Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)

In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. Demonstrating that neighborhoods prevailed across the South, Kaye reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship. This is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves.