing in the Slave Quarters,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
28 (2003), 510-539.

42
Cashin,
A Family Venture,
72; T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker, eds.,
The WPA Oklahoma Narratives
(Norman OK, 1996), 82; Rawick, comp.,
American Slave,
vol. 4, pt. 2: 115, also supp., ser. 2, vol. 5A: 1762-63; McNeilly,
Old South Frontier,
31.

43
Kaye,
Joining Places,
chap. 3; Campbell, “As ‘A Kind of Freeman'?” and Roderick A. McDonald, “Independent Economic Production by Slaves on Antebellum Louisiana Sugar Plantations” in Berlin and Morgan, eds.,
Cultivation and Culture,
243-74, 275-302; Charles S. Sydnor,
A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, Benjamin L. C. Wailes
(Westport CT, [1938] 1970), 101-104; Christopher Morris,
Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770—1860
(New York, 1995), 75-76; Ball,
Fifty
Years in Chains, 131-33, quoted on 131, 147-48.

44
Gutman,
The Black Family;
Ann Patton Malone,
Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-century Louisiana
(Chapel Hill NC, 1992). Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays: “De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li‘l money dat way.” Rawick, comp., American Slave, ser. 1, vol. 4, pt. 1-2, 215.

45
Gutman,
Black Family;
Baptist,
Creating the Old South,
81-82.

46
Gutman,
Black Family,
chaps. 2, 5; Cheryll Ann Cody, “Naming, Kinship, and Estate Dispersal: Notes on Slave Family Life on a South Carolina Plantation, 1786 to 1833,”
William and MaryQuarterly
39 (1982), 192-211; Morris,
Becoming Southern,
68-83.

47
Steven Hahn,
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggle in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration
(Cambridge MA, 2003), 36.

48
Albert J. Rabateau,
Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South
(New York, 1978); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood,
Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830
(Chapel Hill NC, 1998), chaps. 4—5; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.,
Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America
(Chicago, 2000); Berlin,
Generations of Captivity,
203—6.

49
In the early nineteenth century, African Americans touched by the “Second Awakening” attended camp meetings and, given the level of illiteracy, doubtless sang without hymnals. Also many songs were composed on the spot and elaborated in the field or in religious gatherings. They were called “spiritual songs” and the term “sperichil” appeared for the first time in 1867 in William Francis Allen, Charles P. Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison,
Slave Songs of the United States
(New York, [1867] 1951); also see Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Negro Spirituals,”
Atlantic Monthly
19 (1867), 685—94; Sterling Stuckey,
Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America
(New York, 1987), chap. 1; Lawrence W. Levine,
Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk thought from Slavery to Freedom
(New York, 1977), 17, 19—30, 59,159—70; Gilbert Chase,
America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present,
3rd ed. (Urbana IL, 1987), chap. 4, quote on 215. Dena J. Epstein,
Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War
(Urbana IL, 1977); Eileen Southern,
The Music of Black Americans
(New York, 1971), chaps. 6—7.

50
A good selection of the spirituals can be found on the Internet. See for example
www.hymnlyrics.org
(although no dates of attribution are provided).

51
James Oakes,
The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
(New York, 1982), 77; Donald Schaefer, “A Statistical Profile of Frontier and New South Migration: 1850—1860,”
Agricultural History
59 (1986), 563—578; Gavin Wright,
Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War
(New York, 1986), 25. Analysis of the records of the Freedman's Bank and Trust Company, courtesy of Susan O'Donovan, “Mapping Freedom's Terrain: The Political and Productive Landscape of Wilmington, North Carolina,” 16.

52
Leon F. Litwack,
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(New York, 1979); Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863—1877
(New York, 1988), esp. chap. 3; Ira Berlin et al., eds.,
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation
[hereafter cited as
Freedom],
5 vols. (Cambridge UK and Chapel Hill NC, 1983—), ser. 3, vol. 1, esp., chap. 5.

53
W. E. B. DuBois,
Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward the History of the Part Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860—1880
(New York, 1935), chaps. 1—5; Foner,
Reconstruction,
chaps. 1—3; Litwack,
Been in the Storm So Long,
chaps. 1—4;
Freedom,
quoted in ser. 2, 615—16; ser. 1, vol. 1: 23—27.

54
Foner,
Reconstruction,
chap. 5;
Freedom,
ser. 3, vol. 1.

55
U.S. Census Bureau,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to
1970 (Washington DC, 1975), I: part 2, p. 22.

56
Freedom,
ser. 3, vol. 1: 23—24, and docs. 6, 15—22, 23 (quoted), 36, 67, 132, 162.

57
William Cohen,
At Freedom's Edge: Black Mobility and the White Southern Quest for Racial Control, 1861—1915
(Baton Rouge LA, 1991), 28—38; Theodore B. Wilson,
The Black Codes of the South
(Tuscaloosa AL, 1965), chap. 5;
Freedom,
ser. 3, vol. 1, 29—30, 81—84, also docs. 28, 33, 37, 43—45.

58
Gerald D. Jaynes, “Blacks in the Economy from Reconstruction to World War I” in William R. Scott and William G. Slade, eds.,
Upon These Shores: Themes in the African American Experience to the Present
(New York, 2000), 168. Between 1860 and 1910, the south Atlantic states' share of African Americans declined from 46 to 42 percent, while the southwestern states increased from 15 to 20 percent. U.S. Census Bureau,
Negro Population of the United States, 1790—1915
(Washington DC, 1918), table 13; James R. Grossman,
Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration
(Chicago, 1989), 22—23. The northward movement of black Southerners was also small and selective: Elizabeth H. Pleck,
Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865—1900
(New York, 1979), 89.