![]() ![]() John Blassingame in 1973, echoing Herskovits's claims of thirty years earlier, argued that "the most remarkable aspect of the whole process of enslavement is the extent to which the American-born slaves were able to retain their ancestors' culture." Herbert Gutman, in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976), challenged the prevailing belief that slavery had weakened and even destroyed the African- American family. In the early 1970s, an explosion of new scholarship on slavery shifted the emphasis away from the damage the system inflicted on African Americans and toward the striking success of the slaves in building a culture of their own despite their enslavement. Elkins compared the system to Nazi concentration camps during World War II and likened the child-like "Sambo" personality of slavery to the distortions of character that many scholars believed the Holocaust had produced. Stampp and Elkins portrayed slavery as something like a prison, in which men and women had virtually no space in which to develop their own social and cultural lives. Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956) and, even more damningly, Stanley Elkins's Slavery (1959) described a labor system that did serious physical and psychological damage to its victims. In 1943, Herbert Aptheker published a chronicle of slave revolts as a way of challenging Phillips's claim that blacks were submissive and content.Ī somewhat different challenge to Phillips emerged in the 1950s from historians who emphasized the brutality of the institution. Herskovits challenged Phillips's contention that black Americans retained little of their African cultural inheritance. In the 1940s, as concern about racial injustice increasingly engaged the attention of white Americans, challenges to Phillips began to emerge. Phillips's apologia for slavery remained the authoritative work on the subject for nearly thirty years. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918) portrayed slavery as an essentially benign institution in which kindly masters looked after submissive, childlike, and generally contented African Americans. The first major scholarly examination of slavery was fully within this romantic tradition. That same debate continued for a time after the Civil War but by the late nineteenth century, as the historian David Blight revealed in an important 2002 book, Race and Reunion, with white Americans eager for sectional conciliation, both northern and southern chroniclers of slavery began to accept a romanticized and unthreatening picture of the Old South and its "peculiar institution." The debate began even before the Civil War, when abolitionists strove to expose slavery to the world as a brutal, dehumanizing institution, while southern defenders of slavery tried to depict it as a benevolent, paternalistic system. No issue in American history has produced a richer literature or a more spirited debate than the nature of American slavery. ![]() Where Historians Disagree - The Character of Slavery ![]()
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