Notes

Introduction

1. Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton Publishers, 1859), 70, 235, 265, 304.

2. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 66.

3. The Young Man’s Own Book: A Manual of Politeness, Intellectual Improvement, and Moral Deportment (Philadelphia: John Locken, 1842), 163. Similarly, an issue of Southern Planter advised that “by forgetting injuries we show ourselves superior to them; he who broods over them is their slave” (Southern Planter 20, no. 28 [August 1860]: 480). For more discussion about how emotional mastery and self-control were key components of slaveholding, see Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chap. 2, “Managed Hearts and Unmanageable Slaves,” 72–95.

4. According to Ira Berlin, the difference between a “Society with Slaves” and a “Slave Society” was not only the centrality of enslaved labor, but also that in a “Slave Society … the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations,” including family relations and dynamics between slaveholders and nonslaveholders. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8. For more on how patriarchal master-slave relationships shaped Southern social and familial relations, see Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

5. For example, one article, “Management of Negroes,” cautioned that enslaved people should “see from your cool, yet determined manner that [the punishment] is not in consequence of your excited temper, but of his fault.” “Management of Negroes,” Southern Planter 11, no. 2 (February 1851): 39–43. For more examples of injunctions against disciplining in anger, see “Overseers,” Southern Planter 16, no. 5 (May 1856): 147–148; “The Duties of an Overseer,” Southern Planter 17, no. 7 (July 1857): 415; “From Affleck’s Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book—the Duties of an Overseer,” American Cotton Planter 2, no. 12 (December 1854): 333–355; and Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, with an Appendix (Boston: H. Sprague, 1802), 223.

6. Some scholars have written extensively about the emotional rituals of White Southern elites, with particular attention to honor, but they do not consider the myriad affective interactions that took place between slaveholders and enslaved people, and the profound impact enslaved people had on the emotional lives of slaveholding Southerners (and vice versa). See Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s–1880s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (February 1990): 57–74. For works on affective relations in enslaved communities, see John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1977); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1985); Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 4, Family History (Summer 2001): 36–41; Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); and Rebecca J. Fraser, Courtship and Love Among the Enslaved in North Carolina (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

7. See Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956; New York: Vintage, 1989); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South,” American Historical Review 93 (1988): 1228–1252; and Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). More recent scholars of the history of slavery interrogate the performative and power-laden nature of paternalism, and in doing so they provide a more nuanced depiction of relationships between slaveholders and enslaved people. See Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

8. For example, in his work on emotions and the French Revolution, William Reddy articulates how societies permit or repress certain emotions, but in a very top-down model. While his theory of how “emotional regimes” police and restrict affective expression is useful for understanding how the planter class saw themselves as emotional masters, of enslaved people and of themselves, the affective norms and practices of the antebellum South were not determined solely or even primarily by planters and policy makers. Barbara Rosenwein and the Stearnses provide a somewhat more democratic understanding of how affective norms develop in a given society, but they downplay the role of power in the formation of emotional standards and practices and, like Reddy, ignore the subject of race entirely. See William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying About Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 821–845; and Peter N. Stearns with Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813–836, at 828. Rebecca J. Fraser’s very specific work on romantic relationships for enslaved people, Courtship and Love Among the Enslaved in North Carolina, discusses how such bonds helped enslaved people endure and defy slaveholders who saw them as less human. However, Fraser does not discuss contestations over other emotions or how those debates resonated post-Emancipation. More recent scholarship by Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States, on the critical role of emotions in provoking the Civil War, also takes a broader view of feelings in the political arena. Since the work’s focus is on regional divides over emotions in the leadup to war, Woods explores the real and idealized feelings of Southern slaveholders and of Northern elites, while enslaved people are more subjects testing slaveholders’ romanticized emotional selves.

9. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 190–195.

10. There is extensive scholarship on interracial sexual relations and sexual assault of enslaved people in the antebellum South. See Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Clinton, Plantation Mistress; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Edward Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review 106. no. 5 (December 2001): 1619–1650.

11. Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, ed. Richard Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 51, 29. For more proslavery rhetoric about racialized emotional differences, see Edward A. Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 38–39; George S. Sawyer, Southern Institutes (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1858), 200; Sterling Neblett, “For Southern Planter from the Nottoway Club, Brickland, Va.,” Southern Planter 20, no. 6 (June 1860): 359–360; and William Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” in The Pro-Slavery Argument: As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States, Containing the Several Essays, on the Subject, of Chancellor Harper, Governor Hammond, Dr. Simms, and Professor Dew (Charleston, SC: Walker, Richards and Co., 1852), 17, 56–59. For more discussion about how ideas about racialized emotional differences were used to justify separating enslaved couples, see Fraser, Courtship and Love Among the Enslaved in North Carolina, chap. 1, “‘Love Seems with Them More to Be an Eager Desire’: Racialized Stereotypes in the Slaveholding South.”

12. Quoted in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 697. Similarly, after Harriet Jacobs ran away she learned that her owner’s wife had said that Jacobs “hasn’t so much feeling for her children as a cow has for its calf.” Of course, in spite of the prevalence of the opinion among women of the planter class that enslaved people lacked maternal feeling, records, including slave sales and the writings of former slaves and slaveholders, reveal that enslaved women were nevertheless charged with caring for Black and White children on many plantations. Clearly, the subject of enslaved women’s emotional and maternal shortcomings was wielded in prescriptive literature and among slaveholders, but it was ignored when it was inconvenient. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 86–87.

13. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 298–299.

14. Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson: Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada (Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849), 27.

15. Henry Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” in Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky, 51–172 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 66; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 160. For more examples of the trope of enslaved people’s unknowable but intense feelings, see Henson, Life of Josiah Henson, 3; Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 1993), 207, 220; Ambrose Headen’s words in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 743–744; and William Wells Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 173–224, at 216. For examples of the unimaginability of enslaved parents’ emotions, see Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 116, 133; and Sella Martin’s words in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 715.

16. Notably the slave trade was closed in part due to slaveholders’ fears about a revolt of enslaved people of the magnitude of the Haitian Revolution happening in America. Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (Summer 2002): 263–290; Howard A. Ohline, “Georgetown, South Carolina Racial Anxieties and Militant Behavior, 1802,” South Carolina History Magazine 73, no. 3 (July 1972): 130–140.

17. For a discussion of how proslavery and abolitionist debates about “slave breeding” boiled down to different views about the relationship between love, volition, and domination, and how the slave trade closing was a turning point in such debates, see Amy Dru Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love,” in Capitalism Takes Command, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, 119–144 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

18. For discussions of how enslaved women were encouraged or compelled to reproduce, and for slaveholder rhetoric about enslaved women’s supposedly easy childbirths, see White, Ar’n’t I A Woman?; Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings; Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (Savannah, GA: Beehive Foundation, 1992).

19. A number of scholars have written about distinct shifts in how people expressed and evaluated emotions from the eighteenth century to the turn of the nineteenth century, especially with the rise of sentimentalism as a cultural genre and a mode of articulating emotions. According to Jan Lewis, an “ideal of restraint” predominated in the eighteenth century and is evident in the way people conveyed emotions in letters, tempering ardent love or bitter anger for the sake of politeness and moderation. But Lewis argues that as the nineteenth century dawned, and the “cult of sensibility” flourished, elites increasingly believed that expressing emotions was valuable, and they did so more openly in diaries, letters, and other texts. Lewis, Pursuit of Happiness, 28–30, 36–38, 181, 186, 206, 214, 216–217, 222–223, 228.

20. Should people not know how to write in the sentimental mode, they could turn to etiquette guides, which stressed the importance of penning proper letters and urged readers to write descriptively about their emotions in journals. One author observed that diaries had long “consisted of the driest details,” but that young people “should be encouraged to record their feelings in them; their hopes and fears … their joys and their sorrows.” William A. Alcott, The Young Woman’s Guide to Excellence (Boston: Charles H. Peirce, Binney and Otherman, W. J. Reynolds and Co., 1849), 119, 321–322.

21. Michael E. Woods argues that while it had much in common with Northern “domestic sentimentalism” a uniquely Southern brand of sentimentalism developed hand in hand with slavery as sectional tensions between North and South intensified, aptly observing that “mature proslavery ideology was a dialect of American sentimentalism articulated with a southern accent.” Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States, 75. For more on emotions in proslavery propaganda, see 81–82, 84–87, 89.

22. For examples of explicit proslavery responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Sawyer, Southern Institutes, 200, 222; W. Gilmore Simms, “The Morals of Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 175–285, 217; and Pollard, Black Diamonds, 21, 38.

23. Western expansion accelerated slaveholders’ need for enslaved people, which led to increased abolitionist accusations of “slave breeding.” In response proslavery writers were even more vocal in their paternalistic arguments, declaring that love was not contradicted by slavery, but rather that love and domination were inevitably and inextricably tied in the “domestic institution” of slavery. Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love,” 124.

24. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 27. Similarly, Moses Grandy recounted the story of an enslaved man who was so upset at his family being sold that “he dropped down dead; his heart was broken.” Solomon Northup insinuated that an enslaved woman named Eliza died of “grief” after her children were sold. It was also believed that one could become sick from being emotionally overwrought. Moses Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave, in the United States of America,” in Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, ed. William Loren Katz 5–45 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 36; Solomon Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 225–406, at 268, 280, 311; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,102.

25. An enslaved person who could not mask undesirable emotions like sorrow would depreciate in value, while other enslaved people fetched a higher price if they were marketed as “kind and affectionate to children.” Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 310–311; Louisa Picquet, The Octaroon: or Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life (New York: No. 5 & 7 Mercer St., 1861), 36–38.

26. As the narrator of one enslaved woman’s memoir observed, “Oh! … How much of joy, of sorrow, of misery and anguish have they hidden from their tormentors!” Dr. L. S. Thompson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, a True Story, Written and Arranged by Dr. L. S. Thompson, as Given by Mattie (Lawrence, MA.: Sentinel Office, 1866), 18. For examples of the importance for enslaved people of cloaking emotions like anger or sorrow, see Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 42–43; Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 265; and Levi Douglass’s and James Wright’s words in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 303–305.

27. H. N. McTyeire, “Plantation Life—Duties and Responsibilities,” DeBow’s Review 29, no. 3 (September 1860): 357; Mississippi Planter, “Management of Negroes upon Southern Estates,” DeBow’s Review 10 (June 1851): 621–627; Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race—Concluded,” DeBow’s Review 11 (September 1851): 331–336.

28. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 24–25, 81.

29. Henson, Life of Josiah Henson, 43.

30. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 198–212.

31. Knowing that “unusual” emotions were viewed with “suspicion” did not always help enslaved people quell them. Douglass asserted that his plan to run away with several other men might have been disclosed because of their unguarded “joyous exclamations” and the fact that in the days before escape they “were … remarkably buoyant” and “singing.” Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 202–203.

32. For examples of enslaved people discussing how attentive they had to be to slaveholders’ feelings and moods, see Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 27, 60; and Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 62, 65.

33. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 70, 27.

34. For more on how enslaved people exerted influence over their sale, see Johnson, Soul by Soul, particularly chap. 6, “Acts of Sale,” 162–188.

35. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 65.

36. The interactions between Fanny Kemble and Jack also speak volumes about how complicated the affective relationships between enslaved people and members of the planter class could be. As Nell Irvin Painter argues, “hierarchy by no means precludes attachment.” While it is true that all kinds of “attachment[s]” developed between enslaved people and slaveholders for a number of reasons, the writings of former slaves also call into question the depth and authenticity of some of those affections. Nell Irvin Painter, Soul Murder and Slavery, Fifteenth Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures, Baylor University, April 5–6, 1993 (Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund, Baylor University Press, 1995), 25. In his slave narrative, Charles Ball argued that “there never can be any affinity of feeling between master and slave.” Ball posited that any emotions approaching “affinity” that occurred between an enslaved person and their owner were always rooted in a past, present, or future negotiation, contingent on the advantages or disadvantages that could be exchanged. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 218.

37. The most notable are Reddy, Navigation of Feeling; Rosenwein, “Worrying About Emotions in History”; and works by Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, including “Emotionology,” and Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). For more discussions of how emotions are socially constructed and historically contingent, see Lewis, Pursuit of Happiness; Peter N. Stearns and Timothy Haggerty, “The Role of Fear: Transitions in American Emotional Standards, 1850–1950,” American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (February 1991): 63–94; Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 195; and Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49 (May 2010): 237–265.

38. In the wake of the Civil War, “Lost Cause” histories not only heaped praise on the Confederate cause, but also justified slavery with claims that enslaved people had been happy in bondage, happier than free people. See, for example, U. B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1918). To counter myths about contented slaves, a number of psychological histories of slavery were published from the 1940s through the 1960s that attempted to diagnose nineteenth-century individuals with twentieth-century conditions, infantilizing enslaved people and ignoring their capacity for emotional resilience. This school is best exemplified by Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), in which Elkins argued that enslaved people were fundamentally characterized by emotional trauma, and Wilbur J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1941), which stated that members of the planter class suffered from a “guilt complex.”

39. See Blassingame, Slave Community; Gutman, Black Family in Slavery and Freedom; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; and Stevenson, Life in Black and White. The focus on loving enslaved families was also a reaction to contemporary representations of the Black family and community. James C. Cobb and other scholars cite the 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, titled The Negro Family in America: The Case for National Action, which theorized that “the problems of blacks in America’s inner cities were a reflection of the deterioration of the black family ‘that had begun as a result of enslavement.’” “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Office of Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor (March 1965), www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm. This inspired scholars such as Blassingame and Gutman to prove that enslaved people had created close-knit families and kinship networks to survive bondage. Peter Kolchin warns that this historical turn went too far in defending enslaved people’s agency, that such authors have “come dangerously close to replacing a mythical world in which the slaves were objects of total control with an equally mythical world in which slaves were hardly slaves at all.” Kolchin quoted in James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 310, 312–313. And Kenneth Lynn stated that in focusing on loving enslaved families, these works risked perpetuating the notion of “happy-go-lucky darkies” so popular with proslavery and “Lost Cause” authors. Kenneth Lynn, “The Regressive Historians,” American Scholar 47, no. 4 (Autumn 1978): 471–500 at 493.

40. While many nonslaveholding White Southerners were still implicated in both the slave economy and the emotional politics that upheld the institution, as overseers, slave traders, and slave patrollers, and though White Southerners of all classes expressed anxieties about how Emancipation impacted the racialized emotional hierarchies of the postwar South, nonslaveholding White Southerners are not the subject here. Given the preexisting scholarship on the emotions and relationships of White slaveholders, a similar study of the emotional history of nonslaveholding White people in the slave South would shed more light on the intersection of race, class, and the emotional politics of slavery.

41. This interpretation of sources is informed by the theories of Saidiya Hartman and of Gayatri Spivak, who posit that because there are few written accounts by the dispossessed, while sources from elites abound, scholars must read sources created by slaveowners and their political, economic, and legal allies “against the grain” in order to locate the voices of enslaved people and free people of color. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–111 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 10.

42. Walter Johnson argues that authors of slave narratives were not just telling their individual stories, rather they “showed the traces of prior tellings” as they “bore witness for others” who may not be able to share their personal journeys. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 216.

43. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Slave’s Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), xi–xii, xiv.

44. For discussion of how enslaved children learned about the prospect of sale, see Chapter 2, “‘Born and Reared in Slavery.’”

45. For more on slave narratives as works of history, memory, literature, and collaboration, see John Ernest, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the American Slave Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

46. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 11. For more discussion of how to critically read sources by enslaved people and slaveholding elites as both historical and consciously crafted literary texts, see 8–14.

47. For examples, see Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 273, 27; James W. C. Pennington, “The Former Blacksmith” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, iv–87 at viii; Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 364; and Jacob Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 3–100, at 28, 72. Michael E. Woods argues that the prevalence of injunctions against disciplining enslaved people in anger underscores that far more slaveholders were ignoring these precepts rather than abiding by them. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States, 88.

48. J. D. B. DeBow, The Commercial Review of the South and West, a Monthly Journal of Trade, Commerce, Commercial Polity, Agriculture, Manufacturer, Internal Improvements and General Literature, vol. VIII, New Series vol. II (New Orleans, 1850), 70.

49. For a discussion of how letters and diaries demonstrate felt and performed emotions, see James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11–12. For more on determining the performativity of expressed emotions, see Lewis, Pursuit of Happiness,17.

Chapter 1

1. Edward A. Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 22.

2. For a discussion of how the rhetoric of paternalism informed proslavery ideology in the decade before the Civil War, see Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chap. 2, “Managed Hearts and Unmanageable Slaves,” 72–95.

