CHAPTER 5
After a plan to run away failed, Frederick Douglass found himself alone in a jail cell, accused of orchestrating the plot, while his coconspirators were freed. Douglass was despondent during this lonesome incarceration, writing, “thirty-nine lashes on my naked and bleeding back, would have been joyfully borne, in preference to this separation from … the friends of my youth.”1 Douglass’s moving passage attests that the sting of the whip was not the only way to punish an enslaved person; there were also a variety of ways that slaveholders could discipline enslaved people emotionally. Furthermore, Douglass posited that the experience of being whipped was preferable to affective modes of control, including being isolated from loved ones. Douglass’s contention that a whipping would be “joyfully borne” compared to being torn from his closest companions was intended in part as a direct response to proslavery rhetoric that said that enslaved people felt emotions less acutely.2 But he also hinted that emotional modes of discipline were deliberately employed by masters and were the cruelest weapons in a slaveholder’s arsenal.
Historians writing about antebellum American slavery have generally concentrated on the physical violence of the institution.3 In his work on the history of punishment in America, Lawrence Meir Friedman argued that “punishment on the plantation was essentially physical punishment,” with the whip serving as the chosen “correctional instrument of all purpose.”4 When discussing types of punishment used by members of the slavocracy, many historians list physical methods like branding, flogging, paddling, or the stocks, neglecting the myriad ways that slaveholders deployed and targeted emotions when punishing enslaved people.5 Other authors deny that emotional modes of correction existed at all.6 Focusing solely on corporeal punishments of enslaved people ignores the crucial role that individual feelings and collective affective norms played in disciplining enslaved people and maintaining slavery in the antebellum South.
Affective discipline may be overlooked because it lacks the bloody spectacle of the physical violence slaveholders used to subjugate and terrify enslaved people. But examining how slavery was enforced through emotional discipline and affective manipulation sheds light on the lived experience of slavery and on the critical place of emotional mastery in discipline. Studying how slaveholders often used corporeal forms of discipline to compel specific feelings in enslaved people and to punish them for expressing certain emotions challenges traditional notions of how discipline operated on plantations, and it exposes contradictions in the proslavery rhetoric that enslaved people felt emotions and family ties less keenly. A variety of forms of correction functioned as affective discipline, including punishments that aimed to elicit a specific emotion in an individual enslaved person or in the enslaved community and also punishment for someone because they expressed a specific emotion. This is not to deny the physical violence of slavery or the many types of corporeal punishment that members of the planter class wielded. In fact, affective discipline and physical punishment often went hand in ruthless hand. Exploring forms of affective discipline broadens definitions of what constituted discipline, how it was used to shore up slavery, how such punishments were gendered, and how enslaved people responded to their emotions being punitively provoked or suppressed.
Corporeal Punishment Versus Affective Discipline
In the daily interactions that took place between slaveholders and enslaved people emotions were often central to discipline, frequently serving as both the means and ends of punishment. Slaveholders disciplined enslaved people by inciting certain emotions, but enslaved people also faced punishment, physical or emotional, if they were perceived to be feeling or expressing the wrong sentiments. Slave narratives are full of accounts of enslaved people who either were whipped for seeming proud, “insolent,” or untrustworthy or were sold for grieving too long over the death or sale of a spouse or child.
Slaveholders punished enslaved people for expressing certain emotions, and at times they used discipline to prevent specific feelings from intensifying, which could lead to running away, or the dreaded affliction known as “disaffection.” In an 1851 article entitled “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” Dr. Samuel Cartwright opined that “before the negroes run away, unless they are frightened or panic-struck, they become sulky and dissatisfied.”7 He intended this as evidence that slaveholders could keep enslaved people from running away if they worked to ensure enslaved people’s contentment. But his assertion that “sulky” moods and discontentment presaged flight could also convince slaveholders that rather than trying to make enslaved people happy, and watching for signs of their dissatisfaction, they should ward off escape attempts by punishing enslaved people who expressed the discontentment that supposedly preceded running away.8
The writings of slaveholders and formerly enslaved people detail the emotional abuse of slavery, illuminating disputes about which was crueler and more effective, physical or affective discipline. In his autobiography, Henry Box Brown explained that punishments that targeted emotions were far worse than those that aimed to injure the flesh, venturing in his introduction that “the whip, the cowskin, the gallows, the stocks, the paddle, the prison … although bloody and barbarous … have no comparison with those internal pangs which are felt by the soul when the hand of the merciless tyrant plucks from one’s bosom the object of one’s ripened affections.” Brown catalogued the arsenal of tools of physical torture enlisted by members of the slavocracy, methods that would have been quite familiar to abolitionist audiences accustomed to slave narratives that told woeful tales of corporeal cruelty, only to say that there were crueler methods. Later in the text he clarified that he based this comparison on personal experience. When recalling the anguish of being sold away from his mother, he swore that the heartrending event was “a thousand fold more cruel and barbarous than the use of the lash” because the wounds inflicted by a whip would “heal” eventually, “but the pangs which lacerate the soul” as a result of the separation of loved ones “only grow deeper and more piercing.”9 His repeated use of the term “pangs” to describe the anguish of losing a loved one was a testament to how sorrow left no legible scars to heal yet could still cause a grieving person physical pain. Lunsford Lane invoked a similar idea in his narrative when he said that enslaved people were “spiritbruised,” which he claimed was “worse than lash-mangled.”10
While enslaved people wrote about the excruciating emotional and physical brutality of slavery, members of the plantocracy were filling letters, agricultural journals, plantation books, and legislative halls with musings about the most effective ways to police and discipline the enslaved population.11 Enslaved people were familiar with this obsession, as Jacob Stroyer dryly noted that “how to control negroes … was the principal topic of the poor white man South, in the days of slavery.”12 Slaveholders used a number of methods for emotionally exploiting and correcting enslaved people. But the writings of slaveholders and court records suggest that not all members of the planter class agreed about what types of punishment to employ. However, no matter what sort of punishment an overseer, slaveholder, or slave trader favored, emotions were integral to debates about discipline.
