CHAPTER 3

“The Pursuit of Happiness”

In 1841 thirty-two-year-old Abraham Lincoln saw a slave coffle firsthand in St. Louis, leading him to muse about “the effect of condition upon human happiness” in a letter to a proslavery family friend, Mary Speed. Lincoln observed how twelve enslaved men and women had been “separated from … their friends, their fathers and mothers … and many of them, from their wives and children,” and were on their way down the river to be sold. He claimed that while “we would think” it “distressing” to be torn away from family and friends the enslaved people in the coffle “were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures,” as evidenced by their dancing, singing, fiddling, and card playing. From this, Lincoln deduced that divine powers must ensure that even “the worst of human conditions” remained “tolerable.”¹ Though Lincoln conceded how harrowing it would be to be “separated from” loved ones, he insinuated that this loss had not profoundly impacted the enslaved people he encountered, as they seemed to him to be superlatively contented.

Lincoln’s description of enslaved men and women on their way to be sold highlighted a number of prevalent assumptions about slavery and happiness. First, Lincoln hinted that enslaved people experienced feelings differently, employing terms like “we” and “they” to contend that an event that would be “distressing” to “us” was not heartbreaking for enslaved people. Second, he was wholly convinced that cavorting and making music were proof of unalloyed happiness, and that this “apparent” contentment was sincerely felt, rather than a conscious act.² Given the numerous incentives enslaved people had to maintain a façade of joy in the presence of members of the planter class, and the punishments that awaited them if they gave free rein to feelings like anger or sorrow, it is little wonder that so many enslaved people excelled at performing the role of happy slave. As Elizabeth Keckley observed in her narrative of her journey to freedom, “the sunny face of the slave is not always an indication of sunshine in the heart.”³ But it is telling that Lincoln, who acknowledged the cruelty of slavery, accepted signs of merriment as confirmation that life in bondage must be “tolerable.” Throughout his legal and political career the man who would later be known as “the Great Emancipator” was ambivalent about Emancipation.⁴ But in this 1841 letter he voiced a popular dual assumption about American slavery: that enslaved people were happy in bondage, and that this presumed contentment justified the entire institution. Just a few years before Lincoln reflected on enslaved people’s happiness, a Southern slaveholder assured English author Harriet Martineau that American slaves were “the most contented, happy, industrious peasantry in the world.”⁵ These passages demonstrate that slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike posited that enslaved people were happy in order to defend slavery as a moral economic system.

In the antebellum South enslaved people’s emotions could function as liabilities or commodities, and no emotion was more highly valued by slaveholders than happiness. Amid increasing sectional polarization, the North and South were united by a shared cultural obsession with contentment that played out in countless newspapers and journals. Enlightenment-era debates about happiness evolved amid the market revolution of the nineteenth century, leading many authors to pontificate about whether the path to genuine joy was work and wealth, and whether the secret to an efficient labor force was contentment. These claims were freighted with implications. The argument that happiness was not rooted in material wealth challenged the capitalist paradigm, and it could even be used to explain why the nation’s burgeoning middle class might be financially secure but still unhappy. Ultimately, however, employers embraced such theories about the causes of happiness to rationalize paying low wages or no wages at all.

Discussions about the relationship between work, money, and happiness were applied in different ways in the slave South. In the hands of proslavery advocates and slaveholders these arguments were the root of a damning syllogistic fallacy: if people with money were not happy, then money did not lead to happiness; thus unpaid labor (i.e., slavery) was defensible. This proslavery axiom took on an insidious and enduring form: the myth of the happy slave. In letters, agricultural journals, and proslavery essays, advocates of slavery insisted that enslaved people were contented, happier than free laborers or even slaveholders.⁶ For members of the planter class enslaved contentment was more than paternalistic rhetoric used to condone slavery to outsiders. In the antebellum South enslaved happiness was also an asset and a method of control. Meditations on what constituted happiness were not simply philosophical exercises; they were practical tools for plantation management and for marketing enslaved people.

Once proslavery authors established the debate, that enslaved people were contented in bondage, and thus slavery was justified, White abolitionists dismissed those claims by arguing that enslaved people were inherently and unconditionally unhappy. Enslaved people recognized that the myth of the happy slave misrepresented their experiences in bondage, and elided Black pain.⁷ But the White abolitionist trope of the miserable enslaved person was also an oversimplification of enslaved people’s emotions. Aware of these two opposing caricatures, and of the rhetorical and commercial value assigned to enslaved happiness, formerly enslaved people worked to portray the more nuanced emotions they felt while in bondage. Authors of slave narratives explicitly dismantled the myth of the happy slave and implicitly countered it by depicting events from their lives in which joy and sorrow were reversed or went hand in hand. Despite these efforts, the myth of enslaved contentment persisted as a defense of slavery long after Emancipation.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

The definition of happiness is a topic that has fascinated and frustrated philosophers, historians, and artists for millennia. Was happiness tantamount to godliness or to carnal pleasure, or was it exemplified by the absence of misery, fear, and pain? Was happiness equated with knowledge, or was ignorance indeed bliss?⁸ Were “happiness” and “contentment” fungible, or was contentment merely complacency, a dulled simulacrum of joy?⁹ Was freedom a prerequisite for happiness, or was it happiness, or at least its pursuit, that constituted liberty?¹⁰ Debates about whether happiness was internal or external, spiritual or material, increased during the Age of Enlightenment, with philosophers of the period asserting that happiness was not a divine gift to be achieved only in heaven; it was conceivable that one could realize joy in this life.¹¹ That did not necessarily make happiness more attainable for the earth-bound. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau pondered in Emile, “where is happiness? Who knows?”¹² Other Enlightenment-era authors were less concerned with the nature of happiness and more interested in the political and social implications of individual contentment. For John Locke, felicity and freedom were inextricably linked. Humans must be free to choose what made them happy, and they should pursue that goal to the extent that it did not impede the joy or liberty of others.¹³

Out of this cauldron of debate emerged modern ideals of emotions, including the radical notion that earthly happiness was not only possible but also a basic human right. Abbé Pestré asked in his article on happiness for Diderot’s famed Age of Enlightenment encyclopedia “does not everyone have a right to happiness?”¹⁴ What Pestré posed as a question in the mid-eighteenth century was widely accepted by 1776, when lawyer Thomas Jefferson stressed the importance of “the pursuit of happiness” in the opening salvo of the Declaration of Independence. Delegates to the Continental Congress offered a number of revisions to Jefferson, including a suggestion that he modify “inherent and inalienable rights” to “certain inalienable rights,” but no changes were made to the rights themselves, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”¹⁵ Perhaps they had no quibbles with his wording because many other contemporary documents proclaimed happiness, or the quest for it, to be a natural right. Many of the state constitutions drawn up by the thirteen colonies also included references to the emotion, including Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, also penned in the summer of 1776, which stated that “men … have certain inherent natural rights,” including “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Other revolutionary-era politicians reiterated the sanctity of these rights. James Madison proposed amending the Constitution to include mention of the natural rights of “life and liberty,” “property,” and “happiness and safety.”

The inclusion of “property” in the Virginia Declaration of Rights and in Madison’s revisions speaks volumes about how many colonial politicians and intellectuals viewed some rights as interchangeable. Other authors and policy makers simply substituted “property” for “happiness.” In 1764 lawyer James Otis maintained that government existed “to provide … the happy enjoyment of life, liberty and property.”¹⁶ Ten years later the delegates to the first Continental Congress approved a document declaring that the colonists’ basic rights were “life, liberty, and property.” In 1776 Thomas Paine produced an even more pared-down list of rights in Common Sense, writing that a proper governing body “should be strictly limited” to “securing freedom and property to all men.”¹⁷ Over the course of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States the conversation about the basic rights of citizens evolved from property and liberty for all, to the widespread idea that happiness was a right. Within a matter of decades the debate morphed once more, into a question of whether people who were held as property were happier in the absence of liberty.

On both sides of the Atlantic a number of eighteenth-century intellectuals pondered the relationship of money, property, and happiness. In his two-volume treatise on the subject the Marquis de Chastellux worked to establish “indices du bonheur,” or measurements of happiness. He believed that by examining factors such as an individual’s financial health, workload, and leisure, one could quantify their contentment. Chastellux also saw “slavery and war as the greatest impediments to public happiness,” because collective contentment could not exist unless all were free of coercion.¹⁸ In colonial America Benjamin Franklin wrote at length about the origins of happiness, questioning the causal relationship between joy and wealth in his autobiography and in the pages of Poor Richard’s Almanack. In a 1757 issue he opined that “happiness depends more on the inward Disposition of mind than on outward circumstances.”¹⁹

The Age of Enlightenment preoccupation with happiness did not fall out of fashion after the Revolution; rather, nineteenth-century Americans were fervently committed to realizing their affective inalienable right. In his American travelogue Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the infatuation with achieving happiness that characterized the incipient republic, writing that “no one could work harder to be happy” than Americans, who lived in perpetual “fear of missing the shortest cut leading to happiness.”²⁰ Little changed in the ensuing decades, as a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine conjectured in 1857 that since Americans were “a race of pioneers … always moving and looking ahead … restless” that happiness was a perpetual but doomed quest, as “the satisfaction of a want to-day is but the basis of a new desire tomorrow.”²¹ Half a century after the Declaration of Independence was written, Americans seemingly took the dictum to pursue happiness seriously, performing the task with equal parts perseverance and anxiety.

