Of Biscuits and Liberty; or, Freedom Never Tasted so Good: The Condition of Enslaved Humanity in the Antebellum United States
The following was a lecture I presented in the First Year Seminar Series at Bard College at Simon’s Rock (when I used to teach there). Each text in the seminar was accompanied by a lecture. This lecture was intended to supplement our reading of Frederick Douglass's narrative.
Recently, the students in my class entitled “Colonialism, Capitalism, and Slavery” had to find an on-line archive of historical documents, browse the archive, write a review of the website, and write a bibliographic essay on the theme or period that the archive represented. One of the students came across an archive at the University of Virginia entitled “The Geography of Slavery” which contains both transcriptions and digital images of advertisements for runaway slaves and servants from the Chesapeake bay region from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth-century.
One advertisement from the Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer in particular caught our class’s attention. The notice ran as follows:
This ad, however, contains the curious suggestion that Henry Price, alias James, would “no doubt be found in some biscuit bakehouse.” Immediately, our class began to wonder what could we as historians do with this information. There were many ways to try to puzzle out this archival trace, and we came up with a list of questions.
Firstly, why did Andrew Jamieson, the owner looking for Price insist that his slave would be found searching for food? Our contemporary image of slave runaways would suggest that Price must have been running to freedom, not biscuits! So maybe Jamieson was deluding himself, refusing to believe one of his slaves could be so unsatisfied as to want to run to the North. As a slave owner, to acknowledge such rebellious behavior in your slaves was also to acknowledge the limits to your own power and authority, as well as to acknowledge the conscious capacity and will of your chattel. Both these capitulations struck at the heart of pro-slavery ideology, and there is ample evidence that masters did not want to recognize that slavery in the United States was anything but a benign institution.
Beyond these concerns, given the particular demands of the institution of slavery, some historians have suggested that slave owners were incapable of knowing anything of the interiority of their slaves. The institution set up an almost insurmountable wall between master and slave, neither willing to reveal the truth of their innermost thoughts on the nature of themselves or the other.
On the other hand, who are we to be so dismissive of Andrew Jamieson, and so expectant of Henry Price. If slave owners were unwilling to publicly admit the problems inherent in slavery, they recognized, if only obliquely, that the institution was unstable—hence slave patrols, laws punishing slaves and absolving owners, even the pro-slavery ideology itself. If at least some enslaved people weren’t involved in a daily struggle to bring about the destruction of slavery, then why did the slave states go so far to bend their societies around the fundamental task of keeping the enslaved in that condition? Southern whites new quite well that they were sitting on a powder keg that could ignite at any minute. They were too organically tied to the institution to think that the enslaved wanted to be in that position.
This suggests another, even more radical possibility for Henry Price: maybe he was hungry. Maybe running away at this moment meant the freedom to supplement a possibly meager diet. Just as we should not ignore the possibility that Jamieson might actually have some inclination as to what his chattel wanted, we should also be careful not to assume that all runaways were only ever attempting to gain permanent freedom from slavery.
Ultimately, my aim here is to inform our reading of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, indeed the whole genre of ex-slave narratives from the mid-nineteenth century, by complicating our understanding of slave life and our expectations of the enslaved. Henry Price’s story, I think, forces us to confront the difficult questions of slave agency and resistance as seen from the twenty-first century. The genre of ex-slave narratives, so concerned as they are with the twin questions of slavery and freedom, have been read without the proper care. In recent years, they have contributed to a facile and simplistic notion of the enslaved and their understanding of freedom. What the popular myth of our shared slave past tells us is that slaves ran away for freedom, following the north star, to Canaan, to the promised land, to Canada. We have rewritten one of the ultimate act of slave resistance—stealing your own body from a master and a society that denied even corporeal dominion to the subject of that body—as the only act of slave resistance worth really remembering (other than the slave rebellion that we call the civil war, which, as its name implies, we don’t remember as a slave rebellion but rather a “tragic war of brother against brother,” both being imagined as white).
The humanity of the enslaved, ironically then, begins where in fact slavery ends: the action of running away, an action which negates the juridical structures of enslavement, leaves just humanity. This historiographic move shifts our gaze away from the institution of slavery, and secures a blind spot for slavery in American collective memory. It recapitulates the racist imagination of the enslaved as being so thoroughly determined by slavery as to be either happily duped, or infantilized and damaged. Thus only outside of slavery, after the act of running for freedom has been successfully completed, can we imagine African-American’s as fully capable historical subjects, i.e., human beings.
Theoretical Approaches to Slavery in the United States
No doubt we can all agree that chattel slavery was an immoral, unjust, brutal, and degrading system of racialized labor. We should realize, however, that consensus on this point came remarkably recently—as late as the 1940s dominant scholarly opinion held the Gone With the Wind vision of happy and irresponsible slaves. But the recognition of slavery’s brutality, while important, only gets us so far. It tells little about the lives – the day-to-day experiences – of the people who suffered and yet flourished as human beings under slavery in the antebellum South. In fact, while the broad consensus that slavery was cruel and violent is certainly an improvement over earlier attempts to treat it as a benign institution, the new position shares with the previous one a tendency to homogenize the experience of enslaved peoples. While in the “moonlight and magnolias” myth, slaves were ignorant, happy-go-lucky children who loved massa and misses, a swing to the other side of the spectrum only gets us so far. Recognizing the institution of slavery solely as a host of horrors only serves to cast the enslaved as hapless victims with little choice but passive acceptance of the degradation of bondage.
In essence, both the horribly outdated notion of the happy slave and the equally problematic understanding of the enslaved-as-total-victim depend on the interpreter writing enslaved people themselves out of the picture. In one, slaves don’t to matter because they're happy, in the other because slavery fully succeeded in crushing their spirits and souls. Both require us to adopt an equally racist belief that the only important element in slavery were white owners. And both make this crucial mistake: both assume that slavery is safely confined to the past, that it is over, and its legacy has no claims on us, that its resonance no longer matters in a society where freedom and equality are the reigning doctrines. This is the (I think false) belief that in a post-racial United States that had a black president, slavery, as the saying goes, “is history.”
