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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative
Edited by John Ernest
Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014
(p. ix) Acknowledgments

I started planning the Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative at the
beginning of 2009, and it’s been a long journey since then, one that has included a num
ber of personal trials and turns of fortune. I am grateful beyond measure, then, to the
contributors to the volume for never losing faith that this journey would eventually come
to a successful conclusion. I believe that this journey’s end, the publication of this vol
ume, will be a significant beginning for many scholars and students interested in studying
slave narratives, and for those countless others who understand the importance of being
attentive to the voices that reach to us from the past. I am grateful to the contributors for
bringing so much expertise, care, imagination, and passion to their chapters for this vol
ume. I’m both grateful to and impressed by the outstanding people at Oxford University
Press for their guidance and hard work. I’ve benefitted greatly from conversations with
colleagues at West Virginia University and the University of Delaware, and I’m especially
grateful for the support I’ve received from Deans Bob Jones (WVU) and George Watson
(UD) as I’ve worked to finish this project while also serving as department chair. Thanks
are always due to Gordon Hutner, Bill Andrews, Bob Levine, Donald Pease, and Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. for their encouragement and support. Teresa Goddu has been especially
enthusiastic about promoting the work of this project. Her commitment to this work has
been a real inspiration. My closest collaborators in all things scholarly are Eric Gardner
and Joycelyn Moody, both of whom can always be trusted to have a broad and deep under
standing of what this field requires of its scholars, and both of whom are always available
for advice and support.
If acknowledgments are designed to amplify gratitude as they progress, so that those who
are mentioned at the end are the ones worthy of the greatest, the most intimate, the
quite-nearly-inexpressible expressions of gratitude, then I would need to go on for pages,
volumes, before finally mentioning Brendan O’Neill, who has been unflinching, enthusias
tic, and tireless in helping me get this project to such a successful conclusion. And only
then would I begin to prepare to thank Denise for all she does to support and encourage
me, and for all she brings to my life. (p. x)
Page 1 of 2
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Acknowledgments
Page 2 of 2
About the Contributors

Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature Online Publication Date: May 2014
(p. xi) About the Contributors
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Associate Professor of English and African and African

American Studies at Brandeis University. Her areas of specialization include African
American literature and culture and gender and sexuality studies. Her first book,
Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race, was published by
Duke University Press in 2012.
Nicole N. Aljoe is a member of the Department of English at Northeastern Universi

ty. Her research and teaching centers on 18th and 19th century Black Atlantic writ
ing, with a particular focus on Caribbean texts. She is the author of Creole Testi
monies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies (Palgrave 2012) and co-editor
of Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVa, forthcoming). Her cur
rent project focuses on contemporary Caribbean multi-disciplinary engagements with
the neo-slave genre.
William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English and Comparative Lit

erature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author, editor, or
co-editor of about 50 books on a wide range of African American literature and cul
ture, chiefly before World War I.
Daphne A. Brooks is Professor of English and African-American Studies at Prince

ton University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of
Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP) and Jeff Buckley’s Grace
Page 1 of 6
(New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled
Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity (Harvard University Press, forth
coming).
Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., is Professor, Emeritus, of History at the University of Califor

nia, Irvine. His books include Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution
of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915 (1989) and The Origins of African American Litera
ture, 1680–1865 (2001)
Jeannine Marie DeLombard is Associate Professor of English at the University of

Toronto. Her most recent study, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and
American Civic Identity (2012) serves as a prequel to her first book, Slavery on Trial:
Law, Print, and Abolitionism (2007).
John Ernest, Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of
Delaware, is the author or editor of ten books, including Liberation Historiography:
African (p. xii) American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861, Chaotic
Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History, and A Nation within a Nation:
Organizing African American Communities before the Civil War.
DoVeanna S. Fulton is dean and professor at the University of Houston-Downtown.

Her scholarship examines African American women’s oral and written discursive
practices in fiction and non-fiction. She is the author of one book and two co-edited
volumes: Speaking Power (2006), Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts (2009) and
Sapphire’s Literary Breakthrough (2012).
The recipient of a 2012-2013 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Er
ic Gardner teaches at Saginaw Valley State University. His Unexpected Places: Relo
cating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2009) won the Research So
ciety for American Periodicals/EBSCOhost Book Award and was a Choice
“Outstanding Academic Title.”
Page 2 of 6
Teresa A. Goddu teaches at Vanderbilt University. A specialist in nineteenth-century

American literature and culture, she is the author of Gothic America: Narrative, His
tory, and Nation (Columbia UP) and is currently completing a book project on anti
slavery print, material, and visual culture.
Justin A. Joyce is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. His work on the

Western genre and self-defense has appeared in journals and edited collections. Man
aging editor for the forthcoming journal The James Baldwin Review, he is currently
editing a collection of critical essays, Keywords for African American Studies.
Mitch Kachun is Professor of History at Western Michigan University. He is author

of Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Cel
ebrations, 1808-1915 (Massachusetts, 2003) and co-editor of The Curse of Caste; or
the Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins (Oxford,
2006). His current research examines Crispus Attucks in American memory.
Dwight A. McBride is Daniel Hale Williams Professor of African American Studies,

English, & Performance Studies and Associate Provost & Dean of The Graduate
School at Northwestern University. He has published five books, including Impossible
Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony and Why I Hate Abercrombie
and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality.
Barbara McCaskill is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia,

and co-directs the Civil Rights Digital Library. She has co-edited Post-Bellum, Pre-
Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919 (2006) and Multicultur
al Literature and Literacies (1993). Her next study focuses on William and Ellen Craft
in transatlantic abolition (2014).
Joycelyn K. Moody is Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature

and Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches
19th-century African American literature and culture, life writing, and print
(p. xiii)
cultures. She is also founding Director of UTSA’s African American Literatures and
Cultures Institute.
Page 3 of 6
Sharon Ann Musher is Associate Professor of History and Director of American

Studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Her work has appeared in
American Quarterly, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and the Jewish Journal of So
ciology. Forthcoming publications include A New Deal for the Arts (University of
Chicago Press, 2014) and a chapter in The New Deal and the Great Depression (Kent
State University Press, 2014).
Elizabeth Regosin is Professor of History at St. Lawrence University. She is the au
thor of Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipa
tion and Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Recon
struction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files (with Donald R. Shaffer).
Marie Jenkins Schwartz is Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island,

Kingston. Her research focuses on the history of slavery and its legacy, especially the
experiences of women and children. Schwartz is the recipient of two fellowships from
the National Endowment for the Humanities and numerous other awards.
Winfried Siemerling is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and an As

sociate of the Du Bois Institute at Harvard. His books include Canada and Its Americ
as: Transnational Navigations (co-ed., McGill-Queen’s UP 2010), The New North
American Studies (Routledge 2005), and The Black Atlantic Reconsidered (McGill-
Queen’s UP, forthcoming 2014).
Kimberly K. Smith is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Political

Science at Carleton College. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Uni
versity of Michigan. Her research centers on intellectual history and philosophy, par
ticularly the history of American environmental thought and environmental political
theory.
Page 4 of 6
Brenda E. Stevenson is Professor of History at UCLA. She is the author of Life in

Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South and The Contested Mur
der of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots.
Helen Thomas is Principal Lecturer in English and Writing at Falmouth University,

Cornwall, UK. Her research interests include C18th literature and culture, slave nar
ratives, postcolonial theory and texts, black British writing, and contemporary narra
tives of illness and disease.
Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University,

has published Claiming Exodus: A Cultural History of Afro-Atlantic Identity, 1774–
1903 and the scholarly edition of Jane Hunter’s autobiography A Nickel and a Prayer.
She also co-edited the forthcoming The South Carolina Roots of African American
Thought, a Reader.
John Michael Vlach is Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at

(p. xiv)
The George Washington University. His numerous publications include By the Work of
Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife, Plain Painters: Making Sense of
American Folk Art, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery,
and The Planter’s Prospect: Privilege and Slavery in Plantation Paintings, and Barns.
He has developed exhibitions for art museums, historical societies, and libraries from
coast to coast, including the National Museum of American History and the Library of
Congress.
Maurice O. Wallace is Associate Professor of English and African & African Ameri
can Studies at Duke. He is author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and
Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture (2002) and co-editor with
Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making
of African American Identity (2012).
Kenneth W. Warren is Professor of English at the University of Chicago and author

of What Was African American Literature? (2011). He coedited Renewing Black Intel
lectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American
Page 5 of 6
Thought (2009) with Adolph Reed, Jr. and Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sut
ton E. Griggs (2013) with Tess Chakkalakal.
Marcus Wood is a painter, performance artist, film maker, and Professor of English
at the University of Sussex. This many publications include Blind Memory: Visual
Representations of Slavery in England and America (2000), Slavery, Empathy, and
Pornography (2002), Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil
and America (2013), and, as editor, The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthol
ogy, 1764-1865.
Page 6 of 6
Introduction
Introduction
John Ernest
Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature

Online Publication Date: May 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.026
Abstract and Keywords
The introduction to the Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative argues
for the importance of sophisticated approaches to slave testimony while also presenting
an overview of the diversity and complexity of that testimony. The Handbook addresses a
broad range of sources, far beyond the traditional book-length autobiographies usually
associated with the genre of slave narratives. The introduction offers background on the
troubled history of scholarship on the history of slavery, the gradual recognition of the im
portance of slave testimony, and then the challenge of recovering and reading often high
ly mediated accounts from the formerly enslaved. Highlighting the role of slave testimony
in battling against misrepresentations and racism, the introduction argues for a more ex
pansive understanding of the formative role of the institution of slavery in U.S. history
and culture. The introduction then provides an overview of the Handbook's organization,
with brief commentary on individual chapters.
Keywords: slavery, abolitionism, slave narratives, slave testimony, racism, American history
ON November 14, 1847, William Wells Brown delivered a lecture to the Female Anti-Slav
ery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, a lecture recorded by Henry M. Parkhurst, “phono
graphic reporter,” and published by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. In that lec
ture, Brown announced that his subject would be American slavery “as it is,” including
“its influence on American character and morals” (4). Brown knew his subject, for he was
born a slave near Lexington, Kentucky, the son of an enslaved black woman and a slave
holding white man, and indeed was probably related to his owner. He escaped from slav
ery in 1834 and eventually would become one of the leading abolitionists of his time, a
recognized and respected lecturer and prolific writer. In this lecture, though, Brown be
gins by claiming that he faces an impossible task. “Slavery has never been represented,”
he asserts, and “Slavery never can be represented” (4). Any attempt to represent the sys
tem of slavery could only fail; and if he were to try to represent it, he would need to whis
per it to his audience “one at a time” (4). Brown then goes on to represent slavery in a
masterful performance that includes definitions of slavery, examples of its intimate viola
tions, commentary on the white press and commercial interests involved in the mainte
Page 1 of 18
Introduction
nance of the national system of slavery, remarks on the legal system required by slavery,
and observations on the extent to which slavery has corrupted white American character,
including the political and religious ideals to which white Americans claimed devotion. It
was a system, as Brown’s opening remarks indicated, at once so extensive and so inti
mate as to both resist and require representation—and the representation that could only
fail would somehow need to be both general and individualized, both a grand dissertation
and an intimate communication, whispered to individual ears but finding the one in the
many, the many in the one.
For Brown, slavery was the economic, political, and social system that provided the un
derlying but unspeakable unity to a nation all but lost in its own mythology and its own
degradation, and subsequent national experience and historical research have demon
strated there is ample reason to agree with his conclusions. In this address—and, indeed,
in his very existence—Brown represented a nation that regularly proclaimed its devotion
to liberty even though every aspect of the nation—political, economic, social, (p. 2) legal,
even theological—was devoted to slavery. This was a nation that regularly celebrated a
founding document proclaiming that all men are created equal even as it was devoted to
creating the fictions of race so as to enforce unjust, enslaving, and even murderous social
distinctions. This is a nation whose champion of liberty, New Hampshire’s Daniel Webster,
helped to craft a political compromise in 1850 that violated the rights of African Ameri
cans, both those who had escaped from slavery and those who were nominally free. This
was a nation whose highest legal authorities declared in 1857 that black Americans had
“no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This was a nation whose most
popular and influential form of entertainment was blackface minstrelsy, and indeed a na
tion almost obsessed with defining and controlling the terms of black identity. The impact
of slavery was felt in every corner of American life—and in the century-and-a-half since
slavery was legally ended, the lingering effects of slavery still remain strong. Try to imag
ine American history without slavery. It simply isn’t possible. No matter where you look—
be it the history of the labor movement or the history of entertainment—you will soon en
counter clear evidence of the forceful effects of slavery or of the racial attitudes and dis
tinctions that slavery both required and encouraged.
This is not the story of slavery that you will encounter in any American textbook, even to
day. In most cases, you’ll find slavery safely relegated to a discrete chapter, or a portion
of a chapter—a difficult episode in American history, but one finally resolved by the Civil
War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment, a resolution even
more firmly established by the successful election and reelection of an African American
President (including his negotiation of the electoral college that was itself shaped by the
history of slavery). However, the full history of slavery is not one that can be brought to a
neat conclusion, particularly since prominent among the effects of history have been a
studied avoidance of the subject in American society and the mis-education of both white
and black Americans on their shared history. In Brown’s time, those African Americans
fortunate enough to live in nominal freedom faced lives shaped by persistent and crip
pling racism, what Hosea Easton, one of Brown’s contemporaries, called “slavery in dis
guise” (Treatise 46). This “slavery in disguise” was just as pernicious in its way as was le
Page 2 of 18
Introduction
gal bondage, restricting African American opportunity to the extent that it limited the
growth and threatened the vitality of African American communities struggling to estab
lish themselves in a racist environment. Surveying the effects of being excluded from
schools and from lifelong prospects, African American activist David Walker bemoaned in
1827 the prevalence in black communities of “ignorance, the mother of treachery and de
ceit, [that] gnaws into our very vitals” (Appeal 21). But there was ignorance enough to go
around, as white Americans developed increasingly elaborate legal, social, and theologi
cal justifications for maintaining slavery and racial dominance in the land of freedom.
Even in New England, often considered the center of anti-slavery activity, white Ameri
cans who resisted the anti-slavery movement (and even many who supported it) tried to
contain or, in various ways, eliminate African Americans as a significant presence in the
region. Historian Joanne Pope Melish is particularly instructive on this point in her book
Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, (p. 3) 1780–1860.
“New England whites,” Melish notes, “employed an array of strategies to effect the re
moval” of people of color “and to efface people of color and their history in New Eng
land.” Melish looks at a wide range of measures by which New England whites tried to
render African Americans, along with the history of slavery in New England, invisible:
Some of these efforts were symbolic: representing people of color as ridiculous or

dangerous “strangers” in anecdotes, cartoons, and broadsides; emphasizing slav
ery and “race” as “southern problems”; characterizing New England slavery as
brief and mild, or even denying its having existed; inventing games and instruc
tional problems in which the object was to make “the negroes” disappear; digging
up the corpses of people of color. Other efforts aimed to eliminate the presence of
living people of color: conducting official roundups and “warnings-out”; rioting in
and vandalizing black neighborhoods. Finally, some efforts involved both symbolic
and physical elements, such as the American Colonization Society’s campaign to
demonize free people of color and raise funds to ship them to Africa.
(Melish 2)
As Melish notes, many of these measures involved the strategic misrepresentation of

