Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  This presence/absence of the slave in the American world picture points to slavery's powerful haunting of the culture of taste, which has been the subject of this part of my book. And there is perhaps no better representation of this haunting than an anonymous painting from Virginia aptly called Virginian Luxuries (fig. 4.4).13 Painted sometime in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, this was a picture in two sections, both representing the duplicity that characterized the relations between masters and slaves in the plantation complex. On one side was a black man being flogged; on the other side was a black woman being kissed. To the extent that the woman was a slave, we can safely assume that her relationship with the white man was already part of an enforced relationship, a form of sexual violence; the man was being subjected to whipping, the most common form of enforcing bondage. In this context, both parts of the picture represented two forms of disciplining.

  4.2 John Trumbull, George Washington. 1780.

  4.3 Edward Savage, George Washington. 1804

  While it is not clear what the intentions of the anonymous painter of this picture were, the coexistence of these two distinct modes of disciplining in the world of the Virginia elite would ultimately call attention to the duplicity of the institution of slavery itself, where masters presented blacks as the antithesis of cultured life while constantly engaging with them in intimate relations of one kind or another. Embedded in this picture and its doubleness, then, were some of the deepest anxieties driving the culture of the antebellum South—anxieties about gender, sexuality, and violence—and these anxieties were essential to the identity of the antebellum South as it tried to negotiate the line between white civilization and African barbarism.14 We can detect them in Notes on the State of Virginia, where in addition to rehearsing the familiar biological arguments for black difference, Jefferson had underscored the role of passions in marking the slave as other. He had repeated Edward Long's slander about the “the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species”; he had then gone on to argue that black males were “more ardent after their female,” but “love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation.”15

  Ironically, Virginian Luxuries enacted “eager desire” as the province of the white male. In fact, one of the most curious aspects of the painting is how both “romance” and punishment acquired a sexualized character. It is in the interplay of race and gender that the painting exposed the duplicity of antebellum society in relation to the presence of the black body. Aware of the delicate nature of the subject, the painter sought to conceal his or her work, hiding Virginian Luxuries on the back of another painting, Unidentified Man. This duplicity was bound to transform the culture of taste in the slave colonies themselves, where the slave master or owner could not separate himself from the geography of slavery and was thus compelled to adopt various gestures of concealment.

  Here, some contrasts between the adventure of taste in Britain and in the American colonies can clarify what physical proximity meant for slaveholders who could not absent themselves from their holdings. Consider, for example, the role of social gatherings in the making of the subject of taste. As John Brewer has observed, high culture in the eighteenth century was “less a set of discrete works of art than a phenomenon shaped by circles of conversation and criticism formed by its creators, distributors and consumers.”16 And if one were looking for the specific institution that represented this gathering of the creators, distributors, and consumers of culture during this period, it would have to be the ubiquitous coffeehouse, which, in the eighteenth century, replaced the court as the center of high culture. It was in the coffeehouse that social and cultural life was shaped. Indeed, the coffeehouse was idealized by Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, and Dr. Samuel Johnson as the site of polite conversation, the place “in which the improving effects of decorous sociability formed men of taste and morality.”17

  4.4 Artist unknown, Unidentified Man / Virginian Luxuries, America, New England (probably). Circa 1815. Oil on canvas. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia.

  The coffeehouse was not a place of casual cultural encounters. On the contrary, it was the space in which Addison and Steele “shaped an exemplary institution, fabricating an ideal of polite conduct and good taste developed in a convivial environment. They made the coffee house the representative institution of urban life.”18 These eminent men of letters and taste argued that the coffeehouse was the space where agents of commerce and art would meet and mutually inflect one another. This encounter would, in effect, become the philosophical gathering of commerce and virtue; an exposure to aesthetic culture would ameliorate the behavior of commercial subjects, pulling them away, as it were, from vulgar trade and alcohol to coffee and polite conversation, and the cultured subjects would presumably come to a bit of an understanding of trade. In the space of the coffeehouse, the uncouth habits generated by business activities would be processed through the mill of sensibility: “The coffee house was claimed as a new sort of urban territory, one which was accessible and orderly, a permeable, public institution where familiars and strangers could meet for polite conversation.”19 By the end of the long eighteenth century the coffeehouse was established enough to be the subject of burlesque in works by artists such as William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson, who effectively caricatured and inverted the idea of the institution as the gathering of the civilized.

  In the colonial world of eighteenth-century America, however, the institution of the coffeehouse and the sensibilities associated with it were overshadowed by the powerful presence of the peculiar institution of slavery, which generated a different kind of space of sociability. The man of virtue was more likely than not to be a slaveholder; as such, he was more likely to be found transacting business in slave markets and taverns, not places of polite conversation.20 The urban terrain of enslavement in many state capitals of the antebellum South was dominated by the slave auction, the equivalent of our modern stock or commodity exchange. In communities where the sale of African bodies was the central mode of exchange, neither commerce nor conversation were modulated through politeness; the violence of the slave trade and the rowdiness of the captains of this trade excluded polite conversation and conduct altogether. If slave traders were more likely to meet in the slave market than anywhere else in the slave-owning territory of the Americas, then it is fair to say that these encounters were mediated by the violence attendant to slavery rather than polite conversation.

