Slave Culture and Resistance

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Slave Culture and Resistance in Antebellum America ______________________________________________________________________________________ The history of the ‘peculiar institution’ in the United States of America known as slavery has had a largely mainstream approach in the minds of the general populace. Through much debate and discussion about the subjugation faced by the African-American community in the preemancipation era, the general opinion is usually restricted to issues of the moral standing on slavery and its existence in the United States. The fact remains that the American institution of slavery differed from that which existed in the Roman and Greek cultures of the ancient period. In its early phase, prior to the ban on the slave trade, slaves were brought into the country from the West African coast via ship through the ‘Middle Passage’. Later, with the outlaw of slave trading, slave breeding became popular in the American South. Here, the relatively rural plantation economy was dependant on slave labour, unlike the industrialised urban centres of the North. With the end of the Civil War, the institution of slavery was formally abolished. What is interesting to understand amongst all this is how the institution created within itself a culture of its own as well as what constituted those cultural elements. Equally important is how the slaves resisted the negative effects of slavery, and how they managed to persist with their struggle despite being faced with legislative and societal difficulties. In these two questions we find the focus of this essay. With few exceptions, most scholars until very recently have assumed that because United States slavery eroded so much of the linguistic and institutional side of African life, it necessarily wiped out almost all of the fundamental aspects of traditional African cultures. Robert Parks, in 1919, summed this assumption up: ‘The Negro when he landed in the United States, left behind him almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament... Coming from all parts of Arica and having no common language and common tradition, the memories of Africa which they brought with them were soon lost.’ But this social severance did not imply a complete break from African cultural forms during the transport and enslavement process. The ongoing discussion of the nature of Negro culture has usually emphasised this question of African cultural retentions, identified by some as Africanisms. The issue of religion is central to discussions of the culture of Blacks in the Americas. The conversion in the Anglo-Americas of Blacks to Protestant Christianity was “perhaps, the defining moment” in the history of the population group. Not until the First Great Awakening, which began in the 1730s and 1740s, were a significant number of slaves formally converted to Christianity. Before this time, in the United States, little attempt was made to convert slaves; many were actually hostile to such activities. However, toward the end of the nineteenth century, in the wake of a series of evangelical revivals, the number of enslaved and free Blacks who joined the Baptist and Methodist denominations increased considerably. Yet, the religious consciousness of the slaves would continue to reflect the influence of African conceptual systems in terms of both belief and structure. In most discourses on slave religion in American historiography, there was a notion that slaves simply parroted the religion of the master class. Kenneth Stampp, writing in The Peculiar Institution, maintains that most so-called ‘Africanisms’ were “lost within a generation” because of the general decay of Black culture in the Americas. Of those aspects of slave spirituality that Slave Culture and Resistance in Antebellum America

2 ran counter to evangelical Christianity, Stampp assures us that, “there is no need to trace back to Africa the slave’s...dread of witches, ghosts and hobgoblins, his confidence in good-luck charms, his alarm at evil omens, his belief in dreams, and his reluctance to visit burying grounds after dark. These superstitions were all firmly rooted in Anglo-Saxon folklore.” Essentially, Stampp concludes that the slave religious beliefs were aping those of contemporary whites in the antebellum south. W.E.B. Du Bois however departed from this view in The Souls of Black Folk. He chronicled the genealogy of the Black church not to Europe but rather to an African past. In a contradiction to widely held beliefs of a degeneration of Christianity in the Black interpretation of religion, Du Bois rather asserted that it was a spiritual tradition of the “philosophy of life”. He would go on to say that rather than reproducing white religion, the Blacks had early developed particular forms of religious expression which, in the dance of spiritual possession, the cadence of the Black preacher, and the melancholy of the slave spiritual, revealed a distinct theology both wed to yet divorced from evangelical American faiths. Sterling Stuckey had articulated the black notion of religion as early as 1968, saying that it was a way of helping them manage not only the mandate of conversion but also the strictures of plantation labour; a notion that was further enhanced by scholars such as Lawrence Levine and John Blassingame. Albert Rabouteau suggested that this rejection of white norms often took two different forms: on the one hand there was the establishment of independent churches in the South as well as the North to work alongside more ‘invisible’ institutions of slave folk religion; on the other these new creations allowed coloured men and women to draw from the religious and expressive culture of the African past, along with elements of evangelical denominations, to create an oft-times subversive religious practice. Genovese however attempted to resolve this issue by establishing black religious expression both within and without other American ritual forms. He suggested that the contours of slave religious expression were worked out through compromise and conciliation, and that the religious tradition of slaves inspired docility and submission and “softened the slaves by drawing hatred from their souls, and without hatred there could be no revolt.” The slave attachment to their religion, and the white view that religion was a method of suppressing revolt translated into concrete institutions later on. Black prayer houses started becoming more common in the American South, and an organic sub-culture of Christianity was developed as a result. Levine chronicled the development of the Christian tales of creation amongst the slaves. He found that some were “clearly influenced by the ubiquitous AngloAmerican myths which insisted that blackness resulted from God’s curse on Cain or Ham.” Other tales were based on the curse of Noah on his son, or the Devil’s attempt to create man just as God did, and instead created the coloured race. This did not in any way deter the slaves in their love of religion and God. After Nat Turner’s slave revolt in 1831, however, many slaveholders in Virginia forbade worship in the praise house, opting instead to appropriate the nether reaches of their own church balconies and galleries’ for slaves’ use. Accounts of slaves reacting to this highlighted that they only wished to pray in their prayer houses with their own burial grounds. The praise-house, in fact, became the centre of the slaves’ religious life, the loc of ritual practice and ecstasy. Slaves assembled at the prayer house on several nights throughout the week and on Sunday afternoon to worship. Prayer was accompanied by song and dance as the faithful Slave Culture and Resistance in Antebellum America

