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south and west, the slave trade bound the diverging fortunes of the emerging
regions of the South into mutual benefit. Indeed, in the 1850s, when for a
time it seemed that the upper South was being overtaken by a renewed tobacco
boom, the trade began to flow northward as well as southward.
As important as the trade was in the spatial expansion of slavery, the slave
trade also played a crucial role in the reproduction of the slaveholding regime
over time. Even when the prosperous slaveholders of the antebellum South did
not produce their legacies through the direct purchase of slaves for their heirs,
they relied upon that market to provide the standard of comparison (the dollar
values) according to which they divided their estates. The everyday role of the
slave market in the reproduction of the southern social order, however, was far
less abstract than that: it was in the slave market that the rising men of the ante-
bellum South built the stakes that had been provided them by their forebears into
legacies of their own. And it was in the slave market that the political economy of
slavery daily deepened the roots of its own support among southern whites as
nonslaveholders were turned into slaveholders. Indeed, as they faced the sectional
conflict that threatened to end history as they knew it, southern politicians consid-
ered radical measures to insure that non-slaveholders would support the regime of
slavery into the future. In the same series of conventions that led to secession and
in the same journals and newspapers that carried news of the rising political conflict
to the white citizens of the South, slaveholding politicians considered reopening
the African slave trade in order to lower the price of slaves and increase the pro-
portion of slaveholders within the population. “That minute you put it out of the
power of common farmers to purchase a Negro man or woman to help him in his
farm or his wife in the house,” wrote one Louisiana editor in support of reopening
the African trade, “you make him an abolitionist at once.” The future of slavery,
the editor argued, could be bought in the slave market.
That future, it became increasingly apparent, would come to pass (or not) in
the West. Over the course of the antebellum period, the incendiary value of
cotton, the wayward dreams of migrating slaveholders, and the ruthless efficiency
of the slave trade had pushed slavery to the outer limits of “the South.” First in
Missouri, then in Texas, and finally in Kansas and Nebraska, political conflict
over slavery was increasingly defined by the question of how far west it would
be allowed to spread. With every slave sold from the declining eastern seaboard
to slavery’s expanding western frontier, the South pushed the nation a step closer
to its ultimate showdown over slavery. And, once again, it was perhaps less an
irony of history than an axion of historical process that the sharpest critics of “the
Slave Power, ” the abolitionist critics of slavery who would provide their own
push toward Civil War, armed themselves with arguments that had been pro-
duced along the leading edge of slavery’s expansion.
For all of the smoothing over and covering up that characterized their daily
activities, the slave pens provided a remarkably clear exposition of the nature of
slavery—a person with a price. There were of course, other available definitions,
other answers to the question “What is slavery?” answers that emphasized pro-
duction or paternalism or politics or violence, And there were other places to go
to see slavery: plantations where the slave mode of production was visible in the
AGRICULTURE AND SLAVERY IN THE SOUTH AT MIDCENTURY 373
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fields; white churches and universities across the South where the spiritual and
moral benefits of slavery were floridly proclaimed; northern and European
cotton-finishing factories where the full reach of “the slave economy” was daily
evident; the halls of Congress where the influence of the “Slave Power” was
tallied in a series of compromises between “North” and “South” which outlined
the political history of the antebellum period. Increasingly, however, and with
revolutionary effect, opponents of slavery argued that slavery was best seen in
the slave market.
It had not always been so. The central document of early abolitionism,
Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is (1839), had very little to say
about the slave market. It was, instead, a catalog of bodily tortures. Drawing
upon southern newspapers and runaway advertisements which sought to identify
escaped slaves by their mortifying injuries, Weld was able to draw back the veil
that protected “the peculiar institution” from critical eyes. Slavery for Weld was a
system of unchecked brutality, made grotesquely visible on the suffering bodies of
the slaves. Even today, in an age inured to violence by movie-made brutality,
American Slavery As It Is is hard to read. And yet nineteenth-century slaveholders
were quick to develop an answer to this critique of slavery’s inhumane brutality.
