The pleasures of resistance: Enslaved women and body politics in the plantation South, 1830-1861

Journal of Southern History

Volumn 68, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 533-572

  Camp, Stephanie M H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 44949217532     PISSN: 00224642     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3070158     Document Type: Review

References (128)

1. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 55-56 (quotations), 107
2. Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1988), 22
3. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1998), 113
4. For more on the social geography of the colonial and antebellum South see Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill and London, 1982), 11-57
5. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeomen Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York and Oxford, 1995), 10-15
6. and David Goldfield, Region, Race, and Cities: Interpreting the Urban South (Baton Rouge and London, 1997), 69-86, 103-44
7. Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith cited in Matthew Sparke, "Mapped Bodies and Disembodied Maps: (Dis)placing Cartographic Struggle in Colonial Canada," in Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile, eds., Places Through the Body (London and New York, 1998), 305
8. John Michael Vlach discusses the "black system of place definition," its emphasis on movement, and its rejection of fixity in Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill and London, 1993), 13-17 (quotation on p. 14)
9. The phrase "geography of containment" is Houston Baker's, from his response to Michael Hanchard, "Temporality, Transnationalism, and Afro-Modernity" (paper presented to the "Reshaping Afro-American Studies" seminar at the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, University of Pennsylvania, March 27, 1997)
10. Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York, 1918; Baton Rouge, 1966), 327
11. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972), 3-7. Genovese's paternalism thesis has been the subject of intensive debate since the publication of his monumental Roll, Jordan, Roll. Among the many questions at issue is the extent to which enslaved people could resist bondage and the importance of such resistance. Some historians have agreed that paternalist, slaveholding hegemony determined the shape of every feature of black life and, further, that the lives of bondpeople must be understood primarily in terms of their exploitation and oppression by slaveholders. Slaveholding power, in this view, flattened the possibility of meaningful oppositional activity, except for running away and organized rebellion: everyday forms of resistance "qualify at best as prepolitical and at worst as apolitical."
12. See also Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill and London, 1988), 30, 49-50, 319
13. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South," American Historical Review, 93 (December 1988), 1228-52
14. and William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (New York and Oxford, 1996), 235, 248, 265, 270-71, 273. The focus on hegemony overestimates the extent of consent at the expense of the determining role of force. Other historians in the traditional debate have placed black communities, their struggles, and their sufferings at the center of bondpeople's lives - not slaveholders and their hegemonic aspirations
15. This article builds on this tradition, which includes Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943)
16. George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Conn., 1972)
17. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (rev. ed.; New York and Oxford, 1979)
18. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977)
19. Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana and Chicago, 1984)
20. Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South (New York, 1992)
21. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993)
22. Shane White and Graham White, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998)
23. and Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wisc., 1999). This article departs from this literature and this debate, however, in its focus on women, gender difference and conflict, and cultural politics, as well as in its attention not to lore or religion (that is, to the intellectual and moral history of enslaved communities) or to organized rebellion, but to values embodied in the everyday physical use of space, to political belief put into movement
24. Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 (Chapel Hill and London, 1996)
25. Christopher Morris, "The Articulation of Two Worlds: The Master-Slave Relationship Reconsidered," Journal of American History, 85 (December 1998), 982-1007
26. and Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London, 1990), esp. 66, 178, 184-88
27. Historians who have skillfully employed Scott's theories to study U.S. slave resistance include Alex Lichtenstein, "That Disposition to Theft, With Which They Have Been Branded': Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law," Journal of Social History, 21 (Spring 1988), 413-40
28. and Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 1748-1775 (Chapel Hill and London, 1995)
29. Critics of Scott's work include Rosalind O'Hanlon, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia," Modern Asian Studies, 22 (February 1988), 189-224
30. and Sherry B. Ortner, "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37 (January 1995), 173-93
31. Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven and London, 1989), 1
32. C. L. R. James, Grace C. Lee, and Pierre Chaulieu, Facing Reality (Detroit, Mich., 1974), 5
33. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 289-99
34. Dagmar Herzog and Uta Poiger have demonstrated that German feminist analyses connecting the personal and the political grew out of broader German New Left efforts to do the same. American and German feminist movements in the 1970s may have popularized the concept and applied it in especially liberatory ways to women's lives, but they did not invent it. See Dagmar Herzog, "'Pleasure, Sex, and Politics Belong Together': Post-Holocaust Memory and the Sexual Revolution in West Germany," Critical Inquiry, 24 (Winter 1998), 393-44
35. Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2000), 219, 269 n. 32
