Heather Andrea Williams

Of the ones I have read so far, this book is the ideal representative of a Very Short introduction. It focuses on a wide ranging though specific topic. The author makes no assumptions about reader’s prior knowledge of the subject. The narrative is both comprehensive yet always compelling and highly informative. You come away wanting to know more.

Moreover, though the topic is highly emotional, the author avoids propaganda, overly emotional or harsh language. She herself avoids the words “evil” or “horror” in describing slavery although her narrative makes it unequivocally clear that slavery was an evil institution and black slaves lived a life filled with horror and torment. She presents the thinking of white slave holders with only minimal commentary, letting their own words condemn them.

This book is a must read for anyone who wants to begin to understand the awful institution that was US slavery and how and why it resonates in US society nearly one hundred sixty years after it was abolished.… (mehr)

This is the type of book that tells the reader something they may known in principal, but makes it vividly and tragically alive: the separation of African Americans by sale or gift during slavery, and their attempts to to reunite, especially after emancipation. The pain of the slaves at being separated, and of the children at learning that they could be separated, is wrenching. I was surprised to see how much they were able to keep the memory of the details of former owners, and even write letters to owners while still slaves, to try and keep track of their relatives. Unfortunately, name changes and multiple sales meant that most would never be reunited. Given it's length, about 200 pages of text, it took me a long time to read it, because it is all so painful.

It also examines the self-serving beliefs of their owners that their slaves simply didn't feel as strongly as they did themselves, and the separations were not as painful. There is the tender letter written by a slave-trader to his wife, while he is on the road separating other people from their relatives. Another master wrote about his guilt in having to sell ten of his slaves to pay his debts, and hopes it will be a lesson to him about extravagance. Apparently not, since forty more of his slaves were seized for his debts. After emancipation, he writes bitterly that he had sold the lot of the "ungrateful" wretches while he still could.

One flaw that I find in the book is that it is a bit redundant. After reproducing a document, Williams tends to inform us in detail, almost line by line of what we just read. In one case, she reproduces a second document on the same subject, subjects it to the same detailed explication, and then analyzes the two documents together.

This is truly heroic research on William's part. The amount of labor that it must have taken to find all of these advertisements, letters, and recollections is daunting. She has done future historians a great service in finding these. I hope that they could be collected and digitized on the Internet to make them more widely available.… (mehr)