CHAPTER 1
In his epistolary proslavery book-cum-memoir, Black Diamonds, Edward Pollard interwove the personal and the polemical in order to defend the institution of slavery. Pollard described traveling the world as a young man, writing effusively about encountering an enslaved man again upon returning to the South. Pollard did not know the enslaved man but recalled that the man “looked like home.” He described it as follows: “I looked at him with my face aglow, and my eyelids touched with tears. How he reminded me of my home—of days gone by … ‘when I was a boy’.”1 For Pollard the mere sight of an enslaved person, even a complete stranger, inundated him with simultaneous feelings of joy and homesickness. Throughout Pollard’s work, it is evident that enslaved people were the building blocks of Pollard’s emotional life, as they shaped his understanding of happiness, love, and sorrow and formed the scaffolding of his memories and very identity. No doubt trying to prove that slavery was rooted in mutual affection and paternalism, Pollard also revealed that enslaved people were so important to his emotional sense of self that the simple act of seeing an enslaved man again transported him to his own childhood.2 This scene of an enslaved man unleashing a flood of nostalgia for a planter highlights the extent to which slaveholders’ emotions were created by and through enslaved people.
Many historians of emotions as well as psychologists have argued that emotions are not just individually felt but are collectively constructed and historically contingent.3 Yet all too often historians of emotion, in particular those who attribute collective emotions to cultural and social influences, focus solely on how elites shape affective norms, without attention to the ways that dispossessed people and subcultures contribute to or construct those feelings and emotional practices. Even historians who study the lives of slaveholders have downplayed the role of enslaved people in the affective lives of the planter class, contending that physical proximity did not breed intimacy or shared emotional rituals between slaveholders and enslaved people.4 But sources from formerly enslaved authors and slaveholders offer insights into the variety of ways that enslaved women and men were central to the feelings and emotional practices of the people who owned them.
Slave narratives reveal that enslaved people were acutely aware of the effect they could have on slaveholders’ emotions, whether they were intentionally trying to evoke certain feelings or not. One of Elizabeth Keckley’s owners was married to a woman whom Keckley described as being of “humble” origins. Because of that class background, Keckley believed the woman to be “morbidly sensitive” about the enslaved woman, convinced that Keckley “regarded her with contemptuous feelings because she was of poor parentage.” Keckley does not say if she possessed “contemptuous feelings” for the woman, but it did not matter. Despite doing “the work of three servants” Keckley was constantly criticized and “regarded with distrust.”5 Whether Keckley was disdainful of her mistress or not, Keckley’s very existence made her mistress feel shame and class anxiety. Keckley was also forced to endure the ramifications of her unintentional emotional influence, as she was viewed as untrustworthy and was heaped with scorn and skepticism.
Some enslaved people deliberately tried to influence their owners’ feelings. Henry Bibb explained that in his enslaved community it was commonly believed that if one chewed on a “bitter root … and spit towards their masters when they are angry with their slaves” it would dispel their owner’s anger at the expectorating enslaved person. After an escape attempt Bibb feared that a whipping was imminent, so a friend advised Bibb to visit a “conjurer” who would sell him a charm that could stave off beatings. The conjurer sold him a powder, instructing Bibb that if his owner threatened to whip him he should “sprinkle it about [the] master” to “prevent him.” The apotropaic concoction worked so well that Bibb returned for more and began scattering the enchanted “dust” in his owners’ bedroom so they had more exposure to it. Bibb intended it to function as a “love powder, to change their sentiments of anger, to those of love,” toward him. Despite these plans, Bibb’s conjuring campaign ended prematurely after the substance reduced his owners to coughing and sneezing, leading Bibb to worry that they would discover his “dangerous experiments upon them.”6 If they thought Bibb was trying to poison them that would surely warrant an even more severe sentence, so he gave up his attempts to bewitch his owners.
In his narrative Bibb seemed abashed about this anecdote, dismissing his actions as superstitious, but the passage reveals a great deal about how enslaved people viewed the emotional politics of slavery. Like Keckley, Bibb both feared his owners’ anger and recognized the power he had to impact how slaveholders felt. Even if only briefly, Bibb believed that he had “change[d] their sentiments” through the aid of conjuring and had transformed their anger into affection to avert a beating. Of course, this fleeting moment of affective victory was swiftly replaced by fear of an even harsher punishment than the one he originally hoped to avoid. The incident hints both at how much enslaved people were willing to risk in order to influence their owners’ emotions and at how much power slaveholders’ feelings had over enslaved people’s fates.
While slaveholders like Pollard did not always explicitly acknowledge the ways that their closest relationships and feelings were based on enslaved people, documents written by enslaved people and slaveholders tell another story. As Presbyterian minister Benjamin Palmer observed in a sermon just weeks after the 1860 election, “Need I pause to show how this system of servitude … is interwoven with our entire social fabric? … Must I pause to show how it has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling?”7
When writing letters, wills, slave sale documents, or diaries, slaveholders demonstrated that the emotions and affective practices of the antebellum South were fundamentally conditioned upon and constructed by enslaved people. From the ways that slaveholding families bonded and fought, to how they marked occasions from marriage to death, enslaved people had a profound effect on slaveholders’ relationships and feelings, creating sentiments like jealousy, pride, shame, and, in particular, fear. At times this was an unintentional process, as enslaved people were unwillingly incorporated into the lives of the people that owned them. At other times enslaved people deliberately made and unmade relationships, influencing the emotions of slaveholders as a form of self-defense or resistance. This chapter details how enslaved people forged the bonds between slaveholding spouses, lovers, siblings, parents, and children, and how enslaved people unmade these bonds, knowingly mining veins of family tension in order to obtain benefits, avoid punishments, or escape slavery. Finally, the chapter outlines the role of enslaved people in provoking specific feelings like envy, pride, and dread, and how gossip was used to teach and enforce the boundaries of appropriate emotions.
