Southern History across the Color Line

Nell Irvin Painter

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780807853603, 9780807826928
• eBook ISBN: 9781469610993
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The color line, once all too solid in southern public life, still exists in the study of southern history. As distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter notes, historians often still write about the South as though people of different races occupied entirely different spheres. In truth, although blacks and whites were expected to remain in their assigned places in the southern social hierarchy throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, their lives were thoroughly entangled. In this powerful collection, Painter reaches across the color line to examine how race, gender, class, and individual subjectivity shaped the lives of black and white women and men in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. Through six essays, she explores such themes as interracial sex, white supremacy, and the physical and psychological violence of slavery, using insights gleaned from psychology and feminist social science as well as social, cultural, and intellectual history. At once pioneering and reflective, the book illustrates both the breadth of Painter's interests and the originality of her intellectual contributions. It will inspire and guide a new generation of historians who take her goal of transcending the color bar as their own.

1
Soul Murder & Slavery

TOWARD A FULLY LOADED COST ACCOUNTING

We all know on a certain, almost intuitive level that violence is inseparable from slavery. Historians rarely trace the descent of that conjunction, although several of them answered a journalist’s questions about high homicide rates in the late twentieth-century South. In a 1998 article in the New York Times, Fox Butterfield addressed the South’s permanently high murder rate. Butterfield notes the existence of sharp differences in homicide across the regions of the United States. The states of the former Confederacy all figured in the top twenty states for murder, with the highest rate in Louisiana: 17.5 murders per 100,000 people. Overall, the southern murder rate nearly doubles that of the Northeast.¹

Butterfield advanced several explanations, based on the views of nineteenth-century observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted, who blamed the prevalence of guns and a frontier mentality. Historians pointed to the Scotch-Irish culture of many southerners, which disposed them toward whisky drinking and family feuding, a system of “primal honor,” and a touchiness that slavery reinforced. None indicted the long-standing ideals of obedience and submission, the values of slavery, and the acceptance of violence as a means of enforcement.

In this essay I accept the unhappy task of probing slavery’s legacy of violence. My aim is to examine the implications of soul murder (a phrase to which I will return momentarily) and use them to question the entireness of historians’ descriptions of American society during the era of slavery. My hope is that a more complete accounting—what bookkeepers would term a “fully loaded cost accounting”—of slavery’s costs, most notably the tragic overhead costs that were reckoned in the currency of physical abuse and family violence, will yield a fuller comprehension of our national experience. With the broad geography of American slavery in mind, I take as my theme “Soul Murder and Slavery.”

This work is interdisciplinary, drawing on the history of American slavery, feminist scholarship on women, the family, and the workplace, and on the thought of sociologists and psychologists regarding children. My questions have their roots in second-wave feminism of the 1960s, which influenced the rewriting of history generally. By focusing attention on women’s lives, feminist scholarship has made women visible rather than taken for granted and queried the means by which societies forge gender out of the physical apparatus of sex. While some feminist thinkers have analyzed women’s writing and gender, recently other intellectuals and activists have turned a spotlight on a protected, potent social institution: the family. Even though families, as the site of identity formation, shape the elaboration of politics, and even though public policy profoundly influences families, family dynamics have generally been treated as private and separate from the public realm and have not traditionally figured prominently in the writing of history.

Historiographical blindness toward families still persists, even though the source material is abundant. Turning new eyes on evidence that has been at hand forever, feminist historians are able to hear subaltern voices and recognize phenomena that had not previously been investigated seriously.² What were long termed “discipline” and “seduction” of the young and powerless, who were described as feckless and oversexed, we can now call by their own names: child abuse, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, rape, battering. Psychologists aggregate the effects of these all-too-familiar practices in the phrase soul murder, which may be summed up as depression, lowered self-esteem, and anger.

Soul murder has a long genealogy, going back to folk beliefs in Europe and Africa about the possibility of stealing or killing another person’s soul. Soul murder appeared in connection with the 1828 story of Kaspar Hauser, who, having spent his childhood imprisoned alone in a dark cellar, emerged as an emotionally crippled young adult unable to talk or walk. Before emerging into the light, Hauser had glimpsed only one other person, his jailer, to whom he wished to return. Within psychoanalytic literature, the classic, anguished phrasing of soul murder as the violation of one’s inner being, the extinguishing of one’s identity, including sexual identity, comes initially from Anselm von Feuerbach’s 1832 account of Hauser and from Daniel Paul Schreber’s 1903 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, inspired by Feuerbach and commented on, in turn, by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Schreber’s memoir made him the world’s most famous paranoid.³

More recently, soul murder appears in the title of a book by a professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine, Leonard Shengold (Soul Murder: The Effects of Child Abuse and Deprivation). The “abuse” in the subtitle can be violent and/or sexual, which presents children with too much sensation to bear. “Deprivation,” as in the case of Kaspar Hauser, refers to neglect that deprives children of enough attention to meet their psychic needs.

Sexual abuse, emotional deprivation, and physical and mental torture can lead to soul murder, and soul-murdered children’s identity is compromised; they cannot register what it is that they want and what it is that they feel. Like Kaspar Hauser, they often identify with the person who has abused them, and they may express anger toward themselves and others. Abused persons are more at risk for the development of an array of psychological problems that include depression, anxiety, self-mutilation, suicide attempts, sexual problems, and drug and alcohol abuse.⁴ Victims of soul murder do not inevitably turn into abusers—there is no direct or predictable line of cause and effect—but people who have been abused or deprived as children grow up at risk psychologically.

We surely cannot translate twentieth-century psychology directly into the mentalities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century societies, because many aspects of life that we regard as psychological were, in earlier times, connected to religion. Spirituality then, as now, varied considerably from person to person and from group to group; with the passage of time, religious sensibilities were subject to fundamental alterations. American religion generally changed in the aftermath of the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century and the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. The various evangelicals, especially Methodists and Baptists, deeply influenced what we would call the psychology of Americans, as well as the terms in which they envisioned and communicated with their gods.

Despite differences of mentality wrought by greater or lesser religiosity, psychology—when used carefully, perhaps gingerly—provides a valuable means of understanding people and families who cannot be brought to the analyst’s couch. Ideally historians could enter a kind of science fiction virtual reality in which we could hold intelligent conversations with the dead, then remand them to their various hells, purgatories, and heavens and return to our computers. Lacking this facility, we can only read twentieth-century practitioners and enter the archives with our eyes wide open.

Even without the benefit of an esoteric knowledge of psychology, we readily acknowledge the existence of certain conventions associated with slavery: the use of physical violence to make slaves obedient and submissive, the unquestioned right of owners to use the people they owned in whatever ways they wished. But we may need to be reminded that these habits also translate into a set of ideals that were associated with white women in middle- and upper-class families and into another set of ideals identified with evangelical religion. Submission and obedience, the core values of slavery, were also the key words of patriarchy and piety.

Because the standard of slavery calibrated values in other core institutions, slavery deserves recognition as one of the fundamental influences on American family mores and, by extension, on American society as a whole. Religion, democracy, the frontier, patriarchy, and mobility are all recognized as having played their part in the making of American families and American history. Slavery also counted, and not merely for Americans who experienced it as captive, unpaid laborers.

No matter how much American convention exempts whites from paying any costs for the enslavement of blacks, the implications of slavery did not stop at the color line; rather, slavery’s theory and praxis permeated the whole of slave-holding society. Without seeking to establish one-to-one relationships or direct lines of causality, I will pose questions and suggest answers that may foster more comprehensive and feminist thinking about American history. Ironically, perhaps, names that have only recently been coined help reinterpret the past.

The fields of study focusing on child abuse, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse were born in the 1960s and 1970s. In the last quarter century or so these fields have grown and supplied therapists, medical doctors, recovering victims, lawyers, and feminists, some of whom were looking for the roots of women’s impaired self-esteem, others of whom were seeking to right the wrongs that women have suffered in patriarchal families and in the workplace. I suppose the appearance of professionals who profit from suits over child abuse, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment is inevitable in a capitalist society. Nonetheless, the profit-making aspect of the phenomenon of recall has provoked a good deal of commentary about suppressed memory and false memory. The debate now centers mainly on women who can afford therapists and lawyers and whose family mores and career chances have encouraged the suppression rather than the reporting of unacceptable memories. Much commentary on child sexual abuse—currently the most discussed form of violence against the young—involves what the skeptical philosopher, Ian Hacking, terms “memoro-politics.” His and psychologist Carol Tavris’s doubts are institutionalized in the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, founded in Philadelphia in 1992.⁵ With all its visibility, the controversy over false memory obscures the subjectivity of enslaved people, whose victimization is well documented and uncontested.

American habits of thought—what Marxist philosopher and critic Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey call “ideology”—have rendered the experience of slaves utterly invisible in the literature of child abuse. No one at all disputes the fact that these children and women endured hurts that they did not forget, yet these victims do not currently figure in the consideration of the effects of child abuse and sexual harassment. An example is to be found in the widely acclaimed work of Judith Herman, one of the premier analysts of sexual abuse. Herman includes a chapter entitled “Captivity” in her second book, Trauma and Recovery. Here the captivity in question is figurative rather than literal. She does not acknowledge the history of the literal captivity of millions of American slaves over several generations.⁶

For most scholars of child abuse and sexual abuse, slavery possesses neither a literal meaning nor consequences; it serves only as a potent, negative metaphor. As a historian familiar with the institution that existed throughout most of American territory into the early nineteenth century, I do want to think literally: I want to investigate the consequences of child abuse and sexual abuse on an entire society in which the beating and raping of enslaved people was neither secret nor metaphorical.

