The current collapse of affirmative action and the resegregation of American society has led the American people back to first causes: the nearly three centuries of slavery that shaped American race relations. The result has been an outpouring of films ("Glory," "Amistad," "Shadrach" and "Beloved"), TV miniseries (PBS's four-part "Africa in America"), public monuments (at least half a dozen including the National Park Service's memorial to nearly 200,000 black Civil War soldiers), museum exhibits by the dozens and an avalanche of books. According to one count, some 60 books about slavery have been published during the last year. Not since the Civil War abolished slavery and the civil rights movement transformed the status of black people in the United States has there been such extraordinary engagement with slavery. Amid this renascence, the history of slavery is being rewritten.
Gone With the Wind
RUNAWAY SLAVES: Rebels on the Plantation, 1790-1860;\o7 By John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger; (Oxford University Press: 456 pp., $35)\f7
Standing at the fore of this reinterpretation is the matter of the slaves' opposition to their captivity. Resistance cuts to the heart of the meaning of slavery, for it speaks both to the depth of the slaves' determination not to be reduced to a mere extension of the slave owners' will and to the lengths to which slaveholders--who celebrated their own freedom--went to deny that most valued prize to their slaves.
And if resistance stands at the heart of any appreciation of slavery, flight from slavery represents the most telling form of resistance, particularly in the United States, where the fugitive slave became emblematic of the slaves' desire for freedom. Few American slaves engaged in open insurrection, an activity that was all but suicidal in a society in which slaves were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. But almost all slaves partook in the routine insubordination--malingering, tool breaking, theft, for example--that could not overturn the system of slavery but provided slaves a measure of satisfaction and sometimes material comfort.
Flight stood somewhere between these two poles. Like open rebellion, it required careful planning and a conscious decision to break with the slave order, as well as a sober recognition that failure would entail severe consequences. Like day-to-day resistance, flight could also be a means to secure a respite from the world that was marked by humiliation, deprivation and exploitation and perhaps even a chance to escape bondage entirely.
