Mastering Emotions

Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States

Erin Austin Dwyer

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780812299984
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: 19th Century History

Emotions were central to the ways that slaveholders perpetuated slavery, as well as to the ways that enslaved people survived and challenged bondage and experienced freedom. Mastering Emotions examines the interactions between slaveholders and enslaved people, and between White people and free Black people, to expose how emotions such as love, terror, happiness, and trust functioned as social and economic capital for slaveholders and enslaved people alike.The daily interactions that occurred between slaveholders and enslaved people around emotions, in conjunction with larger debates about race and freedom, form the backbone of what Erin Austin Dwyer calls the emotional politics of slavery. Race and status determined which emotions were permissible or punishable, which should be restrained, and by whom. As a result, mastering emotions, one's ability to control one's own feelings and those of others, was paramount for slaveholders and enslaved. The emotional politics of slavery were thus fashioned by enslaved people and slaveholders together through the crucible of slavery.Emancipation was a seismic shift in the affective landscape of the antebellum South. Though the end of the Civil War rendered moot the debate over how to emotionally maintain slavery, the lingering conflict over whether the emotional strictures governing the South would be based on race or free status had serious repercussions, particularly for free Black people. The postwar rise of legal and extralegal attempts to affectively control free Black people underscored the commitment of elite White Southerners to preserving the power dynamics of the emotional politics of slavery, by any means necessary. Mastering Emotions concludes by detailing how the long-term legacy of those emotional politics reverberated through Reconstruction and the Jim Crow eras.

CHAPTER 1

“To Change Their Sentiments”

In his epistolary proslavery book-cum-memoir, Black Diamonds, Edward Pollard interwove the personal and the polemical in order to defend the institution of slavery. Pollard described traveling the world as a young man, writing effusively about encountering an enslaved man again upon returning to the South. Pollard did not know the enslaved man but recalled that the man “looked like home.” He described it as follows: “I looked at him with my face aglow, and my eyelids touched with tears. How he reminded me of my home—of days gone by … ‘when I was a boy’.”¹ For Pollard the mere sight of an enslaved person, even a complete stranger, inundated him with simultaneous feelings of joy and homesickness. Throughout Pollard’s work, it is evident that enslaved people were the building blocks of Pollard’s emotional life, as they shaped his understanding of happiness, love, and sorrow and formed the scaffolding of his memories and very identity. No doubt trying to prove that slavery was rooted in mutual affection and paternalism, Pollard also revealed that enslaved people were so important to his emotional sense of self that the simple act of seeing an enslaved man again transported him to his own childhood.² This scene of an enslaved man unleashing a flood of nostalgia for a planter highlights the extent to which slaveholders’ emotions were created by and through enslaved people.

Many historians of emotions as well as psychologists have argued that emotions are not just individually felt but are collectively constructed and historically contingent.³ Yet all too often historians of emotion, in particular those who attribute collective emotions to cultural and social influences, focus solely on how elites shape affective norms, without attention to the ways that dispossessed people and subcultures contribute to or construct those feelings and emotional practices. Even historians who study the lives of slaveholders have downplayed the role of enslaved people in the affective lives of the planter class, contending that physical proximity did not breed intimacy or shared emotional rituals between slaveholders and enslaved people.⁴ But sources from formerly enslaved authors and slaveholders offer insights into the variety of ways that enslaved women and men were central to the feelings and emotional practices of the people who owned them.

Slave narratives reveal that enslaved people were acutely aware of the effect they could have on slaveholders’ emotions, whether they were intentionally trying to evoke certain feelings or not. One of Elizabeth Keckley’s owners was married to a woman whom Keckley described as being of “humble” origins. Because of that class background, Keckley believed the woman to be “morbidly sensitive” about the enslaved woman, convinced that Keckley “regarded her with contemptuous feelings because she was of poor parentage.” Keckley does not say if she possessed “contemptuous feelings” for the woman, but it did not matter. Despite doing “the work of three servants” Keckley was constantly criticized and “regarded with distrust.”⁵ Whether Keckley was disdainful of her mistress or not, Keckley’s very existence made her mistress feel shame and class anxiety. Keckley was also forced to endure the ramifications of her unintentional emotional influence, as she was viewed as untrustworthy and was heaped with scorn and skepticism.

Some enslaved people deliberately tried to influence their owners’ feelings. Henry Bibb explained that in his enslaved community it was commonly believed that if one chewed on a “bitter root … and spit towards their masters when they are angry with their slaves” it would dispel their owner’s anger at the expectorating enslaved person. After an escape attempt Bibb feared that a whipping was imminent, so a friend advised Bibb to visit a “conjurer” who would sell him a charm that could stave off beatings. The conjurer sold him a powder, instructing Bibb that if his owner threatened to whip him he should “sprinkle it about [the] master” to “prevent him.” The apotropaic concoction worked so well that Bibb returned for more and began scattering the enchanted “dust” in his owners’ bedroom so they had more exposure to it. Bibb intended it to function as a “love powder, to change their sentiments of anger, to those of love,” toward him. Despite these plans, Bibb’s conjuring campaign ended prematurely after the substance reduced his owners to coughing and sneezing, leading Bibb to worry that they would discover his “dangerous experiments upon them.”⁶ If they thought Bibb was trying to poison them that would surely warrant an even more severe sentence, so he gave up his attempts to bewitch his owners.

In his narrative Bibb seemed abashed about this anecdote, dismissing his actions as superstitious, but the passage reveals a great deal about how enslaved people viewed the emotional politics of slavery. Like Keckley, Bibb both feared his owners’ anger and recognized the power he had to impact how slaveholders felt. Even if only briefly, Bibb believed that he had “change[d] their sentiments” through the aid of conjuring and had transformed their anger into affection to avert a beating. Of course, this fleeting moment of affective victory was swiftly replaced by fear of an even harsher punishment than the one he originally hoped to avoid. The incident hints both at how much enslaved people were willing to risk in order to influence their owners’ emotions and at how much power slaveholders’ feelings had over enslaved people’s fates.

While slaveholders like Pollard did not always explicitly acknowledge the ways that their closest relationships and feelings were based on enslaved people, documents written by enslaved people and slaveholders tell another story. As Presbyterian minister Benjamin Palmer observed in a sermon just weeks after the 1860 election, “Need I pause to show how this system of servitude … is interwoven with our entire social fabric? … Must I pause to show how it has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling?”⁷

When writing letters, wills, slave sale documents, or diaries, slaveholders demonstrated that the emotions and affective practices of the antebellum South were fundamentally conditioned upon and constructed by enslaved people. From the ways that slaveholding families bonded and fought, to how they marked occasions from marriage to death, enslaved people had a profound effect on slaveholders’ relationships and feelings, creating sentiments like jealousy, pride, shame, and, in particular, fear. At times this was an unintentional process, as enslaved people were unwillingly incorporated into the lives of the people that owned them. At other times enslaved people deliberately made and unmade relationships, influencing the emotions of slaveholders as a form of self-defense or resistance. This chapter details how enslaved people forged the bonds between slaveholding spouses, lovers, siblings, parents, and children, and how enslaved people unmade these bonds, knowingly mining veins of family tension in order to obtain benefits, avoid punishments, or escape slavery. Finally, the chapter outlines the role of enslaved people in provoking specific feelings like envy, pride, and dread, and how gossip was used to teach and enforce the boundaries of appropriate emotions.

Making Family Ties

One important way that enslaved people constructed slaveholders’ emotions was by forging the intergenerational affective relations that knit planter families together. In an article from DeBow’s Review, an agricultural journal popular among Southern planters, the author, Dr. McTyeire, elucidated how enslaved people helped form those bonds, claiming that older enslaved people were “heirloom[s]” to be “cherished” with “tenderness” because they may have “laid the foundations of the families’ wealth … bore your father in his arms, and went afield with your grandfather when he was starting in life.”⁸ The implication was that enslaved people not only produced heritable “wealth” but also generated family ties and could even embody the memory of beloved ancestors. One’s father or grandfather might be dead, but that intimate relationship was preserved, made manifest through an enslaved person who had cared for that grandfather, father, and son, and might wait on future generations. James Henry Hammond used similar language when describing a thoroughly romanticized and supposedly reciprocal affective relationship between master and slave, reminiscing about enslaved people “who served his father, and rocked his cradle,” shared in their owner’s “griefs” as well as the celebration of holidays, and “whose hearty and affectionate greetings never fail to welcome” their owner.⁹ Like Dr. McTyeire, Hammond blurred the lines between emotions about enslaved people and sentiments about family, revealing in the process the extent to which enslaved people shaped how he felt. Writing in proslavery journals and books, authors like McTyeire and Hammond claimed paternalism in order to defend the institution against its critics, but they also proved how thoroughly planters wove enslaved people into their own emotional lives and their feelings about home and family.¹⁰

Slaveholders did more than idealize the enslaved people who cared for their families for generations; members of the planter class also used enslaved people to cement intergenerational bonds by gifting enslaved people to relatives, typically when celebrating a specific rite of passage.¹¹ In an 1816 Virginia court case over a contested will that included gifting enslaved people, one lawyer observed that “the advancement of children is most frequently in negroes; and a bequest or gift of negroes is generally made as an advancement for the better establishing the child in life.”¹² This suggests that the true affective power of an enslaved person lay not in how they tied a slaveholder to their ancestors, but in the promise of financial security and “advancement” that the enslaved person represented for subsequent generations of slaveowners. As a result, members of the planter class often gave enslaved people to slaveholding children to provide economic and emotional succor on the path to adulthood.

