Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press (1998), 703 pgs.

             Too many histories of the South ignore the impact of regional differences, as do too many histories of southern slavery. Exploring the similarities and differences across time and space in slavery in the regions centered on Virginia (the Chesapeake) and South Carolina (the Lowcountry) is, for Morgan, “to engage in different ways of measuring time.” (18) Just as contemporary analysis has rescued the regions themselves from an artificially conflated and unified “southern history,” Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint clearly and forcefully demonstrates important distinctions between slave experiences across time and space, while identifying key features of a unified black culture. Chesapeake slaves engaged in more cultural assimilation and in many ways crossed racial lines much more easily than their Lowcountry counterparts, who more readily maintained traditional African cultural artifacts in their American lives.

            Many factors contributed to this development. Morgan’s first topical section explores the “Contours of the Plantation Experience.” He notes regional differences in topography, climate, natural vegetation, and even coastal features. These gave rise to a sharp distinction based on the regional choice of staple crop – tobacco in the Chesapeake and rice in the Lowcountry. Tobacco’s economic inefficiency and market instability forced greater crop diversification in the Chesapeake, which gave those slaves a more diverse set of skills than possessed by Lowcountry slaves. These slaves, however, benefited from a more stable social setting borne of rice’s non-exhaustive features and profitability. Thus, staple choice shaped the regional demand for slave labor and the nature of the regional slave trade. Morgan also reads regional differences between the slaves based on their material possessions. Within and across the two regions, Morgan finds relatively substantial variations between slave experiences on small, subsistence farms versus larger, commercial plantations. These situations themselves varied between house and field slaves, as well as over time. The natural crop rhythms afforded Lowcountry slaves wider latitude over their domestic lives, including opportunities to grow their own garden crops or keep their own livestock. By contrast, Chesapeake slaves were generally better fed and clothed. Morgan finds additional such contrasts in assessing field and skilled labor between the regions. Field labor generated a set of shared experiences across time and space, but skilled labor more explicitly demonstrated regional differences. As with material possessions, Chesapeake slaves engaged in a wider variety of skilled labors, but Lowcountry slaves actually found greater opportunities to use such skills.

            Morgan next examines “Encounters between Whites and Blacks” in both regions. Despite the prominence of the chattel principle and the dehumanizing nature of slavery, Morgan effectively demonstrates that personal interactions mediated life between whites and blacks, between masters and slaves. He suggests such a paradox exists in the slave codes, which were purposefully codified as inhumane, yet just as purposefully enforced with great laxity. Yet another paradox exists in the role of slaves as messengers and errand runners, positions that gave them a tremendous amount of responsibility and personal agency within a white world. Morgan examines other such liminal slaves, whose positions of special prestige symbolically placed them with one foot in both black and white worlds. While more prevalent in the Lowcountry, slaveholders in both regions allowed their slaves the opportunity to produce, possess, and trade their own goods. Morgan notes that this certainly benefited the masters economically, but it equally benefited the slaves by teaching them “to take care of themselves in a commercial world.” (376) However, slaves in the Chesapeake benefited from more blurred socio-racial lines than in the Lowcountry, where violence widened the racial divide.

            Morgan’s final section thoughtfully considers the unified yet diversified culture wrought by African American slaves. More realistic than idealistic, Morgan notes the presence of pointed conflict among slaves trying to create a new community out of whole cloth. Cooperation did not eclipse conflict until native-born slaves outnumbered imported African slaves, and this soon bore a “sense of group identity.” (497) Morgan examines the family as the central cultural unit of both regional systems, but finds significant regional differences. The nature of rice plantation slavery generated more stable, two-parent households than did the Chesapeake’s diversified and fragmented economic system. He also examines the development of kinship ties in social relationships, including husband/wife, parent/child, siblings, and extended kin. Language, recreation, and religion also helped create adjoining but regionally distinguishable cultures.