This vision of history is one that arrogantly believes that the literary devices of history telling have been able to literally “conclude” this shameful period of American society. That of course, is wrong. Slavery’s legacy is far more powerful than the comedic nostalgia of gone with the wind, it is also more powerful than the tragic narrative of victim-hood. To use the words of William Faulkner, The history of slavery is not dead. It’s not even past.
Since Eugene Genovese published his magisterial Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, scholars have catalogued the agency of the enslaved as evidence of the role they have played in shaping their own lives under slavery and to counter a totalizing vision of slavery that succeeding in making enslaved people either passive children or passive victims. From the early days of the American colonial project through the eighteenth-century and into the nineteenth century apotheosis of the institution, we see agency in everyday forms of resistance, in the lives of women, and even in the middle passage. It's not too much to say, as Walter Johnson has argued, agency is still the hallmark of the discipline.
Agency, in this definition, is evidenced by the various mechanisms enslaved people employed to resist the will of slave owners. These scholars have demonstrated how the enslaved created autonomous worlds within the system of Antebellum slavery in the United States to blunt the more horrific aspects of the system of slavery in the American South. Two institutions in particular, the family and Christianity provided enslaved people a host of weapons to fight back against their enslavers, sometimes fashioning revolutionary visions of a world without slavery, other times strategically choosing to resist the logics of slavery in ways that seem more modest to our contemporary eyes, simple bare-life facts such as finding meaning in a cruel system designed to deny the enslaved even their own humanity.
The results of this scholarly turn toward agency and resistance have been revolutionary for the historiography of slavery: we now understand much better how the enslaved, operating within a system over which they had no legal control, shaped slavery just as much as did white slave owners. In essence, we now know that Antebellum slavery was a system that was literally created by both slaves and masters. Let me repeat that. Slave agency and resistance does not matter just because it happened—it is not just an interesting sidebar to the bigger story of slave oppression. In very real ways slave resistance was as important as white owner’s intents and desires in producing the type of slavery that existed in the American south.
How can I say this? How did slaves create slavery? Because every time that slaves resisted or opposed their white owners, those slave owners had to move to contain that resistance. As I argued earlier, white southerners understood that they stood atop a powder keg, and they had to do everything in their power to keep slavery in place. The history of slavery is more than just the history of planters oppressing slaves; it is also the history of white southerners constantly moving to contain slave resistance and critique, lest the very structures of slavery itself fall down.
Yet this scholarly turn toward agency and resistance also has downsides, and they mirror the popular myth that makes running away the ultimate act of slave resistance. The word “agency,” as Johnson reminds us, has a complicated history (anyone who has read Walter Johnson, will recognize my debt to his essay “On Agency”). But in the ways I just described, “agency” has generally been used as self-directed action, the type of action that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), quoting the British romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Coleridge, terms “personal free agency.” The problem here is that the nineteenth-century definition of agency as “independent will and volition” was created in self-conscious philosophical opposition to the condition of slavery that existed at the time. In other words, our understanding of what it is to be human, so indebted to the nineteenth-century Romantic philosophers, was constructed philosophically against the Romantics’ understanding of what it meant to be a slave! The result? To quote Johnson, “the term ‘agency’ smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion of selfhood, with its emphasis on independence and choice, right into the middle of a conversation about slavery against which that supposedly natural (at least for white men) condition was originally defined.”
Thus, when it comes to the question of the agency of enslaved people, what we have is a theoretical model which privileges self-determination and choice being applied to a historical condition of, in Johnson’s words, “civil objectification and choicelessness.” This has left us with a rational-choice model of enslaved people where the “rational choice” was freedom, and the irrational choice was collaboration, apolitical action, passivity, or acceptance of the power relations in slavery. To put it in another analytical frame, inaction is evidence to us in the twenty-first century of damage or infantilization, in essence a historical judgment of victimhood which has the tendency to make enslaved people the passive objects, rather than the active subjects, of historical narratives.
So what does this quest for agency leave out? It becomes clear that anything which does not look like outright resistance to slavery becomes historically unimportant. History which does not contribute to the larger “progressive” story of American freedom and equality, or actions that do not pass the test of “independent will and volition” run the risk of demonstrating how the system of antebellum slavery manufactured the consent of the enslaved to their own enslavement: in the words of Genovese, day-to-day resistance to slavery was, by this argument, at best an “apolitical” form of “accommodation,” and at worst “pathetic nihilism.” From this standpoint, I think it becomes easier to see, even in the ex-slave narratives such as Douglass’s, echoes of this analytical quandary that pits the problems of victimhood against self-determined action.
Yet, there are many actions of the enslaved beyond outright resistance to slavery that seem worthy of historical understanding, and those actions are better understood as falling within the category of “enslaved humanity,” rather than the category of “slave agency and resistance.” To invoke the idea of the condition of enslaved humanity, as Johnson argues is, “to try to think, at once, about the bare life existence of slaves, the ways they suffered in and resisted slavery, and the ways they flourished in slavery, not in the sense of loving their slavery, but in the sense of loving themselves and one another.” To look at the enslaved in this way writes a history of slavery where the lives of the enslaved are “powerfully conditioned by, though not reducible to, their slavery.”
The Condition of Enslaved Humanity and Douglass’s Narrative
It is in this context and against this backdrop that I want to look at a few specific examples of the figuration of freedom, and its opposite “unfreedom,” in Douglass’s Narrative. We are first introduced to freedom in the Narrative when Douglass obtained a copy of the Columbian Orator which verbalizes the notion of freedom and its relationship to abolition. It was only in reading the Orator, Douglass told his readers, that he received “a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.” It was the Columbian Orator that led Douglass to “abhor and detest my enslavers” rather than the experience of slavery itself.
This passage has always troubled me. As a trope exploring the links between knowledge, enlightenment, and selfhood, the fact that Douglass tied reading to consciousness made and makes for good morality tales—especially in the context of the nineteenth-century abolition movement which drew on middle-class discourses of civilization and its source in the written word. It also helped that American print culture and the publishing industry was booming at the same time and the number of books and magazines available for Americans to read grew exponentially. The expansion of print culture simultaneously made Douglass’s narrative both possible and all the more significant. There is a nice tautology here in Douglass’s repeated mention of literacy, knowledge, and freedom: His supposedly inherent quest for freedom drove him to learn to read which lead him to hate slavery and want to run away to freedom (which somehow he did not already want), which eventually lead him to freedom, and then to authorship. The circular logic worked well for Douglass’s literary project of presenting himself as an exceptional character. Good literature, perhaps, but bad history. (I'm not suggesting that historians have taken Douglass at face value here, but I believe that the typical classroom presents Douglass's literacy-freedom matrix too simply.)
To imagine that enslaved people were incapable of abhorring and detesting their masters, or that they had no conception of the eighteenth-century enlightenment notions of human rights until they were literate is simply not true. The same circuits of knowledge that brought slave Christianity and the work songs that Douglass wrote of also brought “bold denunciations” by those enslaved. Reverend Anderson Edwards, an ex-slave from Texas, quoted in Genovese summed it up best: “I had to preach what massa told me. And he said tell them niggers if they obey the master they’d go to heaven. But I know there was something better for them,” Edwards recalled. “But I dared not tell em except on the sly. And that I done lots. I told em If they keep prayin, the lord will set em free.”
Douglass all but acknowledged the way that slaves used Christianity not long after the passage on the Columbian Orator when he prayed to God for freedom:
At this point in the Narrative, the literary character Frederick Douglass (as opposed to the historical subject) is at the precipice of freedom, in mind if not in legal body. But one more exceptional incident must occur before he could become the spirit of freedom that he embodied in the second half of the text: the fight with Covey, the slave-driver.
The beating by Covey, Douglass’s resistance, and then his appeals to Thomas Auld created a moment in the narrative which, Douglass explained “was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.” It was also, I would argue, the point at which Douglass steps away from the condition of enslaved humanity and opened the door for our contemporary misreading of the Narrative that contributes to a less-than-complex sense of freedom and slavery in the antebellum United States.
The fight with Covey was a significant passage because it demonstrated the character Douglass’s maturation as a subject willing to stand up and resist slavery in a very legible way. He not only refused to be whipped, a prerogative of any master and almost any white southerner, he also fought back against Covey. Short of attempting to escape or a planned insurrection, this act was as close to unmitigated opposition as one can get. But what the structure of the Douglass’s retelling downplayed was another terribly important element of the history: the moment when Douglass ran away to complain to Auld.
The narrative of Douglass’s appeal to Auld gets lost in what preceded and what followed: bloody, harrowing scenes of brutality and violence. But more significant, I think, or more informative of the system of slavery in the antebellum U.S., as well as more explanatory of the condition of enslaved humanity, is the fact that Douglass ran away after the incident, not off the plantation, but rather to his owner. Douglass does not explain this instance as running away, rather he was “resolved, for the first time, to go to my master, enter a complaint, and ask his protection. … He asked me what I wanted. I told him, to let me get a new home; that as sure as I lived with Mr. Covey again, … that Covey would surely kill me. Master Thomas ridiculed the idea that there was any danger.” Auld denies Douglass’s pleas (though the very act of Douglass entering a complaint from his master should serve to complicate any sense of utter victimhood we might want to attach to antebellum slavery), but what Douglass does with that denial in his telling of the story is what’s interesting.
Auld’s rejection gives Douglass the opportunity to move the Narrative back to the scene with Covey where he defended himself, but six months later, at which point Douglass leaves Covey’s service. Douglass implies that when Auld ignored his plea, he had to fend for himself. In actuality, however, the practice of coming to an owner with a complaint against an overseer or driver who had rented the labor of the enslaved was quite common. Similarly, while owners were loath to admit directly to an enslaved person the justice of their complaint, these interpersonal actions, the very stuff of the paternalist ethos that governed southern slavery, provided the enslaved with a considerable amount of leverage in determining their material conditions as well as the ideological figuration of slavery, though slave owners would never have openly admitted the role that complaints such as these played in the reconfiguration of slavery. What the actual result of Douglass’s interaction with Auld was, the Narrative did not say (did Auld scold Covey? Did it cause him to cease doing business with him?), preferring instead to give the character of Douglass the primacy of action and intention, and thus assigning causality to his direct and violent resistance to Covey: it was his physical resistance that changed his condition when in Covey’s service, not any action by Auld. Though, other sources tell us that often times owners who heard repeatedly from those they enslaved that an overseer or driver was working them too hard would often instruct the overseer to change his behavior and would nearly as often fire an overseer or refuse to rent their slaves to a driver who was not respected by the enslaved of the region.
Thus Douglass denied his act of running away at that moment to Auld, just as he eliminated from the category of running away the many other acts of stealing time and body in the narrative. Take, for example, the opening scenes where Douglass’s mother runs away to be by his side at night; or Aunt Hester’s furtive meetings with Ned Roberts that resulted in the savage beating that set the stage for violence in the text; or the other moments where even Douglass runs away for short periods of time, not in an attempt to gain his liberty by escaping to the North, but rather as a strategy to gain breathing room. Often, following an angry blow-up by an overseer or maybe after having been discovered pilfering food from plantation stores, enslaved people would run to the woods surrounding a plantation to avoid punishments from an owner administered in a fit of rage. Violence in slavery, as we can see in Douglass’s Narrative was horrifyingly arbitrary and enslaved peoples sought to mitigate the caprice of slave owners by putting spatial and temporal distance between an offense and its punishment. They would most often return in a day or two after tempers had cooled and the likelihood of more brutal punishment had diminished. These are just a few of the many possible reasons for an enslaved person to “steal” themselves but not try to leave slavery. However, they are actions that Douglass-the-author eliminates from the category of “running away” as he dismisses them as inconsequential (in a way strangely similar to Genovese's) in comparison to his ultimate act of escape that brings the book to a close.