Corporeal punishment had many advocates among the planter class, and they trotted out endless justifications to defend their disciplinary practices to both abolitionists and opponents of physical punishment. Some declared that corporeal punishments were the only kind that worked on enslaved people, while others claimed that whipping was not excessive or brutal.13 One author writing in the agricultural journal DeBow’s Review went so far as to surmise that after enslaved people were whipped they would “laugh … at ‘Massa,’ who thinks, ‘dat kind o’ lashin ebber hut nigga.’”14 In adopting dialect to say that enslaved people laughed at the notion that whipping could “hurt” them, the author made light of corporeal punishment, and distanced the responsibility for beatings. The author also alluded that enslaved people were inured to physical pain and hinted that the joke was on any slaveholder who believed that an enslaved person could be physically hurt. Other members of the planter class countered accusations that whipping was cruel by pointing out that the same punishment was used to correct children, and sailors in the U.S. Navy.15 William Harper invoked this argument, concluding that beating an enslaved person could not be “degrading to a slave” any more than a whipping was “degrading to a child.”16 Like the author in the pages of DeBow’s Review Harper dismissed the impact of physical discipline, comparing it to the widely accepted practice of spanking a disobedient child. By equating the treatment of enslaved people to children he downplayed the possible severity of such beatings and framed correction as a necessary duty for paternalistic patriarchs in order to dominate all members of the family and plantation.
Some advocates of slavery even touted physical discipline as a superior, kinder alternative to affective punishment. One author in DeBow’s Review observed that an enslaved person who received a whipping had a better fate than that of an English criminal, who would be jailed and thus “banished from hearth and home, wife and children.”17 Like so many defenders of slavery, the author implied that enslaved people were better treated than free workers in Britain (measured by the supposed relative happiness of slaves and “misery” of British workers). But the author also insinuated that enslaved people and free workers alike preferred physical correction, like a whipping, to the emotional punishment of being separated from one’s family in prison, separated “from hearth and home.” A similar argument was made in a poem called “Negroes in the Field” from an 1850 DeBow’s Review, which portrayed enslaved people happy at work and their frequent “jocund laughs” as they labored. In verse the author proclaimed that enslaved people “fear no lash, nor worse! The dungeon’s gloom, / Nor nurse the sorrows of a hopeless doom.”18 The poem perpetuated the myth that enslaved people were naturally happy, “gay” and laughing as they worked, while also alleging that enslaved people were not afraid of punishment, whether it was corporeal or “worse.” Ultimately the poem provides insight into how planters viewed the hierarchy of punishment, which they hinted mirrored enslaved people’s preferences. The “gloom” of incarceration was deemed “worse” than whipping, intimating that some members of the planter class believed that affective discipline was harsher than corporeal correction.
Still other slaveholders insisted that physical discipline was risky or ineffective. Some worried about the impact whippings and beatings had on an enslaved person’s price. According to slaveholder William Harper, the goal in punishing enslaved people was to “produce obedience or reformation, with the least permanent injury.”19 Enslaved people with severe or prominent scars were worth less on the slave market, so concerns about the value of their investments inspired slaveholders to find modes of correction that left less visible marks.20 The children of a Mississippi slaveholder even sued their father in court in 1846, concerned that he was “always cruel to his slaves” and therefore he was devaluing the enslaved human property that they hoped to one day inherit.21
Some members of the planter class questioned the efficacy of corporeal punishment as a tool of plantation management, believing that whipping had a negative impact on master-slave relationships, which in turn lowered worker productivity. This line of argumentation frequently appeared in agricultural journals, the very sources planters turned to for advice on best practices for farming and slaveholding. An 1851 essay in Southern Planter, “The Management of Negroes,” counseled that slaveholders should avoid using the whip to excess, because “if a master be a tyrant his negroes may be so much embarrassed by his presence as to be incapable of doing their work properly when he is near.”22 The author underscored that relying on the whip harmed the affective relations between slaveholder and enslaved people, and it made the enslaved feel “embarrassed,” but the crux of the issue was that this emotional damage rendered the enslaved “incapable of doing their work,” reducing worker efficiency and planter profits.
Other authors warned that physical discipline created unhappy enslaved people, which led to reduced output and higher rates of running away. That same year Cartwright cautioned DeBow’s Review readers against displaying cruelty toward their slaves or “frighten[ing] them by a blustering manner,” contending that a contented slave would not run away.23 In this same vein, a planter from Mississippi described his plantation management techniques in DeBow’s Review, advising that slaveholders should employ the whip less frequently. Doing so would assure “the happiness of both master and servant” and, in the long run, if slaveholders and enslaved people were contented then even fewer whippings were needed.24 A slaveholder perusing Southern Planter throughout the 1850s would have repeatedly read that they should use physical punishment minimally, that instead overseers and owners should compel work through “good temper, conciliation,” and “encouragement.”25 Whether prescriptive literature posited that physical discipline stirred up negative emotions or shaped the affective bonds between slaveholders and enslaved people, all their advice was based on the premise that emotions and discipline were inextricably tied.
