Winter 2017—Antebellum Slavery In The American South: The Repression Of Gender Roles And The Tragedy Of The African-American Family Man

It’s February, and for many people, that means that it’s time to celebrate Black History Month. I will be the first to admit that I don’t normally celebrate Black History Month. First of all, I don’t usually celebrate it because I have no known African heritage in my family history; it simply does not make much sense to me to personally celebrate a culture that simply has not had a distinctive influence in my life. Secondly—and probably more importantly—Black History Month has, unfortunately, been tainted by impure politically-motivated elements in our increasingly leftist-dominated society; at least, this is true in my limited perspective. In my opinion, too many people use Black History Month to elevate one race above another in a manner that seems inappropriate and vengeful. In any case, I don’t have much interest in celebrating Black History Month—or, for that matter, white history month, brown history month, red history month, or yellow history month; I don’t believe in dedicating any month to the celebration of any particular skin color’s history.

Skin color is too shallow an identifier to deserve its own holiday. I prefer to celebrate the nobler and more meaningful character traits, principles of habit, and moral lifestyles that people throughout history have exemplified. Last semester, as a graduate student at California State University, Stanislaus, I was required to take a class dealing with the subject of manhood and antebellum American slavery; in this class, I was required to write a research paper based upon insights I had gained while reading the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup. Even though the class discussions for this course often ended up seeming strange and irrelevant to my conservatively-trained mind, I will be forever grateful that this class led me to read about these two great black men, both of whom were enslaved in the American South during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Learning about them and reading their stories provided me with real examples of manhood worth emulating; today’s generation has Snoop Dogg and Kanye West…but as for me and my house, we will take Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup.

I hope you will be uplifted and inspired as I share what I learned about Douglass and Northup, what I learned about an evil aspect of human slavery you may have never previously considered, and what I believe it means to be a man.

While it may seem natural to talk about slavery in terms of losing one’s freedom, it may seem less instinctive to talk about slavery in terms of losing one’s identity. However, inasmuch as slavery restricts an individual’s will to act within the capacities afforded by their own agency and sense of accountability, it seems logical to conclude that one of the most effective means of enslaving a man is to deny him any real connection with or understanding of his own masculine identity. Up until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the American system of institutionalized slavery stripped entire generations of African-American men of their masculine identities. In lieu of this, slavery substituted a brutal form of oppression and exploitation that not only took advantage of these African-American men’s bodily labors but also repressed their sense of manhood.

Edward E. Baptist, an associate professor of history at Cornell University who specializes in American slavery in the South, laid a great deal of groundwork for understanding models of slave masculinity in an essay written on the subject in 2004. Baptist was interested in the denial of both masculinity and fulfilling gender roles for captive men who suffered under plantation slavery in the antebellum period. In his essay, Baptist presented a useful conception of American slavery that helped to explain that enslaved men were not really considered to be men at all, that slave marriages were destroyed and captive fathers were prevented from raising their own children, and that “enslaved African-American men were also forbidden to protect or control the female members of their families.”  Despite the restrictive environment in which they were prevented from fulfilling the “ordinary virtues” of caring for others in masculine social roles, “many enslaved men stubbornly demonstrated through acts of caretaking…that their own lives and identities mattered.” They “became husbands, friends, and fathers…accumulated new relationships, obligations, and ways in which to care for others.” In the face of slavery stripping from them their masculine identities, slave men “attempted to maintain or rebuild the bonds of families, to supply their needs…to guide the young;” whenever they could, slave men “helped women to survive, perhaps finding meaning in their own lives by protecting those of others.”  This caretaker model of slave masculinity as outlined and described by Baptist provides an excellent epistemological method for understanding the male African-American slave’s experience of repressed masculinity and denial of gender role fulfillment.