In 1819 John Perkins contracted a slave sale as a present to his sister’s children. The bill of sale noted that “in consideration of his natural love and affection which the said John Perkins hath and bearth” for the four children, he sold them six enslaved people for the modest sum of five dollars. If it was not already clear from this dramatically low price and the language of “love and affection” that this was a gift, the bill went on to say that the sale of the slaves was intended to help fund the children’s “schooling and support.”¹³ This was no mere economic transaction spelled out in boilerplate wording: this was a slave sale couched as an uncle’s act of love for his nieces and nephews. Perkins’s hopes for the children’s stable financial future and education were embodied as six people, six individuals who harbored their own hopes and dreams of a different future.¹⁴

Because gifting an enslaved person to a child was more than a commercial calculation, sale documents provide a glimpse of the nostalgia, love, pride, and loss that slaveholding parents experienced when commemorating a momentous event in a child’s life. A slave sale from November 1, 1837, announced, “My son Doct. W. Thomas Brent being on the eve of leaving me” in order to move to Louisiana, “I have this day given to him … two boys named Aaron aged about 22 years and William aged about 16 years,” signed by George Brent.¹⁵ George Brent might be comforted to know that his son Thomas would be tended to as he established a medical practice in Louisiana, but George still expressed his anguish in the document by dramatically describing his son’s move as “leaving” him. While George Brent conveyed that he was taking his son’s choice to move personally, there are no records showing how Aaron and William felt about this major change in their own young lives.

Marriages were another rite of passage of the slaveholding family marked by gifts of enslaved people. Documents from the antebellum South frequently reference slaveholding parents giving enslaved people as wedding presents, typically as part of the bride’s dowry.¹⁶ As William Craft explained in his narrative of his escape with his wife, Ellen, such a gift could be a loaded one for a young couple, larded with ulterior motives and meanings. Craft noted that Ellen’s father was her White owner, a fact so evident that the slaveholder’s wife was “annoyed” at how often Ellen was “mistaken for a child of the family,” leading the slave mistress to give one of her daughters the eleven-year-old Ellen “as a wedding present.”¹⁷ The gift of an enslaved young woman in particular was a promise of financial security for newlyweds, since any children Ellen had in the future would multiply their estate and wealth. Giving a daughter an enslaved person from the family plantation also ensured that the new bride would have at least one familiar face in her new household. But making a present of the bride’s own half-sister could also be construed as a none-too-subtle warning about the infidelity and heartache that awaited many slaveholding wives.

Perhaps because of enslaved people’s prominence in constructing slaveholders’ rituals and familial ties, as children of the planter class grew up, enslaved people continued to shape their relationships with their parents, even after those parents had passed. For many slaveholders, enslaved people served as a vehicle for remembering the dearly departed. In 1847 Louisiana slaveowner Phillip Moore petitioned to free a woman named Henrietta who had belonged to his late mother. Moore was explicit in court documents that manumitting Henrietta was his mother’s “dying wish,” evidently convinced that no contract or law could be more legally binding than a deathbed request. Carrying out her supposed “wish” was a way to honor his mother, and invoking her last words in court helped see her desires to fruition.¹⁸ Rather than being manumitted, other enslaved people became a living memorial to a slaveholder’s dead parents. Before Henry Box Brown’s owner died, the slaveholder gave his son William “a special charge … to take good care of [Brown].” William demonstrated the extent to which he sought to respect his father’s wishes when Brown “overheard him telling the overseer that his father had raised me—that I was a smart boy and that he must never whip me.”¹⁹ This shows how the philosophy of paternalism was learned: William’s father conceived of himself as a kind slaveholder who “had raised” Brown like he was family. Through his deathbed request the slaveholder passed on to his son the gauzy fantasy that he had been a benevolent slaveowner and that William would be too. Unlike Phillip Moore’s mother, Brown’s owner had left no explicit instructions about manumitting him. Quite the contrary, “tak[ing] good care” of an enslaved person could be broadly interpreted. It is notable that William not only tried to mitigate punishment for Brown, but also invoked his father’s affections for Brown in order to do so. Brown thus served as a dead father’s best intentions incarnate, and any time William went out of his way to help Brown, the slaveholder would be reminded of his father and of the promise he was keeping.

For Pollard, memories of and feelings for enslaved people were ineluctably intertwined with those he had for his dead parents. After an enslaved woman named Marie passed away he claimed that she “numbered … among those whom, with love-lit eyes, I can so often see beckoning to me from Heaven,” in a celestial entourage that included his “beloved parents,” several siblings, and many of the other “dear, old, familiar blacks of my boy’s home.” His dream of a welcoming, integrated afterlife could be read as platitudes about enslaved people being viewed as family, nothing more than a performance of paternalism, were it not for how often he blended his affection for enslaved people with the memory of his departed parents. In another nostalgic passage Pollard re...