Making Family Ties
One important way that enslaved people constructed slaveholders’ emotions was by forging the intergenerational affective relations that knit planter families together. In an article from DeBow’s Review, an agricultural journal popular among Southern planters, the author, Dr. McTyeire, elucidated how enslaved people helped form those bonds, claiming that older enslaved people were “heirloom[s]” to be “cherished” with “tenderness” because they may have “laid the foundations of the families’ wealth … bore your father in his arms, and went afield with your grandfather when he was starting in life.”8 The implication was that enslaved people not only produced heritable “wealth” but also generated family ties and could even embody the memory of beloved ancestors. One’s father or grandfather might be dead, but that intimate relationship was preserved, made manifest through an enslaved person who had cared for that grandfather, father, and son, and might wait on future generations. James Henry Hammond used similar language when describing a thoroughly romanticized and supposedly reciprocal affective relationship between master and slave, reminiscing about enslaved people “who served his father, and rocked his cradle,” shared in their owner’s “griefs” as well as the celebration of holidays, and “whose hearty and affectionate greetings never fail to welcome” their owner.9 Like Dr. McTyeire, Hammond blurred the lines between emotions about enslaved people and sentiments about family, revealing in the process the extent to which enslaved people shaped how he felt. Writing in proslavery journals and books, authors like McTyeire and Hammond claimed paternalism in order to defend the institution against its critics, but they also proved how thoroughly planters wove enslaved people into their own emotional lives and their feelings about home and family.10
Slaveholders did more than idealize the enslaved people who cared for their families for generations; members of the planter class also used enslaved people to cement intergenerational bonds by gifting enslaved people to relatives, typically when celebrating a specific rite of passage.11 In an 1816 Virginia court case over a contested will that included gifting enslaved people, one lawyer observed that “the advancement of children is most frequently in negroes; and a bequest or gift of negroes is generally made as an advancement for the better establishing the child in life.”12 This suggests that the true affective power of an enslaved person lay not in how they tied a slaveholder to their ancestors, but in the promise of financial security and “advancement” that the enslaved person represented for subsequent generations of slaveowners. As a result, members of the planter class often gave enslaved people to slaveholding children to provide economic and emotional succor on the path to adulthood.
In 1819 John Perkins contracted a slave sale as a present to his sister’s children. The bill of sale noted that “in consideration of his natural love and affection which the said John Perkins hath and bearth” for the four children, he sold them six enslaved people for the modest sum of five dollars. If it was not already clear from this dramatically low price and the language of “love and affection” that this was a gift, the bill went on to say that the sale of the slaves was intended to help fund the children’s “schooling and support.”13 This was no mere economic transaction spelled out in boilerplate wording: this was a slave sale couched as an uncle’s act of love for his nieces and nephews. Perkins’s hopes for the children’s stable financial future and education were embodied as six people, six individuals who harbored their own hopes and dreams of a different future.14
Because gifting an enslaved person to a child was more than a commercial calculation, sale documents provide a glimpse of the nostalgia, love, pride, and loss that slaveholding parents experienced when commemorating a momentous event in a child’s life. A slave sale from November 1, 1837, announced, “My son Doct. W. Thomas Brent being on the eve of leaving me” in order to move to Louisiana, “I have this day given to him … two boys named Aaron aged about 22 years and William aged about 16 years,” signed by George Brent.15 George Brent might be comforted to know that his son Thomas would be tended to as he established a medical practice in Louisiana, but George still expressed his anguish in the document by dramatically describing his son’s move as “leaving” him. While George Brent conveyed that he was taking his son’s choice to move personally, there are no records showing how Aaron and William felt about this major change in their own young lives.
Marriages were another rite of passage of the slaveholding family marked by gifts of enslaved people. Documents from the antebellum South frequently reference slaveholding parents giving enslaved people as wedding presents, typically as part of the bride’s dowry.16 As William Craft explained in his narrative of his escape with his wife, Ellen, such a gift could be a loaded one for a young couple, larded with ulterior motives and meanings. Craft noted that Ellen’s father was her White owner, a fact so evident that the slaveholder’s wife was “annoyed” at how often Ellen was “mistaken for a child of the family,” leading the slave mistress to give one of her daughters the eleven-year-old Ellen “as a wedding present.”17 The gift of an enslaved young woman in particular was a promise of financial security for newlyweds, since any children Ellen had in the future would multiply their estate and wealth. Giving a daughter an enslaved person from the family plantation also ensured that the new bride would have at least one familiar face in her new household. But making a present of the bride’s own half-sister could also be construed as a none-too-subtle warning about the infidelity and heartache that awaited many slaveholding wives.
Perhaps because of enslaved people’s prominence in constructing slaveholders’ rituals and familial ties, as children of the planter class grew up, enslaved people continued to shape their relationships with their parents, even after those parents had passed. For many slaveholders, enslaved people served as a vehicle for remembering the dearly departed. In 1847 Louisiana slaveowner Phillip Moore petitioned to free a woman named Henrietta who had belonged to his late mother. Moore was explicit in court documents that manumitting Henrietta was his mother’s “dying wish,” evidently convinced that no contract or law could be more legally binding than a deathbed request. Carrying out her supposed “wish” was a way to honor his mother, and invoking her last words in court helped see her desires to fruition.18 Rather than being manumitted, other enslaved people became a living memorial to a slaveholder’s dead parents. Before Henry Box Brown’s owner died, the slaveholder gave his son William “a special charge … to take good care of [Brown].” William demonstrated the extent to which he sought to respect his father’s wishes when Brown “overheard him telling the overseer that his father had raised me—that I was a smart boy and that he must never whip me.”19 This shows how the philosophy of paternalism was learned: William’s father conceived of himself as a kind slaveholder who “had raised” Brown like he was family. Through his deathbed request the slaveholder passed on to his son the gauzy fantasy that he had been a benevolent slaveowner and that William would be too. Unlike Phillip Moore’s mother, Brown’s owner had left no explicit instructions about manumitting him. Quite the contrary, “tak[ing] good care” of an enslaved person could be broadly interpreted. It is notable that William not only tried to mitigate punishment for Brown, but also invoked his father’s affections for Brown in order to do so. Brown thus served as a dead father’s best intentions incarnate, and any time William went out of his way to help Brown, the slaveholder would be reminded of his father and of the promise he was keeping.
For Pollard, memories of and feelings for enslaved people were ineluctably intertwined with those he had for his dead parents. After an enslaved woman named Marie passed away he claimed that she “numbered … among those whom, with love-lit eyes, I can so often see beckoning to me from Heaven,” in a celestial entourage that included his “beloved parents,” several siblings, and many of the other “dear, old, familiar blacks of my boy’s home.” His dream of a welcoming, integrated afterlife could be read as platitudes about enslaved people being viewed as family, nothing more than a performance of paternalism, were it not for how often he blended his affection for enslaved people with the memory of his departed parents. In another nostalgic passage Pollard remarked that during his travels he often thought of an enslaved man named George in the “garden, with its … cherry-trees, and the gentle mounds in the corner, that saddest, sweetest spot … the parental graves!”20 In this stream-of-consciousness description, Pollard revealed how his mind correlated an enslaved man, the garden at his childhood home, and his dead parents, welding them into a chain of linked associations. He could not reminisce about an enslaved person without recalling the deaths of family members; his jaunts down memory lane always took a turn through the slave quarters.
