¹ Stowe, Harriet Beecher, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (London, 1853), p. 323Google Scholar. W. R. Taylor has suggested that a concern for family relationships (white and black) is a hidden theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin. ‘In retrospect, it seems evident that Harriet Stowe employed the plantation setting because she herself believed in it as a meaningful evocation of American family life and not out of any shrewd and vindictive intent, as Southerners tended to think. What she feared for the plantation was simply a heightened version of the anxiety she felt for modern family life in general.’ Taylor, W. R., Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and the American National Character (New York, 1963), p. 292.Google Scholar

² For a pertinent discussion of this theme, see Walters, Ronald G., ‘The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism’, American Quarterly, 25 (05, 1973), pp. 177–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Weld, Theodore D., Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York, 1839) pp. 97. 101. 154.Google Scholar

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⁵ Kardiner, A. and Ovesey, L., The Mark of Oppression: Explorations in the Personality of the American Negro (Cleveland, 1951, 1962), pp. 45–6.Google Scholar

⁶ Ibid., p. 47.

⁷ Stampp, K. M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956, 1964), pp. 343–4.Google Scholar

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⁹ Ibid., p. 49.

¹⁰ Frazier, E. Franklin, ‘The Negro Slave Family’, Journal of Negro History, 15 (1930), pp. 198–259CrossRefGoogle Scholar; p. 199.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 233.

¹² Ibid., p. 234.

¹³ Ibid., p. 255.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 259.

¹⁵ Frazier, E. F., The Negro Family in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 1939)Google Scholar. Even here, however, Frazier concedes that: ‘On the whole, the slave family developed as a natural organization, based upon the spontaneous feelings of affection and natural sympathies which resulted from the association of the family members in the same household. Although the emotional interdependence between the mother and her children generally caused her to have a more permanent interest in the family than the father, there were fathers who developed an attachment for their wives and children.’ Pp. 481–2.

¹⁶ For a notable exception, see Herskovits, M. J., The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941, Boston, 1958)Google Scholar: ‘Though slavery gave a certain instability to the marriage tie, in the New World as a whole the many persons who lived out their lives on the same plantation were able to establish and maintain families; even in the United States, it is far from certain that undisturbed matings have not been lost sight of in the appeal of the more dramatic separations that actually did occur in large numbers.’ p. 139. On the efforts of masters to protect their slave families see Sellers, James B., Slavery in Alabama (University of Alabama Press, 1950), pp. 125–6, 132–4, 168–9Google Scholar. Taylor, Orville W., Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, N.C., 1958), pp. 66–7, 194.Google Scholar

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¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 112.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 114.

²¹ Ibid., p. 113.

²² Blassingame, J. W., The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1972), p. 78.Google Scholar

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²⁴ Ibid., p. 90.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 93.

²⁶ Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L., Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (2 vols., Boston, 1974), 1, p. 127.Google Scholar

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 135.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 137.

³⁰ Ibid., p. 138.

³¹ Quoted in ibid., pp. 138–9.

³² Ibid., p. 135.

³³ Ibid., p. 49.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 5 Mrs Stowe would reject the implications of this last statement: ‘… who is he who compares the hopeless, returnless separation of the negro [sic] from his family, to the voluntary separation of the freeman, whom necessary business interest takes for a while from the bosom of his family?’ A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, op. cit., p. 348.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 142.

³⁶ On the pitfalls of comparative studies, see Genovese, E. D., ‘The Treatment of Slaves in Different Countries: Problems in the Applications of the Comparative Method’, in Foner, Laura and Genovese, E. D., eds., Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History (New Jersey, 1969)Google Scholar. reprinted in Genovese, In Red and Black op. cit., pp. 158–172. See also: Engerman, S. L. and Genovese, E. D., eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

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³⁸ A version of this article was given as a paper in the Panel on American Slavery at the annual conference of the B.A.A.S. at the University of Hull in April 1974.