White Southern Memories and the Legacy of “Slave Marriage” in the United States
In: Journal of Global SlaverySearch for other papers by Tyler D. Parry in
Current site
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This article intersects various secondary works that analyze regional memories in the US South, slave marital practices, and the intellectual history of slavery in the United States. Following a brief analysis of the “Plantation Myth,” it examines the proslavery framework established by southern apologists in the antebellum era and gauges how postbellum authors built upon these arguments. The next part critically probes memoirists’ usage of descriptive material, scrutinizing their motivations for producing the literature, the tone conveyed through their writing, and how they used the wedding ceremony as a symbol for slavery’s benignity. Following this qualitative data, this study examines a research sample found in the collections of Herman Clarence Nixon, a prolific author in the early twentieth century who interviewed former slave owners for his research on slavery in northern Alabama. Finally, this article reveals how postbellum reminiscences portrayed a myth of gender solidarity that transcended racial boundaries.
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1
Manley B. Curry, “Recent Comments Upon the Veteran,” The Confederate Veteran 1 (Jan. 1893): 136.
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3
Quoted in Fred Arthur Bailey, “Mildred Lewis Rutherford and the Patrician Cult of the Old South,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 510.
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5
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 260.
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6
Charles Reagan Wilson, Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (1987; Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 2007), 65.
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11
Sudie Duncan Sides, “Slave Weddings and Religion,” History Today 24, no. 2 (Feb. 1974): 85. For the most detailed analysis of Christmas and southern slaves see Bigham and May, “The Time O’ All Times?,” 263–288.
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18
Jeannette H. Walworth, Southern Silhouettes (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1887), intro. Similar remarks are found in state-based, historical journals in the South. See Ella Storrs Christian, “The Days that are No More, Or, Plantation Life as It Was (1916),” Alabama Historical Quarterly 14, nos. 3–4 (1952): 331; F.B. McDowell, “Reminiscences of Days That Are Gone,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 2, no. 3 (July 1919): 321–327; Lane Carter Kendall, “John McDonogh, Slave Owner, Part 1,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Oct. 1932): 653.
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19
Margaret Devereux, Plantation Sketches (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1906), 1.
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20
K. Stephen Prince, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 231.
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23
William Wells Brown, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom. A Drama in Five Acts (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 26.
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24
George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol. 12: Georgia Narratives (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972), pt. 1, 101; Tyler D. Parry, “Married in Slavery Time: Jumping the Broom in Atlantic Perspective,” Journal of Southern History 81, no. 2 (May 2015): 273–312, esp. 289–295.
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25
Sudie Duncan Sides, “Southern Women and Slavery, Part Two,” History Today 20, no. 2 (Feb. 1970): 126.
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28
Pamela Savage, Diary, 10 Oct. 1825, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh, NC (hereafter NCDAH). Also see C.C. Woodbury, Letter, 1848, SPR 541, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Mobile, Ala. (hereafter ADAH); James, “Ashes of the Sixties,” 36–37, VHS.
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29
L. Maria Child, ed., Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (Boston: The Author, 1861), 114.
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33
Fred Arthur Bailey, “Mildred Lewis Rutherford and the Patrician Cult of the Old South,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 524–525.
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34
John David Smith, An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865–1918 (1985; Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 53.
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39
H.S. Fulkerson, Random Recollections of Early Days in Mississippi (Vicksburg, Miss.: Vicksburg Printing and Publishing Company, 1885), 129.
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41
John Webb, “Reminiscences” (1870), LV.
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42
R.Q. Mallard, Plantation Life Before Emancipation (Richmond, Va.: Whittet and Shepperson, 1892), 48.
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49
James J. McDonald, Life in Old Virginia: A Description of Virginia, More Particularly the Tidewater Section, Narrating Many Incidents Relating to the Manners and Customs of Old Virginia so Fast Disappearing as a Result of the War Between the States, Together with the Many Humorous Stories (Norfolk, Va.: The Old Virginia Publishing Company, 1907), 96.
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51
Ruth McEnery Stuart, A Golden Wedding and Other Tales (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1893), 10. This notion of “orange blossoms” was so prominent in the literature that Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll had one section on slave marriage entitled “Broomsticks and Orange Blossoms”—see pp. 475–481.
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52
Ella Pegues, “Before the Civil War,” Oxford Eagle (21 Apr. 1926), 6.
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54
Anne Simon Deas Papers, ca. 1900, Folder 4, Weddings, etc., SCHS.
