Concentrating on the lives of blacks who achieved freedom, this book describes how, against formidable odds, they amassed property, established plantations, acquired dependent laborers, and lived for several generations as free and independent members of Virginia society…. More >>
Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676
The lives of blacks who achieve freedom.
Rating: 3 / 5
I read this book for my college history class. It was a great look into a society that we know so little about. While reading this book you can see how America begins to slip into slavery with the treatment of Africans on the Eastern Shore. Some pieces of the history of Virginia are missing but Breen and Innes do a great job with what they have to work with.
Rating: 4 / 5
In their revisionist “Myne Owne Ground” Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676, Breen and Innes have two objectives. Assuming the style of essayists, they challenge scholars to take a careful, unbiased view of race, slavery, and African-Americans in the United States generally and in colonial America specifically. They challenge scholars to avoid the teleological assumption that discrimination and racism also existed in the earliest days of European presence in colonial North America and to avoid allowing abstract and largely artificial social categories such as race and slavery to drive research. They even provide some variables, for example demography, spatiality, ethnicity, and wealth. They want scholars to take a personal and careful approach and to find the agency of individuals, especially, as they argue, because tensions increased around the time of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), reaching a legal climax in 1705. The book’s strength and holding power rest in this section because the authors give scholars methodologies, theories, and hypotheses.
Secondly, by studying free African-Americans in seventeenth-century Northampton County, Virginia, Breen and Innes argue that some African-Americans–such as Anthony Johnson, Francis Payne, Emanuel Driggus, and about three hundred others by 1650–were able to achieve freedom because race-based, life-long slavery did not become inevitable until about the 1660s and 1670s. Some of these individuals bought their freedom and then bought property, frequently functioning as equals in society. Only a few of these, such as Johnson, were able to become successful plantation operators. This element of the book seems largely the same or a slightly updated version of Russell’s account; virtually all of the information about Johnson and his family is the same. Neither source addresses Johnson’s treatment of his slaves. And Breen and Innes do not explain why Johnson, “patriarch on Pungoteauge Creek,” moved from Virginia to Maryland beyond their guess that he sought better land. Such a discussion would only serve to add credibility and evidence to their argument that tension developed and increased in this late-seventeenth-century society. Their argument that Johnson achieved success and relative equality is strong because of the court cases and his property. But, their generalization of these conditions to colonial society is weak because they only discuss one small element of Virginia, where eighty something percent of African-Americans were enslaved. Ultimately, these authors do not integrate their goals for other scholars in their own work.
Finally, although they do not study antebellum blacks as other scholars, by studying colonial society before the South transformed from a “society with slaves” to a “slave society,” they are able to show not only perhaps the best situation free African-Americans found in the South before the Civil Rights Movement, but they are also able to establish that what became the United States was not built on racism from the beginning. For the simple reason that not many authors write about colonial slavery, this book is significant.
Rating: 4 / 5
Very readable historical narrative. Clears up a very large misconception: that whites automatically thought blacks were inferior and thus enslaved them.
Only people with enough resources to obtain property were allowed an active and coveted role in Virginia society. Many blacks that had obtained freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore attained this stature – their rights protected and upheld by the court justices, white children placed in their custody, were called to testify against whites in trials, conducted substantial business with great white planters, and so forth. Without anyone considering it taboo.
Virginia’s society was initially based more on class and Englishness than race. Joe the white indentured servant and John the black indentured servant were treated the same way by their masters. As all of their indentures were up, there was a growing class of relatively united black and white freemen who were not part of the upper-class English gentry.
Herein lies the problem. After Bacon’s Rebellion, the gentry created sharp racial lines within the poor class and thus weaked the unity in the lower class. Racism was created — it was not automatic. The main points of this book are to encourage the reader to see the origins of racism in a different light and to tell the awesome story of free blacks on the Eastern Shore in the 17th century.
Rating: 5 / 5
“Myne Own Ground” gives us a better understanding about how the free African slaves in Virginia lived during the sixteen hundreds. T. H.
Breen and Stephen Innes show us a more personal look into this period of time by telling the lives of several of the freed slaves’ families. The book is easier to read than a history textbook because of this. “Myne Own Ground” states some interesting and important facts about this time. The most interesting thing that I learned from this book that we do not learn from history textbooks is that freed slaves owned slaves. White people were not the only people to enslave other people. This was common because people were property. If you owned people, you did not have to pay taxes. There are several other surprises in this book that most people would not know about this time. It is very interesting to know that race was not the main issue, it really was the social class each person was a part of. “Myne Own Ground” makes you wonder about what
it would be like in our country if they had done some things differently. It points out so much that we have more than likely not thought about before. I recommend this book if you are looking for something that will grab your attention and keep it.
Rating: 4 / 5