CHAPTER 6

“Enjoying Freedom”

As a free resident of New York who was kidnapped into slavery, Solomon Northup knew what it meant to be free and what it felt like to be robbed of that liberty. Northup later recounted the experience of being taken captive in Washington, DC, the home of a government that was ostensibly founded on “man’s inalienable right to life, LIBERTY and the pursuit of happiness!,” dryly noting, “Hail, Columbia, happy land indeed.”¹ Though he highlighted the irony of being enslaved in a town meant to represent “liberty,” he also emphasized the hypocrisy of the supposedly universal right to the “pursuit of happiness,” by sarcastically referring to Washington as “happy … indeed.”² Nor was Northup alone in seeing the link between liberty and emotional freedom. Throughout his narrative Northup was emphatic that even people who had been born and raised in slavery understood the meaning of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and that “ninety-nine out of every hundred” people in bondage yearned for those rights.³ Furthermore, he contended that enslaved people fully comprehended the rights and responsibilities that came with freedom, and that liberty would “secure to them the enjoyment of domestic happiness.”⁴ According to Northup, enslaved people were well aware that freedom and their ability to “enjoy … happiness” were inextricably tied.

The writings of historians and formerly enslaved people alike reveal that the “enjoyment of freedom” was the overarching goal for many enslaved people.⁵ Authors of slave narratives portrayed their dreams of “enjoying freedom” and of liberty as something to be “enjoyed.”⁶ Henry Bibb shared how much he “should like to enjoy freedom and happiness” with his wife and child, while Jacob Stroyer lamented the fate of enslaved people who died right before Emancipation, those who had come so close to “freedom but not living to enjoy it.”⁷ Notably they did not say that freedom was something to be possessed, or exercised; it was a right that was woven into the very fabric of happiness: to be free was to be able to pursue happiness, and great joy was derived from freedom. This language appeared in legal documents as well. Enslaved people who were manumitted in Louisiana were promised their “liberty, to have and to enjoy the same from this day henceforth.”⁸ The phrase was frequently found in court cases involving enslaved people and free Black people. A woman who claimed she was a free person who had been kidnapped and enslaved was described as having “been in the enjoyment of her freedom” for many years, but false enslavement had denied her this right.⁹

All these sources demonstrate that in the minds of enslaved people and formerly enslaved people, and in a court of law, freedom was fundamentally linked to joy, and the right to seek and expect happiness was a crucial component of freedom. In his groundbreaking work on the history of emotions, William Reddy defines “emotional liberty” both as the ability of a person to experiment with different emotional goals and expressions, and as a measure of the freedom of a given society. In his view, a society that allows for “emotional liberty” will permit and even encourage individuals to engage in affective “self-exploration,” while repressive societies, like the antebellum South, allow only a limited range of emotions and will punish affective transgressors.¹⁰ Thus Emancipation was not just a civic transformation, from slave to citizen, but an emotional metamorphosis as well.

Since the feelings and affective norms of antebellum society were predicated on slavery, widespread Emancipation was a seismic shift in the emotional terrain of the South. As a result, conflicts arose between free Black people and White Southerners over what the postslavery affective norms of the South would be, and if they would be radically different from the emotional dynamics that existed under slavery. Debates about whether being emancipated changed how newly freed people felt, and how freedom shaped relations between former slaveholders and enslaved people, began long before the Emancipation Proclamation came to fruition. Members of the planter class saw Black political freedom and emotional liberation as a menace to the affective norms of slavery, so White Southern elites fought to limit manumission, and after Emancipation they worked to maintain the affective relations of bondage. Because of the pressure on enslaved people to enact certain emotions while suppressing others, and because of the constant threats to enslaved families posed by the institution, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people asserted that the freedom of emotional expression denied to them while in bondage was an intrinsic component of liberty and citizenship.

Studying the emotional politics of the Reconstruction South lays bare that emotions continued to be the currency of power between free Black people and White people long after Emancipation. In the wake of war formerly enslaved people found a variety of ways to exercise what Reddy terms “emotional liberty” and to dismantle the emotional restrictions of slavery. Those methods included informing former owners of how their relationships had changed, trying to reunite families divided by slavery, engaging in public emotional performances, and establishing new holidays. But White Southerners, especially former slaveholders, did not respond well to this affective revolution. Threatened by free Black people’s emotional liberation, many White Southerners employed legal and extralegal tactics, including laws and contracts demanding deference, and the use of violence to inspire fear and affectively discipline free Black people, all in an effort to preserve as many of the emotional hierarchies of slavery as possible. This chapter details the power struggles over establishing new affective norms, as well as the long-term impacts of racialized emotional restrictions and expectations in the post-Reconstruction South.

Emotions and Manumission

While many enslaved people and free Black people believed that emancipation meant freedom of emotional expression, many White Southerners thought differently. In the antebellum South, in which affective norms and expectations were based on one’s status as free or enslaved, members of the planter class viewed free Black people as a threat to the social and emotional order of slavery. This was clear in the concerns some elite White Southerners had about relations between White people and free Black people. In his essay “On Slavery,” Thomas Roderick Dew argued that manumission was detrimental to the contentment of masters and enslaved people, as emancipation was “utterly subversive of the interests, security and happiness of both the blacks and whites.”¹¹ Prior to Emancipation slaveholders were particularly apprehensive about how free people of color might influence people who were still enslaved. In a speech published in Southern Planter in 1859 the author cautioned that the free Black population was “injurious” to the “contentment and happiness of the remaining slaves.”¹² These convictions, that abolition would endanger the affective strictures of slavery, were frequently invoked to oppose individual and universal emancipation.

People who had escaped slavery were well aware of how elite White Southerners felt about free Black people. William Craft remarked that the “majority of slaveholders hate” Black people, and that members of the planter class had “no mercy upon, nor sympathy for, any negro whom they cannot enslave.”¹³ Paternalism might have been rooted in the belief that slaveholders could show “sympathy” to enslaved people, but Craft countered that only antipathy was reserved for Black people who existed outside the confines of slavery. In averring that slaveholders were unable to feel “mercy” for those they could “not enslave,” Craft insinuated that slaveholders despised Black people if they could not dictate the terms of their affective relations. Formerly enslaved people also knew how concerned slaveholders were that free people of color would emotionally indoctrinate enslaved people, and how members of the slaveocracy tried to swiftly staunch any signs of free feelings in enslaved people. Harriet Jacobs recalled how her owner, Dr. Flint, threatened to make her perform manual labor because her “feelings were entirely above [her] situation” as a slave.¹⁴ Clearly Flint wanted to remind her of her status and to instill in her how enslaved people were, in his view, supposed to feel. For Flint the appropriate feelings for a person in her “situation” were fear and awe of their owner.

Slaveholders’ fears about the emotional influence of freedom and loss of affective control over the enslaved were concretized in manumission law, and how those laws were implemented. This is evident in a Georgia court case that arose after a slaveowner requested that four enslaved people be freed after his death. The slaveholder’s will was contested in a trial in which the judge cited an 1818 law that the state needed to limit manumissions in order “to prevent a horde of free persons of color, from ravaging the morals, and corrupting the feelings of [the] slaves.”¹⁵ As a result, the four enslaved people were not granted the freedom they had been promised. By attesting that “free persons of color” would invariably “corrupt … the feelings” of “slaves,” the law delineated that members of the planter class thought that free Black people possessed emotions that were not only dangerous but contagious.

To isolate the emotional contaminant of free Black people, some slave states permitted manumission only if a White person testified to the good character of the enslaved person seeking freedom. In 1847 Phillip Moore began the process to free an enslaved woman named Henrietta, as that was his mother’s “dying wish.” He affirmed that Henrietta had steady income as a laundress, and that she had always shown “good conduct” while enslaved; therefore she deserved freedom and would “not abuse its exercise.” But Moore’s word alone was not enough to free Henrietta. An acquaintance of the Moore family who knew Henrietta also testified to her character, saying that he had always “found her honest, well-behaved and industrious.” Four additional people signed statements to this effect.¹⁶ It did not suffice for an enslaved person to be seen as trustworthy and faithful to avoid punishment while in bondage; enslaved people were also expected to uphold the affective dynamics of slavery if they ever hoped to be manumitted. Policy makers and slaveholders clung to the notion that the emotional behavior of an enslaved person could predict affective relations after slavery. They could reassure themselves that anyone who had been faithful and “honest” while enslaved was not dangerous and would not try to corrupt enslaved people once free. Moore’s promise that Henrietta would not “abuse” her freedom also hinted that some members of the planter class believed that other newly freed people had done just that after being manumitted.

