34 pages • 1 hour read
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
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Prefaces-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface to the Second Edition Summary and Analysis
Content Warning: The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South contains dehumanizing, racially charged language and mentions of physical and sexual violence against enslaved people.
The preface to the second edition of The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South explains why John W. Blassingame revised and expanded the text after its initial publication in 1972. Specifically, he describes learning about a Black preacher named George Bentley who preached to a white congregation at the Hardshell Baptist Church. George was also a slave who refused to let the Church buy him. Nonetheless, he was supported by his white congregants.
Blassingame claims the “questions raised by George Bentley were innumerable” (viii) and led him to consult new primary sources. These sources and their data especially focused on religion in the Southern United States, folklore, “the African impact on American language”, and “sexual attitudes” (viii). Blassingame also credits questions and more recent work by students, researchers, and others in the new edition.
In particular, Blassingame examined how Christianity, especially the activities of white preachers and missionaries, shaped Southern plantation life. He wanted to investigate how enslaved Africans themselves reacted to enslavement. Overall, the preface argues that both religion and Africans’ own thoughts on their enslavement and Southern society are crucial to understanding slavery.
Preface to the First Edition Summary and Analysis
In the original preface to The Slave Community, Blassingame describes his thesis: “This book describes and analyzes the life of the black slave: his African heritage, culture, family, acculturation, behavior, religion, and personality” (xi). He asserts that the text treads new ground. Before his text, “historians have never systematically explored the life experiences of American slaves” (xi).
Instead, Blessingame argues that historians have focused on the experiences and politics of slave owners: “Although the 3,954,000 black slaves greatly outnumbered the 385,000 white slave owners in the South in 1860, the slave has generally been shunted off to the wings on the historical stage” (xi). In order to capture this history, he had to draw on “new kinds of sources” using “psychological theory” (xi).
Blassingame’s approach helps demonstrate how “the slave held onto many remnants of his African culture [...] and did some personally meaningful things on his own volition” (xiii). This is not only important for understanding the history of slavery, but showing how enslaved people forged their own culture—which “contributed much to American life and thought” (xiii).
Lastly, Blassingame explains what his approach is based on. He draws heavily from slave autobiographies, which he argues have been largely ignored by previous historians. His other sources include “several hundred white autobiographies, plantation records, agricultural journals, and travel accounts” (xii). These sources provide a foundation for psychological analysis through which Blassingame learns and writes about the “personality development of slaves” (xi).
Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis: “Enslavement, Acculturation, and African Survivals”
In Chapter 1, Blassingame examines enslaved people’s experience with enslavement in the Southern United States, from their being taken away from their native communities in West Africa to being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to an unfamiliar land with a foreign language. He seeks to disprove older historical arguments that African people were rendered docile by enslavement. He writes that “the few Africans enslaved in seventeenth and eighteenth-century America appear to have survived their traumatic experiences without becoming abjectly docile, infantile, or submissive” (47).
Discussing West Africa is key to this argument. American plantation owners rarely used Native Americans as slaves because they died from European diseases or had “an economic system so alien to the plantation regimen” (4). African people were targeted because their societies’ agricultural labor was similar enough to that of American plantations that they could adapt. However, the process of enslavement was still “unbelievably painful and bewildering for the Africans” (4).
Blassingame describes how African people in North America reacted to enslavement: Some revolted and took over slave ships, ran away once they reached North America, or became rebellious workers. Despite the “shock of enslavement” (13), other enslaved people adapted and retained their native cultures’ “values, ideas, relationships, and behavioral patterns” (20). Blassingame argues that Christianity resembled African native religions enough that it was easier for enslaved people to create a synthesis of the two. In some cases, this resulted in new religious practices, such as voodoo, which was a fusion of Catholic Christianity and native African beliefs.
Furthermore, enslaved Africans retained memories of their homelands’ dances, music, folk tales, and in some places, native words. Overall, evidence taken from slave autobiographies and the writings of white society suggest that “African culture was much more resistant to the bludgeon that was slavery than historians have hitherto suspected” (34-35). Despite their trauma, enslaved people and elements of their cultures survived.
Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis: “The Americanization of the Slave and the Africanization of the South”
Blassingame builds on his argument on enslaved Africans’ survival in America by comparing their experience to that of enslaved Africans in Latin America and white people enslaved by both Arab and West African people. He finds similarities in the experiences of enslaved peoples across cultures and circumstance. However, there are also significant differences. In general, enslaved people experienced trauma, converted to their captors’ cultures and religions to a degree, and relied on their native cultures and religions for comfort. However, slavery in the Southern United States differed in that enslaved people adapted to their captors’ culture extensively and captors took on elements of enslaved culture and agricultural practices.
Blassingame examines the experiences of white Europeans who were enslaved by Arab slavers and slavers in West Africa. White enslaved people were treated as curiosities in West Africa, while they were treated more harshly by Arab masters. In Islamic countries, these enslaved people either clung more tightly to their Christianity or assimilated into their masters’ culture and converted to Islam out of pressure. Blassingame cites the statistic of 50-75 percent of white enslaved people converting to Islam (57-59). Such enslaved people rarely got involved in mass revolts: “Unarmed, ignorant of the geography of Africa, and unable to converse with his fellows, who spoke a multitude of European languages, the white captive found it difficult to act in concert with other Christians” (62). This difficulty in starting a revolt and the likelihood of assimilation suggest that the experience of white enslaved people under Arabic masters was somewhat similar to that of enslaved Africans in the American South.
Next, Blassingame does a comparative study with enslaved Africans in Latin America. He concludes that compared to Latin American enslaved people, “the Southern slave retained relatively few Africanisms in his music, language, dances, and religion” (65). This is because the slave trade in most of Latin America lasted longer, meaning that enslaved people in the United States were more likely to be descendants of enslaved people brought long before. The Protestant churches of the South, which were better funded and “formalistic” (65), did more to reach out to and involve enslaved people than their Latin American counterparts.
Because of this, religion played a larger role in assimilating enslaved people to Southern culture. Both polytheistic and Muslim enslaved people found appealing similarities in Christianity. They also identified and were drawn to the “egalitarian doctrines” (75) of Protestant Christianity after the American Revolution and the Great Awakening. These movements’ stories of equality, liberty, and justice appealed to enslaved people and they adapted them for their own culture. Meanwhile, plantation owners, especially women, “never rested easy with their black species of property” (79). For women like slave owner Anne Page (80), there was some guilt felt in accordance with Christian morality.
In response to this guilt, Southern leaders like South Carolinian politician John C. Calhoun launched a campaign against anti-slavery sentiment among Southern churches in 1830. They instead argued that slavery was a “political institution” that was “outside the sphere of church interest” (80). Furthermore, white ministers were encouraged to preach that slavery was “God’s will” and that to become a fugitive from slavery was a sin, while the activities of black preachers were heavily monitored and regulated. However, Black people resisted these messages, and instead organized their own religious services.
Blassingame argues that Black people were so resilient in forming their own culture and interpretation of Christianity that “Southern whites…adapted their language and religion to that of the slaves” along with “agricultural practices, sexual attitudes, rhythm of life, architecture, food and social relations” (101). For example, Southern plantation owners adapted African techniques for planting rice (101). Southern culture itself became in many ways a synthesis of both Black and white cultures. However, as Blassingame points out, there was still “the evolution of a distinctive culture in the slave community” (104).
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