Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia

by William Dusinberre

Overview

Strategies for Survival conveys the experience of bondage through former enslaved people's own words. The source of this landmark content is a remarkable series of interviews conducted in Virginia in 1937 by WPA workers. Most of the interviewers were themselves Black; as a result, the subjects spoke with exceptional candor. William Dusinberre explores these interviews to re-create for the modern reader enslaved people's strategies for survival within the severe constrictions bondage imposed upon their lives. Religion and escape were the chief ways of coping with the indignity of family disruption, contempt, and the harsh realities of slavery. We see great creativity and variety in such responses to oppression, but we are forced to acknowledge the dispiriting realties of enslaved existence and the limits of enslaved people's resistance and agency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813928227
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	08/13/2009
Series:	Carter G. Woodson Institute Series
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

William Dusinberre, Reader in History, Emeritus, at the University of Warwick in England, is the author of Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk, Henry Adams: The Myth of Failure (Virginia) and the award-winning Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Good Mistresses and Masters
2. Mixed-Race Ancestry and Long-Term Relationships
3. Cities and Industry
4. Family Disruption
5. Physical Abuse
6. Regimentation
7. Contempt
8. Deprivation
9. Religion
10. Dissidence
11. Families
12. The Black Community
13. Self-Development
14. Oppression and Self-Determination
Appendix
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

An outstanding volume that should appeal to scholars and students of slavery alike.... A wide-ranging yet finely drawn picture of both the grim realities African Americans confronted and the coping tactics they used to survive day to day.... [This] intelligent and engaging book certainly helps us understand the everyday realities of antebellum slavery.

The Journal of Southern History

Presents a full portrait of the experience of bondage. While the limits placed on slaves' ability to fashion tolerable lives for themselves is often dispiriting, stories illustrating the spirit and ingenuity with which they attempted to surmount these obstacles make compelling reading.

Civil War Book Review

[Dusinberre] presents a nuanced portrait of slavery in antebellum Virginia... Strategies for Survival provides a thorough introduction to the Virginia WPA interviews and a classic and careful engagement with the words of former slaves, crafted by an expert historian.

Journal of the Early Republic

" Strategies for Survival may even serve as a template for other historians working with similarly complicated and scant sources. "—author of Virginia Quarterly Review

From the Publisher

This remarkable study of antebellum Virginia slavery displays all the qualities we have come to expect from William Dusinberre— impeccable research, creative questioning, elegant writing, and persuasive interpretations. This is a major contribution from a major historian.

Charles Joyner

Strategies for Survival may even serve as a template for other historians working with similarly complicated and scant sources.

Virginia Quarterly Review

With Strategies for Survival William Dusinberre solidifies his reputation as one of our finest historians of southern slavery. His unusually sensitive reading of interviews with Virginia's ex-slaves returns us to basic questions, but offers startling fresh answers. Like his classic study of slavery on the rice plantations, Strategies for Survival will quickly become a must-read for all students of antebellum American history.

James Oakes

An expert and comprehensive examination of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews with Virginia ex-slaves, conducted almost if not entirely by African American workers.... This volume has more pain between its covers than some much longer works. All Virginians should read it.

The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography