Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South

by Anthony E. Kaye

Overview

In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. In the course of cultivating family ties, forging alliances, working, socializing, and storytelling, slaves fashioned their neighborhoods into the locus of slave society.Joining Places is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves. From these detailed accounts, Kaye tells the stories of men and women in love, "sweethearting," "taking up," "living together," and marrying across plantation lines; striving to get right with God; carving out neighborhoods as a terrain of struggle; and working to overthrow the slaveholders' regime. Kaye's depiction of slaves' sense of place in the Natchez District of Mississippi reveals a slave society that comprised not a single, monolithic community but an archipelago of many neighborhoods. Demonstrating that such neighborhoods prevailed across the South, he reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship.In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. Demonstrating that neighborhoods prevailed across the South, Kaye reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship. This is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves.—>

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807877609
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	01/05/2009
Series:	John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	376
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Anthony E. Kaye (1962-2017) was associate professor of American history at Pennsylvania State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Neighborhoods 21

2 Intimate Relations 51

3 Divisions of Labor 83

4 Terrains of Struggle 119

5 Beyond Neighborhood 153

6 War and Emancipation 177

Epilogue 209

Appendix: Population, Land, and Labor 221

Notes 223

Bibliography 311

Index 343

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This is a boldly conceptual and deeply empirical book that refigures and advances some of the most important historiographical debates of the past thirty years in scholarship on slavery in the United States. It is ambitious, smart, and compelling.—Walter Johnson, Harvard University, author of Soul by Soul: Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

Editorial Reviews

Based on path-breaking research that accomplishes something unthinkable at this late date: it excavates a too-rarely used, massive set of sources that reports new words from ex-slaves speaking about their experiences before emancipation. . . . A rewarding, even exciting contribution to the scholarship of slavery and African-American history. . . . A detailed, breathing portrait of slavery in the Natchez District, one that sometimes is shocking in its living tints. . . . All who study slavery in North America need to read this important new work.—Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Joining Places offers a new approach to familiar questions about the character of slave society and community. . . . [It] demonstrates how 'neighborhood' shaped slaves' work and socialization, their creation of marriage and family ties, and the resistance they offered to slaveholders and the slave regime.—Frederick Douglass Book Prize Committee

By reconceptualizing slaves as living within complex, shifting, historically and spatially specific 'neighborhoods,' Joining Places suggests a promising way out of the increasingly unproductive historiographical impasse between slaves' agency and masters' power. . . . Throughout, Kaye's painstaking examination of his subjects' language leads to new insights.—Journal of American History

Recapture[s] both the fluidity and yearning for stability that marked the lives of the enslaved in this dynamic locale.—The North Carolina Historical Review

Important. . . [a] new and significant interpretive framework for understanding antebellum southern slavery. . . . A welcome addition. . . . The best historical works invite questions, and Kaye's work is no exception.—Civil War Book Review

One of the best books on American slavery to appear in recent years. . . . Scholars have written about these themes for years, but never with Kaye's mixture of empirical depth, stylistic grace, and theoretical sophistication.—Civil War History

[Kaye[ consults a heretofore-neglected source of testimony from the newly freed slaves: the US Pensions Bureau files of African American soldiers who served in the Union Army during the Civil War. . . . Recommended.—Choice

A deep and nuanced portrait of slavery in the Deep South during a critical period in its making and unmaking. . . . An important contribution to the scholarship of slavery and resistance, and should also be of interest to scholars interested in the production of space.—Canadian Journal of History

Virtually an anatomy of the roots of neighborhood in southern communities in the U.S. South. . . . Suitable and highly recommended.—Multicultural Review

Eloquently shows the significance of neighborhoods in the ante-bellum South.—Journal of Southern History

A significant addition to the historiography of the Old South.—Arkansas Historical Quarterly

From the Publisher