Edmund Ruffin , 1794-1865, American agriculturist, one of the Southern fire-eaters , b. Prince George co., Va. His interest in improving impoverished land led him to become a pioneer in soil chemistry. Against much opposition he advocated the benefits of marl and proved its value. His arguments were propounded in An Essay on Calcareous Manures (1832, 5th rev. ed. 1852). He founded (1833) and edited until 1842 an excellent agricultural publication, the Farmers' Register. An ardent supporter of states' rights and secession, he left Virginia for the more congenial political milieu of South Carolina, where on Apr. 12, 1861, he was given the privilege of firing the first shot against Fort Sumter. With the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox he committed suicide.

Bibliography: See his Diary, ed. by W. K. Scarborough (Vol. I, 1972).

Slavery OverviewThe Slave TradeDevelopment and Expansion of SlaverySlave Families, Communities, and CultureHistorians and Slavery
Overview No field of United States history produced a larger body of scholarship in the decades after World War II, or underwent more substantial revision, than did slavery. We now understand that the Africans who came to the North American mainland formed only a small part of the stream of Atlantic slavery. Indeed, only in North America did the unfree population reproduce itself in substantial numbers. Further, contemporary historians now study North American slavery as part of a larger Atlantic history linking Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and recognize differences related to where slaves originated, the crops that they produced and the scale of plantations on which they labored, and the time period involved. The slave experience of those who arrived in North America early in the period of European colonization differed from those who toiled at the peak of the plantation system in the era of “King Cotton,” 1830–1860. On the eve of the Civil War, slavery remained a dynamic and expanding system, not an antiquated labor system on its way to extinction.

Recent scholarship also demonstrates how slaves maintained their humanity under the most trying circumstances. Historians have done much to uncover the extent to which African cultures survived in the Americas; how slave societies grew more hybrid as Africans adapted to new circumstances and as their offspring became African Americans; how slaves struggled to maintain families in the face of long‐distance migration and slave sales; how religion, Muslim as well as Christian, buttressed slaves' humanity; and how slaves strained to create for themselves a measure of space and liberty under the most oppressive conditions.

Melvyn Dubofsky

The Slave Trade The British North American colonies and the United States received about 600,000 slaves in the transatlantic slave trade from Africa, about 6 percent of all slaves arriving in the Americas. Prior to the eighteenth century, some slaves were shipped or transshipped from the British West Indies, but most were sent to the mainland directly from the coastal areas of West Africa, particularly Angola and the Bight of Biafra. The enslaved most often had been captured in warfare or kidnapped within Africa by other Africans, and then marched to the coast for sale to European traders. In addition to the slave trade to the Americas, slaves were also sold for use elsewhere in Africa or in the Arabian world, the direction of movement depending on relative demands for slave labor from different parts of a global trading area.

In the middle passage between Africa and the Americas the ships generally carried more people per ton of carrying capacity than ships carrying free passengers. On slave ships bound for the United States, as on those in other parts of the slave trade, captives' mortality rates averaged about 10 percent over the period, with a decline in shipboard mortality rates over time.

The slave trade peaked just prior to the ending of the international slave trade to the United States in 1808, by act of Congress in accord with a provision of the Constitution. British traders carried most of the slaves to the colonies, although colonists and later independent Americans, primarily in Rhode Island, also engaged in slave trading. Rum was the major commodity Rhode Islanders used in trading for slaves. Most of the slaves arrived in the southern states, Virginia and South Carolina serving as the major recipients.

Sale of slaves within the colonies began with their arrival. The British placed few restrictions on slave sales within or between colonies, and the U.S. Constitution did not limit such transactions. Slave sales could occur directly between buyer and seller or through a specialized middleman, the slave trader. A distinct occupation within the antebellum South, slave trading involved purchasing and selling slaves, often by public auction; shipping slaves within the South from buying to selling regions; providing credit for slave sales; and advertising and distributing information sheets about the state of the slave market and the current prices for slaves of different age, sex, and occupational status. Slave trading was a risky but moderately profitable occupation.

