Agricultural Science, Sentiment, and the Domesticated Slave

Published In

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance

Document Type

Citation

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

In antebellum America, slavery brought whites and blacks together, often in intimate contact, blurring the lines of social segregation that in theory kept the races apart. And according to the worldview of Southern slaveholders, which drew upon [End Page 375] the moral power of American domesticity to legitimize their “peculiar institution,” this intimacy was a family affair.3 The domestication of slavery combines the concept of “home culture” with a programmatic approach to selecting, breeding, and taming an unpaid labor force, and this slave husbandry was essential to a nation that after 1807 relied exclusively on an internally traded population of owned bodies. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondswoman’s Narrative respond directly to such articulations of paternal mastery; these texts evidence Jacobs’s and Crafts’s understanding of (and refusal to submit to) the power white men could wield as the purveyors of specialized, scientific knowledge—a form of knowledge that, though presented as a humanizing force, robbed black subjects, both enslaved and free, of the privileges of humanity. I examine these written protests by Jacobs and Crafts in the context of typical examples of the agricultural literature of the South—publications that disseminated the specialized, scientific knowledge of a slave culture. When read together, these texts by individuals from very different positions in the interracial slave “family” help us to better comprehend not just Southern paternalism and slave resistance, but also domesticity’s place in the national project of racial violence and social control. These diverse writings give us insight into the complex ways in which antebellum America’s notion of home and its attendant associations collaborated with scientific cultivation in the worldview of both slavers and slaves.

Rights

Copyright © 2012 Board of Regents of Washington State University

DOI

10.1353/esq.2013.0000

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/36269

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS