The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation

by David Brion Davis

In contrast to Latin America, Southern planter society officially condemned interracial sexual unions and tended to blame lower-class white males for fathering mulatto children. Yet there is abundant evidence that many slave owners, sons of slave owners, and overseers took black mistresses or in effect raped the wives and daughters of slave families. This abuse of power may not have been quite as universal as Northern abolitionists claimed. But the ubiquity of such sexual exploitation was sufficient to deeply scar and humiliate black women, to instill rage in black men, and to arouse both shame and bitterness in white women.14

  Historian Mia Bay, by thoroughly exploring the vast WPA narratives of elderly former slaves, has dramatically proved that Garnet’s animal metaphors were not limited to the highly literate former slave elite. As Bay concludes, after summarizing thousands of pages of testimony: “Identifying not with their masters’ dependent children but with their masters’ four-legged chattel, ex-slaves remembered being fed like pigs, bred like hogs, sold like horses, driven like cattle, worked like dogs, and beaten like mules.”15 Memories of animalization, in other words, largely undercut the slave owners’ pretentions of “paternalism.”

  It is important to note that most of the WPA interviewers were white and, in the 1930s, often recently descended from slaveholders. The blacks, surrounded by flagrant racism and Great Depression poverty, were cautious and seldom criticized slavery as an institution. Nevertheless, the ex-slaves in numerous Southern states repeatedly remembered that like animals they did not know their age or birthdays and as children often even ate like and with animals: “Dey was a trough out in de yard [where] dey poured de mush an milk in[,] an us chillum an de dogs would all crowd ’roun it an eat together … we sho’ had to be in a hurry ’bout it cause de dogs would get it all if we didn’t.” “The white folks et the white flour and the niggers et the shorts,” one woman reported, and “the hogs was also fed the shorts.” Even the few ex-slaves who praised their masters’ generosity mentioned animals. According to a freedman in South Carolina, “Master Levi kept his niggers fat, just like he keep his hogs and hosses fat, he did.”16

  As Professor Bay points out, the slaves not only were surrounded night and day by mules, horses, donkeys, and other work animals but, like those domesticated species, their only reason for existence was to perform labor for their white owners in exchange for care and feeding. Yet “what the slaves resented most were slaveowners who treated them like animals rather than workers.” Josephine Howard recalled that in Texas “Dey wan’t nothin’ de whites don’t do to ’em—work ’em like day was mules an’ treat ’em jes’ like day don’t have no feelin’.” In Oklahoma a white preacher exhorted Robert Burns and his fellow slaves, “Only white people had souls and went to heaven. He told dem dat niggers had no more soul than dogs, and dey couldn’t go to heaven any more than could a dog.”17

  Confined like captured or domesticated animals to cage-like spaces, slaves knew that if they tried to escape, they would be pursued by armed patrollers who canvassed the country “just like dogs hunting rabbits.” And once seized for any offence, as Joe Ray recalled his childhood on an Arkansas plantation, “Dere was two overseers on the place and dey carried a bull whip all the time.… I saw a slave man whipped until his shirt was cut to pieces! Dey were whipped like horses.” If the master “didn’t want dem beat to death … Dat’s too much money to kill,” “they would take your clothes off and whip you like you was no more than mules.”18

  From antiquity, chattel slavery was modeled on the property rights traditionally claimed for domestic animals, which meant that human beings could be bought, sold, traded, leased, inherited, included in a dowry, gambled, or lost as debt—abrupt changes in identity that negated or deeply compromised marriage, parenthood, or family relations in what historian-sociologist Orlando Patterson has termed a state of “social death.” As the American freedwoman Mollie Barber recalled, every time her owners “need[ed] some money, off dey sell a slave, jest like now dey sell cows and hogs at de auction places.” And Professor Bay quite convincingly sees the auction, to which slaves were driven on foot by mounted white men, as the epitome of bestialization:

  One ex-slave explained: “Speclators uster buy up niggers jest lak dey was animals, and dey would travel around over de country and sell an’ sell ’em. I’ve seen ’em come through there in droves lak cattle.” Once at auction, the slaves were scrutinized by prospective buyers. “A large crowd of masters gathered ’round,’ ” one slave witness recalled, “and dey would put de slaves on the block and roll de sleeves and pantlegs up and say, ‘Dis is good stock; got good muscles, and he’s a good hardworking nigger.’ Whey dey sold ’em just like you see ’em sell stock now. If de woman was a good breeder she would sell for big money, ’cause she could raise children. They felt all over the woman folks.”19

  In recent decades historians have shown that from 1790 to 1860 the southwestern expansion of slavery in the United States depended on such animalizing auctions and on a vast internal movement of over a million slaves, conducted by coastal slave ships as well as by overland coffles of chained men, followed by slave women and children, often trudging seven or eight weeks on foot as they moved toward Louisiana or Texas.20

  I should emphasize that Bay’s evidence on “being treated like animals” is repeatedly confirmed by numerous earlier slave narratives addressed to Northern audiences; but the WPA testimony is especially convincing, since animal parallels were clearly far removed from the white Southern proslavery mythology of that time. The elderly freedpeople’s language signified an enduring black experience. By the same token, Bay shows that freed blacks long continued to use animal comparisons in Southern Jim Crow society. If they were no longer regularly whipped or sold at auctions, many felt they had been turned loose like aged horses and cows without their own fields in which to graze. For the black day laborer, prison farm worker, or sharecropper, still stigmatized by race, emancipation failed to lead to some kind of humanizing “free soil.” And, as we shall see, the theory of inherent black bestiality acquired a kind of tsunami force in the 1880s and 1890s, given the obsession of radical Southerners with lynching as an antidote to the supposedly near-universal desire of black men to rape white women.

