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

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Description

In The Claims of Kinfolk, Dylan Penningroth uncovers an extensive informal economy of property ownership among slaves and sheds new light on African American circle of relatives and community life from the heyday of plantation slavery to the “freedom generation” of the 1870s. By specializing in relationships among blacks, in addition to at the more familiar struggles between the races, Penningroth exposes a dynamic process of community and circle of relatives definition. He also features a comparative analysis of slavery and slave property ownership along the Gold Coast in West Africa, revealing significant differences between the African and American contexts.
Property ownership was once widespread among slaves around the antebellum South, as slaves seized the small opportunities for ownership permitted by their masters. Even as there was once no legal framework to offer protection to or even recognize slaves’ property rights, an informal system of acknowledgment recognized by both blacks and whites enabled slaves to mark the boundaries of possession. In turn, property ownership–and the negotiations it entailed–influenced and shaped kinship and community ties. Enriching common notions of slave life, Penningroth reveals how property ownership engendered conflict in addition to solidarity within black families and communities. Moreover, he demonstrates that property had less to do with individual legal rights than with repeatedly negotiated, extralegal social ties.

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