Breaking the Chains: African American Slave Resistance
William Loren Katz
(reprint of the 1990 edition with a new introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley)
Reviewed by Imani Hinson
When various localities are seeking to return to rhetoric of enslavement being beneficial or benevolent, Breaking the Chains: African American Slave Resistance is a book that is timely and beneficial for both teachers and students to understand the story of African Americans in their time of bondage. William Loren Katz did an amazing job of telling the story of African American enslavement through the eyes of the enslaved. Katz does this by describing a life in which enslaved people were not complacent but rather fought for every freedom awarded to them by their enslavers.
Katz explains, through this history, that African Americans were not only dealt physical blows but also had to fight against the master’s version of history after enslavement ended.
For much of American history enslaved people were described as complacent, willing to work, not upset about their condition or, as historians Allan Nevins and Henry Steele wrote, enslaved people
“were cared for and apparently happy” (9).
In other historical texts historians such as W.E. Woodward falsely stated that African Americans “were the only people in the history of the world who became free without any effort of their own” (234).
Although this had been a standard narrative for many years, Katz pushed back on this idea saying that historians had not done enough to find the stories of the enslaved in order to tell the true story of their resistance and their disdain for enslavement. He even goes as far as to say that “most scholars
have ignored this mountain of evidence” (13). But Katz refused to be another historian who gets history wrong and he wrote this book to detail the lives of the enslaved through the beginnings of the slave trade in Africa up to the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Shown through many different angles and time periods, Katz described a people who resisted enslavement in every way. The book is broken up into four parts with a varying number of chapters in each part. The book begins with two introductory chapters, one written in 2023 in which Robin G. Kelley does the introduction and the other in which the author opens up the book setting the stage for the first chapter.
With the use of large print and historical images this book could easily be used to teach secondary students in grades 7-12 or could be used in an undergraduate college course. The writing is impeccably understandable and uses various sorts of sources including narratives of the enslaved,
accounts from white enslavers, foreign visitors to the United States, reports from the military and government, newspapers, and legal documents. In a society where it feels taboo to talk about the enslavement of African Americans, Katz’s thorough research is paramount to telling the story of
African Americans and their refusal to accept bondage.
Chapter two sets up the rest of the book by detailing why African Americans felt they needed to resist. In this chapter, Katz details the re-enslavement of African Americans on a daily basis and the horrors of what enslavement meant to them. He begins the chapter by stating “The reason for enslaved people’s resistance was slavery” (35). Enslavers understood that in order for them to achieve their goal of assimilating formerly free people into bondage, they would need to assert a form of dominance that denied African Americans the right to be human. Enslaved people were viewed as animals, chattel, property, and were purposefully kept from any knowledge beyond the plantations they toiled in. Chapter 2 details the fact that African Americans were not allowed to mourn, to be educated, to have their own thoughts, and were met with violence when they sought to
show any form of disobedience to Whiteness. In two narratives shared in this
chapter, one Louisiana woman was whipped for saying “‘My mother sent me’” (40) because calling her mother “mother” was akin to claiming the status of Whiteness.
In another story, Roberta Manson expressed that “They said we had no souls, that we were like animals’” and this was shown when her father was whipped for shedding tears after looking at an enslaved person who had been killed (40). Settlers thrived off of this system as they reaped the benefits of this free labor. As Katz explains that the South’s economy depended on the labor of
enslaved people and would not have thrived without them. White settlers were not willing to lose their power or control because they understood how vital enslaved people were to their economic prosperity.
While enslavers were concerned about enforcing and safeguarding their dominance, African Americans sought to play on this thought of enslaved people as inferior, dumb, and senile. Enslaved people deceived their masters into thinking they were joyfully working companions who looked forward to plantation labor. As Katz says “Black people pretended to be meek, happy, and dumb. They learned to answer an enslaver’s questions with the words they wanted to hear” (47). While enslavers were working to suppress the knowledge of the world around them, enslaved people worked to combat this through deception. Enslaved people would “forget” about tasks they were
told to perform or play dumb stating that they didn’t understand the job they were coerced to do. Enslaved people became the best actors claiming to be ill, not able to work due to a physical body strain, or in some cases even pretending to be pregnant. Enslaved people would smile and laugh with their enslavers before possibly running away that exact night. Although African Americans may have seemed dumb and senile, in reality this was a part of them reclaiming their agency to combat the
institution of enslavement.
In the wake of rhetoric that denies African Americans worked tirelessly to undermine the institution of slavery, this book does a great job of bringing to light the various ways in which African Americans resisted. Through the words of the enslaved themselves, as well as other primary source
documents, this book does the work of a historian, by uncovering the truth about African American resistance and their role in obtaining their own freedom.
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