This was not the only way in which slaveholders endeavored to safeguard the emotional politics of slavery even after Emancipation. When Louisiana slaveholder Sambo Bellastre freed fifty-year-old Suzanne, the manumission documents stated his wish that she should have “her liberty, to have and to enjoy … in as full, absolute, and complete a manner … as though she had been born free.” In spite of his statement about her supposed “absolute” freedom, and the implication that this legal process was a symbolic renaissance in which Suzanne was declared to be a person “born free,” the ties of master and slave were retained in a “promise” by Bellastre later in the document that in keeping with Louisiana law he would “oblige” himself and his heirs “to nourish and maintain the said Suzanne … whenever she shall be in want owing to sickness, old age, insanity, or any other proved infirmity.”¹⁷ By placing the onus of care on former owners, the state of Louisiana hoped to reduce the financial burden of providing for the indigent, but in doing so they effectively maintained the social obligations and paternalism of slavery.

Other states tried to isolate the contagion of freedom by expelling free Black people entirely. After Lunsford Lane purchased himself he was legally required to leave the state of North Carolina, a painful proposition since his family was still enslaved there. Lane observed that this law, which attempted to sever the bonds between manumitted people and their enslaved loved ones, reflected White resentment of free Black people. Lane protested being “banished,” noting that from the moment he decided to buy his freedom he had intentionally tried “to conduct” himself so that he would not “become obnoxious to the white inhabitants, knowing … their hostility to the colored people.”¹⁸ This underlined that Lane believed that White “hostility” was codified as policy, but also that he hoped that the actions of individual free Black people could repudiate this stereotype and the attendant collective enmity it produced.

Lane was not alone; abolitionists had long warned enslaved people that in order to be treated as citizens formerly enslaved people would need to learn to adopt the feelings and affective behavior of free people. This is exemplified in a 1796 document printed by a Philadelphia-based antislavery society, a message to formerly enslaved people announcing that abolitionists wanted them to “act worthily of the rank [they] have acquired as freemen.” According to the authors, formerly enslaved people could prove they had earned free status through proper social and affective behavior, including being “faithful in all the relations you bear in society, whether as husbands, wives, fathers, children or hired servants … be simple in your dress,” “avoid frolicking, and amusements” that might incite “deserved reproach among your white neighbors,” and always act “in a civil and respectful manner.” If free people followed these injunctions the authors were confident that they could “refute the objections which have been made against you as rational and moral creatures.”¹⁹ Even once free, formerly enslaved people were expected to mute themselves and to maintain a defensive posture, anticipating criticism and precluding conflict.

The pamphlet’s advice to newly freed people sheds light on how some White abolitionists viewed free Black people and their emotions. Cautioning free people to be “faithful” and demure in dress and demeanor suggested that they were seen, even in the North, as prone to disloyalty and excess. The abolitionists intimated that these measures were necessary because people of color were perceived as irrational and immoral, and the only way to disprove that was to learn the appropriate affective norms and practices of freedom. If formerly enslaved people did not practice restraint in their behavior, relationships, and affective displays, then they would, in the author’s view, “deserve … reproach.” All this assumed that White people already held “objections” to free Black people, and that it was the responsibility of the latter, rather than the former, to “refute” these ideas and resentments. Only then would free Black people be deemed “worthy” of their liberty and the rights associated with that freedom. Ultimately all these efforts to curtail the emotional expressions of free Black people, and to control their relationships with White people and enslaved people alike, stressed slaveholders’ deep-seated need to emotionally control those whom they could not legally master.

The Transformative Power of Freedom

Though members of the planter class were determined to maintain the affective norms and practices of slavery for enslaved people and free Black people, this became increasingly difficult after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Some slaveholders perceived affective shifts in enslaved people immediately. Mary Chesnut in particular became obsessed with reading enslaved people’s faces for signs of emotional sea change, and she wondered if any fluctuations in demeanor were proof that enslaved people longed for freedom and Southern defeat. Just weeks after war began she wrote in her diary about “the demoralization produced by hopes of freedom” after an enslaved butler was noticeably distant. His work had not suffered, but he was quieter and “aloof,” not engaging in his “usual … friendly chat.” She compared this marked difference to the butler’s wife, who, Chesnut claimed, “showed no signs of disaffection.”²⁰

The upheaval of war, and the number of enslaved people who took advantage of that disorder to run away, forced many slaveholders to acknowledge that enslaved people might actively resent them. Other members of the planter class found ways to convince themselves that enslaved people remained loyal and loving. Chesnut’s husband, James, assuaged his concerns that enslaved people were “dissatisfied” and planning to escape by going to visit with them. Something in their behavior or manner must have reassured him, as Chesnut reported that her husband returned “charmed” with the enslaved people’s “affection for him” and confident in their lasting fidelity. Chesnut herself sought solace in the idea that the last time the British occupied South Carolina the local “slaves certainly were faithful” rather than fleeing, a romanticization of the past given that many of her husband’s grandfather’s slaves had run away to join the British.²¹ Clearly slaveholders like Chesnut were emotionally invested in the fantasy that slavery depended on enslaved people’s love for slaveholders, and they were willing to ignore all evidence to the contrary.

While many Southern slaveholders were pondering what enslaved people were feeling, and if they would be devoted through the conflict, an article published in the New York Tribune in December 1861 gleefully surmised that slaveholders were deluding themselves. The author dismissed “attempts of Southern papers to pretend that the blacks are still loyal” as “absurd.” Instead the writer wagered that any enslaved people who had “not yet escaped of course pretend to be faithful,” even telling their owners that the South would win, while fervently hoping otherwise. During his recent travels in the South, the reporter had “observed a feeling of bitterness displayed by the blacks” and even “indignation” at slaveholders and their efforts to prevent enslaved people from running away.²² By concluding that enslaved people were feigning being “faithful” while becoming increasingly and overtly “bitter,” the author portended that enslaved people were still performing the familiar role of the “loyal” slave, but that they were less inclined to do so and were more unwilling to censor their feelings. Just a few years later, a Union officer charged with recruiting African American soldiers in Maryland shared that slaveholders’ paternalistic fantasies of benevolence had not been shaken by years of war; rather, “nine owners out of ten will insist … that their slaves are much attached to them.” Like the Tribune reporter before him, the officer dismissed this idea as “a delusion.”²³

Many slaveholders feared that war would lead not just to enslaved people’s disaffection and escape, but to more violent manifestations of discontent. Members of the planter class had long been apprehensive that Emancipation would lead to vengeance-fueled violence. Dew speculated that universal Emancipation would be repaid in “horrors” and insurrection, while William Harper opined that if freed, formerly enslaved people would “be tempted to avenge themselves by oppression and proscription of the white race,” and that such “retaliation” would lead to “open war” between the races.²⁴ These dire forecasts of post-Emancipation racial discord served to justify slavery, and it united slaveholders and nonslaveholding White people in common cause. Predictions of formerly enslaved people seeking collective, violent revenge became all the more apocalyptic as the Civil War began, though most enslaved people were more interested in using the situation to escape bondage than they were in retaliation.²⁵ Chesnut experienced one rare act of vengeance when her cousin was smothered to death during the war, allegedly by an enslaved person. The night that they learned of the murder Chesnut’s friend Kate confessed that she was worried about how her enslaved maid felt, asking Chesnut, “Does she mean to take care of me—or to murder me?” Chesnut was also overcome by a combination of grief over her friend and misgivings about enslaved people, admitting “I feel that the ground is cut away from under my feet.”²⁶

Judging from Chesnut’s diary, enslaved people’s feelings were more than a personal preoccupation for Chesnut; it was a frequent topic of conversation among members of the planter class. At one party a friend conjectured “we have no reason to suppose a negro knows there is a war” and that she certainly did not discuss the conflict with the people she enslaved. Still, she feared that they knew more than they let on, because when the topic of war or the “Damn Yankee” came up, she repeatedly saw “the sudden deadening of their faces.” Meanwhile, two friends told Chesnut worriedly “that the joy of their negroes” after the Union invasion was “loud and open.”²⁷ These scenes demonstrate that not all enslaved people reacted the same to news of the war in the presence of their owners, but whether they exhibited “joy” or swiftly muted their affective responses, slaveholders were scrutinizing enslaved people’s faces more intently than ever, hoping to discern the feelings that lay within and what those emotions foreshadowed about their own futures. Enslaved people knew they had to keep their feelings about the war in check, at least in the presence of Confederate supporters like Chesnut. Alonzo Jackson testified after the war that while he “always rejoiced over Union victories,” he shared those sentiments with only a trusted few while he was still enslaved in South Carolina, as he feared for his life “if it was known how [he] really felt about the war.”²⁸

As the war progressed, Chesnut was perturbed by the emotional revolution she was witnessing and how it was impacting relations between slaveholders and enslaved people. In 1863, Chesnut fretted that the enslaved people around her were “unreadable,” certain that there was great significance in the “black masks” they donned. She worried that these “masks” conveyed more than outright rejoicing, since she contended that “on all other subjects except the war they are the most excitable of races.” Because she thought enslaved people were generally emotionally transparent and easily “excitable,” their lack of affective reactions about the war made her fear that enslaved people were cloaking their true feelings. By the summer of 1864 Chesnut was in a froth about the enslaved “sphinxes” divulging no feelings as Sherman approached, and she attributed even more meaning to the emotions they were not expressing. Chesnut noted that the people she enslaved were acting “more obedient and more considerate than ever” when they “are in the house,” which she found most disconcerting. It had finally dawned on her that enslaved people performed emotions for the benefit of slaveholders, while concealing other sentiments only in her presence. Slaveholders like Chesnut had always tried to augur what enslaved people felt, but now that she expected a change in their emotions, and now that Confederate defeat and Emancipation were imminent, this task became all the more urgent and more maddening when she felt thwarted. Just three months before the end of the war Chesnut bemoaned that enslaved people still appeared “utterly apathetic,” but she questioned if that would be the case “if they saw” the North was “triumphant.”²⁹ For Chesnut, enslaved people’s perceived apathy no longer signaled a lack of interest in the war: it was irrefutable proof of Union sympathies.

