African Founders, American Liberty

Anyone who sets out to write a history of slavery in America must walk a thin and perilous line between affirmation and denial. When Stanley Elkins published Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life in 1959, he compared the dehumanization of black slaves to the psychological “infantilization” of concentration-camp inmates during the Holocaust. Elkins thought of this as a critique of the totalitarian nature of Southern slavery, in opposition to the absurdly sunny depictions of it in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’s American Negro Slavery (1918). But Elkins found himself bitterly criticized for framing slaves as helpless and brainwashed. As Eugene Genovese wrote in response to Elkins, the supposedly docile “Sambo” was actually playing a game of “day-to-day resistance” on the master, and Elkins was erasing his dignity. On the other hand, when Genovese published Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), he was just as roundly criticized for picturing slave “resistance” to slaveowners’ control as so pervasive, and so characterized by negotiation between black slaves and white owners, that slavery seemed like just another demeaning labor relationship. So, we are faced with what Manisha Sinha has described as a historians’ Hobson’s Choice: “We either accept Elkins’s view of slavery as a totalitarian institution and the concomitant one-dimensional and ahistorical picture of all slaves as imitative ‘Sambos,’ or we follow Genovese’s paternalism thesis if we want to stress the creation of African American culture under slavery.”