3 formed a circle and performed a ‘ring-shout’. The ring-shout, even when performed in an ostensibly Christian setting, revealed the deep connections that the slaves maintained to African ritual expression. Music played a central role in the structuring of slave religion and culture. R.F. Thompson writes that certain principles define the musical and choreographic modalities that connect Black peoples in the Western Hemisphere. Among other things, he continues, these include “the dominance of a percussive performance style, a propensity for a multiple meter and call and response in singing. As a result, dancing, singing and drumming played an integral part in the invocation of the spirits. The Black affinity for music was evident in the fact that slaves would accompany any task they were engaged in with song. The structure and content of slave songs were unique in themselves, and it is here that scholars seem to be divided regarding the effect of the earlier African culture on the culture and traditions of American slaves. While many earlier argued that there was no transmission of cultural traits from Africa to America, it is in slave songs that historians have been able to find some semblance of Africa. Alan Lomax, with reference to slave music, had argued that musical style appeared to be one of the most conservative of cultural traits and that even when an entirely new set of tunes, rhythms, or harmonic patterns is introduced, a musical style will still remain intact and yield to change only very gradually. Lawrence Levine in Black Culture, Black Consciousness said that slave songs in their structure, rhythm and content closely resembled the songs of West Africa instead of Western Europe, despite the fact that they were surrounded by and owned by exponents of Western European culture. Slave culture was greatly influenced by its antecedents. Slave music and religion together gave birth to another spawn of slave creativity and cultural expression – the Spiritual. What Du Bois once referred to as “sorrow songs” were not only that, though they certainly spoke to the slaves’ sense of exile and abjection. These were also songs of triumph, of overcoming, and, as one song goes, of “joy unspeakable”. As Demetrius L. Eudell puts it, “nowhere are the agony and the ecstasy defining the human condition better expressed than in these songs.” Spirituals were collected by the hundreds directly from slaves and freedmen during the Civil War and the decades immediately following, and although they came from widely different geographical areas they share a common structure and content which seem to have been characteristic of Negro music wherever slavery existed in the United States. Levine argued that “the vast preponderance of spirituals over any other sort of slave music rather than being merely the result of accident or error is instead an accurate reflection of slave culture during the antebellum period. Though slaves never abandoned secular song, by the time of the Civil War, the widespread conversion to Christianity and the impact of the revivals had made important inroads.” He also felt that spirituals were not only quantitatively but qualitatively the most significant musical creation of the antebellum period, as secular song was more strictly occasional music and religious music was used by slaves to articulate many of their deepest and most enduring feelings and certainties. As valuable as secular songs are as a record of slave consciousness, it is to the spirituals that historians must look to comprehend the antebellum slaves’ world view, for it was in the spirituals that slaves found a medium which resembled in many crucial ways the cosmology they had brought with them from Africa and afforded them the possibility of both adapting and transcending their situation.