36. This discussion is informed by the work of anthropologists and philosophers who have posited the body as an important terrain of conquest and as a site for the reproduction of the social order. They have also detailed what, following Mary Douglas's account of "two bodies," may be called a second body: the social imprint on the body that shapes and limits the experience of the body. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1967), 109-40
37. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York, 1970), chap. 5
38. and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977)
39. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that the black body has been more than a site of racial subjugation and suffering. Historians of black bodily joy include Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994)
40. Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labor After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1997)
41. Helen Bradley Foster, "New Raiments of Self": African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (New York and Oxford, 1997)
42. and White and White, Stylin'
43. See also Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, "Orthodox Virginity/Heterodox Memories: Understanding Women's Stories of Mill Discipline in Medellin, Columbia," Signs, 23 (Autumn 1997), 71-101
44. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London and Boston, 1966)
45. Douglas, Natural Symbols
46. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J., 1987)
47. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)
48. Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill and London, 1991)
49. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs, 17 (Winter 1992), 251-74
50. For work on the somatics of bondwomen's enslavement see Darlene Clark Hine and Kate Wittenstein, "Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex," in Filomena Chioma Steady, ed., The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)
51. Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York and London, 1985)
52. Stephanie J. Shaw, "Mothering Under Slavery in the Antebellum South," in Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency (New York and London, 1994), 237-58
53. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York and London, 1996)
54. and Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana and Chicago, 1997)
55. Many southern women's historians are also blurring the dichotomy between the personal and creative, and the political and material. See, for example, Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture, 7 (Fall 1994), 107-46
56. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill and London, 1996)
57. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique," Journal of American History, 85 (September 1998), 439-65
58. Paul Gilroy's work also informs the discussion here. See "One Nation under a Groove: The Cultural Politics of 'Race' and Racism in Britain," in David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, 1990), 274
59. White abolitionists used graphic representations of the exploited, abused, or degraded enslaved body to garner support for the antislavery cause. See Phillip Lapsansky, "Graphic Discord: Abolitionist and Antiabolitionist Images," in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1994), 201-30
60. and Elizabeth B. Clark, "The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America," Journal of American History, 82 (September 1995), 463-93
61. Scholars of nineteenth-century slave narratives have demonstrated that black writers - especially women - used rhetorical strategies to draw attention away from their bodies, in order to emphasize their political voices rather than titillate white audiences. See Anthony G. Barthelemy, "Introduction," in Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Collected Black Women's Narratives (New York, 1988), xxix-xlviii
62. Carla L. Peterson, "Doers of the Word": African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) (New York and Oxford, 1995). esp. 22
63. and Jeannine DeLombard, "'Eye-Witness to the Cruelty': Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative," American Literature, 73 (June 2001), 245-75
64. Jennifer L. Morgan, "'Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder': Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54 (January 1997), 167-92, esp. 179 (first quotation), 170 (second quotation), 184 (third and sixth quotations), 181 (fourth quotation), and 171 (fifth quotation)
65. For more on notions of racial difference and their relation to the expansion of the African slave trade and American slavery, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 295-337
66. Jordan, White Over Black
67. Alden T. Vaughn, "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 97 (July 1989), 311-54
68. and Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York, 1993), 11-12, 17
69. "Bio-text" is John O'Neill's phrase, from The Communicative Body: Studies in Communicative Philosophy, Politics, and Sociology (Evanston, Ill., 1989), 3
70. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110-11
71. Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball (Lewistown, Pa., 1836; reprint, Detroit, Mich., 1970), 125
72. The manual's instructions are printed on the inside cover of the Richard Eppes diary, 1858, Eppes Family Papers (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.; hereinafter cited as VHS). Mark M. Smith demonstrates the increasing importance of time discipline to plantation production during the antebellum period in the following works: "Time, Slavery and Plantation Capitalism in the Ante-bellum American South," Past and Present, 150 (February 1996), 142-68
73. "Old South Time in Comparative Perspective," American Historical Review, 101 (December 1996), 1432-69
74. and in his brilliant Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill and London, 1997)
75. and Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2001)
76. December 31, 1846, entry, William Ethelbert Ervin Diaries #247-z (Wilson Library, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; hereinafter cited as SHC); George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (19 vols.; Westport, Conn., 1972), XIII, Pt. 3, p. 128
77. Andrew Boone recalled, "If you wus out widout a pass dey would shore git you. De paterollers shore looked after you. Dey would come to de house at night to see who wus there. If you wus out of place, dey would wear you out." Rawick, ed., American Slave, XIV, 134
78. Rawick, ed., American Slave, XIV, 157 (quotation)
