Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Once upon a time – and it was not so very long ago – studies of American slavery invariably meant studies of slavery as a system of labor, or slavery and its connection to politics. Now, 140 years after the firing on Fort Sumter, monographs on unwaged labor tend to focus on such topics as resistance and rebellion, the black family and community culture, or enslaved women and the internal economy. Each year brings so many new specialized studies and articles on the varieties of unfree labor in North America that even scholars who pretend to specialize in the field can scarcely keep up. This development is as welcome as it is problematical, for many earlier studies on slavery as a form of labor organization tended to ignore the role that bondpeople played in the creation of southern society and culture. But the historiographical trends since the late 1970s have often tended to obscure the role that politics played in shaping the black community – or that slavery played in shaping the nature of the American Union. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese (1983: 212) put it best, if perhaps a bit bluntly: history “is primarily the story of who rides whom and how.” As a good many early national politicians rode to fame and political fortune precisely because labor on their estates was performed by enslaved and unwaged workers, any study that ignores the relationship between political ... log in or subscribe to read full text