Customer Reviews

Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (Norton Library)

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Peter H. Wood did a thoroughly researched well written history of African-Americans in South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion. I am African-American and read this book for the first time in college; it was assigned to me by a terrific professor, (Thomas R. Hietala). I came to that class with my own concept of what slavery was and what it meant; this book totally challenged me to question my perceptions of slavery. I believed the stereotypic view that Africans were brought here and taught skills here and picked cotton and it was all misery and this book and others he assigned showed me how our modern vision of slavery is very shallow.

This book focuses on the rice growing region of South Carolina and it shows how slavers concentrated on capturing Africans from the rice coast because of their agricultural knowledge and skills; he shed a light on who these African people were before slavery. It explores how the cash crop in South Carolina came to be rice. How South Carolina was established as a colony of Barbados and the slave owners in South Carolina were formerly working class overseers who worked for the royal owners of Sugar Plantations in Barbados and later became land and slave owners in South Carolina; in both places (Barbados and South Carolina) the populations became Black majorities.

It also shows how slavery system in South Carolina evolved for the enslaved from something that was oppressive and informal into something brutal, permanent and hopeless. The evolution of slavery also changed the owners as they became a numerical minority the also became increasingly paranoid, determined to establish brutal absolute authority over the slaves and blinded by their own propaganda.

It seems even more astonishing they began to believe that Africans were better off and happy under a system that enslaved them. The most powerful thing Professor Hietala ever said in our class was "Never forget that slaves always wanted ownership of their own bodies and the power to direct their own lives and destinies; nothing was more important."

At times I think historians forget this when writing about African-American slaves. Wood understands this and he also shows respect for how enslaved Africans not only yearned for their freedom but how they planned and took risks for their freedom. He explores in depth the complexity and challenges of their struggle in choosing to look at the Stono Rebellion and the events that lead up to this big risk.

The story Wood tells begins with the history of these two communities (Barbados overseers who become South Carolina planters and enslaved Africans) continues with the development of the system of slavery in South Carolina and climaxes at the Stono Rebellion. The most fascinating thing about this act of Resistance is how close they came to success. When reading it for the first time I found myself saddened that they did not succeed because their success could have rewritten African-American History by altering the issues that sparked the Civil War and subsequent events; Reconstruction, Jim-Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. In essence their success could have changed my history and had far reaching implications with respect to who I am.

I think it is worth reading because of the history it explores and because Wood is an excellent researcher and writer. He not only uncovers the history but he exposes readers to the lives of enslaved Africans in a new way by portraying them as whole human beings who had a life before slavery. He treats with respect their existence and culture in Africa and acknowledges how it (African culture) influenced the economy and agriculture of South Carolina and by inference the South. It is a brilliant well researched and written work, as a student I came to appreciate that brilliant scholars were not always brilliant writers, Wood excels at both. I recommend it highly to any one interested in learning more about African-American history.

Peter H. Wood describes the experience of Blacks in early South Carolina. In the initial stages of colonization, planters welcomed the skills of Africans, encouraging Black initiative in many projects. Some Africans herded cattle and cultivated rice and indigo, as they had in various parts of Africa. Eventually, however, landowners shifted to intensive plantation development. Planters then sought to limit the strikingly independent economic pursuits of enslaved African-Americans. Wood sets the stage for the outbreak of the Stono Rebellion in 1739; he then chronicles the revolt with a combination of magnificent scholarship and tremendous narrative skill.

This study of slavery in early SC is well researched and well written, a social history told in narrative style with a clearly defined chronological structure. Makes a great companion to Philip Morgan's Slave Counterpoint.

If you have an interest in the history of Africans in America, specially in South Carolina, this is book will be right up your alley. I did not not detect any bias or underhandedness. It is an educational and enlightening read.

If you are a history buff, please pick up this book.

I could not put this book down, i learned so much about my people that i never learned in any history class in all my years of schooling in America. That is another story altogether. Peter Wood did an excellent job in examining numerous sources.His ability to identify and understand the diversity of the african backgrounds of the slaves was refreshing. He's helping to undermine the prevalent thought among scholars that the slaves had no technology and were blank slates for Europeans to paint in their own images. He identified the fact that some "Planters" requested slaves from certain areas such as the rice coast, (modern day sierra leone belongs to this coast.)Which in itself shows that Planters were well aware of their slaves origin and the differences between them. I can't say much more without giving away too much of the book. But it's highly recommended.

This book is the beginning of an important thread in African American and Southern History. South Carolina's history was forged by the degree to which it was a slave society on a greater scale than any of the other slave colonies. Its real lineage is not with Virginia's Jamestown or with the Pilgrims, but with the British sugar colony of Barbados and with West African, primarily Senegambian herders and above all rice growers.

From the period discussed here until the 1960s, South Carolina had a Black majority, which in the last days of slavery may have been as much as eighty percent. It reserved some political offices to those who owned a certain number of slaves, until the South Carolina slave holders rebellion was defeatedd by a Union Army that included tens of thousands of former South Carolina Slaves.

The African and West Indian roots of South Carolina were first revealed in this book. It was not only rice--which Europeans simply did not know how to grow until Africans were brought to South Carolina to grow it--but the special skills at cattle herding a general knowledge of how to live in the swampy, malarial, sub tropical heat of South Carolina, that meant that this colony developed a Black majority and survived.

What shines in this book is the description of the awful conditions that both the free and the enslaved lived under in early South Carolina and how close the colony came to failure. On the other hand, the book shows the great harsh work that Africans were put to clearing, irrigating, and raising rice and other crops.

This work has been followed by series of works that discuss the specific African and Senegambian roots of South Carolina and Rice production. Yet, this book was the first to explain the importance and predominance of the Africans of South Carolina

Peter Wood presents a very thorough account of Africans in South Carolina in the 1700s. From the first Africans to arrive on a Spanish expedition in 1526 and the African migrants arriving from Barbados in 1670 to the social tensions of the 1700s, Wood covers such topics as cattle raising, rice cultivation, disease, family life, religion, Black English, growing anxieties between whites and blacks, and the Stono Rebellion in 1739. Blacks became the majority population in South Carolina by the early 1700s. They were brought in as laborers and were immune to many lowland diseases that led to the higher mortality and morbidity rate among European settlers. Interestingly, the sickle cell trait heightened Africans' resistance to malaria. What I gathered from this work is that, while Africans were enslaved by the whites, Africans shaped South Carolina more than any other group through such things as their knowledge of cattle grazing, rice planting and cleaning, etc. Interesting book but, due to the narrowness of the study, I would only recommend it to those interested in black history or South Carolina.

Black mojority is a momagram written to examinne the life of an african american in carolina during the colonial era. While it is very thourough in ts analysis of the slaves role and growth durning this time, it moves very slowly. I was assigned to read this book for a history course i was taking in college, so this wasn't a book i would noramlly pick up and read. I did find that i learned may things i did not know about this time and slaves. I found it all very facinating. this is a great book to read if you plan to major in history. It is thorough and well put together, all in all a great book to learn and grow from.