Yet, after the fight with Covey and Douglass’s discourses on freedom and slavery, Douglass explained that he was forever altered, thinking only of running away, or rather only of running away to freedom. The next discussion of flight came when Douglass hatched a plot with his fellow slaves to escape to the North. So strong was Douglass’s desire for liberty, and so tied to the act of running away was that freedom, that “in coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.” Note the relationship here between slavery and death on the one hand, and liberty and life, or human existence on the other. This linguistic tie goes a long way to explain our current obsession with slavery as a story of human self-actualization: until literal freedom is achieved, humanity under slavery is essentially impossible.
Let us go back to Douglass’s description of his fight with Covey, and the inauguration of his plot to escape. Note what Douglass says he learned from the fight with Covey: “This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.” Douglass echoes this sentiment when he explains to the reader that his sense of time under slavery, mediated through a very gendered lens, was what led him to want to run away:
This stands in sharp contrast to the model of escape that Harriet Jacobs provided in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs was born enslaved in North Carolina in 1813. At the age of 12 she became the property of the Norcom family. The Norcom patriarch James repeatedly assaulted and raped Jacobs. He refused to let her “marry,” even in the system of slavery, another man. Despite Norcom’s demands, Jacobs fell in love with a white man named Samuel Sawyer and the couple had two children together. Norcom was jealous and vindictive and, like Captain Anthony in his relationship with Aunt Hester in Douglass’s Narrative, he tortured Jacobs for ten years. In 1835 she resolved to run away. But rather than head north to “freedom,” she spent her liberty from slavery first in the crawl space above the porch of a friend’s home, and then in her grandmother’s attic. For seven years Jacobs lived confined, hardly “free,” but not enslaved. Why? From her Grandmother’s attic, she could be near her children, keep an eye on them, and assure herself that they were safe. Thus, she chose not to run away from the social world that created her – a world that was both cruel and vicious, but also one that, at least through her family, provided her life with meaning, and presumably gave her some fulfillment. Indeed, she could have endeavored to run away from her family but she chose to stay.
To me, this complicates the notions of freedom and unfreedom that we have been examining, as well as any understanding of agency and resistance that Douglass theorizes in the Narrative. Finally, however, it suggests that the material basis for understanding slavery, profoundly affected the understanding of freedom, will, choice, and humanity held by any given enslaved person (or by the rest of the inhabitants of the United States, for that matter). If it was Douglass’s sense of manhood that prompted him to leave the world that he had known as a slave, it was alternatively Jacobs’s sense of herself as a mother and a women that suggested that she stay.
Let us come back to Henry Price, who may or may not have ended up in “some biscuit bakehouse.” We are left, I hope with a picture of freedom that is at once more complex and more troubling. For enslaved people the most basic features of their lives, Johnson powerfully argues, “feeling hungry, cold, tired, needing to go to the bathroom—revealed the extent to which even the bare life sensations of their physical bodies were sedimented with their enslavement. So, too, with sadness and humor and love and fear.” But, he goes on, “those things were never reducible to simple features of slavery.” The enslaved lived, in a sense, as all people did and do, in structures not of their own making, but ones that provide both boundaries as well as opportunities. The lines of power might be more clear, and certainly more violent and brutal, but that does not mean that the institution of slavery was successful in its attempt to dishumanize those who were enslaved. Indeed, in both Douglass and Jacobs, as well as countless others who lived and died, as well as suffered and loved, under slavery, we are given a glimpse of the incredible variety that is the human experience. Or, in Johnson's soaring words: “The condition of enslaved humanity, it could perhaps be said, was a condition that was at once thoroughly determined and insistently transcendent.”
Recently, the students in my class entitled “Colonialism, Capitalism, and Slavery” had to find an on-line archive of historical documents, browse the archive, write a review of the website, and write a bibliographic essay on the theme or period that the archive represented. One of the students came across an archive at the University of Virginia entitled “The Geography of Slavery” which contains both transcriptions and digital images of advertisements for runaway slaves and servants from the Chesapeake bay region from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth-century.
One advertisement from the Alexandria Advertiser and Commercial Intelligencer in particular caught our class’s attention. The notice ran as follows:
One Dollar Reward. RAN AWAY from the subscriber, on the 27th ult. … Henry Price (alias James) aged 20 years, about 5 feet 9 inches high, downcast, countenance [sic], stout made, and will no doubt be found in some biscuit bakehouse.Initially, this advertisement caught our attention because of this strange mention of where the owner thought Price could be found. Most runaway notices described the physical appearance of the enslaved people being sought – things such as size and build, skin color, and other distinguishing physical features, especially body modifications that were the result of punishment from slave owners, such common deformities as ears or fingers that had been lopped off, or scars and brands that resulted from whipping or other acts of torture. They also often described special skills an enslaved person might have: carpentry or shipbuilding, blacksmithing or caulking that might give a clue to slave catchers as to where to begin looking (runaways had to find a means to live outside of slavery and those who had experience beyond common field labor would employ their skills to earn a living off the plantation).
This ad, however, contains the curious suggestion that Henry Price, alias James, would “no doubt be found in some biscuit bakehouse.” Immediately, our class began to wonder what could we as historians do with this information. There were many ways to try to puzzle out this archival trace, and we came up with a list of questions.
