Volume 44, Number 3 · February 20, 1997
White Wives and Slave Mothers
By David Brion Davis
Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South
by Brenda E. Stevenson
Oxford University Press, 457 pp., $35.00
Life in Black and White is an impressive example of the kind of local and regional history that for the last generation has transformed our understanding of the past. Brenda Stevenson has immersed herself so deeply in the private letters, diaries, school records, newspapers, and census schedules of Loudoun County, Virginia—and occasionally the records of some other Virginia counties—that she is able to bring to life a fascinating variety of Southern whites, black slaves, and free blacks while also providing a broad view of economic, demographic, and social change from the mid-eighteenth century to the Civil War. Stevenson also avoids the sentimentality and demonization that have characterized some of the best-known work on American slavery. As part of her major theme of racial differences between whites and blacks, she challenges prevailing beliefs regarding family life under slavery and thus contributes to the larger debate, which has taken many sharp turns during the past half-century, concerning the alleged weakness and pathology of the African-American family.
Review, 4154 words
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