The maimings and the rapes were isolated episodes, they argued, and they set
about publicizing the “paternalist” reforms that would restore to the system of
slavery its good name. They broke the system of slavery into hundreds of thou-
sands of isolated sets of human relations between individual masters and individual
slaves and argued that the violence of slavery was a matter of generally benevolent
human relations gone awry, of the personal failings of particular owners, of had
masters who gave slavery a bad name, not an inevitable feature of the system itself.
Thinking about the slave trade, however, made possible an entirely different
account of the relation between master and slave J. W. C. Pennington described
his motivation for writing his narrative of slavery this way: “My feelings are al-
ways outraged when I hear them speak of ‘kind masters,’‘Christian masters,’‘the
mildest form of slavery,’‘well fed and well clothed slaves’ as extenuations of
slavery.” Pennington did not deny that such things existed, hut he thought that
they were misleading forms taken by a more fundamental relation: “The being
of slavery, its soul and its body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the
property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, and naked-
ness, are its inevitable consequences,” he wrote. Sale from a good master to a bad
one, from the “mildest form of slavery” to the “worst of which the system is
possible,” from the “favorable circumstances” of slavery in Maryland, Virginia,
and Kentucky to the killing fields of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana was,
in Pennington’s formulation, “the legitimate working of the great chattel
principle.”“It is no accidental result,
” he continued, “it is the fruit of the tree.
You cannot constitute slavery without the chattel principle—and with the chat-
tel principle you cannot save it from these results. Talk not about kind and
Christian masters. They are not masters of the system. The system is master of
them.” Through an outline of the philosophy and practice of the slave trade,
Pennington was able to convey the complicity of all slaveholders (no matter their
individual merits) in the most brutal results of the system of slavery.
374 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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Through his exegesis of “the chattel principle” Pennington placed the slave
trade at the center of the abolitionist critique of slavery; other former slaves ac-
complished the same thing through telling the stories of their own experiences in
the trade. Charles Ball, William Wells Brown, Solomon Northup, and John
Brown all included lengthy discussion of the slave trade in their published narra-
tives. Lewis Clarke (along with William Wells Brown) lectured extensively about
the trade. Henry Bibb concluded his narrative with a list of his owners and the
prices they had paid for him: “In 1836 ‘Bro.’ Albert Sibley of Bedford, Kentucky,
sold me for $850 to ‘Bro.’ JohnSibley,andinthesameyearhesoldmeto
‘Bro.’ William Gatewood of Bedford, for $850. In 1839 ‘Bro. ’ Gatewood sold
me to Madison Garrison, a slave trader of Louisville, Kentucky, with my wife
and child—at a depreciated price because I was a run away. In the same year he
sold me with my family to ‘Bro.’ Whitfield, in the city of New Orl eans, for
$120.In1841‘Bro.’ Whitfi eld sold me from my family to Thomas Wilson and
Co., black-legs. In the same year they sold me to a ‘Bro.’ in the Indian Territory.
I think he was a member of the Presbyterian Church.” Like Henry Bibb, who
outlined his own history of slavery with a series of sales sealed between supposedly
Christian slaveholders, these survivors put the slave trade at the center of their
account of what slavery was and what was wrong with it.
Join to their efforts those of white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison,
who emblazoned the masthead of The Liberator with an engraving of an auction
stand labeled with th e sign “Slaves, Horses, and other Cattle to be sold at
12 O’ Clock,” of traveling observers like Fredrika Bremer, Charles Weld, and
Frederick Law Olmsted, who went to the slave market rather than the cotton field
or legislative chamber when they wanted to see “slavery,” and, finally of Harriet
Beecher Stowe, who, taking a page from Pennington, articulated the connection
between the kindly but ineffectual Kentucky slaveholder Mr. Shelby—“amanof
humanity” she called him—and Louisiana’s brutal Simon Legree by putting the
family-separating trade plied by the heartless “slave driver” Haley at the center of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Carried north by the escapees, the indigenous antislavery of the
enslaved South—the ideology of “the chattel principle” as it was represented in
slaves’ stories and songs about the trade—was reworked into a central element of
the northern abolitionist critique of slavery.