Emotional Mastery and Affective Discipline
In the antebellum South, a world that placed great stock in patriarchal control, self-mastery and the ability to master others were inextricably tied, and legal, emotional, and physical domination went hand in hand.26 Sources from and about members of the planter class indicate that consummate domination required the control of one’s own emotions and those of others. Even in a society in which affective self-control was prized, few were more absorbed with achieving total emotional mastery than South Carolina planter and politician James Henry Hammond. Hammond’s letters, journals, and plantation records expose his lifelong battle to “control” himself “in every particular.”27 According to a biographer, Hammond was hardly unique; rather, he was a product of a society whose norms dictated that “that he always dominate those around him.” Hammond himself opined that members of the planter class were “accustomed … to control and scorn to be controlled.”28
In particular, slaveholders were advised in planter journals and etiquette books, and even by their peers, that managing one’s emotions was a critical component of plantation management. This was most evident in numerous essays in journals like DeBow’s Review, Southern Planter, and American Cotton Planter, which urged slaveholders to quell their feelings, especially anger, when disciplining enslaved people.29 In one article in DeBow’s Review, entitled “Plantation Life—Duties and Responsibilities,” H. N. McTyeire argued that emotions should play no part in debates over discipline, or in the actual punishment itself. First he dismissed critiques of “corporal punishment” as mere “mawkish sentimentalism.” But he admitted that a master should resort to physical punishments only to achieve the “legitimate” goal of “correction and prevention,” and that moderation was key, because “anger is fierce and wrath cruel.”30 McTyeire declared that emotions should be divorced from both discussions and practices of discipline, lest the debate devolve into “sentimentalism” or a slaveholder resort to “anger,” leading them to be overly “cruel.” “Management of Negroes” from Southern Planter in 1851 hinted that it was the manifestation of anger that most needed to be checked, cautioning that “the negro should … see from your cool, yet determined manner that [the punishment] is not in consequence of your excited temper, but of his fault.”31
While the idea of exhibiting emotional restraint while disciplining enslaved people was especially widespread in the emotionally focused sentimental period, this was not new advice. Thomas Jefferson shared similar cautions about emotional mastery, recommending that slaveholders “restrain” their “passion towards his slave,” especially in front of children of the planter class. He believed that all too often parents ignored this, giving free rein to their “storms” of “wrath.”32 Jefferson’s concern was that displays of unchecked emotion were more than unseemly: they were contagious and could infect a future generation of slaveholders. McTyeire was more apprehensive about external critics than internal impacts of such punishments, arguing that emotionless modes of discipline could stave off “mawkish” debates with “sentimental” critics of physical coercion, namely abolitionists. In either case the message was clear: to control enslaved people, a slaveholder needed to control their own emotions, particularly anger.
But the master who exhibited emotional control when punishing enslaved people was an ideal conjured up by proslavery authors and planters in order to defend the institution of slavery; this restraint was not reflected in the daily practices of slaveholders and their proxies. Prescriptive literature may have advised members of the plantocracy to exercise emotional restraint, particularly when disciplining enslaved people, but the recollections of formerly enslaved people highlight how commonly and brutally those precepts were ignored. Charles Ball would never forget the day his slave mistress arrived on her husband’s newly built plantation and promptly whipped an enslaved woman when the mistress’s baby “cried, and could not be kept silent” by the enslaved nursemaid. Though the beating was intended to punish the enslaved woman for being unable to subdue the baby, Ball believed that the whipping instead revealed that the “mistress possessed no control over her passions.”33 Airing their passions could have a price. Stroyer gave an example, noting that some slaveowners asked slave hunters to return fugitives “unbruised,” but others, “in a mad fit of passion,” told would-be slave catchers “‘bring my runaway nigger home, dead or alive.’”34 In Stroyer’s view, savvy planters did not allow their emotions to reign at the cost of injury to their bonded property, but, crazed by “passion,” other slaveholders demanded corporeal punishment to sate their anger, leading them to potentially devalue or even lose their enslaved human investment. In an age in which emotional control was so highly valued Stroyer may have been trying to highlight how unreasonable slaveholders were, particularly if they allowed their impractical “passions” to outweigh their economic self-interests, while denigrating their ability to master their own feelings.
Those who had experienced the whip knew all too well that slaveholders did not merely punish enslaved people while they were upset, they did so because they felt that way. Solomon Northup observed that the people enslaved by his master, Epps, were as likely to be punished for how Epps felt as for an actual offense. Northup claimed that Epps was frequently felled by “periods of ill-humor,” and during these moods a “trivial … cause was sufficient with him for resorting to the whip.”35 Knowing that slaveholders were inclined to exorcise their feelings through the lash, enslaved people learned to be watchful for slaveholders’ fits of anger or “ill-humor.” James W. C. Pennington warned about the direct impact of slaveholders’ vacillating moods on enslaved people’s lives, observing in his slave narrative that “to-day you may be pampered by his meekness, but to-morrow you will suffer in the storm of his passions.”36 Stroyer witnessed such a “storm of … passions” when a local slaveholder became “fretful and peevish” after he was cheated out of a great deal of money by a business partner. The other enslaved people on the plantation were uneasy about the financial loss, both because they realized that they served as the “security” backing the investment and because they knew “slaveholders would revenge themselves on the slaves whenever they became angry.”37
In the pages of trade journals slaveholders publicly exhorted other members of the slavocracy to keep their feelings in check, particularly when disciplining enslaved people, but Douglass surmised that some slaveholders deliberately promoted the idea that they would lash out in anger as a different sort of managerial strategy. According to Douglass, some slaveholders worked to “convince” enslaved people that while an overseer might not mete out punishment in anger, that their owners’ “wrath is far more terrible and boundless, and vastly more to be dreaded, than that of the underling overseer.” Douglass knew firsthand that this was more than an idle threat, noting that if a slaveholder let their “temper be stirred” and their “passions get loose” then that slaveholder would inevitably “go far beyond the overseer in cruelty.”38 Douglass implied that slaveholders sometimes deployed intermediaries, whether it was overseers, jailors, or law enforcement agents, in order to whip enslaved people for minor crimes, but also to maintain the perception that masters only personally wielded the lash when overcome by emotions, thus ensuring that their floggings went “far beyond” the supposedly comparatively dispassionate punishment of an overseer. Ultimately slaveholders believed this helped them maintain control of the enslaved population by fostering a climate of fear, and it encouraged enslaved people to avoid angering their owners at all costs.
But there could be downsides for slaveholders who propagated the perception that they were cruel and quick to anger. When a slaveholder debated using corporeal punishment, often they were thinking not of venting their rage, jealousy, or desire, but of protecting their pride and honor, as being known as physically brutal could damage their reputation with fellow slaveholders and enslaved people.39 As an 1852 article on hiring out enslaved people observed, “harsh discipline … is repugnant to the feelings of every refined nature.”40 Even if the stated disapproval of “harsh discipline” was feigned in order to refute abolitionists’ criticisms of slavery, the suggestion that anyone who wanted to claim they possessed “refined” “feelings” disavowed such punishments highlights once more the defining part emotions played in disciplining enslaved people. Slaveholders were not just punishing enslaved people for how those in bondage felt: slaveowners were crafting a public image of their own emotional life. Douglass theorized that some slaveholders even tempered whippings or avoided them altogether because they did not want to be known locally as “a cruel master.” Douglass averred that only a truly “desperate slaveholder” would risk the “shame” and “odium” of their peers by beating their slaves so violently that their neighbors could hear.41 Indeed, one Virginia court ruled in 1827 that additional laws prohibiting the abuse of enslaved people were not necessary because “the tribunal of public opinion … will not fail to award to the offender its deep and solemn reprobation.”42 Like the 1852 Southern Planter article mentioned above, this judgment assumed a collective understanding of a standard of treatment of enslaved people as well as a widespread belief that the court of public opinion policed norms for slaveholders.
Physical punishments were particularly visible and audible and were thus harder to conceal from the scrutiny of one’s peers, a phenomenon Harriet Jacobs knew all too well. Her owner, Dr. Flint, “had never punished” her directly and would not allow anybody else to punish” her, even though Jacobs knew that his wife frequently urged him to. According to Jacobs, this amnesty from physical punishments was not due to mercy or kindness, but rather because he was afraid of what Jacobs might say, fearing that resorting to “the lash might have led to remarks that would have exposed him in the eyes of his children and grandchildren.”43 Because Flint was concerned about his relationship with Jacobs being made public, and because he hoped to avoid being shamed before his loved ones, Jacobs escaped whippings but was still subjected to affective discipline.
Though slaveholders first and foremost considered their own emotional state when weighing which forms of punishment to deploy, there were ultimately few consequences if one was a “cruel master.” As this chapter shows, enslaved people could be punished for failing to suppress their own emotions, or punished for how a slaveholder felt, but despite injunctions against disciplining in anger, slaveholders faced no legal consequences for affective intemperance, even if it resulted in homicide. A law passed in South Carolina in 1821 stated that it was a felony to plan to murder an enslaved person but that “killing” an enslaved person “in sudden heat and passion is the same as manslaughter,” a lesser charge.44 Journals and other proslavery essays might outline emotional norms for slaveholders, but laws like those in South Carolina effectively decriminalized killing an enslaved person if one claimed it was affectively motivated. The same anger and “passion” that slaveholders were cautioned against enacting on enslaved bodies were also their ticket to acquittal should their emotions prove deadly.
Provoking Enslaved Emotions
While members of the plantocracy debated whether affective discipline was more efficient and instructive than corporeal punishment, and the role of their own emotions in punishment, sources show that slaveholders often used physical discipline toward affective ends, with the goal of curbing or provoking individual or collective emotions in enslaved people. Henry Bibb remarked that the whip was used in the slave yard in order “to make the slaves anxious to be sold.”45 Physical violence was occasionally used as a deterrent and to give weight to another tool in slaveholders’ affective armory: threats. Focusing on affective discipline, and its relation to physical punishment, demonstrates the extent to which members of the planter class relied on intimidation and cultivating fear in order to maintain slavery. Slave patrols, for example, often used corporeal violence, but they were also known to threaten to beat an enslaved person, only to let them go, terrified but physically unharmed. This was done not out of mercy or clemency, but with the intention of heightening enslaved people’s fears of the patrols and of what would happen if they were caught committing a second offense.46 Some slaveholders believed that physical and emotional discipline were both tools for governing enslaved people. Douglass commented that Thomas Auld, his master, was “incapable of managing his slaves either by force, fear or fraud.”47 In Douglass’s view fear was one of several ways to “manag[e]” or affectively discipline slaves, but it was often used alongside bodily “force” and bullying.
Individual slaveholders also relied on the threat of physical cruelty or labor to instill certain emotions in enslaved people. Jacobs remembered that when she was resisting Dr. Flint’s sexual advances he threatened to send Jacobs and her children to a plantation where they would all be forced to do grueling manual labor. Flint stated that the strenuous work would correct her “feelings” which “were entirely above [her] situation.”48 This functioned as affective discipline on two levels. First, the possibility of hard labor was supposed to intimidate her into compliance by inducing fear and anxiety for her children. Moreover, he implied that the drudgery was meant as an affective punishment, rather than a physical one, as the work was meant to rectify her emotions, which were inappropriate for an enslaved woman. In this way he hoped to simultaneously discipline her feelings and to punish her through emotions.
Some members of the planter class were more explicit when justifying why physical and emotional punishment worked best concomitantly. Enslaved people recognized that slaveholders deployed this two-pronged affective attack, which only served to make them mistrustful of any emotional overtures by a master. Jacobs explained that Dr. Flint wielded a variety of methods to make his slaves do as he pleased, several of which relied on emotions for implementation and impact. According to Jacobs, “Sometimes he had stormy, terrific ways, that made his victims tremble; sometimes he assumed a gentleness that he thought must surely subdue.” For Flint, fear and affection were two sides of the same coin and should be used in concert to exert control over the people he enslaved. Interestingly, Jacobs vowed that between the two affective expressions, “I preferred his stormy moods, although they left me trembling.”49
Corporeal punishment could be used or foreshadowed in order to incite certain emotions in enslaved people, but it was also introduced at other times to discipline enslaved people who expressed feelings that were deemed unacceptable. In the slave South the myth of the happy slave was more than an idealized figure valorized by slaveholders: it was a cudgel for enslaved people who dared to feel or express anything less than contentment on a slaveowner-prescribed emotional continuum from happy to furious. Enslaved people were well aware that if they wanted to avoid punishment they needed to censor any emotions on that spectrum that slaveholders viewed as objectionable, undesirable, or even threatening. Moses Grandy wrote that “slaves are under fear in every word they speak,” anxious to avoid any “expression of discontent” lest they be whipped.50 Similarly, Madison Jefferson recalled that when his sister was sold his family was disconsolate, “but … they were obliged to conceal their grief from their oppressors” because if their owner “caught them crying” the grieving family would be punished further.51
No matter how much “discontent” or “grief” they felt, enslaved people could not publicly articulate that sadness if they wanted to avoid a physical punishment. Nor was sorrow the only problematic feeling that needed to be suppressed; expressing “insolence,” anger, hatred, or sorrow could get an enslaved person whipped for being an emotional outlier.52 Beating an unhappy enslaved person would not make them any more contented, or reduce their hatred or anger toward their owner, but such punishments had far-reaching impacts. Flogging an enslaved person who dared to display an emotion that slaveholders considered inappropriate served as an immediate punishment for the individual who transgressed the affective norms of slavery, and it might prevent them from openly displaying an array of offensive feelings in the future.
