Author: Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-05

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 9781330742006

Excerpt from American Negro Slavery, 1918: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime For twenty years I have panned the sands of the stream of Southern life and garnered their golden treasure. Many of the nuggets rewarding the search have already been displayed in their natural form; and this now is a coinage of the grains great and small. The metal is pure, the minting alone may be faulty. The die is the author's mind, which has been shaped as well by a varied Northern environment in manhood as by a Southern one in youth. In the making of coins and of histories, however, locality is of less moment than are native sagacity, technical training and a sense of truth and proportion. For these no warrant will hold. The product must stand or fall by its own quality. The wide ramifications of negro slavery are sketched in these pages, but the central concern is with its rise, nature and influence in the regions of its concentration. In these the plantation regime prevailed. The characteristic American slave, indeed, was not only a negro, but a plantation workman; and for the present purpose a knowledge of the plans and requirements of plantation industry is no less vital than an understanding of human nature. While the latter is of course taken for granted, the former has been elaborated as a principal theme. Slaves were both persons and property, and as chattels they were investments. This phase has invited analysis at some length in the two chapters following those on the plantation regime. Ante-bellum conditions were sharply different in some respects from those of colonial times, largely because of legislation enacted in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth. For this reason the politics of that period of sharp transition are given attention herein. Otherwise the words and deeds of public men have been mostly left aside. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."