Why I Haven’t Embraced the Terms “Forced Labor Camp” and “Enslaved Labor Camp” in My Work on Slavery
In his book Robert E. Lee and Me, Ty Seidule rejects the term “plantation” and instead embraces the term “enslaved labor camp” to describe the conditions enslaved African Americans faced while working on large scale agricultural properties in the U.S. South before the Civil War. In her book I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction, Kidada E. Williams likewise rejects the term “plantation” and calls for using the term “forced labor camp.” According to Williams, “the word ‘plantation’ reflects the enslaving class’s romanticized view of slavery. ‘Labor camp’ or ‘forced labor camp’ more accurately describes the living conditions enslavers forced upon the men, women, and children they held in bondage” (1). Last year, Fort Pulaski National Monument created a pop-up exhibit called “Words have Power” that also embraced the term “forced labor camp” as a suitable replacement for “plantation.”
Seidule and Williams have produced wonderful works of scholarship that should be read by all. Any historic site that takes the work of interpreting slavery seriously should be applauded and encouraged to keep up the good work. However, I do not embrace the terms “forced labor camp” or enslaved labor camp” in my own work interpreting slavery.
Let’s begin with the term “forced labor.” What immediately sticks out to me is that forced labor is not synonymous with enslaved labor or slavery. Forced labor doesn’t always mean “enslavement.” Indentured servitude is a form of forced labor, but it is not slavery. The rapidly industrializing economy of the Gilded Age featured company towns, union busting, poor wages, long hours, child labor, and horrific working conditions. Those company towns could very easily be defined as “labor camps.” Depending on your perspective, they approached something akin to forced labor and enslavement in a certain sense, but it’s nevertheless hard to make a direct comparison with the conditions that existed with antebellum slavery.
What makes chattel slavery in the United States a particularly horrific form of forced labor is that it was premised on the idea of human ownership of other humans as property. Property to be bought, sold, traded, loaned, and insured like livestock animals and tools. The U.S. form of slavery was rooted in the idea of enslavement as inherited, race-based, and for life. “Forced labor” conflates different forms of labor throughout history and minimizes the uniquely brutal conditions of chattel slavery that existed in the United States during its first eighty years of existence.
We now move to “camp.” A camp is a temporary structure. Civil War soldiers established camps in the field during down periods, tore down those camps when it was time to move, and then reestablished those camps once they reached their next destination. Prisoners of war were placed in POW camps such as Andersonville and Libby Prison during the war. Enslaved freedom seekers sought refuge at camps established by the U.S. Army that were often referred to as “contraband camps” at the time. Before the war, freedom seekers sometimes established temporary encampments along their path out of enslavement.
What should be evident here is that a plantation cannot possibly described as a “camp.” For the enslaved, the plantation was an all-encompassing experience that shaped almost every aspect of their lives, for the entire duration of their lives. Enslaved people lacked the basic right to freedom of movement, were constantly under surveillance by their enslavers, and endured any number of harsh conditions that made their daily lives a physical and mental struggle. Countless numbers of enslaved people would have been confined to the small temporal radius of the plantation for the entirety of their lives. Plantation slavery was not a temporary status in a temporary place.
We can also see that “camp” runs the risk of leading people to sloppy comparisons with other horrific episodes in history. The World War II context of concentration camps and internment camps is an obvious comparison point. My friend Emmanuel Dabney argued on Twitter that referring to the plantation as a camp was unhelpful because “people already spend too much time making comparisons with the Holocaust to try to emphasize the pain of American slavery.” In other words, U.S. slavery should be studied on its own terms without having to make comparisons to other horrific episodes in history to generate empathy for slavery’s victims. While comparative historical analysis is a welcomed form of study, it must be done carefully and responsibly. Sloppy comparisons create misunderstandings of both things being compared. I fear that even if a well-meaning scholar uses the term “camp” within the context of plantation slavery, it will still lead to confusion from students and lay audiences.
Williams is undoubtedly correct when she asserts that the term “plantation” was used by the enslaving class to romanticize slavery. Indeed, some historic sites and the visitors who patronize them today are susceptible to falling for the romanticized view of Southern slavery that the enslaving class wished to impart on future generations. A couple years ago I wrote about Julia Dent Grant’s Personal Memoirs and how they reflect what I describe as a “plantation narrative,” a literary genre that emerged in post-Civil War America to romanticize slavery and uphold white supremacy. But I do not see why one group’s attempted appropriation of the term “plantation” necessarily means the term has lost all meaning as a signifier of chattel slavery.
I particularly appreciate the work of six scholars who collectively wroteRemembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum last year. The authors freely use the term “plantation” throughout their study of fifteen historic sites that interpret slavery. They provide some good definitions of what else the term might uncover besides a romanticization of slavery:
The Southern plantation played a major role numerically, geographically, and politically in establishing the ancestral footprint of Africans in the Americas and shaping the geography of descendant Black communities, some of whose members still live and work in plantation regions.
Remembering Enslavement, Page 4
They also cite the work of Matthew Pratt Gutterl
More than a big white house on a broad stretch of land with a handful of slaves, the plantation is thus a place, a practice, and a politics. As such, it is tied to histories of colonialism and slavery but also fixed on the land, in the way that a lighthouse marks the establishment of waterways. Imagined this way, the plantation has history, though not usually in the way we imagine such things, and not as a fixture of one particular moment in time.
Remembering Enslavement, page 32
A place, a practice, a politics, a history. A complex term with many layers beyond a form of white supremacist nostalgia.
I am not opposed to revising the language of slavery more broadly. In fact, I have previously written on this page about my own evolving embrace of the term “enslaved people,” which I pretty much use exclusively now rather than “slave.” I agree with every other language revision proposed in the above image at Fort Pulaski. I do not agree with Aeon Magazine editor Sam Haselby, who states that “when scholars rely heavily on terminology which they’ve imposed onto the past and that the actors themselves never used (or did not even know), it is often a sign you’ve left history and entered cultural studies.”
While Haselby acknowledges that there are exceptions to his rigid terms, the reality is that language evolves over time as a natural byproduct of human evolution. We don’t talk the same way people did 100 years ago, and they didn’t talk the same way as someone 100 years before that. I don’t feel comfortable saying, for example, that historians of disability who do not use once-popular language to describe disabled people such as idiot, insane, or retarded in their scholarship are actually cultural critics and nothing more.
I think the term “plantation” could be replaced someday, but I also think we can do better than “forced labor camp” or “enslaved labor camp.”
Cheers
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