The Poison Pen: Slavery, Poison, and Fear in the Antebellum Press

ABSTRACT

When enslaved people were accused of poisoning enslavers, it was newsworthy throughout the antebellum United States. Part of the broad appeal of such articles was their malleability; as reports of supposed poison plots or arsenic in a planter’s coffee travelled from newspapers in slave states to the pages of Northern publications, the articles morphed in form, purpose, and emotional tone. Southern readers looked to stories about thwarted poison plots to assuage their fears of a similar fate and present a brave united front. Meanwhile, Northern newspapers invited a host of other emotions from their audience, from enjoyment and schadenfreude to sympathy and anger. This article on messaging about slavery, poison, and fear in the antebellum United States builds on my monograph, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States, to focus on the emotional politics of fear. Examining how news about enslaved poisoners circulated and shapeshifted sheds light on the relationship between the antebellum press and collective emotions, and on the role of fear in defenses and critiques of slavery. While the Southern press framed stories about enslaved poisoners to address and manage members of the slaveocracy’s fears, the abolitionist press worked to invoke and amplify that terror.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Beth Wilson and Emily West in particular for organizing the Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World Workshop and for making this special issue possible. I am grateful for everyone who participated in the Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World Workshop and all the ideas that came out of that electrifying workshop.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 ‘An Execution’, Perry County Democrat, December 1, 1842, 1; Enslaved women were disproportionately accused and convicted of poisoning, no doubt in part because enslaved women were more likely to be employed as cooks, nurses, or as domestic servants. It’s a subject I intend to delve into in my poison project in a chapter called “A Woman’s Weapon.” For statistics on the gendering of conviction rates of enslaved people in Georgia for poisoning, see Glenn McNair, ‘Slave Women, Capital Crime, and Criminal Justice in Georgia’, The Georgia Historical Quarterly 93, no. 2, (Summer 2009): 140.

2 The version of this story that appeared in Boston Post (which was reprinted in the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier) was nearly identical but added that ‘She belonged to Wm. Bisland.’ ‘An Execution’, Boston Post, November, 7, 1842, 2.

3 Nicholas Marshall, ‘The Rural Newspaper and the Circulation of Information and Culture in New York and the Antebellum North’, New York History 88, no. 2, (Spring 2007): 138, 139, 140.

4 See Charleston Daily Courier, July 16, 1832, 2, reprinted in the Charlotte Journal, August 7, 1832, 4; Southern Planter, August 11, 1832, 1; and Vicksburg Whig, August 16, 1832, 3.

5 ‘Miseries of Slavery’, The Liberator, August 11, 1832.

6 Marshall, ‘The Rural Newspaper and the Circulation of Information and Culture in New York and the Antebellum North’, 150.

7 Erin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); For more on how power operates through emotions, see a canonical text in the history of emotions, William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

8 See Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 32-36. For a discussion of the relationship between ‘political jealousy’ and fear for members of the slaveocracy, see Chapter 6 of Michael E. Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

9 Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton Publishers, 1859), 320–1.

10 Translated from French. Victor Schoelcher, Des colonies françaises, Abolition immédiate de l'esclavage (Paris: Pagnerre, 1842), 121.

11 Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, Folder 7, 2F91, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin; Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, ed. William J. Cooper, Jr., (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 333.

12 Jan Lewis argues the nineteenth-century ‘cult of sensibility’ led elites to express emotions more openly in diaries, letters, and other texts than in centuries prior. Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 28–30, 36–38, 181, 186, 206, 214, 216–217, 222–223, 228; For more discussion of how letters and diaries demonstrate felt and performed emotions, see James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11–2.

13 See, for example, the Southern response to the dissemination of Walker’s Appeal or the Liberator. Van Gosse, ‘As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends: The Emergence of African American Politics in the British Atlantic World, 1772-1861’, The American Historical Review 113, no. 4, (Oct., 2008): 1003.

14 Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 145.

15 As I discuss in Chapter one of Mastering Emotions, some authors of slave narratives used those texts to provoke slaveholders’ fears of murder and rebellion and remind slaveholders of what enslaved people were capable of. See Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin, 1993), 236; Solomon Northup, ‘Twelve Years a Slave’, in Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky, (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 363.

16 ‘Selections, Rev. Nehemiah Adams On Slavery, From the Christian Examiner’, The Liberator, January 12, 1855.

17 ‘Attempt to Poison’, Evening Post, New York, New York, July 11, 1845, 2; ‘Attempt to Poison’, Liberator, August 1, 1845, 4. Similarly, a Virginia paper reported on recent violence by enslaved people, including a poisoning. This article appeared verbatim in several New York papers with the title ‘Crime in Virginia’; that version was reprinted in National Anti-Slavery Standard. ‘Violence – Bloodshed’, Alexandria Gazette, April 14, 1846, 2; Crime in Virginia’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 21, 1846, 2; ‘Crime in Virginia’, New York Daily Herald, April 21, 1846, 1; ‘General Items – Crime in Virginia’, National Anti-Slavery Standard, April 23, 1846; The Southern press were aware that abolitionist papers reprinted their material, see ‘GOOD TASTE’, The Liberator, June 25, 1858.

