Knox 1

Andrew Knox

Nate Weston

HIST&136 U.S. History to 1877 Final Paper

December 9, 2009.

A Fate Worse Than Death: Life Enslaved

Slavery is by no means a uniquely American institution. History is rife with tales of how one

group of human beings subjugated another for purposes of domestic servitude, labor, et cetera. Perhaps

the most famous account of slavery was reported in the Bible: the enslavement of the Israelites by the

Egyptians. The Book of Exodus essentially states that enforcing involuntary servitude is not a good

way to stay on God's good side. This biblical episode in the historical chronicles of slavery was often

cited by American abolitionists to point out the religious hypocrisy of slave owners as well as to

promote emancipation in the antebellum period. Over the centuries most slaveholders, professing piety,

ignored the religious contradiction of owning fellow human beings by offering flimsy justifications

absent of fact.1

The enslavement of Africans in the United States was a multi-generational failure. Many people

who owned slaves claimed it was an act of human decency to own slaves because the owners were

helping to civilize them. Therefore, first in the name of profit, later claiming that the slaves were being

civilized, and finally in the name of white supremacy, millions of Africans were forcibly converted into

African-Americans. Of the approximately ten million Africans enslaved in the New World at the eve of

the American Civil War, about four million lived in the United States.2 While in the bonds of servitude,
1 Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University,
1972) 85.
2 Foner, Eric. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Vintage/Random House, 2005)
pp. 6, 11.
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slaves in America were often abused physically, verbally, and sometimes sexually,3 by their white

masters and overseers. Compounding this tragedy is the fact that the fruits of slave labor were

expended on the production of raw material and commodities. Little of substance was created besides

wealth for the masters. Similar to, but much worse than, today's wage slaves, African slaves were

bound to, and jostled by, economic conditions and entities far beyond their control or choice.

Within the United States, slavery and racial discrimination were not distinctly Southern

phenomena. While most Northern states had prohibited slavery and indentured servitude decades

before the Civil War, these states had legally condoned such enforced labor.4 Neither were the

Northern states the bastions of racial equality as they have been presented juxtaposed with the South: In

New York City in July 1863, an anti-draft protest evolved into an anti-black riot and lynching party.

The African-Americans whom the posse captured were beaten and hung by the neck until dead on the

city streets. The riot was eventually broken up by Federal troops returning to the city from the Battle of

Gettysburg.5

We, as Americans, view our past struggle with slavery with a high degree of importance. The

struggle to end American slavery is subconsciously considered by most Americans as more dramatic

and emotionally wrenching than what occurred in most other nations. This is our national bias. On the

other hand, the system of slavery that American Southerners inherited from their European forebears

was perhaps the most formally organized, legally protected, economically impacting and widespread in

recorded history. Therefore, although the fact that slavery existed in America is certainly something to

be ashamed of, our American system of slavery was the definitive version.

Most historical sources focus the majority of their text regarding American slavery into the

politics and economics of the subject. This leaves a gap in reporting. What is missing in most sources

3 Blassingame 154.
4 Harper.
5 Foner 56.
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is the human element. What were the living conditions and day-to-day interactions of African slaves

like? What were their attitudes concerning their overlords? How did they cope with the degradation?

In addition, despite the daily adversity that slaves faced, African-Americans contributed immensely to

the cultural, musical6, literary7 and scientific heritage of America. These fellow Americans would never

have influenced America our country if they had stayed in Africa.

In pursuit of information and insight into the lives of American slaves, I read three history

books (primary sources) regarding the subject:

 The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South by John Blassingame.

 Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White.

 Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction by Eric Foner.

These three books, stating many of the same facts in from different perspectives, have painted a vivid

portrait of the life of an African slave in America and the long road to freedom. The following is my

analysis of the primary sources, of their strengths, faults, significance and theses.

In The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South by John Blassingame, we are

led by the author through the American slavery continuum starting with the original enslavement and

importation to North America. After exploring how slaves were acculturated to European civilization

and taught the English language, the author dissects nearly all aspects of plantation slave life including

music, religion, retention of language and fables, family life, disobedience, punishment, escape,

capture, stereotyping of slave personalities and finally, the reversal of the acculturation, the impact of

African and African-American culture on white southerners.

Blassingame wrestles with psychology and philosophy in this book, striving to answer questions

like “what is the breaking point of a man's soul? Or his faith in his religion/cultural norms?”, “what

impact did African slaves end up having on the antebellum Southern white culture?”, “how did slave
6 Blassingame 36-39.
7 Blassingame 223: Langston Hughes Poem.
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families function in an environment prone to forced familial separation?” and “what were the

interactions between slaves and their masters like?” The book eschews much analysis. Most main

points are made through quotations. The author clearly believes that the most persuasive descriptions

come directly from the people who lived in slavery and told about it. The primary sources include

slave interviews and essays (most written years after the fact) as well as journal entries or publications

by slave owners, overseers, clergy, politicians, etc. This approach tends to divide the book into a

dichotomy of blacks versus whites. In addition to direct accounts of slavery, however, the author also

culled unbiased statistics from state and federal records utilized to emphasize given points.

Every waking moment in a slave's life was wrought with degradation; it was a trying time for

the soul. Waking up to a loud horn call beckoning them to a long day working in the fields.8 The

stereotype of blacks being happy and carefree all the time stems from the fact that slaveholders

believed that unhappy slaves were unhappy and, therefore, dangerous. Frowns were punishable by

flogging.9 The only respite from despair came on their only day off, Sunday; faith in an amalgamation

of traditional African religion and their imposed Christianity created a support network and cultural

cornerstone within slave society. Voodoo, also called Hoodoo, was a ritual magic-based synthesis of

the competing religions that especially took hold in Louisiana and the Caribbean.10

Slaves are depicted as having a great influence on characteristics of southern antebellum white

society as well. The source of much of this may have been the fact that many slaveholding households

had slave women (the Mammy stereotype) raising, teaching and caring for the master's children.11

Slaves brought a new range of musical instruments, drums, rhythms and musical dynamics such as call-

and-response and improvisation into the American mainstream, essentially forming the modern

8 Blassingame 262.
9 Blassingame 257.
10 Blassingame 41.
11 Blassingame 266.
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concepts of American jazz, soul, blues, rock and popular music.12 Another creation of the slaves was

the ubiquitous Southern accent, drawn from emulation of various African language speech patterns, as

well as a pool of new words and commodities, like cola, yams and goobers.13

Slave families were fundamentally stable as long as no members of the family were sold.

Outsiders and clergymen placed a moral stigma on separation of family units without sufficient

justification, so such separations were seldom done in pure spite.14 White masters worked hard to

displace commonplace premarital sex amongst slaves with the European monogamy model for

religious and management reasons.15 Expectant mothers were given a degree of maternity leave, even

if it was grossly insufficient by today's standards.16 Many slaves preferred to marry spouses from other

plantations because “no colored man wishes to live at the house where his wife lives, for he has to

endure the continual misery of seeing her flogged and abused, without daring to say a word in her

defense.”17

In Blassingame's view, white people believed there were three common stereotyped

personalities possessed by black men: Sambo, Jack and Nat. They represented the safe, moderate and

dangerous extremes of the “threat to whites” continuum. Sambo was childish, stupid, linguistically

challenged, submissive, and most of all, fearful but loyal to the master. Jack was the closest persona to

reality, being one that “worked faithfully as long as he was well treated. Sometimes sullen and

uncooperative, he generally refused to be driven beyond the pace he had set for himself.” Nat, named

after the ringleader of a famous slave uprising, Nat Turner, was the reverse of Sambo, “Nat was the

incorrigible runaway, the poisoner of white men, the ravager of white women who defied all the rules