Prior to 1790, most internal slave movement covered short distances, generally inland from the initial coastal settlements. After 1790, long‐distance movement from the eastern states of the Upper South to western states of the Lower South became more common, as the cotton kingdom spread westward. The interstate movement caused the share of slave population in the earlier‐settled parts of the South to fall from over 95 percent of all southern slaves in 1790 to less than 50 percent in 1860. The magnitude of this movement, about one million slaves, is not in dispute; historians, however, still debate what proportion of slaves moved with owners, which meant some prospect of holding families intact, and what proportion involved the slave trade. A related debate concerns the interstate slave trade's contribution to the profitability of slavery in the selling areas of the old South. Although owners moved or sold slaves to areas of higher productivity, the income from the actual numbers of slaves sold was insufficient in itself to ensure either the persistence or profitability of slavery in the older areas.
See also Colonial Era; Cotton Industry.

Bibliography

Frederic Bancroft , Slave‐Trading in the Old South, 1931; reprint 1996.
James A. Rawley , The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History, 1981.
Michael Tadman , Speculators and Slaves, 1989.

Stanley L. Engerman

Development and Expansion of Slavery In the early eighteenth century, when English authorities in Virginia and South Carolina gathered the disparate laws affecting slavery into comprehensive slave codes, slavery in North America entered a new phase. Although Africans had arrived on the continent with the early Spanish explorers, slavery under English dominion existed as a combination of acquired customs and laws enacted piecemeal to restrict the behavior of Africans and Native Americans. Beginning in Virginia in 1705, however, slavery took on new institutional life. Thenceforward, a class of human beings identifiable merely by their non‐European ancestry were held as property and systematically denied the rights and privileges of free persons.

The prime mover behind this transformation was the growth of world trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which created unprecedented demand for commodities of every variety. While Europe supplied manufactured goods, the Americas and Africa contributed raw materials and slaves. The English in the northern colonies produced naval stores, fish, animal hides, and cattle. Their counterparts to the south raised tobacco and other plantation staples using slave laborers as well.

The Colonial and Revolutionary Eras.

The tobacco‐based plantation system that evolved in the area surrounding Chesapeake Bay proved to be the seedbed of slavery in British North America. As early as 1676, Bacon's Rebellion had demonstrated the settlers' passion for fresh lands on which to grow tobacco. As they pressed westward, white Virginians established satellite “quarters” where newly imported African slaves cleared the land and planted tobacco. Plantation routines, particularly those governing labor, evolved by trial and error. If smallholders often worked side‐by‐side with their slaves, larger planters embraced a more intense—and more exploitive—system characterized by long hours in the fields under the direction of overseers. Eventually called gang labor, this routine furnished little to the laborers other than food, clothing, and shelter.

Emulating the sugar plantations of the West Indies, the English built a plantation colony in South Carolina during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. When the colonists realized that the swampy soil favored rice cultivation, they developed a plantation system that, while different from the Chesapeake Bay pattern, nonetheless displayed important similarities. Recognizing their own susceptibility to malaria and the Africans' apparent immunity, the South Carolinians imported thousands of African slaves annually over the eighteenth century. After 1750, when the new colony of Georgia authorized slavery, Carolina planters pushed rice cultivation southward. They also revolutionized production, using slave labor to reshape the landscape, harnessing the tidal flow of rivers to flood the rice fields. The task system of labor that evolved in this setting rested on the individual laborer's responsibility for performing a fixed amount of work per day. Overseers assigned tasks to individual slaves and inspected the completed work at day's end. Obliged largely to support themselves, rice‐plantation slaves also controlled whatever surplus they produced from their allotment gardens.

The new plantation systems of Virginia and South Carolina increased social stratification among Europeans and gave rise to a division of labor among the slaves. Masters increasingly brought slaves into their households as cooks, butlers, maidservants, and carriage drivers. Other slaves, mostly men, began practicing trades. The balance between field and house labor on any particular slaveholding plantation depended on the personal circumstances of specific masters and the economic and political currents prevalent in different places at different times.

The farms and plantations of the Chesapeake region profoundly affected the evolution of slave culture in North America. The process whereby Africans became African Americans occurred unevenly, as slaves wielded traditional beliefs and customs against the cultural assault unleashed by their masters. By the mid–eighteenth century, however, slave culture in the Chesapeake Bay represented a blending of West African, European, and Native American influences. Even before large‐scale conversion to Christianity, slaves imbibed the political culture of the English colonial system. They petitioned and sued for their freedom, employing the language of personal rights and liberties that was gaining public currency. In the Carolina lowcountry, a combination of geographic isolation and the high proportion of Africans in the population accounted for a pronounced African influence on language, folklore, burial customs, medical practices, and crafts that in some respects persisted into the late twentieth century.

