African American Women’s Gender Relations and Experience Under Slavery

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Slavery was one of the main grievances experienced by African-Americans. The institution of domestic slavery had an early origin in both the Northern and Southern Colonies. The earliest records of slavery in New England coincide with the Pequot War, 1637 when the captured Indians were enslaved. Negro slaves were shortly thereafter imported, the practice of trading the Indian for the blackamoor arising because the latter was better suited by nature for enslavement.

It would seem that this custom was given positive legal recognition first in the Body of Liberties enacted in 1641, a legal sanction that remained unrepealed throughout the Colonial period. When the New England Confederation was formed in 1643 to promote matters of common concern for the New England Colonies, one provision of the compact was for the rendition of bondservants. Throughout the seventeenth century, it is impossible to discern a public attitude for emancipation in New England. For women, slavery represented a double burden because of their color of skin and gender.

In slavery, African-American women could imbibe their divinely prescribed role and the concomitant virtue of self-sacrifice through commonsensical readings of the Bible. Philosophy prescribed a moral system in which one’s conscience determined all mental and moral judgments and served to guide the individual through life’s turmoils. Whereas While American women under this ideology might ostensibly serve as the purveyors of low-class, domestic morality and the virtuous saviors of a troubled nation, they nevertheless were closed out of a host of career and leadership opportunities as well political, legal, and economic rights.

Moreover, their own voices, feelings, and desires became their enemies, as women were precluded from expressing themselves freely. Given her refusal to follow these prescriptions, Beecher herself demonstrated the losses incurred by the feminine ideal she so vehemently advocated (Franklin and Moss 2000).

For African-American women, attacks on slavery were few and isolated and not in harmony with the prevailing sentiment of the times. There seemed to be no inconsistency between the Calvinistic theory of election and domestic slavery, nor any incongruity between a system of bondage and the Puritan practice in religious and governmental institutions. Puritan political views were strongly influenced by religion, but by the Old Testament religion; they patterned their institutions as prototypes of the Old Hebrew society, and the Law of Moses, with ultimate divine sanction, was their standard.

The doctrine of election in the realm of religion, moreover, was fundamentally out of harmony with a theory of social equality. Whatever views the Puritan advocate of the slave had were humanitarian, for the care of his soul and for the amelioration of his physical hardships, rather than equalitarian, for the absolving of his status (Kelly and Lewis, 2000). The seeds of the anti-slavery crusade were not indigenous to Puritanism, nor did the climate of New England nourish their growth, until shortly before the Revolution when the fertile thought of the American patriot was implanted with them to stimulate a rapid and luxuriant growth (Hill, 2006).

Two principal ideas militating in opposition to the work of the humanitarians; first, the belief that the Negro was a different species from man, that he was without a soul, and that Christianity offered no salvation for him; and secondly, the fear that administration of the sacraments to the slave would elevate him to the plane of the master and would absolve his status as a slave.

In the literature of the Colonial period may be found many pieces of evidence of the belief in the inferior capacity of the Negro, which idea made such an indelible impression on the collective mind of the slaveowners that it was not entirely removed even a century later when assaulted by the combined teachings of the churches in the South during the crest of the development of the religious theory of the unity of the races. Instead, this common belief of Negro incapacity was the Colonial heritage of the ethnological branch of the later pro-slavery thought, which developed the theory of the diversity of races and plurality of their origins (Mullane,1993).

Slavery joined the male-female, public-private binaries in part by espousing an active and public role for women. Rather than reinforce her call for a universal, self-sacrificing feminine identity through shaming tactics and an appeal to Common Sense reasoning.

Another feature of the pro-slavery argument appearing many times in the debates was the spread theory, that is, that it was necessary to extend and spread the institution into new territory so as to lighten its burden on the old slave communities. In order to understand the full significance of this theory, as a pro-slavery argument, it is pertinent to hold in mind a factor that was almost constant in the history of pro-slavery thought (Kelly and Lewis, 2000).

To the Southern mind, the institution of domestic slavery afforded the best relationship under which a superior and an inferior race could live together, provided that a proper ratio of those races was maintained. Intolerable evils would result in society if the proportion of the races became unbalanced. Women were relegated to any form of activity that occurs inside the newly privatized household of the emergent middle class; men, by contrast, are assigned to the competitive and chaotic public world of politics and capitalist enterprise (Kelly and Lewis, 2000).

In the course of the debate, the discussion shifted to the question of what form, if any, the plan of action should take. Many schemes were proposed, all of which were in the nature of colonization. There were those that would colonize beyond the Rockies and those that would establish the colony in Africa; there were those that would colonize through the medium of the federal government, the State government, or the Colonization Society, supplemented by funds from the State or nation.

The second form was gradualism, which shaded into various grades of opinion. They differed with the immediatists, taking the ground that abolition should be accomplished by degrees and steps. Instead of emphasizing the natural right of the slave, they recognized the property right of the master and the practical results of abolition to society (Mullane1993). Others believed that generations, and in some cases centuries, would be necessary to attain complete emancipation.

Whereas immediatism had practically no support within the South, gradualism, in some phases of its theory, had many advocates. Incidentally, an increased supply would reduce the price of slaves. This would enable the poorer classes to purchase them and become slaveowners. The result would be to do away with the undesirable economic conflict between hirelings and slave labor within the South. More slaves were needed in order to break up the concentration of ownership in a small group and diffuse it among a large number of potential masters. It was necessary for the large group of poor whites to share directly in the benefits of slavery in order for them to be brought fully to support the institution (Sanchez-Hucles, 1997).

