American Slavery: 1619-1877 (Penguin history) [Paperback]

It is impossible to over-state just what a superb book this is. Peter Kolchin covers the entire scope of slavery in America from its colonial origins to its destruction following the Civil War and everything else in between in an accessible and highly readable manner. From a casual, passing interest, right up to degree-level, "American Slavery" is nothing less than essential to anyone wanting to understand the 'peculiar institution'.

Slavery runs, like a gash, through the story of America, painful and unavoidable. Recent histories of the United States have underlined this fact clearly: Schama's The American Future, Kagan's Dangerous Nation, Thomas Bender's slightly older A Nation Among Nations. The election of Barack Obama is remarkable because of this particular aspect of history and its legacy.

Peter Kolchin's American Slavery isolates the subject itself, concentrating not upon slavery within the context of other American History but on slavery as the context itself.

Starting with the early colonial days, Kolchin traces the development of the slave economy in the US, using as points of comparison slavery in the rest of the Americas and serfdom in Russia. Bringing together many strands, the author admits from the outset that he has inevitably, within the space of less than 250 pages, sacrificed detail for a broad brush picture. This is very noticeable, and some of the omissions are, to this reviewer, very strange, and require only a scan of the index to spot.

For example, neither the battles of Antietam, the "winning" of which emboldened Lincoln to issue the Proclamation of Emancipation, or of Gettysburg, which broke the back of the Confederacy, gets a mention, and the Underground Railroad, by which southern blacks escaped to non-slaving states in the north, is over and done with after a couple of paragraphs. The annexation of Texas, the driver for which Kagan has given as a desire by slavers for an increase in the number of slaving states for political purposes, bears no comment at all.

The account is not without controversy. For example, commenting on slave numbers, Kolchin notes the discrepancy between the US and the rest of the Americas, the former having a far higher survival rate than the latter. In A Splendid Exchange, William Bernstein has attributed this to the prevalence of sugar as a cash crop outside the US, the processing of which was physically demanding in the extreme, and consequently claimed many lives and therefore the constant need to replenish stocks of slaves. Kolchin, on the other hand, attributes it to traditional two-year breast-feeding periods, which in the rest of the Americas he believes suppressed fertility rates. Bernstein seems to have the stronger case here, but he may have the advantage of an extra decade and a half of research to build upon - Kolchin's work was done in the early 1990s.

What the book does do is give a joined up view of the "slavery experience", and it's no subject for a theme park. The lives of slaves were often brutal, always demeaning, and constantly subject to the whim of their masters down to the minutest level, to the point where their marital status, children's names, and religious practices were often decided for them. There were regular beatings, the work was often back-breaking, and brothers, sisters, wives, husbands were shuffled around the board like pawns, family members often being sold to new masters never again to be seen by spouses, parents or siblings. Whilst there sometimes developed a bond of sorts between masters and "their people", that did not preclude any of this treatment. He notes the hypocrisy of a political system supposedly based on liberty and equality which simultaneously supported slavery as an institution, and singles out revolutionary figures such as George Washington, who granted manumission to his own slaves only in his will, not whilst he was living.

Post-bellum, though nominally free, life remained anything but straightforward for ex-slaves. Nevertheless, for a while at least things were much improved, and they celebrated their new-found liberties, sometimes in simple ways like having a lie-in and entering towns formerly off-limits. However, the old power relationships endured, and it would be another century before the benefits of abolition were truly experienced, and a further four decades before the symbolic election of a black president.

Kolchin relates the story well, and though there are some omissions the balance sheet is firmly in his favour. No one book, even if there was no ongoing research, is ever likely to cover all of the bases, but what this one does is fills in many of the gaps left by others.

This book tackles the subject of American slavery in a very balanced and unbiased way. It tries to portray the 'peculiar institution' in a way that neither demonises the slave owners nor portrays the conditions under which the slaves lived as being universally terrible (beyond the fact of enslavement). It also tries to show how American slavery was different and similar to slavery in the Caribbean and South America. This is still a very highly charged and emotive subject in the US and this book manages to present the material in an objective and scholarly way. At the same time the author manages to avoid the excessive jargon that spoils so many history books. By the end of the book you can feel that you have a good solid understanding of the basic of American slavery. The footnotes at the back of the book do not distract, and the bibliographical essay gives you a comprehensive cross-section of works in order to pursue the subject further. One of the best.