| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740. By Anthony S. Parent, Jr. (Chapel Hill and London: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiv plus 291 pp. Cloth $49.95; paper $19.95).

In this refreshingly bold thesis, based on prodigious research, historian Anthony S. Parent, Jr., lays bare the "foul means" by which "a small emerging class of great planters with large landholdings and political connections brought racial slavery to Virginia" and "gave America its racial dilemma" (p. 2). Parent approaches his subjects—the heads of Virginia's much-celebrated "First Families"—with the jaundiced eye of a muckraking reporter, eager to expose the fraud, brutality, and corruption of America's original ruling class. One might call this study "The Fleecing of America, 1660–1740." Where an earlier generation of historians, most notably Winthrop D. Jordan and Edmund S. Morgan, characterized Virginia's turn to racial slavery in the late seventeenth century as an "unthinking decision" by middling tobacco farmers, desperate for cheap labor of any origin, Parent puts the blame on a small but powerful "great-planter" elite that began to emerge in the 1680s. These men, he writes, "were not only aware of the moral cost of slavery, but they were willing to pay the price in the formation (one could say deformation) of Virginia society," (p. 265) with reckless disregard for the human consequences.

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