Glenn C. Altschuler

Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (review)

For example, she asserts that “the Mountain South exhibited higher slave mortality rates than those regions of the United States characterized by larger plantations” (85). Yet this comparison is to the South in general, rather than regions such as rice-planting South Carolina and Georgia, which, given the mortality rates that Dusinberre has found on such plantations, were likely far more fatal.1 Moreover, her conclusion that Appalachian slaves endured harsher punishments and worse material conditions than other American slaves may be skewed by the interviews that she used. More than one-third of the Appalachian ex-slave interviews were conducted by Fisk University students. These interviews are reputed to paint a darker picture of slavery than those conducted by the Works Project Administration, possibly because the former slaves were franker with fellow African-Americans than the whites who made up the bulk of the wpa interviewers. Thus, she may be comparing Appalachian conditions to overly sanitized accounts of slavery elsewhere. Dunaway’s volumes raise important questions and give provocative answers about the experience of slavery in nineteenth-century America. In particular, the andings of The African American Family will contribute to the ongoing debate about the nature of slavery on small plantations and farms.