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The Black family in slavery and freedom, 1750-1925

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Herbert Gutman's book, "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom," is an important work that must be studied within its historical and ideological context.

Today it is commonly accepted that the relative absence of black males from involvement with family structures is historically attributable to shifts in post Civil War and post WWII migration of males for employment purposes, as well as the historically relative and racist lack of employment for black males in this country--but this was not always the prevailing wisdom.

About 9 years before Gutman's publication, D.P. Moynihan (later a U.S. Sentator from New York) had caused a stir by advocating public policy based on the common idea that American slavery and subsequent neo-slavery policies had destroyed the American "Negro" family. By "destroyed" these historians and policymakers meant that black fathers were historically absent, creating a matrifocal lineage system that was incapable of properly raising children and transmitting cultural values.

Apart from the obvious sexism inherent in that stance, several researchers, including Gutman, attempted to find out if there were viable family structures during the antebellum period in selected black communities---first in Buffalo, and then in plantation communities in Louisiana, Virginia, and South Carolina (among others).

Gutman found that long slave marriages (including between two persons and otherwise when necessary) did exist over a wide period of time and across different geographic locations. Despite the obvious pressures of slaveowners and white cultures, slaves were able to adapt and maintain families kin networks. While disruptions often occurred through sale, death, or forced displacement, these disruptions caused slaves and their communities to adapt and form larger shared kin networks of fellowship and communication based on patterns devised wholly by blacks themselves.

For example, in the face of endogamous practices by plantation owners, slaves practiced wide forms of exogamy that maintained and reinforced stable kinship networks. Children were often the result of prenuptial intercourse, but these parents consistently married each other afterwards. Far from being licentious or indiscriminate mating, these couplings were part of a consistent pattern of social practices. Children were named for blood relatives, further preserving cultural memories---even inscribing the lives of other family members on the narrative of slave children's bodies. through naming.

Rather than destroying families---forced migrations and relocations of slaves spread kinship networks wider and spread a "common slave culture" over the entire South.

Much of Gutman's evidence is convincing-especially early on in his volume-the birth records he relies on and kinship diagrams provide a wealth of information that supports his basic thesis very well. His study, although wide ranging, is easy to read because it is very structured, almost dry, in its presentation.

Gutman runs into difficulty when he attempts to extend his study beyond the antebellum period (ch. 9 and 10) because his documentation is severely lacking in this regard. Moreover, Gutman has a tendency to reproduce a certain amount of patriarchy inherent in the archival sources he consults. It is easy to get the impression that even though Gutman defends black women from charges of indiscriminate mating, he does not thoroughly interrogate his sources for the obvious biases they contain against black women. Some of his thought experiments with the data even seem unnecessary and overdetermined. But his basic thesis is sound, and he has the data to support it.

Herbert Gutman's "The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom" is a thoroughly researched and well-written examination of how black families resiliently responded to enslavement. He forcefully and carefully supports his thesis that slaves were not only victims, but also victors.

Researchers typically only asked, "What did slavery do to the slave?" They also first needed to know, "Who was the slave?" How owners treated their slaves affected how individual slaves behaved. But how slaves behaved depended upon far more than their "treatment." Slave naming practices and marital rules are "unmistakable evidence of the importance of interior slave beliefs and experiences in shaping their behavior" (p. 259).

Historian Edmund S. Morgan summarized it well: "Human nature has an unpredictable resiliency, and slaves did manage to live a life of their own within the limits prescribed for them. Those limits were close but not so close as to preclude entirely the possibility of a private life."

Gutman thus exposes the lie that Black family life did not and could not exist due to slavery and its aftermaths. As a result, he encourages African Americans to take rightful pride in their heritage of family resiliency.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction." He has also authored "Soul Physicians," "Spiritual Friends," and the forthcoming "Sacred Friendships: Listening to the Voices of Women Soul Care-Givers and Spiritual Directors."

Wow! I learned so much I didn't know about the black family during slavery by reading this book. I read the book from cover to cover in a few hours. The more I read the more I wanted to read. If you have an interest in knowing more about this time in our history, this is one of the books I would highly recommend.

This book has already been accepted as a well-recognized source of information related to slavery because of its attention to details not easily found in other sources, for example: the emotional ruptures and affect between parents when families were separated. The focus on the adaptation to the realities of the slave experience and subsequent "freedom" makes this required reading for anyone interested in this topic.
Patricia Heaston, Ph.D.

Herbert Gutman (1928-1985) was an American professor of history at the City University of New York. He was also the author of books such as Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross, and Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1976 book, "This study is an examination of the Afro-American family prior to and after the general emancipation, but it is also a study of the cultural beliefs and behavior of a distinctive lower-class population. It examines its adaptive capacities at critical moments in its history." (Pg. xx-xxi)

Here are some quotations from the book:

"But if most owners did not require that slave husbands and wives remain together, the length of slave marriages is extremely important evidence about slave culture and the norms it upheld." (Pg. 33)
"That many slaves distinguished between prenuptial intercourse and 'licentiousness' and believed prenuptial intercourse and pregnancy compatible with settled marriage escaped the notice of all but a few observers." (Pg. 63)
"Family solidarity did not need the social cement associated with the prescribed civil and religious norms of the national (or even the regional) culture. These marriages derived their strength from norms within the slave culture itself." (Pg. 273)
"Not all sexual ties between slave women and white men were exploitative, and not all interracial contacts between slaves, ex-slaves, and free persons involved black women and white men." (Pg. 389)
"Most southern black women headed neither households nor subfamilies. Far greater numbers of unmarried black women under thirty, for example, lived with their parents than headed households." (Pg. 445)
"(L)arge numbers of lower-class southern black migrants had adapted familial and kin ties---rooted in their prior historical experiences first as slaves and afterward as free rural southern workers and farmers---to life in the emerging ghetto." (Pg. 455)