Janhavi Shah

Debatri Bhattacharya
20 October 2019

Slave Resistance
Slave narrative and culture in 18th century America
See dis barn here
Wid its iron window,
Its walls er brick?
Here wey de wail an’ moan
Of Af ’ica sound
Wuss dan de cry
Of Af ’ica chillum
When dey bone been crack
By de lion’ jaw.
Here wey de last
Er de slave-trader
Sing a song of misery
To a nigger in pain.
Here wey man an’ he woman
Is parted forever,
An’ a prayer was answered
Wid de song of a whip.

This poem, “The Slave Barn” is characterised by a sense of African autonomy. It is deeply
ethnic yet universal in meaning and speaks of collective survival and hope for eventual
liberation. All who experienced or might experience the barn, irrespective of ethnicity, would
find meaning in it.
The nearly 300,000 Africans brought to the mainland colonies during the eighteenth
century were not a single people. And as slavery became more and more entrenched in
the 18th century America, so did the idea of slavery connected to the black colour while
that of liberty to only the white. Slavery rested on the principle of property in man—of
one man’s appropriation of another’s person as well as of the fruits of his labor. By
definition and in essence it was a system of class rule, in which some people lived off
the labor of others. American slavery subordinated one race to another and thereby
rendered its fundamental class relationships more complex and ambiguous; but they
remained class relationships.

On antebellum plantations, where elite slaveholders had many of the powers later
ascribed to the state, it was in the daily tug-of-war over labor and culture that power
and its assumptions were contested from below—not in formal institutions such as

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courtrooms or political organisations. To a degree, day-to-day acts of opposition were
the result and expression of the dialogic of power relations between owner and owned—
part of quotidian plantation relations characterised by a paternalistic combination of
hegemonic cultural control and violent discipline that was supposed to extract not only
obedience but even consent from enslaved people. To a larger extent, however, this
framework fails to explain everyday slave resistance succinctly. The paternalist model
covers an apt theory of plantation management but an incomplete perspective on
plantation, and particularly black, life. Sustained, collective rebellion was almost always
impossible under the level of slave control that permeated antebellum southern culture.
Most opposition was, of necessity, masked and short lived; in itself, this is a measure of
the force to which enslaved people were subjected. Imamu Amiri Baraka captures the
tragic irony of paternalist social relations when he writes that slavery was, most of all, a
paternal institution and yet refers to the filthy paternalism and cruelty of slavery.
Paternalism defined the involuntary labor of the slaves as a legitimate return to their
masters for protection and direction. the slaves, by accepting a paternalistic ethos and
legitimising class rule, developed their most powerful defence against the
dehumanisation implicit in slavery. Southern paternalism may have reinforced racism as
well as class exploitation, but it also unwittingly invited its victims to fashion their own
interpretation of the social order it was intended to justify. And the slaves, drawing on a
religion that was supposed to assure their compliance and docility, rejected the essence
of slavery by projecting their own rights and value as human beings writes, the author of
Roll Jordon Roll, Eugene Genovese. According to Stanley Elkins, James Rhodes did
much to establish the pattern for the subsequent studies/work on American Negro
Slavery. He attacked the institution of slavery against the assertion that ante-bellum
slaves were on the whole "better fed, better clothed, and better lodged" than labourers in
Northern cities and cited evidence that they were frequently overtasked to the point of
physical breakdown. The appearance of Ulrich B. Phillips signified a profound change
of phase. The Progressive Era brought to American history Dunning on Reconstruction
and Phillips on slavery. The basic assumption in American Negro Slavery was that of
innate and inherited racial inferiority. Ulrich Phillips had established undisputed and
superior claims on the level of scholarship, meant the triumph, North and South, of a
view on slavery whose basic premise was racial inferiority.

While studies of resistance are easily and often accused of naïveté, of romanticising
bondspeople and of underestimating the extent and subtlety of their owners’ power,
it seems that the opposite is also often true: these very studies over a keen
appreciation of the forms of abuse and exploitation against which the enslaved
struggled and to which they often submitted. Slave resistance was a fact of life
throughout the Americas, constituted not in the trends and opinions that shape
academic discourse but in the slavery experience itself. Theories of everyday forms
of resistance, those small acts with sometimes outsize consequences, have opened

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enormous possibilities for understanding the meanings of actions that might
otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. Hidden or indirect expressions
of dissent, quiet ways of reclaiming a measure of control over goods, time, or parts
of one’s life. Though it is possible to understand acts of small rebellion like theft,
arson, faking illness etc. as ‘‘safety valves’’ (that is, as individual expressions of
dissatisfaction that released anger and frustration but posed no danger to the
system), such an interpretation loses sight of their importance to slaves and
slaveholders. Neither accommodationist nor a direct attack on slavery, everyday
resistance occupied the wide terrain between consent, on one hand, and open,
organised opposition, on the other. Sterling Brown observed poetry and meaning of
folk songs and spirituals of the slaves as the best expressions of the slave’s deepest
thought and yearnings, speaking with convincing finality against the legend of
contented slavery. Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas mention that some
spirituals might have had double meanings and slaves, as their folktales made clear,
used irony especially through animal depictions. Harald Courlander tells us their
symbolic world was rich; they seized upon songs originally created for religious
purposes and assigned them other meanings using them for a variety of purposes.
Slave bards produced some great poetry and music and the substance of the work
songs in the antebellum period ranges from humorous to sad, biting, unforgiving
and tolerant. There is an incident of protest and ridicule; the extent and meaning of
self-laceration in folklore provides no indication that blacks as a group liked or were
indifferent to slavery. Two songs of slave rebellion attacked the system
directly.Theological tensions emanated from and perpetuated by American slavery
and racial prejudice but slaves and free Afro-Americans interpreted christianity
different from what the white Christians interpreted it as. Then came the decisive
break with WEB Du Bois; Foregrounding the relationship between the rise of
antislavery and changing American political economy during a period of acute
transformation, “Black Reconstruction” is comprehensive in its reinterpretation of
the war and the period of Reconstruction that followed. Du Bois emphasised the
transformative power of slave initiative in “deciding the war.” But he set his own
interpretation o against “two theories, both over-elaborated”: one suggesting that
“the slave did nothing but faithfully serve his master until emancipation was thrust
upon him; the other that the Negro immediately left serfdom and took his stand with
the Army of freedom. Through his work, Du Bois recognised the agency of the
slave which he had lost to the paternalistic oppressors and more often to works
assuming racial superiority of white people. While much of Black Reconstruction
has stood the tests of time, this image of a powerless slave has not. Archives
overflow with an abundance of evidence that indicates that antebellum America’s
slaves were anything but an inert mass waiting for a Moses to show them the way
home. Work did reward the nation’s slaves with a wide range of social, productive,
and polit- ical tools that they could—and did—use to advance their own interests in
the face of slavery’s injustices. Moreover and paradoxically, most of those tools
were unwittingly bequeathed to the slaves by their owners. Inflexibly dependent as

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they were on a flexible labor force, American slaveholders had no choice but to
keep their slaves on a long and loose leash. Slaves ran errands, carried messages,
fetched physicians, herded livestock, and, as personal servants, followed globe-
trotting owners abroad. Slaves were the itinerant crews that cut down forests, tapped
pines, graded roads, and in the 1850s, laid thousands of miles of railroad track.
Slaves were, in short, the movers and makers of an economy that underwrote
regional and national growth. Work had turned their laborers into a politically
aware, politically sophisticated, and political savvy people. What they lacked was a
chance to act, and when that chance came, they did more than heave. As women and
men, as individuals, and as groups, America’s enslaved working class laid down
their hoes, shrugged off their chains, and as Du Bois brilliantly recounts, launched a
Black Reconstruction of American democracy. Susan Eva Donovan critiques Du
Bois’ view and gives the negroes the agency that many historians ignored or refused
to acknowledge may be as a result of a patronising and a romanticised point of view.