The gender roles and perceptions connected with masculinity are an essential part of a man’s character and sense of life purpose, forming a critical building block for his own social identity. Indeed, a man’s need for this kind of social identity—especially relating to the people he cares most about—has a tendency to drive him to build and maintain that identity on the basis of meaningful and purposeful relationships with others. In this way, it should not be surprising that so many men define their masculinity by their ability to establish and maintain social networks and to perform certain roles within those networks. African-American slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries were no different: they attempted to define their masculinity by establishing and maintaining families or other social bonds of friendship, intimacy, and support that approximated a family; they also sought to perform masculine roles of presiding over, providing for, and protecting those they cared about. Antebellum slavery in the American South frustrated, repressed, and in many cases, denied African-American slaves the blessing of stable family ties and masculine social roles that would have otherwise helped them define and maintain their identities as men.

Studying and analyzing the written narratives recorded by enslaved African-American men can help us understand just how passionately and earnestly these men yearned for a return to masculine normalcy in their self-identities; these narratives also reveal the great extent of damage done to African-American slave manhood by the violent, oppressive, and exploitative system of plantation slavery in the American South. This blog post will consider two narratives written by black men who were formerly enslaved in this system. The first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, was written in 1845 by Frederick Douglass, an African-American slave who escaped from Maryland in 1838 and later went on to become an orator, writer, social reformer, and perhaps the most well-known black abolitionist in American history. The second narrative under consideration, Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, written in 1853, chronicles the free-born author’s 1841 kidnapping and abduction into Southern slavery, his twelve years living and working as a slave in Louisiana, and his eventual rescue and return to the North. Through these narratives, both Douglass and Northrup demonstrated that while they lived in a state of enslavement, their masculine identities were repressed due to their inability to fully perform the masculine roles usually associated with family relations; this repression interfered in various ways with both Douglass and Northup as they struggled with wanting to preside over a family unit, provide for their slave “families,” and protect those they loved and cared about most.

Within the first few pages of his narrative, it becomes abundantly clear that Frederick Douglass, a slave since birth, was raised under a series of masters who disrupted slave families in ways that worked to nullify his or any other slave's desire to preside over a family unit. From his early youth, Douglass' masters kept from him his father's true identity. As for his mother, Douglass was separated from her when he was but an infant. "I never saw my mother," he explained, "more than four or five times in my life; and each of those times was very short in duration, and at night."  Slaves like Douglass were often separated from their families, usually because, for white masters, the commodification of African-Americans—and the trading in human bodies that accompanied it—took precedence over keeping slave families intact. Thus, from the moment of his, birth Frederick Douglass faced a disrupted model of family life that contrasted starkly with the intact family units of his masters. Resisting this disruption of slave life likely fueled his own struggle to form a family of his own.

Douglass' struggle to find a home where he could perform the masculine role of presiding over a family that belonged to him and him alone became a lifelong pursuit. As he told it, "the ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes were all suspended in my case." The various plantations he lived on as an enslaved worker were "charmless" and were not home to him; he "looked for home elsewhere."  The kind of home and family that Douglass looked for was not explicitly stated in his written narrative, but there are clues. For example, in looking back on all the plantations he lived and worked on, Douglass wrote with passionate distaste for the "galling chains of slavery" he had left behind, and the "enjoyment of freedom and happiness of home" while composing his story "seated by [his] own table."  Regardless of what Douglass had in mind for the future home and family he wished to preside over, it was clearly a place he could take pleasure in being truly his own.

The dream of presiding over his own household prompted Douglass to take actions, even as a slave, to develop work skills that would ultimately grant him the profits of his labors and to enjoy the responsibilities and pride of freedom. As a slave, he was once sent to work in a shipyard, where he said he "learned the art of using my mallet and irons" as a caulker. A year later, Douglass boasted that he could "command the highest wages given to the most experienced calkers" and brought "six to seven dollars per week" to his masters. Douglass reported that learning these skills inspired him with "notions about freedom."  Doubtless this also inspired him to continue working hard towards his goal of establishing a family, home, and household of his own. This household would be economically secure and would allow him to fill the masculine role of presiding over his own assets as a free man. At the end of his narrative, Douglass rejoiced that as a newly-freed ex-slave, he had found employment and that he was his "own master." He recorded that it was "the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own."  The skills he had cultivated as an emasculated and disenfranchised slave eventually gave him the tools necessary to establish and maintain his own independent family unit.

