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ABSTRACT
This article considers enslaved mothers’ emotional responses to the separation of their children. While slavery studies scholars have discussed the individual impact sales had on enslaved people, and historians of emotion have explored white communities’ understandings of both white maternal love and enslaved emotion, few studies have explored how events such as sale shaped enslaved women's own emotional understandings, practices, experiences and expressions. Guided by enslaved women's own testimony, this article argues that enslaved women created their own, gendered, emotional worlds in response to their experiences of sale – their own conceptions of love and grief, ways of expressing their emotion, and collective emotional practices in the aftermath of separation. Not only individual responses to emotional pain, their collective emotional practices must also be viewed as acts of refusal to submit to slave trading practices, white emotional standards and racialized emotional ideologies. Through loving and grieving actively, enslaved women maintained their maternal bonds in the face of both practical and ideological attempts to decimate them.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Emily West for her support in developing this article and Special Issue. I would also like to thank those who attended the ‘Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World’ conference for their invaluable feedback and for pushing me to develop my ideas further.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston: 1861), 39.
2 Ibid., 13.
3 Michael Tadman estimated that each decade between 1820 and 1860 around 200,000 enslaved people were sold from one region to another. See Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 5.
4 Enslaved mother's expressions of grief appear most frequently in enslaved people's testimony. Though I focus on enslaved mothers, I am not arguing that enslaved men did not experience grief when sold from their children, but that enslaved women had distinct, public emotional practices surrounding sale. Similarly, I focus here on biological mothers, but ‘other mothers’ experienced separation from those they cared for and is a fruitful area for further study.
5 Heather Williams’ important study explores the emotional impact of family separations. I build on her more general study to consider motherhood and sale explicitly, utilizing the idea of collective emotional practices. Heather Andrea Williams, Help me to Find my People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
6 Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is that What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51 (2012), 193.
7 Deborah Gray White, Ar’n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985).
8 Few studies either in the history of emotions or slavery studies have analysed enslaved women's own emotional understandings. In a key exception to this, Sasha Turner considers enslaved women's emotional responses to the death of their children in the Caribbean. Turner, ‘The Nameless and Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery’, Slavery and Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 232–50. I am also grateful to Turner for her feedback on an earlier version of this article, urging me to consider the individual alongside the collective.
9 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; Turner, ‘The Nameless and Forgotten’.
10 bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2001), 4.
11 This idea of refusal builds on the work of Aisha Finch and Jennifer Morgan, who urge us to rethink our understanding of enslaved women's resistance. Due to the centrality of enslaved women's reproductive potential in slavery's perpetuation, Morgan argues that we should focus on the body when considering enslaved women's forms of refusal. Here, I argue that paying attention to embodied emotional expression – often viewed as apolitical and passive – expands our understanding of enslaved women's formation of an oppositional political consciousness. Aisha Finch, “‘What Looks Like a Revolution’: Enslaved Women and the Gendered Terrain of Slave Insurgencies in Cuba, 1843-1844’, Journal of Women's History, 26, no. 1 (2014): 112–34; Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
12 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 26.
13 Jan Lewis, ‘Mother's Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century America’ in Social History and Issues in Human Consciousness, eds. Andrews E. Barnes and Peter N. Stearns (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 210; 214; 225. See also Linda Kerber, ‘The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment – An American Perspective’, American Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1976): 187–205, for a discussion of ideological development of the ‘Republican Mother’.
14 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787).
15 Fanny Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–1839 (1863).
16 See Louisa Picquet and Hiram Mattison, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon: Or Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life (New York: 1861) for another example of the counter-conceptualization of maternal feeling.
17 Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 421.
18 Bethany Veney, The Narrative of Bethany Veney: A Slave Woman (Worcester: Massachusetts, 1889), 26.
19 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.
20 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, ‘The Slave Mother’ in Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (Boston, 1854).
21 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 96.
22 Veney, The Narrative of Bethany Veney, 26.
23 Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage Classics Edition, Penguin Random House UK, 2022), 320; 208; 211; 256. and Kristine Yohe, ‘Enslaved Women's Resistance and Survival Strategies in Frances Elle Watkin Harper's “The Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio” and Toni Morrison's Beloved and Margaret Garner’ in M. Frederickson and D. Walters, Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery and the Legacy of Margaret Garner (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 104.