Sterling Stuckey opines that their sense of injustice of slavery made it easier for
them to act out their aggression against whites in various forms of day to day
resistance without being overcome by a sense of guilt. Apart from slave folk songs,
the slave tales too give us deep insights about the prevalent slave culture. Such tales
were deeply rooted in west African traditions of preserving oral histories of families
and dynasties. Slaves gave America the habit of storytelling ; these tales were
actually projections of the slaves’ personal experiences and hopes and defeats in
terms of symbols, often unnoticed. Stuckey also mentions that there were left no
grounds to erect the old stereotypical painfully constricted “Sambo” structure; slave
folklore decisively repudiates the thesis that Negroes as a group internalised
“Sambo” traits committing to psychological marriage. Herbert Aptheker sheds light
on the individual slave rebellions and the extent of such revolts while Elkins refutes
all such agency of slaves comparing them to the revolts/ rebellions in Haiti, Brazil
and Jamaica. In the US, revolts and extent of resistance was limited because of the
authority and proximity of their white masters who would constantly keep checks
on the labor and because the slave trade was cut off to the US in 1801 resulting in
black being less in population than whites; predominantly native born slave
population. Larry Gara says that the underground railroad system was highly
exaggerated and most fugitives reaching north did so through their own efforts and
they were far more likely to be helped and assisted by fellow slaves and other free
blacks than by philanthropic whites. Kenneth Stamp in his “Peculiar Institution”
tells us that many slaves found ways to exasperate their masters to maintain that
bondage as a labor system had its own limitations. Some misdeeds were merely
unconscious reflections of the character that slavery had given him: Slavery tended
to render him “callous to the ideas of honour and honesty” as the white masters
understood these terms. But the element of conscious resistance was often present
too mostly manifest through ingenious subterfuge- slowing down, careless work,
damaging property etc. A disease was identified peculiar to negroes- Dysaethesia

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Ethiopica often called ‘rascality’ by their white masters which basically meant an
exotic affliction which made them do much mischief intentionally. Feigning illness/
disability was one of the favourite methods of avoiding labor and thus became a
powerful symbol of resistance. Dr. Cartwright discovered and names the second
disease peculiar to negroes - Drapetomania- causing Negroes to run away; escapism
again became an important way of resistance and hope for the negroes. Many such
instances of individual day to day resistance and rebellions have been mentioned by
Herbert Aptheker in his book “American Negro Slave Revolts”.

Thus if one takes on the task of writing about the ‘slave culture’ of the 19th century
America or the antebellum America, especially the South, one would not be able to
discern the exact types and origins of such a culture or answer whether there existed
one homogeneous, universally prevalent, ‘culture’ at all. Africans were brought in
huge numbers through the Atlantic Slave Trade to the American colonies of the
British and other regions too; some of them retained a lot of indigenous African
tribalism and way of life which beyond a point became difficult to sustain given the
umbrella culture perpetrated by their white masters, defined and controlled by those
masters. While others who were the second and onwards generations of blacks in
America were in midst of identity crisis and found themselves grappling between
their owner’s culture and where they had come from. While the entire Civil war
consequently led to the abolition of slavery in 1865, it did not start or even grapple
with the issue of slavery at its fundamentals rendering the American negroes as
insignificant but ironically an influential part of both sides of the war. Once the
atrocities had reached a saturation point, resistance was evident as well as
inevitable. In the works done on slave resistance, often women have been sidelined
and narratives have been distorted but we continue to dwell deeper into this torrent
of literature and history on the American Slave Narrative.

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Bibliography:

• Eric Foner, “Two Views of the Slave Culture” in “The Black Past”

• Stanley Elkins, “Slavery”

• Gary Nash- Chapter on Slavery

• Eugene Genovese- “Roll Jordan Roll” (Introduction)

• Herbert Aptheker- “American Negro Slave Revolts”, Chapter 5 and Introduction

• Peter Wood- Article

• Susan Donovan- Article: America’s Working Classes

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