Whipping enslaved people who expressed inappropriate emotions was also intended to have a chilling effect on the broader enslaved community, enforcing the internal boundaries of the emotional politics of slavery by reminding enslaved people that they were under ubiquitous affective surveillance, so they needed to maintain constant self-censorship. The physical punishment of an individual enslaved person could have a communal impact by invoking fear in the enslaved populace in general. Douglass observed that slaveholders often targeted one enslaved person for “especial abuse” and frequent beatings, not because they believed it would “improve” that person but because of the whipping’s “effect upon others.”53 This was sometimes done in a highly public forum, to maximize the number of enslaved witnesses who were impacted.54 This is exemplified by a story Frederick Law Olmsted shared about an enslaved man who was publicly executed for allegedly bludgeoning his owner to death. The enslaved man was “roasted” over “a slow fire,” purportedly at the site of the murder, in front of an audience of “many thousand slaves” brought in “from all the adjoining counties” by their owners for the express purpose of making them watch the man be tortured to death. Afterward the enslaved man’s ashes were “scattered to the winds and trampled underfoot,” and the enslaved people in attendance were forced to listen to preachers share cautionary speeches meant to deter them from killing their own masters. Only one enslaved man had been executed, but it is impossible to quantify the emotional toll of that gruesome spectacle, or how effective fear was in policing the future behavior and feelings of the enslaved observers who were present that day.55
An enslaved person did not have to kill their owner in order to be considered a mortal threat to the collective affective order of the South, thus earning a public execution. Douglass watched one day as an enslaved man named Demby was shot dead in front of many enslaved people because he was deemed to be “unmanageable” and disobedient. According to the overseer, killing Demby was necessary because “he had set a dangerous example,” asserting that “if one slave refused to be corrected” and did not face consequences, the rest would follow suit, which would invariably lead to “the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites.”56 This speaks volumes about how punishments, especially exaggerated and public punishments, reflected the fears of slaveholders. Demby was ostensibly murdered to teach the other enslaved people on the Auld plantation a lesson, but it was also meant to stave off White anxieties about slave rebellions, race war, and an end to the White supremacy that they maintained with an iron fist.
The fact that physical punishments were often accompanied by affective discipline indicates that some members of the planter class felt that bodily pain was insufficient. Grandy noted that “many mistresses will insist on the slave who has been flogged begging pardon for her fault on her knees and thanking her for the correction.”57 Clearly it was not enough for an enslaved person to be physically punished for a perceived infraction: they must also ingratiate themselves to their owner in a ritual of shame, forgiveness, and submission. Douglass experienced this firsthand under the tenure of his former overseer, Mr. Gore, who he said “was just proud enough to demand the most debasing homage” from enslaved people.58 Douglass believed that Gore was driven to discipline because of his own feelings of pride, which “demand[ed]” that enslaved people show him respect. This illustrates that members of the planter class used a combination of physical and affective punishments both to kindle certain feelings in enslaved people and to curate their own emotions, in order to feel “proud,” revered, or feared.59
According to Douglass, Gore wanted to be seen as a capable overseer, and he wanted to command respect in the enslaved laborers he oversaw. Evidently Gore, like many members of the plantocracy, believed that the best way to dominate and correct enslaved people was by eliciting certain emotions, including fear (of physical harm or loss of loved ones), awe, anxiety, pride, and shame.60 Gore was embodying the recommendation laid out in a Southern Planter article titled “All About Overseers,” that a good overseer must be able to “secure the respect as well as the fear of the negro.”61 The Douglass, Jacobs, and Olmsted sources shed light on how many slaveholders and overseers followed the latter advice, using threats or violence to evoke fear in an individual enslaved person or in the general enslaved population. Another Southern Planter author advised stimulating different feelings in order to discipline enslaved people. The contributor to the widely read journal warned overseers against relying too heavily on fear tactics, declaring that one should “never threaten a negro” because it might backfire, as “a violent and passionate threat will often scare the best disposed negro” to run away. Instead of inspiring terror, and possibly losing a valuable enslaved person or their productivity, the author surmised that the best way to discipline enslaved people was to humiliate them by placing them in “the stocks.”62 A Florida slaveholder agreed, bragging in a treatise on slavery that in his decades as a slaveholder he “hardly ever had to apply other correction than shaming” the men and women he enslaved.63
Slaveholders sought to elicit a number of emotions in order to affectively discipline the enslaved, but one of the most common methods for instilling fear in an enslaved person, or punishing them with sorrow, was to disrupt or destabilize their family. Douglass argued that when a slaveholder mentioned selling an enslaved person it was usually as a “threat,” meant as “punishment of a crime.”64 The specter of the auction block was all the more terrifying for enslaved people who might be sold away from family members.65 Other slaveowners took advantage of family bonds to enact discipline by beating, starving, or selling the family of an enslaved person, rather than the enslaved person themselves. This method was often used to punish runaways, but affective discipline via the family was also frequently utilized to punish enslaved women, usually to intimidate them into sexual relations.
Of course, manipulating the family relations of enslaved people as a form of affective discipline ran counter to proslavery arguments that enslaved people were fundamentally emotionally limited. Proslavery author George Sawyer swore that “the negro race” lacked the “emotions of parental and kindred attachment,” while formerly enslaved man Lewis Hayden recalled a Presbyterian minister who preached to an audience of slaveholders that “there was no more harm in separating a family of slaves than a litter of pigs.”66 In spite of claims made in essays and from pulpits that enslaved people felt emotions less intensely, and could not forge strong family ties, enslaved people’s relationships became a primary site of affective discipline. Once again proslavery rhetoric and White supremacist ideology were contradicted by the daily actions of slaveholders who sought to exert power over enslaved people and their emotions.
