Rhetoric in the Slave Quarter
Contents
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Locating American Slavery
- American Slavery is identifiable as an institutionalized social
practice. Individual slavery was not just a white on black
problem. The first slaves in North America were white slaves in St. Augustine.
Euro-American debtors and criminals were often sold as slaves as a part
of their punishment. Settlers were kidnapped from the Virginia Frontier
by native tribes and sold into slavery in Canada. But once a slave code
was enacted, the badge of black skin became the foundational basis of slavery.
If black, you were presumed a slave unless you could prove otherwise; if
white, you were presumed free. Thus, skin color provided a badge sorting
slave from free on sight. On that basis white enslavement of blacks became
the dominant American arrangement.
- Slave Quarters were villages of slaves located on plantations.
Not all slaves were in such circumstances. Many were held on small plantations
where what community they had was as part of a white culture. The quarters
provided an identifiable public space tolerated and even encouraged by
slavemasters. In fact, slave owners often viewed the slave quarters as
a place where elders would teach the younger to be "good slaves."
To this end, there was a highly regulated code that established the quarters
and dictated when the master could enter and when s/he could not.
- American slavery was an oral culture, so we must access it post-hoc
through the slave narratives. Recorded in the 1870s
and 1930s,
the slave narratives were the recollections of freed slaves recalling their
time within the institution of slavery.
- The slave constructs the evil of slavery in the denial of freedom
and the destruction of the family. Certainly, the slave lacked material
resources, but the indentured servant before slavery were more deprived
by the economic system. Although racism often triggered brutality and
harsh treatment, the economic incentive in slavery favored more
humane treatment than it did in indenture. In fact, the slave narratives often report material wealth diminished by emancipation. Certainly, slaves
were physically abused, disfigured, and murdered, but the slave narratives
construct these as acts resulting from individual perversion of slave owners and overseers not
from the system. The evil of the system of slavery is constructed
as denial of freedom and destruction of the family.
- African Americans did not agree on what they meant by "freedom,"
but they shared the pain of its denial and the joy of its achievement.
It was an ideograph of power in their rhetoric, probably the most powerful
ideograph. <Freedom> serves as an ideograph of errand as surely as
civilizing the continent is the errand of Euro-Americans.
- African Americans identified the selling away of their families as
the most painful experience of their captivity.
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Rhetorical Demands on a public rhetoric in the
Quarters
- Slavemasters provided a public space for black slaves. The masters
expected the culture to shape the productive slave. The slave quarters
were to a large degree territorial, slaves crafted the community in
the quarters within the bounds of the slavery system.
- Thus, there was a public world the slave shaped. The public
world may have been more important for the slave than the individual experience
of life, because s/he had more control over the quarter's public sphere than the
individual sphere. Slaves could not control the fact of their public space,
but they could exploit its existence to make their community.
- Over all of the slave culture lay the fact of captivity.
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The Rhetorical Response to these Needs
- The slave's rhetoric was torn between a rhetoric of acceptance and
a rhetoric of rejection. The rhetoric could encourage the community
to work within the slave system, improving their day-to-day life and avoiding
the dangers of resistance, or the rhetoric could reject the system
of slavery, encourage revolt, and endanger the life and welfare of the slave.
The response to the fact of captivity could not escape this dilemma.
- The dominant answer to these needs was a rhetoric of family pride
which defined slavery as outside their control. The family
was an extended family. Children were identified with the quarter, elders
were identified with the quarter, but in a web of generations and descendancy.
There was in the rhetoric of the quarter a pride in the superiority of
the quarter, of the plantation. These were a proud people.
- Beneath all rhetoric, however, was a subtext of freedom denied.
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The Characteristics of Rhetoric in the
Slave Quarter
What topics were public topics?
- Surviving Slavery. A rich discussion of ways to survive the
slave/master relationship was an important element of talk in the quarter.
Members of the community learned attitudes governing work and the code
of respect demanded by the master. The quarter featured a heavy rhetoric
of "good behavior." But the rhetoric was also charged with debate
about the wisdom of doing the massa's bidding versus the dignity of resistance.
- Freedom and escape. Notions of freedom -- what it was, why it
was important -- were a constant in the quarter. Notions of escape set
off debate. There was both a practical guide of escape and a vague sense
of the desirability of it, colliding with the danger that went with attempting
escape.
- History and the importance of family. Slavery was not historisized.
It just was. Historical accounts, accounts of who you were and why, featured
ancestor-heroes. The cruelty of families lost were expressed through this
framework.
Who was granted authority?
- The aged and survivors attain authority. This was partly from the nature
of the economic relationship. Women and men both were sources of slave
labor. When they became aged and no longer could be a source of physical
efficiency, they retired to the quarter and took care of the children too
young to work while the work force was in the fields. Thus, there was a sort
of extended family in which children spent extended time with elders. These
elders attained an authority in this process. That relationship was reinforced
by the notion that survival was an important public issue and that these
people were survivers.
Two Forms dominated Rhetoric in the Slave Quarters
The Narrative
- Instructions on how to talk and live life of slave were contained
in stories.
- Stories depicted a pride in your quarters
- Stories of runaways praised the flight to freedom or warned of the
dangers of resistance
- The stories contained a strong moral of lives well lived and lives
foolishly lived
- The narratives contrasted a memory and history of the family with
the ahistoric presence of slavery.
- Narratives seldom historicized the slave existence. It was a
sheer presence without the texture of history.
- Occasionally, there were stories of Africa and the middle passage,
but these were not common.
- The narratives concentrated instead on the history of the family. The
values of the narratives were family, kindness, and protectiveness. The
quarter was there for its people.
- Generally, stories did not canonize escape, but talked of freedom as
something wonderful earned or granted.
The Slave Sermon
- The practice of religion changed over the time of captivity.
By 1700, most slaves had become Christian. Early they were admitted into
white churches, attending the services in the churches. By the early 1800s,
the quarters had their own services with their own ministers drawn from the
slaves themselves. In 1832, however, Virginia outlawed black ministers
and the strengthened slave code throughout the South following that date
substituted white ministers again. These ministers were chosen and authorized by the owner of the plantation.
- Sermons split among three messages
- A rhetoric of obedience. Biblically based. Taught that slavery
was a condition of biblical times. Identified obligations of master and
slave articulated in the Bible. Provided support for the master or the basis of condemnation of
master as well as a pattern of living for slaves.
- A rhetoric of life hereafter. An evangelical preaching most
common by 1800. Often by a preacher called from the quarter. Similar to
rhetoric of the frontier: highly emotional and heavily participatory. It
differentiated pain of this world with the glory of the next for God's
people. Effect was to diffuse slave resistance to the conditions here and
now in the face of the promise of the hereafter.
- A rhetoric of revolt. Based on Moses and the Israelites trip
from slavery in Egypt. Motivated the search for a Black Moses. The spread
of this rhetoric led to the ban on slave preaching.
- The funeral was the central religious service. Celebrated the
values that shaped their lives. Used all three rhetorics. An exuberant
display of ungenteel rhetoric.
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The Rhetoric of the Slave Quarter left a lasting legacy
- The horrible dilemma of repression. Rhetoric protected the community
by urging obedience; but such obedience perpetuated slavery. Rhetoric could
promise the end of slavery only at the risk of those who lived within it.
- The dual culture was an inevitable result. Pride in community
could be built only with the separation of identity from the whites
who ruled them; but the separation reinforced the division and the appropriateness
of the separation.
- The picture of a resourceful people who created public life under
the most repressed circumstances. Slavery did not stop public life,
it seems to have made it all the more dear.
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An Exercise
Imagine you are a slave, working all day in the fields and returning
at night to the quarter. How would you answer the following questions?
- What do you look toward public life to provide in your quarter? What
sorts of things are private instead?
- Who has authority in your quarter? Who are you likely to listen to?
- When can you speak? What things do you look for in your surroundings
to decide whether speaking is appropriate? What sorts of restrictions are
you aware of?
- Residents of the quarter are brought to the plantation yard to witness
the public crippling of a teenager who had run away and was caught and
returned by slave catchers. Back in the quarter, the children of the quarter
want to understand what they have just seen. What will the children be
told? Are there multiple messages available to them? If so, what are the
various messages?
- Your uncle has died after a long life in the quarter. He is a respected
member of the slave community. He served in the fields until an advanced
age, and then tended the horses on the plantation. You go to the funeral.
What message(s) do you expect to hear?
- Word passes through your plantation that John Brown set out to free
the slaves by arming them and urging them to revolt, but was caught and
has been hanged for this crime. What messages might you expect to hear
in response to this word?
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