Making Courtship and Marriage
Given the critical function they had in concretizing the familial relations of slaveholders, it is little wonder that enslaved people also shaped the courtship process and marriages of members of the planter class. The first step for many elite Southern White men who wished to compete in the marriage market was to become economically independent, by inheriting wealth or establishing a career, in order to prove to the parents of any would-be brides that they were financially secure.21 Owning enslaved people was the best evidence of one’s solvency and thus one’s potential as a suitor. The opposite was also true: it was well known in the antebellum South that prospective in-laws did not look favorably upon nonslaveholding men. While enslaved, Charles Ball overheard a South Carolina man declare that his daughters would “never marry any but gentlemen of the first character,” nor would they commit the unpardonable transgression of one local girl “who ran away with a Georgia cracker … who had not a nigger in the world.” In the father’s view “gentlem[a]n” status was synonymous with both “character” and class, and it could not be conferred upon a man who did not own even a single enslaved person. In the rigidly structured, patriarchal, slave South it was almost impossible to be considered husband material if one was not already a slaveholder; it was an exceptional occasion, worthy of remark by Ball, when a planter’s daughter who “was esteemed a great beauty” married a man without any property or slaves.22
White Southern bachelors understood the role slaveholding played in making them eligible for marriage. While traveling through Mississippi in the 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted met a young man who confided to him, “I have now but one servant; if I should marry, I should be obliged to buy three more,” which he hazarded would cost him “at least three thousand dollars.”23 The man knew that his very ability to marry was determined not just by being a slaveholder but by the number of people he could afford to purchase. This suggests that a bachelor could get by with only one enslaved person, but to support a wife and family he felt “obliged” to enslave at least four people. This belief was pervasive enough that simply buying an enslaved person could be viewed as a sign that a single man was interested in marriage. In the marketplace of romance, even offering to buy an enslaved person was a way to evince marital intentions. When Moses Grandy was trying to buy his freedom for six hundred dollars, his owner protested that a Captain Cormack had offered a thousand dollars for Grandy. Grandy suspected that Cormack was disingenuous, responding that the Captain overbid because “he is courting Miss Patsey, and he did it to make himself look big.” Rather than correct him, Grandy’s owners “laughed … knowing that [Grandy] spoke the truth” about Cormack’s ulterior motives.24 Clearly enslaved people and slaveholders knew that a suitor might highlight his wealth, eligibility, and desire to marry by emphasizing that he planned to purchase enslaved people and would pay dearly for them.
Enslaved people were more than proof that a suitor was ready for marriage; they were sometimes integral to the rituals of courtship themselves. To ensure a bride’s chastity, young women of the planter class could not be alone with a suitor: a family member had to be present when a man came calling. But according to historian Catherine Clinton, if no relative were available then “a female slave is seated on the rug at the door” to supervise. One slaveholder even confessed to drugging the enslaved chaperone with laudanum in order to covertly steal a kiss from his intended.25 Thus enslaved people could provide security for a groom’s finances and a bride’s propriety, without which a wedding among members of the planter class could not take place. Enslaved women’s bodies were also more directly exploited in order to forge bonds between slaveholding families and couples, as Sella Martin testified when describing his mother Winnifred’s experience in bondage. Winnifred’s owner was a woman whose sole heir was her nephew, Mr. Martin. As such the aunt was emotionally and financially invested in seeing Mr. Martin wedded well. Her wishes paid off, as Mr. Martin was eventually betrothed to a much younger woman “of wealth and position,” necessitating a long engagement until the girl was old enough to marry. Concerned that the union “not be thwarted by her nephew forming attachments elsewhere” the aunt “encouraged, and finally secured a relationship between Mr. Martin” and the enslaved woman until the marriage could take place.26 The aunt did not care that the “relationship” was predicated on her nephew repeatedly sexually assaulting Winnifred. Nor was the aunt concerned that any “relationship” between Mr. Martin and Winnifred might threaten his future marriage. Her only goal was wedding her heir to a suitable woman, even if that marriage was “secured” by the rape of an enslaved woman.
Enslaved people were highly cognizant of how profoundly their owners’ relationships could impact their own lives. In one unique case an enslaved woman accompanied a slaveholding couple on their honeymoon to the North, including a stop in Niagara Falls, which enabled her to escape to freedom in Canada.27 For most enslaved people the effects of slaveholders’ marriages were more mundane, though no less deeply felt. Charles Ball readily acknowledged that when his owner’s daughter married it “had a most material influence upon [his] fortunes, and changed the whole tenor of [his] existence” as Ball was among the enslaved people given to the young couple. Ball recalled that he “was much pleased with the appearance and manners” of his new owner, and he was surprised to find that both wife and husband were “kind” and trusting.28 Ball was fortunate that the “change” wrought by the marriage was not negative for him. But many enslaved people dreaded the nuptials of a slaveholder’s daughter, since the new husband was often a stranger and therefore unpredictable. James Pennington noted that an enslaved person who was inherited by a member of the family they had known since childhood was at least “acquainted with his character, bad as it may be,” but if they were given to a daughter upon her marriage “the young mistress brings her slaves a new, and sometimes an unknown master.”29
Since a marriage could dramatically shape their experience in bondage, some enslaved people tried to actively encourage or discourage certain matches. For them such romantic machinations were a matter of survival. In an 1838 letter to her mother, Elizabeth Keckley closed by writing, “tell Miss Elizabeth that I wish she would make haste and get married, for mistress says that I belong to her when she gets married.”30 Keckley knew that if her owner married she would join her in the young bride’s new home. The enslaved woman clearly wanted to leave her current situation enough to encourage Elizabeth’s marriage to any possible beau, so she tried to involve her mother in her schemes. Other enslaved people tried to vocally dissuade their owners from marrying, worried about how a particular match might affect them. Levi Douglass and James Wright recalled that a man named Simmons, whom they believed to be “of no very reputable character,” was courting their owner, Mary Douglass. Concerned for what the marriage might portend for them, the enslaved men “ventured to ask their mistress not to marry this Simmons,” confiding in her that “they feared his cruel treatment.” Their gamble did not pay off; she married Simmons anyway, and as soon as he assumed the role of their owner “their situation was materially changed for the worse.” Once Simmons learned that Douglass and Wright had opposed the marriage, he sought “to punish their audacity” by selling the men “to the far south.”31 Though Mary Douglass did not heed their advice it is telling that the two men were willing to risk so much to avoid a lifetime with Simmons as their legal owner. That Simmons sought revenge against the enslaved men suggests that he took their actions personally, perhaps recognizing what he could have lost if their gambit had succeeded.
