Re: QUERY: Slavery and Social Practices

Josef J. Barton (texbart@merle.acns.nwu.edu)
Sat, 27 Apr 1996 16:57:54 -0500

[Pam Couture <theopc@EMORY.EDU> writes:]
One of the questions to raise in regard to "place" is the size of
the plantation, how isolated it was, etc. As I have understood
this, the larger the plantation, the more likely that slaves
would develop their own culture as they lived more distanced from
whites; the smaller the farms, the more likely that owners would
work closely with slaves. So one issue regards particularities
even within regional areas.

You might look at Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's book, In the
Plantation Household, for some of the U.S. regional differences,
for example, on the rural Alabama frontier vs. the coastal areas.

> > Willie Lee
Rose, _SLAVERY AND FREEDOM_,
ed. William Freehling > (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)
>
> What evidence is there that suggests in the nineteenth century
> South social practices indigenous to places other than America
> primarily influenced any significant segment of slave
families?
> What about earlier periods?

Noel Erskine at Emory University, Atlanta, and Will Coleman,
Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, might be able to
answer this.
>
> What are the most recent articles and books examining slave
life
> and slave families?
>
> Can we accept the idea that slaves born in America developed
> social systems bound to their immediate condition with little
if
> any reference to social systems in Africa or the Caribbean? Why
> or why not?

Who argues this idea?
>
> What other questions should we ask about these ideas?
>
I'm very interested in this topic and would like to keep in
touch. Pam Couture theopc@emory.edu