Slaveowners were convinced that merely anticipating freedom could alter how enslaved people acted and felt, and many formerly enslaved people concurred. Slave narratives brimmed with descriptions of how their feelings changed in relation to the promise of freedom, culminating in an emotional metamorphosis. Enslaved people who sought liberty, through purchase or by running away, typically characterized this affective process as a total and instantaneous transformation. For some the overwhelming exultation began as soon as they approached a free state, even before they were on free soil. William Wells Brown remembered that as he and his family drew closer to “a land of liberty” his heart “would … leap for joy.”³⁰ Bibb used identical language to recount how, upon nearing the Ohio River, his “heart leaped up for joy at the glorious prospect that [he] should … be free.”³¹ In portraying the flood of completely new feelings Brown and Bibb emphasized that freedom from slavery was an emotional liberation.

For formerly enslaved people who bought their liberty, the affective epiphany could occur at different points in the purchasing process. Elizabeth Keckley wrote that as soon as she was told she could buy herself and her son the news felt like a “ray of sunshine,” as she realized that “the bitter heart-struggle was over.” According to Keckley she was forever altered; as soon as her owner said she could buy her freedom she saw the world in an entirely new light: now “the earth wore a brighter look, and the very stars seemed to sing with joy.”³² Lane reported that his feelings radically shifted when the transaction was over, that once “the money was paid to [his] mistress” he felt free finally: “And a queer and a joyous feeling it is to one who has been a slave.”³³ Lane explained that the moment money was exchanged he felt different, and for the first time he felt “free.” These passages illuminate that Lane not only felt “joyous” at being freed, but that liberty made him feel new and “queer” emotions that he had never experienced while enslaved.³⁴ For Moses Grandy, who had thrice paid for his freedom and been twice denied it, the emotional transformation did not come until he physically held legal documentation that freedom was truly his. Grandy recalled that once he had finally received his “free papers” his “feelings were greatly excited.”³⁵

Authors of slave narratives may have underscored their affective epiphany because they genuinely experienced a moment of emotional rebirth upon becoming free. The trope may also have been invoked to express the profound impact of freedom, in contrast to the affective oppression of slavery.³⁶ But formerly enslaved people also wrote about the moment of transformation because it was of great interest to their audiences. Steeped in sentimental culture, contemporary readers were preoccupied with feelings, articulating their own and reading about those of others, so they were captivated by the emotional experience of attaining freedom. Some authors addressed how popular the topic was and how difficult it was to answer questions about how it felt to become free. Frederick Douglass confessed in his first autobiography that he was “frequently asked how [he] felt” after he had entered “a free State,” adding that he had “never been able to answer the question with any satisfaction” to himself.³⁷ Brown shared that in the years since escaping he had often “been asked how [he] felt” about being “regarded as a man” by White people after all his time in bondage. Like Douglass, Brown averred that he could “not say” that he had “ever answered the question yet.”³⁸ Still, both authors tried to elucidate the moment when they first felt free, as did innumerable others.

While many authors depicted a spontaneous metamorphosis, writers like Douglass and Brown clarified that shedding the emotional expectations they absorbed while enslaved was a more complicated journey. For some the initial emotional epiphany of freedom was followed by a period of affective ambivalence. When Douglass attempted to capture the deluge of feelings he had about freedom, he called it “the highest excitement [he] ever experienced,” but he conceded that this sentiment “very soon subsided; and [he] was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity,” because he realized that he could be returned to slavery. That defenselessness tempered his elation, as did his feelings of isolation, as, after the incipient joy, “loneliness overcame” him. Far from the people he loved he also worried that he could not trust strangers, afraid that one would betray him to the “slave hunters.”³⁹ Like Douglass, Jacobs was also thrilled to be free yet terribly lonely as she learned “what a desolate feeling it was to be alone among strangers.”⁴⁰ Jacobs was plagued by a “constant feeling of insecurity,” and though she yearned to “confide in” someone her options were limited, as she “had been so deceived by white people” that she “had lost some confidence in them.” Whenever she did find people she could trust, her relief was palpable. In Philadelphia Jacobs was introduced to a free Black minister who housed her until she could travel safely to New York. This kindness helped mitigate Jacobs’s fears and “insecurity,” so that evening she “sought [her] pillow with feelings [she] had never carried to it before. [She] verily believed [herself] to be a free woman.”⁴¹ Far from being an immediate transformation, for many formerly enslaved people finding new support systems and allies was a slow emotional evolution that was nonetheless critical to their physical and affective survival.

Even before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, many runaway slaves felt vulnerable after reaching a free state, as numerous authors of slave narratives indicated that they did not feel an emotional liberation until they were in a country that had abolished slavery entirely. Peter Smith, who had been enslaved in Tennessee, did not feel secure until he arrived in Canada, which gave him the “feeling that there is more protection for him under the lion’s paw than the eagle’s wings.”⁴² David Barrett escaped enslavement in Kentucky first by fleeing to Ohio, but he disclosed in an 1837 interview that it was not until he reached Canada that he felt free, and affectively transformed, that once he “planted [his] feet upon British ground … [his] fears left [him] and [his] shackles fell!”⁴³ Levi Douglass posited that it was only once he was on Canadian soil that he was freed from fear, confident that he could finally feel like a free man because no one could “make him afraid.”⁴⁴ For many fugitive slaves their emotional liberation hinged on feeling safe from the grasp of slavery, and therefore, as Barrett and Douglass alluded, free from fear. Similarly, when Jacobs fled from New York to Boston to avoid being caught by Dr. Flint she reminisced that “the day after [her] arrival was one of the happiest of [her] life,” because she was reunited with her children, and she “felt as if [she were] beyond the reach of the bloodhounds.” But she knew that even this security was temporary, as long as Flint was after her. Jacobs eventually traveled to England with the Bruce family, to serve as their nanny and evade capture. Once more, Jacobs had an emotional renaissance. She detailed how once in London she felt immense relief as she slept, “for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom.”⁴⁵ By contrasting her anxieties in New York with the increased safety she felt in Boston, and the full security she finally experienced in England, Jacobs stressed how much fugitive slaves’ feelings were tied to liberty and how their fear stifled affective freedom. Charting her emotional evolution from bondage to freedom reveals how the trope of an immediate affective metamorphosis belied the lengthy process many fugitive slaves underwent to leave behind the emotional politics of slavery.

Any sense of safety and affective freedom that runaway slaves felt evaporated with the Fugitive Slave Act. The Boston abolitionist paper Liberty Bell described the emotional climate in a meeting at Faneuil Hall shortly after the law passed. According to the author the hall was packed with fugitives who were “frightened, trembling … living in a state of mind bordering on distraction.”⁴⁶ Jacobs also experienced the bill’s chilling effect on runaways in New York. She was already nervous about her status as a fugitive, and that was “now greatly increased by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.” She claimed that because of the law fugitives were once again “condemned to live in such incessant fear” of being recaptured. After returning from England Jacobs “lived in a state of anxiety” and “dreaded” the coming summer, when she worried Flint would return to the city to look for her. That inescapable apprehension rendered her a prisoner once more, as she woefully observed that she could not go outside “without trepidation at [her] heart.”⁴⁷ By denying runaways affective liberty and plunging them back into a state of terror, the Fugitive Slave Act effectively extended the spatial parameters of the emotional politics of the slave South. For many fugitives, their sense of security and emotional liberation would not be fully restored until the Emancipation Proclamation.

Accounts of outpourings of joy at contraband camps after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued show that the affective transformation of liberation could be a communal experience. Several people wrote to abolitionist S. S. Jocelyn about the collective jubilation they witnessed at various camps. One recorded the scene at a Washington, DC, contraband camp, where “the first day of January was indeed a happy day to thousands…. In this camp there was much joy manifested by … freedmen.”⁴⁸ James McCrea also wrote to Jocelyn in January of 1863 to chronicle his experience when the Proclamation was read out loud in a camp in South Carolina, and how the formerly enslaved people there “sent forth their glad shouts of joy … and the joyful sounds ‘We are free, We are free’ echoed far and wide.”⁴⁹ As with formerly enslaved people who experienced an individual emotional change once they held their free papers, or reached a nation where slavery was already abolished, these letters demonstrate the shared affective impact of Abraham Lincoln’s order. Of course, for many enslaved people throughout the slave South, January 1, 1863, did not bring freedom, so their emotional transition occurred not when the Proclamation was first issued, but when it was realized at the war’s end. Lizzie Gibson asserted that as a slave in Virginia “the war came and went without [her] feeling it in the least. Then came Emancipation,” which filled free people with joy that they could finally express “without being afraid” or having to censor their feelings.⁵⁰ Like authors who portrayed the emotional transformation of freedom as instantaneous, Stroyer represented the entire “spring of 1865” as though it were one joyful day, writing “the mocking birds and jays sing this morning more sweetly than ever before.”⁵¹

An Affective Revolution

Emancipation was an affective revolution for former slaveholders as well. With the end of slavery an emotional lacuna opened up for them, as enslaved people would no longer function as dowries and living memento mori or serve as a source of honor and family affection. As they took stock of the social upheavals around them, White Southerners’ responses to the postwar racial landscape were often couched in affective terms. They saw Emancipation, and the end of the war, not just as a military, political, and economic loss, but also as a personal blow to White Southern feelings and the emotional structure of slavery. Without these strictures former slaveholders were both unsure of how to emotionally react to formerly enslaved people and uncertain about the tenor of future interracial relations. Many White Southerners of all classes expressed loathing and resentment toward free Black people.⁵² Union soldiers stationed in the South bore witness to this animosity. In the spring of 1865 Colonel Elias Wright voiced “concern over the sentiments” of White North Carolinians, who he claimed “regret” the ending of slavery and “deplore the presence of free negroes.”

Many former slaveholders were also concerned about how free Black people felt about them, fearing the vengeful post-Emancipation backlash that proslavery authors had long predicted. Wright reported that just weeks after Lee’s surrender White people in North Carolina “very much fear ‘servile insurrection.”⁵³ Former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest justified the creation of the Ku Klux Klan in the months after war by arguing that the White supremacist terrorist group was necessary for defense since “the great fear” of White Southerners was of “a revolution something like San Domingo.” Despite the fact that no postwar Toussaint L’Ouverture materialized, Forrest insisted “there was a general fear throughout the country that there would be an uprising” of formerly enslaved people, leading to “a war of races.”⁵⁴ Race relations were still so charged in the years after war that multiple former slaveholders from Mississippi to South Carolina privately compared it to sitting atop “a volcano.”⁵⁵ Rather than subsiding once Emancipation came and went peacefully, elite White Southerners’ paranoid fantasies of former slaves seeking revenge only intensified.⁵⁶

They may have felt fear, but what many former slaveholders conveyed was betrayal and grief over the affective relations they believed had been lost. Ryland Randolph, a former master and Alabama newspaper editor, alleged in 1869 that “Negroes, as bondsmen, were happier … than they are now,” in contrast to the “grim countenances” born by free Black people and their newfound tendency to “grumble.” Former slaveholder Charles Manigault also romanticized master-slave relationships and mourned their loss, complaining that once enslaved people were free “their heads and hearts are turned against … their former protectors and friends.”⁵⁷ Like Randolph and Manigault, politician William Samford of Alabama placed the blame for any change in the affective climate on formerly enslaved people, opining in 1866 that “in spite of the most earnest efforts of their old masters to conciliate and satisfy them, the estrangement between the races increases in its extent and bitterness.”⁵⁸

These sources suggest that former slaveholders were quick to identify how free Black people’s emotions had morphed, and how that abrupt shift had personally shaped them, but former slaveholders were less willing to admit their own role in the collective affective transformation. In her biography of slaveholder and politician James Henry Hammond, Drew Gilpin Faust illustrates the emotional crisis Hammond underwent when enslaved people fled his plantation in droves at the war’s end, “forc[ing]” Hammond “to recognize that what he had regarded as devotion from his slaves had been largely a form of manipulation.” The mass exodus made Hammond confront how enslaved people had felt about him and how he had felt about them.⁵⁹ This array of reactions from members of the planter class demonstrates that there were a number of reasons why slaveholders depicted their feelings about the end of slavery in terms of loss and treachery rather than anger. Doing so placed the blame for any change in relations squarely on former slaves. Acting hurt over this emotional shift also enabled former slaveowners to protect their carefully curated image of themselves as benevolent slaveholders.

Some former slaveholders grappled with seeing the change in affective relations from the perspective of free people. After a formerly enslaved woman talked back to her, Susan Bradford felt “hurt and dazed,” and she vowed that “never before had [she] a word of impudence from any of [her] black folks.” The transformation in free people’s demeanor may have “hurt” her, but it also made her realize the affective breadth of the revolution that had taken place. By responding to her with such “impudence,” the free woman forced Bradford to confront how Emancipation had permanently altered the emotional politics of slavery, compelling her to understand that her servants were now “free to do as they pleased.”⁶⁰ One member of the planter class even advocated for emotional reconciliation, writing in an 1867 letter that White Southerners had to cease giving “hard words and frowning looks” to free Black people in order to move forward socially and economically.⁶¹

Many of the objections members of the planter class had about interracial affective relations boiled down to their reluctance to adopt free labor after slavery’s demise.⁶² In particular, many White Southerners saw Black joy and pride as threats, believing them to be in direct conflict with White profits. In his 1865 diary, lawyer David Schenck griped that while newly free people were “going through this preliminary enjoyment” of liberty “the crops are suffering.”⁶³ William Elliott wrote to his mother in the spring of 1866 to critique the comportment of free Black people as he tried to hire workers for his South Carolina plantation. He described a man named Jacob as “eaten up with self-esteem and selfishness.” From Jacob’s point of view, he may have been feeling proud and confident as a free man working for wages, but Elliott blamed Jacob’s feelings for making him “indifferent” to work.⁶⁴

The perception that formerly enslaved people were “selfish” or “indifferent” workers could have dramatic consequences, and it led to charged interactions between former slaveholders and free people. One White man from Mississippi recalled an 1868 incident between Judge Henry Calhoon and a hired freedman. The man explained that the judge had “reprimand[ed]” a free Black man, supposedly for being idle, when the worker replied that “he was a free man now” and he would never again take orders from “any white man.” According to the witness, “the judge was indignant at the negro’s insolence” and threatened to whip the worker. The free man did not back down and instead raised his hoe. Before either dealt a blow the judge’s son announced that in spite of the free man’s work contract that he would shoot the formerly enslaved man if he did not leave the Calhoon estate at once.⁶⁵ This scene speaks volumes about how former slaveholders and formerly enslaved people were navigating the radically altered affective terrain of the postwar South. It is notable that the judge perceived the free man to be “insolen[t],” which in turn incited his own “indigna[tion].” Calhoon was confounded by the free man’s unchecked display of emotions and wanted to physically discipline him for expressing feelings that would have been a death sentence for an enslaved person. Meanwhile, the worker openly scorned the emotional politics imposed by slavery, refusing to feign deference or suppress anger as a free man.

Because one of their primary tasks was arbitrating such contract disputes between landowners and newly freed people, members of the Freedmen’s Bureau were deeply invested in the postwar affective relations of Black and White Southerners. However, members of the bureau had very different perceptions of the state of Southern interracial relations and thus widely diverging notions of how to ameliorate them. Appointed to head a Virginia branch of the bureau, Charles H. Burd attested that locally “the feeling between the white citizens and the freedmen is very good, and they seem mutually to understand and appreciate each other’s distress.”⁶⁶ Other Union officers and Freedmen’s Bureau officials were less optimistic. As military governor of Kentucky, General John Palmer witnessed so much reluctance to accept Emancipation, and the new labor and affective dynamics that went with it, that he wrote a letter to local slaveholders that appeared in Louisville papers. Palmer warned that “to cling to the shadow of slavery … is to hug … discontent and disappointment to your bosoms,” and instead slaveholders must endeavor to “gain or regain … the confidence of the colored people” in order to move forward. To Palmer the transition to Emancipation was an emotional challenge for both former slaveholders and formerly enslaved people. Notably though he argued that the problem could only be solved by sustained emotional labor from former slaveowners, that they were obliged to shore up trust with people of color after “generations” of “enjoying [their] unpaid and extorted labor.”⁶⁷