The crude spectacle that was daily on view in the slave pen—human body
publicly stripped, examined, priced, and sold—thus became an image that stood
for the whole of slavery. The daily process of the trade provided a template
through which opponents of slavery could establish the connections between
the upper South and the Lower, between kind masters and brutal ones, between
slaveholders’ loose talk about their affection for their slaves and the unmistakable
material reality of a person with a price. By thinking their way through the slave
trade, critics of slavery like Pennington could articulate the links that joined in-
dividual slaveholders to the broader system and argue that the essence of slavery
lay in the worst of its abuses rather than the rosiest of its promises. The daily
process of the slave pens created a type of knowledge about the nature of slavery
that was indispensable to its critics—the information necessary to dismantle the
proslavery argument was produced along the leading edge of slavery’s history.
AGRICULTURE AND SLAVERY IN THE SOUTH AT MIDCENTURY 375
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That history ended in 1865. The slave pens themselves were boarded up and
closed for a time—all signboards advertising slaves for sale in Union-held New
Orleans were taken down on January 1 of 1864—and the pens were later sold.
They became boarding houses and cotton brokerages; on the site of one of the
largest there is now a bank. Through those gates had passed the people who
made the history of the antebellum South—the traders who had outlined that
history with their market time and speculative maps, the buyers who had filled
in the traders’ outline with the fantasies through which slaveholders made sense
of the world, and the slaves themselves, in whose fallible bodies and resistant
wills the history of the antebellum South had finally been made material.
And when slavery was over and the slave market was closed, former slaves and
slaveholders alike found themselves marooned on a shoal of history. The longings
of slaveholders to hold onto the past as it receded from their grasp are well-
documented: their reactionary paternalism, their lost-cause, politics of nostalgia,
and the coercive labor discipline they began to enforce through the state. Well-
known, too, is the disbelief they experienced, the sense of betrayal they talked about,
when their slaves left them behind. For many former slaves, it was likewise too late
to go back—not to slavery or the slave market hut to the places and families they had
been forced to leave behind. They faced a future that was at first defined only by
what it was not: in the words of the freedom song “Many Thousands Gone,”“No
more auction block for me, no more driver’s lash for me, no more peck of corn for
me, no more mistress call for me.” Some placed newspaper advertisements for lost
family members and took to the roads in an effort to travel backwards in time to
the families, friends, and places they had known before the trade. Others stayed
where they were, seizing the first chance that many of them had ever had to
make their marriages legal and to make up their own minds about the relationship
of their households to the wider markets for labor and goods. Still others pushed
on in search of a brighter future—first toward southern cities and later westward
and northward in search of freedom. In 1865, their history began again.
The Neighborhoods and Intimate Lives of Slaves
ANTHONY E. KAYE
John Wade, a slave on the Terry plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi,
could claim many friends in his vicinity. Wade knew Aaron Barefield and his
people on Poplar Hill well enough to take note when Barefield’s son went to
Natchez during the Civil War in the wake of a Union raid into the hinterland.
And Barefield the younger knew his father’s friend well enough to brighten at
the mention of Wade’s name years later: “I knew John Wade during the war and
know him yet, too; in fact I knew him before the war; we lived on joining
places.” Wade also had other contacts on Polar Hill. “I have known Harriet
Pierce all my life,” he recalled; “we lived in the same neighborhood.”
From Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 2007),
p. 2–6, 51–53, 77, 79, 81–82. Copyright © 2007 by the University of North Carolina Press. Reprinted by permission
of the publisher.
376 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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“Neighborhood,” this seemingly prosaic term, opens a window with a panoramic
view of antebellum slave society.
