Peter Wood’s book, Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion,published in 1974 by Alfred Knopf (New York) details the history of black slaves in South Carolina. This history presented by Peter Wood in Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion is not only unique because it focuses on one colony or state, but because the slave population of South Carolina existed under specific circumstances that allowed it to grow as a community apart from whites. The introduction of rice and its subsequent planting by slaves was one of the keys to the early success of isolated black communities and the population rose accordingly. According to Peter Wood inBlack Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion, “during precisely those two decades after 1695 when rice production took permanent hold in South Carolina, the African portion of the population drew equal to, and then surpassed, the European portion (36). Furthermore, disease resistance as a result of the sickle cell trait was also an important element in the population growth and although some of these African slaves did suffer from ailments and diseases but not to quite the same degree as white populations in the area.
These factors couple with the fact that many whites avoided the low-lying areas where the stagnating water of the rice and indigo fields were allowed for a distinct black community to develop in these areas of South Carolina. Furthermore, a unique language, Gullah, emerged which combined English and African language and defined this population. As Peter Wood suggests in Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion, along with the development of a distinct language apart from that of the whites, there was an increasing amount of social organization among these slaves and eventually the tensions between the whites and blacks grew more pronounced. The culmination of these tensions resulted in the Stono Uprising and provides the closing event for Peter Wood’s book. In sum, the thesis of the book is based on the idea of the majority. Peter Wood goes through great lengths to reveal the many conditions that eventually allowed the slaves to posses the majority of the population before finally exploring what the results were of the majority.
The book has dual main points that come together in the end with a massive uprising. First of all, In Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion Peter Wood concentrates much of the first section on how these Africans rose to the majority in the region. “Black slaves were present in the South Carolina colony from the years of its founding, and by the second generation they constituted a majority of the population” (xiv). According to Peter Wood in Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion, the reasons for this dominance in population was in part due their resistance to diseases that white settlers were falling victim to, especially those plaguing the stagnant water of the low-lying areas where these slaves remained. This population growth was initially aided by the cultivation of rice and “during precisely those two decades after 1695 when rice production took permanent hold in South Carolina, the African portion of the population drew equal to, and then surpassed, the European portion (36). This centralized and large population allowed for greater organization and by the time of the first revolts and uprisings, these African “pioneers” had already developed a system of language (Gullah) and a community of their own. “There was a tendency toward social, and occasionally economic, self-sufficiency among blacks as their numbers expanded. A voluntary separation from the white community went along with denser population, wider contacts, and increasingly independent living quarters” (195). By the time of the Stono Rebellion, white fears about this community and the subsequent sense of community that these blacks had seemed to make such an uprising almost inevitable. In sum, Wood concentrates mostly on how these African slaves became the majority through certain conditions (disease resistance and location for example) and how this solidarity led to the culmination of black and white relations in South Carolina. As Wood succinctly states, “The episode, [Stono Rebellion] if hardly major in its own right, seemed to symbolize the critical impasse in which Carolina’s English colonists now found themselves” (308). Though he points out that this was not necessarily a landmark in American history, he has done an excellent job of defining rebellion in wide terms and included elements such as environment, for instance, which might be overlooked in a cursory study of slave uprisings in the United States.
The objective of this book seems to provide a definition of slavery in South Carolina and retell the events traced back from the first black slaves in the state (and Barbados for that matter) and chronologically lead up to the Stono Rebellion. In providing such a framework, the author has done a magnificent job and the book could almost read as a narrative. One of the strong points of the book is that it relies heavily on primary sources such as legal and political tracts as well as quotes from men and women who lived in South Carolina throughout the period this book covers. Unfortunately, while such primary sources are an overall positive addition to the text, there were often far more descriptions of what white people were going through than what the subject of the book, the African Americans in South Carolina, were dealing with. While it is obvious that there is drastically less evidence in terms of writing left over from these black residents of the state, it was easy to forget about them since so much of the evidence was based on white observation. Again, this is a tricky aspect of the book to criticize since there obviously was not enough written by these black residents, and although there a few enlightening interviews with relatives of these first residents, it is not enough to present the whole picture. In fact, it would seem that Wood could have relayed the same thesis with simply what he had from white settlers in the region. At times the narrative got bogged down with discussion about the whites when the reader was expecting to learn more about an aspect of the black culture that was developing in these localized and highly populated black areas. It is a shame that there is not more evidence from that area to buffer Wood’s argument, but there is only limited information available, of course. Aside from this occasional lack of focus on the subject, it is difficult to find fault with Wood’s ideas since they seem rooted in fact and are relayed in a very straightforward fashion without much abstract conjecture. In short, the strong point of this book would be its logical organization and basis in fact and the weak point is certainly the fact that the primary source evidence that is, for the most part, only from whites, is overused and clouds the main objective.
Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion is not a book one might normally pick up to read unless they had a keen interest in either the history of South Carolina or the Stono Rebellion (or have been assigned a summary, analysis, or literature review), but this was a surprisingly engaging text. First of all, it explored the more environmental factors leading to the population increase and followed this natural progression of events through until it seemed as though the Rebellion was only option left. The evidence made the violence depicted near the end seem not only justified but as though it had been meant to happen from the very first settlement of whites and blacks in the area. Although it might not be the most grounded approach—thinking of this book as a testament to the destiny, the way Wood writes makes it easy to see the connections that span across this whole period and how the final outcome is the ultimate sum. This is a book I might recommend to a friend if they were conducting specialized study in African American or Southern history but it is almost too narrow for general consumption. While I am glad I had the opportunity to read it and feel as though I gained a great deal of insight, especially into the early history of slavery in a southern state such as South Carolina, this might be knowledge that is too specific to fit into daily academic debates. I might also recommend this book to friends who seriously consider writing about history for an academic market because of the level of strong organization. Even though Wood tends to get a little bogged down in peripheral evidence, it is clear that this book was painstakingly researched and employed a wide variety of sources and this in itself makes it a model of writing about history. Overall, this was an interesting read about the unique history of slavery and community in South Carolina.
Other essays and articles in the History Archives related to this topic include : Slavery in America’s South : Implications and Effects • The Emancipation Proclamation: Savior or Rhetoric? • Slavery in Brazil and The Quilombo at Palmares