Firstly, why did Andrew Jamieson, the owner looking for Price insist that his slave would be found searching for food? Our contemporary image of slave runaways would suggest that Price must have been running to freedom, not biscuits! So maybe Jamieson was deluding himself, refusing to believe one of his slaves could be so unsatisfied as to want to run to the North. As a slave owner, to acknowledge such rebellious behavior in your slaves was also to acknowledge the limits to your own power and authority, as well as to acknowledge the conscious capacity and will of your chattel. Both these capitulations struck at the heart of pro-slavery ideology, and there is ample evidence that masters did not want to recognize that slavery in the United States was anything but a benign institution.
Beyond these concerns, given the particular demands of the institution of slavery, some historians have suggested that slave owners were incapable of knowing anything of the interiority of their slaves. The institution set up an almost insurmountable wall between master and slave, neither willing to reveal the truth of their innermost thoughts on the nature of themselves or the other.
On the other hand, who are we to be so dismissive of Andrew Jamieson, and so expectant of Henry Price. If slave owners were unwilling to publicly admit the problems inherent in slavery, they recognized, if only obliquely, that the institution was unstable—hence slave patrols, laws punishing slaves and absolving owners, even the pro-slavery ideology itself. If at least some enslaved people weren’t involved in a daily struggle to bring about the destruction of slavery, then why did the slave states go so far to bend their societies around the fundamental task of keeping the enslaved in that condition? Southern whites new quite well that they were sitting on a powder keg that could ignite at any minute. They were too organically tied to the institution to think that the enslaved wanted to be in that position.
This suggests another, even more radical possibility for Henry Price: maybe he was hungry. Maybe running away at this moment meant the freedom to supplement a possibly meager diet. Just as we should not ignore the possibility that Jamieson might actually have some inclination as to what his chattel wanted, we should also be careful not to assume that all runaways were only ever attempting to gain permanent freedom from slavery.
Ultimately, my aim here is to inform our reading of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, indeed the whole genre of ex-slave narratives from the mid-nineteenth century, by complicating our understanding of slave life and our expectations of the enslaved. Henry Price’s story, I think, forces us to confront the difficult questions of slave agency and resistance as seen from the twenty-first century. The genre of ex-slave narratives, so concerned as they are with the twin questions of slavery and freedom, have been read without the proper care. In recent years, they have contributed to a facile and simplistic notion of the enslaved and their understanding of freedom. What the popular myth of our shared slave past tells us is that slaves ran away for freedom, following the north star, to Canaan, to the promised land, to Canada. We have rewritten one of the ultimate act of slave resistance—stealing your own body from a master and a society that denied even corporeal dominion to the subject of that body—as the only act of slave resistance worth really remembering (other than the slave rebellion that we call the civil war, which, as its name implies, we don’t remember as a slave rebellion but rather a “tragic war of brother against brother,” both being imagined as white).
The humanity of the enslaved, ironically then, begins where in fact slavery ends: the action of running away, an action which negates the juridical structures of enslavement, leaves just humanity. This historiographic move shifts our gaze away from the institution of slavery, and secures a blind spot for slavery in American collective memory. It recapitulates the racist imagination of the enslaved as being so thoroughly determined by slavery as to be either happily duped, or infantilized and damaged. Thus only outside of slavery, after the act of running for freedom has been successfully completed, can we imagine African-American’s as fully capable historical subjects, i.e., human beings.
* * *
That was a long introduction, but one that takes 74 words of an advertisement for a runaway slave as an opening in what has been one of the most difficult topics to confront in American history. From this vantage point, I want to do two things to complicate our reading of slave narratives. First, I want to explore the ways that historians have treated the problem of slavery and freedom, to think theoretically about how to approach the subject, and to point out some of the pitfalls and possibilities of different theoretical stances. Then I want to use Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave to question the way in which Douglass configures freedom, as opposed to the ways less celebrated words from the enslaved have done so. All of this, I hope, will give us a better sense of what the condition of enslaved humanity consisted of, and how our imagination of history and the past can both limit as well as open up knowledge onto that condition.Theoretical Approaches to Slavery in the United States
No doubt we can all agree that chattel slavery was an immoral, unjust, brutal, and degrading system of racialized labor. We should realize, however, that consensus on this point came remarkably recently—as late as the 1940s dominant scholarly opinion held the Gone With the Wind vision of happy and irresponsible slaves. But the recognition of slavery’s brutality, while important, only gets us so far. It tells little about the lives – the day-to-day experiences – of the people who suffered and yet flourished as human beings under slavery in the antebellum South. In fact, while the broad consensus that slavery was cruel and violent is certainly an improvement over earlier attempts to treat it as a benign institution, the new position shares with the previous one a tendency to homogenize the experience of enslaved peoples. While in the “moonlight and magnolias” myth, slaves were ignorant, happy-go-lucky children who loved massa and misses, a swing to the other side of the spectrum only gets us so far. Recognizing the institution of slavery solely as a host of horrors only serves to cast the enslaved as hapless victims with little choice but passive acceptance of the degradation of bondage.
In essence, both the horribly outdated notion of the happy slave and the equally problematic understanding of the enslaved-as-total-victim depend on the interpreter writing enslaved people themselves out of the picture. In one, slaves don’t to matter because they're happy, in the other because slavery fully succeeded in crushing their spirits and souls. Both require us to adopt an equally racist belief that the only important element in slavery were white owners. And both make this crucial mistake: both assume that slavery is safely confined to the past, that it is over, and its legacy has no claims on us, that its resonance no longer matters in a society where freedom and equality are the reigning doctrines. This is the (I think false) belief that in a post-racial United States that had a black president, slavery, as the saying goes, “is history.”
This vision of history is one that arrogantly believes that the literary devices of history telling have been able to literally “conclude” this shameful period of American society. That of course, is wrong. Slavery’s legacy is far more powerful than the comedic nostalgia of gone with the wind, it is also more powerful than the tragic narrative of victim-hood. To use the words of William Faulkner, The history of slavery is not dead. It’s not even past.
