Slave Narratives: Dismissed Evidence in the Writing of Southern History
1971; Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/274066
ISSN2325-7199
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoFEW OF ULRICH B. PHILLIPS'S APPRAISALS of Southern history have gone unquestioned, but one judgment which he seems to have made almost in passing remains unexamined as a guide for research among the documents of Negro American slavery. Regarding the use of slave narratives as evidence, Phillips said: Northup went as a Negro kidnaped into slavery and wrote a vivid account of plantation life from the under side. But ex-slave narratives in general, and those of Charles Ball, Henry Box Brown and Father Henson in particular, were issued with so much abolitionist editing that as a class their authenticity is doubtful.' major works on slavery since Phillips, the only evidence of disagreement with him on this matter is negative: historians have generally chosen to ignore even Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, which had Phillips's approval. Slave narratives have been dismissed, for the most part, as evidence for the writing of Southern history. The extraordinary paradox here is that the widespread agreement with Phillips' dismissal of the narratives has been accompanied by a frequent, almost ritualistic, assertion that any history of slavery must be written in large part from the standpoint of the slave .. .2 A dramatic example of the kind of illogic which such contradictory impulses produce is found in Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. the first paragraph of his preface, Stampp affirms the historian's faith that knowledge of the past is important for understanding the present, and he adds: In this instance I firmly believe that one must know what slavery meant to the Negro and how he reacted to it before one can comprehend his more recent tribulations.3 Such a statement would seem to commit Stampp firmly to providing testimony from slaves about the nature of their experience, and he does, in fact, make references to at least four slave narratives, though with little apparent conviction regarding their significance. As Phillips did, he relies mainly for evidence upon the records of planters and the reports of travellers in the South. Well into the book, Stampp explains this apparent contradiction: Since there are few reliable records of what went on in the minds of slaves, one can only infer their thoughts and feelings from their behavior, that of their masters, and the logic of their
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