black character and of the black presence in national history (which was, for many, white
national history). Even those who escaped from slavery to tell their stories in the North
found that the white North had stories of their own to tell.
The problems Melish summarizes extended far beyond New England, and African Ameri
cans recognized the importance, though also the challenge, of fighting their battles on
the printed page. In 1827, an editorial from the first edition of Freedom’s Journal
announced the central mission of the newspaper—to be the voice of the community, and
to thereby exercise some influence in the representation of African American character.
“We wish to plead our own cause,” the editorial stated:
Page 3 of 18
Introduction
too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by mis
representations, in things which concern us dearly, though in the estimation of
some mere trifles; for though there are many in society who exercise towards us
benevolent feelings; still (with sorrow we confess it) there are others who make it
their business to enlarge upon the least trifle, which tends to the discredit of any
person of color; and pronounce anathemas and denounce our whole body for the
misconduct of this guilty one (“To Our Patrons”).
In 1853, African Americans amplified the central conditions of this mission in the Pro
ceedings of the Colored National Convention, Held in Rochester, July 6th, 7th and 8th,
1853, emphasizing that black uplift required responses to white characterizations. “What
stone has been left unturned to degrade us?,” the convention members asked:
What hand has refused to fan the flame of prejudice against us? What American
artist has not caricatured us? What wit has not laughed at us in our wretched
ness? What songster has not made merry over our depressed spirits? What press
has not ridiculed and contemned us? What pulpit has withheld from our devoted
heads its angry lightning, or its sanctimonious hate? (16–17).
(p. 4)
In 1859, publisher and editor Thomas Hamilton continued this cause in his opening “Apol
ogy” for the Anglo-African Magazine, emphasizing the systemic nature of those misrepre
sentations. “The wealth, the intellect, the Legislation, (State and Federal,) the pulpit, and
the science of America,” Hamilton asserted, “have concentrated on no one point so
heartily as in the endeavor to write down the negro as something less than a man” (An
glo-African 1). Small wonder that William Wells Brown believed that slavery never had
and never would be represented. Even if one could do justice to the subject, one would
still have to break through imposing walls of prejudice and racial control before one could
hope for a proper hearing.
But that is exactly what many African Americans who had experienced slavery firsthand
tried to do, and their efforts to tell their stories, to represent the unrepresentable, are
collectively known as “slave narratives,” the body of testimony to which the book you are
reading is devoted. In a study that was essential—indeed, foundational—in inspiring and
guiding serious scholarly interest in slave narratives, Marion Wilson Starling provided in
1946 “a bibliographic guide to the location of 6006 narrative records,” records that “ex
tend from 1703–1944” (xxvi). These records, Starling notes, “are to be discovered in judi
cial records, broadsides, private printings, abolitionist newspapers and volumes, scholar
ly journals, church records, unpublished collections, and a few regular
publications” (xxvi). Included among those narratives are the book-length autobiogra
phies and biographies that have been celebrated for their historical importance. Books
such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gus
tavus Vassa, the African (1789), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave (1845), and Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901)
were well known in their own time and have come to be considered as definitive accounts
Page 4 of 18
Introduction
of the different significant eras of slavery from the colonial to the post-Civil War eras.
Other books, such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) or Lucy
A. Delaney’s From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom, were rela
tively unknown in their own time but have since been recognized as essential entrances
to the history of slavery, even as correctives to the history viewed through the pages of
narratives written by men. But beyond the books lies a broad range of testimony, includ
ing over 10,000 pages of interviews gathered by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s
under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The record of slave nar
ratives is, in other words, extensive, varied, and rich. African Americans, it turns out, did
much to address their exclusion from and misrepresentation in the historical record.
So why are we still struggling to come to a balanced and comprehensive understanding of

this history, one that extends beyond a discrete chapter in a history textbook, a chapter
seemingly designed to keep slavery, as it were, in its place? In part, the answer is that
scholars were slow in appreciating the value of this rich record. For many years, scholars
dismissed the recorded testimony of the formerly enslaved as unreliable historical
records, to the extent that they considered such testimony at all. The early histories of
slavery—most prominently, Ulrich B. Phillips’s influential American Negro Slavery (1918)
and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929)—focused their studies, and based their find
ings, on the records of white southerners, the planters who relied on (p. 5) slave labor, at
tending almost exclusively to the plantations that have come to symbolize slavery. Accord
ingly, many were prepared to accept Phillips’s assumptions about “negroes, who for the
most part were by racial quality submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of
gloomy, amiable and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited pater
nalism rather than repression” (Phillips 341–342). Certainly, many nineteenth-century
white Americans viewed the enslaved in this way, and any historian looking at the “evi
dence,” the great balk of books and documents written by white Americans characteriz
ing enslaved blacks, would have reason to come to such conclusions, but critical attention
to slave narratives would lead one to different conclusions. Phillips’s conclusions were
challenged strongly, though, in the 1950s. Kenneth Stampp offered a more comprehen
sive view of plantation life in The Peculiar Institution (1956), arguing for the need to dis
sociate white romantic views of plantation slavery from hard reality, and arguing against
the assumptions of fundamental racial difference central to Phillips’s thinking. In Slavery:
A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959, revised in 1968 and
1976) Stanley Elkins also argued against such assumptions, but reached conclusions simi
lar to Phillips’ by a different route, arguing that docile slaves—the Sambo type, in Elkins’s
study—were not born but shaped by hard experience under slavery.
As historians increasingly debated such conclusions about the character of the enslaved,
they eventually recognized the importance of considering slave testimony itself. Neither
Stampp nor Elkins relied on slave narratives, either written accounts or the large body of
WPA testimony, but by the 1970s slave testimony inspired a flood of important reconsider
ations of slave life, and, therefore, of the history of slavery more broadly. Among the most
influential of these studies were John W. Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation
Life in the American South (1972), George Rawick’s From Sundown to Sunup: The Mak
Page 5 of 18
Introduction
ing of the Black Community (1972), Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World
the Slaves Made (1974), Herbert G. Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom,
1750–1925 (1976), and Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-
American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977). The importance of this shift in
historical practice cannot be overstated. Blassingame, for example, begins his preface to
The Slave Community by noting that “even a cursory examination of the literature shows
that historians have never systematically explored the life experience of American
slaves,” whereas “southern planters, on the other hand, have had an extremely good
press in the United States” (xi). Historians, he observes, “have, in effect, been listening to
only one side of a complicated debate” (xi). His concerns in The Slave Community, he em
phasized, were dramatically different: “This book describes and analyzes the life of the
black slave: his African heritage, culture, family, acculturation, behavior, religion, and
personality” (xi). As this list suggests, the range of questions to ask of slave testimony
was broad, and the books published in the 1970s, while doing much to prepare for a bal
anced debate, largely surveyed a previously unexplored historical landscape.
With new resources, though, came new complications, for slave testimony was anything
but transparent. Many early book-length narratives were published specifically to (p. 6)
promote the anti-slavery cause, and their authenticity was questioned so frequently—of
ten, because white readers didn’t believe that black Americans were capable of writing
their own life stories—that the phrase “written by himself” or “written by herself” be
came a regular feature of these publications. Addressing those narratives, James Olney
has observed,
Unlike autobiography in general the narratives are all trained on one and the
same objective reality, they have a coherent and defined audience, and have be
hind them and guiding them an organized group of ‘sponsors,’ and they are pos
sessed of very specific motives, intentions, and uses understood by narrators,
sponsors, and audiences alike: to reveal the truth of slavery and so to bring about
its abolition. How, then, could the narratives be anything but very much like one
another? (154)
Although Blassingame had hoped to find in his sources evidence of “the slave’s inner life,
his thoughts, actions, self-concepts, or personality,” Olney suggests that such interiority is
obscured by the political conditions under which the narratives were produced. Indeed,
Olney argues that “the conventions for slave narratives were so early and so firmly estab
lished that one can imagine a sort of master outline…drawn from the great narratives and
guiding the lesser ones” (152). This outline would include the presentation of the book,
the testimonials or prefaces written by white abolitionists “or by a white amanuensis/edi
tor/author actually responsible for the text” (152); but it would include as well a number
of narrative episodes—for example, the struggle for the acquisition of literacy, descrip
tions of “Christian” slaveholders who were more cruel than others, descriptions of whip
pings, and a “description of the amounts of food and clothing given to slaves, the work re
quired of them, the pattern of a day, a week, a year” (153). What “truth of slavery” could
Page 6 of 18
Introduction
one hope to find from such resources beyond the views that guided them in the first
place?
Even if we note that Olney’s conclusions apply only to a relative handful of slave narra
tives, we face other challenges in getting to the heart of the testimony both revealed in
and obscured by these accounts. If we focus only on book-length narratives, we need to
account for autobiographies published specifically in the service of anti-slavery organiza
tions; autobiographies published independently and often without a primary political pur
pose; multiple versions of autobiographical narratives, offering both contradictory and
evolving accounts of the same life story; biographies by white authors on black subjects,
often revealing much more about the author than the subject; autobiographies written by
a white amanuensis, often with white authors clearly engaged in acts of ventriloquism,
putting words in the mouths of their subjects; multiple versions of narratives written by a
white biographer or amanuensis; hybrid narratives of fiction and autobiography, with un
clear lines between the actual and the imagined; and singular tales of discovered or local
stories—for example, Henry Trumbull’s Life and Adventures of Robert, the Hermit of
Massachusetts, not a book that fits into any clear political purpose or any master outline
of the genre. If one were to bring together examples of all these forms of “the slave nar
rative,” one would have trouble piecing together a clear history of “the slave community.”
Even the three versions of his life that Frederick (p. 7) Douglass wrote and published over
the years—Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and
Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881)—do not add up to a
clear and consistent life portrait. If we extend our perspective to take in the whole of
slave testimony, the story gets even more complicated, and the call for a coherent portrait
is both compelling and elusive.
Nor would a comparative reading of these narratives allow one to focus exclusively on the
history of slavery, for almost all the narratives published before the Civil War were writ
ten after the enslaved subject had reached at least nominal freedom, and all the narra
tives published after the war are as much about a tenuous and restricted freedom as
about slavery. As Rhondda R. Thomas explains in her contribution to this volume, locating
the narratives both geographically and historically can sometimes be difficult. Are these
stories about the South or about the North—or about Canada or Great Britain, where
many fugitive slaves moved to protect the freedom they had struggled to attain? Do we
account for them by their points of departure or by their points of arrival and publication
sites? One thinks, for example, of William Andrews’s collection of North Carolina narra
tives, Arna Bontemps’s collection of Connecticut narratives, and Eugene McCarthy and
Thomas Doughton’s collection of narratives associated with Worcester, Massachusetts. In
each case, the scholars have made connections among a gathering of narratives and pub
lished them together to address a particular regional history, but the same narratives
could have been gathered differently to speak of other regions, other histories. Some nar
ratives were written in England, such as William and Ellen Crafts’s Running a Thousand
Miles for Freedom or the “First English Edition” of Henry Box Brown’s story; others are
associated with other significant historical sites (Elizabeth Keckley, for example, who
served in the White House during the Lincoln admistration); and some were published
Page 7 of 18
Introduction
and promoted in social spaces generally (and sometimes strangely) not marked in current
scholarship as significant sites of nineteenth-century African American history (for exam
ple, Lucy Delaney’s, published in St. Louis—a significant site of African American history,
but one only gradually earning the attention of scholars—or Louis Hughes’s, published in
Milwaukee). In virtually all slave narratives, one needs to account for significant move
ment, involving different social spaces, shifting social and political contingencies, and
sometimes even fundamentally different legal and social definitions of “blackness” or
“whiteness” as the narrative subject travels from place to place, where different laws and
customs applied.
Even if we focus on a single account, we are likely to have reason to question the means
by which we can get to the views of those who experienced slavery. In both book-length
narratives and the wider field of slave remembrance, the testimonies of those who had ex
perienced slavery are often highly mediated—that is, presented to us by others. Since all
of white culture so frequently seemed devoted to creating fictions about what it means to
be black, the interest of even the most trusted white Americans in the life stories of black
Americans was almost always a mixed blessing. Scholars and teachers still struggle to
make the point, for example, that many of Sojourner Truth’s speeches were later misre
membered and misrepresented, as white writers not only put words in her mouth but also
presented Truth’s speech patterns in stereotypical black southern dialect, (p. 8) even
though Truth was raised in a Dutch-speaking area of New York. Sarah Bradford, looking
to help Harriet Tubman, wrote a biography that begins by having the young Tubman en
gaged with “a group of merry little darkies,” a biography that also praises Tubman by dis
tinguishing her and her family from other African Americans, asserting that “all should
not be judged by the idle, miserable darkies who have swarmed about Washington and
other cities since the War” (Bradford 13, 69). Such well-intended but prejudiced misrep
resentations were not unusual, and almost all African American public figures of the time
demonstrate a keen understanding of what it means to live in a white supremacist cul
ture. African American narrators accordingly were cautious about the prospect of reveal
ing the details of their lives even to benevolent white readers who were simultaneously
being influenced by a culture bent on trivializing, eliminating, and otherwise controlling
the African American presence in the North. As many slave narrators realized, to tell your
story is to give someone control over your life, unless they are willing to reveal just as
much about themselves. As Robert B. Stepto has observed,
The risks that written storytelling undertakes are…at least twofold: one is that the
reader will become a hearer but not manage an authenticating response; the oth
er is that the reader will remain a reader and not only belittle or reject
storytelling’s particular “keen disturbance,” but also issue confrontational re
sponses which sustain altogether different definitions of literature, of literacy, and
of appropriate reader response. (308)
Slave narratives, accordingly, are difficult acts of remembrance—difficult in the attempt

