Richard Dunn's A Tale Of Two Plantation

Richard Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations is the product of four decades of exhaustive archival research encompassing the lives of over two thousand slaves on the Jamaican sugar plantation Mesopotamia, and the Mount Airy plantation, located in Virginia’s tidewater region. His two primary goals are to reconstruct the lives of these individuals, and through comparative analysis, highlight the differences between the two slave societies (1). To accomplish these objectives, Dunn relies heavily on the writings of two prominent slave holding families, the Barhams of Jamaica, and the Tayloes from Virginia. The possible application of Dunn’s extensive research and accompany genealogical database by historians in their own future research means that it is difficult to overestimate the importance of his efforts to the field of New World slavery. However, when examining the methodology of A Tale of Two …show more content…
slave trade during the mid-nineteenth century. His contention that the majority of Mount Airy’s slaves, which the Tayloes sent to Alabama, were kept together on the family’s southern plantations, contradicting the slave accounts in Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (58, 183, 273-274). This exemplifies the dangers of using one plantation as the representative for an entire system, especially one that seems to be the exception rather than the rule in several ways. It is interesting that Dunn criticizes the traditional slavery historiography, claiming historians usually focus “on the most visible people; e.g., those who run away, wrote about themselves, or were in other ways remarkable” (2). Yet Dunn does just that by focusing on the Mount Airy plantation. The Tayloe family was unusual. They were remarkable for their time. The fact that they inquired so deeply into the lives of their slaves and kept such detailed records is the reason they can be studied so thoroughly