How enslaved people’s familial feelings could be used as a mode of punishment was thrown into stark relief in situations where physical control was not or could not be used. When Bibb and his family were being sold down river to New Orleans there were times when his hands were not bound, even when the ship was docked at port. According to Bibb this was not because his captors trusted him to stay, as he was a notorious escape artist, but because his master “was not … afraid of [Bibb] running away” because the slaveholder still had Bibb’s family. The slaveholder knew that Bibb’s “attachment was too strong to run off,” even if the opportunity arose. This was, in fact, one of the reasons the slaveholder kept the Bibb family together, rather than immediately selling Bibb’s wife and daughter to punish Bibb. The slaveowner did not even hesitate to allow Bibb to explore New Orleans unfettered because the slaveholder kept Bibb’s wife locked up while the enslaved man walked the city streets searching for someone to buy him and his family.67 In this way the slaveowner demonstrated that he believed that Bibb’s love for his wife and child chained him more effectively than literal bonds could. Or perhaps the slaveholder feared that if he sold Bibb’s family he would have no more sway over the recalcitrant enslaved man and thus no other means of subduing him.
Bibb’s owner held his family captive to keep Bibb from escaping, but other slaveholders threatened more aggressive punishments for the families of fugitives in order to discourage runaways. As Pennington struggled with whether to flee, thoughts of his parents and siblings gave him pause. It was “heartaching” to think of leaving them, not only because he feared he would never see them again, but because he worried that if he escaped they would be punished by being “sold off as a disaffected family,” a practice he knew was common when a family member ran away. This was affective discipline in all its ruthless efficiency, as selling a runaway’s loved ones simultaneously punished fugitives and their families and no doubt deterred other enslaved people from escaping. Unable to discipline Pennington physically if he ran away, his owner could still punish him emotionally by vicariously selling Pennington’s family. Tainted by Pennington’s disobedience, his parents and siblings would be deemed emotionally contaminated, labeled as “disaffected,” and sold as devalued and dangerous property. Filled with fear that his loved ones would bear the brunt of his choice to escape, Pennington initially dismissed the idea, but in the end he fled North and his family was sold to a planter in Virginia.68 Though Pennington decided to run away it is likely that not all enslaved people who weighed the risks to themselves and those they loved made the same decision. That he debated escaping, and the impact it would have on his family, for so long exhibits the chilling effect punishing fugitives’ families had on the enslaved population as a whole. While he ultimately decided to run away, knowing full well the consequences for his family, it cannot be estimated how many enslaved people balanced their longing for freedom against concerns for their loved ones and then elected not to escape.
Gendering Affective Discipline
Affective discipline was employed to keep enslaved people in line and to prevent them from running away, but it was also a gendered punishment, frequently engaged to threaten or punish enslaved women in order to compel sexual relations. Many slaveholders and overseers comprehended that a woman who was isolated from her parents, spouse, or children might be more vulnerable to their sexual predations.69 Not long after coming to one of her husband’s Georgia plantations, Fanny Kemble wrote about an enslaved woman she met named Judy, who recounted tales of abuse at the hands of the plantation overseer, Mr. King. After rebuffing his sexual advances King “flogged her severely” for refusing to yield, before he “sent her off, as a further punishment, to Five Pound,” a separate, remote plantation where she claimed slaves were “sometimes banished.” Judy conceded that as “bad as the flogging was, she would sooner have taken that again than the dreadful lonely days and nights she spent on the penal swamp of Five Pound.”70 Like Brown and Douglass, Judy had experienced both physical and affective discipline, and she concluded that punishments that targeted her emotions were worse to endure. Judy’s account also stresses the gendered aspects of affective discipline. As the most frequent targets of sexual harassment and assault, enslaved women were faced with two terrifying options: succumb to their owner or overseer, or face temporary or permanent exile from their loved ones.
An 1860 letter from a Maryland planter named T. D. Jones to an enslaved woman named Eliza is a harrowing example of a slaveholder selling an enslaved person as punishment rather than for profit, and it shows how this was used to affectively discipline enslaved women who resisted an owner’s desires. In the biting letter Jones wrote that he had sold Eliza away from her daughter Jennie because he believed Eliza to be “ungrateful” and untrustworthy. However, over the course of the letter he insinuated that he had actually separated Eliza from her young daughter to punish Eliza for an unspecified emotional slight that he believed she had committed. Eliza had previously written to inquire about her daughter, “expressing the hope” that her master would permit Jennie to come live with her. Eliza longed for her daughter enough to write to her former owner, but his letter was calculated to make Eliza feel the pangs of separation all the more deeply. Jones blithely announced that he had read the letter to Jennie, adding that Jennie “seemed glad to hear from … Aunt Liza … (as she calls you).” Nevertheless, he replied that Jennie herself “doesn’t want to go away from her master.” In his response the tension of their affective tug-of-war was palpable, as was his desire to inflict heartache. The slaveholder first emphasized how little Eliza meant to her daughter, noting that Eliza was no longer referred to as “mother,” but as the more cordial “Aunt Liza,” before telling Eliza that her own daughter allegedly preferred to stay with her owner rather than be reunited with her mother. It is uncertain if these were Jennie’s words or desires, if she felt impelled to say that she would rather stay with Jones, or if the entire conversation was fabricated to hurt Eliza. What was crystal clear to both author and reader was that the decision of whether to allow Jennie to go was in Jones’s hands, and that he was magnifying his power over her family in order to inflict maximum emotional pain.71
Throughout the letter Jones reveled in his influence over Jennie’s fate, drawing out Eliza’s suspense by bemoaning that he could “hardly make up [his] mind,” and that he “would be reluctant to part with her,” as he would “miss her very much” if she left. His equivocating was calibrated to affectively provoke Eliza, contrasting Jones’s control over the situation and her own powerlessness. While putting distance between Eliza and her daughter, he mentioned that he knew “how to estimate the claims of a mother” and could “appreciate the affection of a mother for her child.” However, his unwillingness to part with Jennie shows that he had put a price on these “claims” and found the cost to be too high. His professed attempt at empathy served only to accentuate how he had undermined Jennie and Eliza’s relationship.72