Since Eugene Genovese published his magisterial Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, scholars have catalogued the agency of the enslaved as evidence of the role they have played in shaping their own lives under slavery and to counter a totalizing vision of slavery that succeeding in making enslaved people either passive children or passive victims. From the early days of the American colonial project through the eighteenth-century and into the nineteenth century apotheosis of the institution, we see agency in everyday forms of resistance, in the lives of women, and even in the middle passage. It's not too much to say, as Walter Johnson has argued, agency is still the hallmark of the discipline.
Agency, in this definition, is evidenced by the various mechanisms enslaved people employed to resist the will of slave owners. These scholars have demonstrated how the enslaved created autonomous worlds within the system of Antebellum slavery in the United States to blunt the more horrific aspects of the system of slavery in the American South. Two institutions in particular, the family and Christianity provided enslaved people a host of weapons to fight back against their enslavers, sometimes fashioning revolutionary visions of a world without slavery, other times strategically choosing to resist the logics of slavery in ways that seem more modest to our contemporary eyes, simple bare-life facts such as finding meaning in a cruel system designed to deny the enslaved even their own humanity.
The results of this scholarly turn toward agency and resistance have been revolutionary for the historiography of slavery: we now understand much better how the enslaved, operating within a system over which they had no legal control, shaped slavery just as much as did white slave owners. In essence, we now know that Antebellum slavery was a system that was literally created by both slaves and masters. Let me repeat that. Slave agency and resistance does not matter just because it happened—it is not just an interesting sidebar to the bigger story of slave oppression. In very real ways slave resistance was as important as white owner’s intents and desires in producing the type of slavery that existed in the American south.
How can I say this? How did slaves create slavery? Because every time that slaves resisted or opposed their white owners, those slave owners had to move to contain that resistance. As I argued earlier, white southerners understood that they stood atop a powder keg, and they had to do everything in their power to keep slavery in place. The history of slavery is more than just the history of planters oppressing slaves; it is also the history of white southerners constantly moving to contain slave resistance and critique, lest the very structures of slavery itself fall down.
Yet this scholarly turn toward agency and resistance also has downsides, and they mirror the popular myth that makes running away the ultimate act of slave resistance. The word “agency,” as Johnson reminds us, has a complicated history (anyone who has read Walter Johnson, will recognize my debt to his essay “On Agency”). But in the ways I just described, “agency” has generally been used as self-directed action, the type of action that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), quoting the British romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Coleridge, terms “personal free agency.” The problem here is that the nineteenth-century definition of agency as “independent will and volition” was created in self-conscious philosophical opposition to the condition of slavery that existed at the time. In other words, our understanding of what it is to be human, so indebted to the nineteenth-century Romantic philosophers, was constructed philosophically against the Romantics’ understanding of what it meant to be a slave! The result? To quote Johnson, “the term ‘agency’ smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion of selfhood, with its emphasis on independence and choice, right into the middle of a conversation about slavery against which that supposedly natural (at least for white men) condition was originally defined.”
Thus, when it comes to the question of the agency of enslaved people, what we have is a theoretical model which privileges self-determination and choice being applied to a historical condition of, in Johnson’s words, “civil objectification and choicelessness.” This has left us with a rational-choice model of enslaved people where the “rational choice” was freedom, and the irrational choice was collaboration, apolitical action, passivity, or acceptance of the power relations in slavery. To put it in another analytical frame, inaction is evidence to us in the twenty-first century of damage or infantilization, in essence a historical judgment of victimhood which has the tendency to make enslaved people the passive objects, rather than the active subjects, of historical narratives.
So what does this quest for agency leave out? It becomes clear that anything which does not look like outright resistance to slavery becomes historically unimportant. History which does not contribute to the larger “progressive” story of American freedom and equality, or actions that do not pass the test of “independent will and volition” run the risk of demonstrating how the system of antebellum slavery manufactured the consent of the enslaved to their own enslavement: in the words of Genovese, day-to-day resistance to slavery was, by this argument, at best an “apolitical” form of “accommodation,” and at worst “pathetic nihilism.” From this standpoint, I think it becomes easier to see, even in the ex-slave narratives such as Douglass’s, echoes of this analytical quandary that pits the problems of victimhood against self-determined action.
Yet, there are many actions of the enslaved beyond outright resistance to slavery that seem worthy of historical understanding, and those actions are better understood as falling within the category of “enslaved humanity,” rather than the category of “slave agency and resistance.” To invoke the idea of the condition of enslaved humanity, as Johnson argues is, “to try to think, at once, about the bare life existence of slaves, the ways they suffered in and resisted slavery, and the ways they flourished in slavery, not in the sense of loving their slavery, but in the sense of loving themselves and one another.” To look at the enslaved in this way writes a history of slavery where the lives of the enslaved are “powerfully conditioned by, though not reducible to, their slavery.”
The Condition of Enslaved Humanity and Douglass’s Narrative
It is in this context and against this backdrop that I want to look at a few specific examples of the figuration of freedom, and its opposite “unfreedom,” in Douglass’s Narrative. We are first introduced to freedom in the Narrative when Douglass obtained a copy of the Columbian Orator which verbalizes the notion of freedom and its relationship to abolition. It was only in reading the Orator, Douglass told his readers, that he received “a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.” It was the Columbian Orator that led Douglass to “abhor and detest my enslavers” rather than the experience of slavery itself.
