Review
JULY 4, 2001,
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
Several recent books examine the Civil War era from a black perspective
by Patrick T. Reardon Staff Reporter
Challenging
stereotypes is also at the heart of "Runaway Slaves: Rebels
on the Plantation" (Oxford), a 1999 study by historians John
Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger that exploded the still widely
held myth that Southern slaves were docile, childlike and contented.
In fact, Franklin and Schweninger showed that more than 50,000 slaves
ran away each year-although most were eventually caught.
In
those pre-Civil War days, many Southern whites agreed with Dr. Samuel
A. Cartwright, a prominent New Orleans physician, that it was insane
for a slave to flee. "The Negro is a slave by nature and can
never be happy (if free)," Cartwright asserted. So a slave
who ran away must be mentally unbalanced, a condition he termed
"drapetomania"-from the Greek words for a crazy, runaway
slave.
So ridiculous does that theory seem today that Several of the recent books, as well as some older ones, go out of their way to highlight it. Franklin and Schweninger discuss it, and the theory is mentioned in "Mississippi Swamp" by John Hatch (2ndsightbooks.com) the first of a four-novel series on African-Americans who fled the white-dominated Reconstruction South to live by themselves in an isolated community.
Hatch, who was born in Mississippi and spent his teenage and young adult years in Chicago, notes that many earlier books by African-Americans, such as "Beloved" by Toni Morrison (NAL), detailed the horrors of slavery. By contrast, more recent books stress aggressive efforts by blacks to take control of their lives.
Even So, much of Hatch's "Mississippi Swamp" is about how the newly freed slaves found their lives circumscribed politically, socially and economically by the white power structure. No wonder then that some sought greater freedom by living apart-in the difficult to reach swamps along the Sunflower River, a tributary of the Mississippi.
As for himself, Hatch, who now lives in Berkeley, [CA] says he'd go off and live in a swamp if he had the chance--not as an act of racial separatism, but as a way of breaking away from the money-centered U.S. culture. "Maybe what withdrawal means to me is to[find] something meaningful to do," he says..
Like helping bring history into better perspective.