Slave neighborhoods cut across Jefferson County, up and down the Natchez
District in Mississippi, and throughout the South. They prevailed from the
Chesapeake to the trans-Mississippi West and virtually everywhere in between
in the Upper South and the Old Southwest. This is where Frederick Douglass
grew up, Nat Turner launched his inspired revolt, men and women struggled in
obscurity all their days. In some locales, neighborhoods marked the field of dis-
cipline or the terrain of marriage and family life, the dominion where a coterie of
old folks held sway. In others, this was the circuit worked by slave preachers,
where seekers repaired to their praying grounds and convened for religious
meetings. In some precincts, neighborhoods were the quarters of every kind of
fraternizing. The geography of kinship, work, sociability, and struggle overlapped
with neighborhoods in different ways in different regions. Neighborhoods might
encompass some of these social relations or all of them and more. Everywhere
neighborhoods covered different geographic areas. In short, they were pervasive
but not uniform. Neighborhoods in the Natchez District, then, were similar but
not identical to those migrants had left in the Upper South….
Planters began turning this fertile soil during the eighteenth century, when
the region was still a modest prize traded in diplomatic settlements among the
French, English, and Spanish, who named it the Natchez District. Southwest
Mississippi was an anchor in the Jeffersonian vision of a commercial farming re-
public during the 1790s. The Louisiana Purchase finally guaranteed American
sovereignty over the length of the Mississippi and an outlet for exports from
the cotton frontier. By then, Congress had already decided the slaves in the dis-
trict would be mostly American born. The act organizing the Mississippi Terri-
tory in 1798 prohibited importing slaves from Africa or anywhere else abroad
and authorized slaveholders to bring their chattels from anywhere in the United
States. Many of those slaves had come from Africa by the trans-Atlantic trade
before undertaking their second middle passage to Mississippi. Even after the
United States dropped out of the international slave trade, Americans smuggled
an untold number of Africans into the Deep South, Mississippi included.
Slaves were essential to local planters’ hopes for the region. One coterie de-
clared in a petition to Congress that without slavery, their farms would be
merely “waste land.” From their vantage point, the district still extended beyond
the territory to include lands along the west bank of the Mississippi. The district
also persisted as a regional identity among the planters, many of whom presided
over plantations in Louisiana or Mississippi from a town seat in Natchez. By the
time Mississippi joined the Union in 1817, settlers had already organized the dis-
trict into five counties: Wilkinson, Adams, Jefferson, Claiborne, and Warren.
Here slaves carved out neighborhoods in one of the most princely domains
in the Cotton Kingdom. Many arrived from the Upper South in a forced march
accompanying owners, and most had been acquired via the slave trade.
Throughout the antebellum period, most slaves were only a generation or two
removed from the Upper South. Slaves outnumbered the rest of the population
by a ratio of two to one in 1830 and three to one at the end of the antebellum
AGRICULTURE AND SLAVERY IN THE SOUTH AT MIDCENTURY 377
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period. By 1840, the Natchez District also included the three Mississippi counties
that produced the most cotton in the state, which was now ensconsed among the
first rank of the United States producing the staple. Wear and tear from all these
strivings was already starting to show on the land, most dramatically where the
soil collapsed into deep ravines. The district was home to only two of the state’s
five most productive counties in 1849, none ten years later. Yet these planters
still had few peers for riches. Wilkinson, Jefferson, and Claiborne numbered
among the dozen wealthiest counties in the country in 1860. The size of slave-
holdings in the district though smaller than those in the Louisiana sugar country
and the rice kingdom in the low country, were three times those of the South as
a whole, on a par with the South Carolina Sea Islands.