Enslaved people also served as vehicles for displaying affection throughout the course of slaveholders’ marriages. In his 1801 will Pierre Metoyer requested that an enslaved woman named Marie Suzanne take care of his wife and their youngest son until his wife’s death, or for “as long as” the two women were “content with each other.”32 In this way Marie Suzanne embodied the emotional bonds of the Metoyer family, as a caretaker for Metoyer’s wife and son. Because he intended Marie Suzanne’s “services” to continue after his death, she became a manifestation of his own memory and love for his family. In vowing that Marie Suzanne would take care of his wife after his own death, Metoyer was making the enslaved woman into a postmortem valentine, a proxy for the care he could no longer give.
Unmaking Families
Enslaved people were integral in adhering the bonds of slaveholding families, but sources indicate that the enslaved did not just make slaveholders’ relationships, they could unmake them. In the antebellum South, familial strife, including sibling rivalry, and arguments between parents and children, or husbands and wives, often played out through enslaved people. One case of sisterly enmity pitted affective claims to enslaved people against legal ones. On Valentine’s Day of 1856 Evelina Prescott wrote to her father to express her dismay that some enslaved children she had received in the partition of a relative’s estate had actually been intended for her sister. Prescott protested the decision, citing the affection that she and her children felt for the two enslaved boys, George and Spencer. Evelina lamented that her family would be stung by the “pang of separation” if they lost the boys, noting that she had “nursed” George “with [her] own milk” and that her “children were so much attached” to Spencer.33 Evelina’s plea highlights the complicated relationships that existed both within slaveholding families and between slaveholders and enslaved people. While Evelina purported to want to keep the children because of how “attached” they had become to the entire family, she seemed equally concerned with the power struggle with her sister, the supposed owner of George and Spencer. The letter had a juvenile quality, as she wrote “sister says I must send her slaves to her,” and given that Evelina was involving her father in the matter at all. She begrudgingly agreed to accept her father’s judgment on the situation, but she asked him to remember that she “was never so fortunate as her” sister. Perhaps the Prescotts really did feel heartbroken over any possible “separation” from the enslaved boys. Based on the bitter tone of the letter it is also possible that after years of accumulating perceived grievances, Evelina wanted to undermine her sister, both financially and in the eyes of their father. Records do not show if Evelina’s father was swayed by her arguments, but the letter is a record of how enslaved people could divide sisters even as they purportedly knit together the Prescott family.
Enslaved people were often casualties of slaveholding family fights. Frederick Douglass saw this firsthand after his owner loaned Douglass to his own brother, Hugh Auld. Douglass had become accustomed to Auld’s household when “a misunderstanding took place between” the brothers. Douglass claimed that “as a means of punishing his brother” his owner took Douglass back, forcing the enslaved man to undergo “another most painful separation.”34 The Prescott and Auld feuds illustrate that in intrafamily disputes enslaved people could be the source of a squabble, or a weapon deployed to wage the affective war. And it demonstrates once again that when battles were being fought over and through enslaved people, the emotions of enslaved people were inexorably shaped as well. Because of a disagreement between slaveholding brothers, Douglass was forced to face yet another “painful separation” from people he had grown close to.
Some enslaved people sought to take advantage of the fissures that riddled planter families. By doing so they could mete out revenge against an owner without ever lifting a finger or attracting blame. This is evident in the ways that people enslaved at the Pollard plantation learned to exacerbate sibling rivalries between Edward and his older brother Dick. Pollard recalled that as a child the brothers “were perpetually at fisticuffs,” coming to blows over everything and anything. Pollard claimed that if he bickered with his brother some enslaved people would “egg [them] on to fight each other,” which they did “in the most passionate manner.” Not content merely to pit brother against brother to watch them skirmish, the enslaved spectators were also in league with their mother, Pollard swore. He noted that whenever enslaved people caught the brothers brawling they “informed upon” the bellicose boys, who were promptly caned for their infractions. Pollard confessed that the emotional repercussions for coming to blows with one another were far worse than the corporeal punishment. For the Pollard brothers “what was more painful to the proud and angry spirit of each” was that they “were made to kiss each other” while their mother “in vain” spoke to them “lessons of brotherly love.” These “lessons” seemingly failed, as Pollard noted that the brothers “hated each other thoroughly.”35 Enslaved people on that plantation perceived their “hate” and sought to exploit it, first by encouraging the boys to fight one another, then by “inform[ing]” upon them to their mother. The enslaved people who tattled on the brothers may have been strategically trying to stay in the good graces of Mrs. Pollard. Or they may have wanted to take revenge on two members of the planter class who might someday own them, exerting the limited power they had to ensure that the boys received not one but two whippings, followed by the affective punishment of a forced reconciliation.
Enslaved people were also a source of strife in relationships between parents and children, typically between slaveholding fathers and sons. According to the formerly enslaved James W. C. Pennington some of this stemmed from the young men’s anxieties about how they compared to their fathers as slaveowners. He contended that many young slaveholders developed complexes about competing with their fathers, and “the young master not being able to own as many slaves as his father,” he generally worked the few people he enslaved “more severely.”36 Arguments also arose between father and son about the proper treatment and punishment of enslaved people. Jacob Stroyer witnessed such an issue when an enslaved man named Jim stole a pig from Stroyer’s owner. Jim was caught, and the owner’s son whipped him before tying a “cured middling of hog … around his neck.” Jim was forced to wear the meat day and night, even while he worked in the fields in the sweltering heat, until he was found dead, the rotting hog flesh still hanging from his body. Stroyer explained that the slaveholder “was very angry at his son,” blaming the reckless young man for Jim’s death, and the son was told to leave his home and “never to return.” From Stroyer’s account it appeared that the loss of a valuable enslaved person in such a fashion was unforgivable, grounds for being disowned and ostracized. According to Stroyer, the father’s actions “grieved” the son a great deal, as he worked to “regain his father’s affection.”37 It is not clear if the father was most displeased by the financial loss of Jim’s death or by his son’s overzealous disciplinary methods. Either way, the enslaved man’s punishment and subsequent death were considered grave-enough infractions for the father to cut financial and emotional ties to his son.