to tell a deeply intimate story of violation, and difficult in the means by which that story is
related and received.
Page 8 of 18
Introduction
The most striking example of an African American life virtually lost in its story is that of
Josiah Henson, who became associated Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous fictional charac
ter Uncle Tom. Following the publication of the original version of his story in 1849 and
the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, Henson became famous, somewhat improb
ably, as the “model” for the character Uncle Tom in Stowe’s novel. By the time the last
version of Henson’s story was published, his life had become so identified with that of Un
cle Tom that any hope of understanding the actual man was lost in the fame of the fiction
al character. As Robin Winks has observed, “Henson was seldom left free to be himself, to
assimilate if he wished to into the mainstream of Canadian life—even of black Canadian
life—for he became the focus of abolitionist attention, a tool to be used in a propaganda
campaign which was not above much juggling with the facts, however proper its ultimate
goals may have been” (Introduction vi). Henson’s original narrative, published in 1849,
was written by Samuel A. Eliot, “a former Mayor of Boston who was well-known for his
moderate anti-slavery views” (Winks xiii). This version tells the story of a man who es
caped from slavery and eventually settled in the Dawn settlement in Canada, where he
worked to promote that developing African American community. There is no evidence
that this narrative provided Stowe with her model for the character Uncle Tom, but after
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, the association developed all the same, perhaps aided
by Stowe’s preface to the “substantially revised” version of Henson’s life published (p. 9)
in 1858 (Winks xxxi). After that time, Henson’s narrative was in the hands of the English
clergyman-editor John Lobb. The third version of Henson’s narrative, published in 1877,
was entitled “Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life”: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson
(Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom”), From 1789 to 1876. In 1881, Lobb pub
lished The Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (“Uncle Tom”) From 1789 to 1881, a
version that includes a chapter entitled “Mrs. Stowe’s Characters,” another entitled “‘Un
cle Tom’ and the Editor’s Visit to Her Majesty the Queen,” a “Summary of ‘Uncle Tom’s’
Public Services,” and an appendix offering “A Sketch of Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe.”
One could trace a similar path in the histories of many of those who tried to draw from
their lives either to testify against slavery or to leave some sign of a life, a community,
and a world all but lost in the dominant version of history. The different editions of the
Narrative of Sojourner Truth can be viewed as a struggle between someone known for
her strong voice and the sometimes condescending voices of those who present them
selves as her biographers and champions. Many scholars view Frederick Douglass’s sec
ond autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), as a declaration of indepen
dence from William Lloyd Garrison and other white abolitionists who helped make possi
ble Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an Ameri
can Slave (1845). Henry “Box” Brown followed his original narrative, authored by white
abolitionist Charles Stearns—Narrative of Henry Box Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery
Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide, Written from a Statement of Facts Made by
Himself. With Remarks upon the Remedy for Slavery (1849)—with one that emphasizes
Brown’s attempt to reclaim his story, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written
by Himself (1851). In a different kind of self-reclamation, Thomas Jones resisted the kind
of association that haunted Josiah Henson. Jones’s original narrative, published in 1855,
Page 9 of 18
Introduction
was entitled Experience and Personal Narrative of Uncle Tom Jones, Who Was for Forty
Years a Slave. Years later, Jones published another version, still written by another, but
this one highlighting Jones’s professional accomplishments and community: The Experi
ence of Rev. Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years, Written by a
Friend, as Related to Him by Brother Jones (1885). For those who published just one ver
sion of their narrative, similar problems abound, and one needs to be attentive to the ca
cophony of voices and the challenges of local contexts and interracial connections if one
is to get at the full story of slavery and its effects.
When we turn from book-length slave narratives to the broader field of slave testimony,
we encounter even greater challenges. As Marie Jenkins Schwartz and Sharon Ann Mush
er explain in their contributions to this volume, the WPA interviews of the 1930s yielded a
great deal of testimony that historians have sometimes ignored and often struggled to
evaluate. In many cases, the interviewers were white, and those who had experienced
slavery (not to mention the harsh racial climate following slavery) were naturally hesitant
to trust such interviewers. Moreover, those being interviewed were, in many cases, only
children when they experienced slavery, so their stories often carry traces of the ways in
which oral culture and other influences shape memory over time. Other recorded testimo
ny comes to us from various sources—newspapers, diaries or memoirs, even pension
records, to mention only a few. In each case, we receive these narratives through the
complicating filters of a difficult history, and the narratives we receive often reveal
(p. 10)
as much about those filters as about the conditions of slavery or the struggle for freedom.
The slave narratives, from whatever source, are valuable to us, though, not despite such
complications but because of them, for such complications are not incidental to the story
of American slavery and its effects but very much a part of it. Unless we want to continue
the struggle to maintain the history of U.S. slavery as a conveniently discrete chapter in
American history, we need to attend to the comprehensive reach of this story. In other
words, we need to catch up to William Wells Brown, who in his 1847 speech before the
Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, insisted that addressing the reali
ties of slavery means addressing its effects far beyond the experiences of the enslaved. It
is difficult to think of any aspect of U.S. culture and society that has not been influenced
and, at times, fundamentally shaped by the political, economic, philosophical, and theo
logical gymnastics required to maintain a system of slavery in a land that declared itself
for liberty and equality. The difficult collaborations and other transactions between white
and black Americans in the slave narratives reveal a great deal about the effects of slav
ery, the ways in which a convoluted and incoherent social order settled into habits of
mind. So much slave testimony comes to us indirectly, making the larger story one of
patchwork history and gathered traces of a still-dynamic past—but the search for that
larger story is a quest that involves us in the heart of American history. As we discover
anew as the past erupts again and again, forcing itself back into our consciousness, this is
a story that has everything to do with who Americans are, who they can reasonably hope
to be, and how they can move closer to the ideals they have for so long claimed as central
to their national character.
Page 10 of 18
Introduction
Addressing the ongoing challenge to “manage an authenticating response” to the enor

mous and still only partially examined body of slave testimony, The Oxford Handbook of
the African American Slave Narrative is both a glance back and a look forward. Included
in this Handbook are 25 essays from some of the most thoughtful, informed, and consci
entious scholars in the field, and in their individual chapters, each scholar offers a view of
the work that has come before so as to get to the work that remains. The guiding princi
ple for the volume is that articulated by William Wells Brown so many years ago, that
slavery both cannot and must be represented, and that the task of addressing this vast
world of concerns takes one beyond the usual borders that distinguish between south and
north, slave and free, black and white. Applied to the slave narratives, the challenge is to
look for narratives beyond those contained in the usual historical archives, beyond the
book-length narratives that usually represent the whole of testimony, and beyond the few
leading figures who usually are expected to speak for all—most often, Frederick Dou
glass, Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, and only a
very few others. As Deborah E. McDowell has noted, scholars and teachers have long
“privileged and mystified Douglass’s narrative” by having it serve a “double duty: not on
ly does it make slavery intelligible, but the ‘black experience’ as well” (p. 11) (38–39).
When offering this observation, McDowell was especially concerned with the absence of
attention to women who wrote or told of their lives under slavery. “It is this choice of Dou
glass as…‘representative man,’” McDowell argues, “as the part that stands for the whole,
that reproduces the omission of women from view, except as afterthoughts different from
‘the same’ (black men)” (56). The same point could be made more broadly to include au
thors who were less recognizably literary in their approach to their stories, or slaves
whose stories relied on others for the telling, from those whose stories were related in,
say, the pages of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a collection of doc
umentary evidence to support her contested representation of slavery in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin) to those whose stories relied on the understanding of, or even the questions se
lected by, the interviewers for the Federal Writers’ Project. A central premise of The Ox
ford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative is that the search for slave testi
mony is ongoing, as is the attempt to give that testimony a fair hearing and an appropri
ate context once it has been recovered.
The essays included in this volume are designed to promote scholarship that will continue
the work of recovering the testimony of the enslaved while also developing innovative
methods for attending to that body of testimony creatively and thoughtfully. In planning
the volume and preparing the essays, we have prioritized the broad tradition over individ
ual authors, and while we account for the important scholarship that has brought us this
far, we offer, as well, approaches that will take us deeper into the environment, even the
soundscapes, of slavery. Our intent is not to highlight the singularity of any particular ac
count, nor to comfortably locate slave narratives in traditional literary or cultural history,
but rather to faithfully represent a body of writing and testimony that was designed to
speak for the many, to represent the unspeakable, and to account for the experience of
enslaved and nominally free communities. There are no chapters devoted to major writ
ers, since various resources already exist for that purpose and since those writers natu
Page 11 of 18
Introduction
rally emerge as central figures in many of the essays. In almost all the chapters, we have
tried to encapsulate the conventional wisdom on the subject in the process of exploring
critical new directions for approaching these concerns. The goal of this Oxford Handbook
is to encourage research on a great number of understudied narratives while demonstrat
ing the rich complexity of this field of study for those just entering it.
Historical Fractures
What stories do slave narratives tell? What histories do they reveal? How do they fit into,
challenge, undermine, or otherwise complicate the stories we rely upon, the histories to
which we turn and from which we draw for inspiration and guidance? The chapters in this
section address the challenge of answering such questions. In many ways, Mitch Kachun
offers an introduction to all that follows by addressing the importance of memory in our
approach to slave narratives—both the memories of those who told their stories, and the
remembrance that should follow the telling. Attending to our reliance (p. 12) on both the
vagaries and the intimacies of memory, Kachun explores the fractured but insistent pres
ence of slave narratives in the nation’s shared history, a sense of history that often comes
to us piecemeal, in traces and fragments through various sources. Following those traces,
Eric Gardner addresses the deep connection between the recording and the remem
brance of history. African American historians have long recognized that many of the doc
uments they need to piece together African American history are scattered among public
records and other archives devoted to other purposes. The story of African American at
tempts to come to an understanding of their own history is a story of ongoing attempts to
identify and gather those scattered documents. Gardner explores the challenges of doing
this work in search of slave testimony, working from archive to archive, both with and
against the intended purposes of those archives. Dickson Bruce takes us from the
archives to the practice of history, addressing the impact of the recognition of slave nar
ratives as important if complicated forms of historical evidence. Noting that the slave nar
ratives that receive the most attention were usually written or narrated by exceptional
men and women, Bruce notes how these narratives nonetheless provide us with an en
trance into communities otherwise obscured by the historical record. Jeannine DeLom
bard approaches the historical record from a different angle, reminding us that slavery
was a legal institution—a seemingly simple fact, until one remembers that most slave tes
timony emerged from a difficult legal transaction—presented either by fugitives from
American law or by those who had negotiated a legal “freedom” from slavery, which is far
different from the idealized freedom that seems to await at the end in popular stories of
the heroic Underground Railroad. Slave narratives, DeLombard demonstrates, are often
quite focused on legal matters—from commentary on Constitutional theory to negotia
tions and disputes over the nature or even the possibility of one’s always tenuous “free
dom.”
Page 12 of 18
Introduction
Layered Testimonies
Although they are sometimes treated as straightforward individual statements, slave nar
ratives are anything but, and the challenge of identifying and working through the lay
ered testimonies is the subject of this section. Marie Jenkins Schwartz comments on the
challenges posed by the rich records of the WPA interviews. Noting that scholars initially
viewed the narratives with suspicion, since there were so many reasons to see the inter
views as biased or otherwise flawed, Schwartz notes that historians should always treat
historical documents with some skepticism, but she notes that the historical commentary
on the WPA records itself constitutes an important historical archive that should also be
approached with some skepticism. When these records are considered together—WPA in
terviews and the scholarship marking their gradual acceptance as historical evidence—
we are able to realize the value of this testimony, including its ability to shape the meth
ods, practice, and conclusions of historical scholarship over time. Sharon Ann Musher
addresses the WPA documents as well, emphasizing the importance of a body of (p. 13)
testimony that takes us beyond the stories of the exceptional figures we encounter
through most of the “classic” book-length slave narratives. Noting the challenge of evalu
ating these documents, Musher focuses on specific problems the WPA narratives pose for
researchers and explains how such problems can be productively addressed. Exploring
yet another layer of the historical record, Elizabeth Regosin reminds us that slave narra
tives can be found in documents not specifically devoted to recording individual accounts
of enslavement. Regosin turns to the Civil War pension records in the National Archives
to gather testimony from those who looked for compensation for the service of African
American soldiers during the Civil War. In doing so, she not only uncovers a rich body of
testimony that, like the WPA narratives, take us beyond the perspectives of the exception
al few, she also underscores the ways in which slave narratives always speak of a difficult
negotiation over the legal terms of one’s recognition as a national subject. John Michael
Vlach extends the point still further, noting that slave testimony is written across the
landscape, inscribed even on the oft-romanticized facade of slavery, the plantation. Who
built the plantations, Vlach asks, and shaped the surrounding landscape—and what can
we learn by studying the design of the houses of the enslaved and the environments
shaped by the enslaved, either in collaboration with or against the designs of their own
ers?
Textual Bindings
After searching WPA accounts, pension records, and the architecture of slavery for a sta
ble and reliable record of the lives and perspectives of the enslaved, one might be pre
pared to believe that the most prominent of the slave narratives—the published texts for
mer slaves authored or narrated—should be easy to access. In fact, though, these narra
tives are deeply layered as well, and the enslaved sometimes found themselves bound in
print as they had been bound in life, at the mercy of white narrators, editors, publishers,
and critics. What does it mean to think of these narratives as books, to place them in the
Page 13 of 18
Introduction
world of publishing, distribution, and reception, to consider the presentation of this testi
mony in a culture in which books circulated widely and had broad and intimate power?
What does it mean to consider them in the context of American literary history? Teresa
Goddu initiates this section’s concerns by meditating on the slave narratives as material
objects, as books in an active print culture that included conventions of printing, distribu
tion, and reception. Dwight McBride and Justin A. Joyce examine the significance of print
culture as well, focusing on readers. Slave narrators found a ready audience, McBride
and Joyce observe, but it was an audience rather too ready—that is, an audience ready to
understand them before they had told their individual stories. Both of these chapters,
then, address the ways in which those who told their stories had to work with and against
assumptions about black Americans and slavery, negotiating the (often racist) conven
tions of communication and understanding. Kenneth Warren, in turn, explores the role of
these narratives in the most elevated realm for considering matters of communication
and understanding, literary history. Noting that the story (p. 14) of the individual fugitive
slave’s quest for freedom has played a more pronounced role in American literary history
than has the more significant history of emancipation, Warren explores the tension cen
tral to the slave narratives—between exceptional individuals and anonymous, exploited la
borers—and finds in that tension a central theme of American intellectual and literary his
tory. Indeed, ideological contradictions and cultural tensions abound in slave narratives,
and if we are to fully address the implications of these challenging but revealing texts, we
need to pay attention to their visual as well as their discursive cues, as Marcus Wood
explains in his chapter. Slave narratives often make pointed use of illustrations, but those
illustrations (even photographs of prominent people) are anything but straightforward
supplements to the narrative message. Rather, the illustrations themselves offered lay
ered testimony, often carrying traces of other sources, and often opening up rather than
resolving narrative possibilities. And what happens to those narrative possibilities when
the assumed purpose of slave narratives—a strong anti-slavery message, a call to action—
is no longer the primary or even a pressing point? Addressing this question, William An
drews looks at slave narratives published after the Civil War, and thus at a time when one
could not hope for even the problematically sympathetic readers that McBride and Joyce
describe.
Experience and Authority

We return, then, to the larger purpose of slave narratives—not just to argue against the
institution of slavery but to represent the lives affected by slavery, that is, the individuals
and communities shaped by the economic, political, and social policies and practices
needed for the maintenance of this system for controlling laboring populations. Aliyyah
Abdur-Rahman explores the intimate challenges of serving as a witness to the sexual con
trol and violations fundamental to experience of slavery, including the challenges of
strategically turning such violations to the reader’s own experience, forcing recognition
of the fundamental wrongs encouraged by a system that gave people absolute control
over others. But even that message of sexual violence needed to operate in a culture with
established prejudices about the possibilities and rights assigned to women, and DoVean
Page 14 of 18
Introduction
na Fulton accordingly explores the deeply feminist work promoted by women who told
their story, work still required if we are to do justice to those stories today. Maurice O.
Wallace extends that point by noting that even black males needed to struggle against the
priorities of a patriarchal culture, particularly in that the system of slavery and the defini
tion of masculinity were both deeply shaped by capitalist ideology. Given the challenges
of establishing individual authority over one’s identity, many slave narratives highlight
the importance of family and community, though these relationships were often compli
cated by the realities of slavery and what counted as freedom for those who escaped.
Brenda Stevenson addresses the broad spectrum of family and community affiliations pre
sented in slave narratives, from African ties to loved ones separated by slavery. Finally,
Barbara McCaskill explores the difficult collaborations involved in virtually every slave
narrative—from (p. 15) collaborations between black narrators and white authors to those
broader collaborations suggested by the presentation of family and community in the nar
ratives.
Environments and Migrations

As individuals are shaped by their communities, so both individuals and communities are
influenced by their environments and, through acts of both resistance and witnessing,
can work to influence those environments in turn. Kimberly Smith explores the ways in
which slave narratives both reflect and comment on a landscape itself managed by the
dictates of the economic and social priorities of the system of slavery. Although these nar
ratives are not often included in the history of nature writing, Smith explains why they
should be, and how they might lead us to a better understanding of terms and goals of en
vironmental studies. But as we consider the role of the communities and environments
central to the perspectives and identities of those who offered their testimonies of en
slavement, Rhondda R. Thomas cautions us to think carefully about how we locate slave
narratives. Slave narratives, she notes, are complex commentaries on the importance of
place and often resist our attempts to categorize them geographically in support of a con
ceptually neat understanding of the past (and, accordingly, of the present). Accounting for
Thomas’s analysis, we need to question this Handbook’s own conceptual foundation—the
focus on African American slave narratives. Although this volume is devoted primarily to
those narratives that address the history of slavery in the United States, one cannot ac
count for that history without accounting for nations and communities beyond U.S. bor
ders. Winfried Siemerling explores the presence of slave narratives in the Americas
broadly, and builds to the special significance of Canada in these narratives. Nicole N.
Aljoe turns to another particularly significant region and surveys Caribbean Slave Narra
tives that, important in and of themselves, offer important perspectives on the conditions
and dynamics of slave testimony broadly. As these scholars demonstrate, such interna
tional perspectives are important not only for context but because U.S. slavery is ground
ed in a deeply international and intercontinental history. Nor is this history limited to the
dynamics of the slave trade or to the border-crossing of U.S. slaves, as Helen Thomas
demonstrates, noting the ways in which the history of the slave trade influenced British
Page 15 of 18
Introduction
literature, and then the ways that literature, in turn, became an important presence in
slave narratives.
Echoes and Traces

