The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South

The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South can be understood as a response to the “Lost Cause” historical narrative. John W. Blassingame criticizes historians before him for ignoring the perspectives of enslaved people and instead privileging the history of planters—which reduces slave to “the stereotype of Sambo, a submissive half-man, half-child” (xi). He specifically refers to Southern white interviewers who edited interviews with former enslaved people to remove “material contrary to the paternalistic image of the Old South they wanted to present” (375). This “paternalistic image” reflects the narrative promoted by “Lost Cause” historians.

Lost Cause history is a narrative that promotes pro-Confederate, historically false ideas such as slavery in the South not being as brutal as believed (or even going so far as to frame enslaved people as benefitting from the paternal benevolence of plantation owners), and that the Confederacy would have still outlawed slavery had the U.S. Civil War not happened. These views were originally promoted during the late 19th-early 20th centuries in the Southern United States. They shaped how general histories and textbooks were written and taught in schools not only in the South, but across the United States.