The Performance and Appearance of Confidence Among the Enslavers of South Carolina and Cuba

ABSTRACT

For decades the public and private documents of enslavers have been examined to produce seminal studies of slavery. This article explores the interval between public and private, exposing it as a liminal space of emotional direction for the enslaving elite of nineteenth-century South Carolina and Cuba. Consulting confidential correspondence, periodicals, and published proclamations gathered from archives across Cuba, Spain, and the U.S., this study focusses upon instances when enslavers strategized as to how their violence, words, architectural surroundings, legal codification, and press should best buttress what they regarded as the necessary emotional balance for maintaining their dominance: white confidence and Black fear. Analyzing these words and actions using History of the Emotions methodologies and principles including emotionology, emotional regimes, and the emotional politics of slavery, this article contributes the theorization of the ‘confidence script’, a performative narrative style deployed by proslavery elites to publicly assert unalloyed white composure regardless of tangible unrest among the enslaved population, or furtive admissions of slaveholder dread. Its conclusion asserts that the silences and proclamations surrounding racialised white fear and performative confidence in Cuba and the U.S. continue to propagate and justify nefarious white violence and injustice against Black Cubans and Americans today.

KEYWORDS:

• Confidence
• fear
• History of the Emotions
• History of Whiteness
• censorship
• Cuba
• South Carolina
• slavery
• nineteenth century

The self-assured emotional tone of newspaper columns from 1840s Cuba conveys the impression that white enslavers regarded the island as practically utopian. As the Diario de la Habana proudly proclaimed in May of 1843, refuting claims of instability in the Spanish colony:

We enjoy the most perfect peace, and complete security[…]we can most ably clarify to the face of the entire world, that never has the general peace in this country, nor the personal security of every inhabitant, been greater. Here we live without the least of frights[…]because of the peace and calmness[…]and the methods of policing that the government adopts.¹

Such descriptions belied the furious horror that Cuban enslavers unleashed months later, when the conspiracy of La Escalera – a series of linked uprisings across the island, implicating thousands of free and enslaved people of colour – was denounced. The name ‘La Escalera’ was given in reference to the method of extracting ‘confessions’ from hundreds of enslaved and free people of colour through the process of strapping them to ladders (escaleras) and whipping them to within an inch of their lives.

Similarly, in January of 1820, South Carolinian proslavery zealot, senator, and states’ rights advocate William Smith rebuked the allegations made by a northerner who had published a pamphlet under the pseudonym ‘Marcus’, claiming that southern enslavers lived in perpetual fear of their own insurrectionary slaves. Smith retorted, in tones of jest and derision:

We may be happy to say this man Marcus would be mistaken, as well as many others who had supposed we were not only in a constant state of alarm, but that we were also in constant danger, from an insurrection of this part of our population. This people are so domesticated[…]that Marcus and all his host cannot excite one among twenty to insurrection[…]the owners of these people can place arms in their hands[…]they are the shield of their masters, instead of their enemy.²

Two years after Smith's comments, the alleged Denmark Vesey Insurrection Attempt (which never came to fruition) was discovered in Charleston. Including Vesey, 35 enslaved and free persons of colour were publicly hanged in a merciless bid to make one message patently clear: white domination in South Carolina was inexorable.

White emotion – expressly, confidence – was a remarkably commonplace feature of the proclamations of South Carolinian and Cuban proslavery and anti-abolition spokesmen. There was nothing incidental at all about its evocation. In South Carolina and Cuba between the years 1820 and 1850, elite, white, male enslavers – the subjects of this study – sought to enforce and uphold a specific emotional hierarchy in order for their respective slave societies to function without violent uprising. They considered the following two conditions to be fundamental to maintaining white supremacy: white enslavers should appear unflinchingly confident in their domination while enslaved people should live in fear of the constant threat of violent punishment (be that physical, sexual, or psychological violence). Women also owned, sold, and brutalized enslaved people in South Carolina and Cuba.³ However, since the restrictions and expectations surrounding their emotions differed greatly from their male peers, they will remain the purview of a separate study.

My theorization is that elite white male enslavers in South Carolina and Cuba employed a performative narrative style termed a ‘confidence script’. Each respective confidence script publicly asserted unalloyed white aplomb and dominance at all costs, regardless of tangible unrest among the enslaved population, or private, furtive admissions of enslaver dread concerning the precarity of the entire system of racial enslavement. This tool was deployed to fulfil four objectives. First, to publicly refute abolitionist avowals that enslavers lived in constant fear of insurrection. Second, to reemphasise to the enslaved and free Black population the immutability of white dominance. Third, to encourage and prescribe similarly confident speech among all enslavers, and fourth, to reassure slaveowners who were starting to become fearful (lest their uneasiness risk corroding the institution from within). The confidence script knowingly deployed and performed emotion as a tool of deflection and rebuttal. It was a form of emotional proslavery.⁴ The confidence script was also non-verbal, utilizing violence as its malevolent handmaid in a sinister bid to underwrite white control and ‘order’.

This article interrogates instances when enslavers privately verbalized how they felt they ought to behave and appear in public for a sufficient impression of their domination to be made. Pernicious white doubt found its home in this interval between public and private, a liminal space of malignant emotional organization and strategy. It will explore a selection of the elements enslavers manipulated in an attempt to maintain their appearance of unblemished authority: the performance of mastery; the use of silence to conceal fear; architecture and the codification of slavery; and the emotional censorship of Cuban newspapers. It concludes by suggesting that these methods continue to underpin and propagate racialised inequality, violence, and state-sponsored murder in Cuba and the United States today.

Emotional Direction and Performance

The term ‘emotionology’, coined by Peter and Carol Stearns, articulates the set of values that dictates suitable emotional display in any society. A culture's emotionology delineates acceptable emotional expression for each gender, prohibiting unsavoury conduct, and encouraging that which is deemed commendable in a bid to create a society whose comportment complements the national, or regional, image. The challenge for historians of the emotions, Peter and Carol Stearns advise, is to recognize the difference between the social rules decreed by a society's emotionology and the genuine emotions of those who lived under its doctrines: between what was permitted, and what was felt.⁵ The theory of emotionology galvanizes the truism that emotions are not biological reactions devoid of cultural slant. They are formed during the course of a lifetime, throughout which emotional expression is crafted, suppressed, and amplified according to gender, class, and race.⁶

These social rules comprised the ‘emotional regime’ of any slave society. An emotional regime, William Reddy explains, is a ‘complex of practices that establish[es] a set of emotional norms and that sanction[s] those who break them’: it is the process by which political regimes stipulate the correct emotional display for members of that state.⁷ Great consequence is afforded by historians of the emotions to the praise and punishment conferred upon a subject by their equals, depending on their good or bad emotional conduct. This theory is harmonious with Barbara Rosenwein's conceptual ‘emotional community’, a group ‘in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression, and value – or devalue – the same or related emotions.’⁸ All social circles, Rosenwein maintains, should be considered ‘systems of feeling’, and within each of those systems exists a rubric of ‘the modes of emotional expression that [its members] expect, encourage, tolerate and deplore.’ As Rosenwein continues: ‘historians interested in the characteristics of particular emotional communities need to consider which emotions were most fundamental to their styles of expression and sense of self.’⁹ Accordingly, understanding how enslavers wanted to be perceived is vital to any appreciation of the performative aspect of the confidence script.

Correspondingly, the concept of ‘honour’ in South Carolina and Cuba should not be approached as wistful or passé, but as emotionological scripture for historians seeking to understand not how enslavers felt, but rather, how they were supposed to feel in their respective emotional regimes. In the upper-classes of South Carolina and Cuba, a man's lifelong pursuit of guarding his honourable reputation – his bearing of dominance and unquestionable authority (among other elements) – was the central governing force of his entire existence. When honour is considered aspirational rather than inherently masculine, a mode of limiting and policing emotional display among men of high social class, the distinction between honour and dishonour evolves into a distinction between pride and humiliation.¹⁰

In these two masquerade cultures enslavers occasionally performed autocracy to the people they enslaved. It was imperative that their words and deeds should seek to command indisputable authority. When underneath the (apparent) subservience of enslaved people there simmered the constant risk of insurrection, each enslaver was conscious of how thin the fabric of his desired supremacy, and survival, was. This fear/confidence dynamic is but one thread in the social tapestry that Erin Austin Dwyer terms ‘the emotional politics of slavery’. As Dwyer explains, in a slave society wherein emotion was forged in constant relation to slavery, and constructed by enslaved people, ‘feelings were a currency of power’.¹¹ Enslavers attempted to wield as much power as possible by instilling Black fear whilst masking their own at all costs.

Enslavers themselves, therefore, derided the behavioural defects of their peers. In the minutes taken from a meeting of the landowners of Beech Island, South Carolina, held to discuss recommended measures for the more effectual management of enslaved workforces, it was opined curtly that: ‘not every man who owns a plantation knows how to govern negroes.’ The comment was made with express reference to the conduct of the slaveowner. Openly advocating, and encouraging, the conscious performance of appropriate behaviour when it did not come naturally, the enslavers present at the meeting explained, for the benefit of those in doubt: ‘convince them that you are a tyrant [because] the negro must fear.’ Any man unable to provoke the necessary submission was, they concluded with acerb: ‘not fit to own negroes.’¹²

In a similar vein, four Cuban enslavers: José Vizarro y Gardín, Juan Montalvo, Rafael O’Farril, and Pedro Diego, outlined their thoughts behind domination and mastery. ‘It is not impossible for compassion and subordination to coexist’, they reflected, ‘but it cannot be contemplated in the slightest with the negro, nor can any other impression than harshness be feigned.’ The use of the word ‘feigned’, again, makes direct reference to the correct emotional performance expected of enslavers in order to preserve white domination. Similarly to the Beech Island slaveowners, these Cuban enslavers alluded both to maintaining a façade of white confidence and what they deemed to be the vital importance of enslaved fear in plantation discipline:

The power of the master over them must have an immutable character of strength[…]of inviolability[…]any measure which would be remotely enough to moderate the authority of the master would be sufficient in causing the greatest havoc[…]it is impossible to subject three hundred persons to one voice alone without sustaining by every means imaginable the prestige of that authority[with]the dread of fear[…]maintaining this equilibrium does not consist in more than constantly feigning an extreme severity[…]the miracle of military subordination and discipline has not been achieved, perhaps, without similar means.¹³

The Emotional Betrayal of Architecture and Law

While enslavers in South Carolina had for generations been emboldened by the full liberty to codify slavery as they deemed fit, the codification of Cuban slavery took place in metropolitan Spain rather than according to the preferences of local Cuban slaveowners, who had limitations and obligations imposed upon their mastery from across the Atlantic. Each new or modified set of codifications was a source of bitter complaint among Cuban enslavers who, well into the nineteenth century, were penning aggrieved objections to the colonial government conveying their feelings that Spain was tone-deaf in its attempts to legislate on the institution of slavery from an ocean away. Indeed, those enslavers often felt that the codes designed to protect them were categorically dangerous.

One of many enslaver objections against a proposed mandate to carry out checks on rural plantations investigating the treatment of enslaved people was penned by prominent enslaver Manuel M. Figuera. He urged Captain General Dionisio Vives to appreciate that, in his experience, enslaved people waited with bated breath for any opportunity for violence:

I understand that to speak too much on the subject of improving the lot of the slaves by enforcing repressive methods on their masters is to place the dagger in their hands in order that they should murder those they should obey and respect; to be an advocate for the blacks against the whites, and to prepare the catastrophic end of this island as they prepared it in Santo Domingo.

Figuera continued, fatalistically: ‘ostentatious vigilance[…]would finish most likely with the extermination of blacks and whites[…]because in the moment when the slaves understand that there is in the government this type of protection, pretexts for rebellion will not be lacking.’¹⁴ Captain General of the island, Gerónimo Valdés, went so far as to express that concessions in slave codes put Cuban enslavers ‘in an embarrassing situation’.¹⁵ The reaction to a proposed slave code drafted by Valdés some years later demonstrates not only the defensive reaction of enslavers in Cuba to colonial interference, but also their frustration that slave codes imposed from above misunderstood the needs of the slaveowner as far as his wish to maintain the malign balance between Black fear and white confidence was concerned.

The proposed implementation from as early as 1825 of barracones – dormitory enclosures for enslaved labourers, separated according to sex, purposefully constructed without windows or escape routes and thus lacking in fresh air, and closed every night by lock and key – proved especially frustrating. It was explained to Valdés that the barracones were, in the first place, disagreeable from the enslavers’ viewpoint. ‘He who is charged with their custody becomes careless more easily[…]confident in the walls and bolts which guard the prisoner’ it was outlined. The addition was made, with seeming exasperation: ‘in this way it will occur that our overseers, satisfied with having the key to the barracón under their mattresses, will sleep with total confidence, meanwhile [the slaves] remain free to make plans, and, if they fancy, to leave, safe in the knowledge that no-one is watching them, or will miss them.’ Further to this, on a practical level, a closed structure filled with restless, hostile enslaved people presented complications and dangers to the overseer: ‘these consequences are even more to be feared, for however brave an overseer is, he will always fear to enter the barracón at night, where all of his enemies are gathered, and where it would be easy for any one of them, only extinguishing the light, to strike or kill him without the overseer being able to flee or defend himself.’¹⁶

Most tellingly, the author of this correspondence reasoned that such an obvious physical portrayal of slaveowner nervousness caused a ‘disruption in the customs and habits of the slaves’, giving ‘a poor idea of the force of the power which dominates, as weak is he who fears.’ Something as crude as a constructed enclosure would ‘break the bonds that blind custom forms between the slave and his master, and provoke rebellion.’¹⁷ He was attempting to explain that a barracón would communicate too clearly to the enslaved people inside it how insecure their enslaver was, so anxious and so lacking in authority that he resorted to locking them up each night. The barracón would act as a reified representation of enslaver fear.

Fear was not denied by these men. The risk was that their fear could be betrayed to the enslaved population by slave codes passed in poor judgement. As such, physical, architectural safety measures were seen as doing more harm than good. To assume that a locked and bolted barracón imprisoning an enslaved workforce during the hours of darkness would have been reassuring underestimates the Janus-faced equilibrium enslavers strived to achieve between precluding enslaved violence whilst appearing perfectly confident in their dominance. Despite the staggering frequency at which enslaved workforces revolted on plantations across the island, greater claims of slaveowner fear did not marry with the rushed implementation of every safety measure imaginable. Offering a degree of movement and autonomy to enslaved people, although potentially a physical threat, often minimized the risk of violence. This was, according to the thought process of Cuban enslavers, because enslaved people would sense the doubt and anxiety of an enslaver who relied on blockades, chains, and bolts to keep order on his plantation, inspiring them to conspire against him in his apparent feebleness. Meanwhile, an enslaved workforce (so enslavers believed) would have been persuaded of the absolute dominance and authority of an enslaver who had no need to resort to rude safety measures to maintain order on his property. Indeed, as Will Pérez’ study on El Día de Reyes in this collection affirms, allowing enslaved people a sanctioned day of emotional release and jubilant, even unrestrained celebration and togetherness, was an important opportunity for enslavers to demonstrate (or perform) to those enslaved people that they were unperturbed by it.¹⁸

The Expediency of Silence

Visitors to the U.S. South often mentioned enslavers’ refusal to discuss the prospect of insurrection. Of her time spent in Georgia following her marriage to Pierce Mease Butler, who kept hundreds of people enslaved on his Butler Island plantations, Englishwoman and abolitionist Fanny Kemble observed:

Southern men are apt to deny the fact that they do live under an habitual sense of danger; but a slave population, coerced into obedience, though unarmed and half-fed, is a threatening source of constant insecurity, and every Southern woman to whom I have spoken on the subject has admitted to me that they live in terror of their slaves.¹⁹

Kemble's words highlight not just a strong propensity for southern silence, but her realization that it was a masculine silence, calling attention to the gendered disparity surrounding emotional discussion. Those visiting the South evidently attempted to raise questions concerning fear and insurrection but were faced with masculine walls of silence and avoidance. Alexis de Tocqueville painted that emotional impenetrability vividly:

The danger of a conflict between the white and the black inhabitants of the southern states[…]perpetually haunts the imagination of the Americans, like a painful dream[…]the inhabitants of the North make it a common topic of conversation, although directly they have nothing to fear from it[…]in the southern states the subject is not discussed; the planter does not allude to the future in conversation with his friends.²⁰