That slave narratives can teach us much about who we are and how our world was
shaped is now firmly established, though there is still much work to do. Some of that
work involves the ongoing attempt to recover existing slave testimony wherever we can
find it. Some of that work, too, involves following the traces of this history, and of this
(p. 16) narrative tradition, beyond the testimony of the enslaved. Just as the history of
slavery involved and influenced every aspect of American governance and culture, so
slave narratives have been influential as well, for the importance of accounting for lives
shaped by this history has not diminished over time. This final section, accordingly, ad
dresses the echoes and traces of slavery in other narratives and expressive forms.
Daphne Brooks explores “the poetics of the sonic slave narrative” in her chapter on Blind
Tom, whose testimony is as pressing but also as complicated as anything we might find in
a “classic” narrative by Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs. Joycelyn Moody, in turn,
looks at two “postmemory narratives,” two narratives not about the experience of slavery
but rather about slavery’s traces in the narratives of two African Americans in Rhode Is
land, Elleanor Eldridge and William J. Brown. Together, these chapters are intended to
guide us to the broad world of testimony essential to the larger story toward which all
slave narratives gesture, the story that we can only come to know gradually, and often
through traces that themselves carry the shadows of an obscuring history. Following such
traces, some have talked of certain African American novels and autobiographies as part
of a “neo-slave-narrative tradition,” others have traced influences that lead from the spiri
tuals to jazz, and still others have noted continuities in dance, in pottery, in quilting, in
folklore, even in physical gestures. Fundamentally, the slave narratives are about a histo
ry that presses for a hearing, and the closing chapters of this volume are case studies in
responding to that call.
To understand the ways in which the story of an individual life can be understood as a sto
ry about history is hardly a simple matter. In their introduction to History & Memory,
Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally suggest that “the first black American historians
may have been the authors of slave narratives, those whose testimonies comprised not
only eyewitness accounts of remembered experience but also a set of world views with in
terpretations, analyses, and historical judgments.” “At these points,” they argue, “memo
ry and history come together.” As the following studies of slave narratives collectively
demonstrate, ths history of slavery involves conditions and struggles that can be under
stood only if one accounts for the perspective and moral understanding that arises from
lived experience. Who tells the story, how one tells the story, why one is telling the story,
and what larger vision of history one is serving—these are questions of inescapable impli
cations for this history that, as William Wells Brown suggested, never can be fully repre
sented. One must bring oneself to this history, as did those who left us these narratives,
and even as we attempt to tell the larger story, we can never allow ourselves to stray too
Page 16 of 18
Introduction
far from the many individual stories that have provided us with our intimate entrance to
this difficult past. The scholars who have contributed the chapters to this volume have all
entered into a deeply personal relationship with this demanding but elusive history, and
with the sources they study. We hope that this volume offers its readers with the back
ground, guidance, and vision that might inspire them to carry this work to the next gener
ation.
References
The Anglo-African Magazine, Volume 1—1859. Ed. William Loren Katz. New York: Arno
Press and The New York Times, 1968.
Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South.
New York: Oxford U Press, 1972.
Bradford, Sarah. Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People. 2nd. ed. 1886. Rpt. New
York: Citadel Press, 1991.
Brown, William Wells. A Lecture Delivered Before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of
Salem, at Lyceum Hall, Nov. 14, 1847. Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 1847.
Delaney, Lucy A. From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom. In Six
Women’s Slave Narratives. Ed. William L. Andrews. The Schomburg Library of Nine
teenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford U Press, 1988.
Easton, Hosea. A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition
of the Colored People of the U. States; and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them: With a
Sermon on the Duty of the Church to Them. 1837. Rpt. New York: Arno Press and The
New York Times, 1969.
Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. 3rd
Edition. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1976.
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Ed. Jean Fagan
Yellin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2000.
McDowell, Deborah E. “In the First Place: Making Frederick Douglass and the Afro-Amer
ican Narrative Tradition,” in African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Es
says, Ed. William L. Andrews. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993: 36–58.
Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New Eng
land, 1780–1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Liter
ature,” in The Slave’s Narrative, Ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Oxford:
Oxford U Press, 1985. 148–175.
Page 17 of 18
Introduction
Proceedings of the Colored National Convention, Held in Rochester, July 6th, 7th and 8th,
1853, in Minutes and Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830-1864, Ed.
Howard Holman Bell. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969.
Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New
York: Vintage, 1956.
Starling, Marion Wilson. The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History. 2nd ed.
Washington, DC: Howard U Press, 1988.
Stepto, Robert B. “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives,” in Reconstructing

American Literary History. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press,
1986. 300–322.
“To Our Patrons.” Freedom’s Journal. March 16, 1827.
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment
and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime. New York: D. Apple
ton, 1918.
Walker, David. David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the
Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of United
States of America. 3rd. ed. 1830. New York: Hill and Wang, 1965.
Winks, Robin W. Introduction, in An Autobiography of The Reverend Josiah Henson. Four

Fugitive Slave Narratives. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969. v–xxxiv. (p. 18)
John Ernest
John Ernest, University of Delaware
Page 18 of 18
Slave Narratives and Historical Memory

Mitch Kachun

Online Publication Date: Jan 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.001
This essay examines the problematic nature of individual memory in the writing of slave
narratives; considers scholars’ attention to both individual and collective memory in their
interpretations of slave narratives; and evaluates slave narratives’ changing role in shap
ing the broader public’s understanding of slavery in American history. Scholars and gen
eral readers largely ignored slave narratives from the late nineteenth century until oral
interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administra
tion became widely available in the 1970s. Since that time, slave narratives have become
central to our collective cultural memory of slaves and slavery.
Keywords: slave narratives, collective memory, autobiographical memory, traumatic memory, oral history, histori
ography, Works Progress Administration
IN a very fundamental sense, the slave narrative has everything to do with memory. Like
all autobiography, a slave narrative represents the imaginative remembering, after the
fact, of an individual’s life and experiences, either written down by the person or narrat
ed to someone else who then recorded the person’s recollections. Critic Robert B. Stepto
argues that “the strident, moral voice of the former slave recounting, exposing…and
above all remembering his ordeal in bondage is the single most impressive feature of a
slave narrative” (225). We must also not lose sight of the fact that these individual recol
lections, like all acts of purposeful memory, necessarily take place within a social context.
This is equally true of published slave autobiographies (which are generally crafted and
published with particular political or economic ends); interviews of former slaves (which
are heavily influenced by the particular context of the interview—the race of the inter
viewer, the questions asked, the time and place, and the interviewee’s sense of the best
answers for that situation); and unpublished personal narratives (often written in order to
preserve the memories and experiences of the author for family members and descen
dants).
Scholars critically assessing the interconnections of slave narratives and memory must
therefore approach the topic considering both individual and collective memory, broadly
defined. We must ask questions of the individual’s personal memory of his or her experi
Page 1 of 17
ences. How close to the events was the narrative written? How credible and reliable is
the author? What motives might move the author (or interviewer or amanuensis) to dis
tort, omit, or completely fabricate aspects of the tale? To what extent does individual psy
chology affect what is remembered and what is forgotten? We must also ponder the social
context within which the narrative is produced. What sorts of public issues influence the
telling of the tale? Are certain types of events and perspectives more meaningful, more
readily accepted, or more politically useful at particular historical moments and loca
tions? What roles have publicly available slave narratives played over time in shaping our
shifting collective cultural memory of slaves and slavery? (p. 22)
The origin of the term “slave narrative” is itself intriguing and not completely clear.
Searches in several online historical databases—Making of America, Reader’s Guide Ret
rospective, and Readex American Historical Newspapers—produce no references to the
phrases “slave narrative” or “slave narratives” during the nineteenth century. Of course,
many of the most famous autobiographers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
actually use the word “narrative” in their titles, as with Briton Hammon, Olaudah
Equiano, Nancy Prince, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and many others. This very
likely contributed to the term’s general adoption. W.E.B. Du Bois used the phrase in a
1913 essay on “The Negro in Literature and Art” (235). Alain Locke referred to the “so-
called ‘slave narratives’” in 1928, and E. Franklin Frazier used the term two years later
(Locke 238, Frazier 246). In 1932, a reviewer cited as one of the signal literary accom
plishments of Vernon Loggins’s The Negro Author that Loggins “emphasizes sufficiently
for the first time the importance of the slave narrative or autobiography, and points out
that it should be regarded as distinct type or class of writing” (Nelson 322). As scholars
after the 1940s began slowly to pay greater attention to slaves’ own life experiences and
perspectives, they relied on both published antebellum autobiographies and recently col
lected interviews with former slaves. Funded by the New Deal’s Works Progress Adminis
tration, the Federal Writers Project collected thousands of oral histories of former slaves
between 1936 and 1938. Those interviews were assembled and made available in the Li
brary of Congress rare book room in 1941. The project’s formal title, Slave Narratives: A
Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, seems to
have established the terms in which subsequent scholars have discussed these sources.
As scholars explored the published narratives and oral history interviews, they began to
construct a generally shared understanding of the narratives that would shape public per
ceptions and the narratives’ place in Americans’ collective memory. Long before this post-
World War II revival of interest in slave narratives—going back to the time when the first
antebellum narratives entered public discourse—readers contested their legitimacy and
implications. Critics at times disputed their veracity. When Charles Ball’s narrative, Slav
ery in the United States, was first published in the 1830s, an anonymous reviewer for the
Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine readily accepted it as “a true narrative which has fallen
from the lips of a veritable fugitive,” even though he regretted the absence of “an appen
dix of some sort, containing some documentary evidence to that effect” (8). Another sym
pathetic reviewer in the abolitionist press, this one commenting on the Narrative of James
Williams (1838), bemoaned the “marvelous unbelief” expressed by “our northern citi
Page 2 of 17
zens” and even “many of our anti-slavery friends” when faced with the narratives of the
only “competent narrators of slavery as it exists in our country. Thus the only citizens [the
slaves themselves], who personally know what slavery is from their own observation…are
not only disbelieved, but are suspected of untruth” (9). Indeed, Williams’s narrative was
roundly condemned, even by some abolitionists, as a fabrication “filled with statements of
the most inflammatory and improbable character” (“Narrative of James Williams” 11). Af
ter listing numerous refutations of names, locations, and other details in Williams’s narra
tive, abolitionists James (p. 23) G. Birney and Lewis Tappan called for its publisher to “dis
continue the sale of the work.” The American Anti-Slavery Society, which published
Williams’s narrative, continued to argue for the author’s character and his story’s truth
fulness (“Summary” of William’s Narrative).
The question of the narratives’ truthfulness was critical, and hinged not only on percep
tions of the authors’ honesty, but also on the faithfulness of their memories. Literary
scholar James Olney has argued, quite logically, that authors of antebellum slave narra
tives needed to exercise caution in calling attention to potential flaws in their memories
or their use of imagination in constructing their narratives. Such admissions would neces
sarily call into question the narrators’ veracity and, by extension, the case they were mak
ing against slavery. Olney argues further that autobiographical memory is largely irrele
vant in antebellum slave narratives since they are “most often a non-memorial description
fitted to a pre-formed mold” (151). Olney is correct in pointing out the formulaic charac
ter of many antebellum narratives and their unapologetic use as propaganda to further
the abolitionist cause. Ann Fabian also has observed that marginalized nineteenth-centu
ry autobiographers, in general, tended to adapt language, structure, and metaphor from
existing texts, crafting their own memories in a way that would be readily recognized by
the reading public (6). Yet to fully discount the working of individual memory in the slave
narratives goes too far. Some of the early slave narrators themselves directly addressed
in their texts not only their own truthfulness, but also the clarity of their memories.
One of the earliest and most widely read narratives, that of Olaudah Equiano, contains
numerous telling phrases like, “I remember” (5, 6, 21, 23, 29, 30, 31), “I do not remem
ber” (21, 32, 34), “from what I can recollect” (23), or “if my recollection does not fail
me” (32). It is interesting that Equiano, writing in the late-eighteenth century, departs so
frequently from Olney’s dictum regarding antebellum narratives, and even more so be
cause the vast majority of these references are concentrated in chapter one, which deals
with the author’s purported childhood in West Africa. The rest of Equiano’s Interesting
Narrative is notable for the paucity of such references. Given the evidence presented by
Vincent Carretta, suggesting that Equiano was actually born in Carolina, it pays to con
sider what meaning we might attach to the author’s calling attention to his own acts of
recollection of a time about which many scholars believe he was neither telling the truth
nor recounting actual memories. On the one hand, since Equiano was a young boy at the
time of his purported capture, his memory may well have been uncertain regarding de
tails of cultural practices and daily life among the Ibo. On the other, the frequent uses of
“I remember” and similar phrases may be a case of Equiano protesting too much in order
to lend credibility to a fabricated tale. It is unlikely that his use of language can help de
Page 3 of 17
termine the truth of Equiano’s nativity, but it does call our attention to slave autobiogra
phers’ references to the strength or weakness of their own memories.
Equiano was not alone in presenting evidence running counter to Olney’s argument. In
his nineteenth-century narrative, Charles Ball related his separation from his mother as a
young child, claiming that “the terrors of the scene return with painful vividness upon my
memory” (11). Frederick Douglass, in describing his aunt being (p. 24) brutally whipped
by her master, adamantly asserted his indelible memory of the incident: “I remember the
first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remem
ber it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing.” Like Equiano, Douglass also
gave occasional indications that his memory might be fallible, using phrases like “as well
as I can remember” (6, 23, 86). Others made no such concessions. Harriet Jacobs fre
quently reminded her readers of the lucidity of her recollections: “That day seems but as
yesterday, so well do I remember it” (35). “I well remember one occasion when I attended
a Methodist class meeting” (108). “The memory of it haunted me for many a year” (140).
“To this day I shudder when I remember that morning” (171). “The memory of those
beloved and honored friends will remain with me to my latest hour” (224). Perhaps no an
tebellum autobiographer was more persistent in bringing his memory into the readers’
consciousness than John Brown. Dozens of passages in his Slave Life in Georgia (1855)
included phrases like “I remember” (2, 13, 21, 63, 71, 114, 121, 124, 198, 204, 233) “I re
member well” (3, 5, 10, 94, 163, 230) or, movingly, “One of my chief regrets is that I can
not remember the name of the place where John’s wife lived” (44). Perhaps not surpris
ingly, the more emotional moments in his narrative were especially vivid: “What I en
dured of anxiety that night will never be effaced from my memory” (155)
The capacity to say, “I remember,” and to convey those often bitter memories to a reading
audience, was surely a powerful motivation to write. While the process of recalling and
setting down one’s life story must have been cathartic for many of those who had en
dured slavery and its torments, Harriet Jacobs suggests a sharp contrast between the
memories of the slave and those of the master. Jacobs informs her readers that, after hav
ing contributed to the protracted illness and death of her aunt, her “hard-hearted” mas
ter, Dr. Flint, “wish[ed] that the past could be forgotten, and that we might never think of
it” (219–20) Surely many former slaves, for different reasons, shared the desire never
again to revisit that part of their lives. But many who did record their narratives were em
powered by their ability to speak their truths and impose narrative control over the expe
rience of their enslavement and liberation. Jennifer Fleischner, writing about selected
women’s narratives, argues that slave narratives are imbued not only with the “narrators’
insistence that the stories they tell about their slave pasts are true,” but also that “the vi
olent theft of their memories—of their own selves, and of themselves by others—lay at the
sick heart of slavery” (3). Autobiographical theorist George Gusdorf has similarly assert
ed that autobiography presents the author with “the final chance to win back what has
been lost” (qtd. in Fleischner 3).
Page 4 of 17
For no authors can this have been truer than the early slave narrators. During the eigh
teenth and nineteenth centuries, European and American intellectuals emphasized the
“crucial role of memory, of a collective, cultural memory, in the estimation of a civiliza
tion” (Davis and Gates xxvii). Hume, Kant, Jefferson, and Hegel, for example, all pointed
to the centrality of both literary capacity and a sense of collective history and heritage to
any people’s claims to civilized status and even humanity. Henry Louis Gates and Charles
T. Davis succinctly capture this argument’s logic: “Without writing, there could be no re
peatable sign of the workings of reason, of mind; without memory (p. 25) or mind, there
could exist no history; without history, there could exist no humanity” (xxvii). Aside from
any other motivations, black autobiographers’ writings implicitly refuted the notion that
blacks lacked those fundamental human characteristics. The indisputable black voices at
the heart of their stories, their insistence on embracing their memories, and the collec
tive thematic unities among their narratives established not merely a black literary tradi
tion, but also the race’s intellectual legitimacy.
Of course, the more immediate purpose of the antebellum narratives was to expose
slavery’s horrors and persuade readers to join the abolitionist cause. To fulfill this task,
antebellum autobiographers needed readers’ trust. Calling attention in a very personal
way to their own vivid memories helped humanize their stories and establish that trust.
After emancipation, however, slave narratives occupied a different place in American pub
lic culture. Historian Julie Roy Jeffrey, writing about the post-emancipation autobiogra
phies of white and black abolitionists, argues that these activists remained committed to
the principle that “slavery might be over, but its cruelties and crimes should not be for
gotten” (71). But the recollections conveyed in the post-emancipation slave narratives
changed in some fundamental ways.
Scholars have identified approximately sixty-five original slave narratives published be
fore 1865, and over fifty which appeared between 1865 and 1920 (Blight 11–12). Howev
er, the popularity and public presence of antebellum slave narratives declined markedly
after emancipation, and the new autobiographies and reminiscences of former slaves en
tering the literary marketplace failed to generate the attention such works had received
during the struggle against slavery. Major publishers recognized the lack of a market, and
many narrative authors resorted to local presses or newspapers to print their stories, usu
ally with limited distribution and often at their own expense. Although Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881, sold over 3,000 copies during its first year, it
failed to generate anything approaching the attention of his antebellum narratives. David
W. Blight has argued that, as the nation began to concentrate on the future in the decades
after the Civil War, Douglass believed “blacks were morally bound to uncover and tell
their history, to reshape the national memory by pushing their experience to the center of
the story” (9). Despite its publisher reportedly “push[ing] and re-push[ing] the book con
stantly,” Life and Times was barely reviewed in American periodicals, suggesting that the
American public did not share Douglass’s insistence that his emancipationist vision shape
the nation’s collective understanding of its recent past (Jeffrey 171). Perhaps too, former
Page 5 of 17
slaves’ recollections were too closely tied to the horrific losses of the Civil War, which
many Americans seemed eager to forget.
One significant exception to the public’s neglect of post-emancipation narratives was