18 Nicholas Marshall found that 48.6% of the stories in a rural New York paper were reprints from other newspapers. Marshall, ‘The Rural Newspaper and the Circulation of Information and Culture in New York and the Antebellum North’, 140; For more on reprinting articles see Alexander Saxton, ‘Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press’, American Quarterly 36, no. 2, (Summer, 1984): 216.

19 ‘Southern Crimes and Atrocities’, The Liberator, December 17, 1858.

20 The ‘Fruits of Slavery’ article noted that though some victims had recovered, five enslaved people and one of the enslaver’s children died, and two more were in critical condition. Among the dead were the suspected poisoner, an enslaved woman who ‘not only administrated poison to the white members of the family, but to her own children and herself.’ To read between the lines of this sparse story with a sarcastic title is to see the harrowing tale of a mother who murdered her own children and died of suicide rather than continue to live in bondage. ‘Fruits of Slavery’, The Liberator, April 18, 1845, 4; ‘Delights of Slavery’, Liberator, August 23, 1844, 1.

21 ‘Delights of Slavery’, 1844, 1. It also ran in ‘Anti-Slavery Items’, National Anti-Slavery Standard, September 19, 1844.

22 ‘Slavery Record: Annual View of Slavery’, The Liberator, December 24, 1831.

23 As one reader wrote to the editor of an anti-slavery newspaper in 1834, ‘I must cease reading, or become an abolitionist.’ Marshall, ‘The Rural Newspaper and the Circulation of Information and Culture in New York and the Antebellum North’, 150.

24 Alexander Saxton argues that while many ‘penny press’ papers were apathetic about slavery, some ‘contained scatterings of antislavery material.’ Saxton, ‘Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press’, 232.

25 Charleston Daily Courier, September 16, 1822, 2.

26 Lancaster Intelligencer, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, September 28, 1822, 3.

27 Philosopher Raimond Gaita posits that enslavers can’t admit that enslaved people possess the same ‘individuality’ as they do, ‘the kind of individuality that shows itself in our revulsion in being numbered rather than called by name, and that gives human beings the power to haunt those who have wronged them, in remorse.’ Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 156 quoted in Jonathan Havercroft and David Owen, ‘Soul-Blindness, Police Orders and Black Lives Matter: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Rancière’, Political Theory 44, no. 6, (December 2016): 743, n. 20, 758.

28 ‘More Horrors’, Fall River Monitor, August 8, 1835, 3; Also appeared in the Buffalo Daily Commercial Advertiser, August 10, 1835, 2; Fayetteville Weekly Observer, August 11, 1835, 3; Rutland County Herald, Rutland, Vermont, August 11, 1835, 2; Buffalo Patriot and Commercial Advertiser, August 12, 1835, 2; The Hillsborough Recorder, August 14, 1835, 3; Tarboro’ Press, August 22, 1835; The Liberator, August 22, 1835, 1; Selma Free Press, September 5, 1835, 3.

29 ‘Attempt to Poison’, Liberator, August 22, 1835, 1, 4.

30 For a discussion of the variety of reactions true crime reporting invoked, see David M. Stewart, ‘Cultural Work, City Crime, Reading, Pleasure’, American Literary History, 9, no. 4, (Winter, 1997).

31 ‘Attempted Poison’, Hartford Courant, September 14, 1838, 2; also in Tarboro’ Press, September 15, 1838, 2; A New Orleans paper provided a few more details about the suicide attempt but otherwise had the same information. ‘Attempt at Poison and Suicide’, Times Picayune, New Orleans, August 29, 1838, 2.

32 Hartman also noted that to appear in this ‘archive is … a death sentence,’ which proved all too accurate for the enslaved man in Alexandria. Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 2.

33 Stewart, ‘Cultural Work, City Crime, Reading, Pleasure’, 692-3, 694–5.

34 Valerio argues that “confidence scripts” were employed by enslavers in the Atlantic World as much to convince themselves of their unshakeable domination and fearlessness as to convince their abolitionist critics and enslaved people. 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).]

35 ‘Attempt to Poison’, Charleston Mercury, August 29. 1834, 2. As usual when the story traveled North, details were stripped away, including the element of public terror. But the New England Farmer hinted at a motive for the Mobile enslaver, if not the poisoner, claiming that ‘no means were taken to bring her to justice, in consequence of her great value.’ While the Charleston paper questioned why no actions were taken, this article speculated that it was about money. New England Farmer, Boston, September 10, 1834, 8.