12 Blassingame 33-39.
13 Blassingame 99.
14 Blassingame 174-175.
15 Blassingame 151, 161-164.
16 Blassingame 179-181.
17 Blassingame 165.
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of plantation society.”18

The book paints the views that slaves commonly held regarding their captors. The owners were

too inept or cared too little to show any humanity to the slaves. The overseers were the guards

preventing escape as well as the dispensers of swift punishment with the crack of the whip; they were

seen as cruel sadists with itchy trigger fingers, “mean as the devil.”19 Although the slaves came from

all over Africa, they found unity in their skin color.20

With these questions answered, we move on to reviewing the criticism and opinion of this

source. One historian took issue with Blassingame's rejection of the resources manifested by the Works

Progress Administration's Great Depression-era Federal Writer's Project Slave Narrative Collection.

This historian suggested that Blassingame was purposefully ignoring a vast source to reach the point he

set out to make.21 Blassingame defended this omittance by questioning the openness of the storytellers:

“lots of old slaves close the door before they tell the truth about their days of slavery... [discipline

made] them cautious about saying anything uncomplimentary about their [former] masters.”22

Blassingame's opus takes hits from many angles. Some believe there should be more evidence

of the economic effect of slavery within the book. Others believe the viewpoints of whites23 and female

slaves24 are under-represented in favor of black males. It was a controversial book, but it was also

influential and popular; as one historian said in 1976: “[the criticism] should not obscure the fact that

[Blassingame's] book was of such merit as to warrant spending our time criticizing it four years after its

publication.”25

The Slave Community has been labeled influential by many historians who have followed in it's

18 Blassingame 224-225.
19 Blassingame 271-276.
20 Blassingame 27.
21 Rose 131–133.
22 Blassingame 375.
23 Porter 293–294.
24 White, Deborah G. Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985 ) 21.
25 Rawick 26.
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wake. It was praised by Eugene Genovese, writer of Roll, Jordan, Roll, as well as Deborah Gray

White, writer of Ar'n't I a Woman?. White agreed with the essential thesis of The Slave Community,

but took an exception with Blassingame's characterization of gender relations. She said of the book:

“the work is a classic but much of it deals with male status. For instance, Blassingame stressed the fact

that many masters recognized the male as the head of the family.” The remainder of her grievances

against Blassingame's (and a slew of other) book(s) was the essential disenfranchisement of the stories

and viewpoints of female slaves and overt focus on men in the historical register.26 With this collected,

she wrote Ar'n't I a Woman (named after a speech by Sojourner Truth) with the intent to enrich the

record by describing the lives of the female half of the slave community.

The primary argument of Ar'n't I a Woman is that slave women often endured the same, if not

worse, abuses and injustices as their male counterparts, and were further marginalized and discounted

by misogynist, patriarchal society and history. Receiving a similar quota of work load, as well as being

expected to birth and raise children and maintain domestic tranquility, women got the short end of the

already short stick of slavery. The primary sources are for the most part composed of the female slave's

first hand experiences, with some news articles. Citations to previous historical books are included as

well.

According to Blassingame's The Slave Community, slave owners gave slave males some latitude

regarding the choosing and courting of mates while reserving the right to veto. In her book, White

points out the cruel backside to this practice, the prevailing system of patriarchy did not afford slave

women a similar liberty. “[One slave master] 'graciously' provided one of his slave women with a slave

named Steven, whom she quickly rejected. But the driver's lash made her think twice, and she

reluctantly accepted him.”27

Men, being seen by slaveholders as the heads of slave families were meant to suffer the pain
26 White 21.
27 White 103.
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and embarrassment their wives felt from abuses by proxy. Slaveholders meant to emasculate the male

slaves by prohibiting self-defense when whippings of their wives were ordered. Feelings of impotence

and helplessness when proven unable to protect their family were amplified when slaveholder's

conquest of black women moved from discipline to carnality; “rape has very often been interpreted not

as a violent crime but as the crime of emasculation against black men, preventing them from protecting

their women.” White sees the error in these arguments, that women are objectified as vessels of their

spouse's virility, self-esteem and masculinity. Often is the fact forgotten, in her opinion, that “whites

sought not only to emasculate black men but also to defeminize black women... [the sum of postbellum

violence against blacks was] designed to re-enslave black people and neuter the race.”28

