A Terrible Intimacy

From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a revelatory new account of slavery, uncovering a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of “master-slave” dynamics

A white man hosts a wedding party for his Black servant and finds himself charged with a criminal offense; an overseer ends up dead after getting drunk with a slave; two men, one poor and white and the other enslaved, team up to plot a murder.

A Terrible Intimacy recounts six criminal cases in one Virginia county in the years preceding the Civil War. Witnesses of both races describe a startling variety of encounters between white and Black that reconfigures the binary terrain of “master-slave” relations.

Contrary to our common assumption, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties. Cruelty was baked into the system, yet in households of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well, sharing religious worship, folkways, and complex domestic dynamics. Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861, most white men in Prince Edward County were ready to fight to defend their right to own other human beings.

These webs of interaction make clear that white Americans recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they remained committed to a system that abused and sometimes terrorized them. Offering striking new insights into the true complexity of life in the old South, A Terrible Intimacy expands our understanding of this darkest of histories.

Author Biography

Melvin Patrick Ely is the author of Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War, which won the Bancroft Prize, and The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon. Ely is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at the College of William & Mary, having earlier taught history and African American studies at Yale. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.