The group of imperialists visualized the great contest of the ages ensuing between slave and free society. They believed that had the slave trade never been closed; slave society would have already won the contest in this hemisphere. They realized, moreover, that the contest would continue, even within the South, after Southern independence (Hine et al., 2007). Spratt pointed out after the dissolution of the Union that the causes that tended to defeat slavery still existed.

The slaves were still being drawn off to the west by high prices, and the border States, and even South Carolina, were being supplied with pauper labor and developing an element opposed to slavery. He, therefore, renewed his efforts to revive the trade when the South was in the formation of a slave republic (Smallwood and Elliot1997).

The defense of slavery always followed an attack. Thus during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, pro-slavery opinion was passive. Few persons in public life, or through private writings, rose to defend an institution that apparently remained securely surrounded by constitutional safeguards. The slaveholder, feeling that the question had been settled once for all in the compromises of the Federal Constitution, did not care to reopen the question and was content that no one else did so. On the few occasions in which the question was brought up in Congress, the Southern representatives denied jurisdiction in that body to act (Kelly and Lewis, 2000).

The first defenses that appeared, and there was an occasional one from the very earliest period, were apologetic. This may be explained on the ground that it was the easiest way to put aside the question. It must also be held in mind that, while there had always existed a strong faction that desired to perpetuate slavery, yet many lesser elements within the South looked to its final overthrow. These elements had to be brought in line with the perpetual before the apologetic attitude could be thrown off (Hine et al., 2007).

The discussion over the legal basis of slavery resolved into two broad questions. The first was a philosophical inquiry as to whether the institution conformed to the law of nature, and the second took on more of the character of a legalistic dispute as to whether there was a positive law sanction for the institution. From the genesis of the slavery controversy, both the antagonists and the proponents of slavery had appealed to the law of nature to support their opposite positions.

In American slavery history, the anti-slavery group argued, from the very beginning, that the institution was contrary to nature’s law; and at times, they appealed to nature as a higher law that overrode all man-made sanctions for slavery. Pro-slavery thinkers, therefore, were led to study the great writers on the law of nature and to set forth interpretations of it with which slavery might harmonize (Kelly and Lewis, 2000).

To meet the attack from the natural rights interpretation of natural law, the defenders of slavery divided into two schools; the first attempted to reconcile slavery and natural rights, whereas the second discarded natural rights entirely. In order to accomplish a reconciliation of the two,

In gender relations, moral values and traditions played a crucial role. The moral rationale of slavery made up a distinct division of the philosophy of the slaveholder. From the beginning of the controversy, the principle of right and wrong involved in the slavery relationship was fundamental in both anti-slavery and pro-slavery thought. When the relation was first attacked as a moral evil, the reaction of the slaveholder was objective. Kelly and Lewis (2000) observed actual conditions and replied that it could not be evil when so much good resulted to the parties.

Thus the first stage in the moral justification was the argument of the realist in answer to the idealist who would judge all human relations by a set of abstract principles. When the attack advanced to the position that the relationship of master and slave was a sin per se, everywhere and under all conditions, then he began to construct a moral philosophy under which slavery could be authoritatively supported. Ultimately pro-slavery thought in the field of ethics led to the statement of a rational system under which slavery was brought into conformity with the moral foundation of the universe. For an authoritative code of morality that would govern all human relations, the slaveholder went to the Bible, where divine revelation contributed the basic element in preparing the moral defense (Kelly and Lewis, 2000).

In sum, the classified rights under the law of nature into those that are inalienable, such as that of self-defense, those that may be voluntarily surrendered, and those that may be forfeited by crime, captivity in war, or debt. With the weight of these authorities, the Southern slaveholder united the facts he had derived from history. Slavery had existed in all ages and at all times in some form. It owed its being, therefore, to universal custom, the common consent of mankind.

Based upon the common law of nations, that is, upon universal custom and usage, the institution had received the sanction of the legal codes and judicial decisions, or of the municipal law, of individual nations. The significance of this decision can readily be seen as destroying the authority of the master beyond the limits of his own State and as giving the institution a standing dependent solely upon local lawThen; the emancipationists argued that the rules of property, such as the laws of descent and of primogeniture were determined by statute and might be repealed at any time. An abrogation of the rules of descent would be tantamount to declaring it property no longer, for the value of the female slaves depended upon the value of the offspring.

References

Franklin, J.H. Moss, A. A. (2000). From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. Knopf; 8 Sub edition.

Hill, S. A. (2006). Marriage among African American Women: A Gender Perspective Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 37 (1), 565.

Hine, D. C. Hine, W. C. Harrold, S. (2007). African American Odyssey, The Combined Volume.Prentice-Hall; 4 edition.

Kelly, D.S., Lewis, E. (2000). To Make our world Anew: A history of African Americans to 1880. Oxford University Press, USA.

Mullane, D. (1993). Crossing The Danger Water: Three hundred years of African American. Anchor; 1st Anchor Books Ed edition.

Sanchez-Hucles, J. V. (1997). Jeopardy Not Bonus Status for African American Women in the Work Force: Why Does the Myth of Advantage Persist? American Journal of Community Psychology, 25 (1), 338.

Smallwood, A.D. Elliot, J. M. (1997). The Atlas of African-American History and Politics: From the Slave Trade to Modern Times. McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages.

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African American Women’s Gender Relations and Experience Under Slavery

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