Slavery and the Making of America.

Slavery and the Making of America. By James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, c. 2005. Pp. 254. Paper, $10.99, ISBN 0-19-530451-9; cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-19-517903-X.)

In a companion book to the Public Broadcasting Service series on slavery (aired in February 2005), James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton recount the history of enslaved Africans and their descendants in America. It is a story that begins in Africa with Africans capturing other Africans for sale to European slave traders. Operating from various trade posts and forts along the Atlantic coast of West Africa, agents of European slave-trading companies dispatched millions of enslaved Africans on a forced migration to a life of slavery in the Americas. Many enslaved Africans failed to survive the horrors of the Atlantic crossing, the so-called middle passage, while those who lived through it faced a lifetime of slavery for themselves and their descendants.

Yet, slaves endured. They lived, worked, and worshipped as best they could, even as they sought ways to shed the chains that held them in thrall. Slaves eagerly pursued every avenue that promised freedom, running away (often to the free North) during times of war, especially during the War of Independence and the Civil War. Slaves made their unhappiness with the institution of slavery and their quest for freedom abundantly clear. While the door to freedom opened for some African Americans, the majority remained enslaved. Not until the era of the Civil War and especially the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 did the approximately four million remaining slaves receive freedom. This is the story narrated in Slavery and the Making of America.

The authors portray the slave experience through the eyes of the slaves and free blacks, viewing the history of slavery in America through the personal accounts of those African Americans whose life stories were memorialized in print. In the first chapter, the reader is transported to West Africa through the stories of Anta Majigeen Njaay, Venture Smith, Olaudah Equiano, and others for a firsthand account of the capturing and enslavement process in Africa. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 use the experiences of Samuel Howell, Mum Betts, Absalom Jones, Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, and others to portray the realities of the slave trade, slave life and culture, and the search for freedom from the era of the American Revolution to the Civil War. In the last two chapters, the personal accounts of Dangerfield Newby, Robert Smalls, Harriet Tubman, and many others provide a lens through which the reader examines the experiences of African Americans as they struggled for emancipation during and after the Civil War.

This is a book written for a general audience; it breaks no new historical ground, and scholars looking for an in-depth study of how slavery shaped America will not find answers here. For example, in a mere thirty-three pages (chapter 1) the authors examine the history of West Africa before the fifteenth century, the origins and operation of the Atlantic slave trade, the sale and evolution of the institution of slavery in colonial America, and the abolition of slavery in the North during the era of the American Revolution. However, any history of slavery must include the story of the slaves. Slavery and the Making of America is quite successful in putting the human face on the slave experience in America. Readers interested in the more personal side of the slave story will find this a delightful book.

PATIENCE ESSAH

Auburn University