Freedmen’s Bureau officer Rufus Saxton also worried that trust issues lay at the heart of the strained relations between former masters and newly free people, and he hinted that both groups bore responsibility for that. When Saxton was brought before the 1866 Joint Committee on Reconstruction to discuss Southern race relations in South Carolina and Georgia, he testified that planters did not truly “know” the people they had once enslaved, because “the system of slavery has been one of concealment on the part of the negro of all his feelings and his impulses.” Saxton posited that the instinct to lie was “ingrained” in enslaved people, and that this “mutual distrust” hindered labor negotiations, because neither group had “any faith” in the other. Saxton concluded that it would take a great deal of time to dismantle this “distrust,” as it was woven into the fabric of interracial affective relations and was reinforced through daily interactions.⁶⁸

Amid tensions about the emotional politics of Reconstruction, many officials of the Freedmen’s Bureau harbored their own prejudiced views about the affective capabilities of free people. Self-avowed abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe surmised that “the white man seems to pass out of that phase of young life abounding in mirth and jollity” upon reaching adulthood, “while the Negro remains longer in it, if indeed he ever gets out at all.” This implied that White people emotionally developed as they grew up, shedding the “mirth” and frivolous joy of youth, but that Black people never experienced an affective maturation. Even Freedmen’s Bureau reports on the feelings and general well-being of free people that purported to praise them were infantilizing, perpetuating the idea that Black people were not in control of their emotions. An 1864 statement about the future for free Black people in the South noted that generally “the Africans were loyal men,” that as laborers they were “willing” and “docile … not given to quarreling … cheerful and uncomplaining.”⁶⁹ Another Freedmen’s Bureau officer, Robert Dale Owen, anticipated that despite so many White Southerners’ concerns, postwar-era race relations “would be mutually beneficial.” According to Owen, Black people were “a knowing rather than a thinking race,” who were “dominated by affections”; therefore, “the African would temper the cool and rational Anglo-Saxon.”⁷⁰ Owen’s hope that race relations could be “beneficial” to all involved was undermined by his speculation that Black people were emotional rather than “rational” or “thinking” and thus in need of White supervision and control. Tasked with assisting formerly enslaved people on their path to freedom, and impartially mediating conflicts between White employers and Black employees, instead many members of the Freedmen’s Bureau embraced White supremacist planter propaganda that Black people lacked emotional self-governance and were happiest as laborers. This line of thinking could easily be used to justify legal and economic systems that encouraged “docile” Black people to cheerfully submit to the dominance of “cool and rational Anglo-Saxon[s],” just as they were expected to under slavery.

Challenging the Emotional Politics of Slavery

After the war, newly free people and former slaveholders were at odds over what post-Emancipation affective norms and interracial relations would be. The narratives of formerly enslaved people indicate that the newly freed thought that an affective coup was under way. As free people they firmly believed that they were entitled to the liberty of emotional expression that had been denied to them in slavery, and they worked to cast off the affective shackles of bondage. They did so by informing former slaveholders of how freedom had changed their affective relations, by uniting and protecting families that had been torn apart by slavery, and through a variety of deliberate and public acts of Black celebration.

One of the first ways that many formerly enslaved people defied the affective relations of slavery was by notifying former owners that they were happily free, like James Madison who wrote from Canada to let his former owner know that he was “now living in the enjoyment of liberty.”⁷¹ After Granville, John, and Lewis Bibb ran away together, the brothers delighted in the idea that the slaveholding family that had profited off of their “unrequited toil” was now “left … without a single slave.” In an interview with their fellow fugitive and abolitionist brother Henry, they speculated gleefully that their former owner’s “heart has been filled with grief over the loss of slaves.”⁷² It did not suffice to experience an emotional liberation upon becoming free; these formerly enslaved people wanted slaveholders to know about their affective change. Upon reaching freedom Brown longed to let his friends and family who remained in bondage know that he “was free!” But he also yearned to tell his former owners, joking that he was “anxious” to tell his former mistress “that she must get another coachman.”⁷³ Brown was being glib in framing his message of liberation as a resignation notice, but he clearly wanted to let his master know he was not a slave and would no longer feign the deference expected of enslaved people. It was not just former enslaved people who fled North who seized the opportunity to tell planters that their emotional power dynamics had been irrevocably altered. An acquaintance of Chesnut mentioned that after the war he visited the formerly enslaved people on his Beaufort plantation. He vouched that they “were delighted to see [him],” expressing “overflowing affection,” but they also “firmly and respectfully” told him that they “own this land now.”⁷⁴ The newly freed people’s “affection” paired with “firm … and respectful” claims of ownership delineated that their affective display had not changed, but their social relations had.

Other free people employed affective language with their former owners in order to reiterate that their relationship was forever changed. After planter Colonel Anderson wrote to his former slave, Jourdan Anderson, asking him to come back to his Tennessee plantation to work, Anderson responded with a letter thick with the language of endearment to negotiate. Anderson sent his “love” to the colonel’s family and said he had been “proud … to call him master.” But immediately following this compliment Anderson got down to business, requesting back pay for the decades that Anderson and his wife, Mandy, had worked for the colonel. Anderson calculated that those unpaid wages amounted to almost twelve thousand dollars, minus the colonel’s minimal expenses for food, clothing, and health care. Still, Anderson framed the payment as an affective issue rather than a financial matter, adding that they had “concluded to test [the colonel’s] sincerity” by asking him to send on their wages, assuring him that such an act would help them “forgive old scores.” However, if the colonel “fail[ed] to pay,” they stated that they could “have little faith” in his “promises in the future.”⁷⁵ In discussing the terms of labor Anderson signaled that the master was now an employer, and the man who had once been “proud” to be his slave was now a free laborer and in a position to bargain. By requesting money as proof of the colonel’s sincerity, Anderson also confirmed that trust was a valuable currency. The letter accentuated how much their affective dynamic had changed since Emancipation: no more was the onus on Anderson alone to be loyal; in the postslavery labor market, employer and employee had to be mutually faithful.

As the letter progressed it became evident that this was more than a written request for payment couched in affectionate language; Anderson, like the Bibbs and Brown, wanted his former owner to know how much he was enjoying his liberty. Anderson detailed what his life was like as a free man in Ohio, listing his good wages, better housing, and his children’s access to education. But he also outlined the affective benefits of freedom, that his family was “kindly treated,” including his wife, noting that “folks call her Mrs. Anderson,” a more dignified appellation than “Mandy.” In the North the Andersons received kindness and respect, and they could avoid the fear that their daughters would be “brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters” as they likely would be in the South. The more Anderson illustrated about their lives in the North, coupled with his request for almost twelve thousand dollars in back pay, the more obvious it became that the Andersons were never planning on returning to Tennessee.⁷⁶ Not content to merely seek out employers who would negotiate fair wages and terms of labor, newly free people desired emotional fulfillment as well as financial security. Some of that fulfillment, or at least satisfaction, may have been derived from the power to mock the people who once owned them and their families. Throughout the letter, Anderson subverted his relationship with his former owner with mounting sarcasm. Other free people may have exhibited even more open scorn toward slaveholders. One Kentucky planter wrote to President Andrew Johnson in July 1865 to complain that some formerly enslaved people who fled during the war were coming back “not … with the view of living in harmony with their old Master, but to taunt him with their free papers and threaten him with military power.”⁷⁷ If the former slaveholder realized that free Black people’s threats to appeal to authorities had driven him to write his own appeal to an authority, he did not mention it in his chronicle of grievances.

Another important way that free people repudiated the affective practices of slavery was in their efforts to locate loved ones that had been scattered by the auction block, self-liberation, or war. Formerly enslaved people employed a variety of tactics to do so, including both writing to Black churches throughout America and Canada with names and descriptions of their relatives and also traveling great distances to search for family.⁷⁸ Other free people enlisted the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau and other military officials to find loved ones they had lost before or during the war. Having witnessed so many reunions of Black families during his time at the South Carolina Freedmen’s Bureau, John William DeForest acknowledged how crucial it was for formerly enslaved people to locate their relatives, proclaiming that “the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families that had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.”⁷⁹ One formerly enslaved man from Maryland named John Q. A. Dennis even wrote to the Secretary of War Edward Stanton in the summer of 1864, asking for help in finding and freeing three of his children.⁸⁰ Other newly freed parents sought the aid of local generals and military governors.⁸¹ Such cases show that even before the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified free people firmly believed that the government was obliged to help its formerly enslaved citizens, including helping them defend their loved ones. If slavery had been defined by enslaved families being divided, freedom meant being able to protect one’s family.⁸²

In the months after war, many formerly enslaved people also took out ads in Black newspapers to seek information about lost loved ones. Such ads appeared in great numbers in the months after the war ended but would continue to be published for decades. In the brief announcements the author would generally provide their name and location, and any identifying information they could remember about the loved ones they were looking for, including names and places of former owners, or dates when they had been sold or separated.⁸³ One national Black newspaper offered this service for free in a weekly column for decades after the war. Their notification section opened with a message advising that “All Who Mourn a Missing Father, Mother, Brother, Son, Sister, Wife, Husband or Daughter, Should Read This,” because “there are many persons throughout this great land who mourn some missing relative or friend,” while “many home circles are rendered unhappy by the fact that there is a vacant chair.”⁸⁴ By doing so the column was able to convey that the loss of an individual loved one was a personal tragedy and a widespread, shared experience, and that reuniting families was enough of a public good for the paper to offer the ads for free.