The clearest indication of Douglass' desire to perform the masculine role of presiding over a family once freed from the constraints of plantation slavery can be found in analyzing what Douglass did first after securing his freedom. After he escaped to New York City, and despite his "homeless, houseless, and helpless condition," Douglass sent immediately for his intended wife, Anna. They were married right away and set out for New Bedford to settle down and start a family—exactly what Douglass had had in mind since at least his early teenage years.  This drive to establish a family, to solidify social ties with a woman who would help him create a household of his own that he could take pride in as a free man—this performance of a masculine gender role that had once been repressed under the institution of slavery—was allowed to manifest itself and take shape according to Douglass' newfound freedom and fulfilled masculine identity.

In the narrative of Solomon Northup, another tragic disruption of slave family life confronted the author almost immediately after he was kidnapped and abducted into slavery; this disruption forced Northup to confront the harsh reality that being enslaved meant permanent separation from his own family, preventing him from presiding over his household as a good husband and father should. Northup met up with an enslaved mother named Eliza whose children were forcibly taken from her in the course of the slave trade, and her story "was enough to melt a heart of stone to listen to."  Northup actually witnessed Eliza's parting with her children, describing it as a "mournful scene" that almost brought him to tears; he also said that he had "never seen such an exhibition of intense, unmeasured, and unbounded grief."  Like Frederick Douglass, Northup's masculine identity was surely offended by this breakup of a family unit; unlike Douglass, Northup's status as a father with kids almost certainly made Eliza's story more traumatic to observe.

The damage inflicted upon family units by slavery was not limited to the families of enslaved blacks; Northup also took time in his narrative to describe the warping of masculine identity which took place in the hearts and minds of his white masters. Near the end of his twelve years in slavery, Northup had a master who “delighted” to watch his young son riding out on horseback into the fields to “play the overseer” and whip the slaves, compelling them to their tasks with “expressions of profanity.” Through all this, Northup’s white male master would laugh, commending his son as a “thorough-going boy.” Northup’s reaction to this yet again revealed the inner family man: “‘The child is father to the man’…the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who…are regarded as humane and generous.”  Plantation slavery was the “iniquitous system” Northup referred to, and the warped model of manhood it created among whites disrupted slave families and prevented men like Northup from fulfilling their identities as presiders over intact family units.

At various times in his life as a slave, Northup gave voice to the deep hunger he felt for rekindling those family relationships he had lost by being enslaved and having the presiding role taken away from him. At one point, Northup felt weighed down by the knowledge that in slavery, “there was no one who knew or cared about [him].” He had been ripped away from the family unit that gave his life a purposeful and manly social role to fill. As a slave, he was not needed as a head of household. This, however, did not stop him from dreaming of fulfilling that role once more in the undetermined future. “My family, alas, should I ever see them more?” was a constant worry for Northup.  “My thoughts, as usual, wandered back to my wife and children…my heart was at home in Saratoga.”  As the site of so much that sustained him, Saratoga Springs, New York represented everything Northup craved during his identity crisis as a slave: family, home, and social belonging.

Northup’s greatest desire in life was to act out the gender roles of husband, father, and head of household. Before the point in his narrative where he was kidnapped, Northup explained his life’s ambition in terms unfiltered by the identity constraints of slavery: “With a wife dependent upon me for support, I resolved to enter upon a life of industry.” He “indulged in pleasant dreams of a good time coming, when the possession of some humble habitation, with a few surrounding acres, should reward my labors, and bring me the means of happiness and comfort.” Marriage and family were key to his fulfillment as a man who performed the gender role of presiding over his wife and children. Northup explained: “the love I have borne my wife has been sincere and unabated; and only those who have felt the glowing tenderness a father cherishes for his offspring, can appreciate my affection.”  This is what sustained Northup through the twelve-year ordeal of having his identity and gender roles repressed: the vision of having another chance at filling those roles and presiding over his household once again.