This passage has always troubled me. As a trope exploring the links between knowledge, enlightenment, and selfhood, the fact that Douglass tied reading to consciousness made and makes for good morality tales—especially in the context of the nineteenth-century abolition movement which drew on middle-class discourses of civilization and its source in the written word. It also helped that American print culture and the publishing industry was booming at the same time and the number of books and magazines available for Americans to read grew exponentially. The expansion of print culture simultaneously made Douglass’s narrative both possible and all the more significant. There is a nice tautology here in Douglass’s repeated mention of literacy, knowledge, and freedom: His supposedly inherent quest for freedom drove him to learn to read which lead him to hate slavery and want to run away to freedom (which somehow he did not already want), which eventually lead him to freedom, and then to authorship. The circular logic worked well for Douglass’s literary project of presenting himself as an exceptional character. Good literature, perhaps, but bad history. (I'm not suggesting that historians have taken Douglass at face value here, but I believe that the typical classroom presents Douglass's literacy-freedom matrix too simply.)
To imagine that enslaved people were incapable of abhorring and detesting their masters, or that they had no conception of the eighteenth-century enlightenment notions of human rights until they were literate is simply not true. The same circuits of knowledge that brought slave Christianity and the work songs that Douglass wrote of also brought “bold denunciations” by those enslaved. Reverend Anderson Edwards, an ex-slave from Texas, quoted in Genovese summed it up best: “I had to preach what massa told me. And he said tell them niggers if they obey the master they’d go to heaven. But I know there was something better for them,” Edwards recalled. “But I dared not tell em except on the sly. And that I done lots. I told em If they keep prayin, the lord will set em free.”
Douglass all but acknowledged the way that slaves used Christianity not long after the passage on the Columbian Orator when he prayed to God for freedom:
You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! … You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! … O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! … I will run away. I will not stand it. … I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing…. God helping me … It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave.In Douglass’s narrative, this quite common sentiment among enslaved African-Americans was figured as a consequence of, first, Douglass’s exceptional history and character, and second, his ability to come to consciousness despite the debilitating conditions of slavery. The result was an intentionally ironic exceptional vision of freedom that Douglass simultaneously presented as the only obvious, and politically productive response to the condition of slavery, but one that was nearly impossible unless you were an exceptional character such as Douglass.
At this point in the Narrative, the literary character Frederick Douglass (as opposed to the historical subject) is at the precipice of freedom, in mind if not in legal body. But one more exceptional incident must occur before he could become the spirit of freedom that he embodied in the second half of the text: the fight with Covey, the slave-driver.
The beating by Covey, Douglass’s resistance, and then his appeals to Thomas Auld created a moment in the narrative which, Douglass explained “was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.” It was also, I would argue, the point at which Douglass steps away from the condition of enslaved humanity and opened the door for our contemporary misreading of the Narrative that contributes to a less-than-complex sense of freedom and slavery in the antebellum United States.
The fight with Covey was a significant passage because it demonstrated the character Douglass’s maturation as a subject willing to stand up and resist slavery in a very legible way. He not only refused to be whipped, a prerogative of any master and almost any white southerner, he also fought back against Covey. Short of attempting to escape or a planned insurrection, this act was as close to unmitigated opposition as one can get. But what the structure of the Douglass’s retelling downplayed was another terribly important element of the history: the moment when Douglass ran away to complain to Auld.
The narrative of Douglass’s appeal to Auld gets lost in what preceded and what followed: bloody, harrowing scenes of brutality and violence. But more significant, I think, or more informative of the system of slavery in the antebellum U.S., as well as more explanatory of the condition of enslaved humanity, is the fact that Douglass ran away after the incident, not off the plantation, but rather to his owner. Douglass does not explain this instance as running away, rather he was “resolved, for the first time, to go to my master, enter a complaint, and ask his protection. … He asked me what I wanted. I told him, to let me get a new home; that as sure as I lived with Mr. Covey again, … that Covey would surely kill me. Master Thomas ridiculed the idea that there was any danger.” Auld denies Douglass’s pleas (though the very act of Douglass entering a complaint from his master should serve to complicate any sense of utter victimhood we might want to attach to antebellum slavery), but what Douglass does with that denial in his telling of the story is what’s interesting.
Auld’s rejection gives Douglass the opportunity to move the Narrative back to the scene with Covey where he defended himself, but six months later, at which point Douglass leaves Covey’s service. Douglass implies that when Auld ignored his plea, he had to fend for himself. In actuality, however, the practice of coming to an owner with a complaint against an overseer or driver who had rented the labor of the enslaved was quite common. Similarly, while owners were loath to admit directly to an enslaved person the justice of their complaint, these interpersonal actions, the very stuff of the paternalist ethos that governed southern slavery, provided the enslaved with a considerable amount of leverage in determining their material conditions as well as the ideological figuration of slavery, though slave owners would never have openly admitted the role that complaints such as these played in the reconfiguration of slavery. What the actual result of Douglass’s interaction with Auld was, the Narrative did not say (did Auld scold Covey? Did it cause him to cease doing business with him?), preferring instead to give the character of Douglass the primacy of action and intention, and thus assigning causality to his direct and violent resistance to Covey: it was his physical resistance that changed his condition when in Covey’s service, not any action by Auld. Though, other sources tell us that often times owners who heard repeatedly from those they enslaved that an overseer or driver was working them too hard would often instruct the overseer to change his behavior and would nearly as often fire an overseer or refuse to rent their slaves to a driver who was not respected by the enslaved of the region.
Thus Douglass denied his act of running away at that moment to Auld, just as he eliminated from the category of running away the many other acts of stealing time and body in the narrative. Take, for example, the opening scenes where Douglass’s mother runs away to be by his side at night; or Aunt Hester’s furtive meetings with Ned Roberts that resulted in the savage beating that set the stage for violence in the text; or the other moments where even Douglass runs away for short periods of time, not in an attempt to gain his liberty by escaping to the North, but rather as a strategy to gain breathing room. Often, following an angry blow-up by an overseer or maybe after having been discovered pilfering food from plantation stores, enslaved people would run to the woods surrounding a plantation to avoid punishments from an owner administered in a fit of rage. Violence in slavery, as we can see in Douglass’s Narrative was horrifyingly arbitrary and enslaved peoples sought to mitigate the caprice of slave owners by putting spatial and temporal distance between an offense and its punishment. They would most often return in a day or two after tempers had cooled and the likelihood of more brutal punishment had diminished. These are just a few of the many possible reasons for an enslaved person to “steal” themselves but not try to leave slavery. However, they are actions that Douglass-the-author eliminates from the category of “running away” as he dismisses them as inconsequential (in a way strangely similar to Genovese's) in comparison to his ultimate act of escape that brings the book to a close.
