CHAPTER 5
Blacks never came close to overturning whites in the prewar period. Still, slave resistance persistently annoyed and sometimes panicked masters. The trouble was that Massa’s partially false postures in domestic charades invited Cuffee to dissimulate in distressing—sometimes dangerous—ways.
1
While most slaves resisted or dissimulated to some degree, a minority capitulated to masters’ power. Combinations of brutal lashings and fatherly affection, of savage jailings and fertile garden plots, of wrenching destruction of slave marriages and permissive encouragement to wander and marry sometimes produced true-blue Cuffees. One of North American slavery’s horrors—slavemasters called it the glory—was that docile dependents sometimes became grateful worshipers of overbearing paternalists. That is why some enslaved blacks and enslaving whites achieved transracial bonds of affection and sympathy which developed more rarely in the South after emancipation.1 That is why, during the Civil War, some Cuffees devotedly served soldier-Massas and scorned fake Cuffees fleeing “home.”2
That is why some slaveholders and slaves shared memories of escapades enjoyed, of adventures accomplished, of camaraderie perfected. In a rural culture, the best times were out of doors, hunting and fishing. At such moments, slave could be teacher, master pupil, and the two allies against the elements. Remember the time that squalls hit the fishermen, the boat turned over twenty times, and Cuffee helped save Massa’s life? Remember the time … as if anyone could forget.3
All those times spent hunting, fishing, crying, and dying together were not, from a modern egalitarian’s perspective, paradise lost. Friendship between consenting equals this was never meant to be. Fanny Kemble, an unsympathetic outsider who temporarily was a plantation mistress, derided this paternalism as “that maudlin tenderness of a fine lady for her lapdog.”4 But even she conceded that tenderness existed. Overbearing paternalism could soften and humanize a relationship perhaps most psychologically damaging when most kind.
A Domestic Institution also mitigated against slave revolt. The domestic in domestic servitude was so powerful that when chances came to join slave revolts, some solitary Cuffee almost always thought first of protecting his white family against his black brothers. One betrayer usually sufficed to ruin the shrewdest domestic plot.
More than this domestic scenario made North American slave revolts scarce. Underclasses are always aware of the difficulties and dangers in uprisings from below. While a few successful lower class revolutions and a handful of successful slave revolutions dot the historical record, great revolutions have usually been started by powerful groups—by armies, by upper classes, by middle classes, by a stray professor. To a lumpenproletariat, to borrow Marx’s phrase for the lowest classes, revolution usually seems farfetched.
Still, slaves brought off insurrection less often in North than in South America, despite possessing many similar preconditions for revolution. Some southern terrain, particularly North Carolina’s Dismal Swamp, included dense jungles inviting to runaway slave settlements, called maroon colonies in Brazil. Other southern areas, particularly South Carolina’s rice swamps, had the same ratio of massive black to tiny white populations that invited a coup d’état in Saint Domingue. At moments of southern history, especially the final Civil War year, southern black belts were especially vulnerable.5
Because of such opportunities, North American slaves plotted revolution no less often than did Latin American slaves. The North American record teems with planned conspiracies.6 The difference was that in North America some black domestic almost always alerted some white patriarch in time. Domestic slavery in North America gave patriarchs expanded ways of hearing about revolution. The many slaves who self-consciously played Cuffee had learned all too well how to get along. The few slaves who becameCuffee had been all too well rendered gratefully loyal.
Furthermore, just as domestic servitude peculiarly expanded some slaves’ loyalty to the Big House, so domestic patriarchs turned peculiarly savage upon hearing of “their peoples’” alleged plotting. The slaveholder wavered between normally pretending he had nothing to fear from “domestic friends” and occasionally acting as if he had everything to fear. Wavering came naturally to The Man who would be both permissive parent and remorseless terrorist. Savage deterrence came equally readily to a semi-open system nervously concerned about the need to be altogether closed. That is why North Americans surpassed more closed slave regimes in reacting with panicky reigns of terror when slave plots were suspected. Thus, because of the very domestication of the system, potential slave insurrectionists faced relatively greater chances both of domestic betrayal and violent counteraction.
Some might think that a system full of half-privileged domestics should have experienced many wide-scale revolts, especially since those half-privileged are supposedly particularly prone to rise against the altogether privileged. But in looser forms of despotism, conservatives anxious to save what they possess are as inevitable as rebels who seek to seize what they lack. North American slave revolts illustrated that two-sided tendency. Somewhat privileged blacks, frustrated by their limited privilege, usually initiated revolutionary plots. But recruitment of the privileged usually produced a slave who was either cynically determined to protect privilege or who honestly appreciated his benefactor. The pet slave turned informer. The counter-revolution was a horror. The informer became a more lionized Cuffee or was given his freedom. The surest way to free oneself, under domestic servitude, was not to join a revolution but to betray one to the patriarch.
The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy superbly illustrates domestic slavery’s dual tendency. The Vesey Conspiracy, the most widespread and cogent insurrection plot uncovered in the nineteenth-century South, occurred in the right place to compel attention: Charleston, South Carolina, the southern city in the blackest black belt. It transpired at the right moment: 1822, a period when Charlestonians experimented with the loosest paternalistic control they would ever deploy. The conspiracy was based on the shrewdest strategy: keep initial rebels few to avoid betrayal, have the tight knot of ill-armed conspirators seize the city’s arsenals in a midnight ambush, then and only then urge the masses to kill for freedom.7
Denmark Vesey epitomized openings in the semi-closed society. He was a mulatto in a world supposedly either white or black. He was a free brown in a world allegedly enslaving all non-whites. He was married to several slaves in a world allegedly governed by Massa’s monogamous Christianity and by whites’ determination to separate black slaves and black freedmen. Vesey also epitomized dangers of half-freedom. Proud of his freedom, he resented his children’s enslavement.
Another opening in enslavers’ theoretically closed regime gave Vesey liberty to preach freedom. The African Church, a supposedly barred black congregation in Charleston’s suburbs, had connections with a Philadelphia free black congregation and a black minister espousing black Christianity. In addition to freedom to marry and freedom to roam and freedom to preach that all God’s children—especially his own—should be free, Vesey had access to newspaper stories about northern congressmen urging abolition during the 1820 Missouri Controversy. An early recruit gave Vesey access to a stable, where horses for a potential rebel cavalry paced in their stalls. Another early convert handed the general a key to a store, where guns for Vesey’s troops lay ready for seizure. Charleston’s main arsenal stood barely guarded on a mid-city street, also vulnerable to surprise attack.