  Reflecting on the circumstances of her sale in a slave market in Bermuda, Mary Prince was to leave her readers a hallowing experience of the terror that mediated the social encounter between Europeans and Africans in the Americas:

  At length the vendue master, who was to offer us for sale like sheep or cattle, arrived, and asked my mother which was the eldest. She said nothing, but pointed to me. He took me by the hand, and led me out into the middle of the street, and, turning me slowly round, exposed me to the view of those who attended the vendue. I was soon surrounded by strange men, who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in like words—as if I could no more understand their meaning than the dumb beasts. I was then put up to sale. The bidding commenced at a few pounds, and gradually rose to fifty-seven, when I was knocked down to the highest bidder; and the people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum for so young a slave.21

  Prince acutely noted how the bidding for her family, which would ensure income for her sellers, was also the brutal unmaking of them as a social unit: “I then saw my sisters led forth, and sold to different owners; so that we had not the sad satisfaction of being partners in bondage. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us, begging of us to keep up a good heart, and do our duty to our new masters. It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another,
and our poor mammy went home with nothing.”22

  There was certainly no polite conversation to mitigate the fact that the sale of Mary Prince and her siblings was a brutal, instrumental form of exchange, a fact that was often borne by engravings of slave auctions that highlighted the plight of families on the auction block, on the verge of their separation. For the white gentlemen involved in these activities, however, the story was rather different. A day at the slave market was like one spent at the coffeehouse or the races. In fact, the paradox of one family unit being destroyed to enable the well-being of another was often what caught the imagination of European travelers to the antebellum South.

  When Eyre Crowe accompanied William Thackeray on a trip to the United States in 1852-1853, for example, he had a chance to visit a slave market in Richmond, Virginia. He left behind a powerful description and series of illustrations on the impact of the business of buying and selling black slaves in the city market. In his account, published as With Thackeray in America, Crowe noticed how the business of selling slaves both dominated and suffused the cultural landscape of Virginia's capital. He remembered reading the local paper one day in March 1853: “It was not, however, the leaders or politics which attracted my eye, so much as the advertisement columns, containing the announcements of slave sales, some of which were to take place that morning in Wall Street, close at hand, at eleven o'clock.”23

  Crowe's description of the slave market on the day of an auction resembled a modern-day stock exchange, complete with clerks and agents. The auction rooms, he noted, were “low rooms, roughly white-washed, with worn and dirty flooring, open, as to doors and windows, to the street, which they lined in succession.”24 Crowe then went on to provide a vivid portrait of the sale of slaves and the radically different reactions of buyers and sellers:

  The sale was announced by hanging out a small red flag on a pole from the doorway. On each of these was pinned a manuscript notice of the lot to be sold. Thus I read:—”Fifteen likely negroes to be disposed of between half-past nine and twelve—five men, six women, two boys, and two girls.” Then followed the dealer's signature, which corresponded to that inscribed over the doorway…. The ordeal gone through by the several negroes began by making a stalwart hand pace up and down the compartment, as would be done with a horse, to note his action. This proving satisfactory, some doubt was expressed as to his ocular soundness. This was met by one gentleman unceremoniously fixing one of his thumbs into the socket of the supposed valid eye, holding up a hair by his other hand, and asking the negro to state what was the object held up before him. He was evidently nonplussed, and in pain at the operation, and he went down in the bidding at once. More hands were put up; but by this time feeling a wish for fresh air, I walked out, passing intervening stores and the grouped expectant negroes there.25

  Crowe even left behind a series of engravings that capture both the tragedy of the slave auction and its centrality in the political economy of the antebellum South (figs. 4.5 and 4.6). Here, the selling and buying of slaves was gentlemanly business; it was at least one of the ways in which the antebellum aristocracy took care of its bills.

  One notably large slave auction held on the eve of the Civil War involved the disposal of 436 men, women, children, and infants belonging to Pierce M. Butler, which began on March 3, 1859. Butler, the owner of two plantations in Georgia, had run into debt (one of the vices of a gentleman), and he needed to dispose of some of his assets to pay off his creditors. The human assets were brought to a racetrack in Savannah, Georgia, where they were put in stalls for horses as they awaited buyers:

  4.5 Eyre Crowe, Slaves Waiting for Sale—Richmond, Virginia. Painted upon an 1853 sketch. Oil painting exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1861.

  4.6 Eyre Crowe, After the Sale: Slaves Going South. 1853.

  The sale had been advertised for several weeks. Every hotel in Savannah was filled with potential buyers. In the days before the auction, potential buyers went to the racetrack to look over the people for sale. The slaves were humiliated when the buyers pulled open their mouths to see their teeth and they pinched their arms and legs to check for muscle strength. The slaves said nothing, unless they hoped to be bought by the person examining them. They knew they were to be sold in families, but “family” was defined as husband and wife, mother and young child, not brother or sister or parent. Some tried to convince prospective buyers to purchase their entire family.26

  Within the next few weeks, families were broken up as diverse assets that were disposed of to different buyers. Slaveholders—all Southern gentlemen—had come to Savannah to make a good buy in what was considered to be the largest sale of slaves in the country; for the blacks in bondage, however, the event came to be referred to as “The Weeping Time.”

