Volume 46, Number 10 · June 10, 1999
Plantation Blues
By Edmund S. Morgan
Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation
by John Hope Franklin, by Loren Schweninger
Oxford University Press, 428 pp., $35.00
Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries
by Orlando Patterson
Civitas/Counterpoint, 330 pp., $29.50
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger announce at the outset of their study of runaway slaves that 'even today important aspects of the history of slavery remain shrouded in myth and legend.' The myths and legends are not only those that still romanticize the old plantation but also the contrary ones that demonize it. Like other myths they have only a remote resemblance to fact, but historians who seek to dispel them, an enterprise that has engaged some of the best of them in the past fifty years, have found that in the study of slavery myth clings stubbornly to fact. Every exposition of what actually happened on the plantation carries implications, frequently unintended, that echo the myths. And this is particularly the case with attempts to recover the facts of what slavery did to slaves, where a long tail of implication sometimes seems to wag the dog.
Review, 4810 words
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