This obstinate silence was just as much a part of the confidence script as the words bellowed in Congress. Silence, in fact, was central to the southern defence of slavery. The following words by native Georgian and Presbyterian clergyman Charles Colcock Jones, owner of three plantations, expressed the furtive psychological environment perfectly:

The South, in view of the excitement on the general condition of the Negroes[…]has become sensitive[…]Hence the public mind exercises a sleepless vigilance[…]There is less discussion, and less freedom of discussion, than in by-gone days[…]Under such circumstances there must be a strong inclination to silence; we will ponder the proverb: ‘a time to keep silence, and a time to speak’.²¹

Strict and unrelenting, the atmosphere in South Carolina was one of intuitive and axiomatic censorship, shaped according to the state's emotional regime and emotional politics. Each southern enslaver internalized Jones’ proverb, untiringly judging whether silence or speech was the wisest path. Critically, this silence was used jointly to evade hostile abolitionist questioning and to keep white enslaver fear from being revealed to the enslaved and free Black populations.

Though his public words conveyed impenetrable confidence, Thomas Bennett Jr., Governor of South Carolina at the time of Denmark Vesey's insurrection attempt (and whose own enslaved people were allegedly involved in the plot), privately discussed the thought process behind enslaver silence and performance during times of insurrection. Strikingly, Bennett acknowledged the reality of constructing and maintaining a confidence script when he sombrely reflected to his fellow Charlestonian enslavers during that summer of high tensions: ‘I do fear that if the present moment is pregnant with danger, we shall give birth to it. Much discretion is requisite. We must put ourselves in opposition to every course of proceedings, which shall conduce to prolong the public panic, or acknowledge its existence.’²² Whether Bennett's ‘discretion’ was advised in the interest of reassuring the women and children of Charleston; disproving the theories of the North that slaveowners were nervous despots; heartening nervous enslavers; or presenting the invulnerability of white dominance, his admonition presented the process of emotional suppression and adaptation in action. Bennet further admonished the enslavers of Charleston: ‘[do] not communicate such fears to [your] domestics; it is a mistaken policy, which should inform them, that the slightest apprehension of their power is entertained, or that we believe that any effort they can possibly make, would be attended with even partial success.’²³ Bennet did not deny the reality of enslaver fear: he spoke as a man fully cognizant of the need to shroud it unrelentingly.

Prominent proslavery Baptist clergyman Richard Furman, founder of the Charleston Bible Society to whom Bennett had written advising emotional discretion, also acknowledged the complexities of silence. On the question of whether a public day of thanksgiving should be held to praise God for having protected Charleston from the wrath of Vesey's plot, Furman conceded the difficulty of judging whether: ‘publicity, rather than secrecy [should be the] true policy[…]pursued on this occasion.’ ‘It is apprehended’, Furman ruminated, if Charleston should have observed a day of public praise, ‘that an undue importance would be given to the subject in [the enslaved population's]view[…]that this would induce the designing and wicked to infer our fear and sense of weakness from the fact, and thus induce them to form some other scheme of mischief.’²⁴

Furman's stalling uncertainty is compelling. He continued rhetorically: ‘would not our silence[…]undergo, at least, as unfavourable a construction, and with more reason?’ Furman deemed it strategic to boast to the Black population what he saw as the futility of a repeated attempt at insurrection which, he declared, white strength would surely crush (notwithstanding his belief and relief that God had miraculously saved Charleston that summer). ‘The Negroes should know’, he wrote with the ostensible air of calm authority, ‘that their destitution in respect to arms, and the knowledge of using them, with other disabilities, would render their physical force, were they all united in a common effort, less than a tenth part of that with which they would have to contend.’²⁵ Despite privately being overcome by doubt, Furman exemplifies an enslaver tampering with his public words in a bid to maintain the semblance of unflustered white control.

James Hamilton's published account of the alleged Denmark Vesey insurrection attempt also references that decision-making process. Hamilton was Intendant of Charleston during Vesey's plot, and spearhead of the proceedings against the accused suspects. His justification for publishing the ‘Negro Plot’ account was that he ‘deemed a full publication of the prominent circumstances of the late commotion, as the most judicious course, as suppression might assume the appearance of timidity.’ Clearly, Hamilton regarded this as ‘a time to speak’. One of the defining characteristics of South Carolinian self-censorship was this constant judgement, governed by emotionology and paranoia, of whether silence or speech was the most advisable route in ensuring that abolitionists and the enslaved population alike knew nothing of enslaver self-doubt.

Hamilton conceded: ‘I have not been insensible to the difficulties and embarrassments necessarily incident to the subject, as to what it might be politick either to publish or suppress.’ This Charleston enslaver recognized the importance of public composure, a flustered private mindset notwithstanding. Hamilton's published tone forcefully concealed his trepidation, rebuking not only the suggestion that Vesey's was a formidably designed scheme, but also providing a direct commentary on his – and his fellow white enslavers’ – emotional state: ‘while such wretched expedients are calculated to inspire the confidence [of fellow rebels], or to alarm the fears of the ignorant and credulous, they excite no other emotion in the mind of the intelligent and enlightened, but contempt and disgust.’²⁶

Every facet of public and private slaveowning life in South Carolina was measured with a view to managing the energy surrounding the subject of enslaved violence. On the social atmosphere during a time of legislative debate concerning literacy and the enslaved population, Massachusetts minister Samuel C. Jackson's visit to Charleston affords insight into what he perceived as the relentless southern balancing act between anxiety and performance: ‘both parties are afraid that the blacks will take an opportunity in these commotions to cut their throats, yet they appear to disregard it, & not a word is said about it in print or in public.’²⁷ By intentionally underlining the word ‘appear’, Jackson reveals his wish to communicate to the recipient of his letter the reality that the nonchalance of Charleston enslavers was, if not entirely artificial, certainly conscious.

