The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South.

The Claims of Kinfolk." African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South. By Dylan C. Penningroth. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2003. Pp. x, 310. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5476-X; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2797-5.)

This ambitious monograph examines three prominent issues in the historiography of nineteenth-century African Americans: family and community, property ownership, and the relationship between the two in the pre- and post--Civil War South. Penningroth transcends the conventional insularity of southern history by situating his story more broadly within a transatlantic context and by comparing black southerners' experiences to those of the Fante people of Ghana between 1868 and 1930, during which time slavery was abolished there. The study relies on an impressive array of primary sources, including documentation of over six hundred court cases from Ghana and the antebellum and postbellum American South involving property and family. Penningroth also examines records associated with the 498 claims that former slaves successfully registered during the 1870s with the Southern Claims Commission for property that the Union army requisitioned from them.

Penningroth makes important contributions to our understanding of the slaves' informal economy. In accumulating their small amounts of property, slaves faced a scarcity of time; by contrast, during Reconstruction, freed-people controlled their own time but faced a scarcity of land. Because the laws of bondage made it impossible for human property to enjoy de jure ownership rights over other property, slaves also faced the problem of establishing de facto ownership rights to their possessions. In one of his most original and valuable interpretive claims, Penningroth argues that slaves solved this problem by developing a cultural strategy of "display and acknowledgment," whereby they publicly displayed their property (p. 108). Because these acts of display were seen or heard by others on the plantation, they constituted slaves' unwritten proof of ownership; the distribution of slave cabins--closely situated along a central plantation avenue--created the spatial context and opportunity for slaves to display their possessions to each other on a daily basis. During Reconstruction the importance of this strategy to black southerners' economic aspirations became clear: in their efforts to secure reimbursement for property taken by soldiers or otherwise protect possessions for which they had no formal legal proof of ownership, ex-slaves relied on the testimony of family or friends who had long seen them in public possession of the property.

Penningroth makes a second major contribution when he conveys the three axes of economic conflict facing former slaves during Reconstruction. In addition to fighting hostile ex-slaveholders, they also had to convince dubious northern officials about their property ownership and, no less significantly, pursue their own economic and familial claims against each other in various courts. By highlighting this intraracial tension, Penningroth cogently deromanticizes African American historiography, which all too often assumes an internally harmonious black community.

Yet this stimulating study also raises concerns. First, the relevance of the Fante material to Penningroth's explanation of his American topics is not ultimately clear; to be most useful, his comparative history would require more sustained discussion than simply noting "as in Fante" throughout the volume. Second, by claiming that "[p]roperty was at the heart of African Americans' ideas about family," Penningroth minimizes earlier scholarship that has examined, for example, marital practices and naming patterns and argued that noneconomic concerns were central to slaves' ideas about family (p. 43). Third, in adopting the provocative guiding "principle that black people's lives involved far more than their relations with whites," Penningroth downplays the role of slaveholders, despite other scholarly findings to the contrary (p. 189). He claims instead that "[m]ost white[s] ... either supported the informal economy ... or did not care about it one way or the other" (p. 192). By engaging more directly with the scholarship that he challenges and by developing more fully his comparative analysis, Penningroth would have made his excellent study even more significant.

Winona State University 

JOHN CAMPBELL