The Peculiar Institution

...Book Review: The Peculiar Institution by Norman Yetman Holt, Reinhart, & Winston, $4.50 A generation ago, Richard Hofstadter called for the realization that "any history of slavery must be written in large part from the standpoint of the slave...

...The question of whether slaves were content-which many contemporary controversialists viewed as crucial- seems not to be answerable in general...

...His critics claim Phillips was too scrupulous: he did not begin to exploit the exceptional works, such as those of Frederick Law Olmsted, which achieve credibility despite the commitments of their authors...

...I don't want no man's yoke on my shoulders no more...

...In the 1920s, American sociology, dominated by the "Chicago school" of ethnographers, was engaged primarily in detailed description of various American subcultures-the small-town Midwest, the big city Negro ghetto, the underworld of petty thieves, etc...

...Most often, it seems, slaves assessed their well-being by comparing their lot with that of slaves on nearby establishments...

...Moreover, whoever recorded the fugitive's experience, whether himself or an interviewer, was likely to have done so in order to score points in the national debate, and to have selected from the available material accordingly...

...As one of the ex-slaves here puts it: "If I had my life to live over again, I would die fighting rather than be a slave...

...It is ironic that Phillips had held such accounts suspect partly on the grounds of the atyp-icality of their observations, their inability to "distinguish what was common in the system from what was unique in some special case...

...It should be obvious that such sources are poor guides to the attitudes of slaves and to the details of what private lives they could wrest from the system...

...It is perhaps some measure of progress that this point should seem obvious to most present-day readers...

...Phillips also distrusted such accounts because he was extremely sensitive to the anti-slavery bias of most such travelers...

...As Phillips noted in dismissing such sources, ...ex-slave narratives in general...were issued with so much abolitionist editing that as a class their authenticity is doubtful...

...By and large, however, a discerning reader can weigh the whole of an individual narrative and arrive at some judgment of the narrator's credibility and reliability...

...a South Carolina plantation mistress, for example, often speculated in her journal on what was going on behind the "bronze masks" of her slaves...

...The camouflage taken on in slavery times was apparently still functioning two-thirds of a century after emancipation...

...while one who was disgruntled tells us "Now, Old Marster Goforth had four sisters what owned slaves, and they wasn't mean to them like our Old Marster and Old Mistress...

...The obvious solution would seem to be to turn to documents left us by Negroes...

...The principal reason for slaveholders' inability to testify accurately in these respects is the slaves' early mastery of what sociologists were later to call "impression management", an art universally cultivated by subordinates...

...Pro-slavery travelers were inordinately likely to encounter evidence that slaves were generally well-treated and content, while abolitionists were likely to be told of terrible suffering and incipient revolt...

...Such information as travelers gathered must have come, ultimately, from slaves themselves, and here again the disconcerting propensity of slaves to tell the white man what he wanted to hear clouds the evidence...

...As recent works on the Underground Railroad have documented, flight was an extremely unusual response to slavery...

...Second, the mechanisms which latter-day social scientists have called "selective exposure," "selective perception," "selective interpretation," and "selective retention" operated to ensure that the whites' stereotypes would not be upset...

...Hofstadter shows that the plantations which Phillips studied were among the largest-over a hundred slaves apiece-and that such slaveholders held only about ten per cent of all slaves and were fewer than one per cent of all slaveholders in the South...

...First, the slaves told whites what they thought the whites wanted to hear...

...One should be rightly skeptical of a report like the one (quoted in Lay My Burden Down which concluded: "...all in all, white folks, then was the really happy days for us niggers...

...Most slave states had laws against teaching slaves to ead and write, and those who did manage to learn had neither the time nor the inclination to keep journals...

...A surprising proportion of these narratives are coherent, detailed descriptions of life in slavery, recorded as delivered by those who knew it best...

...It is difficult to say whether runaways, in general, had had a worse time of it than other slaves (as many runaways claimed) or a better (as many slaveholders of the "give-'em-an-inch-and-they'11-take-a-mile" school claimed), but it is certain that they felt more strongly the injustice of the situation than did those who stayed put...

...But in them days, us niggers didn't know no better...

...Fortunately for the historian of slavery, however, there exists a class of sources, not available to Phillips, which furnishes a somewhat more accurate picture of the South's "peculiar institution," as seen from "the standpoint of the slave...

...Those with strong preconceptions will not be happy with this evidence, for the picture is one of great variety-in situation and in response...

...The more perceptive slaveholders only realized more fully the extent of their ignorance...

...It is perhaps the case that such a scholar, if he restricted himself to Phillips' sources, would have little basis for any reliable conclusion about what it was like to be a slave, for Phillips relied primarily on plantation records, and slaveholders' journals and letters...

...There is also an appendix listing each interviewer on the project and his race, a valuable aid to assessing the reliability of these reports...

...There are slaves here who see their masters as sadistic tyrants, and others who see them as benevolent Christian autocrats...