Censored Fear, Published Confidence

Striving to maintain a consistent semblance of order on the island, the Captains General of Cuba bemoaned foreign publications that openly discussed the subject of insurrection and abolition in Cuba. Among them were La Verdad (New York); The Morning Journal (Jamaica); and abolitionist tracts printed as far afield as Bordeaux and Cadiz.²⁸ Since the frequent smuggled entry of such material into the island was considered extremely dangerous, ever-stricter censorship laws were passed as a safeguard: every boat that entered Cuban ports was searched, all seditious material aboard was burned, and by 1822 the use of paper bearing the official seal was introduced to facilitate the easier detection of unsanctioned material.²⁹ By 1838 the Captain General was entrusted to review all printed books entering the island.³⁰ Nothing could be done, though, as Captain General Gerónimo Valdés lamented, about materials that arrived in the post.³¹

José Antonio Saco, expelled from the island in 1834 owing to his liberal political views, is an exemplary author of such material, embodying the rebellious emotional exposition that exile from Cuba permitted. Saco was a bona fide member of Cuban enslaving society, and it was that status which afforded his work, and the writings of other expatriated creoles, subversive power. While proslavery voices used fear to perpetuate slavery on the island, Saco seditiously deployed fear to advance his anti-slave trade (but still patently racist) agenda, which he waged against illegal traders on both sides of the Atlantic.

Saco's insistence that the continued illicit slave trade to Cuba held the island's white population in immediate and extreme danger was a stance that stood to harm all who had proslavery interests. His emotional exposé presented fear as having been manifested in the tentative investment patterns of enslavers. ‘Are there not many plantation owners who keep funds in foreign banks?’ Saco queried rhetorically, further questioning: ‘how much does that capital yield? Isn't it a low interest in comparison to what it would gain in Havana? Is this not a loss they are suffering because of the fear in which they live?’ Saco stressed that those apprehensive measures were influenced entirely by fear of insurrection, which kept investors from feeling fully at ease with their capital or their businesses so long as they were based in an island that seemed to be edging towards the same fate as Haiti. ‘My beloved compatriots, wake up, wake up’, Saco urged. ‘You can no longer put off the calamity which announces itself to you[…]the tremendous hour will sound, and we will all perish in the universal tragedy.’³²

Although anti-abolition and pro-colonial figures endeavoured to keep defamatory publications penned by abolitionists, nationalists, and annexationists out of the island, when those measures failed, they needed wholesale means of refuting their content. The pressing allegation with which colonial authorities and proslavery groups took issue was that theirs was an island in peril: destructively and despotically governed, in a state of economic disarray, and endangered from all angles. Such claims threatened a future of economic decline, given the poor forecast they offered to those who may otherwise have brought their capital to the island. The censored press consequently strategized to reframe the public discourse in less inflammatory, more flattering terms, to reassure uneasy enslavers and investors alike. Saco's subversive attempt to attack the illicit slave trade by highlighting fear was countered by officially sanctioned confidence.

A pro-colonial, anti-abolitionist confidence script characterizing Cuba as flourishing, peaceful, and loyal to Spain, was disseminated in authorized, metropolitan-backed periodicals: the ‘official’ emotional truth. This narrative was also propagated beyond Cuba’s boundaries, in New York, where a Spanish-language periodical would be published with the same aims.³³ The Noticioso y Lucero, founded in Matanzas in 1832 and later operating out of Havana, announced that confidence script in no uncertain terms. Against ‘those who have an interest in destroying the prosperity and the primary elements of wealth of the island, and in disturbing the enviable peace we enjoy’, the periodical warned, ‘[we] have raised a unanimous shout of indignation[…]a solemn: you’re all lying!’³⁴ These publications emphasized that Cuba was in a state of total, blissful security. The private discussion surrounding how best to create that impression demonstrates how artificial such pronouncements were when they declared, as did the Faro Industrial de la Habana, founded in 1841 and circulated across the island: ‘Cuba finds herself in a state of peace’.³⁵

This confidence script was completely curated: an approved discourse devised by men whose financial interests depended upon the continuation of slavery in Cuba. Such descriptions intentionally shrouded the reality that insurrections were habitual in Cuba, and that private correspondence from enslavers to the colonial authorities communicated a constant stream of fear and dread. ‘While civil wars and other calamities afflict almost every city in Europe, Asia and America’ the Diario de la Habana ruminated, ‘no other has managed to maintain peace, tranquillity and order to as high a degree as in the island of Cuba.’³⁶ Privately a different account was related to Spain: that white Cubans lived surrounded by peril, whether from neighbouring Haiti and Jamaica, or from their own free and enslaved populations of colour. That was not, however, the narrative they promulgated. ‘We laugh upon reading that which deserves no other name than that of [a] despicable hoax,’ proffered the Noticioso y Lucero, faultlessly cavalier and mocking in its rejection of the suggestion that Cuba was in danger of any sort.³⁷

This confidence script tirelessly boasted of the island's thriving trade; the all-time high global demand for Cuban coffee and sugar; the faith of white inhabitants in their Peninsular governmental authorities; and, of course, the unflinching confidence that all enslavers had in their own security. Publications also made a firm (and repetitive) point to assert that the white population of the island was growing considerably and healthily.³⁸ In fact, attracting white migrants to Cuba was proving a real source of strain for the colonial authorities. The 1841 census demonstrated that the white population had reached, for the first time, a status of minority. As the Conde de Villanueva privately and curtly noted some years later: ‘all of the efforts made until now to achieve the increase of the white population have been useless.’³⁹

