Women slave owners face their historians: versions of maternalism in Atlantic World slavery

ABSTRACT

Foster investigates the current debate over the status of free women in Atlantic World slavery. This debate is marked not only by competing perspectives among professional historians but by conversations between historians, filmmakers, novelists, genealogists and popular writers. Traditionally, this kind of complex interaction has produced fictional icons like Scarlett O'Hara and Melanie Hamilton of the novel and film Gone with the Wind, figures that influenced southern Americans' ideas of themselves and academic historians' models of gender roles within slavery. As American slavery is more frequently assessed within a full Atlantic World and transnational context, the 'free woman within slavery' question has grown radically more nuanced and contradictory in a relatively short period of time. Particularly suspect is the older idea that servitude and race-based slavery systems served to expand paternal privilege and authority. Foster's article is oriented around the question of whether a multicultural 'maternalism' might have existed to complement or compete with paternal authority within slavery. The first section explores the paradox of free women, acting as metaphorical 'mothers' to enslaved dependents, being portrayed by male contemporaries as desexualized and sexually debauched. The second section shows the restricted way that some historians have defined 'female mastery' and the sometimes very different and less restricted ways free women described their own brands of 'mastery'. The third and final section surveys recent film and novels to assess the possibilities and limitations of achieving a transatlantic perspective on maternalism in current, historically informed popular culture. This review concludes by arguing that all these historical, historiographical and popular materials help to illustrate a new model of New World slavery, one deeply influenced by unstable Atlantic World gender hierarchies far more contradictory, complex and multicultural than the venerable 'Scarlett v. Melanie' debate and expanding paternal privilege ideas are able to encompass.

Keywords:

• free women
• gender
• mastery
• maternalism
• slave owners
• slavery

Notes

¹Shirley Abbott, 'Southern women and the indispensable myth: how the mistress of the plantation became a slave', American Heritage, vol. 34, 1982, 82-91.

²The thesis presented by Kathleen Brown in the mid-1990s linked the coming of race-based slavery in early Virginia to the apparent expansion of patriarchal privilege in that society; see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1996). In the early 1980s, two book-length studies on the antebellum 'plantation mistress' established some of the elements of the public-private divide referred to here; see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1988); and Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon 1984).

³Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Ben Ames Williams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2003), entry for May 1861.

⁴For the signare of Senegal, see especially James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993), 98-101, 107-8; for Guayacuran women and captives, see Susan Migden Socolow, 'Spanish captives in Indian societies: cultural contact along the Argentine frontier, 1600-1835', Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 72, no. 1, 1992, 73-99; for Cherokee women and slavery, see Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press 1979). For an introduction to coerced labour in North American women's monastic communities, see, for example, Susan Soiero, 'Catarina de Monte Sinay: nun and entrepreneur', in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1981), esp. 268-9, as well as my own The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2003), esp. chs 1 and 2.

⁵Here I refer most obviously to the 'Brown thesis' cited in note 2.

⁶Betty Wood, 'Gender, race and rank in a revolutionary age', Mellon Lecture, Tulane University, 11 November 1999.

⁷Kathleen J. Higgins, 'Gender and the manumission of slaves in colonial Brazil: the prospects for freedom in Sabar, Minas Gerais, 1710-1809', Slavery and Abolition, vol. 18, no. 2, August 1997, 1-29, esp. 10, 13-15, Fig. 2 and notes 67 and 68.

⁸See, for example, Ken Ringle, 'Up through slavery', Washington Post, 12 May 2002. For the academic sources, see Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South [1974] (New York: New Press 1992).

⁹For a view of slavery as paternalist reciprocity, see Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Rgime (New York and London: D. Appleton 1918). Paternalist analysis was later transformed in Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon 1974), which explored the give-and-take of master and slave families. Standing contrary to this is, most prominently, the idea of plantation slavery as a sophisticated and profitable economic production system developed in Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown 1974). Finally, Stanley Elkins, in a famous study, compared slavery to a total institution that left little room for negotiation and reciprocity; see Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1959).

¹⁰For a comprehensive introduction to this concept, see the essays collected in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge 1993).

¹¹Bianca Premo, Children of the Family King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2005), 9.

¹²Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols (London: Saunders and Otley 1837), II, ch. 5, sect. 1.

¹³Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols (London: Saunders and Otley 1837), II, ch. 5, sect. 1.

¹⁴Clement of Alexandria (Titus Flavuis Clemens), Christ the Educator, trans. from classical Greek by Simon P. Wood (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc. 1954), 226.

¹⁵See the reprint of the 1831 edition, Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave Narrative, ed. Thomas Pringle (Mineola, NY: Dover 2004), 57-9.

¹⁶Terri L. Snyder, '"As if there was not master or woman in the land": gender, dependency, and household violence in Virginia, 1646-1720', in Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (eds), Over the Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America (New York: Routledge 1999), 219-36 (224-5). For the original pamphlet, see Thomas Hellier, The Vain Prodigal Life, and Penitent Death, of Thomas Hellier (London: Printed for Sam. Crouch 1680). Snyder also mentions that the Hellier account did in fact reflect actual events; see T. H. Breen, James H. Lewis and Keith Schlesinger, 'Motive for murder: a servant's life in Virginia', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., vol. 40, no. 1, 1983, 106-20.

¹⁷Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2004), 228-40.

¹⁸See Susan Mosher Stuard, 'Ancillary evidence for the decline of medieval slavery', Past & Present, vol. 149, 1995, 3-28 (19, 19-58).

¹⁹Letter from Lizzie Neblett, 20 March 1864: Neblett Papers, University of Texas at Austin, quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (New York: Vintage 1997), 70, 274n36.

²⁰For this line of discussion, see Faust, Mothers of Invention, esp. 65-70.

²¹Kirsten E. Wood, Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution to the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2004), 60.

²²York County (Virginia), Deeds, Orders, and Wills, no. 6, 88, 279, 288, 360, 361, 362: Library of Virginia, Richmond, as quoted and discussed in Snyder, ' ''As if there was not master or woman in the land'' ', esp. 219-20.

²³Snyder, '"As if there was not master or woman in the land"', 219-32.

²⁴See Snyder's commentary in '"As if there was not master or woman in the land"', 222.

^{2 5}Hilary McD. Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle/ Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner/ Oxford: James Currey 1999), 61-3. For Brazil, see especially Maria Odila Silva Dias, Power and Everyday Life: The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-century Brazil, trans. from the Portuguese by Ann Frost (Cambridge: Polity Press 1995), esp. 71-109.

²⁶Beckles, Centering Woman, 63.

²⁷Beckles, Centering Woman, 112.

²⁸Valerie Martin, Property (London: Abacus 2003).

²⁹Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston 1861).

³⁰For Cherokee slavery generally and its relationship to warfare captivity, see Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society.

³¹For an excellent treatment of Ward, see Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence (New York: Knopf 2005), 115-19.