In light of the lack of protection provided by their spouses, black women gained thick skin,

becoming “self-reliant and self-sufficient” and building a sisterhood of support and society amongst

their fellow women. This family dynamic of passive fathers and dominant mothers has persisted

commonly into this modern age. “Black women are not considered to belong to the weaker sex.”29

Just as slaveholders projected archetypes like Sambo, Jack and Nat onto the men they bound,

slave women were categorized by the manner of theater they presented to the whites. Unlike the men,

however, the universe of female slave archetypes was less a continuum and more a triangle. The

predominant female slave stereotypes were Jezebel, Mammy and Sapphire. Jezebel was an attractive

woman who seduced men, both black and white, into sex affairs using her body and her charms. This

concept arose during European-African first contact due to vast cultural differences in clothing and

modesty. It was amplified further when slaves were appraised at sale according to their perceived

ability to bear children, qualities assumed by their level of fitness and beauty.30

The Mammy archetype was affixed to the slave woman who was charged with raising and

28 White 146, 177.

29 White 119-125.
30 White 32.
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caring for the master's children. Since the wealth and assumed elegance the mistress of the plantation

adhered to often distanced her from her children, Mammies were made surrogates, and made to do the

grunt work of motherhood. Because of this, many white children under their care felt a stronger

maternal affinity for their Mammy than their mommy. A Mammy was kind and compassionate, but

suffered no fools and permitted no nonsense; horseplay would be rewarded with a loud, stern

redressing. Mammies were usually tasked with cooking, cleaning and other matters pertaining to

domestic upkeep.31

Sapphire was a black “woman scorned”. Vocal and strong willed women with feminist goals,

“Sapphire is a domineering female who consumes [and emasculates] men by usurping their role.”

Viewed as a variant of Mammy lacking maternal sensibilities, they were perennial targets of lynchings

and abuse in the postbellum period.32

The historical implications of Ar'n't I a Woman are self-evident. The female slave experience

was vastly underrepresented prior to this publication. In The Slave Community, points made regarding

slave women seem more mandated than of free will, more a digression than a support for the thesis.

Ar'n't I a Woman however, fulfills its thesis and manifesto; previously obscured truths are exposed,

sexist conclusions of previous historians are reversed.

Perhaps one weakness of this source is the use of quotations that are so deeply mired in the

dialect of the day that they inspire little more than confusion amongst modern American English

readers. One such line, “my child him is mine,” leaves the reader to solve the punctuational puzzle

instead of reinforcing the “village to raise a child” metaphor the paragraph strived towards. 33

As is the assumed knowledge of any reader of this paper, the South lost the Civil War. The day

after cessation of hostilities, the South was in ruins. The Emancipation Proclamation was realized and

31 White 46.
32 White 176.
33 White 110.
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slavery was dismantled, urban infrastructure was crippled, plantations were abandoned. Federal troops

occupied cities and imposed martial law on the residents. Veterans, physically or psychologically

injured, trickled home. Many whites, rich and poor, Union and Confederate, placed the blame for the

national division and war at the feet of the newly freed slaves. The reasoning followed that the slaves

lost the least and profited the most from the war out of any demographic.34

Eric Foner's Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction displays the shaky,

usually patronizing relationship that the Federal Government and its agents had with freedmen.

Forever Free also analyzes the paranoia manifested in white Americans by propaganda railing against

the original affirmative action movement. This book focuses much less on the day-to-day experiences

of slaves and instead focuses on the big picture, the removal of the bonds of slavery. The majority of

sources behind Forever Free are prominent whites: Army officers, politicians, journalists and men of

wealth. When blacks are quoted, they are seldom more obscure than Frederick Douglass, Sojourner

Truth or W.E.B. DuBois.