In Cuba an obstinate sense of ownership and protectiveness over the discourse surrounding the future of slavery strongly resembled the same feeling in South Carolina, as exemplified by the following proclamation broadcast in the Noticioso y Lucero: ‘The local government of Havana[…]the entire rest of the island, [and] the economic societies[…]who are truly interested in its future and happiness[…]have demonstrated the small worth of the representations of those organizations who have no right to involve themselves in our business.’⁴⁰ Erin Austin Dwyer's work in this collection similarly demonstrates the tension surrounding the subject of poisoning in the antebellum U.S. press: every detail of poisoning accounts was relished in the North while, in the South, each case was presented only briefly as a matter fully resolved so as to reassure southern readers. Clearly, newspapers in slave societies interpreted and modified the tone of the news to suit the emotional needs of their readers. In South Carolina, Dwyer describes, periodicals referenced successfully quashed poisoning cases to ‘exorcize’ and ‘allay’ the fears of enslavers.⁴¹

With the same aim, censored newspapers in Cuba made mention of suggestions that the island was endangered either to disparage or discredit the authors who made them. The Faro Industrial de la Habana was explicit: ‘private interest, and not public, is that which drives corrupt quills, disposed to favour whoever pays best[…]in their work of perdition and calumny[…] [who] shouldn't involve themselves in the administration of our land.’⁴² Agents considered either destructive or ignorant and at times, catastrophically, both, were advised to keep their ideas to themselves: ‘these voices[act either with]cunning and harmful intentions, or because they ignore our true state, and thus, either way, they neither can, nor should, speak about us’.⁴³ Remarkably, the Cuban confidence script can be read alongside private dialogues that explicitly strategised how it should have best been engineered and expressed.

Continuation

There can be no harm in the salutary inculcation of one lesson, among a certain portion of our population: that there is nothing they are bad enough to do, that we are not powerful enough to punish.⁴⁴

Charleston, 1822.

Die or dominate, this is the only alternative the white man has with respect to the black man.⁴⁵

Havana, 1841.

We are determined to continue masters, and to do so, we have to[…]assert strict mastery[…][to]draw the reign tighter and tighter day by day, to be assured that we hold them in complete check.⁴⁶

The Disunionist, South Carolina, 1850.

In the U.S. they have no revolution, but they have not been able to resolve economic and social problems like racial discrimination, which we did by persuasion.⁴⁷

Fidel Castro, 1959.

They are often the kinds of kids that are called super-predators – no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.⁴⁸

Hillary Clinton, 1996.

He feared for his life in the final moments of his struggle with Trayvon Martin, and that was the definitive factor in the verdict.⁴⁹

Juror B37 who acquitted George Zimmerman, 2013.

If you don't dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate. Most of you are weak. You’ve got to arrest people[…]put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again.⁵⁰

Donald Trump, 2020.

Lethal white paranoia surrounding presumed Black male criminality in the U.S. has, for decades, influenced exaggeratedly high conviction rates for Black suspects; fatal police violence; denigrative media portrayals of Black men; redlining; and the ‘white flight’ to suburbia, to name but a few consequences. White fear masked by the overbearing insistence of obnoxious white confidence – exemplified in the Clinton and Trump excerpts above – is still shrewdly manipulated by politicians just as it was in the antebellum period. Scholars of Sociology and International Relations demonstrate that emotions have an expressly political function: political speech is tailored both to appeal to and guide the public feeling surrounding any given issue or crisis.⁵¹ The unmistakable American rhetorical style of fuzing aggression with confidence in a bid to exude capability in leadership finds its efficacy in appealing to bigoted white assumptions about Black unlawfulness and violence. This is exemplified by the demagoguery surrounding the ‘get tough’ on drugs and crime movements of the late twentieth century (wars disproportionately waged against Black Americans). As philosopher Tommy J. Curry rightly states, the ‘material dynamics of social pressure and anti-Black rage that animate policy, police-state violence, and white vigilantism are doctrinaire societal obsessions convinced of their desire for the death of Black men.’⁵²

That a largely unchanged confidence script is deployed today to defend and propagate racialised political enterprises, using the same emotional vocabulary that was common in the nineteenth century, attests to the reality that the cultural climate of the U.S. remains conducive to the political weaponization of white fear and confidence. The emotional politics of slavery, as Dwyer accurately points out, is still at large in the U.S.⁵³ It stands to reason, then, that the same emotional language used during the time of enslavement to propagate the white determination to ‘dominate’ has also survived the transition to modernity.

When Cuba is used as an analytical counterpoint the culture and politics surrounding race contrast saliently. The Cuban Revolution characterized racism as a sickness caused and aggravated by imperialism and capitalism. Racism, an essentially American affliction, would be eradicated by a communist revolution that derided racism as anti-revolutionary. Each citizen's Cubanidad (Cubanness) would be the principal defining factor of their identity, not their race. The Revolutionary approach to race was therefore designed in express contra-distinction to the capitalist U.S.⁵⁴

Yet, today, the majority of Cuba's prison inmates are Black men, the most dilapidated neighbourhoods are inhabited by Black families, and the police most often detain Black Cubans they deem to exhibit tendencies of ‘peligrosidad social’ (social dangerousness), as the nation's Penal Code empowers them to.⁵⁵ Black Cubans continue to suffer discriminatory and racist treatment despite political proclamations that racism does not exist in Cuba. Not only is it incredibly difficult to confront and resolve discriminatory practices if the Cuban government denies the conceptual possibility of their existence, but public criticism of that reality is a tremendously dangerous undertaking in a nation whose censorship laws are so infamously fierce. Although pre-eminent Cuban historian of race and slavery Alejandro De La Fuente has argued that the legacy of the Revolution is responsible for ‘institutionalizing the silence surrounding race’, the longevity of Cuban silence surrounding racial frictions can be traced back to emotional censorship in the press during enslavement, which used a confidence script to publicize a peaceful and prosperous island, while, privately, enslavers tortured, brutalized, and worked to death the people they kept enslaved.⁵⁶

