A Warring Nation

Honor, Race, and Humiliation in America and Abroad

Bertram Wyatt-Brown

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813934754
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia americana temprana

In this culminating work of a long and distinguished career, historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown looks at the theme of honor—a subject on which he was the acknowledged expert—and places it in a broader historical and cultural context than ever before.

Wyatt-Brown begins with the contention that honor cannot be understood without considering the role of humiliation, which not only sets victor apart from vanquished but drives the search for vindication that is integral to notions of honor. The American conception of honor is further deepened by issues of race. The author turns to the slave South to show how white and black concepts of honor differed from and contradicted each other, illuminating honor's elusive but powerful role in our society.

He then goes on to explore these themes within a wide range of military and political contexts, from the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm, providing new insights on how honor drove decision making during many defining events in our history that continue to reverberate in the American mind.

1

AFRICAN AMERICAN MALE SLAVES’ HONOR

LOST AND REGAINED IN WAR

Over the last twenty-five years, studies of honor in the Old South have dwelled on the peculiarities of that ancient code among white Southerners. The subject of black slave honor in that same period has scarcely been touched, despite the great advances made in African American scholarship over an even longer period. But that neglect must be rectified. After all, slaves imported to the United States came from African honor societies themselves. That heritage was mostly lost during the antebellum period of enslavement but retrieved when prospects of liberty emerged in the Civil War years. Moreover, it appeared in the resistance that slaves developed to challenge white overrule, however hidden it might be. Even when traditional forms of honor were no longer possible within the stigma of bondage, slaves found other means to assume self-identification as honorable individuals.

The goal in this work is to be sensitive to the psychological aspects of slave life, which is a formidable and perhaps controversial effort. This approach is in contrast to Stanley Elkins’s discredited argument that confined black reactions to the “Sambo” image. While his investigation of concentration camp inmates was innovative, he overlooked the myriad ways by which the Nazi prisoners still found other means of preserving integrity. The same error appeared in his depiction of American slaves. The comparison of slavery and Holocaust victimization was also flawed in that the camps were designed to kill whereas the goal of plantations was to get work done.¹ Clearly, slaves found pathways to self-expression despite a lack of autonomy.

The term “honor” is used here chiefly as the expression of how human beings perceive themselves, which in turn involves how they fit in the social rankings of their culture. As a result, slaves did assert themselves within their own world apart from that of whites. But it is also important to understand that resistance, a far more popular term than honor, includes the concept of honor within it. Ordinary slaves may have lost their original honor via social status, but they still sought to regain the freedom that their forebears had taken from them in the horrors of the Middle Passage and sale. Thus, liberty involved not just the goal itself but also a push for self-respect. Once rendered nearly naked, herded aboard ships, and sold on the auction block, slaves were all dishonored in their own eyes and their captors’. Their continued humiliation was passed on through the oppression of their progeny in perpetuity.

A desire for liberty is a state of mind that transcends the shackles—but that remained a hidden goal. It should come as no surprise that black slaves and freemen fought alongside white colonials in the Revolution against British rule. The yearning for freedom is not exclusive to one class or race, as it was to become in the Old South. As slaves saw it, that right belonged to them as well. The mutual aims of liberty and honor, so tightly chained for slaves in the Old South, were essential to their personal fulfillment. For slaves, the quest for liberty and honor buttressed their sense of self—their inherent value as men despite their condition. The shame of slavery cruelly dissolved so much of what men, white or black, expected of themselves and their society. Yet, sparks of that spirit of manhood remained.

Indeed, because of the harsh, unforgiving, universal nature of slavery, American or otherwise, and the code of white honor imposed upon its antebellum victims in America, the values of personal integrity that the enslaved once possessed were necessarily suppressed from the sight of the outer world. This resulted from the disparity between the powerful and the powerless. Still, slaves used a wide variety of means to reestablish that feeling of self-regard. But their efforts did not always meet the criterion for projecting self and receiving confirmation before others. Instead, as will be discussed later, some slaves turned to outright resistance and rebellion to move beyond self-regard and gain public regard.²

None of this analysis can be proved beyond all doubt. In that age and place, introspection was scarcely recognized. Slaves could not record their feelings on paper, but their behavior speaks to what lay in the heart. Action must necessarily illuminate emotional life. There is no other choice.³

To explore the various ways in which black manhood under slavery survived the outrage of lost liberty, it is essential to discuss the character of African bondage as it existed in the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. This chapter begins with the sketch of a valorous figure, Abdul Rahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori, an African noble imported in the eighteenth century from his own slaveholding state of Futa Jallon, now part of Guinea. In many ways he was atypical of the new human properties, but he symbolizes a style and dignity that many other slaves exhibited. Next, the chapter offers a brief account of the honor that African masters held. From thence the topic broadens to the ways slaves managed to achieve a degree of inner confidence.

The troubling issue of slave submissiveness must also be examined, but not because it conforms to the “Sambo” stereotype. Rather, it was an unfortunate although understandable way for men (as well as women) to handle their owners’ demands and manage their own vulnerability. Race, however, has nothing to do with this submissive reaction toward the powerful. It is found in other societies and circumstances, indeed wherever a systematic intent to humiliate and destroy a victim’s free will exists. Finally, the chapter shifts to the methods employed by slaves to resist the slave regime. These methods ranged from feigned servility and deceitful speech scenarios to overt acts of violence.

All these factors, even the role of playing the subservient soul, demonstrates the buoyancy of the human spirit in the face of degrading humiliations. W. E. B. Du Bois observed that few slaves in America or Africa fully relinquished their sense of honor. However, masters’ “‘honor’ became a vast and awful thing, requiring wide and insistent deference.” He further deplored, “As the world had long learned, nothing is so calculated to ruin human nature as absolute power over human beings.” Still, there were also actual rebellions, often led by members of the warrior class from Africa. The Stono Rebellion in South Carolina was a case in point. Some twenty slaves on a plantation near the Stono River began the attack. They killed their master and seized his weapons. Marching to round up others, their numbers reached nearly one hundred, making it the largest rebellion in the colonial period. They fought lustily, and twenty-one whites died in battle. The leaders of the rebellion were probably from Angola, but, in any case, they knew the warrior culture of their African homeland according to historian John K. Thornton. There, wars and skirmishes were a constant activity so that they had much experience in warfare. In response to the rebellion, the South Carolina authorities passed in 1740 the Negro Act, which prohibited the importation of slaves directly from Africa. Presumably, officials believed that seasoning elsewhere would lessen the perils of slave insurrections.⁴

We can never know entirely how warriors from other African cultures that were contemporaneous with the Fulani system reacted to the humiliation of defeat and complete subjugation. But for an attempted, if only partial, answer, we should explore the story of Abdul Rahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori, who eventually arrived in Natchez, Mississippi, as a slave in the 1780s. At age twenty-six, Ibrahim had been an officer in his father’s Fulani Army, which ruled the mountainous lands in present-day Guinea, West Africa, called at the time Futa Jallon (also spelled Fouta-Diallon). As the son and heir of the almami (Muslim leader), he stood high in the ranks of the Fulani elite. The kingdom was relatively recent. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, almami Karamoko Alfa established a Muslim theocracy and appointed an alfa (or religious leader) for each of the nine provinces under his rule. After Karamoko’s death, his cousin and Ibrahim’s father, Sori Mawdo (meaning Sori the Great), assumed the headship. Sori, though, was beset with uprisings from the ranks of the conquered “unbelievers.” The latter group had disrupted the lucrative selling of non-Muslim captives and foodstuffs to the shippers and traders on the coast. Sori did not permit fellow Muslims to be sold, and the animists deeply resented the discrimination as well as enslavement. “The people on whom we make war,” one of Sori’s aides explained, “never pray to God.” Sori’s army, he insisted, did not make war on “people who give God Almighty service.”⁵

The Muslim Fulanis were, on the whole, a literate people. Their mosque at Timbo, the seat of power, was quite sizable and well-attended. According to a French slaver, Theophilus Conneau, they would not sell others Muslims into slavery, only pagans.⁶ And there was a degree of sophistication in Futa Jallon to put some western countries in the shade. Conneau found that women, even elderly ones, could often read the Koran. The young women of Timbo were noted for their exceptional beauty and grace.⁷ Devout young men of the elite class attended the Arabic University of Timbucktu, and Ibrahim was no exception. He was well-educated in Arabic and the Islamic faith, having studied law and philosophy at the university in the sub-Saharan Mali city. Although he largely hid his faith during the period of his enslavement, Ibrahim refused, in the spirit of the Koran, to touch alcohol.⁸

On a fateful mission to suppress the rebels against the Muslim rulers, Ibrahim Ibn Sori headed a cavalry detachment of 2,000. The animists had turned from resentment to full-scale war. Ibrahim’s force won the battle, but he and a small contingent were ambushed on their journey back to Timbo to proclaim the victory. Fearing reprisal from Sori’s army if they slew his son, Ibrahim’s captors sold him to slattees, native African slave traders, in 1788.⁹

