| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Anthony S. Parent, Jr. Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. 2003. Pp. xiv, 291. Cloth $49.95, paper $18.95.
This multicultural history situates colonial Virginia firmly with the Atlantic slave culture of the time. While sensitive to the English antecedents of plantation culture and the colonists' interaction with each other and with Native Americans, Anthony S. Parent, Jr., makes his most valuable contribution in his portrayal of the African slave community as major initiators of the political, economic and theological developments of the time.	1
Parent begins with a tribute to the thesis that Edmund Morgan expressed a generation ago: that black slavery and white freedom constitute the essential paradox of American history, and that this paradox originated in Virginia. However, Parent believes that Morgan focused too exclusively on Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 as the genesis of that contradiction. Therefore he asks how the paradox unfolded during the intervening century until the Declaration of Independence. He finds two important developments. The first is that the emerging plantation elite planned its slave system carefully. It was not a haphazard process but was based on deliberate decisions and painstaking implementations. More importantly, however, the slave community relied on its own African heritage to generate such a powerful resistance to enslavement that Parent believes much of the revolutionary generation's thought concerning freedom was a deliberate refutation of the slaves' position.	. . .

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