American Slavery: 1619-1877. By Peter Kolchin. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.)
Slavery stands as one of the most debated issues in American history. In the latter quarter of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, there has been an overwhelming flow of scholarly studies. Peter Kolchin’s American Slavery, first published in 1993 and revised in 2003, is his attempt to synthesize the work of his many predecessors and offer a balanced and holistic view of the peculiar institution. The author takes on the daunting tasks of both researching primary source evidence and piecing together the arguments of countless predecessors to get to the heart of American slavery.
In his introduction, Kolchin lays out four goals to distinguish his study from previous ones. The first is alluded to above, in that he sought to strike a balance between bringing new facts and interpretations to light via primary evidence while maintaining a great deal of historiographical information in his works. While his work is peppered heavily with the viewpoints of other historians, Kolchin manages to give these opinions in a concise manner and present his agreements, disagreements, and calls for synthesis while supporting his arguments with adequate primary source material.
His second goal is to maintain a view of slavery that incorporates the perspectives of the slaves, their masters, and the system as a whole. At the time of this book’s publication, historians most often pursued slavery via the investigation of the slaves themselves and the development of slave culture and slave communities. Kolchin, like his contemporaries, devotes a great deal of his work to this idea but also ties in the perspectives of slaveholders, non-slaveholding whites and the institution at the macro-level to broaden the historiographical discussion of slavery.
His third and fourth guiding themes are related to time and space respectively. The monograph investigates slavery from the colonial period until Reconstruction, allowing the author explore how slavery evolved over time. He also draws distinctions between regions within the United States and differentiates the institution’s characteristics across the country. Furthermore, he contextualizes American slavery by stepping outside the United States to compare and contrast it with slavery elsewhere in the world. These two things particularly distinguish Kolchin from the rest of the field. At its beginning, slavery was a system not unlike others in the Caribbean or South America based on the importation of black slaves from Africa. He argues that the United States was unique in that the system was based off of a minority population of native-born slaves thereby explaining the unique path it took in North America.
Many historians can claim to provide more in-depth studies of slavery in the United States based on region, class, race, or any number of other angles historians have pursued over the years. Assuredly, a historian studying slavery from one particular mindset or framework can offer a more thorough investigation but few can claim to cover the topic in as broad and concise a manner as Kolchin manages in American Slavery. To condense a topic as voluminous as slavery into 250 pages is a Herculean task for any historian and some avenues are left unexplored or underexplored. However, this book serves as an excellent primer for any historian studying slavery in the United States and would be an excellent read for any college class.
Michael Green