Yet, after the fight with Covey and Douglass’s discourses on freedom and slavery, Douglass explained that he was forever altered, thinking only of running away, or rather only of running away to freedom. The next discussion of flight came when Douglass hatched a plot with his fellow slaves to escape to the North. So strong was Douglass’s desire for liberty, and so tied to the act of running away was that freedom, that “in coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.” Note the relationship here between slavery and death on the one hand, and liberty and life, or human existence on the other. This linguistic tie goes a long way to explain our current obsession with slavery as a story of human self-actualization: until literal freedom is achieved, humanity under slavery is essentially impossible.
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I want to end with one more short discussion of Douglass’s accounts of running away and contrast them with another slave narrative from the mid-nineteenth century, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl published on the eve of the civil war. Doing so, I think will highlight not only the myriad reasons enslaved people ran away, but it will also, I hope shed some light on the various ways in which enslaved humanity was, again according to Johnson “powerfully conditioned by, though not reducible to, … slavery.”Let us go back to Douglass’s description of his fight with Covey, and the inauguration of his plot to escape. Note what Douglass says he learned from the fight with Covey: “This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood.” Douglass echoes this sentiment when he explains to the reader that his sense of time under slavery, mediated through a very gendered lens, was what led him to want to run away:
I began, with the commencement of the year to prepare myself for a final struggle, which should decide my fate one way or the other. My tendency was upward. I was fast approaching manhood, and year after year had passed, and I was still a slave. These thoughts roused me – I must do something. I therefore resolved that 1835 should not pass without witnessing an attempt, on my part, to secure my liberty.Thus the fight with Covey “revived” in Douglass both the will for freedom as well as his own sense own manhood: while the next year as he was “fast approaching manhood” he was compelled to “secure my liberty.” Note the link between freedom and manhood. Narratively, they were mutually constitutive and could not exist without each other. This should not be a surprise. Remember that the definition of agency (and to a certain extent humanity) from the OED quotes Coleridge; the Romantic’s sense of agency, subjectivity, and humanity was profoundly gendered. The ability to act was defined by the ability to be independent of other men’s will. Women, be they wives or daughters, were legally, socially, and culturally dependent upon men, thus literally incapable of independence and thus action. (Of course a number of female novelists rejected that argument, preferring to demonstrate how women could be actors in their own right, even while they operated under the bonds of patriarchal oppression.) The implications here are significant: Douglass and many others linked this sense of resistance-as-struggle-for-individual-freedom, and hence agency, and hence subjectivity, to a particularly gendered understanding of action and consciousness. It was Douglass’s sense of manhood that prompted his escape.
This stands in sharp contrast to the model of escape that Harriet Jacobs provided in her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs was born enslaved in North Carolina in 1813. At the age of 12 she became the property of the Norcom family. The Norcom patriarch James repeatedly assaulted and raped Jacobs. He refused to let her “marry,” even in the system of slavery, another man. Despite Norcom’s demands, Jacobs fell in love with a white man named Samuel Sawyer and the couple had two children together. Norcom was jealous and vindictive and, like Captain Anthony in his relationship with Aunt Hester in Douglass’s Narrative, he tortured Jacobs for ten years. In 1835 she resolved to run away. But rather than head north to “freedom,” she spent her liberty from slavery first in the crawl space above the porch of a friend’s home, and then in her grandmother’s attic. For seven years Jacobs lived confined, hardly “free,” but not enslaved. Why? From her Grandmother’s attic, she could be near her children, keep an eye on them, and assure herself that they were safe. Thus, she chose not to run away from the social world that created her – a world that was both cruel and vicious, but also one that, at least through her family, provided her life with meaning, and presumably gave her some fulfillment. Indeed, she could have endeavored to run away from her family but she chose to stay.
To me, this complicates the notions of freedom and unfreedom that we have been examining, as well as any understanding of agency and resistance that Douglass theorizes in the Narrative. Finally, however, it suggests that the material basis for understanding slavery, profoundly affected the understanding of freedom, will, choice, and humanity held by any given enslaved person (or by the rest of the inhabitants of the United States, for that matter). If it was Douglass’s sense of manhood that prompted him to leave the world that he had known as a slave, it was alternatively Jacobs’s sense of herself as a mother and a women that suggested that she stay.
Let us come back to Henry Price, who may or may not have ended up in “some biscuit bakehouse.” We are left, I hope with a picture of freedom that is at once more complex and more troubling. For enslaved people the most basic features of their lives, Johnson powerfully argues, “feeling hungry, cold, tired, needing to go to the bathroom—revealed the extent to which even the bare life sensations of their physical bodies were sedimented with their enslavement. So, too, with sadness and humor and love and fear.” But, he goes on, “those things were never reducible to simple features of slavery.” The enslaved lived, in a sense, as all people did and do, in structures not of their own making, but ones that provide both boundaries as well as opportunities. The lines of power might be more clear, and certainly more violent and brutal, but that does not mean that the institution of slavery was successful in its attempt to dishumanize those who were enslaved. Indeed, in both Douglass and Jacobs, as well as countless others who lived and died, as well as suffered and loved, under slavery, we are given a glimpse of the incredible variety that is the human experience. Or, in Johnson's soaring words: “The condition of enslaved humanity, it could perhaps be said, was a condition that was at once thoroughly determined and insistently transcendent.”
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