William Still’s hefty 1872 book, The Underground Rail Road. Unlike individual autobio
graphical slave narratives, Still’s nearly eight hundred pages contained the stories of hun
dreds of fugitive slaves who had made their way over the years through his post as “con
ductor” at the Underground Railroad station run by Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee.
Like the autobiographical narratives, Still recounted the traumas and triumphs of fugitive
slaves and their riveting journeys from the slave South to freedom. Moreover, he went be
yond most antebellum narratives by supplying details that were (p. 26) too dangerous to
include in pre-emancipation tales. Perhaps because of the sheer volume and variety of his
accounts, and their focus on brief but thrilling stories of flight and liberation, Still’s book
sold far better than those of the many other African Americans who were similarly at
tempting to preserve and disseminate the memory of slavery’s cruelty and the courage of
those who fled to freedom (Still; Jeffrey, 61–90). As far as Americans’ collective memory of
slavery was concerned, a romanticized and reconciliationist vision of the underground
railroad and the plantation tales of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and others
of the southern “plantation school” had significantly greater impact than the autobiogra
phies of former slaves (Blight, Race and Reunion 222–31; Schwalm 291).
In the first generations after slavery, while many former slaves shared their experiences
of slavery with family members and acquaintances, precious few made any effort to dis
seminate their stories to a wider American audience. Yet some did set down their recol
lections in writing for the benefit of the much smaller private audience of their families
and descendants. David W. Blight has recently brought two such stories to light, thanks to
handwritten manuscripts being passed down through families to local historical societies.
The former slaves John Washington and Wallace Turnage had no illusions of attaining lit
erary glory or even modest economic success from their narratives, as neither appears to
have made any effort to seek a publisher. Nonetheless, as Blight suggests, “they pos
sessed the will to write, to make their stories of liberation known, to find readers and gar
ner recognition—even if only within their own families—as men who conquered their con
dition as slaves, remade themselves as free people, and left a mark on time as best they
could” (7). Both these narratives, like many published narratives written in the aftermath
of war and emancipation, focused less on the degradations of slavery than on each man’s
empowering self-liberation and uplifting journey to respectability as free men. But this
pattern is perhaps less pervasive than many assume. Historian Leslie Schwalm questions
the widely held generalization that published postbellum narratives consistently under
played the horrors of slavery in favor of tales of post-emancipation uplift and accomplish
ment. She cites, as one example, the relatively unknown 1912 narrative of Samuel Hall,
who focused most of his recollections on a “portrayal of slavery as a horrific institution;
he denounces slavery and…offer[s] a deliberative act of resistance against the tide of na
tional forgetting” (298–299).
Page 6 of 17
But the dozens of published post-emancipation narratives failed to achieve the goals of
Samuel Hall, Frederick Douglass, and other activists who sought to etch the slaves’ expe
riences and perspectives in the nation’s memory. A number of the more widely known
early narratives (by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, for exam
ple) had generated a good bit of national and even international attention in their day,
and had a concomitant effect on public perceptions. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative went
through several dozen editions prior to 1850 and Douglass’s 1845 Narrative sold 30,000
copies by 1860 (Davis and Gates xvi). However, between the abolition of American slavery
and the early twentieth century, former slaves’ recollections of their experiences of the
peculiar institution and their journeys to freedom failed to (p. 27) generate comparable
sales. The fate of the once popular antebellum slave narratives paralleled Americans’ se
lective elision of blacks’ role in the Civil War and the emancipatory meaning of that con
flict: they had been all but erased from the American public’s consciousness. Henry Louis
Gates and Charles T. Davis may have overstated the case only slightly in observing that,
during this period, “the literary presence of the speaking black subject was replaced by
the deafening silence of his absence” (xviii). Recent scholarship has demonstrated that
African Americans engaged in numerous historical and commemorative activities to pre
serve key elements of the race’s history and accomplishments, yet even blacks seemed to
pay little attention to the antebellum slave narratives (Blight, Race and Reunion; Blair;
Fahs and Waugh; Neff; Kachun; Clark).
This cultural silence regarding slave narratives continued through the first half of the
twentieth century, among both the general public and scholars. Historian Geoffrey Cubitt
has observed that twentieth-century historians “readily presented themselves…as the
guardians and transmitters and presenters of…national memory” (40). As late as 1974, in
assessing slave narratives’ usefulness as historical sources, historian C. Vann Woodward
noted that “historians have almost completely neglected these materials” (471). Prior to
the 1970s, virtually all efforts to understand slavery among mainstream historians had
been based mainly on quantitative data and the observations of slaveholders or other
white observers. Even contributors to the Journal of Negro History, whose articles since
its founding in 1916 had consistently challenged mainstream historians’ one-sided view of
slavery, paid little attention to the slave narratives. The JSTOR electronic database pro
vides access to over one thousand scholarly journals in the sciences, social sciences, and
humanities, some of which, like the American Historical Review and the Journal of Ameri
can Folklore, date back to the nineteenth century. A search for the phrase “slave narra
tive” in the database yielded an impressive 1,321 hits; yet only 50 appeared prior to 1969.
Slave narratives’ significance in mainstream historical scholarship—and through that
scholarship, in American education and public discourse—is in fact a very recent phenom
enon.
Between slavery’s demise and the mid-twentieth century, slave narratives largely slipped
from national consciousness. In terms of collective memory, then, until relatively recently
any consideration of slave narratives and remembering would necessarily focus primarily
on slave narratives and forgetting. But the memories of former slaves did receive re
newed attention during the 1920s and 1930s, as a small number of academics began to
Page 7 of 17
interview elderly African Americans in order to salvage and preserve their childhood
memories of bondage. While the best known of these efforts was conducted through the
WPA’s Federal Writers Project between 1936 and 1938, it is important to note the work
done mainly by African American scholars and institutions over the preceding decade. Be
tween 1927 and 1935 scholars working independently from one another at Fisk Universi
ty, Southern University, and Kentucky State University collected oral histories from more
than seven hundred former slaves in their respective regions. The scholarly objectives
and types of questions in these studies varied, with topical questions ranging from reli
gious conversion experiences to master-slave relations to the material conditions of
slaves’ lives. But historian Sharon Ann Musher argues that they all approached (p. 28) the
former slaves’ memories as part of a shared “search [for] a ‘usable past,’ one which might
foster self respect and group identity among blacks” (6).
Responsibility for the much better known WPA interviews, on the other hand, “shifted
from the hands of black academics…primarily to those of white government bureaucrats
and relief workers.” African Americans were largely excluded from organizational and ad
ministrative leadership of the program, and white leaders like John A. Lomax “encour
aged the interviewers to explore the folklore of slavery more than the themes that had in
terested black interviewers: racial uplift, slave resistance, and attitudes toward free
dom” (Musher 6–7). As with any oral history, the script of questions, the context of the in
terview, and the social relationship between interviewer and interviewee had an enor
mous impact on the kinds—and honesty—of memories that emerge. The interview ques
tions put forward by Lomax, along with the fact that interviewers were mostly southern
whites, generated narratives that mainly “concluded with a note of reconciliation rather
than one of anger, pain, or rebellion” (Musher 10–11).
In addition to the potential biases stemming from the interview process and its context,
one of the most problematic aspects of these oral histories relates to the age of the for
mer slaves and the reliability of their memories. Virtually all who have used or written
about the narratives make some mention of the prudence historians must exercise when
forming interpretations based on the memories of elderly people recalling events from
their childhoods more than six decades earlier. C. Vann Woodward, for example, noted the
“failing memory” of the interviewees, and advised that historians should use the inter
views “with caution and discrimination” (Woodward, qtd. in Spindel 249). Nonetheless, as
Donna J. Spindel has argued, “at the same time that scholars were acknowledging the
shortcomings of the data and advising caution regarding its use, they continued to devel
op an interpretation of slave life based upon it” (249). This was especially true of the revi
sionist histories of slavery published during the 1970s. Charles L. Perdue, Jr., went so far
to assert that the “ex-slave interviews…are as reliable as most other historical
documents” (Perdue, qtd. in Spindel 249). Similarly, after acknowledging that “human
memory is fallible,” Paul D. Escott contended that “there is no reason to believe that the
memories of the ex-slaves interviewed were worse than anyone else’s” (42).
Page 8 of 17
Escott and others defending the use of former slaves’ recollections at times cite psycho
logical research supporting the idea that age need not have deleterious effects on one’s
long-term memory, and suggesting that people are especially likely to recall accurately
significant moments in the life cycle or “critical junctures” in their lives. Spindel, howev
er, argues that proponents of this view mined the psychological research very selectively
and often oversimplified or misinterpreted the studies’ findings. Citing a wide range of
materials, she concludes that “the general thrust of the literature in psychology is that
long-term memory is suspect”; nonetheless, she also cites numerous studies challenging
the position “that general memory loss is a necessary function of age” (259). Psycholo
gists in the mid-1990s, when Spindel wrote, had produced no consensus in their assess
ments of the impact of age on long-term memory, so the jury remained out (p. 29) on the
extent to which historians might rely on the ex-slave interviews in shaping their interpre
tations of slavery. Spindel counseled a “vigorous skepticism” (260).
Psychological research on memory accelerated during the first decade of the twenty-first
century, but there is still no definitive conclusion in this debate. A 2003 longitudinal study
indicates that memory declines significantly after age seventy, with even more precipi
tous impairment after age eighty (Singer, Verheghen, et al.). Other recent studies suggest
that older adults have better long term memories for positive events from the past, and
for those that have significant emotional resonance (Petrican, et al.; Spaniol, et al.). A
2006 study concludes that older adults “can subjectively travel back in time” to relive
personal events in the most distant past better than those in the recent past” (Piolino, et
al. 510).
The import of psychological studies of long term and autobiographical memory for our un
derstanding of the twentieth-century slave narratives, however, does not involve a direct
answer to the question of whether elderly former slaves’ memories are accurate. The rel
evance of such studies for historians is much more complex. Historian Geoffrey Cubitt ar
gues that we must view autobiographical memory “not as a collection of one-to-one repre
sentations of discrete and specific moments in past experience, but as a continuous inter
pretive reconstruction of that experience.” Memory, whether relating to the recollection
of specific events or to one’s general feelings about past experiences, is inextricably tied
to synchronic changes in personal identity. The meanings attached to the past are neces
sarily malleable, as individuals’ constructions of selfhood evolve over the course of their
lives. It is in this sense that Cubitt speaks of “the inherent mutability of experiences, the
meanings of which are never fixed definitively…but are always evolving as these memo
ries become subsumed in longer developments, or are refracted through the prism of lat
er events” (89–90). This same logic applies equally to what is remembered and what is ei
ther purposefully forgotten or unconsciously elided from a personal recollected narrative.
To some extent, our approach toward understanding oral histories of the memory of slav
ery can be informed by analogous research in other fields. Memory studies are often as
sociated with traumatic memory, and history’s “turn to memory” in the late twentieth cen
tury was fueled by (if not originated in) studies of Holocaust memory. Some of the most
prolific areas of research have been in the collective memory of twentieth-century wars,
Page 9 of 17
genocides, the American Civil War, and slavery—all of which involve traumatic experi
ences (Berntsen and Thomsen; Eyerman; Winter; Portelli; Hinton and O’Neill; Langer).
While individuals’ narrative recollections of the experience of war or genocide are hardly
identical with one another or with recollections of slavery, there may be shared elements
worth considering. For example, historian Mark Hewitson has observed that some Ger
man veterans of the First World War “seem to have believed themselves members of a
separate group…which was privy to a special kind of knowledge, but which proved large
ly incapable of communicating it to non-combatants.” As one German veteran of the Se
cond World War put it, “Those who haven’t lived through the experience may sympathize
as they read [a soldier’s memoir], the way one sympathizes with the hero of a novel or a
play, but they certainly will never understand, as (p. 30) one can never understand the in
explicable.” Nonetheless, Hewitson points out, participants in twentieth-century wars
“have generated a vast and growing literature in which they grapple with their experi
ences and the meaning of war and try to make it intelligible to a wider public in a nation
al act of remembering,” even as they maintain “the claim that only they know what war is
like.” Substituting the word “slavery” for “war” in the last sentence should suggest the
parallels in the memoirs and autobiographies of these two distinct groups of survivors of
traumatic experience (Hamilton and Shopes, x; Hewitson, 310).
Hewitson’s analysis points to the necessity of reconciling the interconnections and con
testations between personal recollections and national collective memory. While the iden
tification of soldiers as national heroes can often be woven seamlessly into a nation’s
memory, the situation surrounding American slavery is somewhat more complicated (He
witson, 316–17). The experiences of slaves, and the slave narratives, have played shifting
roles in shaping society’s collective understanding of slavery and its relevance to Ameri
can history and identity. One useful gauge of the slave narratives’ place in America’s col
lective memory is their presence in the public sphere.
One measure of that presence is the availability of the narratives to the general public.
According to the WorldCat global catalog of library collections, during the twentieth cen
tury, the most well-known and widely read antebellum slave narrative, The Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass, did not appear in print until 1960. And of the dozens of
new editions appearing between that date and 2010, only four more appeared prior to
1980. In contrast, fifteen editions appeared between 1980 and 1992, thirty-seven be
tween 1992 and 1999, and another fifty-eight between 2000 and 2010.
The extraordinary expansion of this one text’s availability after 1980 is all the more im
portant because of the proliferation of editions geared explicitly toward secondary and
post-secondary educational audiences. Journalist and popular historian Frances FitzGer
ald argued that history textbooks have traditionally been “essentially nationalistic histo
ries” intended “to tell children what their elders want them to know about their coun
try” (47). While not a textbook, per se, the inclusion of Douglass’s narrative in school and
university curricula validated him as an important American figure, and his narrative as a
legitimate and trustworthy perspective on American slavery. Thus the memories of former
slaves came to represent the basis for the kinds of stories increasing numbers of Ameri
Page 10 of 17
can historical and educational authorities selected to construct a revised collective memo
ry of slavery that would inform the coming generations.
The narratives’ entry into the public’s consciousness expanded after the 1970s in part be
cause that decade saw a proliferation of historical monographs on American slavery
which relied heavily on published slave autobiographies and/or the WPA interviews.
Those interviews themselves became much more widely available when historian George
P. Rawick undertook to prepare the original WPA typescripts for publication in the early
1970s. By 1979, under Rawick’s editorial direction, forty-one volumes of the transcribed
narratives had appeared under the title, The American Slave: A Composite
Autobiography. Unlike the typescripts, copies of which were held in a handful of research
libraries, volumes from The American Slave collection were acquired by hundreds of
(p. 31) libraries around the world. Rawick’s widely read introductory volume in that se
ries, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community, offered a convincing
argument for privileging the slaves’ own words as transcribed in the WPA narratives in
developing an understanding of the institution of slavery and the lives of the enslaved.
Around the same time, John Blassingame made a similarly influential argument, using the
published antebellum slave narratives, in his book, The Slave Community: Plantation Life
in the Antebellum South.
Scholarship produced by academic historians tends to trickle slowly and unevenly into
American public consciousness. But the 1970s slavery historiography made remarkably
rapid headway, paralleled as it was by an enormously popular cultural event: the 1976
publication of Alex Haley’s book Roots, and the subsequent television miniseries that be
came an unprecedented cultural sensation. Based on Haley’s genealogical research into
his own family’s history, Roots chronicles the fictionalized lives of several generations of
an African American family from a young boy’s capture in Africa through the period of an
tebellum southern slavery. Though historians criticized its historical inaccuracies and ten
dencies toward romanticization, the book’s—and especially the TV miniseries’—moving
depictions of slavery’s brutality and the slaves’ humanity had a powerful impact. Whether
it altered people’s opinions about black history or race in American society is open to de
bate, but there is no denying its impact in placing slavery and black history squarely be
fore the American public imagination as at no time since emancipation (Haley; Roots; Hur
and Robinson). In the years after Roots, numerous forms of actual slave narratives have
been adapted in books for adult and young audiences, documentaries, and dramatic films
(Berlin et al.; Moses and Christensen; Butler; Jones; Paulson; Hill; Harriet Tubman; Amis
tad; Unchained Memories; Solomon Northup’s Odyssey). Perhaps the most famous of
these, which garnered widespread attention in both book and film versions, was Toni
Morrison’s Beloved. The book, based loosely on the real experiences of Margaret Garner,
was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the 1997 feature film earned numer
ous awards and nominations (Morrison; Beloved).
As the editors of the text and audio publication, Remembering Slavery, noted in 1998,
“the historical memory of slavery remains central to Americans’ sense of themselves and
the society in which they live” (Berlin et al., xlvi). Yet that memory has always been a con
Page 11 of 17
tested one. For generations after slavery’s demise, most Americans elected to remember
as little of the institution as possible, or to very selectively craft its story into one that was
consistent with a national narrative of progress and expanding liberty. In that project the
recollections of the former slaves could have little place, and their narratives were rele
gated to the historical dustbin. But the silenced past has a way of reemerging given
changes in cultural conditions. As these conditions took shape in the mid- to late-twenti
eth century, both published slave narratives and the oral histories of former slaves began
to receive recognition as credible sources for revising our collective understanding of the
nation’s peculiar institution. Despite the numerous problems the narratives present as
historical sources, in recent decades the slaves’ recollections of slavery and its meaning
has largely displaced the perspectives of the slaveholders. With (p. 32) no living person
remaining to offer personal recollections of antebellum American slavery, we will likely
continue to rely heavily on slave narratives in shaping our collective memory of the insti
tution. But as new contexts give rise to new and shifting questions about the past, that
collective memory no doubt will remain malleable, adaptive, and contested.
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Page 16 of 17
Mitch Kachun
Mitch Kachun is Professor of History at Western Michigan University. He is author of

Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Cele
brations, 1808-1915 (Massachusetts, 2003) and co-editor of The Curse of Caste; or
the Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins (Oxford,
2006). His current research examines Crispus Attucks in American memory.
Page 17 of 17
Slave Narratives and Archival Research

Eric Gardner

Online Publication Date: Oct 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731480.013.006
This essay calls for reevaluation of how archives crucial to the study of African American
slave narratives have been defined, constructed, used, misused, and ignored. Grouped
around questions of textual studies and biographical studies, the essay explores how liter
ary historians can navigate, reshape, and even (re)create archives in and surrounding
slave narratives. In treating slave narratives vis-a-vis textual studies, the essay argues for
placing slave narratives within print culture matrices to reconsider questions of author
ship/composition and dissemination/circulation; in this, the essay attends to how slave
narratives have (and have not) come to contemporary readers. The essay's discussion of
biographical studies surveys key resources and identifies troubling gaps. It argues for
recognizing the archival impulse inherent in many slave narratives and asserts that read
ing slave narratives as archives can shape both the interpretation of such texts and the
exploration of other existing records.
Keywords: African American, archives, authorship, Black, literary history, print culture, slave narratives, slavery,
Lucy Delaney, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs
STUDENTS of the archive(s) surrounding slave narratives swim in a sea of contradictions

and ironies. We know more about North American slave narratives than ever before, yet
that knowledge remains miniscule. The entry of slave narratives into the academy has
been a deeply archival project—often requiring archival research simply to find such nar
ratives; nonetheless, many scholars integrate slave narratives into larger literary land
scapes in ways that sever them from any sense of context. Certainly, it is good that texts
like Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life
of a Slave Girl have become expected in survey courses and anthologies alike. However,
such canonization sometimes smacks of tokenism, suggests that some period scholars
have read no more than perhaps a dozen slave narratives, and neglects the recognition—
made in studies from Frances Smith Foster’s Witnessing Slavery and William Andrews’s
To Tell a Free Story—that most uses of the phrase “the slave narrative” are oversimplifi
cations of a complex and still little-explored collection of genres and texts. For the larger
story, one needs to turn to the archives, but such work is undervalued by many poststruc
Page 1 of 20
turalist critics who dismiss archival scholarship on slave narratives, even though such
scholarship offers an object lesson in competing stories, gaps, absences, and shifting
meanings. Others assume that biographical and historical criticism inherently preclude
thoughtful examination of rhetorically constructed subjects. Thus, the lives that suffuse
the printed texts often remain thinly understood, and a key function of many slave narra
tives—not just to battle slavery but to remember Black lives—is often forgotten, ignored,
or dismissed.
To begin to come to terms with such ironies and contradictions, and to offer an act of re
membrance, this essay examines the construction and uses of a set of archives crucial to
the study of slave narratives. My discussion is loosely grouped around questions of, first,
textual studies and, second, biographical studies, and I emphasize how scholars can navi
gate, reshape, and even (re)create archives in and surrounding slave narratives.
(p. 37) Archives and/in Textual Scholarship

Certainly a first step in addressing textual scholarship might be to place slave narratives
more fully within larger matrices of print culture studies—a field that has rarely attended
to Black texts. (There are signs that this is changing—as evidenced especially by the ger
minal March 2010 conference on “Early African American Print Culture” and Leon
Jackson’s sweeping essay “The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian,” both build
ing from Foster’s 2005 “A Narrative of the Interesting Origins.”) This section thus begins
by briefly sketching two areas where archivally based print culture approaches are espe
cially needed: questions of authorship/composition and of dissemination/circulation. My
goal is to recognize and frame the massive amount of study that remains to be done if we
are to have a sense of slave narratives as more than disembodied stories or as, in a wider
but still reductive formation, Black interventions solely in antebellum battles against slav
ery. I then attend to the ways slave narratives have (and have not) come to contemporary
readers—especially through what I term “anthologistic archives” but also through smaller
comparative groupings building from such efforts.
Simply the fact that the manuscripts of almost all known slave narratives are missing—
and my use of this word holds out hope, as it is not synonymous with “not extant”—com
plicates the primary step in considering most texts’ moves toward publication. The ab
sence of manuscripts has stalled discussion of several factors tied to the mechanics of
composition—study of paper, handwriting, etc.—and what they might tell us about au
thors. More importantly, the lack of manuscript evidence of, say, authorial or editorial re
visions has limited consideration of crucial but complex questions of authorship. These
latter questions have always been especially challenging for students of slave narratives,
given proslavery and/or racist accusations that white abolitionist ventriloquists were sim
ply using Black puppets in their production. Consider, for example, the reasonably well-
known story of the effectual silencing of Harriet Jacobs and Incidents by not just biased
nineteenth-century figures but also fine scholars who made crucial contributions to the
study of slave narratives (e.g., John Blassingame) but who concluded it was neither Black
Page 2 of 20
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
[14] ‘There have been half a dozen battles in miniature with the
Indians in America. It looked so odd to see a list of killed and
wounded just treading on the heels of the Peace.’ Letter of
October 17 and 18, 1763, to Sir Horace Mann.
[15] Bouquet to Hamilton, Governor of Pennsylvania, Fort Pitt,
August 11, 1763: Canadian Archives, as above, p. 66.
CHAPTER II
CAUSES OF THE AMERICAN WAR OF
INDEPENDENCE AND THE QUEBEC ACT
It was said of the Spartans that warring was their salvation and
ruling was their ruin. The saying holds true of various peoples and
races in history. A militant race has often proved to be deficient in the
qualities which ensure stable, just, and permanent government; and
in such cases, when peace supervenes on war, an era of decline
and fall begins for those whom fighting has made great. But even
when a conquering race has capacity for government, there come
times in its career when Aristotle’s dictum in part holds good. It
applied, to some extent, to the English in North America. As long as
they were faced by the French on the western continent, common
danger and common effort held the mother country and the colonies
together. Security against a foreign foe brought difficulties which
ended in civil war, and the Peace of 1763 was the beginning of
dissolution.
In the present chapter, which covers the history of Canada from
the Peace of Paris to the outbreak of the War of Independence, it is
proposed, from the point of view of colonization, to examine the
ultimate rather than the immediate causes which led to England
losing her old North American colonies, while she retained her new
possession of Canada.
It had been abundantly prophesied that the outcome Prophecies that the
British conquest of
of British conquest of Canada would be colonial Canada would be
independence in British North America. In the years followed by the loss
1748-50 the Swedish naturalist, Peter Kalm, travelled of the North
American colonies.
through the British North American colonies and Peter Kalm.
Canada, and left on record his impressions of the feeling towards the
mother country which existed at the time in the British provinces.
Noting the great increase in these colonies of riches and population,
and the growing coolness towards Great Britain, produced at once
by commercial restrictions and by the presence among the English
colonists of German, Dutch, and French settlers, he arrived at the
conclusion that the proximity of a rival and hostile power in Canada
was the main factor in keeping the British colonies under the British
Crown. ‘The English Government,’ he wrote, ‘has therefore sufficient
reason to consider the French in North America as the best means
of keeping the colonies in their due submission.’[16]
Others wrote or spoke to the same effect. Montcalm was credited
with having prophesied the future before he shared the fall of
Canada,[17] and another prophet was the French minister Choiseul,
when negotiating the Peace of Paris. To keen, though not always
unprejudiced, observers the signs of the times betokened coming
conflicts between Great Britain and her colonies; and to us now
looking back on history, wise after the event, it is evident that the end
of foreign war in North America meant the beginning of troubles
within what was then the circle of the British Empire.
Until recent years most Englishmen were taught to Incorrect view of
believe that the victory of the American colonists and the conflict
between Great
the defeat of the mother country was a striking Britain and her
instance of the power of right over might, of liberty colonies
America.
in North
over oppression; that the severance of the American

colonies was a net gain to them, and a net loss to England; that
Englishmen did right to stand in a white sheet when reflecting on
these times and events, as being citizens of a country which
grievously sinned and was as grievously punished. All this was pure
assumption. The war was one in which there were rights and wrongs
on both sides, but, whereas America had in George Washington a
leader of the noblest and most effective type, England was for the
moment in want both of statesmen and of generals, and had her
hands tied by foreign complications. We can recognize that
Providence shaped the ends, without going beyond the limits of
human common sense. Had Pitt been what he was in Great Britain failed
the years preceding the Peace of Paris, had Wolfe for want of leaders.
and the eldest of the brothers Howe not been cut off in early
manhood, the war might have been averted, or its issue might have
been other than it was. One of Wolfe’s best subordinates, Carleton,
survived, and Carleton saved Canada; there was no human reason
why men of the same stamp, had they been found, should not have
kept for England her heritage. The main reason why she lost her
North American colonies was not the badness of her cause, but
rather want of the right men when the crisis came.
Equally fallacious with the view that England failed The result of the
because wrong-doing never prospers, is, or was, the War of
Independence was
view that the independence of the United States was not wholly a loss to
Great Britain nor
wholly a loss to England and wholly a gain to the wholly a gain to the
colonists. What would have happened if the revolting United States.
provinces had not made good their revolt must be matter of
speculation, but it is difficult to believe that, if the United States had
remained under the British flag, Australia would ever have become a
British colony. There is a limit to every political system and every
empire, and, with the whole of North America east of the Mississippi
for her own, it is not likely that England would have taken in hand the
exploiting of a new continent. At any rate it is significant that, within
four years of the date of the treaty which recognized the
independence of the United States, the first English colonists were
sent to Australia. The success or failure of a nation or a race in the
field of colonization must not be measured by the number of square
miles of the earth’s surface which the home government owns or
claims at any given time. To judge aright, we must revert to the older
and truer view of colonizing as a planting process, replenishing the
earth and subduing it. If the result of the severance of the United
States from their mother country was to sow the English seed in
other lands, then it may be argued that the defeat of England by her
own children was not wholly a loss to the mother country.
Nor was it wholly a gain to the United States. Such at least must
be the view of Englishmen who believe in the worth of their country,
in its traditions, in the character of the nation, in its political, social,
moral, and religious tendencies. The necessary result of the
separation was to alienate the American colonists from what was
English; to breed generations in the belief that what England did
must be wrong, that the enemies of England must be right; to
strengthen in English-speaking communities the elements which
were opposed to the land and to the race from which they had
sprung. With English errors and weaknesses there passed away, in
course of years and in some measure, English sources of strength;
the sober thinking, the slow broadening out, the perpetually
leavening sense of responsibility. Had the American provinces
remained under the British flag it is difficult to see why they should
not have been in the essence as free and independent as they now
are; it is at least conceivable that their commercial and industrial
prosperity would have been as great; assuredly, for good or for evil,
they would have been more English.
The faults and shortcomings of the English, which Shortcomings of
throughout English history have shown themselves the English in
foreign and colonial
mainly in foreign and colonial matters, seem all to policy.
have combined and culminated in the interval of twenty years
between the Peace of 1763, which gave Canada to Great Britain,
and the Peace of 1783, which took from her the United States; and
in addition there were special causes at work in England, which at
this more than at any other time militated against national success.
The shortcomings in question are, in part, the result The party System.
of counterbalancing merits, fair-mindedness, and
freedom of thought, speech, and action. Love of liberty among the
English has begotten an almost superstitious reverence for
Parliamentary institutions. Parliamentary institutions have practically
meant the House of Commons; and the House of Commons has for
many generations past implied the party system. In regard to foreign
and colonial policy the party system has worked the very serious evil
that Great Britain has in the past rarely spoken or acted as one
nation. The party in power at times of national crisis is constantly
obliged to reckon on opposition rather than support, from the large
section of Englishmen whose leaders are not in office; and ministers
have to frame not so much the most effective measures, as those
which can under the circumstances be carried with least friction and
delay. The result has been weakness and compromise in action;
among the friends of England, suspicion and want of confidence;
among her foes, waiting on the event which prolongs the strife. The
English have so often gone forward and then back, they have so
often said one thing and done another, that their own officers, their
friends and allies, their native subjects, and their open enemies,
cannot be sure what will be the next move. If the Opposition in
Parliament and outside, by speech and writing, attacks the
Government, the natural inference to be drawn is that a turn of the
electoral tide will reverse the policy.
Apart too from this more or less necessary result of party
government, the element of cross-grained men and women, who,
when their own country is at issue with another, invariably think that
their country must be wrong and its opponent must be right, has
always been rather stronger, or, at any rate, rather more tolerated in
the United Kingdom than among continental nations. This is due not
merely to the habit of free criticism, but also to a kind of conceit
familiar enough in private as in public life. Englishmen, living apart
from the continent of Europe, are, as a whole, more wrapped up in
themselves than are other nations; and in this self-satisfied whole
there is a proportion of superior persons who sit in judgement on the
rest, and who, having in reality a double dose of the national
Pharisaism, think it their duty to belittle their countrymen.
Fault-finders of this kind, or political opponents of the Government
for the time being, are apt, as a rule, to make light of any minority in
the hostile or rival country, who may be friendly to England: they tend
to misrepresent them as being untrue to their own land and people,
as wanting to domineer over the majority, as seeking their own
interests: and, if they have suffered losses for England’s sake, the
tale of the losses is minimized. But it is not only the opponents of the
Government who take this line; too often in past history it has been
to a large extent the line of the Government itself. The perpetual
seeking after compromise, and trying to see two sides after the
choice of action has been made, has lost many friends to our country
and nation, and made none: while the retracing of steps, unmindful
of claims which have arisen, of property which has been acquired,
and of responsibilities which have been incurred has, as the record
of the past abundantly shows, brought bitterness of spirit to the
friends of England, and bred distrust of the English and their works.
The element of uncertainty in British policy and Want of preparation
action towards foreign nations or towards British for war.
colonies has been in part due to ignorance: and to ignorance and
want of preparation have been due most of the disasters in war
which have befallen Great Britain. Here again something must be
attributed to the fact of the island home. The rulers of continental
peoples have been driven by the necessities of their case to learn
the conditions of their rivals, by secret service and intelligence
agents to ascertain all that is to be known, and at the same time to
keep their own arms up to date, and their own powder dry. They
have prepared for war. England has prepared for peace. Her policy
has paid in the long run, but it would not have been a possible policy
for other nations; and at certain times in English history it has
wrought terrible mischief. England does not always muddle through,
as the English fondly hope she does; notably, she did not muddle
through when the United States proclaimed their independence.
In these years, 1763-83, there was the party system in England
with all its mischievous bitterness; there was a weak Executive at
home, and a still weaker Executive in the colonies; there was
ignorance of the real conditions in America, unwise handling of the
colonial Loyalists, threatening talk coupled with vacillation in action,
laws made which gave offence, and, when they had given offence,
not quite repealed. All the normal English weaknesses flourished
and abounded at this period, and were supplemented by certain
sources of danger which were the outcome of the particular time.
It was a special time, a time of reaction. England Special evils at
had lately gone through a great struggle, made a great work in England in
the years 1763-83.
effort, incurred great expense, and won great success.
She was for the moment vegetating, not inclined or ready for a
second crisis. Second-rate politicians were handling A time of reaction.
matters, and the influence of the new King was all in
favour of their being and remaining second-rate; for George the
Third intended, by meddling in party politics, and by Partisan attitude of
Parliamentary intrigues, to rule Parliament. Thus the the Crown.
Crown became a partisan in home politics, and in colonial politics
was placed in declared opposition to the colonies, instead of
remaining the great bond between the colonies and the mother
country.
The result was, that throughout the years of the Sympathy in
American quarrel, and in a growing degree, the England with the
colonists and their
colonies found powerful support in this country, cause.
because they were, after all, not foreigners but Englishmen—
Englishmen who compared favourably with Englishmen at home and
whom patriotic Englishmen at home could admire and uphold;
because they were apparently the weaker side, attracting the
sympathy which in England the weaker side always attracts; and
because, through the attitude of the King, their cause was
associated with the cause of political liberty at home. Add to this that
the one great English statesman of world-wide reputation, Chatham,
had warmly espoused the colonial side, and it may well be seen that,
unless some able general, as Wellington in later days, by military
success, saved his country from the results of political blunders, the
position was hopeless.
But for the special purpose of determining what Ultimate causes of
place the episode of the severance of the British North the severance of
the North American
American colonies holds in the history of colonization colonies.
we must look still further afield. The constitutional question as to
whether the colonies were subject to the Parliament of the mother
country or to the Crown alone may, from this particular point of view,
be omitted, for the story of the troubled years abundantly shows that
theories would have slept, if certain practical difficulties had not
called them into waking existence, and if lawyers had not been so
much to the front, holding briefs on either side. Nor is it necessary to
dwell upon the specific and immediate causes of the strife, except so
far as they were ultimate causes also. Among such immediate
causes, some of which have been already noted, were the personal
character of the English king for the time being, the corruption and
jobbery of public life in England, the weakness of the Executive in
the colonies, the enforcing of commercial restrictions already placed
by the mother country on the colonies, the kind of new taxes which
the Home Government imposed, the method of imposing them, and
the object with which they were devised; the outrageous laws of
1774 for penalizing Massachusetts, the Quebec Act, and the
employment of German mercenaries against the colonists, which
gave justification to the colonists for calling in aid from France. All
these and other causes might have been powerless to affect the
issue, if England had possessed statesmen and generals, and if the
growing plant of disunion had not been deeply rooted in the past.
When France lost Canada and Louisiana, two Comparison of
European nations, other than the Portuguese in Brazil, Spanish and British
colonization in
practically shared the mainland of America. They were America.
Spain and Great Britain. Spain won her American empire not far
short of a hundred years before Great Britain had any strong footing
on the American continent; she kept it for some thirty Spain held her
or forty years after the United States had achieved American
possessions for a
their independence. The Spanish-American empire longer time than
was therefore much longer-lived than the first colonial Great Britain held
the North American
dominion of Great Britain in North America, and the colonies.
natural inference is, either that the Spaniards treated their colonies
or dependencies better than the English treated theirs, or that the
English colonies were in a better position than the Spanish
dependencies to assert their independence, or that both causes
operated simultaneously.
It is difficult to compare Spain and Great Britain as regards their
respective colonial policies in America, for their possessions differed
in kind. Spain owned dependencies rather than colonies, Great
Britain owned colonies rather than dependencies. Spanish America
was the result of conquest: English America, not including Canada,
was the result of settlement. But, so far as a comparison can be
instituted, it will probably not be seriously contended that the British
colonies suffered more grievously at the hands of the mother country
than did the colonial possessions of Spain. The main charge brought
against England was that she neglected her colonies and left them to
themselves. Whether the charge was true or not—as to which there
is more to be said—neglect is not oppression; and within limits the
kindest and wisest policy towards colonies, which are colonies in the
true sense, is to leave them alone. ‘The wise neglect of Walpole and
Newcastle,’ writes Mr. Lecky, ‘was eminently conducive to colonial
interests.’[18]
The real, ultimate reasons why England held her North American
colonies, which now form the United States of America, for a shorter
time than Spain retained her Central and South American
possessions were two: first, that the English colonies Absence of system
were in a better position than the Spanish inpolicy British colonial
in North
dependencies to assert their independence; secondly, America.
that—largely because she owned dependencies rather
than colonies—Spain was more systematic than England in her
dealings with her colonial possessions. These two reasons are in
truth one and the same, looked at from different sides. The English
colonies were able to assert their independence, because they had
on the whole always been more or less independent. They had
always been more or less independent, because the mother country
had never adopted any definite system of colonial administration.
The Spanish system was not good—quite the contrary; but it was a
system, and those who lived under it were accustomed to restrictions
and to rules imposed by the home government. Similarly in Canada,
under French rule, there was a system, kindlier and better than that
of Spain, but one which had the gravest defects, which stunted
growth and precluded freedom: yet there it was, clear and definite;
the colonists of New France had grown up under it; they knew where
they were in relation to the mother country; it had never occurred to
them to try and make headway against the King of France and his
regulations. Widely different was the case of the English colonies in
North America. All these settlements started under some form of
grant or charter, derived ultimately from the Crown: the Crown from
time to time interfered and made a show of its supremacy; but there
was no system of any sort or kind, and communities grew up, which
in practice had never been governed from home but governed
themselves. Most of all, the New England colonies embodied to the
full the spirit of colonial independence. Their founders, men of the
strongest English type, went out to live in their own way, to be free
from restrictions which trammelled them at home, to found small
English-speaking commonwealths which should be self-governing
and self-supporting, ordered from within, not from without.
The English have never been systematic or When the English
continuous in their policy throughout their history; but colonies were
planted in North
the period of English history when North America was America there was
colonized was the one of all others when system and the most complete
absence of system
continuity were most conspicuously absent. It was a at home.
time of violent political changes at home, of strife between king and
people. A line of kings was brought in from Scotland, they were
overturned, they were restored, and they were finally driven out
again. This was the condition of the Crown to which the newly-
planted colonies owed allegiance, and which was supposed to
exercise supreme authority over the colonies. Under the Crown were
Proprietors and Companies, whose charters, being derived from a
perpetually disputed source, were a series of dissolving views; and
under the Proprietors and Companies were a number of strong
English citizens who, caring little for the theoretical basis of their
position, cared very much for practical independence, and ordered
their ways accordingly, becoming steadily and stubbornly more
independent through perpetual friction and perpetual absence of
systematic control. Thus it was that the North American colonies
drank in, as their mother’s milk, the traditions and the habits of
independence. They carried with them English citizenship, but the
privileges of such citizenship rather than the responsibilities; and, in
so far as the mother country was inclined to ignore the privileges, the
colonies were glad to disclaim the responsibilities.
They were separate and distinct, not only from the Absence of
mother country, but also from each other, and they collective
responsibility in the
could not in consequence from first to last be held British North
collectively responsible. In the wars with Canada, New American colonies.
England and New York, though alike exposed to French invasion,
and from time to time co-operating to repel the invaders or to
organize counter-raids, yet acted throughout as entirely separate
entities, in no way inclined to bear each other’s burdens as common
citizens of a common country. The southern colonies, until the
French, shortly before the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, came
down into the valley of the Ohio, took no part whatever in the fight
between Great Britain and France for North America. The New
Englanders, most patriotic of the colonists, beyond all others went
their own ways in war and peace; uninvited and unauthorized from
home they formed a confederation among themselves: early in their
history they tried to make a treaty with Canada on the basis that,
whatever might be the relations between France and England in
Europe, there should be peace between French and English in North
America: they took Port Royal: they attacked Quebec: they captured
Louisbourg: and the anonymous French eye-witness of the first
siege and capture of Louisbourg commented as follows on the
difference between the colonial land forces and the men of the small
Imperial squadron which Warren brought to the colonists’ aid: ‘In fact
one could never have told that these troops belonged to the same
nation and obeyed the same prince. Only the English are capable of
such oddities, which nevertheless form a part of that precious liberty
of which they show themselves so jealous.’[19]
Most of all it should be remembered that, though The colonies had
subject to the Navigation laws imposed by the mother never been taxed
for revenue
country and to that extent restricted in their purposes.
commercial dealings, no English colony in North America, before the
days of the Stamp Act, had ever been taxed by Crown or Parliament
for revenue purposes. In the year 1758 Montcalm was supposed to
have written on this subject in the following terms: ‘As to the English
colonies, one essential point should be known, it is that they are
never taxed. They keep that to themselves, an enormous fault this in
the policy of the mother country. She should have taxed them from
the foundation. I have certain advice that all the colonies would take
fire at being taxed now.’[20] This judgement was probably sound. It
might have been well if from the first, when charters were issued and
colonial communities were formed, some small tax had been levied
for Imperial purposes upon the British colonies, if some contribution
of only nominal amount had been exacted as a condition of retaining
British citizenship. There would then have been a precedent, such as
Englishmen always try to find, and there would have been in
existence a reminder that all members of a family should contribute
to the household expenses.[21]
We are accustomed to think and to read of the The political
separation of the American colonies from the mother separation of the
North American
country as wholly an abnormal incident, the result of colonies was the
bad handiwork, not the outcome of natural forces. This natural result of
their geographical
view is incorrect. History ultimately depends on separation.
geography. When two members of the same race, nation, or family
pass their lives at a long distance from each other, in different lands,
in different climates, under different conditions, the natural and
inevitable result is that they diverge from each other. The centrifugal
tendency may be counteracted by tact and clever statesmanship,
and still more by sense of common danger; but it is a natural
tendency. Men cannot live at a distance from each other without
becoming to some extent estranged. The Greeks, with their
instinctive love of logic and of symmetry, and with their fundamental
conception of a city as the political unit, looked on colonization as
separation, and called a colony a departure from home. The
colonists carried with them reverence for the mother state, but not
dependence upon it; and, if there was any political bond, it was
embodied in the words that those who went out went out on terms of
equality with, not of subordination to, those who remained behind.
The English, in fact, though not in principle, planted colonies on the
model of the Greek settlements; their theories and their practice
collided; and, being a practical race, their theories eventually went by
the board.
When an over-sea colony is founded, the new Conflicting
settlement is in effect most distant from the old tendencies.
Distance and
country; that is to say, means of communication sentiment.
between the one point and the other are least frequent and least
developed. The tendency to separation—as far as geography is
concerned—is therefore strongest at the outset. On the other hand,
in the foundation of a colony, unless the foundation is due to political
disruption at home, the sentiment towards the mother country is
warmer and closer than in after years, for the founders remember
where they were born and where they grew to manhood. As
generations go on, the tie of sentiment becomes necessarily weaker,
but, with better communication, distance becomes less; there is
therefore a competition between the opposing tendencies. Many of
the Greek colonies were the result of στάσις or στάσις and
division in the mother cities. The unsuccessful party colonization.
went out and made a separate home. In a very modified form the
same cause was at work in the founding of the Puritan colonies of
North America. Notably, the emigrants on the Mayflower were
already exiles from England, political refugees, who had found a
temporary home in the Netherlands. These founders of the Plymouth
settlement were by no means the chief colonizers of North America,
or even of New England, but their story—the story of the ‘Pilgrim
fathers’—became a nucleus of Puritan tradition; and from it after
generations deduced that New England was the home of English
citizens whom England had cast out. Thus one group, at any rate, of
North American colonies traced their origin to separation. Then came
the element of distance. ‘The European colonies in America,’ wrote
Adam Smith, with some exaggeration, ‘are more remote than the
most distant provinces of the greatest empires which had ever been
known before.’[22] The Atlantic Ocean lay between them and the
motherland, and cycles went by before that distance was perceptibly
modified. In our own time, steam and telegraphy have been
perpetually counteracting the effects of distance. It was not so in the
seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Navigation was improved, but
was still the humble handmaid of wind and tide; and on the very eve
of the American War of Independence the remoteness of the North
American colonies, and the prevailing ignorance in England about
the North American colonies were, though no doubt much
exaggerated, a commonplace among the speakers and writers of the
time.
We start then with colonies planted from a land which had no
thought of systematic control over colonies or dependencies, whose
government was at the time of colonization in a chaotic state, whose
colonists went out in part, at any rate, intent on practical separation,
and who all settled themselves or were settled in a remote region at
a time when distance did not grow less.
The next point to notice is that it has always been held that, as
between a mother country and its colonies, if they are colonies in the
true sense and not merely tributary states, it is rather for the mother
country to give and her colonies to take, than vice versa. This is a
view which has been held at all times and among all races, but
especially among members of the English race. Other nations and
races have, it is true, felt as strongly as, or more General view of the
strongly than, the English the duty of protecting their duty of a mother
country towards its
outlying possessions: they have in some cases colonies.
lavished more money directly upon them at the
expense of the taxpayers at home; but, on the other hand, they have
almost invariably regarded their colonies as dependencies pure and
simple, constrained to take the course of the dominant partner in
preference to their own. The English alone in history have bred
communities protected by, but in practice not subject to, the mother
country. They have given, without exacting toll in return.
No writer has laid greater stress on this view of the Adam Smith on the
relations between the mother country and the colonies subject.
than Adam Smith, who published the Wealth of Nations just as the
American colonies were breaking away from Great Britain. ‘The
English colonists,’ he wrote, ‘have never yet contributed anything
towards the defence of the mother country, or towards the support of
its civil government. They themselves, on the contrary, have hitherto
been defended almost entirely at the expense of the mother country;’
and again, ‘Under the present system of management, Great Britain
derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she has assumed
over her colonies.’ ‘Great Britain is, perhaps, since the world began,
the only state which, as it has extended its empire, has only
increased its expense without once augmenting its resources.’[23]
His opinion would have been modified could he have foreseen the
help given to the mother country in our own day by the self-
governing colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in a war
far removed from their shores; but even in our own day the old view,
against which he contended, largely holds the field, that more is due
from the mother country to the colonies than from the colonies to the
mother country, that what the mother country spends on the Empire
is payment of a debt, while what the colonies spend on the Empire is
a free gift.
This view of the relations between a mother country The mother
and its colonies takes its ultimate source largely from country, being
usually greater than
the fact that the mother country is nearly always[24] the colony, is
expected to give
greater and stronger than any one colony or group of rather than to
colonies; and in the English mind the instinct of fair receive.
play invariably makes in favour of the party to a contract which is or
appears to be the weaker party. It is in the light of the fact that the
American colonies were numerically the weaker party in their
contention with the mother country, and with the misleading
deduction that any demand made upon them was therefore unjust,
that the story of the War of Independence has over and over again
been wrongly told. In one of the more recent books on the subject,
Sir George Trevelyan’s American Revolution, it is stated that all the
colonies asked of the King was to be let alone.[25] That is all that any
man or any community asks, when called upon to pay a bill; and the
question at issue between the mother country and the colonies in the
eighteenth century was the eternal question, which vexes every
community and every federation of communities, who ought to pay.
The bill was one for defence purposes; but, when it was presented,
the colonists’ answer was in effect, first, that it was the duty of the
mother country to defend the colonies; secondly, that Contentions of the
that duty had been neglected; and thirdly, that, colonists.
assuming that it had been performed, it was for the colonies and not
for the mother country to determine what proportion of the expense,
if any, should be defrayed by the colonies.
The first of these three contentions may not have (1) It was the duty
been fully avowed, but deep down in the minds of men of the mother
country to bear the
there lay the conviction that the mother country ought expense of
to pay for defending the colonies, and there it has defending
colonies.
the
remained, more or less, ever since. It is true that the