Being unable to provide for the needs of a family truly his own, Frederick Douglass adopted improvised family units out of the social bonds he formed with fellow slaves; these ad hoc slave “families” allowed Douglass to act out the gender roles central to his own masculinity and to provide for the members of his slave family. Douglass clearly had affection for his enslaved companions. He wrote about feeling indebted to them, explaining that they were “noble souls,” that he “loved them with a love stronger than any thing [he had] experienced since.” He even went so far as to say that he “never loved any or confided in any people more than my fellow-slaves…I believe we would have died for each other.”  Incredibly, Douglass was willing to sacrifice his own life on behalf of his slave family. As a man who provided for those he loved, there could be no greater sacrifice, and it surely gave Douglass an ennobling sense of manhood.

Given the deprivations of plantation slavery, Douglass had plenty of reasons to want to provide whatever aid he could to his beloved slave family members. Douglass reported that adult slaves were only given about eight pounds of meat and one bushel of corn per month for their sustenance. For an entire year of clothing, slaves were only outfitted with two shirts, two sets of trousers, one jacket, and a single pair of stockings and shoes. Slave children went practically naked. Slaves also went without beds. They suffered from insufficient sleep because they were not given any free time during the daylight hours; they had to do all their washing, mending, and cooking at night and without regular facilities.  The meager amount of provisions, time for sleeping, and time for the regular chores of life made it prudent—even necessary—for slaves to live and work together as a family unit regardless of genetic kinship. Douglass would have felt a masculine inclination to provide what he could.

Unfortunately, it seems that Douglass could often do no more to help his fellow slaves than inwardly rage against the suffering they were made to endure; Douglass’ inner rage reflects his masculine frustration at not being able to fill the providing gender role he associated with his identity. At one point in his narrative, he described what it was like to watch the various members of his slave family being auctioned off to fates and masters unknown. He wrote about the “high excitement and deep anxiety” he felt while watching as “men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine…all holding the same rank in scale of being.”  Douglass felt helpless to provide a better path for his slave family, and it certainly broke his heart to recognize that he could do so little. Presumably, feeling helpless did not sit well with a man who felt so strongly the need to provide for those he cared about.

Perhaps the most poignant example of Douglass’ perceived helplessness in fulfilling his gender role as provider for his family actually involved a genetic relative. In an act of “base ingratitude and fiendish barbarity,” Douglass’ grandmother—having outlived her marketable usefulness as a slave—was sent out into the woods near the end of her life and left alone to support herself until she died. This horrible deprivation did more to deepen Douglass’ “conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill [him] with unutterable loathing of slaveholders” than anything he had previously experienced.  It surely must have gnawed at Douglass’ identity as an aspiring family man to know there was nothing he could have done to help his own vulnerable grandmother at her time of greatest need.

It seems that Solomon Northup was generally more successful at throwing off the gender role repression he experienced in the system of institutionalized American slavery, and he found various ways of covertly providing for his enslaved companions. He discovered ingenious methods for providing food for both himself and the other slaves, taking obvious pride in his work. For example, Northup constructed a fish trap that not only helped to feed himself and others, but its design was so effective that it became a model that other slaves emulated in their own search for food. Of his fish trap, Northup wrote that it “succeeded beyond expectation,” that it “was of such benefit…that I am almost persuaded to look upon myself as a benefactor.”  Taking Northup at his own word, it seems apparent that he thoroughly enjoyed acting as a benefactor for others. Unsurprisingly, acting as a provider of food for other slaves played well with Northup’s inner masculine identity as a man who took care of those in his intimate social circle.

There were many times that Northup acted as benefactor for those fellow slaves who needed help and support that he, as a male provider, could supply. One night, as Northup was sitting alone in his slave cabin, a slave girl named Celeste appeared in his doorway, looking “pale and haggard.” When Northup inquired after what it was she wanted with him, she told him that she was a runaway, that she was sick and starving, and that she was looking for some food to take with her into hiding in the nearby swamps. Northup granted her request for food, and gave her further aid and comfort in the days ahead. “For several nights she came to my cabin for food…I carried provisions to a certain spot agreed upon, where she would find them…she regained her health, and became strong and hearty.”  It is with a certain degree of masculine satisfaction that Northup wrote about his efforts to provide food, shelter, and concealment for Celeste. No doubt these actions helped to reaffirm Northup’s gender identity.