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57
Eliza Moore Chinn McHatton Ripley, Social Life in Old New Orleans, Being Recollections of my Girlhood (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912), 258.
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58
Sarah Newman Shouse, Hillbilly Realist: Herman Clarence Nixon of Possum Trot (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1986), 220.
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59
Fred Arthur Bailey, “Class Contrasts in the Antebellum Trans-Mississippi: An Analysis of Twenty-Nine Confederate Autobiographical Questionnaires,” Louisiana History 33, no. 4 (Autumn 1992): 368.
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60
Fred Arthur Bailey, “Class Contrasts in Old South Tennessee: An Analysis of the Non-Combatant Responses to the Civil War Veterans Questionnaires,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 45, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 274. For a fuller treatment of these questionnaires see Fred Arthur Bailey, Class and Tennessee’s Confederate Generation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
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73
Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Viking Press, 2010), ch. 3.
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82
“December 25, 1849,” in Theodore Rosengarten, ed., Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, with the Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822–1890) (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986), 481.
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83
Laura Spencer Porter, “Those Days in Old Virginia: A Picture of the South Before the War,” The Ladies’ Home Journal 19, no. 3 (Feb. 1902): 12. In a different publication, another author noted that at the announcement of a wedding for a slave named Susanne, the mistress “had looked to the details of Susanne’s wedding gown, for the Madame set great store by Susanne …” See Virginia Frazer Boyle, “A Kingdom for Micajah,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 100 (Mar. 1900): 532.
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85
Anna Hardeman Meade, When I was a Little Girl: The Year’s Round on the Old Plantation (Los Angeles: The Fred S. Lang Company, 1916), 13.
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86
Ella B. Washington, “The Ebony Bridal,” The American Magazine: Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 4, no. 1 (July 1877): 481.
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88
Ibid., 481, 486.
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89
Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 102.
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93
Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1918), 328.
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94
Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929), 198.
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96
Charles J. Heglar, Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and William and Ellen Craft (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001), 13. Also see William L. Van Deburg, Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 85.
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97
E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (1939; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 32; W.E.B. Dubois, “The Problem of Housing the Negro—The Home of a Slave,” The Southern Workman 30 (Sept. 1901): 490; W.E.B. Dubois, The Negro American Family: A Social Study Made by Atlanta University Under the Patronage of the Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1908), 21. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a prominent white sociologist and secretary of the Department of Labor, used these concepts to develop the “Moynihan Report,” a controversial publication that declared the black family “a case for national action,” arguing that the historical trauma of racism had led black people (fathers particularly) to become entrapped in a “tangle of pathology” that led to single-parent homes and higher poverty rates: see Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Labor, 1965). For a recent overview of Moynihan’s historiographical impact, see James T. Patterson, Freedom is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama (New York: Basic Books, 2013); Susan D. Greenbaum, Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images About Poverty (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
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98
John David Smith, “A Different View of Slavery: Black Historians Attack the Proslavery Argument, 1890–1920,” The Journal of Negro History 65, no. 4 (Autumn 1980): 305.
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99
Smith, An Old Creed, 200. For an expansion on this topic see John David Smith, Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and the American Negro (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2000).
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102
William Lynwood Fleming, “The American Negro Academy,” Publications of the Southern History Association 9 (Jan. 1905): 50.
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103
John David Smith, “An Old Creed for the New South: Southern Historians and the Revival of the Proslavery Argument, 1890–1920,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 18 (Spring 1979): 75–88.
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104
Steve Estes, I Am a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 44.
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White Southern Memories and the Legacy of “Slave Marriage” in the United States
In: Journal of Global SlaverySearch for other papers by Tyler D. Parry in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This article intersects various secondary works that analyze regional memories in the US South, slave marital practices, and the intellectual history of slavery in the United States. Following a brief analysis of the “Plantation Myth,” it examines the proslavery framework established by southern apologists in the antebellum era and gauges how postbellum authors built upon these arguments. The next part critically probes memoirists’ usage of descriptive material, scrutinizing their motivations for producing the literature, the tone conveyed through their writing, and how they used the wedding ceremony as a symbol for slavery’s benignity. Following this qualitative data, this study examines a research sample found in the collections of Herman Clarence Nixon, a prolific author in the early twentieth century who interviewed former slave owners for his research on slavery in northern Alabama. Finally, this article reveals how postbellum reminiscences portrayed a myth of gender solidarity that transcended racial boundaries.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 673 | 57 | 5 |
| Full Text Views | 220 | 8 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 57 | 21 | 0 |