The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670–1825 by Edward Pearson (review)

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• The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670–1825 by Edward Pearson
• Thomas J. Little

The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670–1825. By Edward Pearson. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. Pp. x, 510. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-5128-2438-4.)

Drawing on the scholarship of Ira Berlin, Edward Pearson’s The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670–1825 offers a panoramic history of slavery in South Carolina from 1670 through the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822, with a special focus on how African Americans experienced slavery in different geographic settings over time. The wide variety of slaveholding practices and the revolutionary changes that occurred within slavery after the institution’s founding in South Carolina created a multitude of experiences of slavery across generations, from region to region, and between historical periods. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers places stress on the dynamic process of how enslaved people’s lives changed and evolved as African American slavery grew and expanded geographically over 150 years of South Carolina history. Pearson’s book emerges with an important interpretive message that makes geographic and temporal considerations central to understanding the full dimensions of slavery in South Carolina during the colonial, Revolutionary, and antebellum years. As the author puts it, “Only by disaggregating slavery in South Carolina—the mosaic of distinctive relationships between enslaved people and their enslavers across time and space—may we grasp the diverse ecologies, populations, economies, practices, and traditions that gave each moment of rebellion or mundane survival its unique dynamic” (p. 3).

Pearson draws together the work of the principal historians who have written about South Carolina slavery while carefully linking his study to developments in Atlantic history. His book offers a systematic exploration of South [End Page 603] Carolina’s Caribbean roots, shows how the colony began its existence with a preference for the use of captive African labor, explains how rice cultivation transformed the province into a full-fledged slave society, surveys the experiences of enslaved people in towns and the countryside prior to the Stono Rebellion, describes the organization of eighteenth-century plantation management, and explores how slavery expanded into the backcountry during the late colonial period. Pearson writes that as commercial farming emerged along the colony’s frontier, “the household and the church became the foundations on which slavery rested; accordingly, the institution’s trajectory in the upcountry took a different path from the lowcountry plantation complex” (p. 170).

During the 1760s and 1770s, South Carolina became a society suffocating with wealth and riven by extraordinary divisions that virtually paralyzed the colony. Fears of slave insurrection and incendiary rumors about British intentions to abolish slavery created a crisis of fear among white colonists that helped catalyze the Revolutionary War. Simultaneously, enslaved people began to take over the language of liberty while seeking new opportunities to secure their freedom, furnishing the province’s powerful slavocracy with an additional motive to embark on a crusade “to defend and secure the institution upon which their status, power, identity, and livelihoods all depended” (p. 213). Pearson traces this struggle through the American Revolution and into the post-Revolutionary period in a narrative that adds new and intriguing insights to South Carolina’s history. He then includes a chapter on the upcountry’s short-staple cotton boom before concluding his study with important sections on the controversial Denmark Vesey conspiracy and its aftermath. After the execution of Vesey and thirty-four others who were accused in the plot, officials adopted new restrictions that further circumscribed the lives of enslaved and free Black people, and South Carolina politics grew more radical as the nation headed toward disunion.

In sum, The Enslaved and Their Enslavers is an important book that adds a significant new argument to the historiography. Pearson uses an impressive array of sources to advance the idea that geographic and chronological considerations are key for genuinely understanding slavery in South Carolina. His book is a work of extremely high quality that will take a prominent place in the pantheon of South Carolina slavery studies.

Thomas J. Little Emory and Henry...