The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South

“The pervasiveness of guilt among planters, the acculturation of the bondsman, the evolution of marriage and family life in the quarters, the education, treatment, and personality development of the slave all hinged, to some degree, on the activities of Southern white churches.”

Religion, especially the activities of Protestant churches in the Southern United States, is a major factor in the history of slavery. As John W. Blassingame notes here, Christianity affected the perceptions of both planters and enslaved people as well as their relationships with each other. For example, planters struggled to reconcile slavery with Christianity’s teachings and either promoted the idea that slavery was not a concern for churches or encouraged preachers to frame slavery as beneficial to enslaved people.

“By concentrating solely on the planter, historians have, in effect, been listening to only one side of a complicated debate. The distorted view of the plantation which emerges from planter records is that of an all-powerful, monolithic institution which strips the slave of any meaningful and distinctive culture, family life, religion, or manhood. The clearest portrait the planter has drawn of the slave is the stereotype of Sambo, a submissive half-man, half-child. Such stereotypes are so intimately related to the planter’s projections, desires, and biases that they tell us little about slave behavior and even less about the slave’s inner life, his thoughts, actions, self-concepts, or personality.”

This quote is Blassingame’s main criticism of previous historians of slavery in the South. Previous historians not only ignored the perspective of enslaved people but focused almost entirely on the experiences and writings of plantation owners.

“While relying heavily on those black autobiographies which pass the tests commonly applied to historical sources, I have also systematically examined several hundred white autobiographies, plantation records, agricultural journals, and travel accounts. This approach permits us to view slave life through the eyes of three witnesses. Two of them, the planter and the slave, give an insider’s view of the plantation. The third witness, the traveler, views the relation between slave and master from the outside. Although there are no absolute guarantees of truth, this three-dimensional picture of the plantation at least reveals the complexity of the institution and, hopefully, gives us a close approximation of the interaction between masters and slaves.”

Here, Blassingame describes his sources. Because slave autobiographies provide a direct look into how enslaved people viewed their own experiences and the plantation system, he argues that they “are crucial for an understanding of the slave experience” (368).