24 Picquet and Mattison, Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, 18.
25 Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853), 81.
26 Susan Hamlin, interviewed by Jessie A Butler, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative project, Vol 14, South Carolina, Part 2, Library of Congress. Hamlin was interviewed once by white woman Jessie Butler, and once by Black interviewer Augustus Ladson, who listed her surname as Hamilton. Significantly, both interviews describe sale and separations.
27 The inclusion of this image by Northup in his narrative also served this purpose by forcing the reader to confront the realities of sale.
28 For more on the portrayal of sexual abuse in Picquet's narrative, see Andrea Livesey, ‘Race, Slavery and the Expression of Sexual Violence in Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon, American Nineteenth Century History 19, no. 3 (2018): 267–88.
29 Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice?’, 209.
30 Peter Stearns and Mark Knapp, ‘Historical Perspectives on Grief’, 134–7.
31 Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 151–9.
32 Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions’, Passions in Context 1, no. 1 (2010): 11.
33 Lucy A. Delaney, From the Darkness Cometh the Light or Struggles for Freedom (St Louis: Publishing House of J T Smith), 56–7.
34 See Turner, ‘The Nameless and Forgotten’, 241 for a discussion of ideas surrounding death and Christianity.
35 See Williams, Help me to Find my People, 87–88, for a brief exploration of the difference between mothers’ expressive grief when sold from their children and enslaved men's muted silence when sold from their spouses.
36 Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 85.
37 Ibid; 107; 160; 53. See Katherine Burn's article in this collection, ‘She Died from Grief’: Trauma and Emotion in Information Wanted Advertisements’.
38 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 26.
39 Erin Dwyer demonstrates that physical punishments were often used by enslavers to both incite certain emotions and punish those who were expressing the wrong emotions. Mastering Emotions: Feeling, Power, and Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 139; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 81.
40 Vincent Brown, ‘Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery’, American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1232–3.
41 Fisk University, Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves (1968), 2.
42 Wells-Oghoghomeh, The Souls of Womenfolk, 158–9.
43 Tiya Miles, All that She Carried; The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (New York: Random House, 2021), 3.
44 Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., Publishers, 1868), 29.
45 Mattie J. Jackson and L. S. Thompson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson: Her Parentage – Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery – Incidents During the War – Her Escape from Slavery (Lawrence: 1866), 17.
46 Hettie Mitchell, interviewed by Irene Robertson, interviewed by Irene Robertson, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol 2, Arkansas, Part 5, Library of Congress.
47 Miles, All that she Carried, xiv; 12; 21.
48 For more on literacy amongst the enslaved, see chapter 1 of Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Ben Schiller, ‘Learning Their Letters: Critical Literacy, Epistolary Culture, and Slavery in the Antebellum South’, Southern Quarterly 45, no. 3 (2009): 11-29; Randall Miller, “Dear Master”: Letters of a Slave Family (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
49 Letter from Vilet Lester to Paterson, John Alfred Papers, Duke University Archives, https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/lester/lester.html.
50 See Sydney Nathans, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) for more details of Mary Walker's experiences.
51 Letter written by J. P. Lesley on behalf of Mary Walker to Mildred Cameron, September 4, 1859. Cameron Family Papers, Box 50, folder 1197, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
52 Ibid.
53 These letters are examples of what Ben Schiller terms ‘critical literacy’, where enslaved people ‘produced texts that disturbed the terms of their bondage, even as they worked within an epistolary culture that maintained and emphasized the imbalance power dynamic of the master/slave relationship.’ In these cases, the authors explicitly used emotion to try to disrupt the terms of their bondage. Schiller, ‘Learning Their Letters’, 15.
54 Burns, ‘She Died from Grief’.
55 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 39.
56 hooks, All About Love, 4.
57 Sarah Knott, in Mother is a Verb, explores ‘the doing’ of motherhood across time and space. I argue here that enslaved women saw maternal emotion as central to the work of mothering, and conversely, the work of mothering as inseparable from the experience of maternal emotion. See Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2019).
58 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, ‘The Slave Mother’.
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Beth R. Wilson
Beth R. Wilson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History, University of Reading, School of Humanities, Edith Morley Building, Shinfield Road, Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 6EL, UK. Email: [email protected]