Northup used the skills he had developed as a free man to bless the lives of other captives. One of his early masters, who liked Northup very much and thought highly of him, sought “to procure a loom, in order that [the slaves] might commence weaving cloth for [their] winter garments.” As soon as Northup heard about this, he suggested to the master “that the easiest way to get one would be to make it, informing him at the same time, that [Northup] was a sort of ‘Jack at all trades,’ and would attempt it.” Later, after Northup had finished crafting the loom, it was pronounced “to be perfect” and “worked so well, [Northup] continued in the employment of making looms.”  Yet again, Northup willingly volunteered to put his past experience to good use to provide material comfort and security for his slave friends, his ad hoc family that allowed him to act out the gender roles he was most familiar with. He obviously enjoyed enormous gratification because of this.

Northup found other ways to provide for the members of his slave family. When he was first transported down to the South on the brig Orleans, he provided emotional support for his fellow captives by helping them carve their initials on tin cups. This act of solidarity among victims gave Northup the honor of knowing that he had “gratified them all, of which they did not appear to be forgetful.”  On another occasion, a slave named Sam approached Northup with the wish that Northup would read the Bible aloud to him. Northup explained that he “often read to him, a favor which he well repaid me by many expressions of gratitude.  Later on in his slave life, Northup again provided emotional support to an elderly slave affectionately known as Uncle Abram, who had been stabbed by his master.  In these instances and others, Northup demonstrated that being a man not only meant providing the material things needed by his loved ones, but their emotional needs as well.

Slavery deprived captives of their freedom, their identity, their families and social relationships with others, and their material comforts and emotional well-being; institutionalized slavery did all of this by enforcing a strict regimen of cruelty and violence that forced men like Frederick Douglass to endure the bitterness of being unable to protect loved ones from harm. Douglass spent a large balance of his narrative detailing this bitterness. He wrote of white masters who kept slaves tied up all day long, whipping them “before breakfast” only to “return at dinner” to whip them again in places already made raw by the application of the lash.  Slaves were ruthlessly gunned down for disobedience or for trying to escape; killing slaves was rarely considered to be a criminal act, and white Southerners would often publicly boast about killing the “d----d niggers.” A cousin of Douglass’ wife was one of the many victims of this racist violence; as a young girl barely fifteen or sixteen years of age, she was mangled by a white woman “in the most horrible manner, breaking her nose and breastbone.”  Douglass—and other slave men like him—felt totally incapable of stopping these acts of brutality.

When he was a little boy, Douglass witnessed an act of violent cruelty that permanently set him at odds with the institution of slavery responsible for frustrating his manly urge to protect. It was the first time he ever saw his aunt whipped. “I never shall forget it,” he said, “whilst I remember any thing…it struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery…it was a most terrible spectacle.”  Witnessing his aunt’s beating traumatized Douglass. He was “so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over.”  Later in life, he and other slaves worried that “against all [their] wishes, prayers, and entreaties…there was the horrid dread of falling into the hands [of cruel masters]…a condition held by [them] all in the utmost horror and dread.”  There are few things that frustrate a man’s sense of masculinity more than finding oneself incapable of protecting others from physical violence, of realizing there is no better course than hiding away in a closet. Douglass had to deal with this emasculating and disempowering reality every day of his captivity.

Some slaves, like Solomon Northup, managed to protect their enslaved friends without alerting their white masters, thereby fulfilling a semblance of their masculine gender roles. One of Northup’s masters accused a trio of slaves of being “melon-stealing, Sabbath-breaking niggers.” He promptly imprisoned these three slaves in the stocks, handed the key to Northup, and “drove away to church at Cheneyville.” As soon as the master had departed the plantation, the three imprisoned slaves begged Northup to let them loose. “I felt sorry to see them sitting on the hot ground,” recalled Northup. “Upon their promise to return to the stocks at any moment they were required to do so, I consented to release them.”  Northup was also known to have initiated a system of fake whippings during the times he was compelled to work as a slave-driver. He “learned to handle the whip with marvelous dexterity and precision, throwing the lash within a hair’s breadth of the back” without ever touching his enslaved companions, who would oblige by making a show as if they had actually been whipped.  Once again, Northup’s ingenuity served him well and allowed him to fulfill the masculine gender role of protecting others from unjustified abuse.