The ads themselves functioned as short, self-published slave narratives, as a few sentences could speak volumes about the heartbreak enslaved families endured and the lifelong efforts many enslaved people went through to try to find loved ones. Eliza Montgomery hoped to track down her brother Dick Bush, “the slave of Edward Bush, a negro trader,” who was their father. In a matter of lines she recounted the harrowing tale of how this father had first sold their mother and left them as “very small children alone,” before selling his own daughter away from her brother not long after. In 1892 when Eliza published the announcement she clearly still hoped to find the brother who had been her compatriot in anguish even though they’d been separated when they were “very small.”⁸⁵ Jane Bell’s brief 1871 notice was another tragic saga. She asked for information on “the whereabouts” of several children as she had “made every effort in [her] power to hear from them and having failed … [was] very unhappy.” Bell mentioned that she had been separated from those children in 1858 before adding that she had “had twenty-seven children, and now [she did not] know the whereabouts of but three.” More than an ad, this was a memoir of a mother’s love and loss, and a testament to her untold efforts, having already found at least some information on twenty-four of those children.⁸⁶ Bell drew solace from at least having knowledge of her children. Nor was she alone. Many of the notices offered rewards simply for information, indicating that physically reuniting families was not the only objective of such ads. One announcement published just months after the war sought “information … of the whereabouts of Wesley Brooks,” disclosing that his brother and sister were alive and searching for him, but “his father and mother, brother Sampson and sister Mary, are dead.” Wesley’s brother and sister might have included all those details in the hopes that it would help Wesley identify them and lead him back to them. But even if Wesley never read the ad, or saw his siblings again, they were still able to share their grief publicly. In this way, these notices could be both missing ads and obituaries, giving formerly enslaved people a space to speak their pain plainly to the world and to name those who had been lost, including, potentially, Wesley.⁸⁷ Though these searches were rarely successful the dedication to attempting to find loved ones underscores the precedent placed on restoring families that had been dismantled by slavery and slaveholders.⁸⁸

Many formerly enslaved children had vivid recollections of the trials their parents endured to reassemble their families after the war. Nettie Henry’s parents had different owners in Mississippi, so when her father’s master moved to Texas after secession the Henry family was torn apart. She was only ten when the war ended, yet Henry remembered with pride that once free her father had “come back,” having “walked almost all the way from Texas.”⁸⁹ Anna Baker recalled that her mother’s first action as a free woman was to confront Baker’s owner and demand that he free her children. He initially refused, only acquiescing after Baker’s mother enlisted the help of a Union Provost Marshal. Baker did not recognize her mother at first because she had been so young when her mother ran away, but her fear quickly subsided as her mother embraced her and carried her seven miles to their new home and their new life together.⁹⁰ By portraying the barriers parents and spouses faced in rebuilding their families, including time, distance, and reluctant slaveholders, these scenes prove how important it was to formerly enslaved people to find loved ones and how much they risked to do so. These passages also shed light on how free people were taking advantage of their newfound mobility and legal rights to challenge those obstacles. Years of forced separations and heartbreak could not be undone, but by prioritizing tracking down family free people showed that they hoped to right some of the affective wrongs of slavery. Finally, these texts demonstrate the lasting impression these brave acts of unconditional love made upon formerly enslaved children, as their parents introduced them to the affective possibilities of freedom.

Free people also signaled their commitment to reclaiming their families through their efforts to legally marry. The slave states did not allow lawful marriage for enslaved people, which left enslaved couples vulnerable to separation. Recognizing that many free Black people longed to legitimize their relationships post-Emancipation, Union General Lorenzo Thomas issued Special Order 15 declaring that any ordained minister could “solemnize the rites of marriage among the Freemen.” A chaplain assigned to a Black regiment wrote to Thomas in 1865 to update him on the order’s impact, stating that at his Arkansas camp “weddings … are very popular, and abundant.” In the last month alone he had performed twenty-five ceremonies, “mostly [for] those who have families; & have been living together for years,” suggesting that even couples in long-term relationships yearned for the legal validation of marriage. According to the chaplain free Black people were enthusiastically embracing marriage, particularly because they wanted to “have their Marriage Certificates, Recorded; in a book furnished by the Government.” He surmised that they wanted that official proof in part because it created multiple records of their union, as the chaplain informed Thomas that a group of self-liberated people had been captured in January by Confederates and “had their Marriage Certificates … destroyed; and [been] roundly cursed, for having such papers.”⁹¹ The chaplain’s letter shows how important free people felt it was to legitimize their relationships, and that many believed that legal marriage, and especially marriage certificates, provided newfound protection for their families. The fact that Confederate soldiers deliberately destroyed marriage certificates issued to Black people also emphasizes how threatening those legal unions were to some supporters of slavery.

Public Displays of Emotional Liberty

For many formerly enslaved people, true liberty did not just mean self-mastery, or freedom from violence; it meant being able to let one’s feelings fly and to pursue pleasure, particularly publicly.⁹² Following the war free people flouted the emotional politics of slavery by deriving pleasure from public spaces and performances that had been denied to them while in bondage. Free Black people’s performative uses of public spaces, clothing, and holidays were in open defiance of the affective strictures and general oppression of slavery. But what formerly enslaved people viewed as opposition to generations of emotional censorship and coerced affective performances, White Southerners saw as a threat and an omen of social issues to come. White observers of all classes took particular umbrage over free Black people’s public displays of joy or pride, increasingly referring to free people of color as “very insolent,” “more and more insolent,” and “impudent.”⁹³ An Irish woman visiting Charleston immediately after the war grumbled that “the colored persons are awful sassy.”⁹⁴ A Virginia newspaper reported in 1866 that the town of Petersburg was beset by Black soldiers, who were “strut[ting]” around “with an air of evident satisfaction.” The author attributed this to them “feel[ing] the importance” of their contribution to the war, and that pride was allegedly clear “in every tone and action.” The same paper later accused Black people of showing an “air of satisfaction” over the end of the war and slavery.⁹⁵ The author insinuated that any “satisfaction” or pride in the “importance” of free Black people was inherently disloyal, tantamount to delighting in the misery of Confederate defeat. They were not alone in asserting that Black joy came at the expense of White people. In recording the heightened racial tensions she experienced as she traveled in Reconstruction-era South Carolina, Elizabeth Botume made note of “the exultant faces of the Negroes, and the scowling faces of the rebels.” To an observer like Botume, the two went hand in hand, because the joy of formerly enslaved people aroused anger and resentment for many White Southerners.⁹⁶ Taken in this light, every act of joy, pride, or confidence by a free Black person underlined for former slaveholders in particular how much had changed and how uncertain their future was.

In this tense climate, clothing became one of the sites where the emotional rights of the postwar South were hotly contested. The writings of White Southerners and formerly enslaved people indicate that free Black people found satisfaction in openly dressing as they pleased.⁹⁷ However, many White Southerners viewed the sartorial choices of free people as loaded affective signifiers. One Northern journalist examining race relations in the Reconstruction South spoke with several White women in North Carolina who lamented the number of free Black women wearing veils. An officer of the Freedmen’s Bureau corroborated their complaint, informing the reporter that local White women saw Black women wearing black veils as such a “great offense” that many White women no longer wore black veils themselves. The reporter explained to his readers that a woman of color donning a black veil was interpreted as a grave insult to the “bitter, spiteful women whose passionate hearts nursed the Rebellion.”⁹⁸ Southern women of all races were no stranger to death after four years of war, but the sight of Black women in mourning clothes elicited “spite” in White women rather than empathy or recognition of a shared experience of loss.⁹⁹ Perhaps the White women who were angered by these expressions of mourning inferred that a woman of color in a black veil was grieving over someone who died fighting for the Union. Or perhaps since arguments about racialized emotional difference had long been used to bolster slavery and White supremacy, many White Southern women simply could not acknowledge that sorrow and grief crossed the color line.

Black veils were not the only articles of clothing that were larded with emotions, representing freedom of affective self-expression for Black people while inspiring rage in White Southerners. Many Black veterans felt great pride about their service, represented by their Union uniforms, but some White Southerners saw their choice of garment as a celebration of Confederate loss. As a result, Black men in blue uniforms were excoriated in newspaper editorials and physically assaulted throughout the South.¹⁰⁰ Black people who wore stylish clothing were also viewed as dangerous to the Southern racial order. In the aftermath of war a White woman remarked that free Black women’s fancy dress and proud “swaggering air” were enough to “inspire the most casual observer with a feeling of contempt” for them.¹⁰¹ A formerly enslaved person mentioned that in Georgia “white men cut the clothes from the backs of ex-slaves” if they were deemed too “well-dressed.”¹⁰² For many White Southerners, Union uniforms and fine clothing were concrete reminders of defeat and of the dramatic revolution in race and labor relations. For Black people, clothes were a site for modeling new affective norms.

