The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution officially prohibited slavery and all its forms on the 6th December 1865. The United States will soon mark 150 years since the abolishment of its “peculiar institution”, and yet, historians are still struggling to establish a collective version of the events that led to its development and continued significance throughout the 18th and 19th centuries . As a result of this, the study of slavery has produced one of the richest and most varied historiographies in all of American history. Walter Rucker’s The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America’s unique contribution to this existing literature, in my opinion, means it should be widely read by scholars and students alike. The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture and Identity Formation in Early America is a fascinating consideration of African culture and its effect on the history of slave resistance in North America. Walter Rucker seeks to establish that the effect was extensive; furthermore, he claims it to have been essential in the creation of a communal consciousness among enslaved peoples. One of his main objectives appears to be to impress upon his reader the important advancements that could continue to be made if greater significance was placed on slaves’ African roots. In doing so, he claims, one could “better grasp the convoluted complexities of slave life” . Not unlike the work of Michael Gomez, in which Rucker places great significance, The River Flows On rejects an “Americanist” approach to the study of slave culture in favour of one that embraces a unique African-American identity . Of those historians who take an “African-Americanist” position on the subject, R... ... middle of paper ... ...netheless it is still an advancement and one that historians should take note of for the future. Works Cited Allison, R. J., review of M. A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South, 1526-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. In Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 30:3 (1999), pp. 475-481. Creel, M. W., review of S. Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. In Journal of American History, 75:4 (1989), pp. 1281-1283. Rucker, W. C., The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Stampp, K. M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, 2nd ed. New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1961.
1.In 1831, James Henry Hammond inherited through marriage Silver Bluff Plantation, on the shores of South Carolina. He was a Lawyer, Teacher and a Newspaper editor. He undertook the running of his plantation and soon realized it was not an easy job to overcome the dominance of the complexity of social system that existed. He struggled to control and manage it for the next thirty years. He called a “a system of roguery. “Hammond astutely recognized that black life on his plantation was structured and organized as a “system “, the very existence of which seemed necessarily a challenge to his absolute control and therefore, as he perceived it a kind of “roguery.” Because Hammond’s mastery over his bondsmen depended upon his success at undermining slave society and culture, he established a carefully designed plan of physical
The origin tale of the African American population in the American soil reveals a narrative of a diasporic faction that endeavored brutal sufferings to attain fundamental human rights. Captured and forcefully transported in unbearable conditions over the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, a staggering number of Africans were destined to barbaric slavery as a result of the increasing demand of labor in Brazil and the Caribbean. African slaves endured abominable conditions, merged various cultures to construct a blended society that pillared them through the physical and psychological hardships, and hungered for their freedom and recognition.
There are many contradictions pertaining to slavery, which lasted for approximately 245 years. In Woody Holton’s “Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era”, Holton points out the multiple instances where one would find discrepancies that lie in the interests of slaveowners, noble figures, and slaves that lived throughout the United States. Holton exemplifies this hostility in forms of documents that further specify and support his claim.
South Carolina was one of the only states in which the black slaves and abolitionists outnumbered their oppressors. Denmark Vesey’s slave revolt consisted of over nine-thousand armed slaves, free blacks, and abolitionists, that would have absolutely devastated society in South Carolina for slave owners, and could have quite possibly been a major step towards the abolishment of slavery in the United states. Robertson succeeded in describing the harsh conditions of slaves in pre-civil war Charleston, South Carolina. This book also helped me to understand the distinctions between the different groups. These groups including the black slaves, free blacks, extreme abolitionists, and the pro-slavery communities.
Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...
Reynolds, Mary. The American Slave. Vol. 5, by Che Rawick, 236-246. Westport , Conneticut: Greenwood Press, Inc, 1972.
Altman, Linda Jacobs. Slavery and Abolition in American History. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 1999. Print.
Kyles, Perry L.. "Resistance and Collaboration: Political Strategies within the Afro-Carolinian Slave Community, 1700-1750." The Journal of African History 93: 497-508.
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
Marable, Manning. Race, reform, and rebellion: the second reconstruction and beyond in Black America, 1945-2006. 3rd ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Print
For most American’s especially African Americans, the abolition of slavery in 1865 was a significant point in history, but for African Americans, although slavery was abolished it gave root for a new form of slavery that showed to be equally as terrorizing for blacks. In the novel Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon he examines the reconstruction era, which provided a form of coerced labor in a convict leasing system, where many African Americans were convicted on triumphed up charges for decades.
Harris, Leslie M. “In The Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. New York: University of Chicago Press, 2003. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html
Breen and Innes' Myne Owne Ground is a book that seeks to address period in US history, according to the authors, an unusually level of freedom was achieved by formally bonded black Americans. As such, the book aims to bear witness to have faith in period of historical possibility, while locating this period, and its decline, firmly within the overall narrative of slavery. The authors claim that in order to do this, it is necessary to consider the lives of their subjects according to the understanding of freedom denoted by the period in question. Given this, any review of the book should focus on how it is able to provide a convincing description of what the authors term genuinely “multi-racial society,” together with the manner in which this
This story was set in the deep south were ownership of African Americans was no different than owning a mule. Demonstrates of how the Thirteenth Amendment was intended to free slaves and describes the abolitionist’s efforts. The freedom of African Americans was less a humanitarian act than an economic one. There was a battle between the North and South freed slaves from bondage but at a certain cost. While a few good men prophesied the African Americans were created equal by God’s hands, the movement to free African Americans gained momentum spirited by economic and technological innovations such as the export, import, railroad, finance, and the North’s desire for more caucasian immigrants to join America’s workforce to improve our evolving nation. The inspiration for world power that freed slaves and gave them initial victory of a vote with passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. A huge part of this story follows the evolution of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment more acts for civil rights.
Northup, Solomon, Sue L. Eakin, and Joseph Logsdon. Twelve years a slave. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Print.