Book Review

Canada and the United States

Building on an extraordinary scholarly legacy, a prodigious amount of primary research, and a hallowed set of historiographical problems, Philip D. Morgan has written a book that is destined to be read and reargued for some time to come.	1
In the first of the book's three parts, Morgan outlines the "contours" of black life in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake and lowcountry: environment; crop regime; rate of slave reproduction; pattern of slave importation; density of white settlement. Combining a nested set of scales of analysis—environmental, economic, everyday—this part of the book represents Morgan's work at its substantial best. In the temperate Chesapeake, tobacco thrived. Because tobacco presented few barriers to entry and offered few economies of scale, most Chesapeake slaves lived on relatively small farms in close proximity to their owners and other whites. And because tobacco required a great deal of care, those slaves were minutely supervised and worked in gangs, usually from sunup to sundown. By 1720, they were reproducing themselves and by the time of the Revolution, Virginia slaveholders had virtually stopped importing African slaves. Cut off from Africa, closely monitored, and surrounded by whites, Chesapeake slaves were, by the end of the eighteenth century, "thoroughly assimilated," dependent on their owners for their material culture, their dress, their language, and their customs.	2
Things in South Carolina were different. The tropical climate and long growing season of the lowcountry were ideal for rice cultivation. The tremendous investment it took to clear, drain, and ditch South Carolina's swamplands favored those who could make a large initial investment, and rice cultivation offered substantial economies of scale. Consequently, lowcountry slaves generally lived on plantations larger than those in the Chesapeake and they saw a good deal less of white people; the majority of the inhabitants of South Carolina were black as early as 1700, and by 1790 many areas were eighty percent black. Rice was a hardy crop that did not require close supervision, and South Carolina slaveholders generally "tasked" their slaves, assigning them a set amount of work for a week and allowing them the rest of their time to themselves. Slaves often used this time to cultivate food which they used to support themselves and sometime sold, thus accumulating a small "peculium" of their own property. Slaves in the lowcountry lived harder than those in the Chesapeake: they were often ill, undernourished, and brutally punished. Although the birthrate among lowcountry slaves was comparable to that in the Chesapeake, lowcountry slaves died at a much higher rate, and South Carolina slaveholders remained enthusiastic importers of African slaves up to (and in some cases after) the closing of the African slave trade in 1808. In contrast to their Chesapeake counterparts, lowcountry slaves were relatively autonomous and "African": they wore few European clothes, slept in African-styled houses, provided their own food, shared a culture full of African elements, and spoke a dialect (Gullah) that was unintelligible to many whites. The differences between slavery in the Chesapeake and the lowcountry, Morgan concludes, illustrate the tragic paradox of New World slavery: "an inverse relationship between material conditions and communal autonomy" (p. 665).	. . .