Some discord in slaveholding homes stemmed from concerns about the family’s reputation, indicating that enslaved people made and unmade family relationships, and they were a building block of slaveholders’ sense of pride and shame. A letter from Charles Batchelor to his mother revealed just how much enslaved people and slaveowning shaped his relations with his father and his sense of self-worth. Batchelor wrote to his mother in the winter of 1860 from the Military Institute of Kentucky, to proclaim that he “felt really vexed” about enslaved people his father had bought, an acquisition that Batchelor thought was unwise. According to the letter, his father had only recently emerged from debt, and Batchelor expressed shock and anger that his father would buy more slaves and “plunge … blindly into debt again.” Batchelor declared that this irresponsible purchase was “enough to make [him] repent the day” his birth gave him his father’s “name.” He bemoaned the fact that he was applying himself diligently at school “in order to make [himself] worthy,” only to see his father act so impulsively that it supposedly made Batchelor contemplate “abandon[ing his] course to glory.” He condemned what he viewed as his father’s “extravagance” not only because the man owed his son money, but because Batchelor clearly staked his own self-respect and capacity for future “glory” to his family’s success as slaveholders and purchasers.38 Beyond his concerns about his family’s financial future, the young man was more anxious about the potential damage to the more invaluable asset, his family “name.”
Sources reveal that differing philosophies about how to treat enslaved people also led to protracted hostilities between slaveholding husbands and wives in the antebellum South. Some of these disputes combined tensions about enslaved people with preexisting frictions between in-laws and extended family. Priscilla “Mittie” Munnikhuysen frequently complained in her diary about the way that her father-in-law ran the Louisiana plantation where she lived with her husband, Howard. In 1861 she wrote, “I feel sad—more whipping going on. One poor old man the sufferer of man’s passion. Thank God my husband is not so heartless.” She continued to articulate her hatred for her harsh father-in-law, concluding by declaring “I wish he was not Howard’s father.”39 The whipping of the old enslaved man was knotted up with the tangle of feelings she had about her husband, her father-in-law, slavery, individual enslaved people, and her ambivalence about moving from Maryland to Louisiana to marry Howard. Munnikhuysen often wrote about her opposition to slavery, but in the passage above she conflated her own sorrow with the suffering of the enslaved man, all while blaming her father-in-law’s cruel treatment of enslaved people on his “passion.” From her diary entries it is impossible to tell where her political distaste for her father-in-law as a slaveholder ended and her personal enmity for her husband’s father began. Nevertheless, her lamentations suggest that how slaveholders felt about enslaved people like the old man could create flashpoints for family conflict, including debates over what emotions were appropriate to feel about enslaved people.
Based on their frequent appearances in her diary, such events were more than a reminder of her disdain for slavery, or for her father-in-law; they were potential nodes for engaging issues with her husband. When the plantation’s enslaved overseer Nace treated a runaway slave cruelly, seemingly at her father-in-law’s behest, Howard objected to the fugitive’s treatment. But Mittie stirred up more drama, informing Howard “loud enough for his father to hear” that she believed her father-in-law “thinks more of Nace than any one of his children” and was more apt to listen to the overseer than to his own kin. She was concerned enough about the influence Nace had over her father-in-law that she told Howard that if he was content “to have a black master over [him] it is more than [she was] willing to have.”40 This heated exchange speaks volumes about the ways that the emotional politics of slavery shaped planter family relations. Since Munnikhuysen was clearly intending to be heard by her husband as well as her father-in-law, it is difficult to discern whether she was proud of her husband for standing up to his father or whether she thought his actions were insufficient and proof that he was permitting himself to be cowed by his father and Nace. Though Mittie was opposed to chattel slavery, she was not without her own share of White supremacist sentiments, judging from the way she derided her husband about having a “black master.” Her suggestion that he was allowing himself to be mastered by another man, and a Black man at that, was calculated to provoke her husband’s anger and to emasculate him. Maybe this was a constant source of tension with her husband, as her journal entries allude that the two often fought about slavery in general and his father’s practices in particular. Or perhaps Howard speaking out about the runaway helped the couple bond over their shared anger at his father.
As Mittie Munnikhuysen’s writings show, the treatment of enslaved people could be a major point of contention between married couples of the planter class, especially when one spouse had antislavery leanings. Fanny Kemble’s own diary offers glimpses of how her feelings about slavery and enslaved people became inextricably tied to both her own emotions and her relationship with her husband, Mr. Butler. She recalled having “a long and painful conversation” with Butler about an enslaved woman whom Kemble believed was unfairly flogged. Kemble confided that arguing with her husband made her feel “perfect agonies of distress for the slaves, whose position is utterly hopeless; for myself, whose intervention on their behalf sometimes seems to me worse than useless; for Mr. Butler, whose share in this horrible system fills me by turns with indignation and pity.”41
Her plaintive entry suggests that her feelings about her husband could not be teased apart from her sentiments about enslaved people. It is impossible to say if she was empathizing with enslaved people or projecting, but it is notable that Kemble used similar language to describe the effect of her emotional state and those of the enslaved people, noting that their “position” was “hopeless” while hers was “worse than useless.” Toward her slaveholder husband, however, she felt a mixture of anger and “pity.” Such tempestuous quarrels were nonexistent when they were newlyweds living in Philadelphia, but her diary shows how cracks in their relationship emerged and widened after the couple moved to the slave South.
Just as enslaved people used the Pollards’ sibling rivalry to their advantage, some enslaved people sought to deliberately manipulate the feelings and intrafamily conflict of slaveowners, often as a survival tactic. In his narrative of being captured and enslaved Solomon Northup detailed his efforts to emotionally subvert his owner’s family. In attempting to protect an enslaved woman named Patsey from sexual assault, Northup incurred the anger of his drunken, concupiscent owner, Mr. Epps. When Mr. Epps tried to exact revenge by pulling a knife on Northup, Northup evaded danger by running to Mrs. Epps and telling her what her husband had done. Northup saw that Mrs. Epps was “possessed of the devil, jealousy,” toward Patsey, and he knew that when Mrs. Epps was angry Mr. Epps often became compliant, “ready to gratify any whim” his wife had. Northup claimed that after he informed her the slave mistress became enraged at both her husband and Patsey. Meanwhile Mr. Epps, who could easily guess that Northup was disclosing his lascivious behavior to his wife, was duly chastened. In strategically seeking out Mrs. Epps in order to provoke her anger and envy, Northup was able to stave off an attack on Patsey and himself, while also causing strain on the Eppses’ marriage.42 It may only have been a temporary reprieve from violence for Patsey and Northup, but he was savvy, turning the incident into an opportunity to drive a wedge between Mr. Epps and his wife, transforming his owner’s rage into Mrs. Epps’s heartache. In this way enslaved people like Northup could, at times, exploit disputes between slaveholding husbands and wives, parents and children, or siblings in order to gain a short-lived benefit or to actively undermine a slaveholding family.
Making Emotions
As Northup’s story about the Epps family demonstrates, enslaved people weaved and unraveled the affective bonds of slaveholding families, and they forged specific emotions for slaveowners, including jealousy, pride, shame, and fear. Mrs. Epps was no anomaly; sexual violence committed by slaveholders was such a defining feature of antebellum slavery that the jealous slave mistress was a stock figure in slave narratives and histories of slavery alike.43 Such wives might have been the first to concede that enslaved women were the source of their envy. The heartache and anger of learning that a husband was sexually assaulting an enslaved woman were so ubiquitous that wealthy planter Mary Chesnut expressed surprise in her diary that the subject was not featured in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, observing “Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.” Chesnut wrote about the novel’s unmarried villain and discussed how other women of the planter class ignored their husbands’ flagrant infidelity, all while nursing fears that her own husband had a sexual relationship with an enslaved woman she referred to as “Rachel.”44 According to Harriet Jacobs, “white daughters” of the planter class were inculcated in jealousy from a young age, taught that such feelings were triggered by enslaved women, as the constant refrain of their childhood was “their parents quarrelling about some female slave.” Naturally the daughters became “curious” about the source of their parents’ strife, and before long “they learn the cause”: that their father had sexually assaulted an enslaved woman. Steeped in their mothers’ envy and convinced that full culpability fell on enslaved women alone, young White women’s conceptions of jealousy were passed down from one generation to the next, inseparable from their perceptions of enslaved women.45
The figure of the jealous slave mistress was more prominent in proslavery and antislavery literature, but male slaveholders also grappled with the emotion, and they blamed it on enslaved women as well. Louisa Piquet’s owner was almost fifty and “gray headed” when he bought her to serve as both concubine and caretaker so that he could “end his days with [her].” Piquet was therefore forced to share her owner’s bed and to endure his chronic mistrust. She explained that if she took too long to open the door when he came calling in the night he would suspiciously search her room, “under the bed, and in the wardrobe” and then ask her why she did not let him in more quickly. She believed that his age was “the reason he was always so jealous.”46 Piquet’s recollections suggest that her owner might have been insecure about aging, or her potential feelings for him, or he may have been afraid that she would run away and he would be left to “end his days” alone. But these feelings were externalized as envy and distrust that was blamed on Piquet and whatever imaginary nocturnal paramours she was hiding beneath her bed.
Jealousy about enslaved people was commonplace in the antebellum South, but that did not mean people of the planter class deemed it an acceptable emotion. If antebellum etiquette books dictated the proper ways to express emotions, gossip and rumors helped police affective norms by highlighting when people had transgressive feelings. Gossip effectively chided its subject for committing an emotional infraction, while also defining for the listener what was affectively appropriate or inappropriate.47 Olmsted saw how much airing dirty laundry revealed about affective boundaries when he was told about a Louisiana planter who was acquitted after attacking an enslaved man “in an anger of jealousy.” believing that the man was courting an enslaved woman that the slaveholder desired for himself. Like so many elite, White Southern men, the slaveowner faced no criminal charges for “mutilate[ing]” the enslaved man, but the slaveholding community still “believe[d] he was guilty, and ought to have been punished” for “being jealous of the boy.”48 The gossip’s wording suggests that the envious slaveholder’s peers thought that his true crime was not injuring an enslaved man he owned, it was giving sway to jealousy. Each telling of the story damaged the slaveholder’s reputation locally and provided the gossip’s audience with a cautionary tale: envy was an unsuitable emotion for members of the planter class, and if one did feel “jealous” of an enslaved person, they should not act upon it in such a fashion.
Slavery and slaveholding were also critical ingredients of pride. Some slaveholders derived caste pride from enslaving people because it meant that their children or wives did not have to labor in the fields.49 Others based their self-respect and notoriety on their abilities to heal, buy, or break enslaved bodies.50 Reputation was paramount to White Southern elites, and they depended on being viewed favorably by their peers. Any damage to that reputation, a source of so much pride, produced a much less desirable emotion: anxiety. In his study of Southern social classes Daniel Hundley claimed that one’s public estimation was of particular importance to those who aspired to the upper ranks of the planter class, saying that middle-class men who yearned to be large slaveholders experienced “torturing anxiety … to be well spoken of by the world.”51
In the antebellum South enslaving people was not just an economic calculation: it was a means to accrue social capital. But that capital, and all attendant pride and reputation, could be lost if one was publicly perceived as an inept slaveowner. An author in DeBow’s Review observed that “a shivering servant is a shame to any master,” while a slaveholder in Louisiana swore to Olmsted that “nobody would have respect for a man that treated his niggers cruelly.”52 Their main concern was not being a “cruel” or negligent master; instead, they feared being put on trial in the court of public opinion, where town gossips were judge, jury, and executioner and the sentence was pride or shame. As Frederick Douglass observed, “Public opinion is, indeed, an unfailing restraint upon the cruelty and barbarity of masters, overseers, and slave drivers.”53 Some enslaved people did believe that fear of losing “the good opinion of the public” provided a check on slaveholders and saved them from further beatings.54 On the other hand, Keckley saw firsthand what occurred when a slaveholder disregarded the opinion of their peers after she was severely punished by her owner. She remembered that these recurring beatings “created a great sensation at the time,” as her owners’ brutality became “the talk of the town and neighborhood.” Keckley’s only solace was the knowledge that her owners were disgraced because they “were not viewed in a light to reflect much credit upon them.”55 Since owning slaves could be a source of pride or of humiliation, affective and social norms were some of the only checks on slaveholders’ behavior.