Nineteenth-century authors continued to plumb the topic of happiness and wealth. In a series of articles on happiness that appeared in Lady’s Book in 1839 the author, Mrs. Harrison Smith, pondered the relationship between penury or prosperity and joy. Smith swore that “there is no necessary or indissoluble connection between riches and happiness—misery and poverty,” that contentment or unhappiness were “indiscriminately distributed,” without regard to wealth or social status.²² Despite her claim that the ability to achieve happiness was individual, random, and wholly democratic, Smith went on to argue in the following month’s column that rich people were unhappier than the indigent. According to her the critical component was not assets, but work; she posited that “employment is an essential ingredient of happiness.” Smith cited the number of monied individuals who had all the leisure time in the world but remained discontented, producing nothing but “ennui.” She even hypothesized that the “pastimes of the rich” are “often more fatiguing than the labours of the poor,” assuring her reader that “happier, far happier are those who are thus forced into activity, than those whom wealth abandons to the tyranny of idleness.”²³ The economy was rapidly changing in the first half of the nineteenth century, and as more people began working outside of their home it is little wonder that writers would tackle the subject of labor and happiness. Smith’s convictions about wealth, work, and contentment were a secularization of the Protestant work ethic, adapted to the modern era. No longer must people work to achieve divine salvation, they must work to attain happiness in life.

Other authors questioned the belief that working more correlated to increased contentment. The author of “Are We a Happy People?” noted that the average household income was on the rise in the mid-nineteenth century, but they saw no concomitant growth in the nation’s store of happiness. The author readily admitted that Americans were hard workers, to the point of excess, observing that they “exhaust” their “energies in the hard drudgery of … daily labor.” Yet despite all this work, and in spite of what Mrs. Harrison Smith espoused about labor being an “essential ingredient of happiness,” the author of the Harper’s article could not answer the titular query in the affirmative. Instead the writer lamented that Americans were “by no means a cheerful people.” Work did not produce happiness; instead, for all too many people happiness was a distraction that impeded work, as “Americans have no appreciation of quiet enjoyment … they seem to despise it, as if it were a waste of time.” According to the author, Americans’ vacations were infrequent and brief, viewed as “interferences with the all-absorbing business of the year,” and “retirement” was “hardly known in America.” Ultimately, they explained, an American’s “only sense of enjoyment” was derived from profit, from “making more … he groans beneath a self-imposed burden that no slave can be made to lift under the whip of his owner.”²⁴ Working ceaselessly without holidays, postponing retirement, continuing to labor even when there was no more material need for wealth: to the writer these were all signs that work did not empower people and enrich their quality of life. Instead, it only shackled them to more work.

As tensions between North and South were increasing over the course of the 1850s it is no surprise that the author used the metaphor of slavery to decry the national overworking plague. Written for periodicals with mostly Northern audiences, these pieces were critiquing the social and emotional impacts of the ongoing market revolution, but the authors may not have fully grasped how their arguments about work and happiness also directly related to proslavery propaganda. Smith contributed to the popular perception that material wealth did not create happiness, while the Harper’s author even implied that excessive work was worse for free laborers, that they struggled under an even weightier “burden.”

Arguments about contentment, wealth, and work served a distinct agenda in the slave South. In the antebellum South, where emotions were based on enslaved people, and where intensifying abolitionist attacks led the planter class to be defensive, debates about happiness could not occur without discussing slavery, and no debate about slavery was complete without a discussion of happiness. This was the quintessential syllogism for proslavery Southerners: that work was synonymous with happiness, and enslaved people worked, thus the enslaved must be happy. That supposed happiness, in turn, was used to externally justify the institution of slavery and was internally valued as a management tool and commodity.

Three years before he was elected the first president of the United States, slaveholder George Washington illustrated how revolutionary-era proponents of slavery viewed contentment and enslavement as intrinsically tied. In a 1786 letter he discussed slaveholders’ concerns that enslaved people were traveling with their owners to Philadelphia and seeking assistance from the local Quakers in suing for their freedom. Washington declared that no one wished “more sincerely than [he did], to see a plan adopted for the abolition of” slavery. Washington averred that he did not want “to hold the unhappy people” who were seeking manumission in Philadelphia in bondage, but he qualified his support for their freedom, opining that “when slaves who are happy & content to remain with their present masters, are tampered with & seduced to leave them … it introduces more evils than it can cure.”²⁵ He did not explain why some enslaved people might be “unhappy” if most were “happy & content” in bondage. Nor did he offer a litmus test for quantifying happiness. But he insinuated that the happiness produced by the institution exceeded the unhappiness, and thus this outweighed his professed desire to abolish slavery.

This line of affective argumentation, that slavery and happiness were congruent, became particularly popular among slavery’s defenders in the antebellum period. It was also evident in the converse claim, that emancipation made enslaved people unhappy. One editorial from DeBow’s Review shared the story of a lawyer who was executing the last will and testament of a New Orleans slaveholder who had asked that the thirty-eight people he enslaved be manumitted upon his death. The article explained that the thirty-eight individuals were freed and taken to New York City, but before long some of them wrote to the lawyer and “begged” him “to take them back … saying [he] might keep them as slaves, or sell them—that they were happy before and wretched now.”²⁶ Published in a planter’s journal, such anecdotes may have been intended to discourage slaveholders from manumitting those they enslaved. But the tale also served both as a ringing endorsement for the “happy” institution of slavery and as a condemnation of the misery produced by Northern freedom.

The Myth of the Happy Slave

Nearly every defense of slavery penned in the antebellum period included passages attesting to how “happy” and “cheerful” enslaved people were and how slavery was “promotive” of their “happiness.”²⁷ Whether these authors were arguing the superiority of slavery on an economic, religious, pseudo-scientific, or White supremacist basis, all were implicitly refuting abolitionist critiques of slavery with effusive descriptions of enslaved people’s ostensible contentment. In a speech at an 1851 medical convention in Louisiana, Doctor Samuel Cartwright concluded that “the negro is a slave by nature and can never be happy … in any other condition.”²⁸ Similarly, in an 1853 treatise, “The Morals of Slavery,” William Gilmore Simms stated that “there are few people so very well satisfied with their condition as the negroes,—so happy of mood, so jocund, and so generally healthy and cheerful.”²⁹ Other defenders of slavery were even more emphatic: enslaved people were not merely happy, they were the “happiest,” “happier” than any other people on earth.³⁰ Thomas Roderick Dew contended that Black people were “the happiest of the human race,” avowing that “a merrier being does not exist on the face of the globe, than the negro slave.”³¹ James Henry Hammond concurred that “slaves are the happiest three millions of human beings on whom the sun shines.”³² After his travels through the South even Frederick Law Olmsted evinced that there were no “other people in the world with whom the Negro would be as contented” or “so happy, as with those who are now his masters.”³³

To demonstrate that happiness was not determined by free status or wealth, but rather in working conditions, defenders of slavery compared the contentment of enslaved people to other groups.³⁴ A frequent argument was that enslaved people were happier than other people of African descent, be they free Black people or “the wild African … in his native woods.”³⁵ Advocates for slave labor often discussed the relative merit of slavery and free labor, and they found free labor less efficient, more expensive, and generally lacking.³⁶ By far the most common claim was that enslaved people were happier than free workers, in the North or abroad.³⁷ An 1859 article from Southern Planter discussing the “difference” between free labor and slavery held “that negro slavery was so much the better for … the well-being and contentment of the slaves.”³⁸ In an essay comparing the two labor systems, author Edmund Ruffin devoted a great deal of ink to the comparative happiness of free and enslaved workers, stressing that “in comparison” to the “suffering hireling laborer … the general condition of … negro slaves is one of comfort, ease and happiness.”³⁹ Edward Pollard pointed to the allegedly mutual affectionate relations fostered under paternalism as the factor that separated the plight of the enslaved “so happily from that of the free laborer, who has nothing but a menial intercourse with his employer.”⁴⁰ The idea that enslaved people were happier than wage laborers was also the crux of George Fitzhugh’s notorious Cannibals All! In it Fitzhugh castigated anyone, particularly abolitionists, who would “shed crocodile tears over the happy negro and boast of British Liberty,” while “miscalled freemen” endured “poverty … and downright starvation.”⁴¹

In order to argue that enslaved people were happier than free laborers, some proslavery authors even questioned whether money was the root of happiness. Hammond wrote that anyone who believed free laborers were happier than enslaved people was also presuming that “gold and silver” were “the greatest test of happiness.” According to Hammond, if one accepted the assumption that contentment stemmed from wealth, then naturally they would also believe that “the American slave must be wretched … because he is not compensated for his services in cash.”⁴² In doing so Hammond deftly combined proslavery critiques of free labor with claims of authors like Mrs. Harrison Smith that happiness was wholly independent from material conditions or “gold and silver.”

