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978-0-89587-119-0
0-89587-119-X
$12.95 paperback
6" x 9"
418 pages bibliography, index
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Slavery is as basic a part of
Virginia history as George Washington, who was accompanied at Valley
Forge and Yorktown by his slave William Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, who
directed his slaves to cut 30 feet off a mountaintop for the site of
Monticello.
Slavery in the Old Dominion
began in 1619, when a Spanish frigate was captured and its cargo of
Negroes brought to Jamestown. The issue was always troubling to men of
conscience. As Patrick Henry wrote, "Every thinking honest man
rejects it in speculation, how few in practice?...I am drawn along by ye
general inconvenience of living without them [slaves]; I will not, I
cannot justify it." Yet it was the contrasting view that
consistently won out, here expressed by Thomas Dew of the College of
William and Mary in 1832: "A worthy advantage of slavery is the
increased amount of labor performed by savages when reduced to
servitude....It may be truly affirmed that the taming of man, and
rendering him fit for labor, is more important than the taming and using
of inferior animals."
Virginia Negroes experienced
slavery as field laborers, as skilled craftsmen, as house servants--even
as breeding stock for slave states in the Deep South. Despite being
subject to the whip, many fought willingly and valiantly in our nation's
wars.
In 1935, the Virginia
Writers' Project began collecting data for a history of Negroes in the
Old Dominion through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Depression.
Published in 1940 as The Negro in Virginia, it was regarded as a
"classic of its kind" and a "model for the other
histories that need to be written." As one magazine put it,
"The product of many hands, Negro and white, is so brilliantly
edited that it reads as though it might be the individual work of a
singularly competent historian."
Modern readers will be
surprised at how relevant it remains today.
about the authors
The Negro in Virginia was compiled by workers of the Writers'
Program of the Work Projects Administration in the state of Virginia.
Other Blair titles on the slave
experience:
Before
Freedom, When I Just Can Remember
Mighty
Rough Times, I Tell You
My
Folks Don't Want Me To Talk About Slavery
On
Jordan's Stormy Banks
We
Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard |
