Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History ... and the University of North Carolina Press) - Softcover

Morgan's synthesis draws upon a wealth of social, political, legal, economic, literary, religious and anthropological sources."Los Angeles Times Book Review" (Best Nonfiction Books of 1998 issue) A monumental social history of slavery in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake region and in the Carolina and Georgia low country.Robert L. Paquette, "Washington Times" YRemindsmodern readers that the world of the 18th century is not so distant as they sometimes imagine."New York Times Book Review" The closest Yexamination yet made of slave life anywhere before the nineteenth century."New York Review of Books" "Morgan's synthesis draws upon a wealth of social, political, legal, economic, literary, religious and anthropological sources."Los Angeles Times Book Review" (Best Nonfiction Books of 1998 issue)" "A monumental social history of slavery in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake region and in the Carolina and Georgia low country.Robert L. Paquette, "Washington Times"" [Reminds]modern readers that the world of the 18th century is not so distant as they sometimes imagine."New York Times Book Review" The closest [examination] yet made of slave life anywhere before the nineteenth century."New York Review of Books" The most comprehensive social history of slavery yet written."American Historical Review"

On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South.
Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the
everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.