            The simplest yet most accurate description of Morgan’s thoroughly-researched and analytically rigorous study comes in his conclusion: “Alike, and yet different, the Lowcountry and Chesapeake slave societies provide useful commentaries upon one another.” (659) His work should inform all interested scholars, as his thoughtful and thought-provoking methods of analysis produce a rich, detailed and engaging comparison of the different faces of southern slavery.

Matthew A. McNiece

Slave Counterpoint:  Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry.  By Philip D. Morgan. Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Many historians have written many great books about slavery in the United States. Philip Morgan, received his Ph. D. in American history from University College London and is currently a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, joined the ranks of these historians with his book Slave Counterpoint.  In the book, he “tried to treat slaves, not as slaves political or as slaves military, but as human beings. Accordingly, I have explored the history of slaves in their many roles: as forced immigrants, as workers, as solitaries, as family members, and as churchgoers (p. xv).”  In other words, Morgan attempted to be as comprehensible as possible about every facet of their lives. Unlike many other historians that explored slavery in the South, the author does not view it as homogenous, but as many different areas with similarities. He compares, in particular, slaves and their lives in the Chesapeake region in Virginia and the Lowcountry that stretched from North Carolina to East Florida. Throughout the study, Morgan examines the five major forces that helped determined the slave societies. The five forces include: the role of staple crops; ecological and settlement systems; rate, sources, and distribution of the slave supply; the morphology of the two slave populations; and the planters’ way of life. By examining these fives forces, the author makes a very convincing argument.
 
Morgan divides the book into three parts to explore every facet of slave life in the two regions. The first part of the book contrasts the two regions; the second examines the interactions of whites and blacks that spawned cultural development; and finally the last part explores the interior world of the slaves. To examine and explain the first part of the book, Morgan uses many forms of historical process to examine the social history of the two regions including historical geography, historical archaeology, the study of the environment, and ecohistory. Using all of these processes, Morgan determines that work proved to be the most important determinant of slave society. Work influenced almost every aspect of the slaves’ lives because the crop determined how many hours a day they worked and the number of slaves on a plantation. In the Chesapeake the slaves worked from dawn to dusk, depending on the season, and on many different tasks, but mainly tobacco. Slaves in the Lowcountry, on the other hand, had a more monotonous workday in the rice fields, but they only had to produce a set quantity of labor before they could have time to themselves.
 
The second part of the book relies heavily on the memoirs and letters of whites in the South to explain their interaction with black slaves. Morgan argues that close relationships developed between masters and slaves for a number of reasons. The most obvious interaction between whites and blacks involved slaves working in the fields alongside their master or in the master’s house. This proved to be most prevalent in Chesapeake where the masters worked in the fields longer than in the Lowcountry, because, as he stated in the first part, the work and the crop dictated the labor.
 
In the last part of the book, Morgan uses resources that provide details on slaves’ houses, tools they used, and black social and economic institutions. By examining these aspects the author determines how slaves interacted with each other on many levels, including Creoles and Africans, and slaves and free men to name a couple. In this part he concluded that even though each of the different groups did not completely understand the other they used their commonalities, mainly their common origin from Africa, to form bonds. In the end, each group used its old African culture to create a new “African American” culture by reinterpreting and implementing aspects of white culture it found useful.
 
This work is an excellent example of how to organize and balance a book. Morgan organizes this large book in a manner that does not confuse the reader. By dividing the book into clearly defined sections and directly connecting them to the thesis, the author allows the reader to comprehend the book more easily. In addition, the author does not spend any time on information or subjects that detract from the purpose of the book. Also Morgan does not focus on one aspect more than another, providing an evenly balanced account of every aspect of the slaves’ lives in the two regions.

Some people would criticize that too much information could distract from the overarching thesis of a book, but Morgan’s book is an exception. He masterfully ties in every piece of information to the thesis. Overall, I would recommend this book only for graduate classes for three main reasons. The first two involve the size and vocabulary of the book, which would intimidate undergraduates. In addition, a reader would need a firm historiographical background on slavery to comprehend completely  the different arguments that Morgan makes.

Charles Grear