Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862-1880 Book

Fascinating story about a little-known aspect of American slavery: industrial slavery. But... (from my book review for class):

Unfortunately, Dew's rigidly chronological approach hinders his ability to draw meaningful conclusions from the data he presents. This issue becomes especially acute in the last section of the book, which chronicles the period from 1858 to 1868 in a tedious month-by-month format. Every July skilled slaves take time off due to the heat, every December the workers celebrate Christmas, and every January Weaver struggles to hire enough slaves for the coming year. Yet in none of these Januarys, Julys, or Decembers does Dew pause to analyze the significance of these trends. Perhaps Dew would have been better served with a narrative structure like that employed in Melvin Ely's Israel on the Appomatox, which, like Bond of Iron, follows a particular black community (the free blacks of Prince Edward County, Virginia) throughout the antebellum period. Ely organizes his book thematically rather than chronologically or biographically, which allows him to describe and analyze all his observations on a given topic in one place.
In addition to its organizational flaws, the book displays a startling lack of engagement with secondary sources; there are entire chapters without a single secondary citation. This historiographical paucity weakens Dew's work in several ways. First, Bond of Iron suffers from a lack of contextualization with contemporary national events. The Panic of 1819 is the only national event that intrudes into the narrative before 1858, yet events like Nat Turner's Rebellion, which sent shockwaves throughout the South and especially Virginia, must have affected Buffalo Forge - and if somehow they did not, that fact itself is worth discussing. Second, while Dew's stated intent is "to imagine what life was like for the slaves of Buffalo Forge" (366), his exploration of slave life is incomplete, handicapped by his reliance on primary documents that only tell part of the story. The record books kept by forge managers are a treasure trove of information about the sorts of things masters care about: work routines, financial transactions, births and deaths. But other critical dimensions of slave life remain virtually unexamined; religion, for instance, gets five paragraphs out of 368 pages (178-79, 360). Even if primary sources at Buffalo Forge are silent on such topics, Dew could have drawn contextual information from Albert Raboteau's classic Slave Religion or other secondary works. Finally, Dew's relatively rosy picture of slave life opens him up to the criticism famously leveled at Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll in 1974: that by dwelling on the positive aspects of slavery, he underemphasizes its underlying evils. Historians of slavery since Genovese have been acutely aware of this potential criticism, yet Dew makes no effort to defend himself from it.