Proslavery authors contrasted the contentment of enslaved people and free laborers so as to find free labor wanting as an affective and economic system, but many also compared the happiness of enslaved people and slaveholders. The only time that defenders of slavery embraced egalitarianism was in their argument that both were equally capable of happiness.⁴³ Proslavery authors typically painted a picture of mutually contented slaveholders and enslaved people, conflating the “happiness of both master and servant.”⁴⁴ A senior editor of Southern Planter remarked that he had “seen no situation yet so enviable as that of” a Virginia planter, “surrounded by his … cheerful negroes, to whom he is not less a protector and benefactor than a master.”⁴⁵ Fitzhugh observed that “the interests of master and slave are bound up together, and each in his appropriate sphere naturally endeavors to promote the happiness of the other.”⁴⁶ Some defenders of slavery went farther, declaring that enslaved people actually experienced more satisfaction and contentment than slaveholders. Dew speculated that while one might believe “the slave … unsusceptible of happiness in his humble sphere … he may indeed be much happier than we are.”⁴⁷ Likewise, Pollard declared that enslaved people were “as happy as, and perhaps happier than,” himself, while politician William Smith swore in an 1861 speech that “in nine cases out of ten, in positive contentment, the Alabama slave is happier than his master.”⁴⁸

No one spent more time recording their thoughts on the comparative happiness of enslaved people and slaveholders than Pollard, who vacillated between positing that slaveholders and the enslaved were equally happy, that enslaved people were happier, and that happiness could be neither compared nor judged. Written in the style of a series of letters to a Northern friend, Pollard’s book Black Diamonds relied on personal anecdotes, and emotional arguments to defend the institution of slavery. Pollard repeatedly returned to the democratic nature of happiness, sharing that he was “profoundly convinced that the negro-slave has naturally as much of happiness” as he did, as enslaved people possessed “the same sum of happiness as … their masters.” In Pollard’s view no one group was singled out for undue joy or misery; instead, “every human lot has its sorrow and its agony.”⁴⁹

The claim that happy masters made for happy slaves, and vice versa, was the apotheosis of proslavery arguments about happiness. Advocates of slavery were no doubt trying to allay abolitionist claims that slavery was physically and emotionally cruel, but that was not the only goal. Contending that the happiness of both enslaved people and slaveholders were inseparable supported the related idea that happiness was divorced from material conditions. The appearance of such hypotheses in agricultural journals like DeBow’s Review and Southern Planter hints at more pragmatic uses for this rhetoric. For members of the planter class the myth of the happy slave was not just proslavery discourse: it was a critical tool of plantation management and enslaved productivity.

According to proslavery authors the converse was true as well: unhappy enslaved people would make for unhappy slaveholders, and if enslaved people were happy in bondage then Emancipation would usher in mass misery. Pro-slavery author William Harper wrote that enslaved people “are too well content with their condition”; thus Emancipation would inevitably result in “the most intolerable mischiefs and calamities to both master and slave.”⁵⁰ Some portended even more widespread affective ramifications should slavery be abolished. In an 1832 diatribe about slavery, Dew warned that the abolition of slavery would “be utterly subversive of the interest, security and happiness of both the blacks and whites.”⁵¹ Similarly, politician A. H. H. Stuart exhorted his audience that abolition would emotionally impact the entire nation, predicting that “a deluge of free negro migration will pour its desolating flood over the whole North and West, sweeping before it the peace and happiness … of the people.”⁵²

In an effort to defend slavery by swearing that enslaved people were happier than slaveholders, and that joy did not correlate to wealth, defenders of slavery succeeded in revealing the depths of both their unhappiness and their debts. William Smith noted that compared to a slaveholder who might be plagued by worries about everything from finances to the weather, an enslaved person had all their physical wants taken care of, so their thoughts of the future were not of impending “bills” and responsibilities but of “holidays.”⁵³ Pollard also alluded to his dire financial and emotional state when comparing his feelings to those of enslaved people. Pollard was clear that his planter status brought stress rather than satisfaction: “all that I suffer from struggles, from disappointments, from agonies in a superior career, [an enslaved person] is a happy stranger to.”⁵⁴ Nor did he think he was alone in experiencing more anxiety than enjoyment, as Pollard confessed: “I have suffered more of unhappiness in a short worldly career than ever did my ‘Uncle Jim’ or any other well conditioned negro slave in a whole lifetime. How many of us, who are so blessed with so many external gifts of fortune, can lay our hands on aching, unsatisfied hearts, and say the same.” Here Pollard intimated that he had experienced more sorrows in his young life than an older enslaved person did in their “whole lifetime,” and that the root cause of this diverging happiness lay in their differing degrees of “external … fortune.” All the money, status, and natural-born privilege had not made Pollard happy, while penniless enslaved people were, in his view, “happy stranger[s]” to such material concerns and insecurities. Furthermore, he assumed that other people of his class shared his dilemma of hefty bank accounts and “aching … hearts.” Later Pollard posed the rhetorical question of how one could even imagine an enslaved person, who “has his … wants supplied,” could ever be “more unhappy than his master, who may see nothing in his own career but a struggle with the great necessities of life, closing in a grave as readily forgotten as that of his slave?”⁵⁵ No doubt Pollard’s intention in tackling the issue of wealth and comparative contentment was, like that of Mrs. Harrison and Hammond, to advance the idea that wealth did not buy happiness. But in his musings that enslaved people were much happier than he was, he divulged far more about his own feelings, including his profound anxieties about his own mortality and his legacy, or lack thereof.

Rather than solely resorting to alleging that enslaved people were happy or happier in bondage, some proslavery authors adopted a different line of reasoning: attacking the idea that happiness was a natural right. Simms questioned the rights themselves, asking whether “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” truly “are inalienable …? Do we not alienate them every day?,” citing executions and prison sentences as examples. Instead he asserted that these rights were “only conditional possessions or endowments.”⁵⁶ His argument was clear: if these rights were merely “conditional,” and not owed to all citizens, then those rights need not be extended to enslaved people. Harper devoted even more space to debating the natural rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Though Harper swore he had the utmost “respect for the important document” he disagreed wholeheartedly with the famous preamble that “All men are born free and equal,” countering that it was more accurate “to say that no man was ever born free, and that no two men were ever born equal.” As evidence that these rights were already regularly abrogated, and thus far from unimpeachable, Harper pointed out that “females are human … yet who complains” when “they are excluded” from full citizenship? Like Simms, Harper mentioned how rights were denied to prisoners and those judged to be criminally insane, noting that “every government does, and … must, deprive men of life and liberty for offences against society,” which in turn restricted their right to freely pursue happiness.⁵⁷ Simms’s and Harper’s readings of the Declaration of Independence did not contradict the myth of enslaved contentment. Instead the two theories reinforced one another: enslaved people could still be presumed to be inherently happy, but if they were not contented then there was no legal obligation to protect their right to seek joy and fulfillment.

The myth of the happy slave took on such potent meaning and staying power because it was defined in opposition to its counterpoint, the angry, rebellious slave. Members of the slavocracy configured an emotional spectrum from the ostensibly loving and loyal mammy, a figment of White longing and nostalgia, to the terrifying waking nightmare embodied by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Nat Turner, figures of White fear. Whether perceived as contented, affectionate, childlike innocents, or vengeful, ungrateful, bloodthirsty killers, this White supremacist emotional continuum for enslaved people was predicated on a belief that the controlling paternalism and violent policing of slavery were more than justified: they were mandatory. Enslaved people would have been aware of this binary and of its ramifications: they should strive to imitate the paragon of the happy, and therefore nonthreatening, slave, not its frightful polar opposite, if they wanted to reap rewards rather than punishment. Since Black contentment was so highly prized by White people in the slave South almost any other Black emotions, especially feelings that were not intended for White consumption, were seen as dangerous, both to the hallowed figure of the happy slave and to White supremacy.

