Mine own ground: race and freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore

Myne Owne Ground: Summary and Critique

As authors and historians T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes point out in the introduction to heir text Myne Owne Ground, slavery had existed in some form or other for at least three thousand years prior to the arrival of Europeans on the North American continent, "receiving philosophical justification from every major Western thinker from Plato to Locke" (3). It would have been more surprising had slavery not existed on these shores, from a historical perspective, and the abolitionist movement that developed in the mid-eighteenth century was strikingly new in its opposition to enslavement. The freedom that was achieved by African slaves in the United States, as individuals throughout the colonies' existence and eventually as a collective whole, led to new social issues and circumstances that historians are only now beginning to fully appreciate and present in an objective light.

Men like Anthony Johnson, who arrived in the colony of Virginia as a slave captured in Africa, eventually earned his freedom, built a large estate that could securely support his large family, and amassed a fair amount of wealth as a free black man. He and his wife were married for over forty years, which made Anthony unique among men of the New World, black or white -- the ratio of men to women simply wasn't in favor of most men getting married and having families. Despite all of these facts, however, nothing is known about how Anthony or his wife achieved their freedom, as the story of free blacks before the Revolution -- and in many respects before the Civil War -- simply doesn't fit the traditional view of Virginian history.

Because of the lack of perceived historical significance of the situation of blacks in Virginia in the seventeenth century -- something that was carried over from the views of the people of that time -- it is difficult to piece together accurate information about the black community of period. Some blacks were certainly slaves, but others may have been indentured servants that were legally and automatically freed after a certain period, like white indentured servants. Color was not as definitive a marker of status in this period as history has come to believe, and in fact there is a fairly well documented group of free blacks living in Northampton County during the seventeenth century. It is an attempt to identify the way that this community dealt with larger Virginian society, and the ways in which they were perceived and dealt with themselves by that society, that is the primary concern of the authors.

The fact that free blacks gathered in their own communities, with their own family and other interpersonal connections, is significant in that it "provided a framework in which even the colony's earliest blacks could have transmitted notions about culture" (104). Still, in the larger Virginian society that the free blacks of Northampton County had to deal with on a daily basis, issues of identity and culture had to remain somewhat fluid, with different presentations of the self and the community given in interactions with different strata of society in order to get by. This has also contributed to the difficulty of developing an accurate understanding of this population, as the different constructions of identity and culture are themselves indicative of the historical and contemporary anomaly this community represented.

Critique

It is difficult to begin a critique of this book as it attempts to deal with issues that are specifically and explicitly not compatible with traditional views of American history; the scholarship that the authors engaged in was necessarily hampered by the lack of previous research and accurate record keeping. Both primary and secondary sources were in scant supply, and without these tools it would be difficult for a text on any subject and within any academic discipline to be created. In this regard, the authors have done a commendable job of attempting to piece together collective histories and individual narratives that need to be told in order to gain an accurate understanding of early America and Virginia.

That being said, the authors spend far too long in this reader's opinion discussing and analyzing the works of previous historians that these authors specifically point out as being inaccurate, incomplete, or outright wrong in their conclusions. The result is a text that appears to be more concerned with the manner in which the specific historical epoch and community has been studied and presented previously, rather than with an accurate and detailed representation of this epoch/community. Statements like, "it was difficult for the historian to imagine," and, "a modern historian who attempted to classify" appear throughout the book, making this a sort of meta-history, and an analysis (usually resulting in a correction or condemnation) of previous scholarship in the authors' research area (31, 45).