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Woody Holton
Peter H. Wood, Black
Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670
Through the Stono Rebellion (New York:
Knopf, 1973), a National Book Award Finalist, 1975.
The only reason I only checked the box marked "Ph.D."
on my graduate school application was that I had heard
that was the only way to get a fellowship. At the University
of Virginia, I majored in activism, and by my senior
year I was regretting never having actually been a student,
so I figured I would grab a Master's degree in Twentieth
Century U.S. History at Duke and then start a career
(in activism). The summer before heading to Durham,
I read a book by one of my future teachers, and it convinced
me that teachers and writers can be activists.
 The
book was Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South
Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion
by Peter H. Wood. In 1973, when it was published,
growing numbers of people were becoming interested in
both Early American History and African American history.
But hardly anyone thought it was possible to write the
history of early African Americans. The closest anyone
had come was to describe white colonists' attitudes
toward the Africans they claimed to own. Even black-history
scholars studying the better-documented 19th century
tended to organize their books topically rather than
chronologically, depriving African Americans of the
one quality that makes history, history: the ability
to change over time. Wood's chronological account of
black South Carolinians contained other surprises as
well. There was, for instance, the very fact that in
South Carolina, this group so often euphemized as "minority"
was actually the majority. Most crucially for me, Wood
dispelled the myth of African American ignorance. His
subjects earned his sympathy but also his respect. For
instance, he showed that Africans, who had considerably
more experience with rice cultivation than Europeans,
played a crucial role in introducing colonial South
Carolina's major crop. (In my view, a recent attempt
to overturn Wood's "Black Labor, White Rice"
thesis proved wholly unconvincing.)
Wood also challenged what my elementary school teachers
had taught me about slaves being contented or at least
apathetic. Black Majority ends in 1739, with
an unsuccessful but epochal slave insurrection. Participants
in the so-called Stono Rebellion were trying to do what
many black South Carolinians had already done: reach
St. Augustine, Florida, where the Spanish governor had
promised to free any British colonial slave who could
reach him.
Scanning the History table at Barnes and Noble, you
might think there are no new discoveries to be made
in American History. I thought that before reading Black
Majority. I don't anymore.
—Woody Holton
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