Emily West - Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina

EMILY WEST

SLAVE COUPLES IN ANTEBELLUM

SOUTH CAROLINA

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

URBANA AND CHICAGO

2004 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
West, Emily, 1971
Chains of love : slave couples in antebellum South Carolina /
Emily West.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-252-02903-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. SlavesSouth CarolinaSocial conditions19th century.
2. SlavesSouth CarolinaFamily relationshipsHistory19th century. 3. CouplesSouth CarolinaHistory19th century.
4. Man-woman relationshipsSouth CarolinaHistory19th century.
5. SlavesSouth CarolinaBiography. 6. SlaverySouth
CarolinaHistory19 th century. 7. Plantation lifeSouth
CarolinaHistory19th century. 8. South CarolinaRace
relations. 9. South CarolinaHistory17751865. I. Title.
E445.S7W47 2004
306.8862509757dc22 2003013736

For Jamie

Many people have provided me with help of one kind or another during this project, which began as a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Liverpool. First and foremost, I should like to express my gratitude to my dissertation supervisor, Mike Tadman. An excellent advisor and an historian of the utmost integrity, I only hope that he is pleased with my finished product. I should also like to thank other colleagues at the Universities of Liverpool, Newcastle, and Reading for their advice and encouragement, as well as the provision of cups of coffee when needed. Here I wish to single out Di Ascott, Sharon Messenger, and all the other mad women of the attic, Brian Ward, George Lewis, Jon Bell, Anne Curry, Stuart Kidd, Anne Lawrence, David Laven, and Helen Parish. The friends and acquaintances I have met through British American Nineteenth-Century Historians (BrANCH), in particular Liese Perrin, have provided many insights on slave relationships, and I have always found it much easier to work on this project following the annual October conference.

The staff at the various libraries and archives I utilized during this project have been extremely helpful, especially in the United States, where I was made to feel particularly welcome by Tibby Steedly of the Institute of Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina and Brian Cuthrell of the South Caroliniana library. I shall also never forget the hospitality provided by Joe Sox, Jim Siti, and Susan Wolfe. Three awarding bodies made this project financially viable for methe Economic and Social Research Council granted me a postgraduate award, which funded the first three years of my Ph.D. research; the British Academy awarded me a Small Research Grant, which enabled me to undertake my research into biracial Baptist churches; and last but by no means least, the Arts and Humanities Research Board provided me with a twoterm sabbatical to complete the book, for which I am extremely grateful. Joan Catapano of the University of Illinois Press has proved helpful and patient, and I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers who commented on the first draft of this manuscript.

Finally, I have been fortunate to have a loving and supportive family who have offered help and encouragement at every step of the way. I could not have completed this book without the financial support of my paternal grandparents, Margaret and the late Aneurin West. My mother and father have offered much more than a polite interest in my work, and I am especially grateful to them for encouraging my initial interest in American history. My husband, Jamie, to whom this book is dedicated, has proven more than a diligent proofreader. I do not believe this book would have reached publication without his help, and for this I cannot possibly thank him enough. Lastly, my son, Conor, was kind enough to take to nursery like a duck to water, thus providing me with the hours I needed to write the final manuscript. I look forward to the day when he is old enough to read it.

________________

Some of the arguments espoused in this book originally appeared in article form. See Surviving Separation: Cross-Plantation Marriages and the Slave Trade in Antebellum South Carolina, Journal of Family History 24:2 (1999): 21231 ( 1999 by Sage Publications; used by permission of Sage Publications; The Debate on the Strength of Slave Families: South Carolina and the Importance of Cross-Plantation Marriages, Journal of American Studies 33:2 (1999): 22141 ( 1999 by Cambridge University Press; used by permission of Cambridge University Press); and Masters and Marriages, Profits and Paternalism: Slave Owners Perspectives on Cross-Plantation Unions in Antebellum South Carolina, Slavery and Abolition 21:1 (2000): 5672 ( 2000 by Frank Cass & Co.; used by permission of Frank Cass & Co.).

This book explores intimate areas of the slave experiencerelationships between men and women, love and affection between spouses, the abuse of female slaves by whites, the consequences of forced separations, and the overall sense of family among communities held in bondage. These are difficult areas to explore, partly because the typicality of intimate sentiments is always hard to establish. Historical evidence also poses a problem: southern white sources tend to rationalize white exploitation of blacks, but those left by slaves are few, and their reliability has often been challenged. This work relies heavily on the careful use of certain exceptionally rich slave testimonies, complemented by a critical analysis of white documents and perspectives. It combines some quantitative analysis of broad patterns that have emerged in the evidence from slave sources with a more textual, qualitative approach, thus allowing the overall themes of spousal and gender cooperation, flexible family networks, and resilience and resistance to be established.

The significance of slave bonding across gender lines is highlighted here. While those of the same sex did maintain close tiesespecially, for example, when a slave had an abroad spouse and spent the greater part of the working week on their own, or when a partner had been sold away relationships between married men and women were generally more important to slaves than were same-gender networks. Also highlighted is resistance to the oppression of bondage. This was achieved primarily through the existence of social space between the lives of slaves and owners. Moreover, the affection between enslaved men and women facilitated the creation and maintenance of this distance. Indeed, bonding between spouses provided slaves with their primary means of surviving and ultimately resisting the brutal institution under which they lived.

American slavery has attracted

This second trend came to the fore in the 1970s, when a number of texts focusing upon the cultural life of slave communities were published.

Fourthly, scholars have witnessed the emergence of smaller, more detailed case studies of American slavery. Charles Joyner has noted how historians describe the slave community without having probed in depth any particular slave community.

Therefore, although Kolchin has argued that the case for autonomy has been overstated, he fails to recognize that emphasizing resilience and the desire for independence does not necessarily mean that exploitation by owners (for example, through sale, separation, or sexual abuse) was not significant. Rather, the fact that slaves