For many years historians in the United States, even scholars who challenged the relatively benign view of slavery and harsh view of Reconstruction that dominated the academy until at least the 1950s, were reluctant to draw on the testimony of the slaves themselves as found in their personal narratives, including those written before and after the Civil War as well as those collected orally during the WPA Federal Writers Project in the 1930s. Even after the 1950s there was considerable debate over whether these accounts of the "peculiar institution" by former slaves could be considered reliable historical evidence. However, more recently, such firsthand stories have been increasingly employed to put a face on slavery and give a more vivid sense of the human dimension of that crucial, and horrifying, epoch of US history. Two new books, Marcus Rediker's "The Slave Ship" and David W. Blight's "A Slave No More," are both powerful additions to this body of scholarship.
Souls on ice
With firsthand testimony, two new books bring the everyday horrors of slavery to life
Rediker's book closely examines the slave ship era, especially that of Britain and the United States in the 18th and early 19th centuries. While other scholars have taken up the slave trade in some depth, none before have examined this key instrument and institution in the business so closely. Rediker convincingly argues that the slave ship in many respects set the character of slavery as well as the cultures of the masters and the slaves in the New World.
Drawing on his vast knowledge of the maritime world in the 18th and 19th centuries, Rediker shows how the slave ship was a capitalist venture, a site of class warfare, a prison, and an unintended instrument of ethnogenesis through which many African peoples speaking scores of languages began to forge common pan-African identities even before their debarkation in the Western Hemisphere. He also delineates some of the processes and the arbitrary peculiarities of race formation in a system that marked slaves as "black" and sailors as "white" - even though some of the sailors were Africans and many not "white" as the term would come to be understood in the United States. Through the use of a wide range of firsthand testimony of merchants, ship captains and officers, common seamen, and captured Africans, Rediker brings to life the brutality of the slave ships. Constant violence and threats were used to crush rebellion by brutally exploited sailors and persistent resistance ranging from suicide to open insurrection by enslaved Africans.