  The irony of American slavery, of course, was that the people Butler was selling off had hitherto been part of his extended “family” and lived within his community. As I noted earlier, while absentee West Indian planters such as Codrington and Beckford were insulated from slavery by its distance, American masters were forced by geography and circumstances to enter into an intimate relationship with those they considered nonsubjects. Thus, on the first day of his big slave sale in Savannah, Pierce Butler “walked among his people, speaking to them and shaking the hands of his favorite servants.”27 He owned them, and he was about to dispose of them to pay his debts, yet they were part of his “family.”

  And this kind of relationship was not unusual. William Lee was owned by George Washington, but the lives of the two men—and their world experiences—were intimately bound by the culture of slavery. It was as if the law that allowed one to own the other had also made them inseparable. Sometimes, as in the case of Thomas Jefferson and his personal slave, Jupiter Jefferson, this intimacy would almost be like a marriage, decreed and willed by law and social custom: “For over fifty years, the lives of Jupiter and Thomas Jefferson were bound together by law, for one man considered the other his property. In 1743, both were born at Shadwell, a newly opened plantation on Virginia's western frontier. As boys they may have fished in the Rivanna River, set trap lines along its banks, and shared hunting escapades in the surrounding woods. As young men they traveled the length and breadth of Virginia together and found wives on the same plantation near Williamsburg.”28 The world of the master was intertwined with that of the slave; freedom and bondage went hand in hand.

  4.7 John Greenwood, Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam. Circa 1752-1758.

  As one moved from Europe to America, the social spaces in which the culture of taste operated also became different. For if the coffeehouse's primary function in Britain was to create a space in which polite conversation would replace the uncouth idiom of trade and thus enable those who had made money in commerce to differentiate means from ends, the slave auction denoted the conflation of brutal means and pleasurable ends. In the landscape of slavery, taste could not taper commerce; all it could do, perhaps, is confront it with its contradictions through irony. This is the kind of irony we see in John Greenwood's 1778 painting Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, the portrait of a group of prominent sea captains whom the painter had encountered in Suriname (fig. 4.7).

  Seen through critical eyes, the tortuous nature of the slave market and the unvirtuous carousing of slave traders would seem to function as the antithesis of taste. Indeed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to carouse is “to drink out; drink freely and repeatedly,” the very activities that the London coffeehouse was intended to suppress and surpass. Rather than representing a measure of deportment, the behavior of the sea captains in Greenwood's painting reflected the carnivalesque and excessive, modes of behavior that were licensed by the cultural institutions of slave-owning cultures.29 Here, carousing was not a social aberration, but a mode of behavior to be found even among respectable members of the slave-owning class. Hence, it was not a great surprise that the carousers caught in Greenwood's picture were not mere buccaneers, but prominent Newport slave traders, incl
uding Esek Hopkins, later commander of the United States Navy, and Joseph Wanton, soon to become governor of Rhode Island.30 Could American slavery be compatible with the culture of taste? Could an aesthetic culture emerge in the shadow of slavery?

  3

  An aesthetic ideology did, of course, emerge in the antebellum South, but it was intimately bound to slavery. As Louis Wright has noted in The First Gentlemen of Virginia, by the end of the seventeenth century a “tight aristocracy” had developed in Virginia and “quickly gained a power and influence far in excess of the numerical importance of its numbers, who were vastly outnumbered by the yeoman class.”31 Like the West Indian planters discussed in the previous chapter, members of this colonial American class were constantly haunted by doubts about whether they could measure up to the English standard of gentility to which they aspired, and by lingering doubts about their aristocratic origins. It was not unusual for the Virginian aristocracy to wrap fantastical stories about royal genealogies around themselves, but this didn't stop taunts about other possible, nonaristocratic origins. As Marcus W. Jernegan caustically observed, the records of Newgate Prison and the Old Bailey, rather than Burke's peerage, might “prove a more fruitful source of genealogical information” on the antebellum aristocracy.32

  When he wrote his book, Wright was eager to salvage the image of the American aristocracy as the worthy equal of its European counterpart, but the real achievement of his work was the recognition that a different set of social circumstances, including the code of honor that governed the lives of the slave-owning class, had led to the modification of the ideal of taste. Virginian gentlemen, Wright observed, thrived on a code that recognized “the inherent inequality in mankind”; they assumed that the upper class had “a natural and inherited right”; they embraced wealth as the precondition for rank; and they cultivated polite manners as the essence of selfhood.33 Nevertheless, Wright noted that the introduction of what he called “the African slave system” was “the most important factor in the evolution of the Virginian aristocracy, for it enabled wealthy planters to crush, perhaps unconsciously, the economic power of small landowners who depended upon their own labor.”34 What he failed to underscore, however, were the specific and unprecedented ways in which the introduction of slaves into the colonial economy challenged, and then transformed, the culture of taste and the social imaginary of the American ruling class.