Although the importance of The Slave Community was recognized by scholars of American slavery, Blassingame's conclusions, methodology, and sources were heavily criticized.

Blassingame defended his conclusions at a 1976 meeting of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History and in 1979 published a revised and enlarged edition of The Slave Community.

"[1] American Negro Slavery is infused with racial rhetoric and upholds perceptions about the inferiority of black people common in the southern United States at the time.

Stampp's study lacks the racist interpretation found in American Negro Slavery and approaches the issue from the position that there is no innate difference between blacks and whites.

He asserts that the retention of African culture acted as a form of resistance to enslavement: "All things considered, the few Africans enslaved in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America appear to have survived their traumatic experiences without becoming abjectly docile, infantile, or submissive" and "since an overwhelming percentage of nineteenth-century Southern slaves were native Americans, they never underwent this kind of shock [the Middle Passage] and were in a position to construct psychological defenses against total dependency on their masters.

Blassingame notes, "Antebellum black slaves created several unique cultural forms which lightened their burden of oppression, promoted group solidarity, provided ways for verbalizing aggression, sustaining hope, building self-esteem, and often represented areas of life largely free from the control of whites.

"[13] Blassingame notes that many of the folk tales told by slaves have been traced by African scholars to Ghana, Senegal, and Mauritania to peoples such as the Ewe, Wolof, Hausa, Temne, Ashanti, and Igbo.

Voodoo priests and conjurers promised slaves that they could make masters kind, harm enemies, ensure love, and heal sickness.

[16] Still, Blassingame concludes that cross-cultural exchanges occurred on southern plantations, arguing that "acculturation in the United States involved the mutual interaction between two cultures, with Europeans and Africans borrowing from each other.

"[21] Nevertheless, Blassingame argues that "however frequently the family was broken it was primarily responsible for the slave's ability to survive on the plantation without becoming totally dependent on and submissive to his master.

[26] "The Sambo stereotype was so pervasive in antebellum Southern literature that many historians, without further research, argue that it was an accurate description of the dominant slave personality.

"[29] Despite slaveowner paternalism and charges of submissiveness, Blassingame contends, "There is overwhelming evidence, in the primary sources, of the Negro's resistance to his bondage and of his undying love for freedom.

He argues that variations present in plantations, overseers, and masters gave the slave "much more freedom from restraint and more independence and autonomy than his institutionally defined role allowed.

"Consequently", argues Blassingame, "a great deal of emphasis has been placed on non-traditional sources in this study in an effort to delineate more clearly the slave's view of bondage and to discover some new insights into the workings of the system.

"[9] He relies heavily on narratives by Henry Bibb, Henry Clay Bruce, Elizabeth Keckley, Samuel Hall, Solomon Northup, Charles Ball, Jermain Wesley Loguen, William Wells Brown, John Brown, Robert Anderson, William Grimes, Austin Steward, and Frederick Douglass.

"[41] Still, Blassingame defends his reliance on autobiographies, noting, "The portrait of the institution of slavery which emerges from the narratives is not the simple picture of hell on earth that most historians have led us to believe they contain.

Blassingame concludes, "Uncritical use of the interviews will lead almost inevitably to a simplistic and distorted view of the plantation as a paternalistic institution where the chief feature of life was mutual love and respect between masters and slaves.

"[47] In The History Teacher, Keith Polakoff comments that "only with the publication of Blassingame's work do we obtain for the first time a detailed examination of the daily lives of the slaves on large plantations, with some intelligent speculation about the forces to which they were subjected.

[48] David Goldfield writes in Agricultural History that the book was the most impressive and balanced attempt to understand the slave's responses to plantation life to date.

"[51] Orville W. Taylor contends in the Journal of Negro History that Blassingame had a tendency to overgeneralize and make "unsubstantiatable claims to originality and uniqueness".

He concludes that Blassingame's "analysis is incomplete in its presentation of a different and more complex scene" even though he "effectively shows the difficulties of the concentration-camp image and the Sambo myth".

In the Journal of American History, Willie Lee Rose writes that Blassingame's use of the fugitive slave narratives is marred by his neglect of the WPA interviews.

[57] Rawick states that Blassingame's "first major error lies in adopting the very questionable deterministic social psychological role theories associated with ... Erving Goffman and Harry Stack Sullivan."

Rawick is convinced that Blassingame would have reached the same conclusions from the sources without the use of psychology "because the historical evidence as seen through an unadulterated commitment to the struggles of the slaves and an equally uncompromising hostility to the masters would have led him there.

Panelists included Mary Frances Berry, Herbert Gutman, Leslie Howard Owens, George Rawick, Earl Thorpe, and Eugene Genovese.

The discussion led to the publication of an anthology edited by Al-Tony Gilmore called Revisiting Blassingame's The Slave Community: The Scholars Respond (1978).

The book includes essays by the panelists as well as James D. Anderson, Ralph D. Carter, John Henrik Clarke, and Stanley Engerman.

Her argument is similar to Blassingame's: "This present study takes a look at slave women in America and argues that they were not submissive, subordinate, or prudish and that they were not expected to be so.

Most of the male authors had done a large part of their work before the development of women's history as a discipline, and even the most sensitive were hampered by a paucity of sources and by unfamiliarity with the questions feminists would soon raise.

In the new preface, Blassingame asserted that the book had to be revised because of George Bentley, an enslaved, pro-slavery Primitive Baptist minister from Tennessee who pastored a white church in the 1850s.