Franklin and Schweninger’s latest co-authored history of American slavery (following on from their prize-winning 1999 collaboration, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation) revisits and complicates some elements of earlier debates in slavery scholarship with a focus on an atypical antebellum slave family. The authors examine an exceptionally strong and dynamic extended family, the Thomas-Rapiers, over three generations as they struggle to escape the shackles of American slavery and racism.  Matriarch of the clan, Sally Thomas, is introduced to the reader as she is being transported with her sons from a tobacco plantation in Charlottesville, Virginia to Nashville. Once in Nashville, Sally hires herself out and eventually establishes a profitable laundry business, gaining custom and respect from the town’s wealthy white residents. Sally enjoys a measure of freedom and prosperity in Nashville unknown to most slaves in the rural South, nevertheless she remains a slave in the eyes of the law and is still vulnerable to the constant threat of sale and separation from her family. So begins a narrative which foregrounds and amplifies the importance of family ties among black Americans and their struggle for freedom, as well as the complex and ambiguous nature of slavery and race in the Old South.

A vigorous debate centred on the impact of enslavement on black family life in the United States can be traced back to the nation’s antebellum era and is perhaps most visible in the contrasting literary treatments of the institution produced by the period’s Southern and Northern novelists. The definitive abolitionist novel was of course Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which highlighted the role of the domestic slave trade in breaking apart slave families and, through the figure of the licentious brute Simon Legree, how Southern slaveholders could also undermine black family stability by sexual predation. By contrast, Southern proslavery novels, such as Mary Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin (1852), suggested that blacks actually benefited from slavery’s paternal largesse and protection, downplaying, or completely ignoring, the domestic slave trade and the sexual exploitation of black women, promoting instead a sanitised and romanticised vision of the institution that would linger interminably.

In the twentieth-century, down to the early 1970s, among those of American slavery’s historians who thought to consider the problem, there was general agreement with the abolitionist position that the black family was destroyed or, at best, remained highly insecure under slavery. This ‘damage model’ of the enslaved black family reached its apotheosis in the writings of Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins and the Elkins-influenced 1965 Moynihan report on The Negro Family. Stampp argued that, living ‘in a kind of cultural chaos,’ slaves had no meaningful family relationships. Elkins claimed that slavery ‘vitiated family life’ and, in turn, Moynihan used slavery as a causal factor to explain to the Johnson administration perceived ‘pathological’ weaknesses in the contemporary black family. Such ideas duly provoked a strong and sustained challenge from a new wave of slavery scholarship that had just ‘discovered’ black testimony. Historians, such as John Blassingame, George Rawick, and, most notably on the question of the black family, Herbert Gutman, reinterpreted American slavery from the enslaved perspective and argued that slaves were much more than mere victims of slaveholder cruelty or passive recipients of slaveholder benevolence. Rather, these historians argued, enslaved black Americans were resilient and culturally creative autonomous agents capable of resisting slaveholder power and of shaping their own worlds. Gutman’s work, contra Stampp and Elkins, argued for the strength of slave families despite the impact of sales, separations and slaveholder interventions. Furthermore, Gutman saw family networks among slaves as the basis for the development of a viable slave community and the spread of a vibrant African American culture.

In Search of the Promised Landdraws on a rich variety of sources in carefully reconstructing the historical backdrop to the Thomas-Rapier family saga. Among the materials used are documentary records from several states, probate records, census records, city directories, newspaper articles, acts of general assemblies and petitions to southern legislatures (one of Schweninger’s many jobs is editor of the impressive online ‘Race and Slavery Petitions Project’). However, the key sources are the autobiography of James Thomas, which Schweninger edited and published in his earlier From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepeneur (1984), and a large collection of correspondence, the Rapier-Thomas papers (held at Howard University).

While the authors acknowledge that Sally Thomas and her progeny were exceptional in many respects and that few enslaved, or free black, people in the antebellum South could have achieved the degree of personal freedom, business success, or incredible freedom of movement enjoyed by some members of the Thomas-Rapier family, they argue that such uncommon experiences open up new vantage points on race, slavery, and southern society.  Perhaps some of the most important of these fresh perspectives are the focus on the lives of ‘quasi-slaves’, such as Sally Thomas, and the limits and possibilities of free black life in Florence, Alabama, as experienced by Sally’s son, John Rapier. Franklin and Schweninger’s narrative won’t suit those looking for a broad-based or theoretically informed historical exploration of the enslaved family experience in the Old South, but what it does provide is an expertly-crafted and very engaging history of a remarkable black family’s odyssey.