The slaveholder’s punitive motives for keeping Eliza in a state of apprehension about her daughter became even clearer as he repeatedly referred to how Eliza had injured his own feelings. First, Jones disclosed that in an earlier letter Eliza had “made no inquiry after [his own] welfare” and wondered if this omission was deliberate, prompted by “indignation or malice” because he had sold her. He contrasted her churlishness with his own past behavior, insisting that she should “acknowledge that [he] was a kind and forbearing master” while she was “an ungrateful servant” who had been disloyal. Jones twisted his affective knife even deeper, opining that if Eliza had acted “faithfully” then he would not have sold her, as “no offer would have tempted” him to “part with” her. In doing so he placed the responsibility for her heartbreak solely on her own shoulders. Jones did not say how Eliza had acted disloyally, but he confessed that selling her away from her daughter was a punishment for her great betrayal, as Eliza’s “tender affections” and care to his sick wife “created in [him] an attachment for [Eliza] that nothing but [her] ingratitude and faithlessness could have broken.” He closed the letter by reiterating how he felt about her, perhaps because of the “attachment” he still had for her, or perhaps in order to make Eliza feel guilty. Jones’s many attempts to hurt Eliza’s feelings throughout the letter hinted at his own cruelty and pain and at his motives for selling Eliza. By continuing to keep her away from her daughter he proved that he did not just want to sell Eliza: he wanted to sever her ties to her daughter, and then contrast her estrangement with her daughter with his own close bond with Jennie. That Jones wrote this lengthy missive at all exemplifies how much his mission was affective discipline. It did not suffice to separate Eliza from her daughter; Jones wanted to exacerbate Eliza’s grief by lashing out at her in writing, making her experience the pain that he believed he had felt.73
By alluding to his strong ties to Jennie, Jones also forced Eliza (and any other reader of the letter) to question the nature of his relationship with her daughter and the extent of his past relations with Eliza. According to Jones, one of the reasons why he was “reluctant” to let Jennie leave was, he told Eliza, “She is petted as you used to be. She is a watchful little spy as you used to be.”74 Maybe Eliza merely served as a nurse to Jones’s invalid wife, or maybe Jones’s anger over Eliza’s supposed disloyalty signals that they had had a sexual relationship, or that he had felt a romantic “attachment” to the enslaved woman. Whatever the tenor of their relationship, it was close enough for Jones to feel slighted by Eliza. In this light, his remarks about Jennie being “petted” just as Eliza had been might have been intended to show that Jennie had privileged status in the Jones household, including a pampered lifestyle that Eliza could never provide. Or perhaps Jones referred to physical petting, thus implying to Eliza that he was planning to sexually assault her daughter. What is clear is the gendered nature of this mode of affective discipline, as Jones exploited Eliza’s maternal feelings, invoked past memories of his treatment of her, and threatened her daughter with similar abuse.
Enslaved women who were targets of slaveholders’ sexual assault and harassment also faced affective discipline if they dared to show affection for any man that was not their owner. Jacobs devoted much of her narrative of her time in slavery to describing the constant sexual harassment she suffered at the hands of her owner, Dr. Flint, and the methods he used to try to coerce sexual relations. He vacillated between bullying her and cajoling her, but the campaign of affective discipline intensified after he heard that she was in love with a free Black man. After learning this, Flint hit her, which Jacobs noted “was the first time he had ever struck” her, but most of his disciplinary methods relied on inducing fear. First, he tried scaring her, vowing that he would kill her or jail her. He also warned that he would force her to do back-breaking field labor, but according to Jacobs Flint was reluctant to follow through with this promise because of his “jealousy of the overseer.” Finally, Flint resorted to trying to distance Jacobs from her lover and her family, stating that he planned to move to Louisiana and that he would bring her with him. In the end Flint succeeded in driving Jacobs and her lover apart, as she told the man to leave her and go North so that he could be truly free of the grasp of slavery. The effect of his departure was devastating for Jacobs, who remembered that once he left her “lamp of hope had gone out … [and she] felt lonely and desolate.”75 This illustrated that affective discipline could be used to compel emotions, but not always in a precise fashion. The jealous Flint had hoped to scare Jacobs into submission; instead he was the cause of her bitter heartache.
Douglass recounted the tragic treatment of an enslaved woman named Esther who was also punished when she “was courted” by an enslaved man named Edward. Their owner, Colonel Lloyd, set out to destroy “the growing intimacy” developing between Esther and Edward because of his own desire for Esther, demanding that she not see the enslaved man any more. Like Jacobs, Esther initially refused, and they carried on their courtship in secret. When Lloyd learned that their liaison continued, he felt “abhorred” by Esther and could no longer conceal “his rage.” One morning Lloyd stripped her to the waist, bound her wrists, and whipped her ferociously. Douglass saw the beating through slots in the wall, watching as Lloyd took his time lashing her, appearing “delighted” by the task. Esther begged for mercy, but Douglass worried that her cries “seemed only to increase his fury.”76
Though his primary mode of disciplining Esther was the whip, once again a slaveholder’s goal was to punish an enslaved person both for the emotions they had expressed and for how the enslaved person had made their owner feel. Her crime was not only that she had loved Edward, or “abhorred” Lloyd, but rather that she had made Lloyd feel acute jealousy, rage, and rejection. Perhaps beating her brought Lloyd perverse “delight,” or satisfied his thirst for revenge, or perhaps it only distracted him so that he did not have to acknowledge how he felt or the profound influence Esther had over his emotions. With every lash Lloyd was reasserting power over someone who had shaped his emotions, with a punishment meant to fit the perceived affective crime.
Resisting Affective Discipline
Affective modes of discipline were popular with the plantocracy, but enslaved people developed a number of responses to this method of discipline and domination. One way that enslaved people did this was by forging strong bonds with family and community in the face of a system that worked relentlessly to destroy or manipulate those kinship ties. That support network helped enslaved people endure and even challenge the vicissitudes of slavery.77 But slave narratives highlight other ways that enslaved people actively resisted affective modes of discipline. This included refusing to stop expressing emotions, even when punished for doing so; defying slaveholders’ attempts to incite a specific emotion; and taking advantage of how affective discipline was applied.