The Price of Happiness

Proslavery authors spent so much time defending the happiness of enslaved people not just to foreclose abolitionist claims, but also because enslaved happiness held real worth in the field and on the auction block for slaveholders. Slave narratives illustrate that enslaved people were keenly aware of how happiness was commodified in the slave market. William Wells Brown recalled that in the slave pens the human merchandise was encouraged to seem merry, “set to dancing … some to singing, and some to playing cards,” in order to “appear cheerful and happy” and entice buyers.⁵⁸ Happiness, or at least the appearance of it, was a selling point for customers, while enslaved people who expressed sorrow were viewed as damaged goods and sold at significantly lower prices. To prevent lost sales or diminished profits enslaved people were verbally chastised and physically disciplined for crying in front of potential buyers. Solomon Northup described how one enslaved woman who could not stop weeping after being separated from her children rapidly lost value in the slave market and was ultimately sold “for a trifle.”⁵⁹ Enslaved people who were deemed malcontents, or “disaffected,” were also sold off at deeply discounted prices.⁶⁰ Little wonder then that Frederick Douglass remembered a slaveholder telling him that Douglass’s “leaden, downcast, and discontented look, was very offensive to her.”⁶¹ Douglass observed that it was for this reason that enslaved people “almost invariably say they are contented, and that their masters are kind.”⁶² An enslaved person who dared to expose their misery or dissatisfaction was not just forcing their owner to confront the cruelty of slavery; they were also actively depreciating their own retail value.

Happy enslaved people were so highly prized in part because of the widespread belief that contented enslaved people were more productive workers. As a result, many defenders of slavery purported that enslaved happiness was commensurate with enslaved utility and value. According to Fitzhugh, slaveholders should provide sufficient clothing, food, and shelter in order to “make his slaves happy and profitable.”⁶³ An 1859 article in Southern Planter explained that for a person of African descent “enslavement … is his most useful and happy condition.”⁶⁴ Slaveholders frequently spoke of the enslaved being “happy” and “industrious” in the same breath; Cartwright avowed that “the most efficient, and, of course, the most profitable laborers are those who are the most active, healthy, happy, and contented.”⁶⁵ Whether in prescriptive literature written for other slaveholders, or in writing intended to defend slavery to outsiders, members of the slavocracy maintained the party line that a happy slave was a productive slave, and a productive slave was a contented one. Some slaveholders framed the causal relationship between work and contentment in another way. Harper warned that if permitted to malinger enslaved people would become “unprofitable” and “discontented.”⁶⁶ Similarly, Dew maintained that slavery was beneficial to the enslaved because it turned “his slothfulness … into industry,” which in turn made “his labor more productive … and his happiness more secure and constant.”⁶⁷ This was paternalism taken to its ostensibly logical conclusion. In their view, masters were not only providing for enslaved people’s contentment in return for work, but keeping enslaved people working made them happy.

Because so many slaveholders saw enslaved productivity and contentment as ineluctably intertwined, happiness was considered essential for plantation management. This is confirmed by the advice given to slaveholders and overseers in agricultural journals like Southern Planter. An 1858 article entitled “All About Overseers” proposed that a good overseer should ensure that enslaved laborers were contented and that slaveholders were profiting. The author emphasized the important role of overseers in achieving this, noting that “upon their discretion … depends the happiness, to a great extent, of the millions of slaves.” An overseer was so crucial to maintaining the emotional and financial stasis of a plantation that the article warned that if an overseer was not diligent then “the interests of his employer would be jeopardized, while the happiness of the negroes themselves would be in no wise enhanced.”⁶⁸ An 1851 article on managing enslaved people was more explicit about the mechanics of how joy translated into output. The author counseled that contentment increased efficiency because “whistling or singing” a happy “lively tune” helped set a good pace for enslaved workers, while “drawling tunes” should be prohibited because they slowed the workers’ pace.⁶⁹ Rather than give free expression to their feelings enslaved people were expected to sustain a constant façade of happiness to guarantee slaveholders’ profit margins.

Since enslaved happiness, or the appearance of it, was highly valued as a commodity and as a labor practice, proponents of slavery wrote at length about what conditions they believed fostered enslaved happiness. Some slaveholders preached that religion was a source of enslaved contentment.⁷⁰ Others contended that, for enslaved people, ignorance was bliss.⁷¹ Some slaveholders even believed that they were the wellspring of happiness for the people whom they enslaved. An 1851 article in DeBow’s Review assured its planter audience of their role in enslaved felicity, explaining that “so long as the paternal authority was absolute, the slaves … were happy.”⁷² Pollard swore that he had seen firsthand that “a great and peculiar source of happiness to the Southern slave is the freedom of intercourse and attachment between himself and his master.” Pollard cited the example of his younger sister in particular, who he claimed was “the light and the joy of them all,” for she “cheered the dark lot of the poor slaves.”⁷³ Given that Pollard represented slaveholders’ and enslaved happiness as a symbiotic relationship it was fitting that he saw slaveowners as a “source of happiness” for enslaved people. One of Douglass’s owners went even further, arguing that as Douglass’s master he should be the singular fount of happiness for the enslaved man, that Douglass should “depend solely upon him for happiness.”⁷⁴ Of course, there was truth to his owner’s narcissistic claims: slaveholders could have a powerful impact on enslaved people’s expressed and felt emotions.

Defenders of slavery could be incredibly vague about how slaveholders should cultivate enslaved contentment. In order to assure both the “happiness” and “the value of the slave” Professor Holcombe stated that a master should provide “for the comfort of the slave” and limit themselves to “steady, though mild discipline.”⁷⁵ George Fitzhugh was equally broad when theorizing about the ingredients of enslaved happiness. Fitzhugh wrote that “good treatment and proper discipline … renders the slave happier … and contented.”⁷⁶ Each were convinced that enslaved people should be overjoyed that their basic needs were minimally met and that their physical punishments were “mild” and “proper.” Neither author acknowledged how imprecise these definitions of happiness were. They did not explain what would meet collectively accepted standards of sufficient “comfort” or “good treatment,” nor did they articulate what would constitute a transgression of the limits of “proper discipline.” With such general, subjective expectations of treatment any slaveholder could claim they provided adequate “comfort” and did not exceed “mild” punishment.

Holcombe and Fitzhugh were not alone in equating enslaved happiness with freedom from physical pain. In his “Letters on Slavery” Hammond declared that “if pleasure is correctly to be defined by the absence of pain” then “slaves are the happiest … of human beings.”⁷⁷ Author Timothy Flint agreed, arguing that “to the Negro, remove only pain and hunger” and they would be in a “state of enjoyment.”⁷⁸ In an article about plantation management a planter from Mississippi reported that reducing whippings guaranteed “the happiness of both master and servant.”⁷⁹ Of course, despite such prescriptions about the fungible value of enslaved happiness, and the role of minimal pain and corporeal punishment in ensuring that happiness, records from slaveholders and enslaved people illuminate how frequently slaveholders resorted to brutal physical abuse to control those they enslaved. This suggests that the value of enslaved happiness may have been primarily rhetorical, and that the appearance of contentment was much more highly prized among slaveholders than enslaved people’s authentically felt joy.

The Value of Holidays

Given slaveholders’ ideas about how to use happiness to increase production and maintain control, it is little wonder that debates arose about how slaveholders should handle holidays. Some members of the planter class believed that sporadic, limited “holydays” were a source of happiness that could be used to occasionally reward enslaved workers.⁸⁰ Others worried that the risks of unchecked, enslaved joy were too great, and they did not justify the lost labor time. It had long been common throughout the slave South to provide some work holidays for the enslaved population, often timed to annual religious or seasonal celebrations. Missionary Timothy Flint recalled that in New Orleans and the surrounding areas “every year the negroes have two or three holidays,” including Mardi Gras.⁸¹ What holidays were permitted varied greatly, depending not only on regional culture but also on the predominant crop regime. Southern Planter reported that in “many parts of Virginia” it was “customary” to have corn-shucking parties for enslaved people to facilitate the harvest.⁸²

Slaveholders throughout the South typically gave the people they enslaved time off for Christmas. Some owners justified it as a way for enslaved people to visit family on other plantations.⁸³ But sources from slaveholders and formerly enslaved people make clear that how many days of vacation enslaved people received depended entirely on the whims of their particular slaveholder. Northup noted that his owner provided a three-day holiday from work while other slaveholders in that area of Louisiana gave as many as six days of respite.⁸⁴ Douglass also reported receiving an annual holiday of six days.⁸⁵ Plantation account books document the holidays given and how much they could fluctuate from one year to another. The owner of Bayside Plantation recorded that “Hollidays commenced” Thursday, December 24, 1846, and continued through Saturday, December 26, when they noted that the “Hollidays continued. Gave black people a dinner.” With the 27th falling on a Sunday the people enslaved at Bayside managed to receive a four-day break that year.⁸⁶ Some slaveholders gave significantly fewer days off. In his Affleck “Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book,” Pierre Prudhomme recorded that in 1857 and 1860 the people he enslaved worked a half-day on Christmas Eve, with respite from work all day Christmas, before returning to work on December 26.⁸⁷ Enslaved people could also never be certain that a holiday given one year could be expected the next.⁸⁸ For all their self-professed interest in enslaved happiness, slaveholders ultimately viewed enslaved contentment as a commodity. If an owner believed that the net value of happiness gained from providing a vacation did not outweigh the loss of output, then the holiday would be abbreviated or canceled altogether.