3. See, for example, William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Peter N. Stearns with Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 813–836; Peter N. Stearns, Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1989); and Rom Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

4. For example, in his work on the rituals of slaveholders, Steven Stowe claims that his goal is to flesh out “a shared intellectual and emotional terrain” of the planter class. Yet Stowe does not see enslaved people as part of this “emotional terrain.” Instead, he explains that he was “struck with how seldom” slaveholders “make mention of black people, even familiar, personal servants.” This leads him to conclude that rather than allowing proximity to breed “intimacy” there was “an essential cultural division between the races,” which meant that enslaved people in no way determined the emotional rituals and norms of slaveholders. Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), xvi–xvii.

5. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes in the Lincoln White House: Memoirs of an African-American Seamstress (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), 11.

6. Henry Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” in Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky 51–172 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 70–71.

7. Benjamin Palmer, “The Trust Providentially Committed to the South in Relation to the Institution of Slavery,” Southern Planter 21 (February 1861): 116.

8. H. N. McTyeire, “Plantation Life—Duties and Responsibilities,” DeBow’s Review 29, no. 3 (September 1860): 363. Amy Dru Stanley argues that defenders of slavery depicted enslaved people as “beloved heirlooms,” configuring love and domination as inextricably tied rather than contradictory, in order to rebut accusations of “slave breeding.” Amy Dru Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love,” in Capitalism Takes Command, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, 119–144 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 126, 137–138.

9. James Henry Hammond, “Hammond’s Letters on Slavery,” in The Pro-Slavery Argument: As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States, Containing the Several Essays, on the Subject, of Chancellor Harper, Governor Hammond, Dr. Simms, and Professor Dew, 99–174 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Richards and Co. 1852), 161. For more examples of slaveholders romanticizing lifelong bonds between slaveholders and enslaved people, see Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (Savannah: GA, Beehive Foundation, 1992), 90; and Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York: Henry B. Price, 1860), 32–34. Booker T. Washington would even invoke nostalgia for that generational care, telling an audience of White people “you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful … and unresentful people that the world has seen” in his famed “Atlanta Compromise” speech in 1895, promising White Southerners the restoration of that fantasy. Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 35–36.

10. Defenders of slavery explicitly countered criticisms of slavery as a brutal or legal institution through claims of mutual affective relations. Hammond argued that though slavery was “founded on force,” the institution was nevertheless able “to cultivate the tenderest and purest sentiments of the human heart” between enslaved people and their owners. Hammond, “Hammond’s Letters on Slavery,” 161. Richard Dana touted slavery in the pages of Southern Planter, reminding about “the sympathies of common home, common childhood, long and intimate relations—all those things that may ameliorate the legal relations of the master and slave.” Richard H. Dana, Jr., “The Coffee and Sugar Plantations of Cuba,” Southern Planter 19, no. 7 (July 1859): 416–419, at 417.

11. For more on the idealization of enslaved caretakers, especially the nostalgia that accrued around the romanticized mammy figure, see McElya, Clinging to Mammy, especially 10–12, 33, 41–42, 44–46, 48, 121.

12. Jones v. Mason, in Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro: Volume I: Cases from the Courts of England, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 1:149–150.

13. Natchez Trace Collection Slaves and Slavery Collection, box 2.325, v48, Folder 2, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Similarly, James Gillespie gave his daughter Mary Winston two enslaved families as a token of “love and affection” on April 1, 1854. Gillespie (James A. and Family) Papers, MSS 669, Folder 1:5, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (this archive is cited hereafter as LLMVC).

14. The gifting of enslaved people had a variety of impacts on the enslaved people involved. One 1828 case from a Virginia court pertained to a slaveholder named Talbert who bought an enslaved woman named Jenny and “made her a promise that when she should have a child for every one of his, (he then having five) he would set her free.” The “promise” of freedom was intended to incentivize pregnancy, no doubt in the hopes that the gift of an enslaved child for each of the slaveholding children would keep peace and equality among the Talbert siblings. But it ultimately meant that should Jenny succeed in bearing five children she would be freed, but her children would remain in bondage. Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 1:151–152. For another example of a parent working to ensure that each of his six children had their own enslaved child attendant, see Levi Douglass’s and James Wright’s words in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 303.

15. Slavery Manuscript Collection (collection # 503), Folder 30, Hill Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

16. For examples of enslaved people being gifted to brides or newly married couples, see Folder 32: Act of donation of slave by Mary Norton Gardner, Saint Landry Parish, to Anna Gardner, Saint Landry Parish, 1849 February 24, Rosemonde E. and Emile Kuntz Collection, 600C, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; article in Austin Statesman, April 1, 1931, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin; Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton Publishers, 1859), 43; Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 15; and James Curry in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 128. See also Applebury v. Anthony, I Wash. Va. 287, Fall 1794; Hopkirk v. Randolph,12 Fed. Cas. 513 (2 Brockenbrough 132), May 1824; Brown v. Handley, 7 Leigh 119, January 1836; and Harvey v. Skipworth and others, 16 Grattan 393, May 1863 [393], in Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 1:103, 139, 180, 253.

17. William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (Salem, NH: Ayer Company Publishers, 1991), 2.

18. Slave Manuscript Collection 503, Folder 5, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. Members of the planter class also paid homage to deceased friends through enslaved people. When Sella Martin’s owner died, the owner’s friend Sherrod struck a deal with Martin to buy him, on the promise that Martin would bring him a great deal of profit if the man hired him out. When Martin was to be auctioned off, Sherrod came forward and announced, “I will have him if it cost me a farm,” explaining the circumstances. The crowd was moved and supported Sherrod, encouraging others to drop out and cheering Sherrod with “deafening” “applause,” for “what many felt to be a partial devotion to the memory of his friend” when he finally won. Martin observed that he “did not share so fully in this feeling as [he] might have been expected to,” because he was aware that Sherrod’s motives were more mercenary. Nevertheless, the White crowd believed it was an admirable way to show “devotion” to a “friend” and honor their “memory.” Interestingly, Martin recalled feeling “expected” to “share” the joy and admiration of the crowd. Sella Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 725–726.

19. Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, ed. Richard Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29.

20. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 97, 98, 30, 38–39.

21. For more on the courtship practices of members of the planter class, see Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 60–65; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), especially the prologue and chap. 1; and Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South. For discussions of the courtship practices of enslaved people, see Michael J. Cassity, Legacy of Fear: American Race Relations to 1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 79–80; Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); and Rebecca J. Fraser, Courtship and Love Among the Enslaved in North Carolina (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

22. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 56, 208, 262–265.

23. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853–1861 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 239.

24. Moses Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave, in the United States of America,” in Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, ed. William Loren, 5–45 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 20.

25. Clinton, Plantation Mistress, 63.

26. Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 703.

27. L. S. Thompson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, a True Story, Written and Arranged by Dr. L. S. Thompson, as Given by Mattie (Lawrence, MA.: Sentinel Office, 1866), 16–18.

28. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 208, 262–265.

29. James W. C. Pennington, “The Former Blacksmith,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, iv–87, at 73.

30. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 15.

31. Douglass and Wright, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 303.

32. April 27, 1801, Last Will and Testament of Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, Joe Henry Collection, Folder #8, 8–10, Cammie G. Henry Research Center, Watson Memorial Library, Northwestern State University of Louisiana.

33. Michael D. Wynne Collection (Moore, John and Family Papers) #2973, W-31, Folder 2, LLMVC. The attachment that slaveholders purported to feel for enslaved people was commonly referenced when slaveholders feared losing said enslaved people. For example, Frederick Douglass described a slave mistress’s feelings for two enslaved men, named Henry and John, saying that she “was very much attached—after the southern fashion—to Henry and John,” because they had “been reared from childhood in her house.” Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 1993), 214–215.

34. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 52.

35. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 77–78.

36. Pennington, “Former Blacksmith,” 73.

37. Stroyer observed that eventually the son came into wealth and his father pardoned him, “But poor Jim was not there to forgive him.” Jacob Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 3–100, at 51–52.

38. Batchelor (Albert A.) Papers 1855–1863, MSS 919, S:143, box 1A, Folder 2A, LLMVC.

39. Bond (Priscilla “Mittie” Munnikhuysen) Diary, Typewritten Edited Copy, Diary 1858–1865, 60–61, LLMVC.

40. Ibid., 64–65.

41. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 62–63.

42. Solomon Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 225–406, at 351, 333.

43. For more discussion of the jealous slave mistress as real or figurative, see Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 39–46; Clinton, Plantation Mistress; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001); and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 2. For more on the increasing regionalization of jealousy in the antebellum period, including the role of the jealous slave mistress figure in Northern perceptions that jealousy was elitist, antiquated, and feminine, see Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States, chap. 3, “Jealousy and the Sectionalization of Emotional Styles.”

44. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 29, 31, 71–72, 168.

45. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 46. For more discussion of the complicated dynamics between enslaved women and women of the planter class, particularly the violence wielded by White female slaveholders, see Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

46. Louisa Picquet, The Octaroon: or Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life (New York: No. 5 & 7 Mercer St., 1861), 36–38.

47. Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 61.

48. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 277–278.

49. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 55–56.

50. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 103–107. For more on the related idea of Southern honor, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (1990): 57–74.

51. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 185.

52. McTyeire, “Plantation Life,” 358; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 277–278. For other examples of proslavery authors discussing how shame and pride were based on one’s abilities as a master, and determined in the court of public opinion, see “Cotton Planters’ Convention,” in DeBow’s Review of the Southern and Western States, Vol. XII, ed. J. D. B. DeBow (New Orleans, LA: Office, Exchange Place, 1852), 278; and Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 186.

53. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 48. For more on the perceived relationship between “public opinion” and treatment of enslaved people, see Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 63.

54. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 27.

55. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 38.

56. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 102–103.

57. Ibid., 13–14, 28, 30. For more in Jacobs on the power of gossip, see 47–48.

58. Ibid., 13–14.

59. “Crop and Supply of Cotton,” DeBow’s Review 12 (January 1852): 76–81, at 77; “Fruit Culture for the South,” DeBow’s Review 12 (May 1852): 535–539, at 536; “Chancellor Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” DeBow’s Review 10 (January 1851): 47–65, at 56.

60. “The City of Mobile,” DeBow’s Review 3 (January 1847): 88–89, at 89; “Virginia Commercial Convention,” DeBow’s Review 12 (January 1852): 30–41, at 37; “Crop and Supply of Cotton,” DeBow’s Review 12 (January 1852): 76–81, at 81.

61. “Cotton Planters’ Convention,” 278.

62. “Chancellor Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 56. They are also terrified of abolitionists, believing that all antislavery advocates want to not only free, but also arm, the enslaved. James Stirling, Letters from the Slave States (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 201.

63. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 320–321.

64. William W. Hening, ed., Laws of Virginia, Vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1832), 481–482, 492–493.

65. Caleb Green, Jr., letter, August 29, 1835, MSS 480, Folder 1, Historic New Orleans Collection (this archive is hereafter cited as HNOC).

66. Caleb Green, Jr., letter, October 5, 1840, MSS 480, Folder 1, HNOC.

67. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 303. Mary Chesnut expressed similar concerns after a friend was suffocated to death in her bed by slaves. Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 198–199.

68. The Battiste conviction is discussed in Withers v. Coyles, 36 Ala. 320, June 1860, in Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro: Volume III: Cases from the Courts of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 3:242. Battiste was also charged with repeated burglaries and muggings and was even accused of being deliberately “difficult to arrest” as he “wore his clothes without buttons” in order to change quickly and avoid identification.

69. Stirling, Letters from the Slave States, 201, 298–299. For more of Stirling’s discussions of slaveholders’ fears of enslaved people, see 294, 301.

70. Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 145.

71. T. W. Higginson, “Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” Atlantic, August 1861, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1861/08/nat-turners-insurrection/308736/. Interestingly, William Harper dismissed the idea that Southern society was rife with would-be Nat Turners. He claimed that visitors to the South “commonly supposed” that a great deal of time and energy was expended in the “formidable” “task of keeping down insurrection.” Instead, Harper called these fears “absolutely ludicrous,” mocking the notion that Southerners “have been supposed to be nightly reposing over a mine, which may at any instant explode.” This hinted that some White Southerners viewed fear of enslaved people as an inappropriate feeling, or at least that one should not air such emotions publicly. “Chancellor Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 51–52.

72. See Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, chap. 12, “Fear of Insurrection”; Judith Kelleher Schafer, “The Immediate Impact of Nat Turner’s Insurrection on New Orleans,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 21, no. 4 (1980): 361–376.

73. Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “The Louisiana Purchase and South Carolina’s Reopening of the Slave Trade in 1803,” Journal of the Early Republic 22 (Summer 2002): 263–290. For more on how fears about slave rebellions, including the Haitian Revolution, shaped policy and slaveholders’ fears, see Howard A. Ohline, “Georgetown, South Carolina Racial Anxieties and Militant Behavior, 1802,” South Carolina History Magazine 73, no. 3 (July 1972): 130–140; James H. Dormon, “The Persistent Specter: Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 18, no. 4 (1977): 389–404; and John Herbert Roper and Lolita G. Brockington, “Slave Revolt, Slave Debate: A Comparison,” Phylon 45, no. 2 (1984): 98–110.

74. Map of New Orleans, 1803, HNOC.

75. Schafer, “Immediate Impact.”

76. For a discussion of the economic “flush times” for slaveholders, and the factors accelerating the spread of slavery and the Cotton Kingdom in the 1820s onward, see Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 5–14, 266–267.

77. See Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 5th ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1983); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 607; and Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 4, Family History (Summer 2001): 36–41.

78. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 236.

79. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 363.

80. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 27.

Chapter 2

1. Willie Lee Rose claims that most slave narratives included a memory of the “traumatic moment of realizing the limits of being in bondage.” Rose contends that this trope was more than a literary device; rather, it signaled a defining “distinct social process” for all enslaved children as they recognized that they were enslaved. In contrast, Calvin Schermerhorn argues that enslaved children did not immediately grasp the totality of enslavement and that their “lack of awareness of the full circumstances of enslavement” fostered “childish resiliency” in the face of bondage. Willie Lee Rose, in Slavery and Freedom, ed. William W. Freehling, 37–48 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 38; Calvin Schermerhorn, “‘Left Behind but Getting Ahead’: Antebellum Slavery’s Orphans in the Chesapeake, 1820–60,” in Children in Slavery Through the Ages, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, 204–224(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 214.

2. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 9–10. Lizzie Gibson expressed similar sentiments about the emotional blow of losing her mother. Gibson recalled, “[I] spent my happiest days of slavery in my childish days” and “thought it was always to be just that way; but at the age of seven years that thought was changed, and a sorrowful change it was,” when she and her siblings were “taken from [their] mother.” Lizzie Gibson, in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 738–739.

3. Henry Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” in Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky, 51–172 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 64–65.

4. Lunsford Lane, “The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, formerly of Raleigh, N.C.,” in Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, ed. William Loren Katz, 1–54 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 7, 8.

5. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 1993), 113.

6. Rose, Slavery and Freedom, 39. See also Nell Irvin Painter, Soul Murder and Slavery, Fifteenth Charles Edmondson Historical Lectures, Baylor University, April 5–6, 1993 (Waco, TX: Markham Press Fund, Baylor University Press, 1995), 10–11.

7. Enslaved children are mentioned in some monographs on plantation communities and enslaved families, but such works fail to sufficiently explore the emotional development of enslaved children, the relationships that such children forged, and how they affectively adapted to slavery. Even studies that focus more specifically on the experience of slavery for children do not sufficiently address the emotional dimensions, how affective norms were learned, and how that process related to the emotional development of children of the planter class. See Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 4, Family History (Summer 2001): 36–41; John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1995); Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1984); and Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). For other works that specifically address the experience of enslaved children, see Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004); and Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Children in Slavery Through the Ages.

8. Historian Phillip Aries claims that the concept of a distinct period of childhood “separate … from adulthood” gained traction among the European aristocracy in the sixteenth century, and it reached its zenith in the nineteenth century. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1965), 128. For more on childhood as a modern construct, see Heather Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 56; and Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Children in Slavery Through the Ages, 1–18, at 3.

9. Nell Irvin Painter also warns those who embark on affective studies of slavery that one cannot expect to apply a “twentieth-century psychology … to the culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century societies.” Painter Soul Murder and Slavery, 8; King, Stolen Childhood, xix.

10. King, Stolen Childhood, xviii; Rose, Slavery and Freedom, 39, xix. For more on the challenges of studying children, see Judy Dunn, “Understanding Feelings: The Early Stages,” in Making Sense: The Child’s Construction of the World, ed. Jerome Bruner and Helen Haste, 20–30 (New York: Methuen, 1987), 26.

11. Historians point out that when former slaves recorded their childhood experiences as adults years later, these recollections have been “filtered through later experiences.” Campbell, Miers, and Miller, “Editor’s Introduction,” 1.

12. For example, see Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 40, 60; and Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, ed. Richard Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 16. Many narratives also include childhood stories that the authors’ parents had told them. Though the authors might not remember the events themselves, only the oft-repeated stories, the lessons embedded in their parents’ tales were often revealing. See also William Wells Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 173–224, at 183–184, 187.

