Plantation slavery deliberately isolated slaves from each other and from information

Evidence

[B]efore the war, the slave was curiously isolated; this was the policy, and the effective policy of the slave system, which made the plantation the center of a black group with a network of white folk around and about, who kept the slaves from contact with each other. Of course, clandestine contact there always was; the passing of Negroes to and fro on errands; particularly the semi-freedom and mingling in cities; and yet, the mass of slaves were curiously provincial and kept out of the currents of information, (pp. 121-22) In the masters’ domiciles, the complexities of the relationships between labor and the exploiters of labor many times included bonds of sentiment, but more importantly and persistently the house servants had realized “The masters had stood between them and a world in which they had no legal protection except the master.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1105

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the isolation thesis Du Bois develops in Black Reconstruction, and echoes the ‘lack of significant intercourse’ that Marx attributed to peasants — the comparison Robinson is drawing. — connects to: Southern law did not protect enslaved families from forced separation by sale — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 1343