Slave mistresses were also painfully aware that to avoid gossip, and protect their reputation as a supposedly kind mistress, they had to maintain, or at least perform, certain relationships with enslaved people. Harriet Jacobs recalled that when her grandmother grew ill many of the local elite, White women stopped by to visit her and “to bring her some little comforts.” When Jacobs’s Aunt Nancy asked their mistress, Mrs. Flint, if she could go care for her mother, Mrs. Flint refused, claiming that there was not “any need” for Nancy to go and that she could not “spare” her. But Jacobs remarked that once Mrs. Flint learned that “other ladies in the neighborhood were so attentive” to the sick woman who had once been enslaved by Flint, and “not wishing to be outdone in Christian charity,” she hurried to fawn over the woman on her sick bed.56 Mrs. Flint must have suspected that public estimation of her character would suffer if her peers were visiting her former slave and she was not. By going to see Jacobs’s grandmother, but not permitting Nancy to attend to her own sick mother, Flint also revealed that she was much more invested in the appearance of being an “attentive” and “Christian” woman than in actually being one.
Slave narratives indicate that, at times, enslaved people were able to use slaveholders’ fears of being grist for the rumor mill to their own advantage. Slaveowners not only were concerned about what other members of the planter class might say about their affective relations with enslaved people, but also were anxious about what enslaved people might reveal. Harriet Jacobs claimed that her grandmother’s respected position in the community offered her “some protection,” because “Dr. Flint was afraid of her” and “dreaded her scorching rebukes.” In particular, he was concerned that because she was well known locally as “Aunt Marthy” for her homemade “crackers and preserves” and also widely admired, if he abused her granddaughter she would make “his villainy … public,” which could damage his own reputation irreparably. Jacobs conceded that this was another benefit of living in a town, rather than a more anonymous city or an isolated rural area, because everyone knew “each other’s affairs.” This demonstrated the power of gossip and the importance of location to avoiding punishment.57
Flint had reason to worry that the free woman’s word would trump his own. He no doubt recalled that when he had tried to sell her, despite the fact that she had long been promised her freedom, there had been an intense public backlash. According to Jacobs, her grandmother’s “long and faithful service in the family was also well known,” as was “the intention of her mistress to leave her free,” so Flint’s actions were viewed with universal distaste. Because of this, when Jacobs’s grandmother came up for auction “many voices” in the audience cried “Shame! Shame! Who is going to sell you, aunt Marthy? … This is no place for you” and “no one bid for her.” Finally her former mistress’s sister, who was well acquainted with Marthy, and her sister’s promise, purchased the woman. The sister was only able to afford her because no one else placed a bid, and after buying Jacobs’s grandmother, she freed her.58 In small Southern towns in particular, public shame was a powerful deterrent for slaveholders. Their reputation as slaveholders was a critical asset, but reputation mattered for enslaved people as well, as it could function as a shield or as a weapon.
Making Fear
Nowhere was the emotional influence of enslaved people clearer than when slaveholders talked about what scared them. Reading through DeBow’s Review, it is evident that slaveowners were plagued by a variety of fears. They feared crop failure and that the slave population would grow until the institution became “utterly unprofitable” and unaffordable.59 They feared competition from other American cities and foreign powers.60 They experienced “fear of exposure and shame,” afraid they would lose face with their peers.61 But they were truly concerned about enslaved people, which the people they enslaved knew all too well.62 Charles Ball opined that Southern slaveholders were like “inhabitants of a national frontier” because they were surrounded at all times by “hostile” people who might resent them enough to resort to violence.63 Terror about slavery was a critical ingredient of the institution from its inception. Fear that enslaved people and indentured servants would ally themselves along class lines to rebel against their masters led colonies like Virginia to establish more laws that restricted enslaved people and also differentiated between the legal statuses of enslaved people and White indentured servants. Such laws included harsher punishments levied against enslaved people and prohibitions on any mass meetings of enslaved people, including “feasts and burialls [sic],” because of the fear that a critical mass of enslaved people would spawn a collective uprising.64
Fears of enslaved people pervaded the letters and conversations of members of the planter class in the antebellum period. In an August 1835 letter to his father, Caleb Green, Jr., described the climate of terror haunting slaveholders in the region. Green claimed that residents in Opelousas, Louisiana, were “pretty excited by insurrectionary moments among the slaves.” Green did not think these were imagined anxieties, declaring that “there is no doubt but a widely extended conspiracy has embraced the whole Southwestern country.” He cited victims of this supposed slave “conspiracy,” including a friend of his who “was shot down near his own house” only weeks before, and his wife’s uncle, who detected the taste of poison in a glass of water. Green blamed both crimes on enslaved people, and he expressed relief that the attempted poisoner had been “sent into the chain gangs of New Orleans” as punishment.65 Nor did these fears subside with time. In a letter written to his father five years later, Green wrote that “insurrections are continually taking place … a few weeks ago a most formidable one was ‘nipped in the bud’…. It aimed at nothing short of indiscriminate slaughter of the whites.” Though this most recent “insurrection” had been prevented, they were not put at ease, for Green noted ominously that slaveholders were “sleeping upon a volcano.”66
Slaveholders throughout the South slept fitfully, worrying about enslaved people’s intentions and tormented by nightmares of race war. A woman in East Texas told Olmsted that abolition was unthinkable because former slaves would “murder [them] all in [their] beds.” As evidence she mentioned a recent case of a local enslaved woman who had “killed her mistress with an axe, and her two little ones.” The woman assured Olmsted that the perpetrator had been executed, which she could only hope would serve as “a good lesson to the rest.”67 One enslaved man could paralyze whole communities with fear. In the summer of 1860 an enslaved man in Alabama named Battiste was brought up on a variety of charges, including hosting meetings for enslaved people and “harboring” fugitives. According to court documents “various citizens of Mobile had frequently complained to the police that they lived in terror” because of Battiste and “were afraid to leave their houses.” He was ultimately convicted of being a “disorderly person,” but fear of enslaved people remained the order of the day.68
While one enslaved man could inspire community-wide anxiety, the greater fear for White Southerners was the enslaved conspiracy theories that Caleb Green, Jr., dreaded. As British journalist James Stirling opined while visiting America in 1856, “such feelings are fermenting in many an African heart,” a theory he based entirely on the “suspicions and fears of slaveowners.” Stirling perceived that some slaveowners tried to “make light of” the potential danger of enslaved insurrection in order to cope with their fear, but even those boasts were revealing, as he suspected that “a vast amount of distrust and fear lurks under their bravado.”69 Whether slaveholders expressed fear or spoke glibly about the threat with visitors, the menacing shadow of the murderous, rebellious enslaved person occupied a great deal of space in slaveholders’ thoughts and imaginations. In order to quell collective White terror, some Southern newspapers elected not to cover slave revolts, only mentioning a recent uprising if it had been successfully thwarted so that any fears of insurrection were assuaged by editors’ assurances that hypothetical insurgents would be caught before their wills were realized.70 But the idea of enslaved people’s latent anger fomenting into organized mass rebellions remained terrifying to Southern slaveholders; whenever there was news of a successful armed slave revolt, the aftershocks were felt even in other states and counties. In an essay on Nat Turner, abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson shed light on slaveholders’ fears that insurrectionary sentiments were commonplace. Higginson observed that even after Turner and his coconspirators were executed, slaveholders throughout the South were chilled to the bone, awakened to the dreadful “suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family.”71 This statement captured the nuance of the emotional politics of slavery: enslaved people could simultaneously fall under a slaveholder’s definition of “family” and also be a source of terror and mistrust.
These fears gave proof to the proslavery lie of the mutual affective relations of master and slave. Despite using the paternalistic language of “family” to describe enslaved people, slaveholders clearly understood that the people who fed, bathed, and nursed them might also want to kill them. Little wonder then that White people throughout the South projected their fears about Nat Turner’s rebellion onto local enslaved people, whipping and even lynching innocent slaves from North Carolina to New Orleans in the hopes that doing so would stave off future revolutions and exorcise their terror.72
Fear of enslaved people, and of armed slave insurrections in particular, was rampant among slaveholders in the antebellum South, but these anxieties rarely translated into concrete policy changes, even after large, successful rebellions. Terrified of the Haitian Revolution, then in its tenth year, South Carolina closed its ports to the international slave trade. Tellingly, the decision was reversed the following year, after the Louisiana Purchase. South Carolina slaveholders likely still harbored fears that they might import the next Toussaint L’Ouverture, but they could not ignore the siren song of the western expansion of slavery, which depended on more enslaved bodies.73 Meanwhile, city officials in New Orleans were concerned enough about the possibility of armed insurrection that during the Haitian Revolution they drew up plans to build ramparts that would wall in the city.74 Those walls were never built. Three decades later Nat Turner’s rebellion shocked the South, enough that mere months after Turner was hanged Virginia’s legislature debated abolishing slavery in the state. In the end, every slave state in the South decided to enact stricter slave codes in the wake of Turner’s rebellion.75 In the intervening decades since the Haitian Revolution haunted their shores, the price of cotton had only skyrocketed, giving slaveholders less incentive to abolish an institution, even if it could prove lethal.76 Like those in South Carolina and New Orleans before them, Virginia slaveholders decided that the benefits of slavery outnumbered the risks, that self-interest outweighed fear.
Enslaved people were extremely familiar with what their owners feared, and both enslaved people and formerly enslaved people sought to deliberately invoke White terror as a means of antislavery resistance. A number of historians have written about how enslaved people used deceit or theft as a survival mechanism.77 Inspiring dread in the people who enslaved them, whether through overt acts of violence or more subtle forms of inducing fear, was another mode of resistance. Some formerly enslaved people used their slave narratives to provoke slaveholders’ fears of murder and rebellion, and to remind slaveholders of what the people they enslaved were capable of. In his first two narratives Frederick Douglass refused to disclose how he had escaped. In his second memoir he explained that he did this in order to “keep the merciless slaveholder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight” used by runaways, hoping that this would keep slaveowners in a heightened state of vulnerability and anxiety. Douglass asserted that the slaveholder “should be left to imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors” and “be made to feel, that, at every step he takes … he is running the frightful risk of having his hot brains dashed out by an invisible hand.”78 Douglass hoped to keep planters in perpetual terror, unsure of which enslaved people wanted to run away or who might be plotting “torment” or murder instead of escape.
Northup also threatened slaveholders with the specter of revolt, warning that “a day may come—it will come…. A terrible day of vengeance, when the master in his turn will cry in vain for mercy.”79 Northup emphasized the gravity of his prediction by correcting his initial assessment that insurrection “may come” to the more confident threat that it “will come.” By describing such an event as “vengeance” and suggesting that it was the slaveholders’ “turn” to experience merciless cruelty, Northup also pinned the blame for this supposedly imminent and unavoidable uprising on slaveholders themselves, suggesting they would reap what they had sown. Douglass and Northup were free of their chains when they wrote these passages, but they knew from their time in bondage how to incite slaveholders’ fears. And they knew just how difficult it was to combat an invisible but ubiquitous enemy like dread.
* * *
Enslaved people and slavery fundamentally shaped how slaveholders felt about their families, spouses, children, and peers, playing an integral part in how slaveowners expressed love, hostility, jealousy, pride, and fear. Even slaveholders’ practices for commemorating emotional turning points in their lives, like growing up, marriage, and death, involved enslaved people. Because that process began in childhood and was woven into the fabric of their daily emotions, it was all too easy for slaveholders to overlook the myriad ways that their feelings, relationships, and affective rituals depended on slavery and enslaved people. Former slaveholders would only begin to grasp that enslaved people had always been inextricably tangled in their affective life once slavery came to an end. Historian W. E. B. Du Bois surmised that it took Emancipation for former slaveowners to truly realize the profound emotional role enslaved people had played throughout their entire lives, from the enslaved women that “at his behest … laid herself low to his lust,” to the countless enslaved people that “had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife.”80
Whether or not slaveholders recognized the extent to which their very emotions and familial relations had been forged by enslaved people, enslaved people knew the vital emotional labor they performed, and how they could manipulate slaveowners’ affective bonds and feelings in order to survive or even resist enslavement. Of course, enslaved people did not learn those emotional survival skills overnight, any more than children of the planter class were born knowing how to compel enslaved people’s joy or fear. Slaveholding children and enslaved children both had to be taught the emotional politics of slavery, including its affective practices and norms. For enslaved children in particular, that learning process began in infancy, and the knowledge they gained of the emotional dynamics of their world would ultimately cut their childhoods short.