The discrepancies in number and length of holidays also reflect diverging opinions among slaveholders about whether they should provide holidays at all and, if so, when. Antebellum agricultural journals targeting slaveholders offer insight into debates about the wisdom of allowing enslaved people the time and space for holidays and celebrations. Based on these sources the two principal concerns about permitting holidays were that celebrations promoted vice or that they were poorly timed to the harvest calendar. In November 1858 an anonymous planter from Virginia wrote to Southern Planter to complain about a local harvest celebration. According to the author it was tradition to gather enslaved people from many plantations for corn shucking, encouraging them to attend and husk corn by promising copious quantities of food and liquor. The author explained that this model meant that “a large amount of corn is shucked, many songs are sung, a hearty supper eaten,” but he claimed it also inevitably led to “quarrels and fights.” After one of his own slaves died in a fight after a harvest party the slaveholder warned that such “assemblies were improper, because they tended to corrupt and debase the slaves.”⁸⁹ This sheds light on how slaveholders weighed the costs and benefits of holidays and celebrations for enslaved people. Clearly the slaveholder decried the harvest party for facilitating drunken “quarrels” only once the value of the corn shucked was outweighed by his personal financial loss from the enslaved man’s death.

As the planter from Virginia demonstrated, some slaveholders employed paternalistic language of concern for the moral and physical well-being of enslaved people in order to elide the commodification of enslaved bodies, labor, and joy. This was apparent in Prudhomme’s account of Christmas 1860 on his plantation. Prudhomme noted in his records that there was “excitement as usual of Christmas. Most of gang enjoy themselves.” Despite “danc[ing] all nite” the people he enslaved were back at work on the “cold and cloudy” morning of December 26, 1860, their annual day-and-a-half recess now a memory. Prudhomme was pleased to report that there had been “good behavior” at the Christmas ball, based on the fact that there was “not one ill not many drunk.”⁹⁰ Slaveholders could act like they were worried about the moral well-being of enslaved people, but Prudhomme’s focus on inebriation, paired with the early return to work, signals another concern: that time would be lost by enslaved people suffering from Christmas hangovers. For all their paternalistic bombast the primary goal for slaveholders was ultimately not to provide happiness for those they enslaved but to ensure they did not lose a valuable enslaved person or their productivity.

Other proslavery authors took issue with how holidays led to debauchery and how they often occurred at inconvenient times during the harvest. An 1843 article on “the Agricultural Year” from Southern Planter advised against giving “the usual indulgence of a holyday at Christmas” because they believed it was preferable for enslaved people to “be at work than encouraged in dissipation and vice, or even in the comparatively innocent pleasure of visiting.” Instead of a holiday at Christmas the author suggested that “the health and comfort of … negroes would be promoted by giving the annual holyday in the last week of October,” with the new agricultural year beginning on the first of November, rather than in January.⁹¹ An 1851 article entitled “Management of Negroes” expressed similar reservations that “the strolling about of negroes for a week” each Christmas “is productive of much evil,” profaning what ought to be “observed as a sacred festival.” The author conceded that enslaved people “need … rest and recreation,” but he recommended “giving a week in July when the crop is laid by, to giving three days at Christmas.”⁹² The author’s proposed alternative holiday elucidates that his underlying fear was not idleness. Rather, he was most worried about losing precious work time at the height of the harvest, as evidenced by his willingness to provide a longer holiday at a more convenient date on the agricultural calendar.

Slaveholders in Louisiana were especially vexed about the timing of celebrations or breaks, allowing the rigorous sugar-cane harvesting schedule, not the calendar, to dictate holidays. In 1860 the cane harvest commenced in October and ended in early December. To mark the occasion the enslaved people at Bayside were given a holiday that started on Thursday, December 6, before they returned to work on Monday, December 10, to start planting a new batch of cane. Despite that four-day holiday the enslaved laborers were given a second recess that December on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. However, the following year found the enslaved people at Bayside “hard at work making sugar” on Wednesday, December 25. It was still a holiday for the slaveholder, who hosted “a gathering of neighbors” that day. As part of the itinerary of Yuletide events the planter brought his guests on a tour of the sugar mill to watch as the enslaved workers processed freshly cut cane. The Bayside accounts show that the people enslaved there were finally given five days of holiday in mid-January 1862, once the cane processing was over.⁹³ As with previous planters who gave alternate holidays, the fact that breaks were typically moved rather than canceled altogether is telling. This indicates that slaveholders were loath to lose time at the height of the harvest, but they still recognized that holidays were too valuable to abolish them completely.

While members of the planter class debated the cost of days off versus the happiness they yielded, formerly enslaved people were also divided about the emotional payoff of holidays. According to Northup the enslaved people he knew had many reasons to “look forward” to the annual Christmas festivities, their sole “respite from constant labor.” A break from work meant “deliverance from fear, and from the lash.” During this time enslaved people were also typically given more latitude to travel between plantations to see loved ones. This vacation from work, the alleviation of anxiety, and the “temporary relaxation” with friends and family were “brief” but transformative; Northup claimed the holiday created “an entire metamorphosis” in the community. Because of this Northup called Christmas “the happiest day in the whole year for the slave,” as it fostered “genuine happiness, rampant and unrestrained.”⁹⁴ Douglass had a very different view about the role of holidays for enslaved people and about slaveholders’ reasons for providing them. Douglass recalled that during the six days of the Christmas break some visited family, while others used the time to hunt or make items to sell or use. But, according to Douglass, most enslaved people passed the holidays less constructively, “fiddling, dancing, and drinking whisky.” Douglass observed that these activities pleased slaveholders most, as they believed that any enslaved person who spent the holidays working, not making merry, was ungrateful.⁹⁵

Considering slaveholders’ motives for providing annual recesses, Douglass condemned holidays as “the most effective means … of the slaveholders in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.” Rather than seeing the days as a benevolent gift, he argued that “holidays serve as … safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity.” Without the yearly distraction of temporary merriment Douglass believed that enslaved people would be forced to confront the “wildest desperation” of their situation, which he implied would lead to collective revolt. He contended that “the slave’s happiness is not the end sought, but rather the master’s safety.” To achieve this goal slaveholders promised an annual oasis of joy to stave off rebellion.⁹⁶

Douglass questioned slaveholders’ rationale for providing vacations, and he wondered if holidays even generated genuine happiness for enslaved people. He believed that to safeguard against enslaved mutiny, slaveholders discouraged pragmatic, healthy, or “rational enjoyment” of the season. Instead slaveowners hoped “drunkenness” and “degradation” over the holidays would “disgust the slaves with their temporary freedom” until they were “glad to return to their work.” According to Douglass this cycle of gleeful debauchery and regret was solely for the benefit of slaveholders.⁹⁷ He saw the holidays as a tool of plantation management and control, arguing that any breaks were not meant to make the enslaved feel happy. Quite the contrary: the slaveholders’ goal was for enslaved people to feel ashamed for celebrating and enjoying their brief taste of liberty.

Challenging the Myth of the Happy Slave

As sectional tensions over slavery intensified in the decades before the Civil War, proslavery authors claimed that only abolitionists viewed enslaved people as unhappy. Pollard chided an antislavery associate, noting that “Northern politicians would represent the slaves of the South as sullen, gloomy … [but] nothing could be further from the truth.”⁹⁸ Other authors leveled more serious charges at abolitionists, asserting that antislavery ideas made enslaved people unhappy. Dew surmised that “since the slave is happy” it was not right “to disturb his contentment” with daydreams of freedom that would “inevitably dry up the very sources of his happiness.”⁹⁹ Similarly, Harper asked of abolitionists “is it not cruelty to make men restless and dissatisfied in their condition?” Harper claimed that doing so did “the greatest injury … to their happiness.”¹⁰⁰

By repeating claims that enslaved people were happier than free workers, African people, or even slaveholders, and that it was abolitionists who made enslaved people unhappy, members of the planter class set the terms of the debate about the emotional politics of slavery. According to them, the institution of slavery was defensible because enslaved people were supposedly so happy, and enslaved people were happy because slavery was such a successful labor and social system. Rather than inquiring how one could prove if another person was happy, or if happiness was a proper metric for judging if a society was just, White abolitionists responded that enslaved people were unhappy and thus slavery was cruel. Many antislavery authors from Britain tackled the topic of slavery and happiness in their writings about America, all concluding that enslaved people were deeply unhappy. Fanny Kemble wrote in 1838 that rather than being innately happy, enslaved people were distinguished by a “predominant … mixture of sadness and fear.”¹⁰¹ A decade later Harriet Martineau remarked on the “look of the depressed slave” she encountered everywhere in her travels, while British abolitionist James Stirling noted in his 1856 travelogue that enslaved people in America were “not happy,” instead they “struck [him] as depressed” and “gloomy.”¹⁰² Kemble’s, Martineau’s, and Stirling’s beliefs about the innate and constant sorrow of enslaved people reflected the prominence of the “suffering slave” that became a popular emblem in antislavery texts in the 1830s. For White abolitionists a totalizing sadness defined slavery and enslaved people. It would be Black abolitionists in particular who sought to complicate these affective narratives of slavery, challenging one-dimensional representations of the blissfully happy or utterly miserable slave.¹⁰³

