The Claims Of Kinfolk: African American Property And Community In The Nineteenth-Century South (The John Hope Franklin Series In African American History And Culture)

The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)

InThe Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African American family and community life from the heyday of plantation slavery to the "freedom generation" of the 1870s. By focusing on relationships among blacks, as well as on the more familiar struggles between the races, Penningroth exposes a dynamic process of community and family definition. He also includes a comparative analysis of slavery and slave property ownership along the Gold Coast in West Africa, revealing significant differences between the African and American contexts.Property ownership was widespread among slaves across the antebellum South, as slaves seized the small opportunities for ownership permitted by their masters. While there was no legal framework to protect or even recognize slaves' property rights, an informal system of acknowledgment recognized by both blacks and whites enabled slaves to mark the boundaries of possession. In turn, property ownership--and the negotiations it entailed--influenced and shaped kinship and community ties. Enriching common notions of slave life, Penningroth reveals how property ownership engendered conflict as well as solidarity within black families and communities. Moreover, he demonstrates that property had less to do with individual legal rights than with constantly negotiated, extralegal social ties. Review The Claims of Kinfolk makes a fine, original contribution to comparative nineteenth-century African American history. I'm particularly grateful for Penningroth's economic analysis of slave propertyin materia as well as cultural and personal terms. He opens up our narrow assumptions about the lives of enslaved and emancipated people, in both the New and Old Worlds. (Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University author ofSouthern History across the Color Line) --Review Review Specialists in African American studies will greatly appreciate this provocative study of property holding among enslaved African Americans.--Journal of African American History About the Author Dylan C. Penningroth is associate professor of history at Northwestern University. In 2012 he was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.