36 Star and Banner, Gettysburg, PA, July 24, 1832, 3. An article in the Richmond Enquirer from July 12 spoke to this problem, saying ‘Rumour has been busy since … the Fourth, in relation to the use of poison,’ but none were of ‘sufficiently satisfactory character’ to print. ‘Sumterville, S.C., July 12, 1832’, Richmond Enquirer, July 17, 1832, 3. Also reprinted in the Frederick Town Herald, Frederick, Maryland, July 28, 1832, 1.

37 The Courier Journal, Louisville, March 18, 1839, 2.

38 Included in the defense was the detail that some of the enslaved men had ‘been but a short time in the county,’ and thus ‘very little intimacy did or could have existed among … them,’ speaking to how poison was viewed as a crime of both physical and emotional proximity. ‘Public Meeting at Memphis’, Tri-Weekly Nashville Union, March 22, 1839, 2.

39 ‘Public Meeting at Memphis’, 2. British journalist James Stirling opined while visiting America in 1856 that some slaveowners tried to ‘make light of’ the threat of enslaved insurrection to manage their own fears, but even those boasts were revealing to Stirling, who suspected ‘a vast amount of distrust and fear lurks under their bravado’. James Stirling, Letters From the Slave States (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969) 201, 298–9. See also the article by Liana Beatrice Valerio in this collection: The Performance and Appearance of Confidence Among the Enslavers of South Carolina and Cuba’.

40 ‘Public Meeting at Memphis’, 2.

41 The Courier Journal, Louisville, March 22, 1839, 2.

42 ‘Suspected Murderous Conspiracy of Slaves’, Burlington Weekly Free Press, April 12, 1839, 2.

43 ‘Public Meeting at Memphis’, 2.

44 David Pilgrim argues that abolitionist Lydia Maria Child ‘introduced the literary character that we call the tragic mulatto’ in short stories she published in 1842 and 1843, but the Dabney family poisoning attempt was in 1839. David Pilgrim, ‘The Tragic Mulatto Myth’, November 2000, revised 2012, Jim Crow: Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Ferris State University, https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/mulatto/homepage.htm.

45 ‘A Slave in Memphis’, The Liberator, April 26, 1839, 4.

46 This is a common trope that I will explore in a chapter of my poison project, enslavers’ fear that the enslaved people they perceived as trusted and loyal were most likely to poison them. See Extrait d’une lettre de la Mart. 14 Sept. 1823, ANOM, Martinique Carton 52 Dossier 430 FM SG MAR 52/430 (Martinique); Henry Bibb, Puttin’ On Ole Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky, (New York: Harper & Row, 1969) 70-71; Tiya Miles, Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 86-91, 103-6.

47 ‘A Slave in Memphis’, 4.

48 ‘Attempt to Poison’, New York Tribune, August 28, 1843, 2, also appeared in Sunbury Gazette and Northumberland County Republican, September 2, 1843, 2. The same article was later reprinted in National Anti-Slavery Standard, September 14, 1843 and the Vermont Watchman and State Journal, September 29, 1843, 3. I could only find it in one Southern paper, the Wilmington Chronicle, September 20, 1843, 2.

49 ‘SNELL’, The Liberator, January 21, 1832.

50 L. Maria Child, ‘The Stars and Stripes, A Melo-drama’, National Anti-Slavery Standard, January 23, 1858; Though fictional this couple seemed based on William and Ellen Craft, including William’s own emotional anguish when he could not protect his beloved wife Ellen from the sexual abuses of slavery, see the article by Kaisha Esty in this collection, ‘Horrible enough to stir a man’s soul’: Enslaved Men, Emotions, and Heterosexual Intimacy in the Antebellum U.S. South'; Saxton, ‘Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press’, 223. ‘Slavery Record: Annual View of Slavery’.

51 Saxton, ‘Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press’, 223.

52 ‘Slavery Record: Annual View of Slavery’.

53 The way enslaved people were pushed to the margins of news stories underscores Katherine Burns’ claim that ‘information wanted’ advertisements in Black newspapers post-Emancipation were a form of ‘protest writing’ because they recorded the long-erased names, stories, and traumas of formerly enslaved people and their loved ones. Katherine Burns, ‘Keep this Unwritten History’: Mapping African American Family Histories in “Information Wanted” Advertisements, 1880-1900’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, forthcoming 2023). Also see the article by Katherine Burns in this collection, ‘She died from grief’: Trauma and Emotion in Information Wanted Advertisements’.

54 Havercroft and Owen, ‘Soul-Blindness, Police Orders and Black Lives Matter’, 743.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin Austin Dwyer

Ascription: Erin Austin Dwyer, is an Associate Professor in the History Department, Oakland University, 104 Fitzgerald House, 2200 N. Squirrel Road, Rochester, MI 48309-4401, USA. Email: [email protected]