Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina

Based on the author's doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University.

Fired by the wrong of slavery and writing with the anger of a Herbert Aptheker or Vincent Harding, Jones seeks to reverse recent scholarship, based on Eugene Genovese's seminal Roll, Jordan, Roll ( LJ 9/1/74), which casts the plantation South as a "hegemonic" paternalistic world. To Jones's eye, violence underscored slavery, and the slaves in no way had any complicity in the masters' paternalism. Through such controls as the breakup of slave families, dividing slaves by function, intrusion into slave religion, and armed patrols, fearful masters kept their boot on the blacks. Jones's assertion that other scholars have ignored control mechanisms is unfounded, and his focus on South Carolina lacks the close reading of folk life and locality that made Charles Joyner's Down by the Riverside ( LJ 6/1/84) so important. Still, Jones's description of multiple mechanisms of control is a useful summary of the many ways masters tried to rule unruly slaves. For university libraries. An article by Jones and John C. Tyson, "African American Writers and the White Press," appears in this issue, p. 48.--Ed.
- Randall Miller, St. Jo seph's Univ., Philadelphia
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