From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Colonial Williamsburg Studies in Chesapeake History and Culture Series)

Rating:
Summary: An important contribution to the history of slave life
Review: This is an unusual history, in which Lorena Walsh seeks to investigate the lives of slaves within one related set of Virginia's Burwell family plantations, rather than focusing upon slavery on a larger regional scale. Her subject is Carter's Grove, Virginia, where Walsh is employed as a resident historian, and where historical reenactments suffered from a lack of information on the slaves who worked the plantation in the 18th century. She is therefore motivated primarily to provide a detailed account of the Carter's Grove slaves themselves, though she hopes that her study will help to substantiate more general histories of slavery in Virginia.

Walsh begins by tracing the origins of the Carter's Grove slaves, noting that perhaps half came to the plantation from other Virgina slaveholders, while the others arrived directly from Africa. She believes that the diverse backgrounds of the slaves must have resulted in cultural conflict among them at first, but that they eventually assimilated while maintaining some African traditions. By the 1750s, the majority of the plantation's slaves were creolized, resulting in a more stable population where close kin networks led to decreased resistance and more tolerable lives for the slaves. The slaves' material and working conditions also improved over time, as the Burwell family reduced their reliance on tobacco and turned to producing less labor intensive crops like wheat and dairy products for local markets. The emphasis on local trade also allowed slaves to visit among neighboring plantations and strengthen kin networks. Unfortunately, the 1770s saw the Burwell family fortunes decline, and the community at Carter's Grove was broken apart, with some slaves moving to western plantations while others were eventually scattered throughout the state. While nuclear family units were usually kept together, the extended family continued on in importance in the slaves' lives only through oral tradition.

Walsh's inquiry is both unique and problematic due to the limitations of her sources. While she hopes that the primary evidence she finds at Carter's Grove (archaeological evidence, planters' records, and 19th century slave memoirs) will help to bolster the conclusions made in more generalized histories of slave life in Virginia, it is difficult at times to determine whether her conclusions are drawn entirely form her primary sources, or whether she is simply using secondary literature to guide her in understanding the evidence from Carter's Grove. Moreover, at times her conclusions, while creative, are based on little evidence at all, such as when she assumes cultural conflict between creole and African slaves. Such hypotheses are sensible, but there is little actual evidence to support them. Nonetheless, this is an important study for anyone seriously interested in the history of slave life and culture in 18th century Virgina, and a model for future inquiries in the field.