Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

About this episode

Melvin Patrick Ely discusses his book on the complexities of interracial life in the slaveholding South before the Civil War.

“In the generation just before the Civil War, something like one-quarter of America’s enslaved people lived on large plantations with fifty or more forced laborers—in essence, work camps, where contact with whites might be limited and mostly utilitarian. Another quarter lived on plantations where twenty to fifty persons were held in slavery. The typical owner of, say, thirty captive Black workers knew his enslaved people individually, even if their true feelings often remained hidden from him. That leaves half the South’s enslaved population living on properties where fewer than twenty Black people were held in bondage. Households that included, say, five or ten enslaved folk were very numerous. Callousness and exploitation were baked into the system, but slavery on this scale also required physical closeness between white and Black. This sort of environment was home to nearly two million African Americans by 1860, and it represented the predominant pattern in Virginia, which held within its borders the largest enslaved population of any colony or state throughout the period from 1619 until 1865. These smaller farms and homes formed a system where, for the most part, the…

People in this episode

Host: Al Zambone

Guest: Melvin Patrick Ely

Topics covered

• interracial relationships
• slavery
• American South
• historical intimacy
• plantation life
• pre-Civil War America

Keywords

• interracial life
• slaveholding South
• plantation
• enslaved people
• historian
• American history
• intimacy
• exploitation

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slave Holding South

Places: Virginia

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