Unfortunately, the wrong semi-enslaved black could take the surprise out of an ambush. Vesey wrestled with the betrayal problem more shrewdly than any other North American black revolutionary. Knowing that slaves were frightened of reprisals if masters heard of plots, Vesey would deploy a reign of terror more terrifying still.8
The Charleston establishment at this vulnerable moment was not deploying much terrorizing. “By far the greater number of our citizens,” white Charlestonians reported, exulted “in what they termed the progress of liberal ideas.” Softhearts hoped that a “mild and generous” system would secure serviles’ “affection and gratitude.”9 A control system momentarily depending too much on consent to slavery invited Denmark Vesey to offer slaves something better: consent to freedom. A system relying too little on severe coercion invited the rebel leader to threaten slaves with something worse: more heavyhanded terrorizing. For once an insurgent might both promise more carrots and frighten with more sticks than could The Man.
Until he could ambush The Man’s arsenals, Vesey’s great obstacle remained his ill-armed recruits’ fears of Massas who still possessed the rifles. Vesey’s physical presence counterbalanced some apprehensions. A giant of a man, he swore he would mash any betrayer. Gullah Jack, although the tiniest rebel, also helped offset black uneasiness. The wizened former African witch doctor offered voodoo tokens to guard rebels against white violence. Vesey’s appeal shrewdly combined African tribal religion with Afro-American Christianity, just as Vesey himself resourcefully combined a tribal tyrant’s coercive threats with a democratic chieftain’s charismatic persuasion.10
Vesey’s cleverest way of out-intimidating Massa was to schedule the revolt for a Saturday night, the time many country slaves descended on the city, bearing master’s produce for Sunday market. Vesey claimed to have recruited thousands of these visitors. He probably lied. Allowing so many in on the secret when The Man still had the guns would have courted betrayal. But no slave confined to the city could check. Charleston recruits only knew that Vesey swore that his country army had pledged to slaughter his betrayer.
Still concerned that neither his promises of freedom nor his threats of violence might be as compelling as slaveholders’ intimidations, Vesey warned recruiters not to approach “waiting men who receive presents of old coats, etc., from their masters.”11 Indulged slaves were the most likely betrayers. But indulged blacks were also the most likely rebels. Some of Vesey’s prime lieutenants were free blacks. More were trusted house slaves.
Ned and Rolla Bennett, for example, favorite retainers of South Carolina’s governor, Thomas Bennett, ostentatiously took visitors’ coats and praised slavery when the governor entertained the gentry. Bennett’s domestic servants, feigning Cuffees in front of whites, at least pretended in front of blacks to be anti-Cuffees. Rolla Bennett told blacks he lusted for the choicest privilege. “When we have done with the fellows,” winked this “family friend,” “we know what to do with the wenches.”12 Rolla pointed to Massa Thomas’s daughter as his future “wench.” The slave playing “boy” would then indeed bring his manhood to The Man’s attention.
Denmark Vesey, whatever his concern about loyalties of pampered “boys,” needed their rage at the pampering they had received. When he mistakenly approached a body servant grateful to Massa, he could only try to terrify the potential betrayer. The strategy proved not quite good enough. At the very moment Rolla Bennett was speaking about his anticipated delight, Vesey’s lieutenants recruited one slave too many. A domestic servant, when approached, pretended to agree to rebel. The domestic then scurried to inform Massa about plans for rebellion. Whites investigated. One privileged slave after another put investigators off the trail. Ned Bennett especially laughed off charges that he plotted to murder Massa Thomas. Beloved masters, especially Thomas Bennett, relaxed.
Vesey’s lieutenants tensely moved the rebellion up a month. But 72 hours before Cuffees were to become anti-Cuffee, the problem struck again. A black informer told whites about the revised plot.
A no-longer-smiling Governor Bennett, no longer doubting insurrection loomed, sought to crush rebellion without over-reacting. The no-longer-relaxed community, no longer trusting Massa Bennett’s under-reactions, brushed him aside. On July 26, 1822, on a long gallows erected for the occasion, Charleston patriarchs executed almost two dozen of “their people.” They trampled another “domestic” to death while fighting for the best view. They strung up a dozen more “family friends” in the next few days.
As always in a slaveholder democracy, anti-familial bloodletting could not long be sustained. White republicans soon retreated from unrepublican slaughtering. In August, judges published most of their trial proceedings, purporting to show that the slain had had a “democratic” trial.13 The judges also urged that executions had deterred blacks quite enough. Blacks, having been forced to watch mass slayings on the gallows, had indeed been compelled to play the faithful domestic.
Two black turncoats who had betrayed Vesey’s domestic ambush, having been freed and enriched by grateful whites, chose revealing different domestic paths. One loyal savior of white patriarchs, exemplifying the usual black response to freedom, protected his black family by buying and freeing his wife. The other informer on black brothers, exemplifying a highly unusual black use of opportunity, devastated a black family he purchased. This black slaveholder filled his purse by selling a slave child away from its mother, then maximized his heirs’ coffers by ordering them to sell the slave wife away from her husband. His betrayals of one black after another illuminate the way this so-called Domestic Institution could warp homes black and white, even as it perfected its domestic defenses.14
2
Still, if a few genuine Cuffees betrayed revolutions, most slaves were neither utterly dominated nor malignant people who preyed on each other. Instead, pretend Cuffees found and exploited the inconsistent paternalist’s weaknesses.
The deadliest weakness was the possibility of murder by an individual slave. The Domestic Institution was as likely to produce the lone assassin as it was unlikely to produce collective insurrection. Cuffee, Massa’s informer about plots, slept right next to the bedroom. “Consenting” servants cooked Massa’s supper, drove Massa’s coach, served Massa’s daughter. A little poison slipped into the pot or a harness not fastened properly to the horse and Massa, “accidentally,” would be master of nothing. “The negroes as domestics,” Jefferson Davis told the Senate in December 1859, “have access at all hours through the unlocked doors of their masters’ houses.” If “their weak minds should be instigated to arson, murder, and rapine,” their “first act of crime” would be dismayingly “easy.”15
Two months after Davis spoke, a “boy” publicized the ease of domestic murder. The Hon. William Keitt, a state legislator and brother of South Carolina Congressman Lawrence Keitt, lived on a Florida plantation. William Keitt was ailing. One night, his slave crept into the sickroom and slit Massa’s throat. Keitt’s blood spurted like a geyser. The news swirled around the South like a hurricane.16
Southerners more feared individual bloodletting than mass murder, even on rare occasions when the masses struck. During the Vesey Conspiracy, the initial fear was that thousands would rise. With the conspiracy smashed, one creditable fear remained. When the court trying Vesey conspirators published its trial record, one aspect of the plot was not publicized. Gullah Jack, confessed a conspirator, “was going to give me a bottle with poison to put into my master’s pump.” The italicized words, the forbidden words, were censored for publication.17
There it was, the peculiar domestic nightmare of these peculiar masters. Slaveholders sensible enough to guard arsenals could stop collective revolts. Nothing could stop a solitary domestic from poisoning the slumbering household. The only antidote to the individual domestic assassin was the characteristic human response to the horrible: it could never happen to us.