In the Natchez District, slaves defined neighborhoods precisely, as adjoining
plantations, because this was the domain of all the bonds that constituted their
daily routine. Slaves worked and went visiting on adjoining plantations and at-
tended dances, Christmas celebrations, and other big times there—weddings, re-
ligious services, and prayer meetings, too. Slaves courted, married, and formed
families across plantation lines. Here slaves told their stories, conversed, gossiped,
conspired, and collected intelligence about intimate relations, parties, and other
affairs; about the staple, the livestock, and other goods; about newcomers to
the neighborhood, drivers, overseers, and brutal owners; about harsh words,
whippings, and other run-ins. Adjoining plantations were also where slaves lay
out, purloined food, and otherwise contended with the powers that be. Neigh-
borhoods encompassed the bonds of kinship, the practice of Christianity, the
geography of sociability, the field of labor and discipline, the grounds of solidar-
ity, the terrain of struggle. For slaves, neighborhoods served as the locus of all the
bonds that shaped the contours of their society.
Neighborhoods were dynamic places. To endure, they could not be other-
wise. Making places is always a process. Making places under the exactions of
slavery and slave trading, which enabled owners to unmake neighborhood ties
as readily as slaves make them, was a perpetual struggle. Slaves were continually
sent out of the Natchez District after their forced migration from the Upper
South. They were sold as punishment, mortgaged for debt, bequeathed to heirs,
and pressed into caravans by owners migrating to distant parts along the rolling
southern frontier. The planters’ exchanges of human property reproduced the
plantation household across generations, further into the Deep South, and cre-
ated a steady traffic in and out of slave neighborhoods in the district. Slaves were
forever giving up their neighbors and incorporating folks new to the place. This
is not to say that individual people could be replaced exactly; rather, the social
relations they had forged, broken by their departure, had to carry on. Men and
women still had to keep up all the ties—intimate relations, work, trade, struggles,
links to adjoining plantations—that bound neighborhoods together. Slave neigh-
borhoods were in a constant state of making, remaking, and becoming….
Slaveholders were inextricable figures in slave neighborhoods. The planters
had their own neighborhoods, too, bigger than those of the slaves. From the
slaves’ standpoint, their neighborhood was enclosed within the slaveholders’ neigh-
borhood and surrounded by it. Slaves in the Natchez District and/elsewhere in the
378 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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South mounted fewer revolts than their peers elsewhere in the Americas not
because they loved master more but because they knew where power was located.
What is most remarkable about neighborhoods is not how little slaves
achieved in struggle on these grounds but how much. They used the neighbor-
hood to monitor intimate relations and gain recognition for permanent unions
between men and women unrecognized by law. The slaves established the
neighborhood as a field where runaways could find respite from increasingly ex-
acting regimes of labor and discipline. The slaves ’ critical achievement, though,
was the neighborhood itself. Despite planters’ attempts to control mobility–by
the whip, the law, the slave patrol, and the pass system–slaves forged enduring
bonds to adjoining plantations. Men and women multiplied the possibilities of
courtship, worship, amusement, struggle, and collective identity, of love, faith,
pleasure, and solidarity; extended networks of kinfolk, friends, collaborators,
and Christians; gave permanence to their neighborhoods by creating and re-
creating the bonds that held them together, even as slaveholders constantly sold
people in and out of the place. By pressing social ties across plantation lines, in
short, slaves attenuated the power relations of slavery and cleared some ground
for themselves to stand on….
Mary Ann Helam was a reluctant bride, perhaps because she had endured a
great many separations in her day. There were her parents and her daughter
away off in Kentucky, and she had already lost two husbands. She buried one
and was sold away from Robert Helam but kept his name anyhow. Now in
1845, her owner, Latham Brown, was asking her to marry William Madison.
She refused, but Brown would not take no for an answer. “I was told to marry
this man by my master,” Helam recalled. “I got 50 lashes on my back to make
me marry him,” And so a pledge exacted at the whipping post was taken as a
vow at Belle Grove Church, “a colored peoples church.”
