Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775


Product Description
Michael Kay and Lorin Cary illuminate new aspects of slavery in colonial America by focusing on North Carolina, which has largely been ignored by scholars in favor of the more mature slave systems in the Chesapeake and South Carolina. Kay and Cary demonstrate that North Carolina's fast-growing slave population, increasingly bound on large plantations, included many slaves born in Africa who continued to stress their African pasts to make sense of their new world. The authors illustrate this process by analyzing slave languages, naming practices, family structures, religion, and patterns of resistance.Kay and Cary clearly demonstrate that slaveowners erected a Draconian code of criminal justice for slaves. This system played a central role in the masters' attempt to achieve legal, political, and physical hegemony over their slaves, but it impeded a coherent attempt at acculturation. In fact, say Kay and Cary, slaveowners often withheld white culture from slaves rather than work to convert them to it. As a result, slaves retained significant elements of their African heritage and therefore enjoyed a degree of cultural autonomy that freed them from reliance on a worldview and value system determined by whites.
Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775 Review
This is primarily a book for historians. Although the book has its moments, it mostly focuses on the historiography of slavery in North Carolina during the period from 1748 to 1775. The authors discuss the origins of North Carolina slaves, treatment of slaves, slave naming practices, slave culture, and the ideology of slavery as North Carolina approached the American Revolution. A fault of the book is that the analysis stops mostly at 1775, cutting off the picture of how the American Revolution transformed the slave institutions of the state. The book is well written; anyone who needs information on the nature and character of slavery during the period will find this to be an authoritative source. Most armchair historians will probably be disappointed that this study is not a narrative; yet, there are many wonderful insights on the nature of slavery in North Carolina for the interested reader.Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775 ...

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