The first step is to think about slaves as people with all the psychological characteristics of human beings, with childhoods and adult identities formed during youthful interaction with others. As ordinary as is the assumption that white people evolve psychologically from childhood to adulthood, to speak of black people in psychological terms can be problematical. This history has a history. Much of scholars’ and readers’ reluctance to deal with black people’s psychology goes back to the 1960s debate over Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), which provoked extensive criticism and revision.

Acknowledging the “spiritual agony” inherent in American slavery, Elkins compared slavery in the American South with Nazi concentration camps, in which, he thought, an all-encompassing system of repression infantilized people who had been psychologically healthy. Elkins wrote that on southern plantations and in Nazi concentration camps, inmates “internalized” their masters’ attitudes. Drawing a flawed analogy between concentration camps, which existed for a few years, and slavery, which persisted over many generations and was psychologically more porous, Elkins argued that the closed system of slavery produced psychologically crippled adults who were docile, irresponsible, loyal, lazy, humble, and deceitful, in short, who were Sambos. With regard to both slavery and concentration camps, Elkins’s methodology was more psychological than archival, and he also overlooked resistance in both contexts. In the American South, Elkins ignored the significance of slave families and communities and the long tradition of resistance and revolt, as chronicled in Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943).⁷

The scholarship appearing in the 1970s and 1980s provided a more complete view of slaves and slave families than Elkins had presented in the broken-up character of Sambo. Yet since the thunder and lightning of the Elkins controversy—even after the appearance of extensive revisionist writing—scholars and lay people have avoided, sometimes positively resisted, the whole calculation of slavery’s psychological costs. The Sambo problem was solved through the pretense that black people do not have psyches.

Prevailing wisdom says that strong black people functioned as members of a group, “the black community,” as though black people shared a collective psyche whose only perception was racial, as if race obviated the need to discuss black people’s subjective development. Within this version of the black community, the institution of “the black family” appears as preternaturally immune to the brutality inherent in slavery. Black patriarchy with a human face appears in much of this post-Elkins writing, particularly in the case of the well-intentioned work of Herbert Gutman, which refuted a 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan that blamed poverty and criminality on black families.⁸ In family groups or as individuals, slaves emerged from historians’ pages in the pose of lofty transcendence over racist adversity. Any analysis hinting that black people suffered psychological trauma as a result of the vicious physical and emotional practices that slavery entailed seemed tantamount to recapitulating Elkins and admitting the defeat of the race at the hands of bigots.

Rejecting that reasoning is imperative, because denying slaves psychological personhood impoverishes the study of everyone in slave-holding society. Historians already realize that including enslaved workers as part of the American working classes recasts the labor history of the United States; similarly, envisioning slaves as people who developed psychologically sheds new light on the culture of violence in which they matured.

Societies whose economic basis rested on slave production were built on violence, and the calculus of slavery configured society as a whole, as nineteenth-century analysts realized. When proslavery apologists spoke of owners and slaves as belonging to the same family, they were acknowledging the relationship between modes of production, politics, family, and society that three other nineteenth-century commentators, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Alexis de Tocqueville, also perceived. From very different vantage points and with quite different emphases, Tocqueville in Democracy in America and Marx and Engels in The German Ideology recognized the influence of the political economy on civil society. For Marx and Engels, “the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men,” which they totaled up as “the language of real life.” Material existence, they said, shapes the relationships between husbands and wives and between parents and children that we term “family” and that they underlined in the original.⁹

Peering through the lens of political economy, Marx and Engels spoke in the interest of workers, but Tocqueville, who was more comfortable with people of his own privileged class, unabashedly admired the democracy of the United States. Moving among Americans who had flourished since the American Revolution, Tocqueville in his appraisal of the consequences of American institutions was generally positive. He credited American political arrangements with the creation of more democratic relationships within American families, but he also traced democracy’s limits. Where there was slavery, he noted, democracy could not do its salutary work. Slavery was “so cruel to the slave,” but it was “fatal to the master,” for it attacked American society through opinions, character, and style and devalued the ideals that undergird democratic society.¹⁰

Marx and Engels may have overestimated the ramifications of the dominant mode of production, and Tocqueville may have held too sanguine a view of the consequences of political democracy within the household, bu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• SOUTHERN HISTORY ACROSS THE COLOR LINE
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Soul Murder & Slavery
• 2 The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas
• 3 Three Southern Women & Freud
• 4 “Social Equality” & “Rape” in the Fin-de-Siècle South
• 5 Hosea Hudson
• 6 Sexuality & Power in The Mind of the South
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Series