Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

U p until the late 1960s and early 1970s one could have been almost forgiven for believing that the slave societies of the American South sprang into existence in a fully fledged form in 1830 or thereabouts. As far as scholarly interest was concerned, the first century and a half of slavery and race relations in the southern mainland was to all intents and purposes a void. True, there were some notable exceptions to this general rule of neglect. Back in the 1930s, for example, Lewis C. Gray had devoted a goodly portion of the first volume of his History of Agriculture in the Southern United, States to 1860 (1933) to the origins and development of the colonial South's slave-based plantation economies. In the 1940s John Hope Franklin included a discussion of the colonial southern experience in his pioneering work From Slavery to Freedom , a book now in its seventh edition. A few years after the publication of Franklin's study, Oscar and Mary Handlin (1950) and Carl Degler (1959) became embroiled in an intense argument as to whether or not the first twenty or so West Africans to arrive in Virginia in 1619 had been immediately enslaved by the English colonists, who were said by John Rolfe to have purchased them from the Dutch. Although the issues raised by the Handlins and Degler were of fundamental significance, it was to be another ten years before they received any more serious ... log in or subscribe to read full text