...The transcripts of these interviews have been used extensively by later historians, and excerpts have been published as Lay My Burden Downin Life Under the ''Peculiar Institution," Norman Yetman has brought together over a hundred of these narratives, in their entirety, and from them the general reader can begin to piece together for himself an answer to the question of what it was like to be a slave...

...In fact, Richard Wade argues that slavery was incompatible with city life partly because the urban scene provided more varied reference points-in the form of free Negroes and poor whites -than did the countryside...

...When slaves report satisfaction with their situation, the basis for this satisfaction is worth examining...

...Federal Writers Project...

...An indictment of the slavery system could be based on the extent to which it restricted the slaves' grounds for comparison...

...docile compliance alternates with foot-dragging and sabotage...

...The bulk of the material written by Negroes prior to emancipation is in the form of autobiographies (often "ghostwritten") and letters by fugitive slaves- not very reliable testimony on the general experience...

...He felt particularly that those who wrote for publication were "propagandists of one cause and another, and as such set their spectacles upon their readers' noses...

...The anti-slavery writer James Redpath, for instance, while acknowledging that "...the slaves often told me, at first, that they did not care about freedom," reported that "...never yet have I met with one who did not finally confess that he was longing for liberty...

...The shock reported by many slaveholders when "devoted" servants defected to the Union army and the remarkable trust which many runaways reported having exploited are evidence of the success with which some slaves, at least, concealed their real feelings about slavery and "old massa...

...Yetman has supplemented these reminiscences with a fine essay on the history of the Slave Narrative Collection, with an even-handed discussion of possible bias in the selection of ex-slaves to be interviewed, with a description of how he chose these narratives for this volume, and with photographs of almost painful poignancy...

...Many aspects of everyday life and thought in "the quarters" (particularly those contrary to the white folks' desires and preconceptions) were carefully shielded from observation-sometimes with the aid of magical forces...

...A different objection to over-reliance on documents left by slaveholders is that the plantations for which they are available are unrepresentative, "the upper crust of the upper crust...

...Hofstadter argued that the impression which one gets from Phillips' writings is sufficiently close to the slaveholders' view of the slave "as a singularly contented and docile 'serio-comic' creature" to put some justice in the accusation that his work was "a latter-day phase of the pro-slavery argument...

...In general, then, documents left us by contemporary whites are at best of uncertain reliability as guides to the slaves' viewpoint...

...Phillips was a Georgian who, in two remarkable books and a number of articles, essayed a comprehensive study of the structure of slavery in the ante-bellum South...

...At that time, the field of slavery history was dominated by the work of Ulrich B. Phillips and his students...

...Their aim was not so much to forge these materials into weapons against ideological opponents as simply to record this invaluable source material while it was still available...

...Of course these narratives are not without their own drawbacks as evidence on the experience of slavery...

...there is seething resentment and genuine devotion...

...John Shelton Reed...

...Although such collections were initiated by academic researchers at Fisk and Southern University, the best known is probably that undertaken by the W.P.A...

...As the editor of another collection of ex-slave testimony reminds us: "The passing of the years, the early age of witnesses at the time, and the bitterness against the institution of slavery might be arguments against the historical accuracy of everything which follows," and, moreover, the reader must beware the tendency to remember the unusual rather than the mundane...

...The few slave-written letters which are available reveal little of interest to the historian...

...Influenced by this work, with its emphasis on representativeness, accuracy of recording, thoroughness of detail, and avoidance (in principle, at least) of moral judgment, a number of investigators returned (shortly after Phillips' last book was published) to the collection of ex-slaves' narratives...

...Although compelled to acknowledge his signal contributions, Phillips' critics have claimed that he failed in several respects, particularly in his treatment of the slaves' response to slavery...

...When Hofstadter wrote, however, no really satisfactory attempt had been made to address the question: "How did the slaves experience slavery...

...If, as students of public opinion polling have demonstrated, white interviewers still lead black respondents to distort their reported attitudes, one can imagine the effects on ex-slaves in the South in the 1930s...

...As testimony on the experience of slavery, travelers' accounts have still another shortcoming...

...If fugitives in general were an atypical lot, how much less typical must have been the characters and experiences of those who chose, and were able, to write about their lives...

...Discussing ways to overcome this bias, Hofstadter suggested greater use of travelers' accounts of the Old South...

...Needless to say, very few are available written bv slaves while enslaved...

...Even outright fantasy sometimes appears in these accounts...

...A slave who was content reports: "When we would look and see how the slaves on the joining farm was farming, 'twould almost make us shed tears...

...Finally, those partisans who wrote for publication must be suspected of what may be genteelly called "selective reporting," until their innocence is established...

...Ranging over most of the South, this group sought out more than two thousand surviving ex-slaves and recorded verbatim their recollections of everyday life under slavery, of the war, and of emancipation...

...If a scholar who did not share Phillips' preconceptions were to do as intensive a study, Hofstadter asserted, he would arrive at a "materially different version of the slave system...