  Bay’s thesis stresses the continuing determination of African Americans, both slave and free, to reject and counteract all attempts at animalization. Even the few blacks who accepted the argument that Noah’s biblical “curse of Ham” had justified their enslavement, joined in the continuing defense and assertion of their humanity. Yet, as we will see, a very few radical blacks who called for a slave revolt also condemned black slaves for a docility and subservience that seemed to be the result of unprecedented oppression.

  But dehumanization has clearly been a central aspect of slavery from ancient times, and what I have referred to as “the problem of slavery” involves the impossibility, seen throughout history, of converting humans into totally compliant, submissive chattel property. Nevertheless, from ancient Greece to the development of New World colonies and on to the prosperous American South in the mid-nineteenth century, slave labor has proved to be remarkably productive, effective, and economically successful. And racial slavery generated new forms of racism, which encouraged efforts at animalization in extreme and systematic forms. In the next chapter we will explore how the whites’ projection on blacks of unwanted “animal” traits and attributes highlighted the slaves’ supposed incapacity for freedom—a crucial issue for the “Age of Emancipation.” Animalization also raised the issues of psychological internalization and black self-esteem—questions that by no means disappeared with emancipation. Accordingly, before turning to the Haitian Revolution, black colonization, and other highly selective aspects of the “Age of Emancipation,” I want to explore in some detail some subjects that lie at the heart of slavery’s “problem.”

  1

  Some Meanings of Slavery and Emancipation: Dehumanization, Animalization, and Free Soil

  God’s first blunder
: Man didn’t find the animals amusing,—he dominated them, and didn’t even want to be an “animal.”

  —NIETZSCHE, Der Antichrist

  THE MEANING OF ANIMALIZATION, PART I

  Traveling through the South in 1856, the famous journalist and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted remarked to a white overseer that it must be disagreeable to punish slaves the way he did. The overseer replied, “Why, sir, I wouldn’t mind killing a nigger more than I would a dog.”1

  Does this mean that blacks who were treated like animals were literally seen as “only animals,” or as an entirely different species from humans? The answer is clearly no, except perhaps in some extreme cases and for very brief periods of time—as for example in the post-emancipation lynching era, when many black men accused of raping white women were hanged or tortured, dismembered, and burned alive, occasionally before immense cheering crowds of Southern white men, women, and children.2

  Degradation and insult are reinforced every day when people call other people curs, pigs, swine, apes, bitches, and sons of bitches, terms which momentarily dehumanize one party while enhancing the “non-animal” superiority of the other. But animalization can cover a spectrum from superficial insult to the justification of slavery and on to lynching and genocide.

  Thus the use of such animal metaphors as lice, vermin, microbes, and cockroaches, as in the Nazi Holocaust, lowers the process to a different level, justifying the complete extermination of an impure enemy group that supposedly threatens the basic health of society and therefore has no right to exist. I am mainly concerned here with the psychological and linguistic process, as a way of dealing with the question of whether humans who were treated like animals were ever literally seen as “only animals,” since a discussion of diverse motives would lead us far astray. The world had never seen such an extreme and systematic engine of dehumanization as the Nazi propaganda machine, epitomized by Joseph Goebbels’s assertion in an early speech (March 7, 1942) that “It is a life-or-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish microbe. No other government and no other regime would have been able to muster the strength to find a general solution to this issue.” Nearly a year later, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler would expand the point in a speech to SS officers:

  Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany.3

  Given the Nazi example, it is worth noting that the antipode of this animalizing can be seen in a universal tendency to project our potentiality for self-transcendence, freedom, and striving for perfection onto images of kings, dictators, demagogues, and cultural heroes of various kinds. This form of idolatry, which ancient Judaism fortunately singled out as the most dangerous sin facing humanity, can also appear in various kinds of narcissism and egocentrism, as when an individual imagines that he is godlike and free from all taint of finitude and corruption.

  There is actually a long history to the links between animalization and genocide or ethnic cleansing, and the formula by no means ended with the Nazis. In 1994, when the Hutu slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsi neighbors in Rwanda, the victims were repeatedly likened to inyenizi, or cockroaches.4

  But were Jews and Tutsis truly seen as nonhumans, as the actual equivalent of microbes, lice, or cockroaches? Given the appalling realities of mass murder, we are intuitively inclined to think yes. Why else would Himmler try to persuade SS officers that their actions would be exactly the same as delousing? Fortunately, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has insightfully clarified this issue as his discussion of ethics moves from social hierarchy to insiders/outsiders and on to genocidal massacres. In accounting for genocide, “the familiar answer” presumes that members of some outgroup are not considered “human at all.” Yet that “doesn’t explain the immense cruelty—the abominable cruelty,” which is not evident even in the extermination of pests. As Appiah then reasons:

  The persecutors may liken the objects of their enmity to cockroaches or germs, but they acknowledge their victim’s humanity in the very act of humiliating, stigmatizing, reviling, and torturing them. Such treatment—and the voluble justifications the persecutors invariably offer for such treatment—is reserved for creatures we recognize to have intentions and desires and projects.