The facts, however, could not make anyone sure. During the Vesey scare, Elias Horry, a revered rice planter, protested when constables arrested his beloved coachman. The patriarch assured authorities “they were mistaken.” After hearing troubling evidence, Horry turned to his slave. “Are you guilty?” Horry asked incredulously. “What were your intentions?” The coachman whirled on the paternalist. I desired, screamed the slave, to “kill you, rip open your belly, and throw your guts in your face.”18
We will watch slaveholders plead that abolitionists be silenced lest southern firesides witness guts-in-your-face. Firesides were precisely the danger spot. Twentieth-century urban dwellers can avoid a ghetto corner on a dark night. Slaveholders could not avoid anti-Cuffee in the house unless the Domestic Institution was shorn of domestic servants. One could not even talk about the danger, think about the unthinkable, for the slightest hint of fear could give domestics ideas. Under these circumstances, abolitionists became superb scapegoats for the way a few domestic assassins exploited the weakness in the domestic script and thereby turned Massa’s charade into a dangerous sham.
3
The more usual way Cuffee violated the domestic script was by exploring Massa’s inconsistency. Historians have dubbed slaves’ constant probing “day to day resistance.”19 Slaves were indeed daily testing how far resistance could go.
The slave’s weapon was deceit. Power was achieved by playing childish parts maladroitly. Missed cues and missing lines were so subtle that masters veered from one exasperated extreme to another. Slaves, masters said, were docile and loving. Slaves, masters also said, were deceptive and lying. Cuffee was usually not anti-Cuffee. But was he Cuffee? Or to rephrase the constant question, who were these “boys” anyway?20
Who, indeed? Blacks were at pains to keep whites from knowing. Slaves constantly misunderstood orders, broke tools, abused mules, missed weeds. Was all of this deliberate? Or were “boys” too infantile to labor satisfactorily?21
Then, too, so many things were mysteriously missing. That “nice fat rump pork” had been locked in the smoke house. Four little pieces survived. One could have sworn those jewel trinkets had been placed in the drawer. They were gone. Cuffee suddenly had $8 to spend on perfume and silk cravats. Any connection to the $100 missing from the desk?22
Equivalent mysteries surrounded slave illnesses. Females periodically claimed awful cramps and bleeding. Male complaints were also heartrending. But were professed illnesses excuses for a vacation? Or was slave health menaced and likely to be made worse by working?23
Less petty mysteries surrounded fires and food poisonings. During a drought, fires could spontaneously start. Or a slave could provide a “spontaneous” spark. Again, steaming temperatures and poor refrigeration could easily have spoiled the food Massa and Missus had unfortunately eaten. Alternatively, some resentful cook might have slipped something into the pot.24
Everything wrong might be a slave’s fault. That easy explanation for life’s mysteries menaced serviles. Fortunately for slaves, white families found that easy explanation uncomfortable. More comfortable, if more mystifying, was the conclusion that nothing ugly was Cuffee’s fault. Who could say? The only certainty was that mysterious fires and mysterious nausea made the comfortable Big House a domain of queasy discomfort.
At least when slaves ran away, exasperated whites knew who did what. Yet most often “lazy devils” returned voluntarily after a few days. They claimed contriteness. They promised never again to wander. They swore they had disappeared only to have days with mates and children.25
Such contrary behavior shrewdly took advantage of the democrat in the slaveholder. A republican could not automatically deploy savage punishment when he had to act as judge and jury and was not sure who, if anyone, was guilty. Nor could a paternalist drawn toward permissiveness automatically lay 39 lashes on poor devils who might not have heard his orders or might be ill or might be tuckered or might be trying their hardest. Nor could patriarchs who assumed darkies were irreversibly stupid and slothful govern as if childish stupidity and sloth were avoidable. In fact, some degree of childlike contrariness was pleasurable. Infantilism proved that the “boys” needed a paternalist.
Still, a child with a match can ruin everything. A youngster who runs away produces a father without children. Children who get away with tiny defiance start wondering if defiance need be tiny. And even if countervailing wills were expressed in ways not so much alarming as annoying, little annoyances could add up to alarming problems. A slothful gang could bring Massa to ruin with labor so poor as to produce crops hardly worth marketing. No wonder that ten times a day The Man was tempted to whip and at the same time tempted to stay his hand. No wonder “boys’” daily assignment was to walk the exquisite line between being so bothersome as to bring the lash to mind and yet not quite bothersome enough to bring the whip on down.
Cuffee’s act, Massa’s treasure, thus became Massa’s exasperation. Cuffee supposedly had to be carried from the field, leg allegedly swollen like a balloon. Massa could discern no puffiness in the leg. Cuffee never touched a watermelon. Hollow melons abounded on the vine. Negroes, it seemed, simply “cannot tell a straight story.” One could “have no idea how the scamps will poach upon you if you allow them one inch,” whimpered Linton Stephens.26
Then, occasionally, violence, seemingly appearing out of nowhere, tore deceit to shreds. Unpremeditated violence did not really come out of nowhere but predictably out of erratic punishment. Inconsistent discipline left definitions of fair discipline hazy. A lashing that seemed right to the lasher could seem undeserved to the lashed. Put the brutal paddle in the hand of the disciplinarian who usually just waved it threateningly. Then tempers could explode when the lasher smashed and smashed.
Masters’ inconstant brutality plus slaves’ nonviolent dissimulation particularly led to unplanned violence. The man who could play Cuffee perfectly and still think himself not to be Cuffee was an unusually fine human actor. The more usual sort did not quite march to Massa’s order and did not quite know if he was as “black-assed” as Massa said.
Events brought clarity. Slaves based what they could get away with on past experience with Massa’s temper. But past experience was hardly reliable when provocations deliberately brought Massa to the point of irrational exasperation. When Cuffee miscalculated a shade and went a little too far, Massa sometimes went a lot too far. When a slave expecting a duped father suddenly confronted a lashing zealot, temper tantrum could be met by temper tantrum. An instant later, someone would lie dying.
