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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Writing in 1853 Harriet Beecher Stowe, defending the veracity of her famous novel, declared:
The worst abuse of slavery is its outrage upon the family; and as this writer views the subject it is one which is more notorious and undeniable than any other.
1 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (London, 1853), p. 323Google Scholar. W. R. Taylor has suggested that a concern for family relationships (white and black) is a hidden theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin. ‘In retrospect, it seems evident that Harriet Stowe employed the plantation setting because she herself believed in it as a meaningful evocation of American family life and not out of any shrewd and vindictive intent, as Southerners tended to think. What she feared for the plantation was simply a heightened version of the anxiety she felt for modern family life in general.’ Taylor, W. R., Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and the American National Character (New York, 1963), p. 292.Google Scholar
2 For a pertinent discussion of this theme, see Walters, Ronald G., ‘The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism’, American Quarterly, 25 (05, 1973), pp. 177–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Weld, Theodore D., Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York, 1839) pp. 97. 101. 154.Google Scholar
4 Moynihan, D. P., The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965)Google Scholar, reprinted in Rainwater, Lee and Yancey, W. L., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (M.I.T. Press, 1967), p. 16Google Scholar. The quotation is from Pettigrew, Thomas F., A Profile of the Negro American (New York, 1964), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar
5 Kardiner, A. and Ovesey, L., The Mark of Oppression: Explorations in the Personality of the American Negro (Cleveland, 1951, 1962), pp. 45–6.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., p. 47.
7 Stampp, K. M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956, 1964), pp. 343–4.Google Scholar
8 Du Bois, W. E. (ed.), The Negro American Family (‘The Atlanta University Publications’, No. 13), (Atlanta University Press, 1908), p. 21.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., p. 49.
10 Frazier, E. Franklin, ‘The Negro Slave Family’, Journal of Negro History, 15 (1930), pp. 198–259CrossRefGoogle Scholar; p. 199.
11 Ibid., p. 233.
12 Ibid., p. 234.
13 Ibid., p. 255.
14 Ibid., p. 259.
15 Frazier, E. F., The Negro Family in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 1939)Google Scholar. Even here, however, Frazier concedes that: ‘On the whole, the slave family developed as a natural organization, based upon the spontaneous feelings of affection and natural sympathies which resulted from the association of the family members in the same household. Although the emotional interdependence between the mother and her children generally caused her to have a more permanent interest in the family than the father, there were fathers who developed an attachment for their wives and children.’ Pp. 481–2.
16 For a notable exception, see Herskovits, M. J., The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941, Boston, 1958)Google Scholar: ‘Though slavery gave a certain instability to the marriage tie, in the New World as a whole the many persons who lived out their lives on the same plantation were able to establish and maintain families; even in the United States, it is far from certain that undisturbed matings have not been lost sight of in the appeal of the more dramatic separations that actually did occur in large numbers.’ p. 139. On the efforts of masters to protect their slave families see Sellers, James B., Slavery in Alabama (University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 125–6, 132–4, 168–9Google Scholar. Taylor, Orville W., Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, N.C., 1958), pp. 66–7, 194.Google Scholar
17 Genovese, E. D., ‘American Slaves and Their History’, New York Review of Books, 3 12 1970, pp. 34–43Google Scholar reprinted in Genovese, , In Red & Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (Vintage Books, N.Y., 1972), p. III.Google Scholar
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 112.
20 Ibid., p. 114.
21 Ibid., p. 113.
22 Blassingame, J. W., The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1972), p. 78.Google Scholar
23 Rawick, George P., ‘The Black Family Under Slavery’, in Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (19 vols.), vol. 1Google Scholar; From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Connecticut, 1972), pp. 77–94, 79.Google Scholar
24 Ibid., p. 90.
25 Ibid., p. 93.
26 Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L., Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (2 vols., Boston, 1974), 1, p. 127.Google Scholar
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 135.
29 Ibid., p. 137.
30 Ibid., p. 138.
31 Quoted in ibid., pp. 138–9.
32 Ibid., p. 135.
33 Ibid., p. 49.
34 Ibid., p. 5 Mrs Stowe would reject the implications of this last statement: ‘… who is he who compares the hopeless, returnless separation of the negro [sic] from his family, to the voluntary separation of the freeman, whom necessary business interest takes for a while from the bosom of his family?’ A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, op. cit., p. 348.
35 Ibid., p. 142.
36 On the pitfalls of comparative studies, see Genovese, E. D., ‘The Treatment of Slaves in Different Countries: Problems in the Applications of the Comparative Method’, in Foner, Laura and Genovese, E. D., eds., Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History (New Jersey, 1969)Google Scholar. reprinted in Genovese, In Red and Black op. cit., pp. 158–172. See also: Engerman, S. L. and Genovese, E. D., eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton University Press, 1974).Google Scholar
37 See Nichols, William W., ‘Slave Narratives: Dismissed Evidence in the Writing of Southern History’, Phylon, 32 (Winter, 1971), pp. 403–9Google Scholar; Osofsky, G., ‘Puttin' On Ole Massa: The Significance of Slave Narratives’, in Osofsky, , ed., Puttin' on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup (New York, 1969).Google Scholar
38 A version of this article was given as a paper in the Panel on American Slavery at the annual conference of the B.A.A.S. at the University of Hull in April 1974.