• Project Timeline

• Introduction to the LOC collection (PDF)

• 1941 introduction to the LOC collection (PDF)

• Introduction to the Mississippi Narratives

• Instructions to the interviewers (PDF)

• Sample narratives

• Introduction to the Index

• Acknowledgements

• Foreword by Dr. Charles Joyner

Mississippi

by Ken Lawrence

The Once and Future History of Slavery

In recent years, no institution of American life, with the exception of the U.S. presidency, has commanded as much attention from historians as has slavery. Paradoxically, it is studied as a thing-in-itself; histories of the nation generally devote little attention to the institution other than to argue whether it was or wasn't important to the framers of the Declaration of Independence or the main cause of the Civil War, or whatever. Most of the responsibility for this contradiction rests with the consensus view that history was made by great white men. But part of it rests with the historians of slavery, whose work only rarely treats slavery historically. There is quantitative slavery, comparative slavery, and local slavery; the origins of slavery are compared and sharply debated; and so forth. Rarely do historians treat slavery as an institution that had a long and varied life in the United States, shaped and molded by the accidents of nature, the march of technology, the pressure of the world market, the exhaustion of the soil, the political needs of the slaveowners and their enemies, and, most of all, the struggles of black people themselves for freedom. To be sure, there are exceptions; the best recent ones are Lerone Bennett's The Shaping of Black America, Peter Wood's Black Majority, and John Anthony Scott's Hard Trials on My Way.

Writers who have set out to paint a new picture of the past by using slave sources have generally confined their attention to the final two or three decades of the institution, often implying, with scant documentation, that their portraits of slave community life can be projected backward. This is an easy rut to travel, given the scarcity of first-hand accounts of the early years of American bondage. I believe, however, that a more careful approach to the final antebellum decades can flesh out details whose history can be confidently backtracked more reliably than can most of the traits of culture and community. Combining the insights gleaned from the narratives of former slaves with evidence from traditional sources, we ought to be able to reconstruct the struggles and technologies that forced a transformation from gang labor to task labor, and countercurrents, on the large cotton plantations; the tendency toward job specialization and its development; the tendency of hiring out to transform itself into quasi-wage labor, and sometimes to return to the plantation in this form; and the trend, as the slave labor system collapsed, for striking plantation hands to demand, and sometimes win, wages for their labor. Turning our analysis to the process of production will permit us to show how the slaves applied the collective will derived from their family, community, religious, and cultural life to transforming not just their own social group, but the society that enslaved them as well. That demonstration will bring us a great deal closer to the task assigned us by C. L. R. James: revealing the role of the slaves in the making of the modern world.

Pursuit of this history will place us squarely at odds with C. Vann Woodward, who told the Organization of American Historians that black people.

should receive all the credit they have been denied. But during the greater part of the struggle for power and place and fame that make up so much of history, black men were kept in chains and illiteracy and subject thereafter to crippling debasement and deprivation. The number of landmarks and monuments they were able to leave on the history of their country was necessarily limited.

With history thus defined, Woodward's prejudice against “celebrating ever more obscure and deservedly neglected figures of the past” informs the mock respect he expressed for the WPA narratives in his American Historical Review article. Moreover, his scholarly standards, at least those he applies to others, reinforce his white southern legacy. Woodward believes that historians qualify themselves by “mastering” the literature in the field—by demonstrating a familiarity with all prior literature in any particular area of historical interest. I do not agree. I think that one of the greatest burdens facing historians of slavery is the requirement that each and every one assimilate and critically discuss so much trash. This has two debilitating effects: it delays for months or years a student's chance to get on with important work, and it habituates the student to past historical prejudices as a norm and a standard against which to measure his or her own product.

I believe we should retire a number of books from active duty. Hereafter, students of slavery can be taught their essentials from review essays; enough copies will survive in libraries to satisfy special needs, like, say, studies of racism in U.S. historiography. My candidates for immediate retirement are: Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery; Stanley Elkins, Slavery; and Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross. Others would be added to the list as they are superseded. Surely, even the strictest paring will leave behind enough marginal material on which to hone the critical faculties.

If this suggestion were to prevail, not only would historians be liberated from their anachronistic albatross; publishers, too, would be able to devote themselves to propagating the creativity of the present rather than the dead weight of the past. History, as a humanities discipline, would reflect a dignity that only literature has so far achieved—the propagation of classics and the dismissal of unworthy efforts.

The profitability of outmoded histories of slavery is well established, however, and so there is a new edition of Elkins’ book. In a lengthy essay, the author attempts to answer many of his critics and remove some of the tarnish from Slavery. He notes that the current discussion of slavery focuses on culture and resistance, while his own work dwells on damage to the slaves. With clever sleight- of-hand he equates oppression with damage, and then contends that his work should stay on the shelf because “any theory” of slavery “that is worth anything” must allow for damage.

Elkins has harsh remarks for two books based on slave sources, Blassingame's The Slave Community and Rawick's From Sundown to Sunup. He concludes his comments about the former with the comment that if the slaves were as successful as Blassingame argued, “perhaps the entire subject of slavery is less important than we thought.” It is a curiously perverse mind, it seems to me, that considers slavery worthy of study only to the extent that it debased its victims.

Elkins points out that Rawick incorrectly rendered the name of white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. If Elkins had paid as much attention to Higginson's teachings as he did to Higginson's name, he might have reconsidered his own argument about slavery. One of the most powerful rebuttals to Elkins’ “Sambo thesis” is found in Higginson's book Army Life in a Black Regiment:

I cannot conceive what people at the North mean by speaking of the negroes as a bestial or brutal race. Except in some insensibility to animal pain, I never knew of an act in my regiment which I should call brutal. In reading Kay's “Condition of the English Peasantry” I was constantly struck with the unlikeness of my men to those therein described. This could not proceed from my prejudices as an abolitionist, for they would have led me the other way, and indeed I had once written a little essay to show the brutalizing influences of slavery. I learned to think that we abolitionists had underrated the suffering produced by slavery among the negroes, but had overrated the demoralization. Or rather, we did not know how the religious temperament of the negroes had checked the demoralization.

Elkins was also distressed about the claim that the abolitionist movement was a product of the black community. He writes: “There is nothing in Rawick's evidence—eighteen volumes of it—to support such an extraordinary assertion, nor, so far as I know, in anyone else's evidence either.” There is already work in progress, based largely on the narratives, that will place blacks at the center of abolitionism in Mississippi, a movement hitherto ignored by historians. Other historians using ex-slave testimony, particularly C. L. R. James and John Anthony Scott, have drawn conclusion similar to Rawick's.

Lawrence D. Reddick, architect of the slave interviewing project, wrote, in 1937, that

there are but two aspects of the field unexplored. First, there is need for a thorough study of the attempts to break the system by the slaves through suicide, flight, individual resistance and group insurrection. Secondly, there is not yet a picture of the institution as seen through the eyes of the bondsman himself.

Herbert Aptheker quoted this passage in the introduction to American Negro Slave Revolts, the book which took up the first of the tasks set forth by Reddick. For thirty-three years Aptheker's work has weathered criticisms from every quarter; it remains the definitive and preeminent treatment of the subject.

The second of Reddick's proposals did not fare so well, despite the fact that he had already taken steps himself to implement it three years earlier. For thirty-five years the WPA narratives were rarely used. Since the publication of the first series by Greenwood in 1972, they have been cited by scholars with increasing regularity, but often in a thoroughly distorted manner. The very size and complexity of the collection provide a refuge for scoundrels as well as a potential force for truth. Then, just as it seemed that the needed work was about to begin in earnest, Time on the Cross appeared, diverting the attention of the best scholars for nearly two years to its refutation. That interlude is now mercifully behind us, and, with luck, the most revealing studies will soon appear.

No longer can anyone seriously argue about whether to use the evidence provided by former slaves. That debate has been won. The discussion now proceeds to matters of substance; historians are finally on the verge of writing the history of African slavery in the United States. After that is done, the whole panorama of the past can enter the popular imagination, as a rule mediated by novels and film.

The tension between history and historical fiction creates, as its offspring, legend, myth, song, drama, and lore. In these domains, humans made of ordinary flesh and blood are transformed into heroic figures, larger than life. These in turn are reified and become part of the present and the future as later generations strive to emulate them. Thus, the theft of a people's past costs a great deal more than a few missing history texts.

Of course, no one's history can be completely eliminated, and works like Black Thunder by Arna Bontemps and Jubilee by Margaret Walker provide proof, if any is needed, of the magnificent future that is in store. Nearly a century ago Americans thrilled to Huckleberry Finn's duel with his conscience and his final capitulation to sin—he will run away with Jim, a slave, rather than return him to Miss Watson, his owner. Today the picture is quite different. The largest share of the slavery budget is being banked by Kyle Onstott, author of Mandingo and Drum, and his imitators.

In Mandingo, Hammond Maxwell's greatest triumph is the defeat of his own humanity. He vomits while Agamemnon is being whipped and cries afterward, but he hardens himself into a cruel master. Lest any reader mistakenly believe that the intended message is the barbarism of the slaveowners, a publisher's note reassures us that the system wasn't their fault. “Ten years of intensive research” by Onstott produced slaves indistinguishable from those of Elkins. The sequel, Drum, climaxes with the heroic Drumson sacrificing his life to save Hammond Maxwell's life by fiercely fighting to defeat a rebellion of his fellow slaves.

