Book Review

Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcoun-try. By Philip D. Morgan. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xxvi, 703 pp. Cloth, $49.95, isbn 0-8078-2409-7. Paper, $21.95, isbn 0-8078-4717-8.)

When the historical study of slavery underwent a near explosion in the 1970s, many scholars wondered how long the heat would last. There seemed to be slight cooling in the next decade, but the topic has warmed once again in the 1990s. Now, we have two new, truly important books on the topic. They both concentrate on the years prior to the "classic" period of the generation before the Civil War and decisively torpedo the long-standing assumption that little can be learned concerning slavery prior to about 1830. They both also add to the now prevailing focus on changing developments and processes through time involving Africans and African Americans.	1
Michael A. Gomez's study concentrates on the way the variegated cultures of West African and West Central African ethnic groups persisted in the British-dominated North American colonies, especially Virginia and South Carolina to which the largest numbers of enslaved Africans came. He argues that the individuals caught up in this forced migration retained powerful memories of their home cultures, that different parts of Anglo-America received different mixtures of African ethnic groups, and that, under the shared pressure of common enslavement by white Englishmen, Africans and their descendants came to define themselves more and more in terms of "race"—of being black rather than white. For the years when American-born slaves became numerically dominant, especially after the American Revolution, he points to the development of new fissures in this young community based largely on what he calls "classism." The fissures, he says, arose in connection with work skills that were often based on different African cultural practices, miscegenation, urbanization, and the creative Africanization of Christianity. He stops with 1830, when race relations and the issue of slavery took a different turn.	2
Such a bald summary of the theses of Gomez's study inevitably distorts and unjustifiably diminishes them. The first half of his book is devoted to the cultures (the polities, the ethnicities, and linguistic groups) of the western slaving coast of Africa, which extended some thirty-five hundred miles. Twenty years ago it would not have been possible to write such a survey, though since then the field of precolonial African history has merely turned from a briar patch into a thicket. Gomez's analysis moves from north to south, from the societies of the Senegambia region through Sierra Leone all the way to those of the Bight of Biafra. He then lumps the remaining third of this coastline (roughly, Congo and Angola) into a largely undifferentiated, amorphous mass, with exception made for the Christians in the kingdom of Kongo converted by the Portuguese. His most particular and persuasive case is for the first of these regions, the Senegambia, whose peoples, with the exception of the inland Bambara, were heavily Muslim, and for the resulting persistence of Islamic practices and faith in North America.	3
Gomez's book is by far the most ambitious, thorough, and sophisticated attempt yet made at describing the impact of variations in West African and West Central African cultures upon the societies that later became the United States. So far as Africa is concerned, the author's northerly geographical emphasis results largely from the current state of scholarship about the coastal regions of western Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Yet he has been bold enough to undertake a venture that ought to have been attempted more commonly long ago by not beginning his history of eastern North Americans with the gangplank at Jamestown (or even at the Bering Strait).	. . .