It is only in the last twenty years that historians have come to appreciate how various and enduring were the ways in which black men and women resisted bondage. In the 1960s, when scholars began to explore the impact of slavery on African Americans, many portrayed blacks as passive victims of a brutal system. They concluded that the experience of captivity left African Americans so disoriented and demoralized that they lost the will to fight back. Indeed, one influential historian compared the regimen of southern plantations to that in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, arguing that both were "total institutions" that utterly transformed the personalities of those subject to such repressive conditions. To survive the horrors of slavery, blacks became docile, submissive, dependent, even childlike.

That interpretation has been sharply challenged since the mid-1970s by other historians who argue for the resourcefulness and resilience of African Americans in bondage. Without denying the harshness of the slave system, these scholars have shown that most southern plantations were not so tightly and efficiently controlled as to cripple the personalities of slaves. On the contrary, they believe that blacks created space within those settings to fashion a sustaining family and communal life, institutions that endowed them with a strong sense of personal and collective identity. They contend, too, that relationships between owners and slaves were often complex interactions in which blacks could negotiate terms for better treatment. There is much evidence to confirm that some slaves became expert at showing masters that their productivity depended on having some measure of freedom—being permitted to set their work schedules, to meet at night for religious services, to choose their mates.

1			The African American Experience at Stratford: http://www.stratfordhall.org/africa.html?RESEARCH This essay reveals the difficulty historians have had in attempting to understand the lives of African-American slaves during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What evidence does this author utilize in constructing his narrative? Which of these kinds of evidence do you find most and least compelling? Why? Is the author making an argument in this essay? If so, what is it? How do his portraits of slaves compare with the various depictions described in this chapter's counterpoint essay? Based on the evidence provided in this essay, which explanation of slaves' responses to their situation seems most convincing to you?