At the wedding, the bride, the groom, and their neighbors somehow made a
start at consecrating the marriage, despite its unlovely beginnings. Among the
slaves in attendance were two from the Brown place. The rest, she noted, were
slaves “in the neighborhood.” Over twenty years, Helam and Madison turned a
forced concubinage into an enduring marriage, even if she maintained a certain
distance and marked it by keeping the surname Helam. Her old friend, Rose
Ballard, married at Belle Grove that day, too, and Helam and Madison named
their first child a year later after Ballard’s husband, Sidney. The boy died at just
one month, but their two other children, Eli and his younger sister, Elizabeth,
survived to adulthood. The baths Helam gave Madison were less a romantic in-
terlude than a wifely service. “I done it to Keep him clean when he would come
in from the field tired hot and dusty,” she explained. Yet there was a touching
intimacy to this chore as well, and she “washed him all over many times.” When
he enlisted in the Union army in 1863, he bought her some lumber, and she
built a house in Natchez, where his regiment camped for a time. Madison re-
turned to her from Vicksburg in May 1866, his face “hollow and sunken,”
with a feeling that told him he was “sick in his heart.” He was only skin
and bones: “He asked me to wash him. I washed him all over, and the next
day he died.”
AGRICULTURE AND SLAVERY IN THE SOUTH AT MIDCENTURY 379
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Intimate relations were fraught with tension for slaves because the weight
of mastery bore heavily on even the most personal bonds. In the absence of
legal recognition for spouses, forever subject to separation and vulnerable to
the sexu al predations of owners and their agents, men and wo men soug ht order
for their attachments by cont riving a structure of intim ate rel atio ns. Comprising
that structure was a set of understandings about different types of conjugal
relationships—how they were created, what a couple could expect o f each
other, and how these unions rela ted to one another.
In the Natchez District, slaves made fine distinctions between “sweetheart-
ing,”“taking up,”“living together,” and marriage. Sweethearting—neither per-
manent, nor monogamous, nor subject to the neighborhood’s sanction—was an
open-ended relationship for the young. Taking up was temporary, too, but was
for mature couples prepared to submit to neighbors’ informal recognition. Living
together, by contrast, was a permanent bond, perhaps the most familiar to mod-
ern eyes, and entitled men and women to share a surname as well as a cabin.
Marriage was permanent as well, yet distinguished from cohabitation by the
formal recognition of weddings. The boundary between living together and
marriage, slaves believed, was essential to the integrity of the bond between hus-
band and wife. Rights and duties did not set unions apart. Sweethearting and
taking up overlapped from that standpoint. So did living together and marriage.
What distinguished them was how slaves and owners sanctioned these unions.
The endless task of creating and re-creating this structure, of articulating its rules
and enforcing them as norms, was a neighborhood undertaking. As neighbors
fastened bonds between men and women, they clinched the most binding ties
in the neighborhood….
Slaves fashioned the structure of intimate relations as they came to terms
with the conflicting desires of men and women as well as the capricious inter-
ventions of owners. Planters as well as their drivers and overseers forced them-
selves sexually on bondwomen. Slaves knew all too well that no couple was
master of their own fate when owners had the power to sell, bequeath, or hire
out either party as an exercise in discipline, as a bequest to children upon mar-
riage, to settle a debt, or to divide an estate among heirs. Some measure of the
toll these transactions exacted can be reckoned from Union army registers of
marriages performed in 1864 and 1865 at Natchez, Vicksburg, and Davis Bend.
Among 3,846 men and women reporting previous spouses, nearly one of every
six aged twenty or over reported a forced separation by an owner. The likeli-
hood of separation increased over time. More than a third of all couples with
one partner at least years old had come through at least one broken union—
one in five women thirty years old and over, one in four men….
Indeed, no tie bound the neighborhoods of southwestern Mississippi more
tightly than marriage. After the wedding, often a neighborhood event, the hus-
band became a fixture over at his wife’s quarters. The proximity of adjoining
plantations facilitated more frequent visiting than was possible in an “abroad
marriage,” which typically permitted couples to spend weekends together. In
the Natchez District, some married men had a standing pass to spend one night
during the week, usually Wednesdays, as well as Saturdays and Sundays with their
380 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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families. Edward Hicks beat the path every day between his cabin on Oak Ridge
and his wife’s, only three-quarters of a mile off on the adjoining Grant place.