The Revolutionary War shook but did not topple slavery. The Virginia planters who played a major role in crafting the rationale for independence took care that the demand for freedom not reach the slaves. They took equal pains to assure that the new nation's fundamental law favored the property interest of slaveholders over the human rights of slaves. As northern slaveholders embraced gradual emancipation and some of their southern counterparts embraced the African colonization movement, most southern slaveholders clung ever more firmly to slavery.

Amidst this renewed commitment to human bondage, planters in the Chesapeake Bay region diversified their agriculture by growing wheat and other grains along with tobacco. As a result of declining soil fertility, a slave population growing rapidly through natural increase, and changes in international markets, planters confronted a surplus of slaves. Thus they allied with opponents of the trans‐atlantic slave trade to ban the importation of enslaved Africans after 1807. As the plantation system expanded westward with the new nation, the lower South provided a ready market for the “surplus” slaves of the upper South.

The Slave System Spreads Westward.

The South Atlantic states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia illustrate the post‐revolutionary expansion of slavery westward. Opposed to abolishing the slave trade, much less slavery, settlers streamed into the upcountry even before Eli Whitney's cotton gin made the large‐scale cultivation of short‐staple cotton profitable. They crossed the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, knowing that, although the Northwest Ordinance (1783) prohibited the formation of new slave states north of the Ohio River, no such prohibition applied south of the Ohio. Expanding cotton manufacturing in England (and soon in New England) created an apparently insatiable demand for raw cotton that sparked the explosive growth of plantation slavery throughout the South.

The expansion of slavery continued for the four‐score and seven years between the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, and Texas entered the Union as slave states between 1803 and 1845. Even before qualifying for statehood, these areas had witnessed the rapid spread of slavery and the equally rapid development of plantation clusters. The appropriation of Native American lands, particularly during Andrew Jackson's presidency, further facilitated this expansion. By 1850, the Black Belt stretched from the Carolinas to eastern Texas.

Gang labor under overseers quickly became the defining feature of the cotton‐plantation system. To outsiders, plantation life often appeared unusually monotonous, with fields, buildings, slave quarters, and even the crossroads towns displaying little distinctiveness. Work routines likewise seemed to lack variety: Daily toil began before sunrise and ended at sundown or later. Cultural aspects of the system also became routinized by the 1830s. Masters acquiesced in the religious instruction of their slaves, on the understanding that slavery was a system of labor ordained by God and that planters served as God's custodians for the putatively inferior descendants of Africa. Masters permitted slaves to marry in ceremonies that stopped short of sanction by church or state, and they generally refrained from selling small children apart from their mothers.

Considerable diversity, however, belied the appearance of uniformity. Seasonal rhythms varied the kind and the pace of work, as did the vagaries of geography and weather patterns. Even on large plantations, routines differed by the size of the slave force, the relationship between overseers and slaves, and—most importantly—the personality and beliefs of the master. If few masters renounced the whip, each wielded it with different frequency and intensity. Some offered their slaves such prerogatives as gardening and marketing. On smaller farms, the circumstances in which slaves lived and worked varied widely. Cities and towns offered masters and slaves additional possibilities for experimentation, depending on the size of the city, its racial and ethnic demography, the nature of its economy, and the local political climate.

A critical element in slavery's westward spread was the growth of a regional market in slaves. Trading houses emerged in areas where slaves were in abundant supply (such as Richmond) and where they were in demand (such as New Orleans). Between 1800 and 1861, perhaps as many as one million slaves were relocated from the Upper South to the Lower South and from the southeastern to the southwestern slave states. Like other forms of property, slaves were sold to speculators, deeded to heirs, given as wedding presents, and wagered in games of chance. The scant restraints on such exchanges intensified the slaves' most dreaded fate—the breakup of families through sale to strangers—a process intrinsic to the machinery of expansion.

As early as the 1830s, the lands settled in the years after the Revolution had begun to deteriorate under relentless cotton cultivation. In upcountry Georgia, for instance, travelers observed deep gullies where the topsoil had washed from the fields. The Panic of 1837, largely a product of heavy speculation in western lands, temporarily limited slavery expansion but in the long run fostered it. The ensuing contraction depressed cotton prices until after the Mexican War, but amidst the stagnation, cotton planters studied the prescriptions for agricultural reform that such Upper South figures as Edmund Ruffin of Virginia had long advocated: deep plowing; fertilizers; improved methods, implements, seeds, and work animals; and, most important of all, diversification. They organized agricultural societies to pursue these objectives, circulated tracts on improved farming, and subscribed to reform‐minded agricultural journals. If the rising price of cotton by the late 1840s produced some backsliding, the reform cause—and its cardinal tenet of self‐sufficiency—gained a new lease on life as the sectional crisis deepened.

The Expansive 1850s.

With the return of prosperity in the 1850s, a number of significant changes helped spread cotton cultivation—and slavery—into new areas. Prosperity, for instance, enabled planters to reduce the wild canebrakes of the Yazoo‐Mississippi Delta to the plow. Likewise, railroad promoters, perfecting the networks they had been envisioning since the 1820s, convinced cotton planters that railroads provided the key to the future of marketing their crops. The startling growth in rail mileage across the South generated profound social changes. Railroads sped the movement of goods, people, and ideas, but at a price. For many planters, railroads represented the distilled essence of the market and transportation revolutions that threatened the stability of the region.

The 1850s also witnessed the expansion of cotton cultivation into yeoman‐farming areas outside the Black Belt. Not surprisingly, the railroad played a part in this development. Traditionally, yeoman farmers had viewed market production as a supplement to subsistence‐oriented production. Railroads introduced an alluring range of consumer goods to which cotton growing promised access. Although the full effects of the yeoman farmers' switch from subsistence to market production did not materialize until after the Civil War, the numbers of new cotton growers, fresh cotton acres, and additional bales of cotton profoundly affected the institution of slavery on the eve of the Civil War. Cotton mania even gave rise to a short‐lived but intense campaign to reopen the transatlantic slave trade. Although the proposal failed, it alerted the North to the growing demand for slaves amid the rising tide of cotton prosperity.

Through the secession crisis and the events leading up to the Civil War, many white southerners became convinced that leaving the Union would not only guarantee their independence, but also improve the prospects for expanding slavery. They looked approvingly on the fact that between 1790 and 1860 the slave population had grown from approximately .7 million to nearly 4 million. On the eve of the Civil War, the two most populous slave states, Virginia and Georgia, alone had more slaves than had been in the entire United States in 1790. Eyeing Central America and the Caribbean (especially Cuba), planters believed that the future of slave expansion looked bright. Beyond generating wealth, they believed, they would also demonstrate to the world slavery's ability to harmonize capital and labor and thereby avoid the class conflicts that threatened to plunge urban, industrial societies into chaos. Not until invading northern armies moved south and by 1863 undertook an all‐out war against slavery did planters realize the unreality of that dream.
See also African American Religion; Agriculture: Colonial Era; Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Antebellum Era; Antislavery; Brown, John; Business Cycle; Calhoun, John C.; Colonial Era; Compromise of 1850; Cotton Industry; Depressions, Economic; Early Republic, Era of the; Expansionism; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Fugitive Slave Act; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Industrialization; Nat Turner's Uprising; Racism; Revolution and Constitution, Era of; Scott v. Sandford; Slave Uprisings and Resistance; Textile Industry; Tobacco Industry.

Bibliography

Kenneth M. Stampp , The Peculiar Institution, 1956.
Eugene D. Genovese , Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1974.
Lawrence W. Levine , Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 1977.
Albert J. Raboteau , Slave Religion, 1978.
James Oakes , The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders, 1982.
Sterling Stuckey , Slave Culture, 1987.
Michael Tadman , Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South, 1989.
Ira Berlin , Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, 1998.
Philip D. Morgan , Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth‐Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, 1998.

Joseph P. Reidy

Slave Families, Communities, and Culture African enslavement in North America was a deeply isolating experience. After enduring the middle passage, newcomers underwent a brutal “seasoning” process intended to accommodate them to an alien culture and break their independent wills. Torn away from the families, communities, landscapes, and cultures they had known, survivors faced the Herculean task of reconstructing their lives, individually and collectively, within the harsh and hostile confines of the New World slavery system.

