The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Studies in Modern Capitalism)
by Wilma A. Dunaway
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Book Summary Information
Author: Wilma A. DunawayEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-04-14
ISBN: 0521012163
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Reviews of The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Studies in Modern Capitalism)
Book Review: The hell of slavery in the Appalachians
Summary: 5 Stars
If you were a slave woman of past 12 in the Appalachians you had the shortest life expectancy of anyone in the United States. The malnutrition, overwork during and after pregnancy, the intensive breeding to sell your children, and the constant sexual terrorism by white masters, not to speak of the violence regularly rained down on slaves, the unsanitary living and food conditions, and the exposure to noxious industrial, mining, and agricultural biproducts you were subjected to would kill you quicker than any other category in the whole country!
Slavery in Appalachia was worse than slavery anywhere else in the United States, especially for women and children. Dunaway who has build an exhaustive database of information on the economic, social, and political history of Appalachia under slavery, shines her light not only on the family, but the general conditions that African Americans in the Mountain areas faced under slavery and during the years following emancipation. She shatters the myth that slavery was kinder, more gentler in these areas than it was on the big plantations of the cotton, rice, and sugar cane South.
Appalachia had higher concentrations of industrial slavery where slaves were owned or rented out to mines, mills, saltworks, railroads, canals, and other businesses that worked them almost to death, surrounded them with dangerous industrial pollutants and kept them in worse conditions than their mules and horses. Smaller Appalachian rural slave holders often had a lower margin and less resources than Southern plantations to house and feed their slaves, and often used more severe violence and torture to keep their slaves slaves. Moreover in the last three decades of slavery, Appalachian masters got more into the business of breeding slaves for the labor hungry market of the Deep South, forcing slave mothers to have children again and again and again regardless of their health, but sending them back into the fields and mills or to nurse white children when their own children needed their nuturing.
Dunaway makes an important contribution to the general study of slavery and African American history and health by describing the different nutritional needs Africans enslaved in American had as a result of how evolution had bred in biological resistance to tropical health hazards. She explains that these needs along with the harsh work Appalachian and all slaves faced means that their nutritional needs, especially for protein, were grader than average and that attempts to determine slave nutrition based on "average" nutritional needs for the US minimizes the degree of malnutrition among the slaves in general and Appalachian slaves in particular.
Nor did slavery end peacefully in Appalachia. Many areas in the mountains were exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation because they were in union-held territory or states that did not secede. Even after the war and after slavery was abolished nationally, Appalachian masters held Black folk in slavery sometimes as much as two years, after they were due their freedom. She also discusses the violence, starvation, and degredation African Americans faced in Appalachia in the immediate aftermath of Emancipation.
Dunaway is a meticulous researcher, a clear analyst, and a quiet good writer. She never tries to dumb down or popularize her work. Yet, she never engages into the obtuse and confused language some academics think is necessary to make a work sound more "theoretical" or scientific.
This book belongs in the homes of anyone concerned with Black, Appalachian, or slave history
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