‘Horrible Enough to Stir a Man's Soul’: Enslaved Men, Emotions, and Heterosexual Intimacy in the Antebellum U.S. South

ABSTRACT

This article analyses enslaved men's emotive responses to slavery's sexual economy in the antebellum U.S. South. It joins the growing historical literature on everyday forms of resistance and refusal, shedding light on the intimate dimensions of enslaved men's resistance. Using the framework of ‘emotional regimes’, this article shows that enslaved men strategically dissembled within, evaded, and defied slavery's culture of paternalism and strict emotional regime. It argues that enslaved men desired, sought, and valued strong intimate and affective relationships as an everyday life-affirming practice. While slavery's sexual economy routinely undermined enslaved romantic unions and emotional bonding, enslaved men typically showed their strength through vulnerability, emotional resilience, and emotional caretaking in intimate relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• U.S. slavery
• emotions
• intimacy
• masculinity
• enslaved men
• emotional regimes
• sexual economy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom: Or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London: William Tweedie, 337 Strand, 1860), 27.

2 Kaisha Esty, ‘“I Had Resolved That I Would Be Virtuous, Though I Was a Slave”: Enslaved Women, Feminine Virtue, and the Sexual Economy of U.S. Slavery’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 24 (forthcoming), 12.

3 Ibid.

4 William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 8.

5 Thomas A. Foster, Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (Athens, Ga University of Georgia Press, 2019), 5.

6 This article acknowledges that enslaved people who might be understood today as trans were, if female-bodied, also subject to the violence of sexual and reproductive abuse.

7 According to census data the population grew from 654,121 in 1790 to 3,950,511 by 1860. Weber State University. ‘Statistics on Slavery’, http://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm (accessed March 25, 2019). See Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

8 Esty, ‘“I Had Resolved That I Would Be Virtuous, Though I Was a Slave”,’ 3.

9 Adrienne D. Davis, ‘“Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle”: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery’, in Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital, eds. Adrienne D. Davis and the BSE Collective (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 2019), 16; Esty, ‘“I Had Resolved That I Would Be Virtuous, Though I Was a Slave”,’ 3.

10 Edward E. Baptist, ‘The Absent Subject: African American Masculinity and Forced Migration to the Antebellum Plantation Frontier’, in Southern Manhood: Perspective on Masculinity in the Old South, eds. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 137. See also Foster, Rethinking Rufus.

11 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129.

12 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, 126.

13 Beth R. Wilson, ‘I ain’ Mad Now and I Know Taint No Use to Lie’: Honesty, Anger, and Emotional Resistance in Formerly Enslaved Women's 1930s’ Testimony’, American Nineteenth Century History 22, no. 3 (2021): 309.

14 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 42–3.

15 Bianca Premo, ‘As if She Were My Own: Love and Law in the Slave Society of Eighteenth-Century Peru’, in Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories of the Americas, eds. Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018), 79.

16 John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 230.

17 This expectation intensified as slavery apologists launched desperate counters to growing abolitionist critiques. For a discussion of white fear and slaveholding see Liana Beatrice Valerio, ‘Scripts of Confidence and Supplication: Fear as the Personal and Political Among the Elite Male Slaveholders of South Carolina and Cuba, 1820-1850’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2019).

18 Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 3.

19 Jacob Stroyer, My Life in the South (Salem: Salem Observer Book and Job Print, 1885), 47–8.

20 Some field-shifting works include Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Tamika Y. Nunley, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, & Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021); and Vanessa M. Holden, Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021).

21 For example, see Deborah Gray White, Ar’n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Revised Edition (1999. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985); Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Emily West, Enslaved Women in America: From Colonial Times to Emancipation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); and Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). The term ‘dis-humanizing’ is borrowed from historian, Walter Johnson. See Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 207.

22 For an earlier critique of the ‘Sambo Thesis’ see Blassingame, The Slave Community.

23 Edward E. Baptist, ‘The Absent Subject: African American Masculinity and Forced Migration to the Antebellum Plantation Frontier’, in Southern Manhood: Perspective on Masculinity in the Old South, eds. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 137. For additional studies on models of enslaved masculinities, Rebecca Fraser, ‘Negotiating Their Manhood: Masculinity amongst the Enslaved in the Upper South, 1830-1861’, in Black and White Masculinity in the American South, 1800-2000, eds. Lydia Plath and Sergio Lussana (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); Kenneth E. Marshall, Manhood Enslaved: Bondmen in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey (Boydell and Brewer, 2011); Sergio Lussana, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South (Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press, 2016); David Stefan Doddington, Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Foster, Rethinking Rufus, and Libra R. Hilde, Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

24 Hilde, Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century, 1.

25 Foster, Rethinking Rufus, 6.

26 Sergio A. Lussana, ‘“No Band of Brothers Could Be More Loving”: Enslaved Male Homosociality, Friendship, and Resistance in the Antebellum American South’, Journal of Social History 46, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 872.

27 Reddy defines ‘emotional refuge’ as ‘a relationship, ritual, or organization … that provides safe release from prevailing emotional norms and allows relaxation of emotional effort, with or without an ideological justification, which may shore up or threaten the existing emotional regime’. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 129.

28 Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York: Published by the Author, 1849), 29.

29 It is worth noting here that ‘friendships’ could refer to platonic and romantic relationships.

30 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. Written By Himself (Boston: Published at the Anti-Slavery Office, No. 25 Cornhill, 1845), 82–3.

31 Rebecca J. Fraser, Courtship and Love Among the Enslaved in North Carolina (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 3.

32 Douglass, Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass, 83.

33 Ibid., 106.

34 Ibid.

35 Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 47.

36 Douglass, Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass, 106.

37 Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 226.

38 Interview with Berry Clay in Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. Library of Congress. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 1, Adams-Furr. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Digital ID: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mesn.041 (accessed November 1, 2018), 191.

39 As quoted in Gregory D. Smithers, Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 97.

40 Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 39.

41 Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 226.

42 Historian Emily West notes that “Conjurers and sacred charms also introduced an African element into slave courtship and marriage rituals.” Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press), 23.

43 Walter Rucker, “Conjure, Magic, and Power: The Influence of Afro-Atlantic Religious Practices on Slave Resistance and Rebellion” Journal of Black Studies 32, no. 1 (2001): 100.

44 Blassingame, The Slave Community, 110.

45 Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 30.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 31.

50 Ibid.

51 Steven E. Brown, ‘Sexuality and the Slave Community’, Phylon 42, no. 1 (1981): 7.

52 Blassingame, The Slave Community, 145.

53 Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 39–40.

54 Foster, Rethinking Rufus, 6.

55 Hunter, Bound in Wedlock, 43.

56 Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 59.

57 Brown, ‘Sexuality and the Slave Community’, 5.

58 West, Chains of Love, 26.

59 Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States. A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who Lived Forty Years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a Slave Under Various Masters, and was One Year in the Navy with Commodore Barney, During the Late War (New York: Published by John's Taylor, Brick Church Chapel, 1837), 33.

60 William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself (Boston: Published at the Anti-Slavery Office, No. 25 Cornhill, 1847), 44–5.

61 West, Chains of Love, 45.

62 Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance,” 545.

63 Stephanie M. H. Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South” The Journal of Southern History 68, no. 3 (2002): 534.

64 Ibid., 534.

65 West, Chains of Love, 23.

66 Ibid., 23–5.

67 Hunter, Bound in Wedlock, 6.

68 West, Chains of Love, 23.

69 Esty, ‘“I Had Resolved That I Would Be Virtuous, Though I Was a Slave”,’ 12.

70 William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 8.

71 Esty, ‘“I Had Resolved That I Would Be Virtuous, Though I Was a Slave”,’ 12.

72 Ibid.

73 William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, 8.

74 Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 38.

75 Psychiatrist and trauma studies scholar, Bessel van der Kolk writes that one of the most effective ways to ‘access your inner world of feelings’ is through writing. See Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 240.

76 Ibid., 43.

77 Ibid., 44.

78 Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 92.

79 Interview with Young Winston Davis in Works Projects Administration, Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Florida Narratives, Project Gutenberg EBook https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12297/12297-h/12297-h.htm#DavisYoungWinston (accessed 11/01/2018).

80 David Doddington, ‘Manhood, Sex, and Power in Antebellum Slave Communities’, in Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories of the Americas, eds. Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018), 146.

81 Ibid.

82 As quoted in Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 64.

83 Interview with Henry Wright in Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. Library of Congress. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 4, Telfair-Young with combined interviews of others. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Digital ID: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mesn.044 (accessed April 26, 2023), 201.

84 Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, 85.

85 Ibid., 88.

86 Ibid., 88.

87 Interview with Isiah Green in Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. Library of Congress. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 2, Gary-Jones. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Digital ID: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mesn.042 (accessed April 26, 2023), 50.

88 Ibid.

89 Interview with Peter Brown in in Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. Library of Congress. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 1, Abbott-Byrd. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Digital ID: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mesn.021 (accessed November 1, 2018), 311.

90 See Smithers, Slave Breeding and Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2016).

91 Interview with Laura Thornton in Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. Library of Congress. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 6, Quinn-Tuttle. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Digital ID: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mesn.026 (accessed November 1, 2018), 326.

92 Ibid.

93 John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (London: No. 27, New Broad Street, 1855), 17. For a discussion of enslaved women and infertility see Jenifer L. Barclay, ‘Bad Breeders and Monstrosities: Racializing Childlessness and Congenital Disabilities in Slavery and Freedom’, Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017).

94 Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 40.

95 See Thomas Foster, Rethinking Rufus; and Stephanie Jones Rogers, ‘Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery: White Women, the Slave Market, and Enslaved People's Sexualized Bodies in the Nineteenth-Century South’, in Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories of the Americas, eds. Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2018).

96 Douglass, Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass, 61. Emphasis in original.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid., 62.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid., 63.

102 Foster, Rethinking Rufus, 6–7.

103 Ibid.

104 Berry, Swing the Sickle, 83.

105 Rogers, ‘Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery’, 115.

106 Interview with William Ward in Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938. Library of Congress. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 4, Quinn-Tuttle. 1936. Manuscript/Mixed Material. Digital ID: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mesn.044 (accessed June 26, 2023), 133.

107 Indeed, white men were not the only perpetrators of slavery's violence. For discussions of white women as violent perpetrators, see Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

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Kaisha Esty

Kaisha Esty is an assistant professor of African American Studies, History, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University, 343 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA.