Volume 27, Number 6 · April 17, 1980
Why Didn't Slaves Rebel?
By Winthrop D. Jordan
From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World
by Eugene D. Genovese
Louisiana State University Press, 173 pp., $9.95
In the wake of the bloody Nat Turner slave rebellion in 1831, a Virginia legislator reassured himself and his colleagues by announcing, 'Our slave population is not only a happy one, but it is a contented, peaceful and harmless one.' That assertion would have startled American slaveholders a generation earlier. The myth of slave docility got started remarkably late in the institution's two centuries of existence in North America. But it flourished for more than a hundred years, dominating both popular and scholarly white views of blacks in bondage. Then, about 1940, the myth came under severe attack by Herbert Aptheker and other scholars. Since then many historians have labored against the myth, chiefly with the aim of proving a negative proposition: that slaves were not contented. Now Eugene Genovese raises the level of discussion to a point where we can talk about slave revolts without being hemmed in by the old ideology of proslavery apologists.
Review, 2485 words
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