"THE SLAVE HAS SPOKEN FOR HIMSELF": The Slave Narrative as Historiographical Lens

[Editor's Note 1: As one certainly has noticed, in the previous months there has been a regrettable slowdown in the content provided by the site. Time management in and of itself is worthy of its own post, but needless to say, the busyness of our final semesters of coursework have diverted attention from posting on the website. Hopefully it has been some consolation to everyone that our Twitter account has remained relatively up-to-date.]

[Editor's Note 2: In lieu of the exciting news that 12 Years a Slave, the film adaptation of Solomon Northrup's 1853 slave narrative, won the Oscar for the Best Picture of the Year, I'd like to offer a suggestion as to how these rich resources - a number of which can be found at UNC's Documenting the South database - maybe be used for historiographical purposes.] 

William L. Sheppard, "The First Cotton Gin," 19th cent.

Peter Wood once admitted to anxiety regarding his source base when he began his research on slavery in colonial South Carolina. Bracing himself for the possibility that what was necessary for his work may “scarcely” exist, Wood instead discovered that slave voices proved “more than ample” through myriad primary sources.[1] Often, studying slavery requires a large mount of reading in the lines, such as utilizing the records of the Royal African Company to illuminate the morbid nature of the Middle Passage for saltwater slaves and examining probate records to gauge the economic optimism owners viewed the reproductive capabilities of their female human property.[2] Most valuable to historians, though, are the narratives left by escaped or emancipated former slaves who detailed their experiences whilst in the throes of the peculiar institution. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a close reading of a slave narrative – in this case, the narrative of James Williams – can act as a historiographical lens to recent scholarship on American slavery.

Think Before You Count: Reflections on Trotti's recent article in the JAH

Being that the school year is still young and that the work is usually weighted towards the end of the semester, I actually had time to prop up my feet at the office and enjoy reading an article in the most recent edition of the Journal of American History that I got in the mail today. (I can already hear my professors lecturing me on how I'm supposed to use the free time I have now to get ahead on all the work that that will be due in December, even though they know damn well they did the exact sort thing when they were in grad school.) Of particular interest to me was Michael Ayers Trotti's article, "What Counts: Trends in Racial Violence in the Postbellum South." Trotti's piece is germane to most graduate students, regardless of their specialty, because it wrestles with the methodological pitfalls surrounding quantitative history. Trotti highlights the great difficulty inherent in quantitative historical analysis, especially when said analysis that has moral implications related to some of the darkest chapters in American history. (A quick disclaimer: this blog post is by no means intended to be an exhaustive summary of the article, but only notes some of the key points that I felt like particularly mattered to grad students.)

Trotti begins by reminding his readers that the very definition of lynching is itself contested and not always the best yardstick with which to measure the effectiveness of racial terrorism in American history. Definitions and statistical analyses of lynching emerged in the early twentieth century, usually through the work of groups like the NAACP, in order to combat the epidemic of violence. Usually, we think of lynchings as having multiple perpetrators. But Trotti points out that simply determining what counts as a "lynching" for the historian is far from simple and, furthermore, all lynchings were not created equal. Sometimes the murder of a solitary black leader by a white citizen provoked far greater terror than a brutal public lynching. Even still, it is impossible to even grasp at the total number of lynchings that occurred between 1880 and 1920 (what we usually think of as the high-point of racial terrorism in the US). Records are shoddy, testimony is often skewed, and ascertaining whether an event should count in the tally of a "lynching" is far from clear. (If three people watched one white person murder an African American, but didn't actually participate in the killing, how should the historian count it?) Trotti insists that scholars broaden their view beyond lynchings to a more expansive notion of racial terrorism because studies of "lynchings" fail to capture the totality of the situation for many black Americans living in this time period.