Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina.

Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina. By Emily West. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2004. Pp. xii, 184. $30.00, ISBN 0-252-02903-8.)

Given the attention paid to slave families in historical studies, it is surprising that until now there has been no sustained examination of slave couples. Emily West's Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina addresses this neglect by examining the relationship between enslaved men and women from courtship through marriage. Within this discussion are detailed analyses of work and status, abuse committed by white and black men, interracial sexual relations, family disruptions through relocation, and general family life. Throughout the book, West considers the perception of the slaves and that of their owners. She argues persuasively not only that slaves sought to control their personal and romantic lives but also that slave efforts to define these relationships for themselves "increased the psychological distance or 'social space' between" slaves and owners and enhanced slaves' ability to endure the system of human bondage (p. 30).

Chains of Love is based on the study of a variety of sources. West anecdotally and quantitatively uses all of the 344 Works Progress Administration slave narratives from South Carolina in George P. Rawick's The American Slave. She supplements this data with information from church records, personal papers of slave owners, and full-length autobiographies of former slaves, some of whom were not South Carolinians but whose stories contain aspects that arguably are representative.

Undoubtedly West has undertaken a difficult task--seeking conclusions about the cross-gender relationships of people whose documentation, especially in the case of marriage, is often only implicit. Consequently, despite presenting a variety of evidence and useful analyses, one is left feeling that she has occasionally allowed the behavior of her subjects to denote their thought process. For example, while female slaves living on sites with no suitable marriage partners frequently married men who had different owners and lived elsewhere, it is not at all clear that such women "would have preferred to marry off their place of residence than not to marry at all" (p. 55). Some readers will question West's reliance on Donald M. Jacobs's Index to "The American Slave" (Westport, Conn., 1981) to compare instances or frequency of phenomena (e.g., spousal abuse, interracial relationships) in all the WPA narratives to her findings in the South Carolina volumes. The comparison suggests that the indexer read and interpreted the former slaves' statements in the same way West would have done and that Jacobs missed no examples West might have caught.

Despite these potential weaknesses, West succeeds in pushing us to reconsider some aspects of the historiography related to slavery. For example, although she erroneously criticizes Anne Patton Malone for "not investigat[ing] cross-plantation marriages" (Malone looked primarily at households rather than families), West's point that some cross-plantation marriages were highly functional is well taken. More substantially, it might provide an alternative view to that established by Brenda Stevenson's study of Loudoun County, Virginia, slaves (p. 49). Chains of Love also urges us to see beyond the female networks whose significance Deborah Gray White established. West argues that "relationships between married men and women were generally more important to slaves than were same-gender networks" (p. 1). While Larry Hudson stressed the economic opportunities and advantages that family life created for slaves, West focuses on the significance of affection within, and the social space resulting from, family construction. Finally, West adds to our discussion of slave resistance by viewing slave efforts to choose their marriage partners as tangible evidence of resistance to slaveholder authority. And to the extent that they succeeded, slaves simultaneously enlarged the "space" within which they might extend their resistance. Although readers will wish for more evidence for all of these conclusions, West raises important issues that we will have to consider as we continue to study the interior lives of slaves.

STEPHANIE J. SHAW

Ohio State University