Formerly enslaved people who wrote narratives before Emancipation were authoring consciously abolitionist texts, so they knew that detailing the misery of slavery had commercial and political value for the antislavery cause. But rather than simply depicting enslaved people as entirely characterized by sadness, formerly enslaved people deliberately countered the myth of happy slaves, emphasizing instead the nuances of enslaved joy and sorrow. As people who had experienced enslavement firsthand, they may have been motivated both by an urge to dispel proslavery stereotypes and by the desire to repudiate authors who purported to know how enslaved people truly felt. Through depictions of the layered and at times contradictory ways that enslaved people experienced joy and sorrow, slave narratives explicitly and implicitly debunked the cliché of the happy slave and refuted White abolitionists’ oversimplified image of the depressed slave. In particular formerly enslaved authors portrayed the complex nature of enslaved emotions by discussing how unadulterated happiness was confined to childhood, by describing the limits to enslaved people’s contentment and by highlighting how often joy and sorrow were juxtaposed or reversed for people in bondage.

Some authors consciously used slave narratives to dismantle the fictions spun by members of the plantocracy about the happiness of enslaved people. James Bradley intimated that the figure of the happy slave was little more than slaveholder propaganda, remarking in his 1835 memoir “how strange it is that anybody should believe any human being could be a slave and yet be contented!”¹⁰⁴ Writing a few decades later, Douglass disputed the concept that the happiness of slaveholders and enslaved people was equal and mutually assured, arguing, “I was about as hard to please by a master, as a master is by a slave.”¹⁰⁵ Henry Bibb addressed the related idea that enslaved people were more contented than slaveholders because they were not burdened by the preoccupations of free people. Bibb observed that enslaved people experienced the “calamities of sickness, death” that befall all humans while also being “denied the consolation of struggling against external difficulties, such as destroy the life, liberty, and happiness of himself and family.” Rather than being a boon that enslaved people did not have to “struggle against misfortune,” for Bibb this was another sign of the rights and power that were withheld from them, leaving them “helpless.”¹⁰⁶ This was the crux of the vaunted pursuit of happiness: one was not guaranteed happiness itself, but people were promised the right to struggle for its attainment, including, Bibb suggested, the right to fail in that endeavor.

Authors of slave narratives were particularly dismissive of the proslavery chimera that enslaved people were happy because their material needs were met by their owners. Douglass rejected this as a complete fabrication, noting that his own “experience contradicts” slaveholders’ tall tales that “slaves enjoy more of the physical comforts of life than the peasantry of any country in the world.”¹⁰⁷ Northup responded to multiple happy-slave myths. Looking back on the deprivations he endured while enslaved, Northup observed that he never came “to the conclusion, even once, that the southern slave, fed, clothed, whipped and protected by his master, is happier than the free colored citizens of the North.”¹⁰⁸ In doing so Northup linked the notion that enslaved people were well provided for to the belief that enslaved people were happier than their free Northern counterparts, calling both arguments into question. According to Douglass, perhaps the biggest lie about enslaved happiness was that slaveholders genuinely cared about it at all. As human property Douglass opined that he was “but the sport of a power which makes no account, either of [his] welfare or of [his] happiness.”¹⁰⁹

The amount of space Black abolitionists devoted to attacking the proslavery shibboleth of happy slaves speaks volumes about how insidious formerly enslaved people thought the convention was. Douglass repeatedly attacked proslavery misconceptions about enslaved happiness in his pre-Emancipation narratives, especially the widespread perception, popular even in the North, that “singing, among slaves,” was “evidence of their contentment and happiness.” Rather than being a symptom of enslaved contentment Douglass wrote that “slaves sing most when they are most unhappy,” as the melodies “represent the sorrows of [their] heart[s].” To Douglass these tunes functioned as catharsis, and he compared this musical solace to how “an aching heart is relieved by its tears.”¹¹⁰ In parsing this scene Douglass was asking what “evidence” could be considered proof of contentment. Douglass returned to this subject again in his second narrative, mentioning how often he heard that “slaves are the most contented and happy laborers in the world” because “they dance, and sing,” but Douglass cautioned his reader that “slaves sing more to make themselves happy, than to express their happiness.”¹¹¹ His remark about how often people equated singing with happiness, and the fact that he repeated lengthy passages from his first narrative verbatim, hints at his contempt for this belief and conveys how little the popularity of this myth had waned in the intervening decade.

Authors of slave narratives also implicitly contested idealized depictions of contented slaves by describing the sorrows they had endured while enslaved.¹¹² This was acutely clear in discussions of enslaved people who died by suicide. Keckley recalled the defiant desperation of an uncle who hanged himself “rather than be punished the way Colonel Burwell punished his servants.”¹¹³ A similar unwillingness to face another lashing led Moses Grandy’s brother to “[lay] himself down” in the woods “and die … there.”¹¹⁴ Suicide need not always have been a deliberate act of rebellion in order to resist the institution of slavery and rebut representations of contented slaves.¹¹⁵ Depressed over being sold back into slavery after years of freedom, Mattie Jackson’s grandfather sank into “deep despair.” “Overwhelmed with grief” he decided to run away in the winter, intending to “put an end to his sorrows by perishing with cold and hunger.” His plans were thwarted when his owner learned the enslaved man was missing and tracked him down the following day. Her grandfather survived his night in the woods, but he suffered severe frostbite in “his fingers and toes, and was thenceforth of little use to his new master.”¹¹⁶ According to Jackson her grandfather had made the choice to die of starvation or exposure rather than suffer life in slavery once more. The frost damage to his extremities would serve as a constant reminder of this choice. Though he had not died by suicide, making his sorrow manifest might have disabused his owners of any happy slave stereotypes they harbored, and it certainly depreciated his potential market value.

Rather than allow proslavery authors to represent how enslaved people felt, formerly enslaved authors used their narratives to discuss the realities of happiness and sorrow for enslaved people. Many authors of slave narratives reiterated the unhappiness of slavery by depicting their childhood in bondage as a sheltered period of joy that was abruptly cut short. Portraying that innocent, undefiled contentment and how it was violently interrupted served to heighten the contrast with the sorrow they endured as enslaved adults.¹¹⁷ Many authors referred to having had a “happy childhood” and talked about the “happy” or “happiest days” they experienced as enslaved children.¹¹⁸ Slave narratives also underscored how “carefree” this happiness was, depicting an idyllic time in which “troubles” fell away “like water on a duck’s back,” and sorrows were briefer than a spring rainstorm.¹¹⁹ Some authors accentuated the role of racial parity in their abbreviated childhood happiness, describing childhood as a liminal period in which they knew “the same joyful freedom as the little white children” and possessed “a heart as free from care as that of any free-born white child.”¹²⁰ Douglass described this ostensibly color-blind, democratic bliss of childhood as a period where there was “little difference in the measure of contentment felt by the slave-child neglected and the slaveholder’s child cared for and petted…. [I]f cold and hunger do not pierce the tender frame, the first seven or eight years of the slave-boy’s life are about as full of sweet content as those of the most favored and petted white children of the slaveholder.” Douglass continued that enslaved children were capable of almost as much happiness as children of the planter class in part because the enslaved child was rarely subjected to “lectures on propriety of behavior, or on anything else.”¹²¹ Of course, “cold and hunger” were all too familiar for many children, many of whom also experienced sale or loss of their family before they were the age of seven. Douglass’s claim that enslaved children were “content” because they did not have to sit through “lectures” was also glib given Douglass’s own unslakable thirst for knowledge as a child. That he portrayed childhood for the enslaved as happy, pastoral, and egalitarian after his own experience of early sorrows reveals the cultural currency of the image of the happy enslaved child in abolitionist texts, even for those who vehemently refuted propaganda about happy enslaved adults.

Equally critical to the trope of the blissfully happy enslaved childhood was the depiction of the unexpected moment when that state of contentment was shattered, and the author was forced to confront their slave status. Whether it was when a parent died, or when an enslaved child was first sold or put to work, slave narratives recounted the “sorrowful change,” the moment when innocent happiness ended and “sorrows and sufferings commenced.”¹²² As Harriet Jacobs explained, the “happy days” of her childhood were blotted out by “that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel” when her “kind mistress died.”¹²³ Though authors of slave narratives acknowledged that this affective epiphany was different for each enslaved child, Jacobs’s remark implied that the experience of emotional rupture was universal and inevitable for “every human … born” into slavery.

