A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

This striking account from Bancroft-winning historian Ely (Israel on the Appomattox) examines interrace relations in the antebellum South at the level of daily life, revealing a more complex, and tragic, picture of slavery than is typically depicted. Ely notes that half the South’s enslaved population lived in white households, rather than in slave quarters. In these shared domestic spaces, “the exploiters and the exploited knew one another personally, sometimes even intimately,” and “had far more in common than we imagine today.” Drawing on close readings of court cases, Ely spotlights moments when white Southerners frequented Black tradesman or shared in recreation with Black household members, or even “accepted the word of an enslaved person over other whites” or “harbored a Black fugitive who had fled from a cruel slaveholder.” Such examples of mercy and clemency within a larger system of oppression, are, Ely argues, a testament to the fact that “the most appalling horror of American slavery may well be that whites... recognized the humanity of Black folk every day, yet they remained full, even avid participants in a system that abused and terrorized those very people.” Animatedly told and gracefully constructed, this is a vital and unflinching look at slavery’s deepest existential horrors. (Apr.)