A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South
Fully half the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties; this pattern prevailed in much of Virginia. Testimony from criminal trials in Prince Edward County reveals that cruelty was baked into the system, but also that in households of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well. The enslaved, enslavers, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861, most white men in Prince Edward County were ready to fight to defend the right to own other human beings. White Virginians recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors even as they remained committed to a system that abused and sometimes terrorized them. Dr. Melvin Ely’s lecture will take a close look at interracial life in slaveholding Virginia.
Dr. Melvin Patrick Ely is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities, History, at the College of William & Mary. He researches and teaches the history of Black Americans, the South, popular culture and media, and race and ethnicity. Before joining William & Mary, he taught at Yale University, where he received both the Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication and Research and the Prize for Teaching Excellence, and he served as Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dr. Ely is the author of The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon; Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize, the Albert J. Beveridge Award, and the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction; and, most recently, A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South.
The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
