Title Slave against slave : plantation violence in the old South / Jeff Forret

Published Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2015] ©2015

Click on the following:
ProQuest Ebook Central

Copies

Description 1 online resource Contents Introduction: Violence, community, and agency in the slave South -- Origins, prevalence, and patterns -- Slaves, masters, church, and the civil law of slavery -- Intraracial slave homicide and the criminal law of slavery -- Violence at work and play -- Violence and the slave economy -- Violence in the creation, maintenance, and destruction of slave unions -- Honor, violence, and enslaved masculinity -- Honor, violence, and enslaved femininity -- Epilogue: "Black-on-black violence" in historical perspective -- Appendix: Intraracial slave homicides in Virginia, 1777-1864 Summary In the first-ever comprehensive analysis of violence between slaves in the antebellum South, Jeff Forret challenges persistent notions of slave communities as sites of unwavering harmony and solidarity. Though existing scholarship shows that intraracial black violence did not reach high levels until after Reconstruction, contemporary records bear witness to its regular presence among enslaved populations. Slave against Slave explores the roots of and motivations for such violence and the ways in which slaves, masters, churches, and civil and criminal laws worked to hold it in check. Far from focusing on violence alone, Forret's work also adds depth to our understanding of morality among the enslaved, revealing how slaves sought to prevent violence and punish those who engaged in it. Forret mines a vast array of slave narratives, slaveholders' journals, travelers' accounts, and church and court records from across the South to approximate the prevalence of slave-against-slave violence prior to the Civil War. A diverse range of motives for these conflicts emerges, from tensions over status differences, to disagreements originating at work and in private, to discord relating to the slave economy and the web of debts that slaves owed one another, to courtship rivalries, marital disputes, and adulterous affairs. Forret also uncovers the role of explicitly gendered violence in bondpeople's constructions of masculinity and femininity, suggesting a system of honor among slaves that would have been familiar to southern white men and women, had they cared to acknowledge it. Though many generations of scholars have examined violence in the South as perpetrated by and against whites, the internal clashes within the slave quarters have remained largely unexplored. Forret's analysis of intraracial slave conflicts in the Old South examines narratives of violence in slave communities, opening a new line of inquiry into the study of American slavery Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes English Print version record Subject Enslaved persons -- Southern States -- Social conditions Slavery -- Social aspects -- Southern States -- History Violence -- Southern States -- History Agent (Philosophy) -- Social aspects -- Southern States -- History Plantation life -- Southern States -- History Community life -- Southern States -- History POLITICAL SCIENCE -- Public Policy -- Cultural Policy. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Anthropology -- Cultural. SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Popular Culture. Community life Plantation life Slavery -- Social aspects Enslaved persons -- Social conditions Social conditions Violence SUBJECT Southern States -- Social conditions -- 18th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85125662 Southern States -- Social conditions -- 19th century Subject Southern States Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780807161128 0807161128 0807161144 9780807161142 0807161136 9780807161135

  Permalink