Talk:Marriage of enslaved people (United States)

Keeping family together

Sychonic,

I appreciate the quote about how (some) slaveholders saw the benefit of keeping family together. This was true for some, and at a certain period, but in my opinion that became less important when there was a shift to greater use of enslaved people in the Deep South, when cotton and rice plantations paid more money for enslaved people. And, during that time enslaved people were threatened to be sent into the Deep South where their workload and treatment was very difficult (i.e., many enslaved people dying in their early twenties - having had little chance to establish families).

Also, it was also common for fathers to work on another plantation and only had visitations with their families based on their and their family's slaveholders discretion. (Vs. purchases being made to keep the family together.)

I am wondering how to have the right balance to show that some slaveholders absolutely saw the benefit of keeping families together... but in practice that did not happen that much.

What are our thoughts on that?–CaroleHenson (talk) 17:24, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Returned to chronological order:

Also, ignores the practice of Slave breeding in the United States.17:25, 5 April 2022 (UTC)

Even though much recent scholarship on American history suffers from the well-documented politicization of academia, I continue to believe real historiography matters. I’ve seen some pretty bad examples of authors stringing together a succession of unhappy anecdotes and calling it history. From the better scholarship on the subject of slave life in the Old South, it seems clear that the nuclear family was of primary importance to both slaves and masters on plantations in the antebellum south. Though marriages were not legally recognized, they retained great importance because plantations served in some ways as legal entities unto themselves. Each individual planter devised rules that served administrative functions as would laws or regulations in civil society.

With that in mind, marriages and the families they engendered were of great importance in the lives of slaves. They were important to masters too, if only because they desired a stable environment and a content workforce. How many "abroad" marriages took place is not clear from the information available, but what does exist indicates that slaves met and chose their spouses themselves within the context of family and the broader slave community. Though they required the approval of the master, in most cases it appears this was a perfunctory formality. Even the historian Brenda Elaine Stevenson admits as much in her agenda-driven work, which seeks (ineffectively) to denigrate the prevalence of nuclear families among slaves in favor of a "matrifocal" African-influenced community life.

To what degree families were separated through slave sales, and at what age, has been a contentious issue since before The Civil War. Abolitionists insisted fervently that it was common practice and southerners retorted that it rarely happened. As usual, the truth falls somewhere between, but common sense, journal entries, and the statistics seem to imply that it was not something done lightly, if only because of its emotional and social consequences. While stories recount slaves making heroic attempts to reunite with separated family members, evidence also exists that many masters would go to great lengths to avoid it. Also, for reasons that can only be described as "human", many masters wanted to be liked, even loved, by their slaves.

Moreover, that family separation was becoming more common seems to be contradicted by the evidence available. The Alabama State Code included a provision in its 1852 codification that conditionally prohibited the sale of children under ten from their mothers, and an outright ban on those five years or younger. This was a weak provision, and one can easily believe it was neither punctiliously observed nor strictly enforced. Still, it is just one indication of how serious southerners believed such family separation was.

On the issue of life expectancy of slaves, Engerman and Fogel in their Time on the Cross, which employs cliometrics to assess antebellum slave life, say this: “Although the life expectation of slaves in 1850 was 12 well percent below the average of white by Americans, it was well within the range experienced by free men during the nineteenth century.”

My views are informed by various authors on the subject, including Herbert Gutman, John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, David Brion Davis, W.E.B. DuBois, and E. Franklin Frazier. The article itself is badly in need of rewriting. It reads like a polemic rather scholarship and lacks the dispassionate voice so important when writing about an institution that stirs great emotion.

My addition was just one small attempt to make it a little bit better in that regard. It still requires a good deal of work. Sych (talk) 02:14, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

I am confused by this response, particularly about being considered a polemic. I come at any topic by researching without a particular mindset and letting sources drive the content of the article. I am going to start a "Further reading" section for works published by the authors you mentioned... and that would be a great place to start for more research.

Please add any additional sources that you think would be helpful to the Further reading section.–CaroleHenson (talk) 22:08, 10 April 2022 (UTC)

@Sychonic: A central principle of Wikipedia is WP:NOR. All what you wrote above is OR. Additionally, it is not "concise" (see WP:TPYES). Your insertion of the interview with "Jeffersaid Davis" (as you called him, obviously not even looking at it when you reverted my revert), is also OR, since you arbitrarily selected one of the many available primary sources. Rsk6400 (talk) 17:50, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

My post in response to a query about my thoughts on the matter on this page was as long as as I required it to be, using the proper number of words to accomplish its purpose. The opinion as to concision is quite irrelevant, as is the observation that my thoughts here are original research. I am opining on ways to make the article here better, not writing the article itself, where I would use a different method.

The interview with Jefferson Davis is a perfectly good addition to the article, and by taking it from two respected media sources, it clearly does not constitute original research, no more than any quoting from a news source does. Compared to other references on this and many other Wiki pages, these sources cannot be considered OR simply because they were published during the Civil War. That’s an untenable standard. Sych (talk) 04:11, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

Sychonic, It is very interesting to me that you did not reply at all to my message. That's very telling. Just to document what I have done in response to your comments:

What I am finding is that you have focused on a specific set of historians who furthered the discussions about families of enslaved people in the 1970s and 1980s. Their opinions, though, seem to have been made without thorough research (e.g., anectotal information from slave narratives, for instance) and they fed on one another's viewpoints. Ann Malone, though, one of the people you mentioned, actually did further the scholarship in a meaningful way in the 1990s by throughly studying records and information about 155 slave communities in Louisiana.

My edits, including creating a histiography section, since your updates on the 5th are here. I have more to add, including a summary of Malone's work (after I finish her biography article at Ann Patton Malone). And, I am finding that the sources that I had used, except for Henry Box Brown were of scholarship after 1977, and all are valid and reliable sources.–CaroleHenson (talk) 17:03, 13 April 2022 (UTC)

References