Slave Culture and Resistance in Antebellum America

4 An element of Negro culture that was apart but not detached from religion and music was the folk tales of the slaves. Apart from tales regarding the creation of the black race, as mentioned earlier, slave tales communicated the slaves’ own version of historical narratives, often passed down from African-born grandfathers to slave-born children. The most well-known slave tales are compilations of Joel Chandler Harris of his Uncle Remus tales, which he insisted were not ‘cooked’ but were ‘given in the simple but picturesque language of the negroes, just as the Negroes tell them.’ Malinowski asserted that slave tales were almost totally devoid of cosmological myths, but there was some aspect of mythology is slave tales which he said were characterised by ‘a retrospective, ever-present, live actuality.’ Slaves had their own version of history in these tales as well, often talking about the slave journey through the Middle Passage, and even commenting upon historical figures of the American Republic. An example of this was the folk-tale which said that George Washington, in his last words on earth, said, “Forever keep the niggers down”. Similar tales existed for Andrew Jackson, and tales of Abraham Lincoln were also around, though presenting the figure in a more positive light. Slave versions of history, like all slave tales, were enhanced by the manner of their delivery. The oral inventiveness of good storytellers, who appear to have been relatively common in black culture, was a source of delight and stimulation to their audiences. Their narratives were interlaced with chants, mimicry, rhymes and songs. The emphasis on oral transmission was a salient feature of slave tales, which were only documented much later. Popular animal trickster tales had slave origins, and historians note that there was a degree of uniformity in content and transmission throughout the country for these tales. The culture of the slaves gave a great impetus for resistance in the pre-emancipation period. More than any other scholar, Herbert Aptheker focussed on American slave revolts. His work, American Negro Slave Revolts, as well as numerous essays, has argued for ‘a revolutionary tradition among the slaves.’ However, Genovese critiques Apthekar’s view in saying that though he was revolutionary himself in granting Negro revolts such a characteristic, ‘his choice of emphasis flowed from an empirical error and led to an incorrect theoretical assessment. Satisfied that he had discovered a revolutionary tradition, he missed the chance to apply his considerable professional talent and critical Marxist perspective to the problem of the weakness and limited extent of the revolts and to move the discussion toward a reconsideration of those preconditions for hemisphere slave revolt which can tell us so much about the general conditions of slave life.’ Slave revolts in the United States had the character of the ultimate class struggle under the most unfavourable conditions. The fact that slave revolts took place gives us an understanding of the level of resentment which the slaves harboured. However, the size, frequency, intensity or general historical significance of these was nothing in comparison to those of the Caribbean or South America. None of the major slave revolts of the United States were very large, with wellknown ones such as that of Nat Turner having only about seventy slaves participating. Many revolts and precedents were set by legal issues regarding slavery. The Dred Scott case concerning a slave who wanted to be considered free when he travelled to a non-slave state with his master was amongst the most famous, resulting in a court adjudging the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and slavery legal in all territories. An incident of a sporadic slave revolt came in the form of John Brown’s revolt, where a group of 18 people seized the Federal Slave Culture and Resistance in Antebellum America

5 Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, believing that they would be joined by slaves and nonslave-owning white farmers. They were caught and executed, making John Brown a martyr for the Northern abolitionist cause. The disorganised nature of slave revolts in the United States was a primary feature of the phenomenon. Apart from armed revolt though, slaves found other ways of putting up resistance. As mentioned earlier, slaves found solace from their subjugation through music and religion. Running away also became a common feature in slave resistance, with slaves going missing from plantations and attempting to make their way to the North or Canada (after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act, the North was no longer a safe haven for runaway slaves). The Underground Railroad was also another way for slaves to make an escape, with an extensive network connecting slave states to Canada. Slavery was indeed a peculiar institution, for it oppressed an entire race while leaving just enough room for the development of an indigenous and unique culture as well as space for showing resistance. With the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, slavery was formally abolished in the United States of America, though the African-American people faced hardships similar to slavery all the way to the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th century. In spite of this, slaves were culturally a vibrant community and within their culture they were able to organically grow a culture of resistance. Though these resistance efforts were failures, they did leave a significant mark on the psyche of the people of the United States who, up till this period, assumed that slavery was an institution which did not require to be viewed from a moral perspective. As many of the scholars mentioned above have asserted, the slaves in antebellum America were oppressed, and within this oppression they found contentment in their old culture. Music, dance, spirituality, storytelling, all gave them the ability to bear the brunt of the brutalities of the peculiar institution. Despite suffering from a lack of success in resisting established conventions of the racial schism that existed in America, slaves of the antebellum period were able to pave the way for future attempts and efforts which would eventually lead to the African-American peoples finally attaining what they had been denied for centuries – true freedom. BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. Boritt, G. and Hancock, S. (ed.) Slavery, Resistance, Freedom, Oxford University Press (2007) 2. Halttunen, Karen (ed.) A Companion to American Cultural History, Blackwell (2008) 3. Hornsby Jr., Alton (ed.) A Companion to African American History, Blackwell (2008) 4. Levine, Lawrence W., Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Oxford University Press (1978) 5. Genovese, Eugene, Roll, Jordan, Roll, Pantheon Books (1974) ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ By Soumya Srijan Dasgupta B.A. (Honours) History, 2nd Year St. Stephen’s College Paper: The History of the United States of America (1776 – 1939)

Slave Culture and Resistance in Antebellum America