Sometimes a slave murderer would be a life-long troublemaker. Many plantations contained at least one black full of dark looks and surly manners.27 More often, the assassin would be an apparent Cuffee. He would be whipped unexpectedly hard. He would strike back instantly, instinctively, stunning even himself, slashing and smashing in retaliatory fury before lighting off for the woods.28
More occasionally still, a few hours would elapse between provocation and murder. On an October day in 1856, Lewis B. Norwood’s mourning slaves routed North Carolina neighbors from bed. Massa, they wailed, had fallen in the fire and burned to a crisp. While Norwood’s corpse was indeed horribly scalded, not a hair was singed. A black confessed. Norwood had locked two bondsmen in outhouses for days after they had allegedly harbored slave runaways. One night they ambushed him, slugged him, crammed a funnel in his mouth, and poured scalding water down his throat.29
Southern communities handled such matters with precision. In black-belt Alabama in 1850, an overseer “attempted to flog a boy. Four of the ploughmen stopped their mules and … advanced upon him in battle-array.” The overseer retreated to the Big House. Owner and agent, armed with double barrel guns, “returned to the field.” The black “militia presented a phalanx. The white men aimed their guns, and slaughtered four incontinently. While these victims were weltering in their gore like stuck hogs,” the two whites tied up “the original offender, and with a cowhide administered two hundred lashes upon his bare back.”30
Such coercions sufficed to turn the bravest slave towards careful dissimulation. But such violence was child’s play compared with the counter-reaction when whites panicked about insurrections. Some mysterious incident—a rash of house burnings, a series of runaways, a slave’s perhaps unseemly look at a white lady—would turn undercurrents of vague fear into moments of intense suspicion. Then a slave would profess to have overheard compatriots plotting revolution.
At that terrible moment, slavery maximized human panic. Slaves were lashed and lashed, lashed some more until they “confessed.” “Confessions” implicated others. Others “confessed.” Hangings increased. Patrols lynched. The “democratic” South became a dictator’s armed camp.
Then, as swiftly as it had come, the terror overran its climax and swelled into absurdity. The community regained its nerve. Democrats scuttled dictatorial courts. Doors were unlocked. Patrols vanished. Master and bondsmen shot deer together in the woods. A favorite handkerchief disappeared. Pokerfaced Cuffees displayed exquisite compassion in helping their distraught mistress conduct the futile search. Once again the cast had hit its stride. Once again slaves’ dissembling seemed more irritating than dangerous.31
4
Duping Whitey, the essence of slaves’ day-to-day pretenses, continued back at the quarters, when night fell and Massas were absent. Blacks then created an Afro-American counterculture which mirrored their duplicity in the face of The Man. Here, like in any true counterculture, slaves raised resistance to higher levels of insight, beauty, and awareness.
Historians have lately recaptured Afro-American slave culture.32 But disguises helping to define that culture have not been sufficiently emphasized. The centrality of creative pretense in slave culture no less than in slave behavior is most obvious in slaves’ dominant fictional tradition. This tradition, originally oral, was later published under the famous label of Brer Rabbit.33 Brer Rabbit was the supreme con man. “De rabbit is de slickest o’ all de animals de Lawd ever made. He ain’t de biggest, an’ he ain’t de loudest but he sho’ am de slickest.”34
Brer Fox was slick too. In Uncle Remus’s thinly disguised vocabulary, Massa alias Fox could be as brutally calculating as Cuffee alias Rabbit. Uncle Remus’s sagas continually warned the hapless not to overreach themselves. For example, the Monkey who thought he would imitate his owner had lost the sense of reality necessary to be trickier. The owner, when shaving, used the razor’s blunt side. He then stealthfully turned the instrument. Monkey, when imitating, slit his own throat. Such sagas warned that resistances grounded in illusions, alias slave insurrections, were a guileless way to be killed.35
But when the weaker understood the stronger better than the stronger understood the weaker, illusion could be the trick to power. In one tale, de Fox bore a string of fish de Rabbit envied. The situation was a version of Massa possessing delicacies bondsmen loved to pilfer. De Rabbit lay down in de Fox’s path. The conniver, moaning about being deathly ill, beseeched the fisherman to race for a doctor. The situation was a version of slaves feigning illness and masters not knowing what to believe.
De Fox believed. He lay down the fish. He scurried for help. De Rabbit dined and absconded. “Brer Rabbit got de fish,” Uncle Remus drolly concluded, “an’ got better.”36
Such fictional celebration of slave manipulation would not necessarily have enraged white manipulators. Sagas of black duplicity were not meant for white ears. Whites did not become really aware of Brer Rabbit until long after slavery perished. Still, tales, like all slave resistances, may have been made ambiguous partially because ubiquitous whites might for once see.
What The Man could see, as always, could be looked at two ways. Tales of the powerful confronting the powerless, however loaded with double meaning, were, after all, only about foxes and rabbits. Furthermore, sagas of lessers aggravating superiors were, after all, only fictions and celebrated no more than aggravations.
These aggravations seemed particularly harmless because in many Brer Rabbit tales, rabbits aggravated only rabbits. In one brutal black fantasy, Man has strung de Rabbit up in a tree until the pot is ready. De Squirrel comes along and asks de Rabbit why he is hanging. De Rabbit, claiming to be enjoying a fresh air swing, kindly offers de Squirrel a turn. De Squirrel unties de Rabbit and de Rabbit fastens de Squirrel. So Man feasts on duped squirrel instead of wily rabbit.37
Such a con job would have struck a listening paternalist as apt. Just as loyal domestics sometimes betrayed black rebels, so loyal servants sometimes told master who stole his ham—and sometimes complained to Massa about blacks stealing from them. Degrading conditions invite the degraded to prey upon each other as well as upon the degrader. The difference under slavery was that a “father” was self-appointed to stop “boys” from harming other “boys.” The more serviles conned each other, the more the paternalist felt needed.
Tales of de Rabbit outfoxing de Squirrel, then, could be heard by de Fox as no danger to the establishment. Even tales of rabbits outwitting foxes, while based on aggravating truth, could be heard as safety valves, as tales of limited triumphs keeping the underclass from thinking about larger triumphs. In such tale-telling, as in slave behavior, “boys” were usually too clever to be seen as out to slay The Man.
5
Anti-Cuffees masquerading as Cuffees are critical in a place historians have tended to overlook them, at the centerpiece of slave counterculture. Slave religion, correctly celebrated in late twentieth-century revisions as a hallmark of black creativity, has been described as if unrelated to de Rabbit. But slave religion, like slave tales, brought to high consciousness the essential lesson of resistance to this regime. Resisters had to be “de slickest o’ all.”