The assuagement of white paranoia still has an architectural component, though now distance does its bidding, translating into, for instance, urban housing divisions with ecological consequences such as chronic illness for Black families living in poor quality housing. Concurrently, declarations of political confidence in U.S. law enforcement, shrouded behind benign, innocuous ‘Copaganda’, portrays the inherent virtue of the police as an unblemished force for good, even while they murder innocent Black Americans with almost uninterrupted impunity.⁵⁷

White fear is an emotion with a long, savage, and repugnant pedigree. This article has sought to illuminate that, for centuries, those occupying positions of power – be they nineteenth-century enslavers or politicians in modernity – have been in the process of designing the semblance of dominance and control, using emotion as a tool to enforce that message. These emotional politics speak directly to the History of Whiteness and the History of Emotions. The double-helix of nefarious white fear and the performed white confidence script (both its verbal and non-verbal forms) continues to shape Black life, death, and suffering as it has for centuries.

Acknowledgements

My earnest thanks first go – effusively – to Beth Wilson and Emily West for having organised the Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World conference that brought together such a splendid group of historians of the emotions. Thank you to everyone present at the conference who offered me constructive, thought-provoking feedback. Beth and Emily brought this trailblazing special issue into being, and our discipline is richer for it. Their advice during the editing and proofing stages was invaluable, as was their tirelessly kind support. My wholehearted gratitude is finally extended to Erin O'Halloran, Rodrigo Mendoza Smith, and Katherine Burns, for their priceless guidance as I composed this article.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liana Beatrice Valerio

Liana Beatrice Valerio is a Teaching Fellow in History at the University of Warwick. Her first book project [currently underway] will theorise the manner in which the prolific enslavers of Cuba and South Carolina performed, utilised, and deployed emotion in their attempts to defend and perpetuate slavery well into the nineteenth century.

Notes

1 Diario de La Habana, no. 150, May 29, 1843, excerpt sent from Gerónimo Valdés to Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de la Gobierno de Ultramar, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid [henceforth AHN], Ultramar, leg. 4617, exp.13, no. 677, May 31, 1843.

2 Speech of William Smith, Annals of Congress, Senate, 16th Congress, 1st Session: 267.

3 See, for instance, Stephanie E. Jones Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, Yale University Press: 2019) and Teresa Prados-Torreira, The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth Century Cuba (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2021).

4 This theory was developed in my doctoral thesis alongside a ‘Supplication Script’. 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 diss., University of Warwick, 2019).

5 Carol Z. Stearns, Peter N. Stearns, ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’, American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813–36.

6 Emotions have been termed by Neuroscientists as ‘neurosocial’: the products of cognitive and physical reactions flavoured by their social contexts. See, for example, Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998).

7 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of the Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 323–4.

8 Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Worrying About Emotions in History’, The American History Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 842.

9 (My emphasis.) Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of the Emotions’, Passions in Context 1 (2010): 11, 15.

10 I am sincerely grateful to Lacy K. Ford for his comments to me on this subject.

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

12 Beech Island Farmers’ Club Records, South Caroliniana Library [henceforth SCL], Manuscripts Misc., Beech Island Farmer's Club, 7 August 1847: 102–3.

13 ‘Testimonio de las Diligencias Formadas Sobre el Reglamento de Policía Rural’, sent to Dionisio Vives, signed José Vizarro y Gardín, Juan Montalvo, Rafael O’Farril, Pedro Diego, Archivo General de Indias [henceforth AGI], Ultramar, leg. 89, November 26, 1827.

14 ‘Testimonio de las Diligencias Formadas Sobre el Reglamento de Policía Rural’, Manuel M. Figuera to Dionisio Vives, AGI, Ultramar, leg. 89, June 11, 1828.

15 ‘El Gobernador Dn. Gerónimo Valdés inserta su comunicación al ministerio de Ultramar remitiendo ejemplares del bando del gobernación y Policía’, AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 1308, November 30, 1842.

16 ‘Representación acerca del articulo 25 del reglamento de esclavos pidiendo se derogue el mismo y otras observaciones sobre la situación de los esclavos’, [Unmarked sender] to Gerónimo Valdés, Biblioteca Nacional José Martí [henceforth BNJM], classification: C.M. Morales T.78, no. 132, August 11, 1843.

17 Ibid.

18 See Will Perez’ article in this collection, ‘Happiness in Havana? Día de Reyes as an EmotionalRefuge in Colonial Cuba’.

19 Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (New York, 1864): 295–6.

20 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (London, 1835): 345.

21 Charles Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah, 1842): 108.

22 (My emphasis.) Governor Thomas Bennett, Jr. ‘Letter To the Board of Managers of the Charleston Bible Society’, October 1, 1822, printed in Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette ‘Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair’, The South Carolina Historical Magazine 105, no. 1 (January 2004): 3.

23 Ibid., 2.

24 Ricard Furman, Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population in the United States in a Communication to the Governor of South-Carolina (Charleston, 1822): 5.

25 Ibid., 4.

26 James Hamilton, Negro Plot: An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection among a Portion of the Blacks of the City of Charleston (Boston, 1822): 2, 50.

27 Samuel C. Jackson to William True, SCL, Samuel C. Jackson Papers, December 14, 1832.

28 Miguel Tacón to Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de la Gobernación (de Ultramar), AHN, Ultramar, leg. 4627, exp.1, no.15, August 31, 1836.