The challenge, though enormous for all, differed significantly for each person. Age and sex mattered, as did physical, mental, and spiritual health. So too did the nature of the climate faced, the crops raised, and the master to be endured. Did you arrive earlier, or later? Did fate confine you to a large plantation or a small farm? Did you live in the city, learn languages quickly, work in the big house, or possess special skills of use to your workmates or your owner? All these variables and many more shaped the personal conditions for gradually rebuilding a web of relationships within the system of hereditary, race‐based enslavement.

Establishing human ties under inhuman conditions often appeared impossible, and many succumbed to depression, insanity, or suicide. Thousands of newcomers each year found their unpaid work exhausting, their nutrition poor, and their shelter minimal. Violence and abuse proved commonplace, freedom of movement was monitored, and access to literacy prohibited. Such conditions taxed strength, drained emotion, and left hope in short supply. But slave narratives (and memoirs from slave labor camps in modern times) demonstrate that the need for community and culture is difficult to crush entirely.

Since newcomers found it virtually impossible to retain contact with enslaved members of their African family or village of origin, they established bonds with others who spoke a similar language or had survived the Atlantic passage on the same ship. They also had frequent contacts with European indentured servants and artisans, Native Americans (enslaved and free), and a variety of free blacks and mulattoes. But their most important encounters were with two other groups: recently arrived “saltwater slaves” from different (though frequently similar) African cultures, and “country‐born Negroes,” with no personal knowledge of Africa, who had adapted to life in the American “gulag.”

Out of these contacts, new families took shape in the face of conflicting pressures. Motivated by self‐interest, planters encouraged domestic ties. Slave offspring represented added labor and larger profits; family bonds tempered the desire for escape or rebellion; and conjugal units among slaves suited slave owners' desires to enforce propriety. But owners also frustrated and mocked close slave relationships. Exploiting their nearly absolute power, they frequently raped black women, forced couples to procreate against their will, punished polygamy (acceptable in some African cultures), and discouraged lasting relationships between slaves belonging to different masters.

Even when unused, the legally sanctioned power of any owner to offer large rewards (including freedom itself) and impose stringent punishments (including whipping, maiming, chaining, or castration) affected relations among the enslaved. Planters held, and occasionally used, the legal power to separate husbands from wives and parents from children—suddenly and permanently—by invoking the right to sell human property for profit. Even manumission could have divisive effects, for owners occasionally freed their own mulatto offspring, turncoats who betrayed conspiracies, and elderly or crippled workers who then had to subsist on their own.

A comparison to the West Indies is revealing, for the slave regime in the U.S. South was less harsh and life expectancy longer than in the sugar islands. Also, child mortality remained lower. Therefore, long before the end of the slave trade in 1807, mainland planters preferred to encourage childbirth and absorb the cost of raising future laborers, rather than working slaves to early deaths and buying costly adult replacements. Since the ratio of women to men was less imbalanced among the enslaved population in North America (in part owing to the importance of African women in Carolina rice production), this population achieved and sustained a positive growth rate much sooner than in the Caribbean.

A further contrast proved significant. By the eighteenth century, Africans vastly outnumbered Europeans on the Caribbean islands, while in most slaveholding areas of North America whites maintained not only legal, but also numerical, domination. Black majorities prevailed in the lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, in tidewater counties of Virginia and Maryland, and in the cotton plantation regions of Louisiana and Mississippi. But as the United States expanded while curtailing the African slave trade and absorbing a steady flow of immigrants from Europe, black Americans had fewer contacts with Africans and more with Europeans and Native Americans than did their West Indian counterparts.

Add to this important demographic fact the heavy weight of racist ideology, the brutalizing nature of hereditary slavery, plus its sheer longevity, and the roots and complexities of African‐American culture make increasing sense. Though African traditions and practices persisted more strongly under enslavement than many have understood, the above‐mentioned factors also help explain why such cultural patterns were less abundant and enduring in the American South than in the Caribbean region.

Given the formidable odds, safe, stable families could not be the norm among enslaved Americans. Yet lasting marriages and wide kin networks emerged, and new lifeways developed. With regard to speech, food, music, dance, dress, body language, religious belief, and most other aspects of life, slaves steadily mixed different African traditions together, while also integrating and absorbing significant aspects of Euro‐American and Native American experience. The result of this extended syncretic process was the appearance, even before 1800, of a distinctive and enduring African‐American culture, with common strands and numerous regional variations.

Nothing epitomized Afro‐America's emergent culture more than the rise of a distinctive black Christianity. Despite efforts by white authorities to preach only submission and conformity to slaves, the Bible offered precedent and inspiration for a message of triumph over bondage. Its stories, when personalized, provided meaning and hope in the face of deep suffering. More than any other institution created in slave times, the church provided a sanctioned haven for building communities of belief and mutual support.
See also African American Religion; African Americans; Antislavery; Cotton Industry; Douglass, Frederick; Gospel Music, African American; Marriage and Divorce; Racism; Protestantism; Religion; Slave Uprisings and Resistance; Spirituals; Tobacco Industry; Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Bibliography

John W. Blassingame , The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, 1972.
Herbert G. Gutman , The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925, 1976.
Sterling Stuckey , Slave Culture, 1987.
Larry E. Hudson Jr. , To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina, 1997.
Michael A. Gomez , Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, 1998.
Ira Berlin , Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, 1998.

Peter H. Wood

Historians and Slavery In American Negro Slavery (1918), Ulrich B. Phillips portrayed the institution of slavery as a benign paternalism that ordered relations between docile, childlike slaves and their masters. Though Phillips's knowledge of the plantation economy was not balanced by an understanding of slaves as human beings, his was for decades the most influential text on the subject. Herbert Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) represented a sustained response to Phillips, who had labeled slave uprisings as “crimes.” Aptheker provided extensive evidence of slave resistance and gave imaginative attention to relevant institutional features of slavery, but not until Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956) was plantation slavery examined in ways that systematically reversed or modified Phillips. For Stampp, slavery as labor system, far more than paternalism, was its defining reality. However, Stanley Elkins in Slavery: A Problem in American Intellectual and Institutional Life (1959), drawing upon the analogy of Nazi concentration camps, reintroduced Phillips's serio‐comic slave (the so‐called Sambo), contending that the totalitarian nature of slavery so battered the slaves' personality that childlike behavior seemed natural to large numbers of slaves in the deep South.

Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll (1972) borrowed Phillips's conception of a benevolent paternalism but stressed a reciprocal, often subtle relationship between master and slave that assumed the humanity of slaves. The slaves' desire for freedom, Genovese argued, stemmed mainly from Christian influence. New lines of investigation, however, soon reconsidered the degree of slave dependence on the master. Peter Wood's Black Majority (1974) disclosed that Africans brought work skills with them, including rice cultivation, that greatly benefited the plantation economy of South Carolina. A year later, in American Slavery, American Freedom, Edmund Morgan contended that slave labor in tobacco fields, especially in Virginia, was vital to the colonists' Revolutionary struggle against England that led to freedom for white European settlers but, paradoxically, not for slaves. Owing to Morgan's interpretation, Edward McColley's earlier demonstrations, in Slavery in Jeffersonian Virginia (1964), of slaves' responsibility for tobacco cultivation and for every aspect of readying it for shipment took on new resonance. Consequently, the significance of slave labor in America's overall economic development was recast as a vital factor.

Although Lawrence Levine in Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1975) credited African influences in slave music and tales, he deflated the question of cultural origins, concluding that by the mid–nineteenth century slaves were mainly Christian. But disagreement among historians of slavery about the degree to which Christianity influenced slave religion and culture remained acute. Leslie Howard Owens's This Species of Property (1976), for example, was among the first studies to insist on the centrality of slave reliance on African religious values.

William Piersen's Black Legacy (1993) and Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture (1987) offered sustained explorations of the question of origins. Piersen demonstrated that slaves in the West Indies and North America shared numerous African values, while Stuckey contended, contrary to long‐held opinion, that specific African cultural elements—Ibo, Bakongo, Mendi, and others—formed the central core of slave culture throughout antebellum America and militated against the possibility of slaves being merely Christian.
See also African American Religion; Antebellum Era; Colonial Era; Cotton Industry; Historiography, American; Racism; Slave Uprising and Resistance; Tobacco Industry.

Bibliography

David Brion Davis , The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 1996.

Sterling Stuckey