grant of self-government in its fullest sense to the present great
provinces of the British Empire has been coupled with the withdrawal
of the regular forces from all but a few points of selected Imperial
vantage, and to that extent the colonies have taken up, and well
taken up, the duty of self-defence; but the burden of This view still
the fleet, the great defensive force of the Empire as a prevails.
whole, is still borne in the main, and was till recently entirely borne,
by the mother country. When colonies or foreign possessions are in
a condition of complete political dependence upon the mother
country, it may fairly be argued that the latter, in insisting upon
dependence, should, as the price of supremacy, undertake to some
extent the duty of defence. And yet a survey of the British Empire at
the present day shows that no self-governing province of the Empire
is so highly organized or so fully charged for the purposes of defence
as is the great dependency of India.
The first and most elementary duty of an Independence
independent community, the one condition without implies self-
defence.
which it cannot be independent, is providing for its
own defence. The American colonies claimed in reality political
independence, at any rate as far as internal matters were concerned;
but they did not admit, except to a limited extent, that it was their
duty to provide against foreign invasion. That duty, in their eyes,
devolved upon the mother country because it was the mother
country; because it was held that the mother country derived more
advantage from the colonies than—apart from defence—the colonies
derived from her; and because the mother country dictated the
foreign policy of the Empire; in common parlance, it called the tune
and therefore, it was argued, should pay the piper.
The Navigation laws, the commercial restrictions The Navigation
imposed by Great Britain on her colonies, were Acts an inadequate
return for the
assumed to represent the price which the colonies charge imposed on
paid in return for the protection which the mother the mother country
for defending the
country gave or professed to give to the colonies; and colonies.
these same laws and restrictions, viewed in the light of later times,
have been held to be the burden of oppression which was greater
than the colonies could bear. Adam Smith, the writer who most
forcibly exposed the unsoundness of the old mercantile system, also
demonstrated most conclusively that that system was universal in
the eighteenth century; that it was less oppressively applied by
England than by other countries which owned colonies; that under it,
if the colonies were restricted in trade, they were also in receipt of
bounties; and lastly, that the undoubted disadvantages which were
the result of the system were shared by the mother country with the
colonies, though they weighed more heavily upon the colonies than
on the mother country, and were to the colonies ‘impertinent badges
of slavery’. The conclusion to be drawn is that, assuming Great
Britain to have adequately discharged the duty of protecting the
colonies, she was not adequately paid for doing so by the results of
the mercantile system.
But it was further contended that the duty of (2) Did Great
protecting her colonies was one which Great Britain Britain neglect the
defence of the
neglected. While the colonies were poor and North American
insignificant, the mother country, it was alleged, colonies?
neglected them. When they became richer and more valuable she
tried to oppress them. If the charge of neglect in the general sense
was true, we may refer to Mr. Lecky’s words already quoted, as
showing that it may well be argued that the colonies profited by it.[26]
Mr. Lecky writes of conditions in the eighteenth century, but Adam
Smith used similar terms with reference to the earlier days of the
colonies. Contrasting the Spanish colonies in America with those
owned by other European nations on that continent, he wrote: ‘The
Spanish colonies’ (in consequence of their mineral wealth) ‘from the
moment of their first establishment attracted very much the attention
of their mother country; while those of the other European nations
were for a long time in a great measure neglected. The former did
not perhaps thrive the better in consequence of this attention, nor the
latter the worse in consequence of their neglect.’[27] It may be
answered, however, that the neglect here referred to was neglect of
the colonies in their internal concerns, leaving them, as Adam Smith
puts it, to pursue their interest in their own way. This was an
undeniably beneficial form of neglect, wholly different from the
neglect which leaves distant dependencies exposed to foreign
invasion and native raids. Was then the British Government guilty of
the latter form of neglect in the case of the American colonies?
There were many instances in the history of these The attitude of the
colonies, while they were still under the British flag, of mother country in
the earlier history of
the Imperial Government promising assistance which the colonies.
was never sent, or only sent after months of delay:
there were instances of gross incapacity on the part of leaders of
expeditions sent out from home, notably in the case of Walker and
Hill, who commanded the disgracefully abortive enterprise against
Quebec in 1711. The state of Acadia, when nominally in British
keeping after the Treaty of Utrecht, was a glaring illustration of
English supineness and procrastination. There was, at any rate, one
notable instance of the mother country depriving the colonies of a
great result of their own brilliant enterprise, viz. when Louisbourg,
taken by the New Englanders in 1745, was restored by Great Britain
to France under the terms of the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle in 1748.
Undoubtedly Great Britain on many occasions disappointed and
disheartened the colonies, and especially the most patriotic of the
colonies, the New England states. On the other hand, it is beyond
question that the colonies were never seriously attacked by sea.
They were threatened, sometimes badly threatened, as by d’Anville’s
fleet in 1746; they were liable to the raids of daring partisan leaders,
such as d’Iberville; but either good fortune or the British fleet,
supplemented no doubt by a wholesome respect for the energy and
activity of the New England sailors themselves, kept the coasts and
seaports of the American colonies in comparative security through all
the years of war. It must be noted too that, while the colonies
suffered because Great Britain had interests elsewhere than in
America; while, for instance, a fleet designed for the benefit of the
colonies in 1709 was sent off to Portugal, and the New Englanders’
prize of Louisbourg was forfeited in order to secure Madras for the
British Empire, the colonies at the same time shared in the results of
victories won in other parts of the world than America. The Peace of
Utrecht, with what it gave to the English in America, was entirely the
outcome of Marlborough’s victories on the continent of Europe.
Nothing that was done in America contributed to it. The failures of
England were under the colonies’ eyes; her successes, the fruits of
which they shared, were often achieved at the other side of the
world.
But, taking the main events which contributed to the security and
greatness of the American colonies, how far should they be credited
to Great Britain and how far to the colonies themselves? In earlier
days, nothing was more important to the future of the English in
America than securing a continuous seaboard and linking the
southern to the northern colonies. This object was obtained by taking
New York from the Dutch, the result of action initiated in Europe, not
in America. The final reduction of Port Royal was effected with the
assistance of troops and ships from England. The Peace of Utrecht,
which deprived the French of Acadia and their settlements in
Newfoundland, was, as already stated, wholly the result of
Marlborough’s fighting in Europe. Though the New The conquest of
Englanders took Louisbourg, and England gave it Canada was mainly
due to the mother
back to France, the colonists’ success was largely country.
aided by Warren’s squadron of Imperial ships. But,
most of all, the final conquest of Canada was due far more to the
action of the mother country than to that of the colonies.
The great, almost the only, foreign danger to the English colonies
in North America was from the French in Canada and Louisiana, but
it is not generally realized how enormously the English on the North
American continent outnumbered the French. At the time of the
conquest of Canada, the white population of the English colonies in
North America was to that of the French colonies as thirteen to one.
It is true that the English did not form one community, whereas the
French were united; but it is also true, on the other hand, that the
several English communities were more concentrated than the
French, and that they held the base of the triangle, which base was
the sea. A single one of the larger English colonies had a white
population equal to or surpassing the whole French population in
North America. Under these circumstances it might fairly be asked
why the English colonists required any help at all from the mother
country to conquer Canada. The war was one in which they were
vitally concerned. Its object was to give present security to their
frontiers, to rid them once for all from the raids of French and
Indians, which had for generations desolated their villages, farms,
and homesteads, and to leave the West as a heritage to their
children’s children, instead of allowing the valleys of the Mississippi

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The Oxford Handbook of the African

American Slave Narrative John Ernest

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(p. ix) Acknowledgments

About the Contributors

(p. xi) About the Contributors

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman is Associate Professor of English and African and African

Nicole N. Aljoe is a member of the Department of English at Northeastern Universi­

William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English and Comparative Lit­

Daphne A. Brooks is Professor of English and African-American Studies at Prince­

Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., is Professor, Emeritus, of History at the University of Califor­

Jeannine Marie DeLombard is Associate Professor of English at the University of

DoVeanna S. Fulton is dean and professor at the University of Houston-Downtown.

Teresa A. Goddu teaches at Vanderbilt University. A specialist in nineteenth-century

Justin A. Joyce is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. His work on the

Mitch Kachun is Professor of History at Western Michigan University. He is author

Dwight A. McBride is Daniel Hale Williams Professor of African American Studies,

Barbara McCaskill is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia,

Joycelyn K. Moody is Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature

Sharon Ann Musher is Associate Professor of History and Director of American

Marie Jenkins Schwartz is Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island,

Winfried Siemerling is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and an As­

Kimberly K. Smith is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Political

Brenda E. Stevenson is Professor of History at UCLA. She is the author of Life in

Helen Thomas is Principal Lecturer in English and Writing at Falmouth University,

Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Assistant Professor of English at Clemson University,

John Michael Vlach is Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at

Kenneth W. Warren is Professor of English at the University of Chicago and author

Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature

Abstract and Keywords

Some of these efforts were symbolic: representing people of color as ridiculous or

As Melish notes, many of these measures involved the strategic misrepresentation of

So why are we still struggling to come to a balanced and comprehensive understanding of

Slave narratives, accordingly, are difficult acts of remembrance—difficult in the attempt

Addressing the ongoing challenge to “manage an authenticating response” to the enor­

Experience and Authority

Environments and Migrations

Echoes and Traces

Stepto, Robert B. “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives,” in Reconstructing

“To Our Patrons.” Freedom’s Journal. March 16, 1827.

Winks, Robin W. Introduction, in An Autobiography of The Reverend Josiah Henson. Four

John Ernest, University of Delaware

Slave Narratives and Historical Memory

Print Publication Date: Apr 2014 Subject: Literature, American Literature

Abstract and Keywords

One significant exception to the public’s neglect of post-emancipation narratives was

Beloved. Burbank, CA: Touchstone Home Video, 1999.

Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979.

Clark, Kathleen Ann. Defining Moments: African-American Commemoration & Political

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Boston, 1845.

Fabian, Ann. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America.

Fitzgerald, Frances. America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century.

Harriet Tubman. Irving, TX: Nest Entertainment, 1996.

Hill, Lawrence. Someone Knows My Name. New York: Norton, 2007.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Boston, 1861.

Kachun, Mitch. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African-American Emanci­

Nicole N. Aljoe is a member of the Department of English at Northeastern Universi

William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English and Comparative Lit

Daphne A. Brooks is Professor of English and African-American Studies at Prince

Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., is Professor, Emeritus, of History at the University of Califor

Winfried Siemerling is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and an As

Addressing the ongoing challenge to “manage an authenticating response” to the enor

Kachun, Mitch. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African-American Emanci

Spindel, Donna J. “Assessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsid