Negro Slavery in Arkansas [Book]

Originally published in 1958 by Duke University Press, Negro Slavery in Arkansas by Orville Walters Taylor is a classic examination of the history of the bondage of enslaved African Americans in the state. The work was republished in 2000 by the University of Arkansas Press as part of their Arkansas Classics Series.

Orville Taylor was born on September 20, 1917, in Wesson (Union County) to the Reverand William Oscar Taylor and Minnie Belle White Taylor. Taylor graduated from high school in Berryville (Carroll County). During World War II, Taylor served in the United States Army Air Corps in the Pacific Theater, seeing action in the Philippines and New Guinea. He eventually retired from the United States Air Force Reserve with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Returning to Arkansas after the war, he completed a degree in history from Ouachita Baptist College (now Ouachita Baptist University) in 1947, followed by an MA in the subject from the University of Kentucky in 1948. He earned a doctorate in history from Duke University in 1955. The work that would become Negro Slavery in Arkansas is based on his dissertation. From 1950 to 1955, he served on the faculty of Little Rock Junior College (now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock).

After completing his doctoral degree, Taylor and his wife, Evelyn Adella Bonham Taylor, served as missionary teachers in Nigeria and returned to the United States in 1962. He took a position at Duke for a year, followed by two years at what is now the University of North Carolina–Asheville. He served as the chair of the history departments at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and Georgia College and State University. Taylor died in 2000 and his wife died in 2017; both are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Negro Slavery in Arkansas is divided into thirteen chapters, with the first four focusing on the growth and development of the institution and the remaining chapters focused on the lives of enslaved people. Utilizing primary resources, including newspapers, court documents, diaries, family Bibles, and other documents, the author found resources never before used in the study of Arkansas. In Taylor’s original introduction, written in 1958, he shared his desire that the book would help people better understand racial problems in Arkansas and the South.

Published two years after Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution, Taylor’s work agrees in part with Stampp’s revisionist examination of slavery when compared to the paternalistic writings of early twentieth-century historian U. B. Phillips. While Phillips glossed over many of the horrors of slavery and argued that the system helped African Americans, Stampp argued that the institution was in fact dehumanizing. Taylor came down somewhere between the two assessments, agreeing with Phillips’s claim that whippings were not used often due to the financial worth of the enslaved but also sharing Stampp’s view that slaveowners were capitalists who profited from the institution, not paternalistic men engaged in an effort to humanize enslaved people.

Reviews on Taylor’s work were mixed when it first appeared. Walter Brown wrote in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly that while Taylor did fill a void in the existing literature, the work fell short by not examining the relationship between slaveholders in the state and the push for secession; nor did it address the experiences of enslaved people during the Civil War. Writing in the Journal of Negro History, Edgar Toppin found many shortcomings, including minimizing the cruelty of slaveowners and offering without any documentation an opinion that enslaved African Americans were more promiscuous than whites during the same period. Toppin also pointed out that Taylor did not address the sexual attacks of owners against enslaved women, instead writing that many enslaved women likely welcomed sexual advances from white men in an effort to improve their lots.

The work marks a change in the understanding of slavery in Arkansas, especially as new works in the mid-twentieth century challenged long-held ideas about the experiences of enslaved people. Important as the first in-depth examination of slavery in Arkansas, Negro Slavery in Arkansas is valuable to researchers who wish to understand how the historiography of the institution has evolved over the decades.

For additional information:
Brown, Walter L. “Review of Negro Slavery in Arkansas.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 18 (Summer 1959): 104–107.

Taylor, Orville W. Negro Slavery in Arkansas. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

Toppin, Edgar A. “Review of Negro Slavery in Arkansas.” Journal of Negro History 44, no. 2 (1959): 176–178.

David Sesser
Southeastern Louisiana University