No matter how shrewdly Northup managed to fool his masters, even he was not immune to undergoing extremely painful moments of having his masculine role of protecting others stripped from him. The barbaric whipping of Northup’s friend, a woman named Patsey, provided one of the most tragic, heart-wrenching, and inhumane scenes in Northup’s narrative. It was a matter of pride for Northup that he was “happy in the belief that on numerous occasions I was the means of averting punishment from the inoffensive girl,” but on one particular occasion, he was unable to save her from the master’s whip; it turned out to be “the most cruel whipping that ever [he] was doomed to witness.”  Worst of all, Northup himself was compelled to perform the whipping. With outright disgust, Northup wrote that Patsey was stripped naked and “terribly lacerated” and “literally flayed,” that Patsey screamed and begged for mercy, and that, eventually, Northup became so shaken that he actually threw down the whip and refused to continue. When the white master took up the whipping where Northup had left off, Northup considered his own “tempestuous emotions” and looked upon the master with “unutterable loathing and abhorrence, and thought within [himself]—‘Thou devil, sooner or later, somewhere in the course of eternal justice, thou shalt answer for this sin!’”  Just as Douglass’ flight to the closet emasculated his own sense of gender identity, surely Northup’s inability to spare Patsey was a grave moment of crisis in Northup’s identity as a man enslaved.

The slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup provide two evocative examples of the identity repression African-American male slaves experienced in the slaveholding states during the antebellum period of U.S. history; the narratives explain how both Douglass and Northup yearned for and sought out opportunities to perform masculine gender roles that brought meaning to their lives. These masculine roles manifested in various ways in the two narratives of enslaved life, but the three broad categories of presiding, providing, and protecting stand out for their close association with the manly virtues of guidance, loving concern, and protection aforementioned in Edward Baptist’s caretaking model of slave manhood. Whether it was Douglass sending for his intended bride to come and join him in New York City, or Northup giving aid, comfort, and shelter to the runaway Celeste, both men did whatever they could to form meaningful social relationships within which to play the masculine roles they identified with. Unfortunately for both Douglass and Northup, plantation slavery did not provide a conducive environment for acting out the gender roles that made up such an important part of their social identity; to the contrary, plantation slavery in the American South was explicitly designed to emasculate and undermine African-American manhood, totally reducing the black slave man into a state of identity below that of the most despicable savage.

Without the perceptions and gender roles connected with masculinity, it is very easy for a man to lose touch with his identity, the social bonds that provide venues for him to act out that identity, and ultimately, the feeling that his life has meaning and purpose. Antebellum slavery in the U.S. was not merely a system that restricted slaves’ freedom to act; the wounds inflicted ran far deeper, leading to a repression of slaves’ very identities. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Twelve Years a Slave provide clear evidence that their respective authors were men who hungered for a restoration of their masculine identities, that they sought to satisfy this hunger and survive the horrors of slavery by filling out gender roles in social relationships with fellow slaves that ultimately provided a path towards being a part of a family unit. Slavery was the obstacle that prevented Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup from achieving what they really wanted their freedom for: to preside over, to provide for, and to protect their families.

Although written records by former African-American slaves are relatively scarce, it can be easily imagined that those left behind by Douglass and Northup are representative of the identity crises experienced by thousands of other enslaved black men. The efforts of slave men to accumulate purposeful relationships, to find new ways to take care of other slaves, and to insist through their actions that their lives as men did in fact matter were indeed valiant. Yet, for many slave men who were not fortunate enough to escape slavery as did Douglass and Northup, their efforts and stories remain underappreciated and untold. These men most likely wanted nothing more than what so many other men throughout history have wanted: to be free to raise families of their own, and to give their friends and loved ones the materials and protection needed to sustain fulfilling lives. Slavery prevented these men from accomplishing this dream and furthermore denied them the masculine identity that was so crucial to filling these roles in the first place. This remains one of the great and fundamental tragedies of institutionalized American slavery.

--Christopher Peterson, February 25^th, 2017