Since enslaved people were often affectively disciplined for expressing emotions that slaveholders deemed transgressive or otherwise undesirable, one way that enslaved people challenged this system of emotional correction and censorship was by refusing to suppress their rebellious feelings. While in the slave market awaiting transport, Northup encountered a woman named Eliza who, much to the chagrin of the slave traders, was heartbroken after having been sold away from her children. Eliza was repeatedly chastised by the traders for being “a blubbering, bawling wench” and was whipped for sobbing in front of customers. The limits of affective discipline became evident, as the slave merchants could think of no other way to punish a mother who had already been separated from her children. When beatings failed to staunch her tears, one slave trader could do little more than demand that she stop weeping or “he would soon give her something to cry about.” Having seen that the lash could not dispel her anguish the slave traders had no other recourse but threats, which had no effect on Eliza’s grief.78
Though Eliza managed to be sold, she continued to resist all efforts to censor her sorrow or command her fear. Northup recalled that when their new owner saw how inconsolable Eliza was, the slaveholder could not conceal his “regret at having bought her” to be a house slave. In his appraising eyes Eliza was depreciating in value by giving free rein to her emotions, sorrow in particular. The slaveowner’s reaction reveals that enslaved people’s feelings directly impacted their worth and productivity. And indeed, as Eliza grew increasingly despondent, her work began to suffer. According to Northup, Eliza also displeased their mistress by being “more occupied in brooding over her sorrows than in attending to her business” and as a result she was sent to do field work. The change did nothing to mitigate Eliza’s expressions of heartbreak, and eventually she was sold “for a trifle” to another man. She continued to decline emotionally and physically, as Northup lamented that “grief had gnawed remorselessly at her heart, until her strength was gone.” Because of the effect her agony had on her work, her new master beat her severely, but Northup observed that nothing could “whip back the departed vigor” and health she possessed before her children were taken from her.79 The traders in the market, and each subsequent owner, were explicit that the punishments would stop if she checked her despair, but still Eliza refused. Once Eliza had been deprived of her children she had nothing left to lose, which meant slave traders and slaveholders had lost their most reliable method for disciplining an enslaved person: emotional leverage.
Since members of the planter class often applied affective discipline in order to arouse fear, heartbreak, sorrow, or shame in enslaved people, when enslaved people openly flouted attempts to provoke their emotions it was a form of resistance and an assertion of their personhood.80 After Jacobs’s Uncle Benjamin was caught running away, his owner declared that he would make an “example” of Benjamin by detaining him “in jail until he was subdued, or … sold.” Benjamin had been imprisoned for months when passersby heard him singing and laughing in his jail cell. Jacobs explained that his “indecorum” was reported to Benjamin’s owner, who requested that the enslaved man be chained up in his cell. For the act of exhibiting unrepentant joy while incarcerated, he was shackled, proof of how threatening that laughter was to the planter status quo and how little power the slaveholder had over Benjamin’s feelings. Still not contrite, Benjamin diligently “worked at his chains” until he was able to slip out of them, before dropping the manacles out the window and asking that they be sent to his owner. By emphasizing that he could not be physically restrained, Benjamin was underscoring that he could not be emotionally chained either. The more Benjamin resisted the dual affective discipline of prison and of slavery the more his owner sought to “subdue” him, trying to chain the body of a man who was already in a jail cell since he could not shackle Benjamin’s laughter.81
Jacobs also blatantly refused to be emotionally coerced by her owner’s punishments or threats. Attempting to scare Jacobs into compliance, Flint asked her if she realized that he had the “right” to kill her at any time. Instead of inspiring fear, as Flint had hoped, Jacobs brazenly responded that she “wish[ed]” he would kill her, then challenged his assertion that he could, in fact, “do as you like.” He replied with another threat, asking her how she would feel about being imprisoned for her “insolence.” This also backfired, as she retorted that at least in jail “there would be more peace … than there is here.”82 Only then did Flint back down, realizing that he could not provoke the emotions in her that he desired. Like Benjamin, Jacobs could not be made to feel fear or contrition, and she would not quell her “insolen[t]” feelings.
Some enslaved people may even have taken advantage of their knowledge of affective discipline, exploiting the fact that “disaffected” and disrespectful slaves were typically swiftly sold to escape their owner, or slavery more generally. Sella Martin had a number of owners during his time in bondage, including a couple that resided outside of New Orleans. Longing to live in the city, where he believed he could more easily escape to freedom, Martin decided to sow discord with his owner’s wife in the hopes that he would be sold as a “disaffected” slave. Martin set about “constantly quarrelling with her” in order to “provoke” his master “either to sell” him or release him from a “vigilance” that was “standing in the way” of his “plans for escape.” Martin bickered with the woman until he “succeeded” and was then sold to a man in New Orleans.83 This was a victory for Martin, paving the way for his eventual escape up the Mississippi River, but he was also clearly proud of having manipulated relations with his owners so expertly.
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Physically brutal forms of punishment have long been the focus of historians of slavery, but that overlooks how discipline in the antebellum South was fundamentally shaped by emotions. Only through examining the less visible but no less damaging forms of affective discipline, and how physical and emotional discipline were used in concert, can scholars hope to more fully understand the lived experiences of enslaved people and the variety of ways that power operates through emotions. Enslaved people were punished for how they felt, punished for how slaveholders felt about them, and punished for daring to express emotions deemed rebellious. Proslavery authors may have claimed that enslaved people felt emotions less acutely, or lacked strong family bonds, but they were quick to punitively induce emotions by harming or selling an enslaved person’s loved ones. Attention to the critical function emotions played in discipline provides insight into the daily interactions and abuses of slavery, and the specific ways that punishment was gendered, as well as how enslaved people endured and resisted emotional modes of correction.
Slaveholders’ historic reliance on specifically affective modes of discipline was made abundantly clear after the Civil War. The post-Emancipation South was uncharted emotional waters for former slaveowners, who found themselves flummoxed by Black people whose feelings were now ostensibly out of their control. No longer able to whip a proud or angry enslaved person, or to quell or compel certain feelings with the emotional bludgeon of the auction block, members of the planter class were forced to find new methods to maintain the emotional politics of slavery. Meanwhile formerly enslaved people who had endured emotional methods of correction were more than ready to cast off those affective constraints to exercise their newfound emotional freedom.