Black theologians, like black tale-spinners and work-shirkers, had to lie to thrive. Spreading African theology full of undisguised revolutionary conditioning was a courageous way to die. In Latin America, where the African slave trade lasted longer, where whites’ drive to acculturate Africans was pressed less vigorously, where armed revolution once triumphed and maroon runaway colonies often thrived, slave religion was sometimes heavily African in an ominously revolutionary sense.38 In comparison, the Afro in Afro-American religion was more attenuated. Religious resistance tended to be nonviolent. Black preachers tended to take care that black religion could be heard as a nonrevolutionary version of white Christianity.
Whites tended to see any Afro-American religion as un-American. Whites’ favorite black religion was blacks worshipping under a white who preached Christian obedience. Slaves caught cheering while black preachers thundered about freedom could be lashed. Bondsmen caught participating in African celebrations could be lynched.
The resulting black religion had a secretive aspect. To worship, forbidden black style, blacks sometimes had to steal away in the dark night, bound for places called, revealingly, “Hush Harbors.” Souls then huddled around a black iron kettle turned upside down. Suppliants prayed into the vessel, beseeching the kettle to hush the sound.
Slave preachers seldom wholly depended on such crude silencing devices. Whites, blacks knew, might eventually hear. Illegitimate messages had to have the sound of legitimate servility. That need, like much else in slaves’ condition, yielded an Old Testament-inspired, Moses-oriented theology. White preachers to slaves emphasized St. Paul’s injunction that “servants obey in all things your Masters.” Slave ministers preferred the Book of Exodus, especially tales of the Red Sea opening to allow Hebrew slaves to escape. Slave sermons dwelled on pitiful David slaying pretentious Goliath, on ridiculed Noah sailing from his scoffers, above all on mighty Moses freeing his people.
“Moses,” complained a white Christ-worshipper, “is their ideal of all that is high, and noble, and perfect, in man.” Christ became not so much “a spiritual Deliverer” as “a second Moses, who would eventually lead them out of bondage.” Slaves tended to sing not of Jesus the meek but of Jesus as warrior: “Ride on King Jesus, No man can hinder thee.”39
Spirituals carried slaves back to their favorite river. “Roll, Jordan, roll,” they chanted, “Roll, Jordan, roll … O my soul a-rise in Heaven, Lord, For to hear when Jordan roll.” The black “Looked over Jordan, and what did I see,”
Comin’ for to carry me home,
A band of angels comin’ after me,
Comin’ for to carry me home …
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home,
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
The Jordan’s sweet chariots would visit them, too. The hero down in Egypt would come to them soon.
Go down, Moses,
‘Way down in Egypt land,
Tell ole Pharoah
To let my people go.40
Such celebrations of freedom ostensibly prayed for release after life. Still, such injunctions could be heard as preparations for freedom on earth. “Run to Jesus,” went the spiritual, “shun the danger, I don’t expect to stay much longer here.” A plea for slaves to run away? Possibly. A joy that stay on earth would soon be over? Possibly. “We’ll soon be free,” ran another spiritual, “We’ll soon be free, We’ll soon be free, When de Lord will call us home.” Freedom now? Perhaps. Freedom hereafter? Perhaps.
Confused whites could be thankful (and most were shakily thankful) that black theology was somewhat “white.” After all, while the ideology went a little heavy on Moses the warrior and light on Jesus the meek, the Old Testament too was white man’s tradition. The cultural borrowing, whatever the twist, showed Africans had become at least partially acculturated Westerners. Again, while black preachers came down hard on “freedom” and softly on “obedience,” freedom from earthly travail was Christian expectation. Indeed, since prayers for freedom were ostensibly centered on the next world—and black prayers were always ostensibly so centered—eternal hope could become another earthly safety valve, a way to channel instincts in safe directions.
The physical activism in black evangelical counterculture was as rich in double meaning as the theology. Black congregations never sat. Bodies twisted. Drums boomed. Voices chanted. At its climax, the jerking syncopation led to the “ring shout,” a circle of worshippers shrieking for freedom soon.
Africanism reborn? Perhaps. African antecedents for ring shouting abounded.41 Still, black revival culture could also be taken as another twist on white acculturation. White revivals, especially at lower-class, Baptist-Methodist, holy roller extremes, were also activist, emotional, sensual. White celebrants too joined hands and sang in circles. Upper-class whites were prone to hold noses—and check wallets—about as often when contemplating lower-class whites’ revivals.42 The Afro-American style, if somewhat un-American, also somewhat fit an American tradition. Here was why many whites winked at black services and some worshipped under black preachers—worshipped, and wondered, and pretended not to worry.
6
One notorious anti-Cuffee epitomized doubts, dissimulations, and unsteadinesses on both sides of the Massa-Cuffee charade. In the mid-1830s, Frederick Douglass, then in his early twenties, successfully ran away from slavery in Baltimore. He soon became the most famous northern black abolitionist. Douglass’s Life and Times, one of the great American autobiographies, ranked with Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as widely disseminated volumes having incalculable impact on northern public opinion.43Because his life and writings sum up much about the Domestic Institution, this runaway’s tale demands fresh retelling.
Frederick Douglass was born the wrong half white. From his mother, a black slave, the Marylander inherited thralldom. From his father, an unknown white and perhaps a slaveholder, the future runaway received the contempt of a patriarch running away from responsibility for a child enslaved. Douglass despised his anti-father father, worshipped his caring mother, and adored his mother’s mother, who tenderly raised him.
Such attitudes would seem to encourage finding black beautiful and white loathsome. But Douglass disliked much of slaves’ cultural blackness. He had no use for conjuring or voodoo or any other traces of African “primitiveness” (so he considered it). He carefully scrubbed his voice of slave dialect. He liked to credit the linguistic transformation to a white playmate he barely knew after he was nine.44
This transparent excuse for his own efforts to whiten himself showed Douglass’s uneasiness about black styles. He was less uneasy about his dislike for some slaves’ “black-assed” behavior—fawning, cringing, eyes downcast, worshipful of whites as some superior beings. He “quite lost [his] patience” upon finding “a colored man weak enough to believe” in submission. He found plantation slaves “in point of ignorance and indolence” and “stupid indifference” to be sinking with the worn-out soil into “general dilapidation.”45
In contrast, Douglass shared enslavers’ vision of the ideal personality type: independent, fearless, egalitarian, individualistic, the reverse of everything servile. In this slave’s Utopian world, whites would repudiate slavery as antithetical to white culture. Blacks would then live up to cultural whiteness better than had whites. Douglass’s anguish was that whites, repeating his despised father’s act, usually put him down as “nigger,” despite his attempt to whiten the very sound of his blackness. Even this black liberator could not liberate himself from scars of slaveholders’ black-is-ugly dogmas.
