Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry(Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press)

On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future. |A detailed comparison of 18th-century slave life in the two areas where their population was centered: the Chesapeake region of Virginia and the South Carolina Lowcountry.

About the Author :
Philip D. Morgan is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University.

Review :
"A genuine glimpse of what it felt like to be a slave and an admiration for slaves' determination to shape their own destinies in the face of overwhelming barriers to autonomy."--Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review "A successful and enduring analysis. . . . Vital to a balanced understanding of slave culture."--Southern Historian "Authoritative and detailed. . . . Morgan's synthesis draws upon a wealth of social, political, legal, economic, literary, religious and anthropological sources to illuminate through a variety of prisms what he calls 'the core contradiction of slavery -- treating persons as things, ' which guaranteed that master and slave would be thrust apart, even as they were bound inextricably together."--Los Angeles Times Book Review--Best Nonfiction Books of 1998 "Building on an extraordinary scholarly legacy, a prodigious amount of primary research, and a hallowed set of historiographical problems, Philip D. Morgan has written a book that is destined to be read and reargued for some time to come. . . . The most comprehensive social history of slavery yet written. . . . It is, then, as much for the extraordinary stories he tells as for the scholarly arguments he makes that Morgan is to be commended."--American Historical Review "One of the most important books on unfree labor in the past twenty-five years. Every historian of early America will need to read it."--Journal of the Early Republic "Only a historian at the top of his profession could have produced such a sweeping comparison of the development of the 'peculiar institution' in Tidewater Virginia and the South Carolina Low Country prior to 1790."--The Historian "The closest [examination] yet made of slave life anywhere before the nineteenth century. . . . Morgan's account is exhaustive . . . in its detail, but it is more than a recovery of hard-to-find facts. It is informed throughout by Morgan's recognition that slavery, as an extreme form of domination, resonates with the ambiguities present in all human relations."--New York Review of Books "The finest, most comprehensive work we have in the field of early American slavery."--Reviews in American History "The first comprehensive work to synthesize the wealth of documentary sources with the range of recent studies by archaeologists, architectural historians, anthropologists, and folklorists of African American culture in the Chesapeake and Lowcountry."--Winterthur Portfolio "The Chesapeake Bay Area and the Low Country. . . . are described in encyclopedic detail, with an exhaustive mastery of sources that is truly unprecedented. The author has utilized them all in a masterly way, including the most recent archaeological findings. His book immediately becomes the starting point for anyone interested in knowing what the North American colonial South was actually like."--Journal of American History