Joy amid Sorrow and Sorrow amid Joy

Because of the cultural endurance of the “suffering slave” in antislavery texts, formerly enslaved authors may have been reluctant to write about feeling unmitigated joy in bondage both because it perpetuated the myth of the happy slave and it defied the rules of the slave narrative genre and thus their abolitionist audience’s expectations. This authorial quandary surfaces in many slave narratives, as most references to happiness during slavery were accompanied by qualifying statements. When chronicling how her grandfather fell in love with an enslaved woman amid the “sorrow and hopeless toil” of bondage, Mattie Jackson did not describe their relationship as one of unadulterated joy; rather, she noted that “they lived as happily as circumstances would permit.”¹²⁴ This careful wording insinuated that there were limits to the amount of happiness that was possible during the “hopeless … circumstances” of enslavement. The notion of circumscribed happiness was often invoked when formerly enslaved people described being sold. To refute both the fantasy of the kind slaveholder and that of the happy slave, authors of slave narratives were explicit that even if their owner changed, any happiness they felt was relative because they remained enslaved. For example, when Northup was sold to a cruel man named Tibeats, Northup stated he was “doomed … to lead no more the comparatively happy life” he had while enslaved by a Mr. Ford, while Sella Martin recalled that when his family was bought by Dr. C. that “for three years [they] were as happy as it falls to the lot of slaves to be.”¹²⁵ Neither Northup nor Martin unequivocally stated that they had been content in bondage; instead they maintained that any joy they experienced was “comparative,” conditioned upon their enslavement. They could only be “as happy” as enslaved people could be, their potential happiness constrained by “the lot of slaves.”

Douglass disavowed feelings of joy while in bondage even more forcefully, stressing how dangerous he thought it was to depict unreserved enslaved happiness. Douglass specified that “much of the happiness—or absence of misery” that he felt while enslaved by a Mr. Freeland was due to the “ardent friendship of [his] brother slaves” and the love they bore for one another. Despite these strong, supportive bonds he “hated slavery” so intensely that in the last few years that he was in bondage he was “not only ashamed to be contented in slavery, but ashamed to seem to be contented.”¹²⁶ Rather than unconditionally aver that he had felt some joy while enslaved, Douglass tempered his admission of “happiness” by claiming that he had only experienced “the absence of misery” and that the two were not synonymous. Over time Douglass came to see that purported “absence of misery” as false and shameful. With the benefit of hindsight he denied having ever felt happiness while in chains, and he even decried feigning contentment. Published in the mid-1850s, as conflicts between abolitionists and proslavery advocates grew more aggressive, Douglass’s narrative stated that desire to repudiate any happiness he had felt in bondage, and his implicit criticism of enslaved people who endeavored to “seem … contented,” elucidates how threatening the figure of the happy slave was to antislavery rhetoric. He could not admit to feeling unchecked joy, nor did he want enslaved people to perform happiness, or even appear content, lest it give members of the slavocracy more ammunition to defend the institution.¹²⁷

In addition to challenging the conceit of the happy slave, illuminating enslaved sorrow, and qualifying their definitions of happiness, many formerly enslaved authors also described the often-contradictory nature of happiness and sadness for enslaved people. Slave narratives are saturated with scenes portraying moments of joy amid feelings of sorrow and of moments of sorrow amid times of joy. Depicting the complex ways that enslaved people experienced those feelings was another rebuke to the legend of the happy slave and to all the simplistic feelings that fictitious invention represented. In his discussion of the cathartic role of singing, Douglass observed how song was able to capture how antipodal emotions could intertwine for enslaved people. He recalled that enslaved people “would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone,” thus “revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.”¹²⁸

Other authors asserted that rather than existing simultaneously, “the highest joy and the deepest sadness” were often inverted for enslaved people. This meant that events that were celebrations for free people could be mournful for enslaved people, while situations that free people met with sadness might be cause for joy for people in bondage. For example, holidays enjoyed by free people often triggered entirely different sentiments for enslaved individuals. Harriet Jacobs explained how enslaved families could be divided on January 1, as slaveholders rented out enslaved people for year-long contracts. Jacobs spoke directly to her readership, declaring, “O, you happy free women, contrast your New Year’s day with that of the poor bond-woman!” While for free people “the day is blessed,” full of “friendly wishes … and gifts,” Jacobs noted that for enslaved mothers “New Year’s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows.”¹²⁹ In the sentimental era, flipping the affective script in this fashion to reverse the traditional valence of feelings and emotional occasions would have been powerful for readers. The frequency with which formerly enslaved authors illustrated how “the highest joy and the deepest sadness” were compounded or switched for people in bondage also confirms that many authors saw this as a defining trait of enslaved emotions.

Nowhere were the conflicting emotions of enslaved people thrown into sharper relief than in slave narratives’ discussions of rites of passage like courtship, marriage, and childbirth. Rather than portraying them as happy occasions, authors delineated the different associations these life events held for enslaved people. Bibb recalled his hesitance to marry, or even court, an enslaved woman, fearing that their union would only serve to “obstruct [his] way to the land of liberty.”¹³⁰ Douglass concurred that love could limit rather than liberate, arguing that “thousands would escape from slavery, who now remain, but for the strong cords of affection that bind them.”¹³¹ Jacobs experienced firsthand that falling in love in bondage produced more anguish than joy, asking her reader “why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away?”¹³² A number of authors of slave narratives conceded that love had brought them a glimmer of joy, but this was typically immediately accompanied by their recollections of the inevitable heartbreak for enslaved lovers. Once again formerly enslaved people warned their sentimental readers that they should not expect a happy romantic story; instead, their experiences of love were laden with ambivalence.¹³³

Slave narratives also depicted the mixed emotions enslaved people had about becoming parents. Keckley expressed hesitation about motherhood because she “could not bear the thought of bringing children into slavery—of adding one single recruit to the millions bound to hopeless servitude.”¹³⁴ Jacobs was also loath to have children because she “shuddered to think of being the mother of children that should be owned by [her] old tyrant.” This reluctance did not subside when her first child was born; she described her feelings for her infant son as “a mixture of love and pain.” Amid her love for the newborn she “could never forget that he was a slave,” which cast “a dark cloud over [her] enjoyment.”¹³⁵ Enslaved fathers experienced similar complicated sentiments. After his daughter was born Bibb did not feel the joy that might be expected of a free man who had become a new father because he could not “look upon the dear child without being filled with sorrow and fearful apprehension, of being separated.” Even once he became free Bibb confessed that he had “to lament” that he was “the father of slaves.”¹³⁶ Over the course of the nineteenth century more importance was placed on children and childhood, which would have made these authors’ anxieties about parenthood all the more harrowing for their audience.¹³⁷

Formerly enslaved authors argued that even reunions between siblings, spouses, or parents and children were not purely joyful if they occurred in the confines of slavery. After successfully running away Bibb dared return to the South to see his wife and child. But his homecoming was marred by warring emotions, as he recalled that “the sensation of joy at that moment flashed like lightning over [his] afflicted mind, mingled with a thousand dreadful apprehensions” known only by the “heart-wounded slave father and husband.”¹³⁸ Leonard Black experienced these clashing feelings when he got to see four of his brothers for the first time in many years. Black noted that he “was glad to see [his] brothers, but yet [he] was a slave,” so even this momentous event left him depressed, “crushed by the cruel spirit of slavery.”¹³⁹ In depicting how supposedly joyous occasions were freighted with sorrowful or competing emotions former slaves stressed that in bondage there could be no purely happy moments.

Formerly enslaved people also outlined how occasions that might be tragic for free people might be celebrated by the enslaved. This was exemplified in scenes that discussed how it felt when an enslaved loved one ran away, was sold, or died. Jackson bore witness to both her sister and her father running away to seek freedom, but rather than depicting this as a tragic loss, Jackson emphasized how happy her remaining family was to know that their loved ones would be free. To avoid being punished Jackson’s mother even “pretended to be vexed and angry” in their owner’s presence when she was told that her eldest daughter had run off. But Jackson saw how her mother truly felt, describing “how wildly mother showed her joy at Nancy’s escape when [they] were alone together.” Her sister ran away when Jackson was young, but it left a distinct impression on her. Beyond teaching her to conceal certain emotions from slaveholders, Jackson’s mother modeled the complexities of love for her daughter, showing Mattie that one could rejoice at the loss of a family member if it meant that they had escaped enslavement. This early lesson was repeated a few years later when Jackson’s father ran away rather than be sold away from his family. Jackson would “never forget the bitter anguish of [her] parents’ hearts … or the profusion of tears” they cried when her father came to say goodbye. “The parting was painful,” but Jackson explained that her mother even helped her husband implement his plan for escape because she wanted him to be free.¹⁴⁰ As a child Jackson repeatedly saw the lengths one might go to in order to see a loved one become free, even if that meant relinquishing them forever, and that such an occasion could be met with acceptance and joy.

