Volume 22, Number 14 · September 18, 1975
Off the Plantation
By Willie Lee Rose
Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
by Ira Berlin
Pantheon, 423 pp., $15.00
They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830-1861
by Jane H. Pease, by William H. Pease
Atheneum, 331 pp., $3.95 (paper)
The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké
by Katherine DuPre Lumpkin
University of North Carolina Press, 265 pp., $11.95
As the crisp outline left when a cooky cutter has finished its business serves to remind us, it is occasionally possible to see the shape of things as well from the outside as from within. That plantation slavery was much more than a labor system most readers of American history understand well enough: how much more is being slowly absorbed as the studies of those who lived just outside the system accumulate. In the last year several distinguished works have appeared on slavery as slaves and their owners experienced it. But it is a measure of the increasing sophistication of this field of scholarship that we also have several important new works of historians who have gone off the plantation, so to speak, to explore the social meaning of slavery for abolitionists and the free black victims of society, those who were in a technical sense the chattel property of nobody.
Review, 4614 words
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