  Appiah adds in an endnote that the victimizers always “tell you why their victims—Jews or Aztecs or Tutsi—deserve what’s being done to them.”5 That was emphatically true of the Nazis, who pictured the Jews not only as an active global threat to civilization throughout history, but in World War II as the hidden conspiratorial force behind both their Soviet and Western enemies. Clearly this retention of a human element fails to make animalization more humane. Quite the contrary.

  At this point it should be clear that “dehumanization” means the eradication not of human identity but of those elements of humanity that evoke respect and empathy and convey a sense of dignity. Dehumanization means the debasement of a human, often the reduction to the status of an “animalized human,” a person who exemplifies the so-called animal traits and who lacks the moral and rational capacities that humans esteem. As Appiah implies, this extreme dehumanization deprives the victims even of the kind of sympathy and connectedness often given to Alzheimer patients or those in a coma.

  I would only add that since the victims of this process are perceived as “animalized humans,” this double consciousness would probably involve a contradictory shifting back and forth in the recognition of humanity. When Henry Smith, an African American accused of rape, was tortured and killed in 1893 before a Texas mob of some ten thousand whites, many in the crowd no doubt saw him momentarily as “nothing but an animal” as they watched hot irons being pressed on his bare feet and tongue and then into his eyes, and heard him emit “a cry that echoed over the prairie like the wail of a wild animal.”6 Conversely, we have reports of German soldiers who momentarily recognized the true humanity of individual Jews as they were herded toward the gas chambers.

  In any event, the creation of “animalized humans” can produce a mental state in the victimizers and spectators that disconnects the neural sources of human identification, empathy, and compassion, the very basis for the Golden Rule and all human ethics. In extreme cases, this means the ability to engage in torture or extermination without a qualm. But the focus on extreme cases can obscure the fact, emphasized by David Livingstone Smith, that “we are all potential dehumanizers, just as we are potential objects of dehumanization.”7 No doubt many situations arise, especially in war, where people kill or inflict pain without misgivings and without any explicit animalization.8 But the victims must still be dehumanized in similar ways. And animalization, which also appears in such group differentiations as class, caste, and ethnicity, as well as race, clearly makes the process easier for large collective groups.9

  One explanation, as already suggested, involves the projection on victims or on groups such as slaves of an exaggerated version of the so-called animal traits that all humans share and often fear and repress.10 This psychological process deprives the dehumanized of those redeeming rational and spiritual qualities that give humans a sense of pride, of dignity, of being made in the image of God. At the same time, the projection enables the victimizers to become almost psychological parasites, whose self-image is immeasurably enhanced by the dramatic contrast with the degraded and dehumanized “Other.” But why have we humans been so concerned with our “animality,” and what is the ultimate source of this desire to animalize other humans—apart from the quite diverse motives of slaveholders, white supremacists, and Nazis? Here I would turn to Reinhold Niebuhr’s view of the core of human “distinctiveness,” as opposed to other animals, in the fear, self-doubt, anxiety, and even pride and confidence generated by t
he dilemma of finitude and freedom. The dilemma that prompts us to ask, “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “What is it all about?” As Niebuhr remarks, while surveying the ways we distinguish the self from the totality of the world, “The vantage point from which man judges his insignificance is a rather significant vantage point.”11 If one samples some typical quotations on the human condition, we see a single answer in the tension between our sense of our existential animal finitude (evoked by our discovery in childhood that we are certain to die) and our capacity for self-reflection, for making ourselves our own object. Countless poets and philosophers have agreed with Charles Caleb Colton (1780–1830): “Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.”

  As expressed by the great French Renaissance essayist Montaigne, “Man sees himself lodged here in the mud and filth of the world, nailed and fastened to the most lifeless and stagnant part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, at the furthest distance from the vault of Heaven, with the vilest animals; and yet, in his imagination, he places himself above the circle of the moon, and brings Heaven under his feet.” Or according to Edward Tyson, a founder of comparative anatomy whose dissection of a chimpanzee in 1698 led him to the view that “Man is part a Brute, part an Angel; and is that Link in the Creation, that joyns them both together.” Or Edward Young, an eighteenth-century religious poet much favored by the later British abolitionists: “Helpless Immortal! Insect infinite! / A worm! a God! I tremble at myself, / And in myself am lost! At home a stranger.” And Lord Byron, first in Sardanapalus: “I am the very slave of circumstance / And impulse—borne away with every breath! / Misplaced upon the throne—misplaced in life. / I know not what I could have been, / but feel I am not what I should be—let it end.”