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‘How a Slave was Made a Man’: Negotiating Black Violence and Masculinity in Antebellum Slave Narratives

2007; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01440390701428048

1743-9523

Sarah N. Roth,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

Abstract In the manner in which they portrayed black masculinity, fugitive slave autobiographies published in the 1840s represented a sharp break from abolitionist narratives produced during the previous decade. Unlike anti-slavery authors writing in the 1830s, slave narrators of the 1840s deliberately renounced any connection between black manhood and a willingness to commit horrific acts of retributive violence against whites. At the same time, fugitive slave authors insisted on the admirable manliness of the African American men they depicted, including themselves as the protagonists of their stories. The return that radical abolitionist authors made to a glorification of black violence in the 1850s marks the publication of slave narratives in the 1840s as an exceptional moment in the history of antislavery literature. The popular success of these narratives, contrasted with the unpopularity of the more violent antislavery texts of the 1830s and the 1850s, also reveals the fears of black violence that white Americans harboured throughout the antebellum period and fugitive slave authors' consciousness of those fears. Notes [1] Bibb, Narrative. [2] Walker, Appeal. [3] Douglass, The Narrative, 74–75. [4] Douglass, 'On the Union', 258; Douglass, The Narrative, 74. [5] Marion Wilson Starling's The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History constitutes a relatively early and thorough treatment of slave narratives that discusses the reliability and the literary value of works within the genre. For a later, more cultural-studies-oriented investigation of the veracity of one particular slave narrative, see Wood, 'Narrative'. [6] Dwight McBride has pointed out Douglass's awareness of what his white Northern audience would accept and what they would not, but he omits discussion of slave violence as a critical element in white Northern consciousness as Douglass understood it (McBride, Impossible Witnesses). [7] Stewart, 'Emergence of Racial Modernity'. [8] James and Lois Horton argue that no matter which contemporary model of masculinity antebellum whites subscribed to, 'aggression, and sometimes sanctioned violence was a common thread in American ideas of manhood' (Horton and Horton, 'Violence', 382). [9] Hildreth, Archy Moore, 174, 182, 202. [10] Hildreth, Archy Moore, 173, 205-6, 174, 203. [11] In the first chapter of his novel, Hildreth (Archy Moore, 5) put forth the hope that his story might 'summon up, in the mind of a single oppressor, the dark and dreaded images of his own misdeeds' and thereby bring about 'the remorse of tyrants'. [12] Historians have not determined with any certainty whether Ball's narrative was autobiographical or a fictional account like Hildreth's (see Davis and Gates, Narrative, 81). [13] Ball, Slavery, 19. [14] Karcher, Reader, 186, 188, 187. [15] Weld, American Slavery, 9. [16] Douglass, My Bondage, 361–362. [17] Douglass, My Bondage, 360, 362. [18] Bibb, Narrative, i. [19] Clark and Clarke, Narratives, 611, 640; Douglass, The Narrative, 29; Grandy, Narrative, 10–11; Henson, Truth, 20; Bibb, Narrative, 44. [20] New York Tribune, June 1845. [21] Hayden, Narrative, 77; Henson, Truth, 90–91. [22] Bibb, Narrative, 17; W. W. Brown, Narrative, 17, 18, 20. [23] Henson, Truth, 3–4, 6, 7. [24] Douglass, The Narrative, 75. [25] Ball, Slavery, 131–132, 466, 517. [26] Bibb, Narrative, 15–16, 163; Henson, Truth, 52, 53–54. [27] Ball, Slavery, 379; H. Brown, Narrative, 51–52; Bibb, Narrative, 127; Douglass, The Narrative, 92; Hayden, Narrative, 100. [28] Douglass, The Narrative, 80, 81; Hayden, Narrative, 75, 76. [29] Clark and Clarke, Narratives, 647; Henson, Truth, 91. [30] Stowe's novel was originally published serially in The National Era in 1851; it came out in book form the following year. [31] Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 11, 13, 14, 15, 91, 94, 164, 172. [32] Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 344, 358, 362; The Liberator, 26 May 1852. [33] Stowe, A Key, 419–420; Henson, Truth, 53–54, 59. [34] Frederick Douglass' Paper, 20 May 1852, 15 April 1853; The Liberator, 26 May 1852, 9 July 1852. [35] Douglass, 'The Heroic Slave'; Steward, Twenty-Two Years; Delany, Blake. [36] Douglass, 'The Heroic Slave', 300, 303; Delany, Blake, 16, 17; Steward, Twenty-Two Years, 34. [37] Douglass, 'The Heroic Slave', 344; Steward, Twenty-Two Years, 37; Delany, Blake, 127–128. All spelling as in the original texts. [38] Steward, Twenty-Two Years, 32; Delany, Blake, 305. [39] Stowe, Dred, Vol. 1, 240–241. [40] Stowe, Dred, Vol. 1, 320; Vol. 2, 174, 215, 232, 275. [41] Stowe, Dred, Vol. 1, 241; Vol. 2, 255, 299; Douglass, 'The Heroic Slave', 303. [42] Stowe, Dred, Vol. 2, 296, 301, 331; New Englander 13 (February 1855), 518–519. [43] Hildreth's novel sold 7,000 copies within a year of its release, which gave it a decent run in the mid-1830s, but did not make it a popular hit, considering that three years later, sales of Weld's American Slavery As It Is ran to 100,000 copies. In 1855, Hildreth recalled that 'the small and at that time almost proscribed sect of the abolitionists' had been 'almost the only persons who ventured to look into' Archy Moore in 1836. Nevertheless, Hildreth noted that even though 'very few booksellers would allow it in their shops, the first edition was speedily disposed of, principally at the anti-slavery depository, in Boston' (Hildreth, Archy Moore, xv; Starling, Narrative, 189; Davis and Gates, Narrative, xvi, 20). Douglass printed 'The Heroic Slave' in Frederick Douglass' Paper in 1853, while Blake was serialised in The Anglo-African Magazine during 1859 and The Weekly Anglo-African in 1861–1862. [44] Putnam's Monthly 8 (November 1856), 537. [45] New Englander and Yale Review 14 (November 1856), 519; Ladies' Repository 18 (March 1858), 173; Putnam's Monthly 8 (November 1856), 537, 538; New Englander 13 (February 1855), 517. Additional informationNotes on contributorsSarah N. RothSarah N. Roth is in the Department of History, Widener University.