The relationship between spouses naturally created other bonds of kinship that
crossed plantation lines. Henry Hunt, who was sold from Virginia to Warren
County in his early teens during the mid-1830s, got around as a teamster but
married a woman in his neighborhood in 1848. She already had a son, Jefferson,
who was nine years old by then. Marriage thus made Hunt both a stepfather and
a husband. As husbands and wives became mothers and fathers, they begat new
connections in the neighborhood—among generations, among families, among
kin of all kinds.
Men shouldered many burdens to bring together spouses and neighbor-
hoods. The mandatory negotiations with owners, for example, were conducted
by the groom. When it came time to request permission to live together or
marry, he was obliged to do the asking. If a couple belonged to different owners,
he talked to her white people as well. This diplomacy was no easy task. Couples
had a lot riding on his words, and testy slaveholders could get unpleasant even
about the best intentions. Henry Lewis’s owners cast aspersions on his request to
marry Tishne Price, although they eventually agreed. When “my husband asked
my old master for me,” she recalled, Lewis was dismissed as a neophyte. “You
have only been here four years, and you want to marry your mistress’ body
servant.” Lewis, who had nerve but not the cheek his owner implied, stood his
ground. “Well, she loves me and I love her,” he responded. Price was not spared
the abuse, but it seemed to take her by surprise, particularly when master asked
whether Lewis was the best she could do. “I might do worser,” she ventured….
No one confounded the order slaves tried to impose on conjugal unions
more than planter men. The ravages of the planters were too numerous to cata-
log. They turned a blind eye on drivers and overseers who had their way with
slave women. They raped their people, seduced them, and imposed on them
with a combination of force and cajolery that defies latter-day distinctions be-
tween consensual sex and sexual coercion. Some slaveholders were deterred by
a husband’s presence. Mary Ann Holmes had a husband belonging to another
owner at the time she bore her daughter, Eliza, by Austin Williams. But neither
the bond between spouses nor the proximity of husbands accorded much pro-
tection to women belonging to planters of Gabriel Shield’s ilk. He gave his con-
sent for two house servants, Eveline and James Perano, to live together but had
her sleep in the big house. For Shields, the arrangement conveniently kept his
nurse close by his children and preserved his own easy access to her for nearly
a decade. Eveline Perano bore one child by Shields while she had two with her
husband. Then in the late 1850s, Shields sent him to another plantation in
Louisiana and broke up the Peranos’ tenuous union for good….
Slaves made their structure of intimate relations prevail in many ways, all of
which constituted victories, moral and practical, of a high order. This structure
hissed and sputtered with contradictions, to be sure, and breaches opened up in
the quarters. Drivers placed themselves outside it, and some unions were not in-
corporated into it. Nowhere in the Americas did slaves entirely protect conjugal
life from the trespasses of owners and their agents, and the Natchez District was
AGRICULTURE AND SLAVERY IN THE SOUTH AT MIDCENTURY 381
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no exception. Slaves did not even have a tenable means of calling owners to
account for the worst outrages. That slaves managed to give any structure at all
to unions between men and women, considering the powers that bore down on
them, was no mean feat. That they imposed this order, imperfect as it was, on
their owners was an ingenious work of social engineering. That they obtained
owners’ cooperation was the most difficult maneuver of all, tactic slaves used to
good effect in other struggles as well. Slaves achieved all of these ends by making
the most personal bonds profoundly social. A wedding only gave formal, full-
blown expression to the regulating of intimate relations that took place in every
neighborhood. Sweethearting, taking up, living together, and marriage dispersed
affinities throughout the neighborhood and grounded them there.
FURTHER READING
Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974).
Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (2005).
Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (1982).
Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planter’s and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World,
1820–1860 (2007).
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the
Old South (1988).
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (2005).
Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in
the Colonial and Antebellum South (1998).
Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976).
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and the Making of America (2004).
Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in
Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (2008).
Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town,
1784–1810 (1984).
Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the
Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (1995).
Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: intellectual Life and the American South (2003).
Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (2004).
Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South
(1997).
Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (1978).
382 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.