Nowhere was the reversal of traditional sentimental emotions clearer than in slave narratives’ discussions of how death might be welcomed rather than grieved. Jacobs observed that she “had often prayed for death” and even found herself wishing that her newborn child might die too, claiming that “death is better than slavery.”¹⁴¹ Northup expressed similar fatalistic sentiments throughout his narrative. After watching Patsey recover from a savage whipping by their owner, Northup opined that “a blessed thing it would have been … had she never lifted up her head in life again.” Northup pined for death himself, noting that there were multiple times in bondage “when the contemplation of death as the end of earthly sorrow … has been pleasant to dwell upon.” Just as Jackson’s family rejoiced when family members escaped to freedom, authors of slave narratives painted the death of an enslaved person as a “pleasant” or “blessed” event, not a tragedy. Taken together these depictions of the inversion of sorrow and joy felt by so many enslaved people recapitulated the horrors of slavery while also repudiating any claims that enslaved people led lives of simple, blissful contentment.¹⁴²

Though Northup detailed the suffering endured by enslaved people, he was clear that he was not merely falling into the reactionary trap of claiming that enslaved people were miserable in order to counter the myth of the happy slave. Rather than accept proslavery fictions of contented slaves, Northup rejected the debate itself. In his narrative Northup opined that “there may be slaves well-clothed, well-fed, and happy, as there surely are those half-clad, half-starved and miserable; nevertheless the institution … is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one.”¹⁴³ Instead of responding to slaveholders’ fantasies of merry slaves with tales of unrelenting woe, Northup contended that even if some enslaved people were happy, which he doubted, a few “happy” slaves did not represent all enslaved people. Stirling made a similar point in 1857, writing that “even if” proslavery authors were right “and the slaves were really as ‘happy’ as they would have us believe,” he was undeterred in his staunch opposition to slavery. He would not be bogged down in a false dichotomy debating “happiness or unhappiness”; he was more interested in slavery “as a matter of right or wrong.”¹⁴⁴ Like Northup, Stirling counseled that happiness was a misleading metric for the health of a society, or of slavery, and should not be used to measure their justness.

Emancipation and the Myth of the Happy Slave

Even after Emancipation, the myth of the happy slave did not lose its talismanic power for slavery’s defenders. White romanticization of master-slave relations only intensified in the wake of war as Confederate apologists and former slaveholders sought to safeguard slavery’s legacy by characterizing enslaved people as contented.¹⁴⁵ Exalting representations of benevolent masters and contented slaves was part of the “Lost Cause” agenda. As former general P. G. T. Beauregard opined, members of the planter class needed to take the helm in crafting the narrative of slavery and the war in order to “see that it is correctly written.” For them, a “correct” depiction of the South was one in which enslaved people were as faithful as they were happy.¹⁴⁶

The obdurate myth of the happy slave is evident in Lost Cause novels, films, and historical texts and also in continued efforts by African Americans to dispel that stereotype in the decades after slavery’s end.¹⁴⁷ Charlie Moses of Mississippi reflected on his time in slavery over half a century later in an interview for the Federal Writers’ Project, observing, “the young folks now-a-days are happy an’ don’t know ’bout war an’ slavery times, but I does…. [T]hey are happy. We was miserable.”¹⁴⁸ Tellingly Moses did not say that he had been alone in his misery in bondage; rather, he stated that “we was miserable.” In doing so he underlined that enslaved people’s unhappiness was universally felt, not individual or singular. He also hinted that as time passed it was even more critical that survivors of slavery speak about their affective experience in order to inform young people about the realities of the institution and disabuse them of such myths.

The writings of Black Southerners also reveal how tightly many White Southerners clung to the belief not only that enslaved people had been happy, but also that Black people remained contented with their status as second-class citizens in the Jim Crow South. For White Southerners to preserve that deluded assumption, the emotional politics of Jim Crow dictated that Black Southerners must cultivate and maintain a happy façade during all interactions with White people. Richard Wright wrote at length about White Southerners’ expectations that Black Southerners appear content at all times in his memoir about his formative years in 1920s Mississippi. Wright recalled that as a teenager a White employer asked him, “Why don’t you laugh and talk like the other niggers?” Wright admitted, “Well, sir, there’s nothing much to … smile about,” deliberately “smiling” as he replied.¹⁴⁹ Wright’s White boss had evidently become so accustomed to the forced happiness displayed by Black Southerners that he may have believed Wright was anomalous for not expressing that familiar contentment. Or he may have been warning Wright that he found Wright’s affective performance wanting, putting Wright’s job (and life) at risk. Regardless of the man’s intentions, Wright’s response indicates that by seventeen he knew the emotional politics of Jim Crow, though he chafed against their constraints, and he recognized that smiling carried more weight than any words he might say.

Wright’s memoir also sheds light on how difficult it was to sustain a cheerful countenance. At a subsequent job at a drugstore Wright described how he was struggling to maintain an adequate performance of happiness. This culminated in an interaction with a White customer when Wright found that he “had to figure out how to perform each act and how to say each word.” He “could not grin.” Growing up in Mississippi, Wright was schooled in the affective expectations White Southerners had of Black Southerners, but that perpetual burlesque of contentment was no less exhausting because it was familiar. As a result, Wright was relieved when he was hired as a night janitor, as he would not encounter White customers. His colleagues were also young Black men, so Wright “was happy”: “at least I could talk, joke, sing, say what I pleased.”¹⁵⁰ White Southerners like Wright’s bosses and customers could disregard their complicity in compelling his feigned contentment, even as they demanded that Black people “laugh” and “smile” in their presence and threatened punishment when Black people failed to do so. Ignoring their role in establishing the affective norms of Jim Crow enabled White Southerners to pretend that happiness was genuine rather than coerced. In the eyes of Wright’s White bosses, when interactions with Black people did not go as anticipated the problem was not the oppressive, racialized expectations of the emotional politics of Jim Crow, but the Black people who “could not grin” or “figure out how to perform.”

As a child in Alabama and Florida, Zora Neale Hurston was also well acquainted with the expectation that Black people should always appear cheerful and nonthreatening. In the introduction to a 1935 anthology of African American folk tales, Hurston wrote that “the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive” and that it was common practice for Black people to “smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the White person because, knowing so little” about Black people, they did not “know what [they were] missing.” According to Hurston the “seeming” deference and smiles were a Trojan horse, “evasive” maneuvers that helped Black people carve out sites of opposition and emotional sanctuary in an otherwise violent, segregated society. She called it “feather-bed resistance,” observing that try as White people might to squeeze information or sincere feelings from Black people their efforts were thwarted by “laughter and pleasantries.”¹⁵¹ Hurston insinuated that concealing genuine emotions was not always oppressive for Black people. Instead it could function to protect the Black community and to shelter Black individuals’ authentic inner selves.¹⁵²

The debate over the myth of the happy slave that had divided abolitionists and proslavery authors in the nineteenth century also played out in the historiography of slavery. In the early twentieth century many historians accepted Lost Cause propaganda texts at face value, leading to histories that affirmed slaveholder rhetoric of contented slaves. U. B. Phillips’s 1918 monograph, American Negro Slavery, is one of the more notorious examples of idealized master-slave relations. Phillips invoked the White supremacist rhetoric of authors like Thomas Jefferson, James Henry Hammond, and Samuel Cart-wright when he wrote that the “typical negro” was “sociable and amorous … and contented.”¹⁵³ Phillips’s theory was still the accepted narrative in 1941 when Wilbur Cash declared in The Mind of the South that “the negro … is a creature of … facile emotion and, above everything else under heaven, of enjoy-ment.”¹⁵⁴ But in this era the myth of the happy slave was deployed not just to rationalize slavery but to justify the steady creep of Jim Crow–era segregation nationwide.¹⁵⁵

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The myth of the happy slave did not die with the coming of Emancipation. Rather, it was perpetuated with new fervor in order to defend slavery’s legacy and its ideological successor, Jim Crow. The debate once fought between proslavery and abolitionist authors over whether enslaved people were singularly contented or wholly miserable continued to be waged in the historiography of slavery and the popular memory of the institution, in service to many different political agendas. But authors of slave narratives were not just trying to dismantle the trope of enslaved happiness; they were challenging any accounts that reduced the experience of bondage to simplistic emotions and relationships. Rather than replace the happy-slave conceit with one of misery, such authors rejected all one-dimensional affective depictions of enslaved people in favor of portraying the complex gradations and inversions of feelings that people in bondage endured.

Meanwhile the goal for formerly enslaved authors was exactly what proponents of the myth of the happy slave found most unnerving, the idea that behind their façade of coerced happiness Black people concealed deep veins of thoughts and nuanced emotions. Because of that, members of the planter class required happiness from enslaved people at all times and were also paradoxically obsessed with determining whether enslaved people’s emotions were authentic. For slaveholders the question of whether or not enslaved people’s feelings or motives were sincere was of great consequence, because slaveholders’ very lives and livelihoods depended on their ability to trust the people that they kept enslaved.