Free Black people also resisted the affective restrictions imposed by slavery in a collective, public manner, through parades, rallies, and holidays. A parade held in Charleston on March 21, 1865, showcased the mix of emotions free people were feeling about the end of slavery. The New York Times documented that the free people’s parade, “in honor of their liberation from slavery,” was “large and enthusiastic,” drawing roughly four thousand people. The reporter was particularly taken with the symbolism involved, describing a slave auction scene staged on the back of a cart, where two Black women pantomimed being sold by a man playing auctioneer who shouted “how much am I offered?” as the cart rolled along. As though to punctuate the tragic scene that was so familiar to its audience, the next cart was a “mock hearse” bearing a coffin labeled “Slavery is dead,” with solemn women in mourning garb processing behind. The reporter did not understand why the women appeared so somber, since he would assume “that the colored people would not be greatly afflicted with grief after having been assured of their freedom.”¹⁰³ What the reporter missed was that the parade epitomized the complicated emotions produced by the dawn of freedom. Though enslaved people were generally overjoyed at the advent of Emancipation, a funeral for slavery did not necessarily indicate nostalgia for the institution, but rather a desire to acknowledge the sorrows of bondage, including the loss of loved ones by death or sale at the auction block.

The funeral was also satirical in purpose, allowing formerly enslaved people to commemorate the end of slavery while mocking any White Southerners who grieved the loss of the institution.¹⁰⁴ In doing so, the parade organizers highlighted the extent to which former slaveholders’ feelings were based on slavery. Pretending to mourn the demise of slavery also reiterated the performative nature of emotions, perhaps giving further weight to former slaveowners’ anxieties that enslaved people’s supposed contentment and affection had been feigned all along. The Times journalist may have misunderstood the layered meanings of the pageant, including the potential irreverent message of the funeral, but he could not help but notice the White spectators’ reactions, noting that “the expression on the countenances of many” in the crowd showed that the parade was “not altogether agreeable” to them, though “they wisely swallowed objections.”¹⁰⁵ The crowd in Charleston may have quashed their opinions about the procession, but other White Southerners were less muted in their responses to celebrations of Black freedom. An 1868 article in the Macon Telegraph expressed “outrage” over a recent rally of Black people for several Republican candidates, saying, “A more humiliating scene was never witnessed.”¹⁰⁶ This provided telling insights into why White Southerners were so upset by events thrown by the Black community. According to the author these celebrations did not just anger White Southerners, they provoked shame by reminding them of their military and social defeat.

In the Reconstruction period many White Southerners were particularly threatened by manifestations of Black joy. In an 1868 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine novelist Harriet Spofford chronicled a recent “celebration of emancipation” held in Washington, DC. Though Spofford lauded the participants at first for processing in a “serious and stately” fashion, her other descriptions of the event undermined this praise. Spofford depicted the celebration as “an endless black cloud” or “mob,” and she complained that “the throngs that compose it frolic … in exuberance and effervescence that know no bounds.” While she could admit that the celebrants were “serious and stately,” her comments suggested that there was something sinister about Black people celebrating, that their collective “effervescence” turned the participants into an unindividuated “black cloud” or “mob.” Her wording also hinted that Black people could not restrain their emotions, for their feelings “know no bounds.”¹⁰⁷ The article illuminates how White people from the North and South were processing the demise of the emotional politics of slavery. After decades of claiming that enslaved people were happy in bondage, many White people were now confronted with, and disturbed by, Black people’s authentic joy over liberation. Of course, Black joy could only be seen as a menace by those who believed that Black rejoicing was fundamentally synonymous with White sorrow. To cope with anxieties about Black “exuberance,” and about changes in race relations more generally, people like Spofford resorted to the White supremacist, proslavery rhetoric that Black people felt and expressed emotions differently and thus needed to be controlled.

Parades were not the only venue for displaying Black freedom and jubilation. Black Southerners also created and reappropriated holidays in order to deconstruct the emotional rituals of slavery. This was especially clear in postwar celebrations of January first, the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation being issued. For enslaved people the first of the year held tragic associations as the day that contracts for hiring out enslaved people for the upcoming year began. As a result, enslaved people feared the dawn of what some called “heartbreak day,” as it often heralded separation from loved ones who were to be leased out.¹⁰⁸ Though only a fraction of the millions of people enslaved were actually freed on January 1, 1863, within weeks of the Proclamation’s passage Frederick Douglass was among those calling for the day to be commemorated, vowing that it would be an “incomparably greater” holiday than July Fourth.¹⁰⁹ Though most enslaved people were not freed until the end of the war, by honoring the Emancipation Proclamation on a date that had long had devastating effects on enslaved families, Black people began the process of dismantling the significance of that fated day. By January 1, 1866, preacher Henry McNeal Turner announced in a sermon marking the anniversary that “the most bitter day of the year … shall henceforth and forever be filled with acclamations of the wildest joy and ecstasy.”¹¹⁰ By redefining January first as a day of exuberant “joy,” rather than sorrow and loss, formerly enslaved people were consciously reclaiming the day and altering its emotional connotations. Its past as a day when families were divided was not forgotten, but formerly enslaved people were now free to determine the meaning and memory of that day for themselves.

Because most enslaved people were not freed until after Southern surrender many wanted to celebrate their Emancipation at the anniversary of the war’s end. In Texas news of Confederate surrender and Emancipation was announced on June 19, 1865, leading to an annual celebration of “Juneteenth” regionally and later nationally to mark when all enslaved people were finally freed. Black and White Southerners recognized that freedom celebrations were construed as a direct challenge to the postwar emotional status quo. When free people in Richmond decided to organize an event in April of 1866 to mark the day Union troops liberated the city they knew that doing so might upset local White people, so event planners distributed broadsides to “respectfully inform the public that THEY DO NOT INTEND to celebrate the failure of the Confederacy.” In spite of these conciliatory efforts numerous newspapers condemned the occasion, with editorials calling it “a jollification on the saddest of days” and warning that they would “wade through blood before the nigger shall celebrate the day.” Incited by such rhetoric White residents of Richmond violently contested what was perceived as affective mutiny, burning down a Black church and threatening more violence if the event took place.¹¹¹ From editorial pages to the cinders of Black institutions, the holiday became a battleground for the emotional politics of the Reconstruction South. Black organizers anticipated the possible effect on the White populace, and the prospect of bloodshed, and they saw the need to differentiate between a commemoration of freedom and a celebration of White suffering. Nonetheless, White residents of Richmond interpreted any enactment of Black joy as an affront and hoped to quell it by spreading fear in the Black community. Remarkably the organizers would not be intimidated, and the celebration went on as planned.

Resisting Black Emotional Freedom

Faced with free Black people who could no longer be emotionally mastered, or affectively disciplined as they had been under slavery, White people turned to both legal and extralegal means to reinstate the social order of the emotional politics of slavery. As an article from the Nation from August of 1865 asserted, “White southerners sought to ‘retain the slaveholding spirit without keeping the slaves.’”¹¹² In the years after the war many White Southerners resorted to illegal methods to emotionally master free people, employing real or implied violence against individual free people in order to foster a collective state of fear among Black Southerners. White terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan perpetuated forms of affective discipline used during slavery, wielding dread to establish political and social control in the South. Accounts of formerly enslaved people reveal widespread fear of such White terrorist organizations, particularly in more isolated, rural areas.¹¹³ A primary goal was to systematically frighten Black people into voting Democrat or to otherwise stifle the Republican vote. As one formerly enslaved man from Mississippi explained, “The Yankees tried to get men to vote, but not many did ’cause they was scared of the Ku Kluxers.”¹¹⁴

The scope of these terrorist tactics, and their far-reaching political implications, came to light during congressional inquiries into the Klan’s activities. A Black woman from South Carolina named Harriet Simril testified about how masked Klansmen visited her home three times, calling her husband a “radical” and vowing that “if he joined the democratic ticket they would have no more to do with him.” When her husband persisted in his allegiance to the Republicans, the Klansmen visited the Simrils a final time, hauling Harriet into the street and repeatedly raping her. The Simrils spent the next four nights hiding in the woods, terrified the men would return. Abram Colby recounted how, after Emancipation, he was elected to the Georgia state legislature as a Republican and promptly offered a bribe by local Democrats to vacate his seat. Days after Colby refused, dozens of Klansmen arrived at his home, and when he denied their request again they beat him for hours. Colby testified that the “worst thing about the whole matter” was that his family saw him be dragged into the woods and whipped. When his daughter followed and pleaded with the men not to take her father they aimed a gun at her. Colby swore to the congressional panel that this “actually frightened her to death,” as “she never got over it until she died” less than a year later.¹¹⁵

The Colby case elucidates how Black community leaders and politicians were specifically targeted in the hopes that threatening or assaulting an influential person would terrify the broader community into compliance. James Alston, for example, was a Republican member of the Alabama state legislature. White Montgomery citizens offered Alston thousands of dollars to convince local Black men to vote for Democrats. When Alston turned them down, masked gunmen fired hundreds of rounds into his home, wounding Alston’s wife and child. After receiving mounting death threats, the Alstons were forced to flee. The Klan also targeted ministers for their prominent role in the Black community. A Baptist deacon from Alabama spoke before the congressional committee about how his church was burned down because the Klan believed the congregants “were too strong republicans” and they hoped to “break up this arrangement of the republicans.” Even more symbolically the Klan set fire to the church, which the congregation had built themselves, on January 1, the anniversary of Emancipation.¹¹⁶ In spite of the Enforcement Acts passed in 1870 and 1871 to curtail White supremacist terrorist groups, an 1875 report to Congress on White terrorism in Mississippi noted that free Black people throughout the state were “thoroughly intimidated, and will not vote … for fear of their lives.” According to the report, these scare tactics were highly successful, as no Republicans had won in the last election.¹¹⁷

The Klan deployed fear to limit the Republican vote and scare Black communities in general, but they also wielded violence in order to discourage emotions and affective expressions that they deemed inappropriate for free Black people. A Black woman named Caroline Smith was woken up one night in 1871 when Klansmen arrived at her Georgia home. Ten men took turns whipping her, supposedly for her defiance to a White woman, as one of the assailants warned Smith “we don’t want to hear any big talk; and don’t sass any white ladies.” Nor was this an isolated incident. Two days after Smith spoke before Congress, another Black woman from Georgia, Sarah Ann Sturtevant, testified that she was stripped to the waist, beaten, kicked, and pistolwhipped, all as a preemptive measure, “for fear [she] would sauce [sass] white women.”¹¹⁸ It is unclear what, if anything, Smith and Sturtevant had done to make those White men believe that they had or would show disrespect to White women. Perhaps the only infraction they had committed was being Black women who dared to be confident, which was coded by White Southerners as “sass” and treated as a punishable offense.

White supremacist terrorist groups and lynch mobs also tried to curtail expressions of Black joy through violence. Sam McAllum recalled that during Reconstruction some African Americans in Meridian, Mississippi, “were havin’ a party one Sat’day night” at the home of a formerly enslaved man named Miler Hampton when some White men in disguise arrived on horseback, accusing Hampton of having “done somethin’ bad,” without elaborating further. The masked men captured Hampton without any struggle from the partygoers since, as McAllum confessed, they “were all scared” they would be killed, too, if they fought back. Hampton was murdered that night. Interestingly, while the vigilantes insinuated that Hampton had committed some infraction other than throwing a party, some of Hampton’s guests saw a clear link between the festivities and the appearance of the lynch mob. This is evident in the reaction of those who witnessed Hampton’s abduction. McAllum and the other men who had been in attendance at Hampton’s home went to town the following day to “buy all the ammunition” they could get” because they were “having another party the next week,” remarking dryly that the masked murderers “didn’t come to that party.”¹¹⁹ This event exemplifies the ways that some White Southerners deployed violence to incite fear and suppress emotions like joy in the Black community. But it also offers insights into how some Black people were responding, willing to fight for their inalienable right to pursue happiness, including by throwing a party on a Saturday night.

After Emancipation elite White Southerners were desperate to find alternatives to the affective strictures of slavery in the hopes of keeping free Black people meek and manageable. Former slaveholders seemed particularly furious that free Black people were no longer forced to maintain an attitude of servile compliance in the presence of White people, nor compelled to smother their emotions as they had while enslaved. A Freedmen’s Bureau agent shared that White Southerners were “quite indignant if they are not treated with the same deference that they were accustomed to” from enslaved people.¹²⁰ The answer to former slaveholders’ anxieties about losing the hierarchies of slavery lay in writing new laws like the Black Codes, which codified affective norms and behavior for free Black people. Such laws circumscribed interracial affective relations and, in doing so, restored some of the emotional power dynamics of bondage. Mississippi’s Black Code prohibited “insulting gestures, languages or acts” toward White people.¹²¹ Florida’s version defined the punishments for affective infractions, stating that anyone convicted of “willful disobedience … impudence … [or] disrespect to his employer” could be “hired out … imprisoned or whipped.” Every Black Code included a statute that simultaneously legalized marriage between free Black people and also barred interracial marriage or sexual relations.¹²² Through these statutes affective norms that had been custom under slavery became law, and the expectation returned that Black people must perform subservience and mask their feelings.

Some White employers also tried to legally preserve the emotional politics of slavery through labor contracts. In an 1886 contract between a Black sharecropper named Fenner Powell and a White landlord named A. T. Mial, Powell agreed to work land on Mial’s North Carolina plantation for one year. In addition to detailing what tools and food Mial would provide for the year the document stated that “Powell agrees to work faithfully and diligently … and to be respectful in manners and deportment to … Mial.”¹²³ Not content to have contracted labor, White employers like Powell hoped to formalize interracial affective relations, legally obligating laborers to maintain the emotional hierarchies so familiar under slavery, including the expectation of deference and loyalty.

When they could not control the emotions of living, breathing, free Black people, some White Southern authors took to memoirs, history, and literature to create the scenes of racialized affective dominance that they were nostalgic for. This was evident in the opening of Charles Colcock Jones’s 1888 book entitled Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, which he dedicated “in memory of Monte Video Plantation and … the family servants whose fidelity and affection contributed so materially to its comfort and happiness.”¹²⁴ Abstractly referring to the “happiness” of the “plantation” as a whole suggested that the supposed contentment of slavery had been universally shared, even as enslaved people “materially” created those feelings. The emotional labor performed by enslaved people was downplayed in this dedication, just as the euphemistic language of “servants” elided the violence of slavery. Those “family servants” were now free women and men, but the expectation remained that they would be loyal and loving. The fantasy that the emotional support system of slavery remained steadfastly in place even after Emancipation was particularly insidious revisionism, allowing former slaveholders to believe that the emotional labors of enslaved people had been genuine rather than coerced. Nor was the myth of faithful, loving enslaved people solely attractive to former slaveholding Southern audiences. Quite the contrary, the nationwide popularity of “plantation nostalgia” literature and minstrel shows, and products like Aunt Jemima pancake mix illuminated that White longing for the emotional politics of slavery defied class and region. These rosy portraits of mutual and affectionate master-slave relations, consumed by audiences throughout the United States, were a critical component of the postwar, “Lost Cause” ideology, leading to the demise of Reconstruction and later serving as a defense of Jim Crow segregation.¹²⁵

* * *

In the wake of Emancipation free Black people sought to establish new feelings and emotional practices, while former members of the slaveocracy tried desperately to maintain the affective relations and norms of slavery. In spite of their efforts to reinstate the emotional caste system of slavery post-Emancipation, many White Southerners continued to take offense to emotional expressions by Black people that they perceived as inappropriate. Almost a decade after Reconstruction ended, South Carolina poet Paul Hamilton Hayne decried the “insubordination and impudence” of Black people.¹²⁶ In the absence of federal occupation, even with increasingly restrictive laws that eroded rights for African Americans and prescribed Black feelings, many White Southerners continued to label any perceived misstep by Black people as “impudence,” a catch-all for condemning and criminalizing Black behavior. In response to this perceived affective destabilization, White Southerners of all classes deployed legal and extralegal modes of violence and social control to reestablish the racialized emotional hierarchies of slavery. Many Black people, in turn, lost hope in the promise of Reconstruction, instead experiencing, as W. E. B. Du Bois noted, “bitter disappointment.” Frustrated over efforts to perpetuate the dynamics of slavery, Du Bois observed that former slaveowners were “determined to perpetuate slavery under another name.” That name, it soon became evident, was Jim Crow.¹²⁷

Nevertheless, the repressive affective strictures of the Jim Crow South reinforced for many African Americans the urgent need to resist those emotional fetters. Seeking to exercise their freedom of affective expression, Black people in the postwar period used a variety of sites, including their bodies and public spaces, to deconstruct the emotional politics of slavery and to forge new affective norms, even amid disappointment over the death of Reconstruction-era progress. Just as free Black people in Richmond refused to sacrifice their celebration of freedom in the face of White supremacist intimidation, some formerly enslaved people combated the resurrection of the affective restrictions and censorship of slavery. They had been promised the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, so the denial of Black emotional liberty through legal and illegal means was not just an emotional dis-enfranchisement, but a political one. As a result, it would have far-reaching ramifications on Southern society and race relations, leaving a legacy of the emotional politics of slavery that reverberated for generations to come.