The Cuban film El Otro Francisco is the finest recent example of a fictional but accurate portrayal of the slave experience; Ganga Zumba places the heroism of Palmares, the Brazilian maroon nation, on the screen. But U.S. slaves still await their due, despite efforts ranging from Mandingo and Drum to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.*

It is by our literature and theater that we measure our souls, and the current readings are not favorable. We hope that in publishing the narratives of former Mississippi slaves we can help turn the tide.

The WPA narratives provide the view from the bottom of society—the side that is usually left out of history books. Historians of the last years of slavery, the Civil War, the Reconstruction era, the triumph of Reaction, and all the years through the Great Depression, will find a gold mine here—largely untapped documents representing a century of human existence, suffering and survival.

Very little in the WPA collection illuminates the early frontier years in Mississippi; these are the lives of those who experienced slavery, freedom, and near reenslavement. Historians of the early years will not get much help here, but those who study the century following the 1830s will find these narratives indispensable. More can be learned about the pattern of forced migration, Old South to New, from these documents than from any other source, an investigation well suited to both traditional and quantitative methods.

French provincial archives indicate that slave imports from Africa began early in the eighteenth century, and the interviews collected along the Gulf Coast by WPA workers reveal that the illegal African slave trade operated until the bitter end of slavery. Other WPA writings say that the seaside home of pioneer historian J. F. H. Claiborne had cages for keeping Africans until they were “tamed,” and white testimony in the WPA collection describes the slaving pirates who hid out in secluded bays nearby smuggling in fresh human cargoes from Africa. A close look at these materials, perhaps enhanced by a first-hand review of coastal folklore, will probably indicate a much stronger and more recent and sustained injection of African ways into Mississippi than historians following Charles Sydnor have previously been willing to admit.

No one has written the history of abolitionism in Mississippi, one of the most exciting episodes in the state's history. When someone does write it, the memoirs of former slaves will provide much of the fact, flesh, color, and romance of the story. The tortured oscillations of the freedom struggle—from interracial to separatist, from open to underground, from reformist to revolutionary—cannot be adequately told without reference to the narratives.

Charles Sydnor's book Slavery in Mississippi is the only monograph on the subject, and as Carter G. Woodson showed when it first appeared, it is entirely inadequate. As the only widely available secondary source, it supplies most of the information about Mississippi that creeps into general studies of slavery in the United States. At the time Sydnor was writing his book, there were more than twice as many ex-slaves alive in Mississippi as there were when the WPA interviewers sought them out; yet, he apparently felt he could adequately tell their story without consulting a single one. The only slave narrative he used as a source was that of William Wells Brown. Virtually every estimate he made of the institution will be radically revised when a new history incorporates the testimony of the system's victims.

The main effect, however, will not be on Sydnor's book, which should have been put out to pasture long ago. General histories will probably receive the largest jolt from these “new” sources. African slavery in Mississippi dates from the second decade of the eighteenth century. By the time abolition was a significant political force nationally, Mississippi was a pivotal slave state. Its political significance grew to match its economic importance, providing the Confederacy with its president and one of the decisive battles of the Civil War. But Mississippi, where cotton was king and thriving, fueled by the forced marches of thousands of black men and women, received scant attention from most of the slavery specialists, far less than parts of the South where agriculture based on slavery was leveling off or declining. When the pieces are all in place, the picture that emerges will certainly be more complex and turbulent than any of those that now appear in the standard texts.

Our find was announced in the June 30, 1973, issue of SCEF Notes, in Joseph Delaney's article “Slaves’ Narratives Give Accounts of Slavery in Interesting Book” in the November 9, 1973, issue of Muhammad Speaks (a review of From Sundown to Sunup), and in an article entitled “Oral History of Slavery” in the Winter 1974 issue of Southern Exposure.

Very quickly a number of historians and educators began to incorporate these materials into their writings and curricula. For example, the highly acclaimed ninth-grade history text Mississippi: Conflict and Change makes good use of one of the narratives from the Mississippi Writers’ Project collection. (This is the book that the Mississippi State Textbook Purchasing Board refused to approve for use in the schools.) Graduate and undergraduate historians began mining this collection even before C. Vann Woodward advised them to bring their buckets to this well. Though our goal of massively popularizing the life experiences of ordinary people—in this instance, the slaves—remains elusive, we are pleased that so much has been accomplished already and confident that publishing the entire collection constitutes another milestone on the journey.

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