79. See also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 3-7, 570, 577-80, 584
80. Roger D. Abrahams has shown how bondpeople sometimes turned paternalistic events like corn shuckings into rituals of their own meaning. Abrahams, Singing the Master, 83-106
81. Rawick, ed., American Slave, XVI, 23
82. Some WPA informants reported that attending plantation frolics was an activity reserved for white men. For instance, George Fleming said, "White ladies didn't go to de frolics, but some of de white men did." George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, supplemental series 1 (12 vols.; Westport, Conn., 1977), XI, 128
83. Rawick, ed., American Slave, XIV, 213
84. Rawick, ed., American Slave, XIV, 213 (Charlie Crump), 156 (Midge Burnett)
85. Rawick, ed., American Slave, XII, Pt. 2, p. 188
86. Austin Steward, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman, intro. by Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease (Reading, Mass., and other cities, 1969), 19-22 (first quotation on p. 19; second and third quotations on p. 20). Steward's autobiography was originally published in 1857
87. Hadden, Slave Patrols, 109; Fry, Nightriders in Black Folk History, 93
88. Perdue et al., eds., Weevils in the Wheat, 93, 297 (quotation)
89. Rawick, ed., American Slave, XIII, Pt. 4, p. 80
90. Perdue et al., eds., Weevils in the Wheat, 316
91. XV, Pt. 2, p. 132
92. Rawick, ed., American Slave, supp. ser. 1, XI, 128
93. Rawick ed., American Slave, VII [Mississippi], 161
94. Perdue et al., eds., Weevils in the Wheat, 49-50 (Fannie Berry)
95. and the remaining dances are described in Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia, 1990), 19
96. Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin', 20
97. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York and Oxford, 1996), 23, 255
98. Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860 (New York and London, 1995), 63
99. For more on black style under slavery see Patricia K. Hunt, "The Struggle to Achieve Individual Expression Through Clothing and Adornment: African American Women Under and After Slavery," in Patricia Morton, ed., Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past (Athens, Ga., and London, 1996), 227-40
100. Foster, "New Raiments of Self"
101. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States . . . , ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. (1953; reprint, New York, 1984), 82 (first quotation)
102. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), 100-103
103. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1987), 11
104. Rawick, ed., American Slave, supp. ser. I, XI, 130 (George Fleming)
105. See also George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, supplemental series 2 (10 vols.; Westport, Conn., 1979), VIII, 2990
106. As enslaved women's historians have pointed out, this "masculinization" of bondwomen at work was never complete, and rarely did it define enslaved women's gender identities. At work in their specialized labor, their gender-segregated or gender-specific agricultural labor, and the reproductive labor they performed for their families, enslaved women constructed their own meanings and expressions of womanhood. See White, Ar'n't I a Woman?
107. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985)
108. and Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We
109. Joyner, Down by the Riverside, 74
110. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 82
111. Thomas C. Buchanan, "The Slave Mississippi: African-American Steamboat Workers, Networks of Resistance, and the Commercial World of the Western Rivers, 1811-1880" (Ph.D. dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, 1998), 175-84
112. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1977), 164-71 (quotations on pp. 164-65)
113. Aunt Sally; or, The Cross the Way Freedom: A Narrative of the Slave-Life and Purchase of the Mother of Rev. Isaac Williams, of Detroit, Michigan (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1858), 47
114. Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage; or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (New York, 1890; reprint, New York and Oxford, 1988), 64
115. Foster, "New Raiments of Self", 112, 114 (Morris Sheppard), Appendix III
116. Rawick, ed., American Slave, XI, 52-53
117. Rawick, ed., American Slave, XVII, 306 (Salena Taswell)
118. Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), 223
119. Rawick, ed., American Slave, supp. ser. I, VI, 249 (Ebenezer Brown)
120. Shane White and Graham White, "Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Journal of Southern History, 61 (February 1995), 70-71
121. Foster, "New Raiments of Self", 115, 252 (second and third quotations)
122. See the clothing distribution lists, 1802, in Jane Frances Walker Page, Commonplace Book (VHS)
123. For more on women's use of clothing to exhibit their "individuality, " see Hunt, "Struggle to Achieve Individual Expression through Clothing and Adornment," 227-40
124. Rawick, ed., American Slave, XII, Pt. 2, pp. 188-89. Fatigue, and its effects on plantation production, was a problem after paternalist frolics as well. Some slaveholders accounted for exhaustion and allowed some time the day following frolics for naps. For example, Addie Vinson remembered how after a dance given by her owner, "Niggers dat had done danced half de night would be so sleepy when de bugle sounded dey wouldn't have time to cook breakfast. Den 'bout de middle of de mawnin' dey would complain 'bout bein' so weak and hongry dat de overseer would fetch 'em in and have 'em fed. He let 'em rest 'bout a hour and a half; den he marched 'em back to de field and wuked 'em 'til slap black dark."
125. Preamble and Regulations of the Savannah River Anti-Slave Traffick Association (adopted November 21, 1846), 3 (first quotation), 4 (subsequent quotations). For Hammond's complaints about drinking and theft among the enslaved population at Silver Bluff, see James Henry Hammond, plantation records for Silver Bluff, October 16, 1835 (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.)
126. on microfilm in Kenneth M. Stampp, ed., Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War, ser. A, pt. 1, reel 1
127. Preamble and Regulations of the Savannah River Anti-Slave Traffick Association, 3 (first and fourth quotations), 4 (second and sixth quotations), 5, 8 (third and fifth quotations)
128. Charleston juries quoted in Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1964), 157