Although Ibrahim must have stood out from other captured Africans by his commanding demeanor and self-control, he was most likely given no special privileges. In fact, after he had been seized, his kidnappers took away his shoes so that he had to march barefoot in chains all the way to the coast. He saw his horse just ahead of him but could not ride. He and the other captives passed through Mandingo country on the Gambia River and from there to the coast. With fifty others he was shoved aboard the British ship Africa, possibly at Banjul. The Africa, which held three hundred captives, sailed to the island of Dominica in the Caribbean. Ibrahim never elaborated in writing about his experience on the Middle Passage. Either his silence was owing to the suppression of traumatic memories or he retained the stern reticence of his people. The Fulanis found it difficult to air personal matters.¹⁰ From Dominica, the former army officer found himself in New Orleans but soon was shipped upriver to Natchez, Mississippi, then under Spanish governance.¹¹ There, one Thomas Foster, a dirt farmer from South Carolina, bought him and another from Futa Jallon named Samba (meaning second son in the Fulani language). Foster paid $930 for the pair: “dos negros brutos.”¹²

Ibrahim Ibn Sori was doubtless mystified about his location and the circumstances. He thought perhaps he could do as other defeated warriors did in Africa: win freedom through a customary redemption process. Ibrahim promised his new master a large ransom in cattle, goods, and possibly even other slaves from Futa Jallon if he would be permitted to return to his native land. Foster, of course, knew what a prize he had and was not about to send Ibrahim home. Because of his imperious, dignified style, Foster dubbed Ibrahim “Prince.” But to indicate his new position in life, Foster had Ibrahim’s hair, a symbol of his warrior masculinity, cut off. It was intentionally humiliating, designed to force him to recognize his degradation. Ibrahim manfully struggled against those holding him down for the barber. But Foster had deeply discredited his black antagonist. In Ibrahim’s eyes, he, a Fulbe (another term for “Fulani”) warrior, had sunk to the level of a tribal youngster, honorless and vulnerable.¹³

Other and worse debasements occurred when Ibrahim contemptuously refused to follow commands about work. His Fulani tribe was pastoral as well as agricultural, so the lowest ranking herdsman or field hand looked on manual labor as a woman’s obligation. Such demeaning demands were not fit for a man of war, especially one with the high status that Ibrahim once held. Hard work in the fields belonged to the animist Jalunke, whom the Fulani had conquered and enslaved. Women, too, were sent to the fields, although they also wove cloth, fixed meals, and did the other activities universally common to their sex. Newly arrived female slaves knew how to manage the agricultural tasks, but at home, they had done so on their own; now, a planter or overseer directed their labor.¹⁴ Field work was a greater source of shame for the African male, who never willingly would stoop to that level. Outraged by the whippings he suffered for refusing to work, Ibrahim escaped in 1788 into a nearby swamp fed by St. Catherine’s Creek. It took weeks for the new slave to realize that survival depended on his return to the small farm, later known as Foster’s Fields.¹⁵

Ibrahim’s Islamic faith prohibited suicide as an alternative. Some imported Africans, however, did kill themselves in the hope that their spirits would return them to their homeland. For instance, in 1776, William Dunbar, a wealthy and prominent planter and neighbor to the humble Fosters, recorded his outrage upon apprehending a new slave recently brought from Africa and Jamaica, who Dunbar thought was planning an insurrection. Under severe torture, another slave had named him as the leader of a plot, though the confession was likely tragically false. Adding to Dunbar’s fury, the apprehended slave then had the unconscionable temerity to leap from Dunbar’s skiff and drown himself to avoid further humiliation and imminent execution. Of course, the owner assumed that the slave’s action was out of shame for his subversive conniving and remorse for betraying Dunbar’s trust.¹⁶

As the local story goes in the Natchez community, Ibrahim suddenly materialized at the door of the crudely built Foster cabin. Thomas Foster was not there, but his wife, Sarah, was. Seeing the tall, bedraggled, halfstarved African with piercing eyes, she might have been unnerved by so startling an apparition. But Sarah was a remarkable woman. Instead, she smiled. Sarah put out her hand in greeting. Then the most surprising thing occurred: The new Foster property dropped to his knees. With his hand, he placed her bare foot on his neck. What he meant was no obsequious gesture. This was the custom in West Africa when a tribal chief had to admit defeat. The victor then had the option of either beheading his foe or granting him life. If the victor so decided, he would consider the battle loss a sufficient demand.¹⁷ Under the African honor code, this would have been a magnanimous gesture because it lent the victor the prestige of full power.

Thereafter, Ibrahim Ibn Sori did what he thought was in keeping with the Koran and Allah’s will. According to one of the Foster family’s neighbors on St. Catherine’s Creek, Ibrahim became “a faithful, loyal servant.” Bowing to the importuning of his American slave wife, Ibrahim even stopped his Islamic praying openly and put away his prayer rug. He joined the Methodist Church to which she belonged. He was, in fact, the first newly imported African to be admitted to fellowship in the church. Secretly, however, he kept his faith alive but only for his own satisfaction.^1...