29 ‘Providencia Acordada Entre los Excmos. Sres. Presidente Gobernador y Capitán General e Intendente Superintendente General de Real Hacienda de esta Isla, Mandada insertar en Tres Diarios’, Dionisio Vives and Claudio Martínez de Pinillos, AGI, Ultramar, leg. 89, April 10, 1826; letter from Nicholas Mahy to Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de la Gobernación de Ultramar, AGI, Santo Domingo, leg. 1293, March 8, 1822.

30 Real Cedula, AHN, Ultramar, leg. 4627, exp.1, July 25, 1838.

31 Gerónimo Valdés to Sr Secretario de Estado y del Despacho d la Gobernación de Ultramar, AHN, Ultramar, leg. 4627, exp.1, no.133, August 28, 1841.

32 José Antonio Saco, Mi Primera Pregunta. ¿La abolición del comercio de esclavos Africanos arruinara o atrasara la agricultura Cubana? Dedicado a los hacendados de la isla de Cuba su compatriota José Antonio Saco (Madrid, 1837): 25, 30.

33 Ministerios de Estado y de Gobernación del Reino to Ministro de Estado y Dirección de Gobierno Ultramar, AGI, Ultramar, leg. 90, November 3, 1848.

34 Noticioso y Lucero, no. 152. vol. 12, June 2, 1843, excerpt sent from Gerónimo Valdés to Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de la Gobierno de Ultramar, AHN, Ultramar, leg. 4617, exp. 13, no. 677, May 31, 1843. [Henceforth abbreviated: Valdés to Secretario de Estado].

35 Faro Industrial de la Habana, no. 150, May 31, 1843, Valdés to Secretario de Estado.

36 Diario de La Habana, no. 150, May 29, 1843, Valdés to Secretario de Estado.

37 Noticioso y Lucero, no. 152., vol. 12, June 2, 1843, Valdés to Secretario de Estado.

38 Diario de La Habana, no. 150, May 29, 1843, Valdés to Secretario de Estado.

39 Conde de Villanueva to Secretario de Estado y del Despacho de Hacienda, AGI, Indiferente, leg. 2828, no. 5910, February 7, 1849.

40 Noticioso y Lucero, no. 152., vol. 12, June 2, 1843, Valdés to Secretario de Estado.

41 See Erin Dwyer's article in this collection: ‘The Poison Pen: Slavery, Poison, and Fear in the Antebellum Press’.

42 Faro Industrial de la Habana, no. 150, May 31, 1843, Valdés to Secretario de Estado.

43 Noticioso y Lucero, no. 152. vol. 12, June 2, 1843, Valdés to Secretario de Estado.

44 James Hamilton, Negro Plot, 2.

45 ‘Informe de la Comisión, Nombrada al Efecto, Sobre el Proyecto de Convenio de SM Británica Relativo a la Libertad de los Esclavos’, Ignacio Francisco de Borja de Peñalver y Peñalver, Evaristo Carillo, Narciso García y Mora and Tomás de Juara, BNJM, classification: C.M. Morales, T.78, no. 123, September 28, 1841.

46 Edward B. Bryan, The Disunionist: Or, Secession, The Rightful Remedy Being a Few Facts, and Hints on Things That Are and Ought to Be, Addressed to the Slaveholders of the South (Charleston, 1850): 44.

47 ‘Five-hour Television Appearance’ [transcription], Castro Speech Database, Latin American Network Information Center, December 21, 1959. < http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/1959/19591221.html> [accessed January 31, 2023].

48 Samuel Osborne, ‘Hillary Clinton's Most Controversial Quotes of the Campaign’, The Independent, November 3 2016, <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/hillary-clinton-quotes-donald-trump-emails-benghazi-libya-what-did-she-say-career-a7391661.html> [accessed January 31, 2023].

49 Martel A. Pipkins, ‘“I Feared For My Life”: Law Enforcement's Appeal to Murderous Empathy’, Race and Justice 9, no. 2 (2017): 187.

50 ‘Transcript of Trump's Call With Governors: “Dominate, or You’ll Look like a Bunch of Jerks”’, The Mercury News, June 2, 2020, <https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/02/transcript-of-trumps-call-with-governors-dominate-or-youll-look-like-a-bunch-of-jerks/ [accessed January 31, 2023].

51 Nicholas Demertzis, ‘Introduction: Theorising the Emotions-Politics Nexus’, in Emotions in Politics: The Affect Dimension in Political Tension, ed. Nicholas Demertzis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 8; Brent E. Sasley, ‘Theorising States’ Emotions’ International Studies Review 1, no. 3 (2011): 452–76.

52 Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia, Temple University Press: 2017), 111. On what Curry terms ‘Super-predator Mythology’, see: 111–4.

53 Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 202–7.

54 Danielle P. Clealand, ‘When Ideology Clashes with Reality: Racial Discrimination and Black Identity in Contemporary Cuba’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 10 (2013): 1619; Nadine Fernandez, ‘The Changing Discourse on Race in Contemporary Cuba’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 14, no. 2 (2001): 117–21.

55 Alejandro De La Fuente, ‘The Resurgence of Racism in Cuba’, NACLA Report on the Americas 34, no. 6 (2001): 34; Alejandro De La Fuente, ‘Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in Cuba's “Special Period”’, Socialism and Democracy 15, no. 1 (2001): 74–5.

56 De La Fuente, ‘The Resurgence of Racism in Cuba’, 34.

57 I am sincerely grateful to Erin Austin Dwyer for her comments to me on this subject.