Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 229

Scholarly fascination with American slavery, particularly slavery in the antebellum South, shows little sign of diminishing. A first response to this new book might well ask what more could possibly be said about the slave family? In the 1970s, revisionist historians such as John Blassingame, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Eugene Genovese, and especially Herbert Gutman argued that the slave family survived the brutality and inherent instability of plantation slavery. While dis-agreeing with one another in many respects, they suggested that most slaves grew up in a family situation 230 the agricultural of some kind, if not nuclear then extended in structure. An impressive body of scholarship on slave women that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s highlighted the important role played by females in what some described as the matrifocal slave family, but also stressed the great trauma caused by sexual assault. More recently, Brenda Stevenson, Michael Tadman, and Walter Johnson have placed far greater emphasis upon planter control and the fragile slave family that was frequently broken up by owners who, despite claims to be paternalists, had no hesitation in selling for profit.

Where does this new book fit in? According to Wilma Dunaway, it has a major contribution to make. She asserts that study of the slave family has been hampered ‘by four fundamental weaknesses’, a reluctance to accept that owners broke up the family by sale, overemphasis upon large plantations, neglect of slavery in the upper South, and ‘exaggeration of slave agency’ (p.2). She sets out to correct the mistakes of ‘the Gutman-Fogel paradigm’ that reads ‘more like a Disney script than scholarly research’ (p.270). Contrary to the wide scope of the book’s title, however, the subject is far narrower, concentrating upon the Appalachian South between 1850 and 1870. This is not a general synthesis, nor a decade by decade chronology, but a tightly-focused monograph on a specific time and place. Displaying impressive research, the book utilizes a quantitative study of 216 counties in six upper South states and thirty-eight counties in three lower South states, some manuscript sources, and 600 interviews with ex-slaves from the mountain area. Great stress is placed upon the narratives as presenting the voices of the slaves themselves. The African-American family in slavery and emancipation is a welcome and valuable addition to the field. Slavery in Appalachia has not been investigated in the same detail as in other parts of the South and studies of the slave family have indeed based their interpretations upon evidence from large plantations, which were rare in the mountain area.

It is in providing a detailed discussion of slavery and its demise in Appalachia that this book works best. Crisply written chapters mix qualitative and quantitative evidence illuminating numerous topics such as slave sales, health and nutritional intake, disease, living conditions, the surprisingly diverse work experiences ofAppalachian slaves, the informal economy, and, of course, family structure and roles. Particularly noteworthy are three chapters on the Civil War and Reconstruction that present a bleak picture of the limited choices available to black Appalachians, whowere mistreated by both Confederate and Union forces despite the latter’s claim to be liberators. The reader gains a rounded insight into the lifestyles and history review struggles of Appalachian African-Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Less satisfactory is the failure to incorporate the vibrant recent literature on Appalachia in this period, including work by Dwight Billings, Martin Crawford, Durwood Dunn, John Inscoe and Gordon McKinney (although older books by the latter two are mentioned in the bibliography). Undoubtedly, the book would be much stronger if it had engaged with this scholarship.

Most problematic, though, is the application of conclusions about mountain slavery to the South as a whole. There were just 300,000 slaves in Appalachia in 1860 out of a total slave population of approximately 4 million. Dunaway insists that their experiences were ‘typical of the circumstances in which a majority of US slaves were held’ (p.5). This is dubious. Not only was more than half the slave population found on plantations of twenty or more in 1850, most slaves were located in close proximity to one another, especially in the Deep South, enabling the formation of cross-community ties. That this did not happen in Appalachia emphasizes the region’s atypicality. Moreover, the stress upon refuting Gutman and Fogel is misplaced. Post-revisionist historians have been chipping away at their position for nearly two decades. Very few, if any, academics now accept the notion of slave agency uncritically or minimize the devastating impact of the internal slave trade. It would have been far better to place the Appalachian African-American family within the context of the historiography as it stands in 2004, not 1980. Alongside Tadman and Stevenson, who are mentioned, important recent studies have been published by Norrece Jones Jr., Ann Patton Mal-one, and, above all, Walter Johnson. By ignoring these scholars, Dunaway not only diminishes the importance of her own findings but misses the opportunity to build upon work that shares her stress upon the overriding brutality of American slavery.