Slave Counterpoint

Philip D. Morgan. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1998.

Morgan's epic work of scholarship won a raft of major awards upon publication in 1998, and it has endured as a modern classic ever since. Long, but neither dense nor burdened with theory, his study of the subject is possibly as "exhaustive" as it is possible to be given the paucity of primary sources. Morgan, like other historians of early America, have followed Rhys Isaac's lead, finding new ways to "read" information which previous generations might have regarded as mere decorative detail, if they even noticed them at all.

What that means in practice is that Morgan casts a wide net; he uses material culture and archaeology, as well as applying a probing, critical eye to first-person accounts by both white observers as well as slaves and former slaves. He analyzes oral histories, accounts of clothing, gesture, dialect, etc. One reason this book is so long is because Morgan was seemingly tireless in finding any possible facet of black culture during this period.

Although the subtitle might seem to indicate that this is a comparative history, that is not entirely the case; Morgan is interested in comparing these two regions--which collectively were the home of the vast majority of Eighteenth-century British North American slaves--but also in noting their similarities. While he is interested in the differences, ultimately this book is about the larger fact of American slavery, and the leading role that these two regions played in shaping the institution and its further development in the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

This is, he notes, a "structural history" (page xix), divided into three parts. Part I examines the landscape, and the agricultural reality, in each of the two sections--place is very important in understand Chesapeake and Lowcountry slavery, as are the differences between the primary cash crops (tobacco in the former, rice in the latter) and secondary cash crops (wheat, and indigo, respectively) in terms of the work required to produce them and the infrastructure required. In the Chesapeake, generally, tobacco and wheat favored smaller production units, lower capital costs, and a less relentless work regimen than rice and indigo called for in the Lowcountry. At the same time, the relatively unhealthy climate in the Lowcountry dictated that it would take longer to develop a self-sustaining (i.e., demographically self-replacing) slave population than in the Chesapeake. Therefore, large-scale importation of new slaves from Africa lasted longer there, giving Lowcountry slavery a more explicitly African tinge.

Part II explores interactions between Blacks and Whites in the two regions; this section therefore delves into issues of patriarchy, paternalism, interracial antagonism and cooperation, intimacy of all kinds as well as hostility.

Part III finally considers the Black American culture that began to take shape over the course of the century in these two regions. This is a detailed examination of everything from dance, to conversational sarcasm, dialect, funerals, African influences on religion and the assimilation of Christianity, and more.

The book is heavy with detail and anecdote, but never gets bogged down. Morgan has done a masterful job of teasing out numberless strands of meaning from a diverse range of sources and scholarly realms.