Colin A. .

Palmer - Slave Resistance - Reviews in American History 26:2 9/30/10 4:33 PM

Colin A. .Palmer - Slave Resistance

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Slave Resistance
Colin A. Palmer [1]

Gary Collison. Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen.

Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997. 294 pp. Index. $27.95.

Peter B. Hinks. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and

the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. xvii + 301 pp. Bibliography and index.
$45.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

When Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma in 1944, he observed

that "The Negro's entire life and, consequently, also his opinions on the Negro
problem are, in the main, to be considered as secondary reactions to more
primary pressures from the side of the dominant white majority." Disagreeing
with this assessment of the behavior of black Americans, Ralph Ellison, the
writer, enquired: "But can a people (its faith in an idealized American Creed
notwithstanding) live and develop for over three hundred years simply by
reacting?" 1 Ellison was certainly aware of the rich tradition of resistance by
African Americans to slavery and other forms of societal mistreatment. But he
also knew that their entire lives were never spent on the barricades reacting to
white oppression; blacks responded to their own pulls, created their own spaces,
and realized themselves in their own fashion.
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Contemporary scholars have sought to depict blacks as playing active roles in the
construction of their lives and have embraced resistance as an ubiquitous theme
in the African-American past. Responding to some earlier characterizations of
blacks as being docile under slavery, recent scholars have focused on the ways in
which the enslaved challenged the institution that held them in thrall. While
many have emphasized revolts, conspiracies, and flight, others have seen the
remarkable cultural production of the slaves as constituting a form of resistance.
Similarly, much of the new scholarship on blacks since emancipation has
examined their struggles against segregation and racial discrimination, and for
civil rights.

Although resistance as a methodological construct represents a healthy

corrective to earlier interpretations, it has been used so mechanically and
applied to so many aspects of black life that it has lost much of its interpretive
[End Page 371] power. The remarkable tradition of resistance in black
American history is becoming increasingly trivialized in the hands of some
scholars. Every act by a black person, in some accounts, has been dictated by the
behavior of whites and the need to contest their intrusive power, precisely the
flawed methodology that Ellison questioned half a century ago. As currently
employed, the resistance paradigm has such interpretive elasticity that by
seeming to explain everything, it explains nothing at all or interferes with our
understanding of black life in all of its complexities.

A maturing historiography of black America must also eschew hagiography if

only because it diminishes the humanity of the people being studied and makes
caricatures of their struggles, vulnerabilities, successes, and failures. In
frequently making resistance the sole interpretive paradigm--even in situations
where such a construct is questionable--we fail to capture the variegated nature
of black life and deny to our subjects the very autonomy that many struggled to

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achieve. The resistance paradigm, obviously, has much to recommend it and

should not be abandoned. But it requires a serious and creative reexamination
and a more limited and nuanced application to the complex history of the
peoples of African descent.

The two books that are being reviewed here represent important discussions of
the responses of blacks to the institution of slavery. Gary Collison's book is an
absorbing account of one man's escape from slavery in Virginia, his precarious
freedom in Boston, his recapture by slave catchers and his extraordinary rescue
and flight to Montreal. This is historical detective work at its best, gripping and
dramatic. This masterly study by an English professor pieces together the
splinters of Shadrach Minkins' life, crafting an intensely human portrait of one
man's efforts to claim his freedom and himself. This powerful story needs no
embroidery; it is a signifier of an entire people's travail in this nation, their
challenges to end an oppressive social system, and their uncertain place in the
land of their birth.

Shadrach Minkins was born a slave in Norfolk, Virginia, probably in 1814 or

1822. As a slave in an urban environment, Minkins may have had an easier life
in contrast to his peers who labored on plantations. In common with other
urban slaves, he was hired out and eventually sold twice in 1849. Like thousands
of other enslaved persons before him, Minkins escaped from bondage in 1850
and headed for Boston. He found a temporary sanctuary among Boston's free
black population of some 2,500 and accepted a job as a waiter. Minkins' uneasy
freedom was short-lived as he was recaptured by agents of his master.
Fortunately for him, black Bostonians successfully executed a courageous rescue
scheme. Recognizing that his freedom would never be secure in Boston or
anywhere in the United States for that matter, Minkins fled to Montreal and a
life away from slavery. Canada was no racial [End Page 372] paradise to be
sure, but Minkins and the other escapees who lived there had achieved a

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measure of victory over slavery.

Collison's compelling narrative situates Minkins' odyssey within the context of

the abolitionist movement and the larger political currents in the nation.
Dispassionate in tone, the book provides a credible picture of the texture of life
for blacks in Norfolk, Boston, and Montreal. The result is a major contribution
to the history of black resistance, unembroidered and free of romantic
condescension.

While Collison's account enriches our understanding of one man's poignant

struggles to claim himself, Peter Hinks examines the life and times of David
Walker, an early black nationalist, intellectual, and advocate of violent resistance
to slavery. Born free in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1785, Walker lived in
Charleston and Boston before his death in 1830. Hinks presents the most
complete picture to date of Walker's career, often combining the little known
aspects of his life with hefty doses of speculation. The author places Walker in
the expanding worlds of free blacks, elucidating their attempts to create their
own institutions and their assaults on slavery. His is a very sympathetic account
of Walker's life, often breathless and even romantic in its discussion of black
resistance to slavery during the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Hinks establishes the social and political context within which the enslaved
launched their challenges and began the process of defining themselves. His
primary focus, however, is on David Walker's "Appeal to the Citizens of the
World," a pamphlet that he published in 1829. Hinks dissects this extraordinary
document, providing a sensitive discussion of its call to slaves to resist their
oppression, its appeal for black unity, and its espousal of black autonomy. The
book provides a rich analysis of the ways in which southern authorities sought to
prevent the circulation of the incendiary pamphlet.

Hinks, unlike some other scholars, does not view the Appeal as essentially a
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black nationalist document. He notes that "Walker was filled with a radical
egalitarian evangelicalism that postulated a universal equality and
connectedness among all humans and races through God" (p. 250). These
principles, to be sure, are not necessarily contradictory to the diverse
expressions of black nationalist ideologies. The broad outlines of the story that
Hinks tells are well-known, but he weaves unfamiliar details into a narrative
that, for the most part, deepens our understanding of forms of black resistance
in the early nineteenth century.

Taken together, these two works constitute sophisticated analyses of black

resistance to slavery. Collison focuses on one individual's travails and Hinks uses
the impassioned writings of one man as a window through which to [End Page
373] examine the challenges to slavery. Still, the study of black resistance to
slavery in the United States remains in its conceptual infancy. Scholars of the
African-American experience can learn much from the nuanced ways in which
historians of the St. Domingue revolution and the Demerara slave revolt of 1823
address the struggles of slaves for liberation. 2 These, as well as other studies
draw upon the cultural backgrounds of the enslaved peoples to show that the
nature and style of resistance, like other forms of human behavior, must possess
cultural legitimacy and need not take violent forms. Monica Schuler has, for
example, suggested that many African peoples saw their enslavement as a
misfortune and the result of sorcery. Consequently, according to Schuler, "if
slaves defined slaveowners as sorcerers, there surely could be no acceptance of
bondage." 3 Such sorcery, however, could only be contested by the application of
a stronger form of sorcery and not by a resort to violence. Insights like these
remain to be tested cross-culturally. At the very least, however, contemporary
historians should be sensitive to the variegated nature of the challenges to
constituted authority and systems of domination that blacks employed in the
diaspora. Resistance frequently took violent forms, but this was not a universal

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feature, as Schuler suggests. Viewing the texture of slave resistance through a

modern Western optic may obscure more than it reveals about the struggles of
peoples who responded to other cultural pulls.

Colin A. Palmer[2] , Department of History, Graduate School of the City

University of New York, is the author of Passageways: An Interpretive History
of Black America (1998).

Notes
1. The two quotations may be found in Ralph Ellison, "An American Dilemma: A
Review" in Shadow and Act (1964), 315.

2. See, for example, Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue
Revolution from Below (1990); Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears
of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (1994).

3. Monica Schuler, "Afro-American Slave Culture" in Historical Reflexiones, ed.

Michael Craton (1979), 13134.

References

1. ^ Colin A. Palmer (muse.jhu.edu)

2. ^ Colin A. Palmer (muse.jhu.edu)

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