Douglass looked like a man trapped between races. His skin was neither black nor white, but in the phrase he loathed, “yeller.” He inherited light eyes and lean lips from his father. His thick black curly hair came from his mother. Right in the middle of his square, tough, yet ethereal face was his most eerie physical characteristic. A thick bony protuberance erupted under his eyebrows and abruptly stopped, before it had fairly begun, at the bridge of his nose. It was as if his jumble of genes had the whole puzzle worked out until one thick piece, fitting nowhere, had to be jammed in.
As a child, Douglass fit in nowhere, in no family, black or white, after being torn from his enslaved grandmother at age six. The tearing was itself a comment on the Domestic Institution. Douglass’s grandmother had been assigned to raise him while his mother labored in far-off fields. The baby possessed in his grandmother’s crude cabin critical childish belongings: nourishment, continuity, caring. Then, one day, at Massa’s command, grandmother and grandson tramped many miles to the home plantation. Douglass knew not why they had been summoned. The grandmother lovingly carried the weary lad part of the way. The grandson uncomplainingly dragged himself part of the way, so as to relieve his beloved of her burden.
They arrived. Frederick could not understand why “Grandmamma” looked so “sad.” Grandmamma pointed out to Frederick two sisters and a brother. “Brothers and sisters we were by blood, but slavery had made us strangers.” Grandmamma, “affectionately patting me on the head,” told Frederick “to go out and play play with them.”
The lad, sensing something, reluctantly went. Outside he remained aloof, watching these strangers, his “family,” play. Then someone told him Grandmamma was gone. He rushed in. She was nowhere. Frederick “fell upon the ground and wept a boy’s bitter tears.”46
Grandmother’s place was taken by black Aunt Katy, no blood aunt to Frederick, who presided over the plantation’s anti-family nursery. The tyrannical Katy gave extra food to her own offspring, starved other black children of nourishment and affection, and taught them the meaning of the lash. One day, when Frederick had to steal to eat, his mother paid him the last of her infrequent visits. She gave him a large ginger cake. With “deep and tender pity,” she took Frederick into her “strong protecting arms.” Douglass learned that night “as I had never learned before, that I was not only a child, but somebody’s child. I was grander upon my mother’s knee than a king upon his throne.”
He went to sleep. When he awoke, his mother had left. He would never see her again. “I knew my mother so little,” regretted Douglass decades later, “and have so few of her words treasured in my remembrance.”47
Three years later, this motherless and grandmotherless boy was transferred to an almost-home. Douglass’s owner, who resided on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, lent Frederick to kin living in Baltimore. Douglass’s new surrogate owners, Sophia and Hugh Auld, true to the Massa-Cuffee charade, welcomed him as big brother to their child, Tommy. Little white Tommy and little black Freddy romped together, fighting each other’s battles in the streets. Sophia Auld, grateful to little Freddy for keeping little Tommy “out of harm’s way,” taught the black orphan “to regard her as something more akin to a mother than a slaveholding mistress.” While little Tommy was clearly “her most dearly loved child, she made me something like his half-brother in her affections. If dear Tommy was exalted to a place on his mother’s knee, ‘Freddy’ was honored by a place at the mother’s side.”48
Then the usual anti-familial time bomb exploded in Douglass’s almost family. His master died. He had to be sent back to the Eastern Shore for division of the inheritance. Sophia and little Tommy and little Freddy “wept bitterly, for we were parting,” perhaps “forever.”49
Douglass won a reprieve. His new owner lent him back to Hugh and Sophia Auld. Frederick returned to Baltimore, to a joyous family reunion. But the family charade was growing strained. Before Douglass’s departure and reprieve, Mistress Sophia had taught Little Freddy and Little Tommy to read. Massa Hugh, horrified, had ordered the matriarch to halt. The slave, said the patriarch, must know only Massa’s word. Sophia, guilty about what horrible thing she had begun, hounded Frederick thereafter to see what reading material he possessed. He grew angry. She grew cold. And little Tommy, now larger, began to lord it over the formerly equal playmate.50
The rift in Douglass’s latest family led the lad seeking caring kin to black folk. He disliked blacks who acquiesced in servility. He relished helping blacks advance towards literacy and freedom. His new black “family,” like all those to follow, consisted of non-kin raising each other to make whites’ aspirations black reality too. Hugh Auld, contradictory paternalist, having refused to allow little Freddy to learn letters inside the white household, now allowed hulking Frederick to share lessons inside a black brotherhood.51
Soon, another anti-familial time bomb threatened the fraying Auld family charade. Hugh Auld, Frederick’s sort-of-patriarchal nonowner, had a disagreement with Frederick’s nonpatriarchal owner. Douglass, at age 16, was again dedomesticized. He was ordered out of his Baltimore “home,” away from his black brotherhood, back to the Eastern Shore. There he was assigned to the ultimate anti-domestic experience, a year with Edward Covey.
Covey was slave breaker of the Eastern Shore. Lease the man your slave, went the understanding, and you will receive back a modest rent payment and a slave immodestly more docile. Covey’s tactic was to order slaves to labor, then ostensibly to leave. He often hid nearby, behind stumps or in high grass or under bushes. If he spied the slightest let up in hard work, he would leap out of hiding and lay into the slave. He whipped Frederick Douglass every week for six months. This regime, unlike Hugh Auld’s, was remorseless, 100% slavery in the midst of border looseness.
One hot, humid day, Douglass became dizzy. He lay down. Edward Covey booted Douglass in the side. That not sufficing to rouse the slave, Covey smashed a hickory slab into Douglass’s face.
The bleeding slave picked himself up and fled. He ran not towards freedom but to report Massa’s damaged property to master. Douglass’s owner, at first disconcerted by the damage, ultimately felt compelled to side with the damager. He ordered Douglass back to Covey.
This order showed how loose the most northern South’s slavery could become. This desperate slave was not chained and marched back. Instead, he was asked to take himself voluntarily back to the lasher. Frederick showed the power of the system at its loosest by going right on back. But he determined to test the looseness. If Covey came at him again, Douglass resolved to resist.
A fight between Covey and Douglass ensued. The powerful slave bloodied the brutalizer. Covey finally retreated, saving face by saying he would assault again if Douglass misbehaved. No further assaults transpired. The slave had stepped an inch towards freedom.52
Six months later, when Douglass’s year with Covey was up, Massa assigned his “boy” to a plantation with a milder regime. The better treatment included no whipping, more food, less demands to slave in dizzying heat. Douglass now had to endure neither Auld’s emotionally brutal charade nor Covey’s physically brutal lashings. He was now just a decently treated field hand, with no pretenses about little Freddy being as dear as little Tommy.
Richer family-like ties to blacks accompanied better treatment from whites. Douglass formed another tiny group of slaves who wished to rise above being “black-assed” through literacy and Christianity. Once, whites, reflecting the need to smash countercultures, broke up Douglass’s congregation. More usually, reflecting Hugh Auld’s wavering permissiveness, they winked at black education sessions. Douglass enjoyed the shared learning. Then he scheduled a graduation. He conspired to effect a group runaway.
Alas, one conspirator in Frederick’s caring brotherhood turned out to value his semi-liberty more than a brothers’ gamble on full freedom. He confessed. The Domestic Institution had done its usual twisting work on yet another of Frederick’s families.
Conspirators were rounded up. Other masters got their “boys” off scot free by blaming Frederick, the “yeller,” for infecting blacks’ “childish” imaginations. Frederick’s master threatened to sell the instigator down river to Alabama. Then Massa instead decided to send his non-Cuffee back “home,” to Hugh Auld’s in Baltimore.53
“Home” had now lost almost all pretense of domesticity. Little Tommy was now Big Thomas, determined to distance himself from the bad black “boy.” But Hugh Auld remained a sort-of-patriarch, trying to do best by not-so-little Freddy. He hired Frederick out to a large shipbuilding concern.
There Douglass learned firsthand what a morass the border slave regime had become. Some fellow workers were enslaved blacks, promised freedom if they worked well. Other slaves hired out their own time, paid masters most of their wages, and saved to buy their freedom. Some workers were free blacks, still others free whites, wage slaves doing “nigger work.”
That collapse of black/white and slave/free distinctions infuriated white laborers. Douglass fell victim to their wrath. A gang of whites jumped him and almost gouged out his eye. Frederick ran “home.”
He found the Aulds to be more sympathetic than his master had been about Edward Covey’s assault. “The heart of my once kind mistress Sophia was again melted in pity towards me.” In “tears,” she washed away the blood, covered the torn eye with “fresh beef,” all the while full of “friendly and consoling words.” The lad yearning for a home found her attitude “almost compensation” for the brutal beating. “No mother’s hand could have been more tender.” The Auld familial charade was fleetingly again no act.54
Hugh, acting as if his own son had been savaged, went to the police. He found that officials could not touch a white suspect without white witnesses. The frustrated paternalist soon agreed to allow Frederick to hire out his own time and to save towards his purchase price. Douglass had to pay Auld $3 a week. Otherwise, Frederick was now feeling freer, especially since he had found a new black “family” in free blacks’ East Baltimore Improvement Society.
Suddenly, the growth toward manhood ended. Douglass was two days late paying Hugh Auld. Auld, again the wavering disciplinarian, responded by taking away Douglass’s privileges. No longer able to save towards freedom, Douglass now would have to flee towards liberty.
Formidable deterrents blocked his way. Only Canada, hundreds of miles north of slaveholders’ border, would be altogether safe. Even the few dozen miles to the Pennsylvania line looked formidable, what with slave nappers eager to pounce on fugitives and collect bounties. Meanwhile, the alternative journey, if the flight for freedom failed, looked atrocious. The captured runaway might be sold down to sugar lands thick with Edward Coveys.
One new familial circumstance raised the stakes of Douglass’s possible gamble. He had fallen in love with a free black. If he successfully escaped, she could join him. They could then marry as free man and free wife. But if he was captured, he would likely be sold away from her.
Encouraged by his fiancée and furious about having his partial privilege taken away, Douglass struck for full privilege. He boarded a train heading north towards freedom. He was dressed as a sailor and carried papers belonging to a seaman. The train conductor asked to see the documents. Douglass’s heart pounded. The fellow barely looked.
A train passed by. It carried someone who knew Douglass. Frederick flinched. The man did not spot him. A familiar German blacksmith eyed Douglass suspiciously. The runaway quavered. The man remained silent. A black, perhaps after a runaway bounty, asked leading questions. Douglass moved away. The train crossed the crucial bridge. America’s soon-to-be most famous fugitive was home, so he thought, home at last.55
7
I escaped, Frederick Douglass concluded in his autobiography, because a loose form of slavery could not work. As Douglass looked back over his enslavement, he believed that harsh masters had enslaved his spirit, good masters had generated his liberation. At Covey’s, he had sought to endure. At Auld’s, he had sought to escape. Give the slave “a bad master,” concluded Douglass, “and he aspires to a good master; give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master.”56
The theory that the man with half a loaf will inevitably revolt has never been put so well or acted out so bravely. But Douglass’s tale of border slavery illuminated the reverse of his thesis. His two key acts of liberation, the fight with Covey and flight from Auld, had occurred at the classic moment of slave resistance, not when treatment grew milder but when punishment became arbitrary. Moreover, Douglass’s compatriots, experiencing the same loose bonds, did not usually flee. Douglass escaped not because all slaves smash every rusty chain but because rust on chains emboldens the exceptional spirit. The question remains, why was Frederick Douglass the exceptional bondsman willing to gamble half of everything dear?
Perhaps because the Domestic Institution had warped Douglass’s domestic situations unusually severely. This institution characteristically raised hopes for familial relationships between blacks and whites, as well as between blacks and blacks, and then twisted and dashed those hopes to one degree or another. But Douglass’s hopes were raised higher and savaged more totally than most. Few slaves experienced so strong an emotional inclusion in a white family as did little Freddy or so pure a resentment at not being able to grow up like little Tommy. Few slaves endured so utter a smashing of black kinship ties as did this black, abandoned by his father, ripped from his mother and grandmamma, then bounced in and out of homes from the Eastern Shore to Baltimore.
While Douglass’s unusually destructive domestic experiences generated special rebelliousness, his unusual lack of domestic ties left him less to lose than other would-be rebels. As Douglass correctly described his exceptional position, “thousands more would have escaped from slavery but for the strong affection which bound them to their families…. The daughter was hindered by the love she bore her mother and the father by the love he bore his wife and children.” Douglass had “no relations in Baltimore, and I saw no probability of ever living in the neighborhood of sisters and brothers.”57
The fugitive would leave behind friends in the East Baltimore Improvement Society. But he had found, in his forced marches from one “home” to the next, that the pain of breaking nonblood ties could be eased by new brotherhoods at the next waystation. He would also leave his fiancee. But they had no children, and she, unlike most blacks who were run away from, could freely follow.
Douglass still wavered. Then he left. His friends also wavered. They usually stayed. The wavering was the point. A little shove backward, such as Hugh Auld delivered to Frederick Douglass, or a larger shove forward, such as abolitionists tried to give to runaways, might incline wavering Cuffees towards the daring dash. The border’s slightly more vulnerable masters, not any inevitable collapse of all mastery, was the true lesson of Frederick Douglass’s passage out of the borderland in between.
8
Douglass’s story also illuminated the way master and man shaped each other. Not even Douglass could flee exploiters’ power to make blackness seem black-assed. The one redeeming feature of this “paternalistic” system, physically horrible when most violent, psychologically wrenching when most kind, was that loose control gave slaves some space to form a countervailing culture and personality—and to mold their masters’ politics and personality.
Frederick Douglass supremely illustrated slaves’ partial control over the Slavepower. Slaves’ most potent countervailing weapon, deception, forged one of Southerners’ most important characteristics, extreme suspiciousness. Nowhere were slaveholders’ suspicions more rooted in plantation reality or more disruptive in national politics than with the fugitive slave problem.
Douglass’s form of protest, the individual deceiver as opposed to the group confrontationist, has been called a nihilistic, isolated response that could not dent The Man’s sway. The truth is the reverse. When collective resistance was bravely organized, as in the case of Denmark Vesey, resisters were inevitably betrayed. So too, when Douglass sought to organize a collective runaway, he fell victim to the usual collaborator.
But when Douglass and others fled individually, their escapes had far-reaching effect. North American slavery everywhere pitted a controlling system not as total as it pretended to be against Cuffees rarely as loyal as they pretended to be. Because borderlands were the more exposed and least tyrannical slaveholder areas, a few border slaves could maximize concern about whether domestic slavery might be too vulnerable a charade.
That apprehension eventually yielded demands that Congress seal off the Slavepower’s northern hinterlands. The two most important mid-nineteenth-century slavery edicts, the Fugitive Slave and Kansas-Nebraska acts, originated in border slaveholders’ concern about runaways. Northern determination to circumvent these Slavepower laws increased Southerners’ suspicions of Northerners, which increased Northerners’ suspicions of Southerners.
Easy enough to see is how such snowballing distrusts, north and south, led to disunion, war, and an army of liberation. Less easy to see but crucial to keep in view is the way supposedly “apolitical” runaways initiated this political process. Even harder to visualize but even more vital to appreciate is the way the charade of Massa and Cuffee, with its strained characterizations, gave the lowly opportunities to shape slaveholders’ very way of perceiving. No one made slaveholders more prone to suspect that Yankee “friends” were unfriendly than the individual slave schemer, who trained Massa to see con men everywhere, in the mirror, inside the quarters, beyond the plantation, wherever a democratic world pretended to love a tyrant.
9
These critical slave contributions to the process leading to Civil War and liberation have been curiously omitted from accounts of enslaved Afro-Americans’ accomplishments. Recent historical works have stressed the positive aspects of slave counterculture, the strength of black marriages, the ability to reduce white dominance. Emphasis rests not on the victimization of the enslaved but on the vitality of the victim. An emphasis on blacks’ political contribution, when added to accounts of their cultural contribution, risks transforming the history of slavery into even more a celebration of black creativity. If slaves mastered masters’ way of seeing, and if that mastery ultimately helped unseat the master class, slaves not only endured. They triumphed.
May nothing here lead to that interpretive extreme. Posterity must keep in mind two truths about slaves: the new truth that blacks partially controlled their own as well as whites’ history and the old truth that whites massively controlled blacks in debasing ways. Slavery would not have been so horrendous an institution if it largely caused that productive human suffering which leads to growth, accomplishment, fulfillment, triumph. This institution stifled growth, limited accomplishment, restricted fulfillment.58
While the supposedly utterly dependent slave reduced the supposedly utterly independent master to psychologically important dependencies, black dependency remained a heavy burden. Precarious slave marriages were dependent on Big House whims and profits. Slave religion often involved white preachers droning on about obedience. Little trinkets and fatty beef scraps and ability to rest during illness were sometimes dependent on striking the right note of fawning obsequiousness.
Nor was there anything romantic about the only successful counterinsurgency available to the man playing “boy.” Slaves trifling with the script did not know they were helping cancel the performance. Cuffees did not foresee that little evasions might goad enslavers into a rabid defensiveness productive of a liberating army. In the tradition of the lowly, Cuffee did only what little he could. Serviles were aware only that they knocked the mighty a little off stride.
To those customarily kicked around the earth, a little counter-push feels very much like heaven. But this taste of earthly heaven was frustratingly limited. Slave culture, with its disguises of freedom now, taught a people to be furtive in their pride. Slave day-to-day resistance, with its indirect twitting of the tyrant, taught serviles to camouflage their rage. Slave tradition of triumph through trickery taught the beaten, in part, how to trick each other. The history of North American abortive slave insurrections records black traitors betraying black liberators. The lore of Brer Rabbit illuminates the degradation of life in quarters where slaves stole from each other as well as from headquarters. A “shame culture,” one celebrator of slave culture has called it.59 Cuffee was indeed ashamed of some consequences of inescapable shams.
Still, all the conning and conniving, the celebration of slick rabbits and the worship under sly preachers, the stealing and lying and tricking and absconding did more than give blacks some saving self-respect. Vaguely, victims hoped they might be ending their victimization. Less vaguely, slaves knew that individual resistance was making the Domestic Institution something other than the master of the charade desired. Slaveholders’ deployment of power was too inconsistent, the mix of permissive democratic parent and remorseless impersonal dictator too loose to produce enough consenting serviles. Just as little women chipped back the chauvinism of domestic despots and nonslaveholding majorities gave pause to imperious aristocrats, so resourceful slaves clipped back the sway and presumption of the tyrant. In a hybrid world where the democratic infiltrated the dictatorial, masters could rarely make mastery come out just right.
Those who could not be cocky about altogether mastering slaves were more anxious about mastering freemen. Despite the almost unlimited coercion their world allowed when dictating to blacks, command over lowly “niggers” never quite fit their domestic design. How, then, could slaveholders master a democracy which left despots largely unable to coerce insincerely loyal whites—and convinced that the insincere peopled the earth?