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Summary Of American Negro Slavery By Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

1160 Words5 Pages

Justin Brookshire
HIST 4001
01/24/2023
The first scholarly historical work of significance considering the topic of slavery as an institution is American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. As a southerner publishing in 1918, this book was racist in nature against African Americans. Phillips’ argues in his book that slavery was a necessary paternalistic practice between master and slave that established an interdependent agricultural society for the betterment of the country. Another significant feature of Phillips’ argument is that slavery also served to train Africans for civilization, with many metaphors to the institution as a “school.” Phillip and this argument led scholarly thinking surrounding slavery, receiving both praise and …show more content…

Phillips portrays slaves as happy yet simple people that were well cared for by plantation owners. To formulate his argument that slaves were mostly content with slavery and that the institution was benign, Phillips utilizes the voice of slaveowners more than any other source. In their opinion, the slaves were “honest and obedient, and appeared perfectly happy” as written by Floridian plantation owner Z. Kingsley. Many of these sources were from owners to overseers regarding how the owner wanted his slaves maintained. For example, Phillips utilizes a plantation manual written by James H. Hammond often when depicting enslaved people. This manual, along with most other sources Phillips uses, demonstrates the utmost concern for slaves, who are property and profit for the owners. Phillips writes that “their initial topic was usually the care of the slaves,” with many owners writing about how and why to properly take care of slaves in health and even while sick or pregnant. Through this analysis of plantation owner records, Phillips portrays slaves as well-off in terms of …show more content…

Rather than portraying slaves as incompetent and content, he finds them to be repressed and abused but intelligent and discontent with their position as slaves. By using the accounts of slaves, rather than just the slaveowner’s perspective on slaves, Stampp portrays that slaves “showed great eagerness to get some—if they could not get all—of the advantages of freedom.” They were not hidden from the fact that freedom exists, and they knew of freed slaves and that it is possible. Therefore, slaves, according to Stampp, were never content with being slaves. He then argues that the slaves, who rarely gained the chance at freedom, resorted to many ways to exasperate their masters. These included acting ignorant and working behind the scenes to disrupt the plantation’s efficiency without the master’s understanding. One method used by fieldhands was to conceal “dirt or rocks in their cotton baskets” to slow down work on plantations. Other slaves damaged property, stole food, or simply worked at a lesser capacity than they could. Only rarely did slaves try and escape and even less often did they openly rebel since the punishments for the crimes were not worth the risk. Stampp’s portrayal of slaves as disobedient and witty in their defiance of the slaveowners furthers his argument that the slaves were not content with slavery and that is was a harmful and oppressive

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