Forever Free was well received by book critics and scholars. A New York Times reviewer felt

the book was competent, but would be overshadowed by Foner's other works about Reconstruction.35

A review in The Washington Monthly said “Foner delves deeply into the politics of the time, to be

sure, but he spends much more time showing how political decisions affected real people. . . . This

book has the potential to become a model for future history books that target a broader audience.”36 A

review by The Washington Post was less flattering: “[the author] summarizes these studies, breaking

little new ground but presenting a highly readable story of black Americans' ongoing heroic struggle for

freedom in a racist white society. Here black Union soldiers claim manhood as they fight for

emancipation, and freedmen demand economic and political rights during the complicated politics of

34 Foner 68-71.
35 Goodman.
36 Foner back cover.
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the late 1860s.”37

One weakness that this book, as well as many “New History” books, share is that they tend to

pit blacks against the world. Their struggle for equality was without ally, their cries for acceptance fell

on deaf ears. Some believe that New History books approach a topic with a decidedly liberal, anti-

imperial, politically correct viewpoint and spend more time dissecting the factual and philosophical

inaccuracies of their nonfiction predecessors than actually teaching the reader history. That is not to

say the anti-racist, white guilt stance of Forever Free is not fully warranted; it is. A reader, no matter

their political stripe, should be watchful and wary of bias.

Perhaps the most despicable institution to ever be called American, slavery was a grievous and slow-to-

heal wound inflicted by whites onto blacks. Every step of the process, from procurement, to the middle

passage, auctioning, separation of families, torture, rape, murder and dehumanization, are vast insults

to a people. Mere monetary reparations are grossly insufficient.

The trifecta of The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South by John

Blassingame, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South by Deborah Gray White and

Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction by Eric Foner forms a universe of

understanding regarding American slavery: Men, Women, and the Forces above their control.

Beginning with The Slave Community, I learned that the bulk of the subservience was a charade, the

spirit of man is unbreakable. Ar'n't I a Woman flips the gender and family dynamics proposed in The

Slave Community upside down. Unresolved questions and contradictions were cured, as Man and

Woman were each allowed their own accounts. Forever Free was an entry into a forgotten era in

American history. Reconstruction began with lofty goals that were squandered by political and

administrative ineptitude. An opportunity for achieving great racial equality was missed, and a new

dark age set in. As W.E.B. Du Bois said, “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; and

37 Richardson.
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then moved back again toward slavery.”38

While neither uniquely Southern or American, our relatively recent bout of slavery is a stain

that refuses to wash out of American race relations. Racism and discrimination, however subtle, still

pervades American culture. Despite the righteous grudge of African-Americans and awkward guilt of

Caucasian-Americans, America is not a yin-yang. Significant groups of all nationalities, ethnicities,

creeds, religions and political orientations exist and thrive in America. All of these divisions are merely

dated methods of classifying American citizens judged equally before the law.

38 Foner 212.
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Works Cited

Primary Sources:

 Blassingame, John W.. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New

York: Oxford University, 1972.

 Foner, Eric. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York:

Vintage/Random House, 2005.

 White, Deborah G.. Ar'n't I a Woman?. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985.

Secondary Sources:

 Goodman, James. "Reconstruction Revisited ". New York Times. 12/9/09

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29goodman.html>.

 Harper, Douglas. "Slavery in the North". 12/8/09 <http://www.slavenorth.com/index.html>.

 Porter, Kenneth Wiggins. "review of The Slave Community,". Journal of Southern History May

1973.

 George P. Rawick, "Some Notes on a Social Analysis of Slavery: A Critique and Assessment of

The Slave Community", in Gilmore, ed., Revisiting Blassingame's The Slave Community.

 Richardson, Heather Cox. "Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction". The

Washington Post 2006.

 Rose, Willie Lee. "The Slave Community". Journal of American History June 1973.