Slave Communities

Despite the terrible conditions under which American slaves were forced to live, they were in many ways successful in establishing stable slave communities and in maintaining their sense of wholeness both as individuals and as members of their original cultures by depending on what culture they could transport with themselves - mostly in the form of stories, songs, music and dance - an in relying on a sense of family (often based not on consanguineal or not only on consanguineal bonds but also affinal ones) as well as religion, often the adopted Christianity of blacks in the New World.

Most Americans of African descent originally were brought to the continent involuntarily as slaves, although of course others have immigrated to the United States since the end of the slave trade. The legacy of the transatlantic slave trade can still be seen in the lives of black Americans as well as in American society in general, especially in those areas where slavery was the strongest, including of course the South, where, where slaves once worked on tobacco, cotton, sugar, and rice plantations. The importation of slaves to the United States became illegal in 1808, but illicit traffic and natural increase produced a steady growth in the black population, who lived under conditions that not only were physically difficult but also created social and psychological problems for families and individuals. It was only by overcoming these that they could hope to survive (Mintz and Price 38).

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ssion, and no doubt some were exactly this. But others were clearly survivals of a native culture in the new society (Young 63). It should be noted that there were wide variations in the extent to which slaves were able to maintain a sense of African identity and in the ways in which slaves were able to create mechanisms for allowing themselves to cope with the conditions of their lives. One of the most important distinctions in terms of how stable and distinct a life slaves could create for themselves was the size of the household in which they lived: Slave culture was probably very different on large plantations from what it was on small farms or in urban households, where slave culture (and especially Creole slave culture) could hardly have avoided being very similar to the master culture (Mintz & Price 111). Slave cultures grew up within the perimeters of the masters' monopoly of power but separate from the masters' institutions, and this degree of separation was in large measure determined by the ratio of slave to whites in a household. Religion, which performed the multiple function of explanation, prediction, control, and communion, seems to have been a particularly fruitful area for the creation of slave culture. The Afri

Category: History - S