13. Historian Emily West, for example, argues that despite what might be “imperfect recall,” or memories of childhood that “may have dimmed with age,” later narratives like Works Progress Administration interviews “hold immense historical value.” Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 7.

14. Childhood anthropologist Heather Montgomery observes that a child “is born into a complex web of social relationships” and therefore children need to understand the rules and structure of this “web” in order to “become active members” of that social order. Montgomery, Introduction to Childhood, 106. According to Margaret Mead, children learn the hierarchies of the society around them by learning “the essential avoidances,” what is dangerous or taboo, who has power over them, and the ramifications for violating those rules. Young Samoan children, for example, were warned not to put their hands in fire, or to play with knives, but they were also cautioned against touching sacred objects or disrespecting the chief. Through “occasional cuffings” and reprimands, children quickly learned that overstepping the boundaries of social hierarchies was as dangerous as playing with fire. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (New York: William Morrow, 2001), 18, 20. For more on how children learn how to relate to others by observing power dynamics between people, see Dunn, “Understanding Feelings,” 30–31.

15. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 33–34, 36, 63.

16. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 11, 18. Harriet Jacobs suggested that these lessons were particularly difficult for her and her brother to grasp because their father had “more of the feelings of a freeman than is common among slaves.” Consequently, her brother William “was a spirited boy, and being brought up under such influences, he early detested the name of master and mistress.”

17. Jacob Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 3–100, at 17–18.

18. For example, see Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 115–116; Solomon Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 225–406, at 244–245, 265; and Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 20, 25.

19. As Wilma King asserts, “If childhood was a special time for enslaved children,” it was due to the efforts of their parents, who worked to protect them from “slaveholders who sought to control them psychologically.” King, Stolen Childhood, 1. For more on how the affective ties of family helped enslaved people survive and resist slavery, see Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters.”

20. I do not mean to suggest that enslaved families were free from neglect and abuse. The conditions of slavery may have made many parents yearn to protect their children, but Nell Irvin Painter notes that it could also foster sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. Painter, Soul Murder and Slavery.

21. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,8.

22. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 32–33.

23. Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton Publishers, 1859), 12.

24. L. S. Thompson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, a True Story, Written and Arranged by Dr. L. S. Thompson, as Given by Mattie (Lawrence, MA.: Sentinel Office, 1866), 6–7.

25. As Wilma King observes, enslaved parents had little free time “to indulge their children, yet many never stopped trying to foster positive relationships with them.” King, Stolen Childhood, 18–19.

26. Lane, “Narrative of Lunsford Lane,” 6.

27. Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” 187.

28. Gibson, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 738–739.

29. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83, 101, 121. For more discussion of trickster tales as pedagogical tools, see chap. 2, “The Meaning of Slave Tales,” especially 81–135.

30. Ibid., 91–93.

31. For more on enslaved children being sold, see Susan Eva O’Donovan, “‘Traded Babies’: Enslaved Children in America’s Domestic Migration, 1820–60,” in Campbell, Miers, and Miller, Children in Slavery Through the Ages, 88–102, at 89–90, 98.

32. Tabb Gross and Lewis Smith, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 346–347.

33. Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 16. Other authors idealized the conversation about separation in verse. At the end of Lunsford Lane’s 1842 narrative, a poem entitled “The Slave Mother’s Address,” by “J.P.B” functioned as a cautionary tale from mother to child about slave sales, saying:

And if perchance some tender joy

Should bloom upon thy heart,

Another’s hand may enter there,

And tear it soon apart.

Thou art a little joy to me,

But soon thou may’st be sold. (55–56)

The poem implied that happiness was possible for enslaved children, but that it was always in peril due to the threat of sale. It might instill fear in a child to know that sale was always imminent, but the words also sought to provide solace, through the comfort of having known a mother’s love. Of course, the poem was clear that if a child was sold it destroyed the “joy” of child and parent. The poem concluded with the mother saying she would “gladly” see her child dead and buried “beneath the sod” in order to have her child be “Unmarr’d with grief,” and “free” in “spirit,” if not in body. The poem thus ended with a wish for the child’s death, hinting that if the mother’s child ever had their own “little ones” they would understand these feelings. In this way the poem served as a collection of the different emotional lessons and challenges that enslaved people faced over the course of their life.

34. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 32–34, 38.

35. Lane, “Narrative of Lunsford Lane,” 8. Similarly, Charles Ball recalled being sold away from his mother: “young as I was, the horrors of that day sank deeply into my heart.” Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 11.

36. Gibson, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 738–739. Gibson only saw her siblings again at a subsequent auction.

37. As Trudier Harris argues in her study of African American writing about the South, whether in reality or in fiction, “Black people and Black characters had to become diviners, fortune tellers who must always read any situation correctly or suffer the consequences.” Trudier Harris, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 12. According to historian Calvin Schermerhorn, enslaved children in particular became schooled in learning about their world “through observation,” developing their “abilities to judge character and reliability” in order to identify possible allies as well as potential threats. Schermerhorn, “Left Behind but Getting Ahead,” 205, 216. See also Judy Dunn on the importance of learning to identify “the feelings and wishes of other people in their world” as part of socialization. Dunn, “Understanding Feelings,” 26–27.

38. In 1840 Charles Darwin began recording the behavior of his two-month-old baby. Darwin observed that his son “studies expressions of those around him” and responds accordingly. Research almost 150 years later supports this finding, showing that, when in “ambiguous” or uncertain situations, babies look to the expressions of adults to establish how to respond, and “if the adults look worried, babies are more likely to cry … than if adults look happy or unconcerned.” This is called “social referencing.” Ben S. Bradley, Visions of Infancy: A Critical Introduction to Child Psychology (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press with Basil Blackwell, 1989), 14–16. For more on Darwin’s research into human emotional development, see Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

39. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 39.

40. Ibid., 62–63, 65, 137.

41. Ibid., 61–62.

42. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,27.

43. Wilma King argues that “one of the most unsettling events in the lives of slaves was the early separation of mothers and children when the women returned to work.” King, Stolen Childhood, 13. According to Henry Bibb, enslaved mothers who did field labor were not permitted to return to the quarters during the day to nurse their babies, so they were forced to “carry them to the cotton fields and tie them in the shade of a tree” so that they could tend to their babies on their lunch break. Those infants had many threats to contend with, including “scorching rays of the sun[,] … poisonous rattle snakes,” and “large alligators,” which meant that enslaved babies were “often found dead in the field and in the quarter for want of the care of their mothers.” Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 112–118.

44. Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” 180–181.

45. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 35.

46. Because of these conditions, most enslaved children endured a great deal of uncertainty, leading many to feel what Nell Irvin Painter calls “‘soul murder’ which may be summed up as depression, lowered self-esteem, and anger.” Painter, Soul Murder and Slavery, 7.

47. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 32–33, 100.

48. See Sarah Meer, “Autobiography, Authenticity and Nineteenth-Century Ideas of Race,” in The Uses of Autobiography, ed. Julia Swindells, 89–97 (Bristol, PA: Taylor and Francis 1995); and William Andrews, ed., Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991).

49. Moses Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave, in the United States of America,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 5–45, at 6.

50. According to Calvin Schermerhorn, emotions served as both the means and ends, as the “pain and loss” that enslaved people experienced were “stimulated strategies for survival.” Schermerhorn claims that for enslaved children one of those “strategies” was “to recruit others who could care for them.” Schermerhorn, “Left Behind but Getting Ahead,” 204. Wilma King contends that older enslaved people were crucial to helping young slaves navigate slavery whether they were “related or not.” King, Stolen Childhood, 14–15. Similarly, childhood anthropologist Heather Montgomery asserts that “children themselves take an active part in forming their families.” Montgomery, Introduction to Childhood, 132–133.

51. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 42, 51, 58, 83, 97, 106. For another example of affective relationships between slaveholders and enslaved children, see Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy,” 6.

52. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 36. In his second autobiography Douglass mentioned again how “Mas’ Daniel” had given him “cake,” but he also claimed that he “learned many things” from him. He does not say what he “learned,” but it is clear that establishing an affective relationship with a slaveholder could yield a variety of advantages for an enslaved child. See more on Douglass’s relationship with Daniel Lloyd in Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 83, 97.

53. Edward A. Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 75.

54. Child psychologist Ben Bradley explains that it is common for children to display signifiers of affection to gain basic necessities, a practice he labels “cupboard love.” Bradley, Visions of Infancy, 105.

55. Douglass refers to Daniel Lloyd as “a friend” and also describes Lucretia Auld as someone he “regarded” as a friend. He also held no illusions about the nature of these relationships, stating that Auld “pitied” him, “if she did not love” him. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 59–60, 83, 97.

56. Children’s psychologist Judith Rich Harris claims that children learn social norms best from other children because “in every society, acceptable behavior depends on whether you’re a child or an adult.” Montgomery, Introduction to Childhood, 126.

57. Heather Montgomery argues that for many children “the links between play, socialization, and work are extremely blurred.” Ibid., 149.

58. King, Stolen Childhood, 14. For more on enslaved children and work, see Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters.”

59. Sella Martin hinted at this complex relationship when he recalled how he used to “play” with “the son of [his] master, and whose attendant [he] was.” Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 706.

60. A number of authors of slave narratives mention playing with the children who would become their owners. Henry Bibb recalled how Harriet White was his “playmate” when they were children but also “the legitimate owner” of his mother and all his mother’s children. Linda Brent also became very attached to the child who legally owned her, a “Miss Flint” who “was endeared to [her] by many recollections.” Slaveholding parents frequently assigned specific enslaved people to children in their wills. Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy,” 6; Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 64–65; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 76.

61. Lane, “Narrative of Lunsford Lane,” 6, 49–50; Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 59. Mattie Jackson described a similar experience: “How well I remember those happy days! Slavery had no horror then for me, as I played … with the same joyful freedom as the little white children.” Thompson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, 13. Some proslavery authors also employed the trope of childhood as egalitarian and free of race-based prejudice. Slaveholder Edward Pollard recalled that his enslaved friends, “in all the affairs of fun and recreation, associated with [him] on terms of perfect equality.” Pollard, Black Diamonds, 50–51.

62. Slavery Scrapbook 3L398, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

63. Childhood sociologists see the liminal quality of play as integral to maturation. Montgomery, Introduction to Childhood, 141.

64. James W. C. Pennington, “The Former Blacksmith,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, iv–87, at 3.

65. It is also notable that Pennington chose to imagine the whip as a horse, rather than pretend that he was an overseer with a whip. Because of cases like these, Heather Montgomery cautions against “seeing children’s play as simply imitative,” because doing so belies “the ways that children are creative and imaginative.” She brings up the example of the “role-playing” games of the Mehinaku of Amazonia and how Mehinaku children “incorporat[e] adult activities into their own world and simultaneously mock … them.” Also, the fact that he was pretending does not mean he was not thinking about the larger society he occupied. Montgomery, Introduction to Childhood, 146–148. Judy Dunn suggests that even when engaged in make-believe, children may be working through their understanding of the “social roles and rules of their world.” Dunn, “Understanding Feelings,” 32.

66. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 11–13.

67. Of course, these feelings could be suppressed only so much. Douglass suggests that even at play slavery still influenced his feelings: “in all my sports and plays, and in spite of them, there would, occasionally, come the painful foreboding that … I must soon be called away to the home of my master.” Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 70, 37.

68. Ibid., 39–40.

69. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (Savannah, GA: Beehive Foundation, 1992), 4–5.

70. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, with an Appendix (Boston: H. Sprague, 1802), 223.

71. Tattler, “Management of Negroes,” Southern Planter 11, no. 2 (February 1851): 39–43.

72. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853–1861 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 572–573.

73. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 338, 370–371.

74. Thomas Roderick Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” in The Pro-Slavery Argument: As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States, Containing the Several Essays, on the Subject, of Chancellor Harper, Governor Hammond, Dr. Simms, and Professor Dew, 287–490 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Richards and Co., 1852), 456.

75. Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York: Henry B. Price, 1860), 32–33.

76. James Henry Hammond, “Hammond’s Letters on Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 99–174, at 161. See also H. N. McTyeire, “Plantation Life—Duties and Responsibilities,” DeBow’s Review 29, no. 3 (September 1860): 363.

77. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 32–34. The antislavery Fanny Kemble also romanticized the long-term effect of childhood intimacy between free and enslaved children. Kemble theorized that as masters and slaves were increasingly linked for “successive generations” then over time “the relations of owner and slave” would “lose some … harsher features.” Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation,90.

78. Tattler, “Management of Negroes,” 39–43.

79. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 48–49.

80. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 103.

81. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 41.

82. According to child studies scholar Judy Dunn, children “very frequently ‘play’ with pretend feelings states,” engaging in games that require them “to ‘take on’ a feeling state other than their own.” Dunn, “Understanding Feelings,” 32.

83. Anya Jabour, “Albums of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 125–158, at 137.

84. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,20.

85. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 30, 38–39.

86. Fortunately, for Henson, this kindness was repaid years later when Henson sought to buy his freedom and informed Francis of this plan. The slaveholder responded with a “sympathy which penetrates the heart of a slave, so little accustomed … to the exhibition of any such feeling on the part of a white man.” So Henson’s kindness to Francis as a child paid off, as he agreed to help Henson to freedom. Of course, far too often childhood attachments did not lead to greater empathy on the part of members of the planter class. Henson acknowledged that his case was anomalous when noting that enslaved people were not “accustomed” to such responses from slaveholders. Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson: Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada (Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849), 20, 32.

87. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 224.

88. Lane, “Narrative of Lunsford Lane,” 7.

89. Painter, Soul Murder and Slavery, 26. See also Pollard, Black Diamonds, 42, where he talks about how his feelings about enslaved people changed over time.

90. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 161.

91. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 223.

92. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 367–368.

93. Ibid., 370.

94. Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” 183–184.

95. Pollard further justified his actions by explaining that his enslaved “playmates” served as “conspirators,” and indeed “no one enjoyed the sport more heartily” than his “sable companions.” Perhaps they did enjoy watching elders they had been taught to respect be tricked and pelted with fruit, or perhaps they were unwilling accomplices in Pollard’s efforts to exercise his nascent power. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 50–51. Interestingly, Harriet Jacobs’s brother decried the “meanness” of his “young master,” in particular that the young man would trick an elderly enslaved “man who kept a fruit stand” with counterfeit coins. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 18–19.

96. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 76–77.

97. Ibid., 76–77. William Wells Brown also played on this very fear, warning slaveholders that “in every southern household there may be a Nat Turner…. The slaveholder should understand that he lives upon a volcano.” William Wells Brown, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863), 73.

98. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 76–77.

99. Harriet Jacobs made clear that all slaveholding children were threatened by the perversion of slavery, noting “the slaveholder’s sons are, of course, vitiated, even while boys, by the unclean influences everywhere around them. Nor do the master’s daughters always escape.” Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,46.

100. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom,574.

101. For more on displaying different “fronts” in different interactions and based on status, see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1990). As Olmsted’s passage suggests, young members of the planter class learned that in the plantocracy not only that they could exert control over enslaved people on their own plantation, but also that any enslaved person could be subject to their wiles. William Wells Brown described how one day, while running errands for his master, he was “attacked by several large boys, sons of slave-holders, who pelted” him with “snowballs” and “stones and sticks” until he was “overpowered.” Though he did not belong to any of their families after Brown allegedly “hurt” one of his assailants, that boy’s father punished Brown by beating him so severely that “it was five weeks before [he] was able to walk again.” This served as a lesson for the boys as well as Brown that slaveholders could enact their desires on any enslaved bodies without retribution. Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” 186–187.

102. Tattler, “Management of Negroes,” 39–43.

103. Montgomery, Introduction to Childhood, 169.

104. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 75–76. For more discussion of the meaning and origins of this song, see Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness,95.

105. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 116–119.

106. Heather Montgomery notes that the practice of terrifying children is not atypical, that “a common method of keeping children disciplined is by the use of threats of the supernatural, nonhuman beings that will come to take them away if they misbehave.” Montgomery, Introduction to Childhood,169.

107. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 55. Frederick Douglass would go on to observe in his second autobiography that “it is easy to see, that, in entering upon the duties of a slaveholder, some little experience is needed.” Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 113.

108. Ibid., 55.

109. Ibid., 40, 43.

110. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 113.

111. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 40, 43.

112. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 24.

113. Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 706–707, 728.

114. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 40.

115. Pennington, “Former Blacksmith,” 73.

116. Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” 456.

117. Hammond, “Hammond’s Letters on Slavery,” 127–128.

Chapter 3

1. Abraham Lincoln, letter to Mary Speed, September 27, 1841, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858 (New York: Library of America, 1989), 74–75. That he was writing to Mary Speed, the proslavery sister of his close friend Joshua Speed, may have shaped how Lincoln depicted people on their way to be sold.

2. Saidiya Hartman challenges the belief that activities like dancing and singing were signifiers of genuine contentment for enslaved people. According to Hartman, witnesses who accepted that idea were implying that slavery was “socially endurable” or “bearable,” thereby diminishing the violence inherent to scenes of supposed enjoyment. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 34–35.

3. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes in the Lincoln White House: Memoirs of an African-American Seamstress (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), 29.

4. James M. McPherson, “Who Freed the Slaves?,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139, no. 1 (March 1995): 1–10.

5. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, vol. 1 (New York: Saunders & Otley, 1837), 255.

6. For a discussion of how paintings of supposedly happy and dancing enslaved people were also employed as proslavery propaganda, see Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 188–190.

7. Ibid., 36.

8. Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006), xi, 14, 186, 201–202, 234.

9. Mrs. Harrison Smith, “Who Is Happy?,” Lady’s Book (May 1839): 216.

10. McMahon, Happiness, 14, 186, 201–202, 234.

11. McMahon calls the Age of Enlightenment “an age anxious to be happy.” Ibid., 195, 208–210, 236, 247.

12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker (New York: Penguin, 1979), 88–89.

13. McMahon, Happiness, 186.

14. Abbé Pestré, “Bonheur,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences des arts et des métiers, 35 vols. (1751–1780), 2:322.

15. Julian P. Boyd, “The Declaration of Independence,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 1:1760–1776, 413–432 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950); McMahon, Happiness, 315. Of course, Jefferson did accept a major edit, excising a paragraph condemning the slave trade, which Jefferson claimed “violat[ed]” “human nature’s … most sacred rights of life and liberty … of a distant people … carrying them into slavery … to incur miserable death.” So he was concerned about the rights of enslaved Africans to “life and liberty,” but not so concerned that it made the final draft. Nor did he mention their natural right to the pursuit of happiness. McMahon, Happiness, 332.

16. McMahon, Happiness, 317–319.

17. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (New York: Penguin, 1986), 20, 97.

18. François Jean, Marquis de Chastellux, De la Félicité publique, ou Considérations sur le sort des hommes dans les différentes époques de l’histoire, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1772), 1:9.

19. See Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 108; J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume Two, Printer and Publisher, 1730–1747 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 205.

20. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988), 1:243.

21. “Are We a Happy People?,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 14, no. 80 (January 1857): 207–209.

22. Mrs. Harrison Smith, “Who Is Happy?,” Lady’s Book (April 1839): 97.

23. Mrs. Harrison Smith, “Who Is Happy?,” Lady’s Book (May 1839): 214–216.

24. “Are We a Happy People?,” 207–209.

25. “From George Washington to Robert Morris, 12 April 1786,” in The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, vol. 4, 2 April 1786–31 January 1787, ed. W. W. Abbot, 14–17 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 15–17.

26. “Editorial—Literary—Miscellaneous, Etc.,” DeBow’s Review 14, no. 1 (January 1853): 90.

27. For more references to enslaved people being “happy,” see William Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 1–98, at 11, 14, 16; George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1857), 47; “The Two Great Evils of Virginia and Their One Common Remedy,” Southern Planter 19, no. 10 (October 1859): 644; and Edward A. Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 21–22, 25.

28. Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” DeBow’s Review 11, no. 1 (July 1851): 64–69, at 65, 69.

29. W. Gilmore Simms, “The Morals of Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 175–285, at 217.

30. Pollard described one enslaved man in particular as being a “better-dispositioned and happier old boy” than he had ever met. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 58; Martineau, Society in America, 1:255.

31. Thomas Roderick Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 287–490, at 442, 459, 460.

32. “Governor Hammond’s Letters on Slavery, No. 3,” DeBow’s Review 8 (February 1850): 123.

33. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853–1861 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 614.

34. Of course, many proslavery authors believed that happiness was rooted in race. As Sterling Neblett wrote, “The white man has more individuality and care, the black man more faith and contentment.” Sterling Neblett, “For Southern Planter from the Nottoway Club, Brickland, Va.,” Southern Planter 20, no. 6 (June 1860): 359–360.

35. Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 61. For claims about enslaved people being happier than free Black people, see Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” 426, 427–428; Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, 296; and Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 15–16. For more assertions that enslaved people were happier than Africans, see William R. Smith, The History and Debates of the Convention of the People of Alabama, Begun and Held in the City of Montgomery, on the Seventh Day of January, 1861, in Which Is Preserved the Speeches of the Secret Sessions, and Many Valuable State Papers (Montgomery, AL: White, Pfister & Co., 1861), 201; and Martineau, Society in America, 1:255.

36. For discussions of how slave labor was cheaper or more efficient, see “Improvement,” Southern Planter 2, no. 12 (December 1842): 278; Calx, “Estimated Costs of Free and Slave Labor,” Southern Planter 12, no. 3 (March 1852): 71–73; and Edmund Ruffin, “Address of Mr. Ruffin,” Southern Planter 13, no. 12 (December 1853): 8–16. A comparison of slavery and free labor in an article from Southern Planter entitled “On Lime—as Used in Pennsylvania” demonstrates how seemingly any discussion in the slaveholders’ journal could devolve into a discussion of the merits of free labor versus enslaved labor. Letters to Editor, Southern Planter, 4, no. 12 (December 1844): 265, 268.

37. For more examples of proslavery arguments that enslaved people are happier than free laborers, see “Song of the Cane Fields,” DeBow’s Review 8 (1850): 68; Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 24; “Misery and Degradation of British Workmen-Slave Laws,” DeBow’s Review 14, no. 1 (January 1853): 271; and “An Address Delivered Before the Virginia State Agricultural Society, by Franklin Minor of Ridgeway, Albemarle,” Southern Planter 15, no. 12 (December 1855): 378. For an excellent discussion about how different definitions of emotions, especially happiness, reflected and contributed to increasing sectional tensions over free labor versus enslaved labor, see Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chap. 1, “Free Labor, Slave Labor, and the Political Economy of Happiness,” 35–71.

38. “The Two Great Evils of Virginia and Their One Common Remedy—Continued,” Southern Planter 19, no. 11 (November 1859): 671.

39. Edmund Ruffin, “Slavery and Free Labor Compared,” in American Colonization Unveiled, ed. Edmund Ruffin, 1–28 (Washington: L. Towers, 1859), 2, 3.

40. Pollard, Black Diamonds,48.

41. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, 276, 321. For more of Fitzhugh comparing the “happiness” of enslaved people and free laborers, see 30, 47, 59, 61, 232, 234, 246, 273, 302, 317, 339.

42. James Henry Hammond, “Hammond’s Letters on Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 99–174, at 162.

43. William Harper remarked that if one contrasted the emotions “of the most happy, and the most miserable of man [one] should perhaps be startled to find the difference so much less than … previous impressions” could lead one to think. Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 24–25.

44. Mississippi Planter, “Management of Negroes upon Southern Estates,” DeBow’s Review 10 (June 1851): 625. For more on the supposedly mutual contentment of slaveholders and enslaved people, see Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 615; and Pollard, Black Diamonds, 57–58.

45. CTB, “Letters from Senior Editor,” Southern Planter 2, no. 11 (November 1842): 245–246.

46. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!,302.

47. Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” 460.

48. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 25, 42; Smith, History and Debates, 201. For more of Pollard’s ruminations on happiness, see 40, 42, 50–51.

49. Pollard, Black Diamonds,42.

50. Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 5, 243.

51. Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” 460. Dew also warned that ending slavery would cut off an enslaved person’s “very sources of … happiness.” Ibid., 293.

52. “Address of Hon. A. H. H. Stuart Before the Central Agricultural Society of Virginia, at Richmond, Oct. 28th, 1859,” Southern Planter 20, no. 6 (June 1860): 334.

53. Smith, History and Debates, 201.

54. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 40, 42.

55. Ibid., 51. Elsewhere Pollard expressed a similar sentiment, that “God gives happiness to men, without reference to the circumstances that surround them: he gives it to the beggar as well as the lord; to the slave as well as the master.” Ibid., 40.

56. Simms, “Morals of Slavery,” 259.

57. Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 6–7, 10–11, 13–14.

58. William Wells Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself,” in Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky, 173–224 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 194. For more on how enslaved people “in the pens were instructed to appear happy” as to “enhance” their “value,” see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 130; and Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 37.

59. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 264–265, 268, 280, 311.

60. For examples of enslaved people being sold at reduced prices after being labeled “disaffected” or discontented, see James W. C. Pennington, “The Former Blacksmith,” in Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, ed. William Loren Katz, iv–87 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 58; Sella Martin, in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 728; Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 1993), 88; and Johnson, Soul by Soul,28.

61. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 119.

62. Ibid., 88. In his first narrative Douglass uses almost identical wording, stating that this is why the enslaved “almost universally say they are contented.” Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 30.

63. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, 126.

64. “The Two Great Evils of Virginia and Their One Common Remedy,” 644. William Harper also wrote that enslaved people “should be made to labor,” as this was vital to both their “happiness” and their “usefulness.” Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 65.

65. Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” 69. See also Samuel Cart-wright, “How to Save the Republic, and the Position of the South in the Union,” DeBow’s Review 11, no. 2 (August 1851): 188–189.

66. Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 65.

67. Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” 336.

68. “All About Overseers,” Southern Planter 18, no. 7 (July 1858): 411–413, at 411, 412.

69. Tattler, “Management of Negroes,” Southern Planter 11, no. 2 (February 1851): 39–43.

70. Simms, “Morals of Slavery,” 261.

71. Douglass discussed how one of his owners told him that knowledge would not make him happy. Douglass repeated this belief throughout his narratives, observing in his second memoir, “I almost envied my fellow slaves their stupid contentment” and “To make a contented slave, you must make a thoughtless one.” Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 90; Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 118–119, 233.

72. “How the South Is Affected by Her Slave Institutions,” DeBow’s Review 11, no. 4 (October 1851): 358.

73. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 48, 116.

74. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 90.

75. Professor Holcombe, “Speech to the Annual Meeting of the Agricultural Society,” Southern Planter 20, no. 1 (January 1859): 29. Later in the speech Holcombe refers to other building blocks of enslaved happiness, including “food, clothing[, and] … holydays.” Ibid., 39.

76. Fitzhugh, Cannibals All!, 317, 126.

77. “Governor Hammond’s Letters on Slavery,” 123.

78. Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company, 1826), 139–140.

79. Mississippi Planter, “Management of Negroes upon Southern Estates,” 625.

80. Holcombe, “Speech to the Annual Meeting of the Agricultural Society,” 29, 39.

81. Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years,140.

82. A Planter, “Cornshucking,” Southern Planter 18, no. 11 (November 1858): 666–667.

83. How some slaveholders viewed holidays is evident in a parody slave pass written in verse by a South Carolina slaveholder:

Permit me friends poor sable Dick

Who scarce can walk without the stick

To pass to Mr. B_____’s plantation,

To see the people of his nation.

This poor old man has lost his wife,

It touches hard upon his life.

Then pray permit him to depart,

And seek a wife to mend his heart.

Christmas comes but once a year,

To give poor nigger happy cheer …

Major Hugh Lide, Copy of a Slave Pass Written in Verse, Slavery Papers, Series 2092.2, Southern Historical Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (this archive is hereafter cited as SHC).

84. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 342, 347, 345, 383.

85. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 70–71; Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 186–187.

86. Bayside Plantation Journal, vol. 1, 1846–1852, Folder 1, Bayside Plantation Records, SHC.

87. Pierre Prudhomme Plantation Record Books, 1857 and 1860, Folders 272 and 274, Prudhomme Family Papers #613, Series 3.1.5, SHC.

88. Bayside Plantation Journals, vol. 1, 1846–1852, and vol. 3, 1860–25 Oct. 1862, Folder 1, SHC.

89. A Planter, “Cornshucking,” 666–667.

90. Pierre Prudhomme Plantation Record Books, 1857 and 1860, Folders 272 and 274, SHC.

91. SSV, “For the Southern Planter, the Agricultural Year,” Southern Planter 3, no. 10 (October 1843): 240.

92. Tattler, “Management of Negroes,” 39–43.

93. Bayside Plantation Journal, vol. 3, 1860–25 Oct. 1862, Folder 1, SHC.

94. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 342, 347, 345, 383.

95. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 70–71

96. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 186–187.

97. Ibid., 186–187. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 78. Of course, here Douglass glosses over the fact that some enslaved people took advantage of holidays to run away. William and Ellen Craft used the extended break of Christmas to escape, while one of Douglass’s runaway attempts involved using a counterfeit slave pass to travel for “the Easter holidays.” William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (Salem, NH: Ayer Company Publishers, 1991), 31, 68, 80.

98. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 25, 40.

99. Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” 459–460. Dew repeatedly conflated freedom, knowledge, and misery when comparing abolitionists to “the serpent in the garden of Eden,” swearing that telling enslaved people their “situation is degrading” was what made enslaved people miserable. Ibid., 459–460.

100. Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 94.

101. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (Savannah, GA: Beehive Foundation, 1992), 49–50.

102. Martineau, Society in America, 1:150; James Stirling, Letters from the Slave States (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 49. For more of Stirling challenging proslavery claims that enslaved people are happy, see Stirling, Letters from the Slave States, 47–49, 201, 292.

103. Elizabeth Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (September 1995): 463–493, at 464–468.

104. James Bradley, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony,689.

105. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 192.

106. Henry Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 51–172, at 67.

107. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 76.

108. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 288.

109. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 151.

110. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 26–27.

111. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 75–76.

112. Rather than depicting happiness, formerly enslaved authors sometimes called attention to enslaved unhappiness by comparing their misery with the joy of others. See, for example, Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 63–64. Often this contrast between sorrow and external joy was highlighted through depictions of nature as “happy” or beautiful. See Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 250, 368; and Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 121.

113. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 30.

114. Moses Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 5–45, at 6.

115. As historian Terri Snyder observes, suicide can be “an anguished act of personhood” and resistance even when “suicide was not … [an] intentional act.” In some African cultures suicide was taboo, but in others it was viewed as “a praiseworthy and honorable response to peril.” Terri L. Snyder, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 4, 9.

116. Dr. L. S. Thompson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, a True Story, Written and Arranged by Dr. L. S. Thompson, as Given by Mattie (Lawrence, MA.: Sentinel Office, 1866), 6.

117. The trope of the happy childhood found in so many slave narratives was no doubt also intended to garner sympathy from mid-nineteenth-century readers who placed increasing value on childhood as a special and protected time. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1965), 128; Heather Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

118. Thompson, Story of Mattie L. Jackson, 13; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 8–10; Gibson, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 738–739.

119. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 35. Both Douglass and Harriet Jacobs compared the brief sorrows of children to weather, with Jacobs stating that “childhood is like a day in spring, alternately shower and sunshine,” while Douglass opined that the tears of a child were like “the dew-drop on the rose” that dries quickly in “the summer breeze.” Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 102; Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 34.

120. Thompson, Story of Mattie L. Jackson, 13; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 10.

121. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 34.

122. Gibson, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 738–739; Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 64–65.

123. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,10.

124. Thompson, Story of Mattie L. Jackson,6.

125. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 278; Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Community, 706.

126. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 196–197, 200.

127. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 25–27.

128. Ibid., 25–27.

129. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,16.

130. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 75, 76–77.

131. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 92.

132. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 33, 35.

133. Enslaved authors repeatedly depicted the mixed feelings they had about love and romantic relationships. Jacobs questioned the point of falling in love but also admitted that her love for a free man “had been [her] support through many trials.” Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 33, 35. Frederick Douglass claimed that love could bind one to slavery but also that “love” could not “be annihilated by … anyone.” Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 65–67. Meanwhile Henry Bibb may have hated the idea of giving his heart to an enslaved woman but he confessed to seeking the aid of a “conjurer” for a potion “to make any girl love” him. On one page he described “the time and place of [his] marriage” as one of the most trying” of his life, and on the next he described the early days of marriage as “one of the most happy seasons” of his life. In bondage, joy and sorrow went hand in hand, and the “sweet[est]” memories were seemingly both tainted and intensified by enslavement. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 73, 75, 78, 79.

134. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 46.

135. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 49, 54.

136. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 75, 81.

137. For more on how ideas about parenthood and children were evolving in the nineteenth century, see Aries, Centuries of Childhood, 128; Montgomery, Introduction to Childhood, 56; and Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Children in Slavery Through the Ages (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 3.

138. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 88.

139. Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery, Written by Himself (New Bedford, MA: Press of Benjamin Lindsey, 1847), 14, 15.

140. Thompson, Story of Mattie J. Jackson, 18–19, 7–8.

141. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 53, 54.

142. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 369, 296.

143. Ibid., 338.

144. Stirling, Letters from the Slave States, 47–48.

145. Saidiya Hartman argues “plantation nostalgia” proliferated after the war, manifesting itself in “happy scenes of the plantation.” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 29.

146. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 262. This was at odds with how post-Emancipation abolitionists continued to argue that to be free was to be able to experience joy, and thus slavery and happiness were incommensurate. For example, in 1872 Senator Charles Sumner referred to slavery as “those unhappy days before the war.” Amy Dru Stanley, “Revolutionizing Human Rights,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, 269–302 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 280.

147. Examples of Lost Cause literature include Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus series; Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia (1887) and Red Rock (1898); Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s novels, including The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), which was later adapted into the 1915 Lost Cause film Birth of a Nation; Mary Johnston’s Cease Firing (1912); and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936). For more on the Lost Cause apologist genre, see Blight, Race and Reunion, 5, 111, 222–223, 225, 226, 251, 262–263, 284, 393–394; and William Garrett Piston, Lee’s Tarnished Lieutenant: James Longstreet and His Place in Southern History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 157–158.

148. Charlie Moses, in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936–1938, vol. 9, Mississippi Narratives (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1941), 1.

149. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 178, 182.

150. Ibid., 195–196.

151. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1975), 1–3.

152. Wright exhibited this in his memoir, where only once he was around other young Black men was he “happy,” able to freely “talk, joke, sing” without the anxiety of performing for White people. Wright, Black Boy, 195–196.

153. U. B. Phillips, “Chapter I: The Discovery and Exploitation of Guinea,” in American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime (1918), 8. According to historian Kenneth Lynn, “In American Negro Slavery (1918), Phillips portrayed slavery primarily as a system of social relationships between patriarchal White masters and happy-go-lucky-darkies.” Lynn theorized that Phillips’s historiographical claim that the enslaved had been happy furthered the Lost Cause narrative while functioning as “implicit” support for segregation for Southern and Northern readers. Kenneth Lynn, “The Regressive Historians,” American Scholar 47, no. 4 (Autumn 1978): 471–500, at 493.

154. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South—with a New Introduction by Bertram Wyatt-Brown (New York: Vintage, 1991), 49. For more on how historians perpetuated the notion of “black satisfaction” at the turn of the twentieth century, see C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 74.

155. A subsequent wave of authors argued against the historiography of the happy slave by asserting that the trauma of enslavement dictated emotions for enslaved people. For example, Stanley Elkins famously called Phillips’s thesis into question in his 1959 history, rejecting Phillips’s depiction of enslaved people as contented “Sambos,” but Elkins’s affective portrayal of the enslaved was still simplistic and rooted in stereotypes. Elkins argued that slavery was marked by totalizing trauma, and enslaved people’s emotions were wholly determined by their infantilizing owners, observing that “the Negro was to be a child forever … a happy child.” Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 82, 132. Throughout the twentieth century the historiographical pendulum swung back and forth, in turns focusing on the misery or contentment of enslaved people. In response to Elkins’s characterization of enslaved people as emotionally ravaged and childlike, a number of historians challenged his theories by shifting their scholarly focus from the slaveholder’s perspective to that of enslaved people. Using slave narratives as their primary sources, these authors argued that enslaved people were not emotionally effaced by bondage, or indoctrinated by slaveholders; rather, they fought to create close-knit families and communities to survive and resist slavery. For examples, see John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1977); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1995); Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 4, Family History (Summer 2001): 36–41. However, some scholars countered that this historical turn went too far in touting the emotional agency of enslaved people, and the role of the family in creating stability and sheltered contentment, and thus risked perpetuating the “mythical world” of “happy-go-lucky darkies” so popular with proslavery and Lost Cause authors. Historian Peter Kolchin observed that in trying to create a view from the slave quarters, such authors had “come dangerously close to replacing a mythical world in which the slaves were objects of total control with an equally mythical world in which slaves were hardly slaves at all.” Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 148–149; Lynn, “Regressive Historians,” 493. In an effort to avoid simplistic affective portrayals, or speculation about felt emotions, more recent scholars have written about the performative nature of enslaved people’s supposed happiness and the inherent violence of slaveholders requiring that enslaved people appear contented. For examples, see Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; and Johnson, Soul by Soul.

Chapter 4

1. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (Savannah, GA: Beehive Foundation, 1992), 24–25. Kemble explained that the enslaved people at that plantation “once were, but no longer are, permitted to keep pigs.” Ibid., 25.

2. Trudy Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 26.

3. Ibid., 4–6, 16, 25. For more discussion of when trust succeeds, and when it breaks down, see Anne Warfield Rawls and Gary David, “Accountably Other: Trust, Reciprocity, and Exclusion in a Context of Situated Practice,” Human Studies 28, no. 4 (October 2005): 469–497; and Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1990).

4. Dr. D. McCauley, “Humbugiana,” DeBow’s Review 1, no. 5 (May 1846): 444–449.

5. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), xiii, xiv, xv, 35, 51.

6. “The Duties of an Overseer,” Southern Planter 17, no. 7 (July 1857): 415.

7. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 154, 60, 25. For another discussion of the Irish as liars, see C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 56. For more on stereotypes of enslaved people as liars, see Kenneth M. Stampp, Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage, 1989), chap. 3; Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 102–132; and Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), chap. 12.

8. H. N. McTyeire, “Plantation Life—Duties and Responsibilities,” DeBow’s Review 29, no. 3 (September 1860): 363.

9. Henry Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” in in Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky, 51–172 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 122. The subject of enslaved people feigning health or illness also led to a number of legal battles. Slaveowners filed suits claiming they had been sold enslaved people who appeared “sound” of body and mind, only to have them grow ill or die. Some plaintiffs blamed slave traders or dishonest doctors. In the 1833 case of Shellman v. Scott, a Georgia court determined that several enslaved people had “feigned” “derangement,” which “greatly reduce[d] their value.” Shellman v. Scott, R.M.C. 380, May 1833 (Georgia), in Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro: Volume III: Cases from the Courts of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 3:14. For another case in which enslaved people were accused of faking illness, see State v. Abram, (a slave), 10 Ala. 928. January 1847, in ibid., 3:162.

10. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 72.

11. For other examples of enslaved people being accused of “playing possum” or “possuming,” see William Wells Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 173–224, at 200–201; and Jordan v. State, in Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 3:55–56.

12. Martin, in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 717–718.

13. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 269–270. For more on enslaved people being unable to testify in court, see Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 34.

14. Moses Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave, in the United States of America,” in Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, ed. William Loren Katz, 5–45 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 37.

15. Jacob Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 3–100, at 72–75.

16. “Query to Subscribers Far South,” Southern Planter 17, no. 8 (August 1857): 461. For more references to perceptions that enslaved people were prone to theft, see Tattler, “Management of Negroes,” Southern Planter 11, no. 2 (February 1851): 39–43; J.B.M’C, “The Law of Enclosures,” Southern Planter 12, no. 7 (July 1852): 200–201; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 599–600, 603; and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

17. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 26.

18. James Pennington recalled that his former owner often “saw fit to entrust [Pennington] with considerable money[,] … not a cent” of which “was ever coveted or kept.” James W. C. Pennington, “The Former Blacksmith,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, iv–87, at 79–80. See also Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson: Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada (Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849), 21; Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 332; and Thomas Hughes, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 209–212.

19. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 60, 143, 81, 124–125.

20. Thomas Roderick Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” in The Pro-Slavery Argument: As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States, Containing the Several Essays, on the Subject, of Chancellor Harper, Governor Hammond, Dr. Simms, and Professor Dew, 287–490 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Richards and Co., 1852), 458.

21. William Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 1–98, at 39–40, 94.

22. Ibid., 81.

23. James Henry Hammond, “Hammond’s Letters on Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 99–174, at 161.

24. George S. Sawyer, Southern Institutes (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1858), 225–226, 197. Sawyer also claimed that enslaved people were “generally extremely credulous … and easily duped.” In his view enslaved people were not only trustworthy they were trusting. Ibid., 199.

25. The idea was prevalent enough for one Alabama judge to reference “the known disposition of at least a portion of abolitionists … to delude” slaves into “escaping.” Mangham v. Cox and Waring, 29 Ala. 81, June 1856, in Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 3:211–212.

26. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 110–112.

27. Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York: Henry B. Price, 1860), 231.

28. Edward A. Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 19, 31–32.

29. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 39. For more on former slaves who describe their owners as hypocrites, see Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 69, 118; and Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, ed. Richard Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37–41.

30. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 47. William Craft was given similar council when traveling north with his wife, who was dressed as a White male slaveholder. A White guard on the train told William, “When you get to Philadelphia, run away … and have your liberty.” Afraid that it might be a trap, William replied that he would “never run away from such a good master.” This skepticism dissipated when William encountered a free Black man on the train, who told him about a local abolitionist who harbored runaways, and William “thanked him kindly.” Notably, when a Black man broached the subject, William thanked the man, implying that he might want to run or at least was not opposed to the idea. William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (Salem, NH: Ayer Company Publishers, 1991), 77–78. For more on distrusting White people who profess their opposition to slavery, see Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 85.

31. For other examples of enslaved people learning that they cannot trust poor White people in particular, see Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 47; Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 26; Pennington, “Former Blacksmith,” 58–59; and Dr. L. S. Thompson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, a True Story, Written and Arranged by Dr. L. S. Thompson, as Given by Mattie (Lawrence, MA.: Sentinel Office, 1866), 5–6.

32. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 131.

33. Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 42–43.

34. Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy,” 5–6, 11–12, 46.

35. Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 27–28.

36. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 111, 112.

37. Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 712–713.

38. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 14–15, 117. Jacobs was equally wary of the vows made by her mistress, who “promised to protect” Jacobs from her husband’s sexual abuses. Jacobs said that she “should have been comforted by this”: “My experiences in slavery had filled me with distrust.…I knew I could not expect kindness or confidence from her.” Ibid., 31.

39. For example, Mattie Jackson was told that her grandfather was emancipated then kidnapped, robbed of his free papers, and sold into slavery by his White male business partner, a “Judas-like friend, who had received the bounty.” The moral of the story was twofold: that freedom was vulnerable and that White people could not be trusted. Thompson, Story of Mattie L. Jackson, 5–6. Similarly, a White man who worked for years beside James W. C. Pennington’s father and “professed a warm friendship to [their] family” betrayed the Penningtons by giving a letter from James intended for James’s father to their master. Suspecting that they had helped James run away, the Pennington “family was divided” and sold South. Interestingly, the family was eventually reunited and sent “back to Virginia,” which James attributed to the fact that his father was in a “situation of considerable trust,” which enabled him to prove his loyalty and trustworthiness. Pennington, “Former Blacksmith,” 58–59.

40. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 30–31.

41. Ibid., 30–31. Douglass recounted this same anecdote almost verbatim in his second narrative. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 1993), 88–89.

42. Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 45.

43. Ibid., 48.

44. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 108.

45. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 122.

46. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 61.

47. Trudy Govier explains that “trust is the glue of social life,” critical to the success of all “complex societies.” Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities, 26.

48. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 203.

49. Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 81; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 110.

50. Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 59.

51. McTyeire, “Plantation Life,” 363.

52. Legal records reveal that some slaveholders spoke in their wills of leaving “faithful” enslaved people to be cared for by their heirs: for example, Tooke v. Hardeman, 7 Ga. 20, June 1849; Walker v. Jones, 23 Ala. 448, June 1853; Harden v. Mangham, 18 Ga. 563, August 1855; Pace v. Mealing, 21 Ga. 28, March 1857; Sheftall v. Roberts, 30 Ga. 453, January 1860; and Cobb v. Battle, 34 Ga. 458, June 1866. This was sometimes done after states like Georgia limited the ability of slaveholders to fully manumit enslaved people. For other examples of slaveholders freeing “trusty” and “faithful” enslaved people, see Carroll v. Brumby, 13 Ala. 102, January 1848; Cleland v. Waters, 16 Ga. 496, October 1854; Hughes v. Allen, 31 Ga. 483, November 1860. See Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 3:23, 190, 44, 54, 74, 92, 166, 38–39, 80.

53. Scranton v. Rose Demere and John Demere, by prochein ami, Ga. 92, January 1849 [93]. Ibid., 3:21–22.

54. All too often even an owner’s intentions to manumit a person did not suffice; many court cases reveal that the state could ignore the requests made in wills to manumit slaves. Examples include Spencer v. Negroes Amy and Thomas, R.M.C. 178, May 1822 (Georgia); American Colonization Society v. Bass, 18 Ga. 127, May 1855; Word v. Mitchell, 32 Ga. 623, May 1861; Harrison v. Harrison, 9 Ala. 470, January 1846; and Hooper v. Hooper, 32 Ala. 669, June 1858, Ibid., 3:9, 42–43, 84, 159, 226–227. The state was not the only obstacle. Some records indicate that a slaveowner promised manumission to enslaved people, only to have their heirs renege the offer. David Holmes, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 297.

55. Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 26–28.

56. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 220–221.

57. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 26.

58. James Hope, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 12–13. Enslaved people were known to make similar promises to would-be buyers. Solomon Northup recalled that when a man tried to buy only one of Eliza’s children, she begged him to buy her daughter and herself as well and “promised … to be the most faithful slave that ever lived.” In this way Eliza was attaching her loyalty to the combined value of her daughter and herself, offering future fidelity in exchange for not losing her daughter. Solomon Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 225–406, at 264–265.

59. Henson, Life of Josiah Henson, 47, 32–33.

60. Ibid., 47.

61. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes in the Lincoln White House: Memoirs of an African-American Seamstress (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), 48, 18–19.

62. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 169–170. As the Bibb passages show, describing an enslaved person as “Christian” was intended to signal their honesty and integrity. According to William Wells Brown, an enslaved person might be described by an auctioneer as “a good cook, good washer, a good obedient servant. She has got religion!” to express to would-be buyers that an enslaved person would be loyal and docile, as they found “religion very profitable to them.” Brown, “Narrative of William Wells Brown,” 211.

63. For more on how distrustful enslaved people were valued, see Eugene Genovese’s chapter on theft by enslaved people in Roll, Jordan, Roll, 607. Court cases also reveal how often masters lied about the veracity and criminal history of enslaved people. See Cozzins v. Whitaker, 3 Stew. And P. 322, January 1833 [323]; and Bell v. Troy, 35, Ala. 184, June 1859 [186], in Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 3:137, 235.

64. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 114.

65. Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 37–38.

66. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 118.

67. Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 37–39, 41. Henry Bibb and Solomon Northup concurred that enslaved people’s religious instruction from their owners solely focused on the precept of “obey thy master.” Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 69; Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 292.

68. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 143. For another example of former slaves’ thoughts on the hypocrisy of religious slaveholders, see Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton Publishers, 1859), 15.

69. For example, when his owner sent him down the Mississippi, Henson decided to kill the slave traders, steal their money, and flee. He went into minute detail describing how he was about to slay a man with an axe when “suddenly the thought came to [him], ‘What! Commit murder! and you a Christian?’” and he grew ashamed of his homicidal intentions. Henson may have laid out these hypothetical plots to build suspense, but by first explaining how he was justified in murdering slave traders, then articulating why he did not, he emphasized his personal integrity. Henson, Life of Josiah Henson, 41–43.

70. Ibid., 23–25.

71. Noted sociologist Erving Goffman argued that in social scenarios where deceit is not expected it is much easier to enact, but once someone believes that another person is untrustworthy then they are on guard for dishonesty, forcing any “con-man” to work doubly hard to assuage concerns that they should not be trusted. Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 8, 225.

72. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 118.

73. Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 702, 709–712.

74. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 352–354. This defense did not work when Epps accused the enslaved Patsey of having sexual relations with a White neighbor. Though Patsey swore she had only gone to their house to borrow soap, Epps claimed she had gone there to indulge a “baser passion.” When she denied this he declared that she was lying, to which she responded, “I don’t lie, massa. If you kill me, I’ll stick to that.” Knowing that Epps would beat her regardless of whether she was telling the truth, she sought to defend her honesty by staking her life on it. In this way she emphasized that she was telling the truth, while perhaps subtly reminding him that brutally beating her would not incite her to reverse her statement. This suggests that enslaved women may have had a more difficult time proving their trustworthiness, or at least defending their innocence, to slaveholders. Ibid., 367.

75. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 132.

76. Eugene Genovese argued that though theft among the enslaved was rare, “one or two thieves would keep an entire plantation agitated and foster mutual suspicion.” Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 607.

77. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 63–64.

78. According to sociologist Niklas Luhmann, people learn how to trust from a young age, typically from family members. Govier, Social Trust and Human Communities, 26.

79. Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, 17, 37–38; Pennington, “Former Blacksmith,” 30.

80. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 58.

81. According to Lawrence Levine, given the starvation rations enslaved people were given it is little wonder that obtaining food was the focus in so many trickster tales, especially “through guile from some stronger animal.” He also observes that such stories are teaching the double standard of honesty, because “only rarely do these stories picture slaves stealing from one another.” Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 108, 128, 131. For more discussion of the meaning and uses of trickster tales, see chap. 2, “The Meaning of Slave Tales,” 81–135.

82. Marie Jenkins Schwartz explains that parents turned a blind eye to the origins of the food their children brought them, “in part because they reasoned that slaves were not committing theft when they took from their owners,” because “owners were the real thieves.” Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 4, Family History (Summer 2001): 36–41, at 37, 39. Throughout the South many historic plantation home tours refer to the paths between external kitchens and plantation homes as a “whistle walk,” claiming that the name comes from the supposedly antebellum practice of slave mistresses insisting that the enslaved people, often children, tasked with bringing food from kitchen to table must whistle as they did so. This was based on the idea that one could not whistle and chew stolen food at the same time. Scholar of sound Mark M. Smith argues that while “forms of aural control were real,” and while many “southern historic house museums” relate stories of their “whistle walks,” “little evidence exists to support such claims” that this method of surveillance was employed in the antebellum period. This suggests that this story, which I have heard from a docent at Melrose Plantation in Melrose, Louisiana, was a post-Emancipation construct intended to perpetuate the White supremacist idea that enslaved people were innately deceitful. Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 76.

83. Calvin Schermerhorn points out that enslaved children “learned survival behavior in an environment that rewarded deception.” Calvin Schermerhorn, “‘Left Behind but Getting Ahead’: Antebellum Slavery’s Orphans in the Chesapeake, 1820–60,” in Children in Slavery Through the Ages, ed. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, 204–224 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 217–218. For more on children and trust, see Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 91.

84. Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters,” 39.

85. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 115, 116.

86. Ibid., 123, 128.

87. Ibid., 146.

88. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 42–43, 57–59. Stroyer notes that “these customs” were only used “among the negroes … for they did not consider it stealing when they took anything from their master.” Ibid., 59.

89. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 196–197.

90. Ibid., 173, 217. For another example of a would-be fugitive being “betrayed” by a trusted, fellow enslaved person, see Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive From Slavery, Written by Himself (New Bedford, MA: Press of Benjamin Lindsey, 1847), 22.

91. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 353, 374–377.

92. Erving Goffman contends that time is crucial to forging trust. Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 16.

93. Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 715–716.

94. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 63–64.

95. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 93–94.

96. For a discussion of the relationship between space, mobility, resistance, and gender in the antebellum South, see Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

97. Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 712–713.

98. William later told his sister that he refused his owner’s money because he would not “tak[e] any money from his master on false pretences.” Though he planned to run away, he wanted to emphasize that he was not a thief. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 110–112.

99. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 237–238, 242. Josiah Henson had earned the reputation of being a “trust-worthy slave” over the years, so he was able to do exactly what Douglass described. With the confidence of his owner, Henson was permitted to travel as a preacher, gaining the money to buy his freedom. Henson, Life of Josiah Henson, 28–30.

100. As Karen Halttunnen argues, in the “treacherous city … character had to be assessed quickly within relatively fleeting relationships.” Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 51.

101. For example, see Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853–1861 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 574; Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 30.

102. Pennington, “Former Blacksmith,” 22.

103. Ibid., 23.

104. Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 733–734.

105. Brown, “Narrative of William Wells Brown,” 218–219. James W. C. Pennington also experienced the moment of judgment when he had to decide whether to trust a Quaker man that a neighbor had directed him to go see. Though in the free state of Pennsylvania, he remained wary of strangers until the man offered him food and shelter and Pennington’s “fear subsided.” As a result, the Quaker won Pennington’s “confidence,” and he felt that he “might confide to him a fact which [he] had, as yet, confided to no one”—the fact that he was a fugitive. Pennington, “Former Blacksmith,” 41.

106. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 93. For other examples of skepticism of White people by fugitive slaves, see Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 131, 138–139.

107. Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 83–85.

108. See, for example, Brown, “Narrative of William Wells Brown,” 207; Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy,” 34; Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 280, 282; Henson, Life of Josiah Henson, 5, 19; Pennington, “Former Blacksmith,” 8; and Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 110–112.

109. Henry McMillan, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 379–381.

110. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 66, 95; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 85. Bibb explained that “the only weapon of self-defense that [he] could use successfully was that of deception,” which he referred to as “the most effective defense a slave can use,” while Jacobs claimed that “cunning” was “the only weapon of the weak and oppressed against the strength of tyrants.”

111. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 137.

112. That is to say that the least of formerly enslaved people’s concerns was atoning for any past lies. Laurence Levine argues that while trickster tales might “have served as a convenient channel for whatever guilt slaves felt” about stealing or lying, “but on the whole the evidence indicates that the slaves’ strong convictions regarding the injustice they suffered at the hands of whites, who themselves were guilty of hypocrisy and gross immorality, were sufficient to allow them to relax or neutralize their normal standards and mores in certain situations.” Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 124.

113. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 227, 388. In the same vein, Harriet Jacobs commenced the preface to her autobiography with the aside “Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction.” Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 2.

114. See, for example, Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 153.

115. Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy,” iii–iv.

116. Joanne M. Braxton, “Harriet Jacobs’ ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’: The Re-Definition of the Slave Narrative Genre,” Massachusetts Review 27, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 379–387, at 383.

117. Lunsford Lane, “The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, formerly of Raleigh, N.C.,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 1–54, at 27, 29–30.

Chapter 5

1. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 1993), 219. Frederick Douglass frequently differentiated between physical and emotional or mental abuse, arguing that the latter was far more brutal, and that his “troubles from the beginning, have been less physical than mental.” Ibid., 237. See also 107, 161–162.

2. See, for example, William Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” in The Pro-Slavery Argument: As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States, Containing the Several Essays, on the Subject, of Chancellor Harper, Governor Hammond, Dr. Simms, and Professor Dew, 287–490 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Richards and Co., 1852), 17, 56–59; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, with an Appendix (Boston: H. Sprague, 1802), 190–195; Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Company, 1826), 137; and Edward A. Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 38–39.

3. A noted exception is Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, in which she argues that attention to spectacularized violence desensitizes audiences to that violence while reinforcing the idiom of “black suffering,” and it ignores the variety of ways that slavery’s violence was manifested in the mundane, including through commodification and forced performances like minstrel shows. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19–28.

4. Lawrence Meir Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 85.

5. Some authors speak of there being a “variety of measures used to keep slaves in line” other than whipping, yet only go on to discuss physical forms of correction, listing branding, stocks, and execution as other possible punishments. See, for example, Daniel E. Walker, No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Elizabeth Dale, Criminal Justice in the United States, 1789–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 63–64.

6. Vernetta D. Young and Zoe Spencer assert that “the punishment of slaves was usually corporeal” and that “noncorporeal punishments typically were not used” to punish slaves, arguing that it would be “futile and counterproductive” to try to provoke feelings, in particular humiliation, in enslaved people, who were already thoroughly inculcated with “stereotypes about their inferiority.” Vernetta D. Young and Zoe Spencer, “Multiple Jeopardy: The Impact of Race, Gender, and Slavery on the Punishment of Women in Antebellum America,” in Race, Gender and Punishment, ed. Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, 65–76 (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 71–72.

7. Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” DeBow’s Review 11, no. 1 (July 1851): 65–69.

8. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History, 88.

9. Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, ed. Richard Newman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3, 4, 28.

10. Lunsford Lane, “The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, formerly of Raleigh, N.C.,” in Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, ed. William Loren Katz, 1–54 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 52.

11. Articles about overseers and advertisements in agricultural journals like Southern Planter and DeBow’s Review reveal the extent to which planters were concerned about managing their slaves. For example, one plantation account book by J. W. Randolph of Richmond, Virginia, advertised in Southern Planter and DeBow’s Review, touted its chapter on the “Rules for the Government and Discipline of the Negroes.” “Plantation Book,” Southern Planter 12, no. 8 (August 1852): 255; DeBow’s Review 14, no. 1 (January 1853): 92. For more on disciplining the enslaved, see Tattler, “Management of Negroes,” Southern Planter 11, no. 2 (February 1851): 39–43.

12. Jacob Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 3–100, at 74–75.

13. In his history of punishment in the nineteenth-century South, Edward Ayers points out that the majority of “white Southerners simply did not perceive whipping to be particularly cruel or even harsh punishment for blacks.” Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 101–102.

14. “Misery and Degradation of British Workmen-Slave Laws,” DeBow’s Review 14, no. 1 (January 1853): 271.

15. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 63.

16. Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 34.

17. “Misery and Degradation,” 271.

18. “Song of the Cane Fields,” DeBow’s Review 8 (1850): 68.

19. Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 34.

20. Eugene Genovese notes that some used a “Cowhide paddle,” believing that it “left no scars while inflicting terrible pain.” Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 65. Similarly, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall observes that some slaveholders in St. Domingue viewed the punishment of cutting the hamstrings of frequent runaways with “great repugnance” in part because it would “diminish” a slave’s “value.” Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 75.

21. Whitney vs. Whitney, Mississippi, 7S. and M. 740, November 1846 [750], in Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro: Volume III: Cases from the Courts of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 3:310.

22. Tattler, “Management of Negroes,” 41.

23. Of course, Cartwright undermined this point by conceding that a “frightened” enslaved person would not run away. Though Cartwright called for “kind” and “gracious” attitudes to enslaved people, he acknowledged that coercing an enslaved person to feel fear would likely get the same result: an enslaved person who was not inclined to run away. Either way, the goal was to maintain affective control. Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities.”

24. Mississippi Planter, “Management of Negroes upon Southern Estates,” DeBow’s Review 10 (June 1851): 625. Similarly, W. W. Gilmer observed in “Management of Servants” that “a great deal of whipping is not necessary…. The hope of reward and fear of punishment induce human action in master and servant.” W. W. Gilmer, “Management of Servants,” Southern Planter 12, no. 4 (April 1852): 106–107.

25. See, for example, “Harvest,” Southern Planter 12, no. 6 (June 1852): 177–179; and “Overseers,” Southern Planter 16, no. 5 (May 1856): 147–148.

26. For more on White Southern men of the planter class’s desire to dominate kin, peers, subordinates, and enslaved people, see Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (February 1990): 57–74.

27. From an 1848 letter to William Gilmore Simms, quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 4. According to Faust, Hammond was inculcated with the drive for absolute discipline from a young age by his father, who advised the then-teenaged Hammond in an 1826 letter that the “greatest contests that the greatest men have ever had … were with their passions to subdue and over come them.” Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South, 9. For more on Hammond’s battle to master his body, face, speech, and “passions,” see ibid., 225.

28. Ibid., 307.

29. For examples of injunctions against disciplining the enslaved in anger, see “Overseers,” Southern Planter 16, no. 5 (May 1856): 147–148; “The Duties of an Overseer,” Southern Planter 17, no. 7 (July 1857): 415; and “From Affleck’s Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book—the Duties of an Overseer,” American Cotton Planter 2, no. 12 (December 1854): 333–355.

30. H. N. McTyeire, “Plantation Life—Duties and Responsibilities,” DeBow’s Review 29, no. 3 (September 1860): 361.

31. Tattler, “Management of Negroes,” 42.

32. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia,223.

33. Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton Publishers, 1859), 273, 27.

34. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 72.

35. Solomon Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” in in Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky, 225–406 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 364.

36. James W. C. Pennington, “The Former Blacksmith,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, iv–87, at viii.

37. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 28.

38. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 65. Emphasizing this point, he contrasted the “delight” his master Lloyd took in whipping an enslaved woman with the demeanor of the overseer, Mr. Sevier, who was perceived to “take no especial pleasure” in whipping slaves. Ibid., 67, 73.

39. According to Genovese, “a master who used his whip too often or with too much vigor risked … hatred” from those they enslaved. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 124–125.

40. “Hiring Negroes,” Southern Planter 12, no. 12 (December 1852): 376–379.

41. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 42.

42. Commonwealth v. Turner, VA, 5 Randolph 678, November 1827, in Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro: Volume I: Cases from the Courts of England, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 1:150. In the case, a slaveholder was sued “for cruelly beating his own slave.” The court upheld a lower court’s decision to indict. Ibid., 150.

43. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 30–32.

44. J. D. B. DeBow, The Commercial Review of the South and West, a Monthly Journal of Trade, Commerce, Commercial Polity, Agriculture, Manufacturer, Internal Improvements and General Literature, vol. VIII, New Series vol. II (New Orleans, 1850), 70.

45. Henry Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 51–172, at 115.

46. Sally Hadden argues that Southern slave patrols were known to “toy … with a slave, threatening a whipping.” Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 118.

47. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,55.

48. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,72.

49. Ibid., 26.

50. Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy,” 36.

51. Madison Jefferson, in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 217, 218, 221.

52. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 42–43, 88; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 10–11, 70; Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 264–265, 268, 280, 311; William J. Anderson, Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, Twenty-Four Years a Slave (Chicago: Daily Tribune Book and Job Printing Office, 1857), 14, 15.

53. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 192. Daniel Walker identifies a similar practice in Havana, where some slaveholders would pay to have one or two enslaved people whipped each month, not for a specific crime but to keep the other enslaved people from becoming “unmanageable.” Walker, No More, No More, 28.

54. For more on the punitive use of spectacle, in particular public executions, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995); Michael S. Hindus, Prisons and Plantations: Crime, Justice and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767–1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); and Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History.

55. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 572–573.

56. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 33–34; Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 93.

57. Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy,” 36.

58. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 32.

59. For more on the use of shaming punishments in the North and South, see Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History; and Hindus, Prisons and Plantations.

60. For the mention of inciting anxiety to control enslaved people, see Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 115. For reference to appealing to “pride” to control enslaved people, see “Harvest.”

61. “All About Overseers,” Southern Planter 18, no. 7 (July 1858): 413. For more on invoking fear to punish the enslaved, see Gilmer, “Management of Servants,” 106–107.

62. “Duties of an Overseer,” 415.

63. Z. Kingsley, A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society as It Exists … Under the Name of Slavery. By an Inhabitant of Florida (1833), 21–22.

64. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 129.

65. For more on enslaved people’s fears of being sold away from family, see Amy Murrell Taylor, The Divided Family in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 192.

66. George S. Sawyer, Southern Institutes (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1858), 222; Lewis Hayden, quoted in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 697. For more examples of arguments that enslaved people or people of African descent were emotionally different or limited, see Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 79; Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 17, 56–59; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 190–195; Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 139–140; Pollard, Black Diamonds, 38–39; and Ezra Tawil, The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For more examples of members of the planter class comparing the family bonds of enslaved people to those of animals, see Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 86–87; and Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (Savannah, GA: Beehive Foundation, 1992), 60.

67. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 113, 116.

68. Pennington, “Former Blacksmith,” 12–13, 58.

69. See, for example, Hayden, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 695–696; and Jefferson, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 217, 218, 221.

70. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 108.

71. Butler Family Papers, June–Dec 1860, MSS 1026, Box 5 of 18, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

72. Ibid.

73. Ibid.

74. Ibid.

75. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 58–66.

76. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 65–67.

77. A number of historians have written about how enslaved people survived and resisted slavery through affective ties, and by fighting attempts to sever those bonds, most notably John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1977); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1985); and Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 4, Family History (Summer 2001): 36–41.

78. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 264–265.

79. Ibid., 268, 280, 311. For another example of an enslaved mother being punished for refusing to suppress grief over being separated from her children, see Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 10–11.

80. Stephanie Camp argues that joy and pleasure specifically functioned as a form of resistance in an institution in which the enslaved body was so often objectified and reduces to a “site … of suffering.” Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 62–64, 68.

81. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 22–23.

82. Ibid., 36–37.

83. Martin, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 728.

Chapter 6

1. Solomon Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” in Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky, 225–406 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 348.

2. Some proslavery advocates challenged the precepts of the Founding Fathers, and the idea that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence promised equality and liberty for all, including enslaved people. In a proslavery essay, William Harper posited that “no man was ever born free … that no two men were ever born equal,” and that people, including children and prisoners, were regularly denied their freedom. William Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” in The Pro-Slavery Argument: As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States, Containing the Several Essays, on the Subject, of Chancellor Harper, Governor Hammond, Dr. Simms, and Professor Dew, 287–490 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Richards and Co., 1852), 5–7. Meanwhile, William Gilmore Simms contended that the Declaration was written in “angry” times, by “angry” forefathers, and “what they alleged to be self-evident then, is at this time, when we are comparatively cool, a source of very great doubt and disputation.” William Gilmore Simms, “The Morals of Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 175–285, at 250–251.

3. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 338. Many authors of slave narratives discussed how long they had dreamed of becoming free. For example, James L. Bradley recalled, “From the time I was fourteen years old, I used to think a great deal about freedom. It was my heart’s desire…. My heart ached to feel within me the life of liberty.” Bradley claimed that for enslaved people freedom was “the great thought and feeling that fills the mind full all the time.” James L. Bradley, in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 688, 690. See also Jacob Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” in Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium, ed. William Loren Katz, 3–100 (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 21.

4. Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 370.

5. Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1–2.

6. For example, see Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 35; Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 227; James Madison, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 267; Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton Publishers, 1859), 298–299; Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, A Fugitive from Slavery, Written by Himself (New Bedford, MA: Press of Benjamin Lindsey, 1847), 22; and Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: New Press, 1992), 185–186, 193.

7. Henry Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 225–406, at 94; Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 61.

8. Jean Baptiste Meuillon Papers, 713, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

9. Trudeau’s Executive v. Robinette, 4 Mart. La. 577, January 1817. For more reference to the language of “enjoying” freedom, or freedom to be “enjoyed” in court cases, see Bazzi v. Rose and Her Child, 8 Mart. La. 149, May 1820; Catin v. D’Orgenoy’s Heirs, 8 Mart. La. 218, June 1820; and Julien v. Langlish, 9 Mart. La. 205, January 1821, in Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro: Volume III: Cases from the Courts of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 3:463–467.

10. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129. For more, see chap. 4, “Emotional Liberty,” in particular.

11. Thomas Roderick Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” in Pro-Slavery Argument, 287–490, at 293, 437.

12. “The Two Great Evils of Virginia and Their One Common Remedy,” Southern Planter 19, no. 10 (October 1859): 644.

13. William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (Salem, NH: Ayer Company Publishers, 1991), 37.

14. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 72.

15. Roger, next friend of negro woman Antoinette, her two children, and negro man Jack, v. Marlow, R.M.C. 542, May 1837, in Catterall, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 3:14–15.

16. It is notable that Phillip Moore said that manumitting Henrietta was “the dying wish of his late mother.” Judging by how many slaveholders employed such language in court, it suggests that they believed that affective claims could compete with legal claims. Slave Manuscript Collection 503, Folder 5, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

17. Jean Baptiste Meuillon Papers, 713, Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

18. Lunsford Lane, “The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C.,” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 1–54, at 17.

19. American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Third Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies Established in Different Parts of the United States Assembled at Philadelphia, on the First Day of January, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety-Six, and Continued, by Adjournments, Until the Seventh Day of the Same Month, Inclusive (Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson, 1796), 12–15. Proslavery advocates also argued that enslaved people were emotionally unfit for freedom. William Harper cautioned that unless the enslaved population was “prepared for its enjoyment,” freedom would be “fatal to himself and others” and former slaves would be “miserable.” Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 48–49, 73.

20. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 78.

21. Ibid., 407, 467, 535, 159, 375, 220.

22. A December 23, 1861, report from Hilton Head, SC, via the New York Tribune, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 360–363.

23. Letter from William Birney, January 28, 1964, in Berlin et al., Free at Last, 346–348.

24. Dew, “Professor Dew on Slavery,” 439; Harper, “Harper’s Memoir on Slavery,” 48–49, 73. For more on White fears about slave rebellion during the war, see Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 20; and Berlin et al., Free at Last, 4, 5, 131, 133.

25. For examples of Union officers remarking on how formerly enslaved people choose not to resort to revenge when interacting with former slaveholders or Confederates, see Berlin et al., Free at Last, 115–116, 491.

26. Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 198–199. Chesnut mentioned more incidents of slaveholders killing enslaved people during the war. Ibid., 235.

27. Ibid., 233, 234, 415.

28. Alonzo Jackson testimony, March 17, 1873, in Berlin et al., Free at Last, 154–155, 160–161.

29. Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 235, 794, 699, 704. Chesnut described one incident of how enslaved people were “mask[ing]” their feelings after she gave some of her diamonds to an enslaved woman to hide from Union soldiers. Though Chesnut trusted the woman enough to hand over her precious jewels, she was upset that the woman showed no emotional response. Rather, the enslaved woman viewed the gems “with as little apparent interest … as if they were garden peas.” The scene highlights that Chesnut was growing increasingly concerned about enslaved people’s lack of affect, and it suggests she was perhaps testing the woman by asking her to harbor the stones. Ibid., 794.

30. William Wells Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself,” in Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa, 173–224, at 205. On the following page Brown repeated this sentiment, claiming “the thought that I should one day be free … made my heart leap for joy.” Ibid., 206.

31. Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,” 151. For more examples of the trope of affective transformation, see Northup, “Twelve Years a Slave,” 400; and Dr. L. S. Thompson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, a True Story, Written and Arranged by Dr. L. S. Thompson, as Given by Mattie (Lawrence, MA.: Sentinel Office, 1866), 28.

32. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes in the Lincoln White House: Memoirs of an African-American Seamstress (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006), 21.

33. Lane, “Narrative of Lunsford Lane,” 17.

34. Similarly, William Wells Brown described how becoming free made him feel differently. He observed that “the fact” that he “was a freeman” made him feel that he was not himself. Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” 220.

35. Moses Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave, in the United States of America.” in Katz, Five Slave Narratives, 5–45, at 11–16, 19–22, 25. Of course, having one’s freedom bought could also be a complicated emotional experience. When the family Harriet Jacobs worked for in New York bought her freedom she was “deeply grateful,” but she loathed her former master and resented reimbursing him for something she believed had “never rightfully belonged to him.” Regardless, Jacobs noted that in spite of her opposition to Flint being paid, she had a visceral emotional reaction to being free, that “when it was done [she] felt as if a heavy load had been lifted from [her] weary shoulders.” Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 163.

36. The trope of Emancipation from slavery as emotional transformation influenced later literature. Toni Morrison recollected that after quitting a job in publishing to pursue writing, she felt an affective metamorphosis that was initially difficult to describe, writing that she “knew what fear felt like; this was different”: “Then it slapped me: I was happy; free in a way I had never been, ever. It was the oddest sensation. Not ecstasy, not satisfaction…. It was a purer delight, a rogue anticipation with certainty.” This feeling, which she eventually identified as “the shock of liberation,” led her to think about what freedom would have meant to women who had been enslaved. She remembered reading a history of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, and from there she began to develop the book that became the acclaimed Beloved. Acquainted with slave narratives, Toni Morrison felt an emotional revolution and thought of freedom from enslavement. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004), xv–xvii.

37. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003), 93.

38. Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” 219–220.

39. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 93.

40. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 157. Frederick Douglass had similar feelings, detailing in his second narrative how “a sense of … loneliness and helplessness crept over” him, covering him “with something bordering on despair.” Being in a city only magnified that “loneliness,” as he was “in the midst of thousands of my fellow-men … yet a perfect stranger!” Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 1993), 249.

41. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 139, 133–134. According to Jacobs, part of how she came to trust White people was through her interactions with the New York family she worked for as a nurse. Jacobs began the job “with the distrustful feelings” she had brought with her “out of slavery,” but after several months the family’s kindness was “thawing” her “chilled heart” and she “gradually became … more cheerful.” Ibid., 138–139.

42. Peter Smith, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 245.

43. David Barrett, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 189, 198.

44. Levi Douglass, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 304. For another example of an emotional transformation upon reaching Canada, see Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson: Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada (Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849), 58–59.

45. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 148–149, 153.

46. Edinbur Randall, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony,320.

47. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 155–159.

48. District of Columbia, January–June 1863, 15915, AMA Collection Box 20, Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA.

49. South Carolina, Jan.–March 1863, H5170, AMA Collection Box 156, Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA. While on furlough in Washington, DC, Emma Edmonds also saw a “contraband camp.” She declared that “all were happy, because they were free—and there seemed to be no room for anything like gloom or despondency in their hearts.” Emma E. Edmonds, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, Comprising the Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields (Chicago: J. A. Stoddard & Co., 1865), 238–241.

50. Lizzie Gibson, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 738–739. Jacob Stroyer used similar language to explain the feeling of the war’s end, exclaiming that “at last came freedom. And what joy it brought!” Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 99.

51. Stroyer, “My Life in the South,” 99. Histories of Emancipation often depict the end of the Civil War as a collective affective transformation. W. E. B. Du Bois observed that it was “difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was the feeling.” W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 27, 21.

52. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 27.

53. John David Smith, An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865–1918 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 17–18.

54. Shawn Leigh Alexander, ed., Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2015), 102.

55. In October 1865 a former Mississippi slaveholder wrote to state legislators that “the whole south is resting upon a volcano,” and Elizabeth Botume of South Carolina wrote in 1868 that they all “seemed to be living over a volcano.” E. G. Baker, letter, October 22, 1865, in Berlin et al., Free at Last, 519–521; Elizabeth Hyde Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands (Boston, Lee and Shepard, 1893), 267–289.

56. John Hope Franklin argued that White Southerners’ “wild, nightmarish fear” of slave rebellions increased after the war’s end, and stemmed from their own “sense of guilt and despair.” John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 3, 6, 93–97. For more on fears of uprisings by free Black people, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 121–122.

57. Smith, Old Creed for the New South, 18–19, 25, 26, 52.

58. Michael J. Cassity, Legacy of Fear: American Race Relations to 1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 130–131.

59. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1982), 104.

60. Susan Bradford Eppes, Through Some Eventful Years (Macon, GA: J. W. Burke, 1926), 283.

61. Joseph Holmes to Nickels Holmes, November 24, 1867, Nickels Holmes Papers, Duke University, Durham, NC.

62. As early as 1863 slaveholders in Occupied Louisiana complained about adopting free labor practices, arguing that if they could not exercise “unlimited control of their slaves” and “punish them as they please,” they would be financially “ruined.” They contended that even an occupying army and the Emancipation Proclamation should not prevent them from “inflict[ing] corporal punishment, and, as they say, make the slave fear them.” Lieutenant Enoch Foster, Jr., letter, June 8, 1863, in Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, Selected from the Holdings of the National Archives of the United States, Series I, vol. 3, ed. Ira Berlin, Thavolia Glymph, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland, and Julie Saville (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 428–429.

63. David Schenck Diary, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC.

64. William Elliott letter, March 25, 1866, Elliott-Gonzalez Papers, 1009, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC.

65. Cassity, Legacy of Fear, 147–148.

66. Burd quoted in Scott Reynolds Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 50.

67. General John M. Palmer, letter, August 22, 1865, in Berlin et al., Free at Last, 418–422.

68. Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 39th Congress, First Session (Washington, DC, 1866), part III, 101–102.

69. Stephen Tomlinson, Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 359, 348.

70. Robert Dale Owen, The Wrong of Slavery: The Right of Emancipation and the Future of the African Race in the United States (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1864), 220; Tomlinson, Head Masters, 350. Like Howe, Owen infantilized Black people’s emotions, stating that “their cheerfulness and love of mirth overflow with the exuberance of childhood.” Ibid., 220.

71. James Madison, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 267.

72. Granville Bibb, John Bibb, and Lewis Bibb, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 286.

73. Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown,” 220.

74. Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 827.

75. Jourdan Anderson to Colonel P. H. Anderson, August 7, 1865, in Lydia Maria Child, The Freedmen’s Book (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 265.

76. Ibid., 265. Jourdan Anderson emphasized how little he trusted the colonel in his closing remarks, asking the colonel to thank a man named George Carter for “taking the pistol from” the colonel when the colonel was “shooting” at him. In this way Jourdan Anderson reminded his master that he had much to “forgive.” Ibid., 265.

77. C. Graham, letter, July 24, 1865, in Berlin et al., Free at Last, 408, 413–414.

78. William H. Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, or, Fifteen Years in Slavery (Eau Claire, WI: James H. Tifft, 1913), 16–17, 25, 105, 108, 117–119.

79. DeForest quoted in Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 146. For more on former slaves’ efforts to reunite with loved ones, see Foner, Reconstruction, 78, 82–84; and Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 1, 3, 20.

80. John Q. A. Dennis, letter, July 26, 1864, in Berlin et al., Free at Last, 120–121.

81. Ibid., 373–374.

82. For more discussion of how formerly enslaved people believed that freedom was inextricably tied to being able to love freely, and to protect one’s family, see Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonials of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 22–26; and Amy Dru Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love,” in Capitalism Takes Command, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, 119–144 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 136–142.

83. Some were much more concise. Alexander Buford’s 1909 ad in an Alabama paper read simply “wants to find his folks.” “Mr. Alexander Buford is searching for his folks,” Information Wanted Ad, Huntsville Journal (Huntsville, AL), March 4, 1909, “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” accessed May 9, 2019, http://informationwanted.org/items/show/3402.

84. “Susan Cheek searching for Anthony Newby,” Information Wanted Ad, Appeal (St. Paul and Minneapolis, MN), November 27, 1897, “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” accessed May 9, 2019, http://informationwanted.org/items/show/2176.

85. “Eliza Montgomery searching for her brother, Dick Bush,” Information Wanted Ad, Baptist Times (Garnett, KS), March 1892 [published in a monthly newspaper], “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” accessed May 9, 2019, http://informationwanted.org/items/show/3433.

86. An accomplishment that she or the paper’s editor acknowledged in their use of italics for emphasis in her ad. “Jane Bell is searching for five of her children: Polly Bell, Grafton Bell, Jeremiah Bell, Lorenzo Bell, and Fanny Bell,” Other: Information Wanted Letter to the Editor, Republican Banner (Nashville, TN), May 13, 1871, “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” accessed May 9, 2019, http://informationwanted.org/items/show/3431.

87. “John and Barbara Brooks seek brother Wesley,” Information Wanted Ad, Anglo-African (New York City), August 12, 1865, “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” accessed May 9, 2019, http://informationwanted.org/items/show/3469. For more on how African Americans wrote or testified about their pain in the postwar era both as a claim for citizenship rights and as a form of resistance against White supremacist violence, see Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me, chaps. 1 and 2.

88. Although it is impossible to know how many enslaved families were found, the digital collection “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery” insinuates that it was exceedingly rare, especially as time went on. As of May 2019 of the thousands of missing family ads on the site, only about a dozen shared stories of loved ones being reunited. “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” accessed May 9, 2019, http://informationwanted.org/items/browse?tags=reunited. For more on this incredible database of sources, see Ari Shapiro and Maureen Pao, “After Slavery Searching for Loved Ones in Wanted Ads,” National Public Radio, February 22, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/22/516651689/after-slavery-searching-for-loved-ones-in-wanted-ads.

89. Nettie Henry, in Federal Writers’ Project, ed., Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936–1938, vol. 9, Mississippi Narratives (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1941), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12055/12055-h/12055-h.htm. See also Reverend James Singleton of Simpson, Mississippi, who was only nine when the war ended but remembered that “after the war … pappy came an got” him after traveling from South Carolina. A Northern journalist reporting in the postwar South encountered a similarly dedicated father. In North Carolina the reporter met a weary man who had walked over six hundred miles from a plantation in western Georgia in the hopes of finding his wife and children. John Richard Dennett, The South as It Is: 1865–1866 (New York: Viking, 2010), 130–131. For examples of children trying to track down their father or mother after the war, see Anonymous, “Mrs. Thomas L. Johnson seeks family,” Information Wanted Ad, Anglo-African (New York City), August 12, 1865, “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” accessed May 9, 2019, http://informationwanted.org/items/show/3454; and “Mrs. Ann Hampton searching for her mother, Nellie Beecham,” Information Wanted Ad, Twice-a-Week Independent (Coffeyville, KS), March 20, 1896, “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery,” accessed May 9, 2019, http://informationwanted.org/items/show/3422.

90. Anna Baker in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936–1938, vol. 9, Mississippi Narratives (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1941), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12055/12055-h/12055-h.htm#BakerAnna.

91. Berlin et al., Free at Last, 220–222, 507–509.

92. According to Amy Dru Stanley, the idea that free people had a government-protected right to experience joy was a totally “unprecedented conception that being human included the inherent right to pursue amusement in public.” Amy Dru Stanley, “Revolutionizing Human Rights,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, 269–302 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 269–271. For more discussion of how freedom entailed “volition” in work and romance, and “the emancipation of feelings and inclinations,” see Stanley, “Slave Breeding and Free Love,” 136–143.

93. See, for example, Berlin et al., Free at Last, 98, 520–521.

94. Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 127, 129.

95. Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man, 44, 52.

96. Botume, First Days Amongst the Contrabands, 267–289.

97. For a discussion of the pride and pleasure that enslaved women in particular derived from making and wearing fancy clothing to illicit parties, and how that enjoyment was a form of resistance against the objectification, physical violence, and material scarcity of slavery, see Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 68, 78–86.

98. Sidney Andrews, South Since the War (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 186–187.

99. For a discussion of clothing and mourning practices during the Civil War, see Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage Civil War Library, 2009), 146–149.

100. For examples of White Southerners responding to Black veterans in Union uniforms with resentment and violence, see Daily Index (Petersburg, FL), March 1, 1866; Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man, 44, 52; White and White, Stylin’, 127–131; and Berlin et al., Free at Last, 514–515.

101. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 2–3.

102. White and White, Stylin’, 127–128.

103. “Affairs at Charleston,” New York Times, March 30, 1865, 3.

104. White and White, Stylin’, 128, 132, 134–135.

105. “Affairs at Charleston,” 3.

106. White and White, Stylin’, 136.

107. Harriet Prescott Spofford, “The Streets of Washington,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 37, no. 21 (August 1868): 414.

108. Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808–1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 118.

109. Frederick Douglass, “January First 1863,” Douglass’ Monthly (January 1863): 769–770.

110. Henry McNeal Turner, “On the Anniversary of Emancipation” (1866), in Respect Black: The Writings and Speeches of Henry McNeal Turner, ed. Edwin S. Redkey, 5–7 (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 5–6.

111. Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 118, 179–180. See 254 and 260 for more discussion of Juneteenth. Kathleen Ann Clark, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 54. For another example of newly freed people preemptively stating that their post-Emancipation actions were not rooted in revenge or a “feeling of resentment toward … former owners,” see “Resolutions of Petersburg Negroes,” June 9, 1865, in Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Volume 2: From the Reconstruction to the Founding of the NAACP, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Citadel, 1992), 538.

112. “Slave and Slaveocracy,” Nation 1 (August 17, 1865): 202. For more examples of White people’s reluctance to part with slavery, see Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 829; Tomlinson, Head Masters, 347; and Smith, Old Creed for the New South, 27, 8.

113. Though in Atlanta former slaves had more latitude, Tera Hunter notes that “in rural areas of Georgia, residents were isolated, and thus more vulnerable to elements intent on depriving them of life, liberty and happiness.” Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 2–3.

114. Mollie Williams, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936–1938, vol. 9, Mississippi Narratives (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1941), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12055/12055-h/12055-h.htm. For more examples of White supremacist terrorist violence during Reconstruction, see Foner, Reconstruction, 119–120; James Lucas and Isaac Stier, both in in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936–1938, vol. 9, Mississippi Narratives (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1941), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12055/12055-h/12055-h.htm.

115. Alexander, Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings, 45–52.

116. Ibid., 61–66, 79–83, 56–60, 87–92.

117. Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1875 with the Testimony and Documentary Evidence, vol. 2, 44th Congress, Second Session, Senate Report 527 (Washington, DC, 1876), part II, 103–107.

118. Alexander, Reconstruction Violence and the Ku Klux Klan Hearings, 35–38.

119. Sam McAllum, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, 1936–1938, vol. 9, Mississippi Narratives (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1941), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12055/12055-h/12055-h.htm.

120. Foner, Reconstruction, 79, 120. For more on White concerns about “surrendering the etiquette of slavery,” see Smith, Old Creed for the New South, 7; and White and White, Stylin’, 127–129.

121. “Laws of Mississippi, 1865,” in Walter Lynwood Fleming, Documentary History of Reconstruction, 281–290 (Cleveland, A. H. Clark, 1906), 290.

122. Daniel A. Novak, The Wheel of Servitude: Black Forced Labor After Slavery (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1978), 6; “Laws of Mississippi, 1865,” 290.

123. Alonzo T. and Millard Mial Papers, North Carolina Division of Archives and History, quoted in Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 91.

124. Charles C. Jones, Jr., Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, Told in the Vernacular (Detroit, MI: Singing Tree Press, Book Tower, 1969). For more examples of Lost Cause literature, see Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus series; Thomas Nelson Page’s novels, including In Ole Virginia: Or Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887) and Red Rock (1898); and Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.’s novels, including The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905). For more on the Lost Cause apologist genre that David Blight has labeled “the Plantation School,” see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

125. Micki McElya argues that post-Emancipation nostalgia accrued heavily around the cultural totem that was the mammy figure. She asserts that the nationwide popularity of this genre of literature demonstrates that “Sentimental evocations of plantation abundance and benign slavery held increasing allure for non-southern whites as well, as it appealed to their own racism, fears, and post-war concerns,” and the perpetuation of “the image of the faithful slave … contributed to the dismantling of Reconstruction.” Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 10–12. For more of McElya’s discussion of “white supremacist nostalgia for antebellum paternalism,” see 10–12, 33, 35–36, 39–42, 44–46, 48, 121. For a discussion of how White Southerners used music to express and exorcise their nostalgia for slavery and its emotional power dynamics, see Gavin James Campbell, Music and the Making of a New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 69, 76–78, 94. For more on cultural nostalgia for slavery, see Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

126. July 7, 1885, Paul Hayne Papers, Duke University, Durham, NC.

127. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 27–28, 45. For more on Black disillusionment at the end of Reconstruction, see Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War, 215–217; Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 197; and Peter Kolchin, “The Tragic Era? Interpreting Southern Reconstruction in Comparative Perspective,” in The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture After Slavery, ed. F. McGlynn and S. Drescher, 291–309 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 292, 293.

Epilogue

1. Frederick Douglass, Why Is the Negro Lynched? (Bridgwater, UK: John Whitby and Sons, 1895), 15, 7.

2. Ibid., 2.

3. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 33.

4. Peter Stearns and Timothy Haggerty argue that fear has biological components but is also learned, and that what fears are considered appropriate in a given time and culture are based on myriad factors, including a person’s age, gender, and profession. Peter N. Stearns and Timothy Haggerty, “The Role of Fear: Transitions in American Emotional Standards, 1850–1950,” American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (February 1991): 63–94, at 63, 64.

5. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 302. As Michael Cassity observed in his anthology about American race relations, many Americans have long “feared that greater freedom for others necessarily implies a loss for themselves.” Michael J. Cassity, Legacy of Fear: American Race Relations to 1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 1.

6. Black fear in the Jim Crow South was so prevalent that it infused literature from and about the region throughout the twentieth century, becoming a prominent-enough trope to elicit literary commentary. In her work on how Black authors write about the South, Trudier Harris argues that the “pronounced fear of the South” and “general fear of southern white people” that Black authors documented bore many similarities to the terror described in slave narratives. Trudier Harris, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 1–18.

7. A number of scholars have argued that White fears about Black people drove policy makers to legally restrict Black Southerners. See Howard W. Odum, Race and Rumors of Race: The American South in the Early Forties (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 57–58, 64, 97–103; and Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2010), 25, 28.

8. Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 116.

9. Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1908), 44.

10. McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 45.

11. Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 155.

12. Quoted in McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 72.

13. Wright, Black Boy, 66. For further discussion of Wright experiencing fear and distrust of White people, see 23, 179, 185, 192, 200, 231, 232, 234–235, 238, 239, 245, 253, 255, 257, 300.

14. Benjamin Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography (New York: Scribner, 1971), 25.

15. Wright, Black Boy, 227.

16. Ibid., 229, 234, 227, 233, 200. For more on Black Southerners masking and performing emotions during Jim Crow, see 175, 195, 227–230, 245, 256, 277.

17. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 68.

18. For this very reason, Wright noted in his memoir his “admiration” for “the ideology of Garveyism” not necessarily because of the Black nationalism involved, or the philosophy of economic sustainability, but because of the “emotional dynamics of its adherents” and the pride and “dignity” that their involvement in the movement inspired. Wright, Black Boy, 231, 286.

19. Quoted in McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 10.

20. Wright, Black Boy, 145–146, 182.

21. Mays, Born to Rebel, 25.

22. Wright, Black Boy, 175, 194, 195, 251.

23. Ibid., 224, 253, 250, 344.

24. Ibid., 261, 273, 278–279. For more of Wright’s insights into the racialized emotional dynamics of the North, see 262–266, 282–283. For more on the emotional politics of Jim Crow, see 182, 185, 194, 200–201, 242–245, 249, 252–255, 269, 300, 318, 338, 365, 369, 372, 373.

25. Danielle McGuire argues that this shift accelerated during the Montgomery bus boycott, that “the fear that had immobilized African Americans for so long seemed to disappear as the boycott continued,” replaced by a “new sense of pride and power.” McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 114, 121, 126.

26. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263.

27. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 53. For more on how the Civil Rights Movement’s successful campaigns were helping African Americans dispel fears of White supremacist terror, while White fears were increasing, see Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 151.

28. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 148, 170, 207. For more on fear of Black men and Black sexuality more generally, see Peter N. Stearns, “Fear and Contemporary History: A Review Essay,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 477–484, at 479; and Corey Robin, “Reflections on Fear: Montesquieu in Retrieval,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 2 (June 2000): 347–360, at 351.

29. More than sixty years after Till’s murder, the White woman in the grocery store (and ex-wife of one of Till’s confessed killers) admitted that Till had not touched her at all and she “doesn’t remember exactly what did happen.” Richard Pérez-Peña, “Woman Linked to Emmett Till Murder Tells Historians Her Claims Were False,” New York Times, January 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/emmett-till-lynching-carolyn-bryant-donham.html; McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 121.

30. William Faulkner, “On Fear,” Harper’s Magazine (June 1956): 31–34, at 31–32.

31. Robin, “Reflections on Fear”; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

32. Faulkner, “On Fear,” 32, 34.

33. That so many young Black people had imagined and feared a similar fate is another reason why the Emmett Till story reverberated so widely and then radicalized some future members of the Civil Rights Movement. See Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell, 1992), 127–135.

34. Corey Robin argues that in highly stratified societies fear is not experienced in the same way for people with differing amounts of power because they have more or less to lose based on their rung on the social ladder. Robin, “Reflections on Fear,” 358–359.

35. This had essentially been true since slave colonies started passing laws like the Virginia slave act of 1669, which stated that if an owner or overseer was punishing an enslaved person “and by the extremity of the correction should chance to die, that his death shall not be accounted a felony, but the master … be acquitted … since it cannot be presumed that premeditated malice (which alone makes murder a felony) should induce any man to destroy his own estate.” William Waller Hening, Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, vol. 11 (Richmond, VA, 1809–1823), 270. See also an 1821 South Carolina law that averred that it was a felony to murder an enslaved person but that “killing” an enslaved person “in sudden heat and passion is the same as manslaughter.” J. D. B. DeBow, The Commercial Review of the South and West, a Monthly Journal of Trade, Commerce, Commercial Polity, Agriculture, Manufacturer, Internal Improvements and General, Literature, vol. VIII, New Series vol. II (New Orleans, 1850), 70.

36. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Confessions of a Nice Negro, or Why I Shaved My Head,” in Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream, ed. Don Belton, 12–22 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 13.

37. Examples of this abound, from Kanye West’s condemnation of President George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina being “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” to the invocation of “Black friends” to “shield” White people who are accused of racism. “Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” YouTube, April 16, 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIUzLpO1kxI; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” Atlantic, September 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/. See also Braden Goyette, “‘I’m Not a Racist but…’ and Other Stupid Excuses for Being Horrible,” Huffington Post, June 6, 2014, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/06/im-not-a-racist_n_5454615.html.

38. For more on stereotypes about Black mothers and Black women and hypersexuality, see Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin, eds., Race, Gender and Punishment: From Colonialism to This War on Terror (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 4–5.

39. See, for example, Adam Nagourney, “A Defiant Rancher Savors the Audience That Rallied to His Side,” New York Times, April 23, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/us/politics/rancher-proudly-breaks-the-law-becoming-a-hero-in-the-west.html; and Daniel Victor, “Bill O’Reilly Defends Comments About ‘Well Fed’ Slaves,” New York Times, July 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/business/media/bill-oreilly-says-slaves-who-helped-build-white-house-were-well-fed.html.

40. Drew Magary, “What the Duck?,” GQ, December 17, 2013, https://www.gq.com/story/duck-dynasty-phil-robertson.

41. Erin Mosbaugh, “Recent Ad for Paula Deen Restaurant Uses Southern Slave Motif,” FirstWeFeast.Com, October 23, 2014, https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/10/ad-for-paula-deen-restaurant-uses-southern-slave-motif.

42. Yanan Wang, “Scholastic Pulls Children’s Book Starring George Washington’s Happy Slaves,” Washington Post, January 19, 2016; Demetria Lucas D’Oyley, “After Outrage, Publisher Pulls Happy-Slaves Children’s Book,” Root, January 17, 2016. For more on outrage over the book, see Liam Stack, “Scholastic Halts Distribution of ’A Birthday Cake for George Washington,’” New York Times, January 17, 2016; and Michael Schaub, “Children’s Book ’A Birthday Cake for George Washington’ Pulled over Depiction of Happy Slaves,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2016.

43. Associated Press, “Kids Book About George Washington’s Happy Slaves Is Pulled from Shelves,” New York Post, January 18, 2016.

44. “From George Washington to Robert Morris, 12 April 1786,” in The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, vol. 4, 2 April 1786–31 January 1787, ed. W. W. Abbot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 15–17.

45. Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 34, 86–96, 274–277. For more on how the Obamas are perceived as angry or as going out of their way to mute any anger, see Roxane Gay, “The Media’s Michelle Obama Problem: What a Selfie Says About Our Biases,” Salon, December 10, 2013, https://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/the_medias_michelle_obama_problem_what_a_selfie_says_about_our_biases/.

46. See Coates, “Fear of a Black President.” After the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, filmmaker Spike Lee exhorted the president to let loose his anger, advising Obama “one time, go off!” Kristi Keck, “Charge to Obama: ‘Go Off!,’” CNN, June 3, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/06/02/obama.oil.spill.tone/index.html. Meanwhile, in 2016 the then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump also critiqued President Obama for failing to blame “radical Islamic terrorism” for a mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, observing that during Obama’s press conference “there was certainly not a lot of anger.” Andrew Kaczynski, “Trump: People Can Figure Out What I Meant by My Comments on Obama and Radical Islam,” Buzzfeed, June 13, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/trump-people-can-figure-what-i-meant-by-my-comments-on-obama?utm_term=.qwjP73B0R#.wvLyObWMK.

47. “Luther” is introduced in the series premiere of Key and Peele, which aired on Comedy Central on January 31, 2012, and the character reappeared in several episodes in later seasons. President Obama himself embraced the Luther character, inviting Keegan-Michael Key to perform in character with Obama, “translating” for him at the 2015 White House Correspondents Dinner.

48. For examples of assaults or murders of Black people being justified on the basis of White fear, see Kelley, “Confessions of a Nice Negro,” 15. For multiple essays that address racial bias and presumptions of fear and danger in the Trayvon Martin shooting in particular, see Devon Johnson, Patricia Y. Warren, and Amy Farrell, eds., Deadly Injustice: Trayvon Martin, Race, and the Criminal Justice System (New York: New York University Press, 2015).

49. 2011 Florida Statute, Title XLVI, Chapter 776.012, 776.013. For an in-depth analysis of “reasonable fear” in the law, see Katheryn Russell-Brown, “Go Ahead and Shoot—the Law Might Have Your Back: History, Race, Implicit Bias, and Justice in Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law,” in Johnson, Warren, and Farrell, Deadly Injustice, 115–145, at 118–119, 121–123.

50. Kenneth Nunn, “Racism Is the Problem Here,” New York Times, March 21, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/21/do-stand-your-ground-laws-encourage-vigilantes/racism-is-the-problem-not-the-stand-your-ground-laws. See also Elie Mystal, “Are ‘Stand Your Ground’ and ‘Defense of Home’ Laws Racist?,” Above the Law, March 20, 2012, https://abovethelaw.com/2012/03/are-stand-your-ground-and-defense-of-home-laws-racist/. For more on racial bias and gender bias in presumptions of fear and perceptions of danger, see Kevin M. Drakulich and Laura Siller, “Presumed Danger: Race, Bias, Stigma, and Perceptions of Crime and Criminals,” in Johnson, Warren, and Farrell, Deadly Injustice, 23–58, at 23–27, 47, 48; and Toya Like, Lori Sexton, and Savannah Porter, “Threat, Danger, and Vulnerability: Trayvon Martin and Gwen Araujo,” in Johnson, Warren, and Farrell, Deadly Injustice, 81–112, at 81, 85–89.

51. Cord Jefferson, “The Zimmerman Jury Told Young Black Men What We Already Knew,” Gawker, July 14, 2013, http://gawker.com/the-zimmerman-jury-told-young-black-men-what-we-already-770650992. For musician ?uestlove’s editorial about the insidious effects of internalizing racialized emotional expectations for Black men, including the assumption that Black men “don’t have feelings,” see ?uestlove, “That Doesn’t Mean It Doesn’t Sting Any Less,” Huffington Post, July 15, 2013, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/questlove/trayvon-martin-case-verdict_b_3601148.html. For more on the impact of internalizing affective stereotypes about Black men, see Trey Ellis, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?,” in Belton, Speak My Name, 9–11. For discussion of the effects of internalizing racial stereotypes on Black women, see Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen.

52. Opal Tometi, “#BlackLivesMatter Stands with Baltimore,” Ebony.com, April 29, 2015.