Slavery

Family

During the colonial period, slaves' concept of masculinity often came from Africa, where husbands and fathers normally exercised patriarchal authority (contrary to common misconceptions that African societies were predominantly matriarchal) and aspired to be great men as warriors, village politicians, or spiritual leaders, although women often joined men in the latter role. Enslaved men in the Americas strove, within the constraints of slavery, to approximate these roles as they protected their families, negotiated with other slave households, and provided spiritual leadership as conjurers, healers, or teachers. The masculine ideals forged in the colonial period remained vital into the nineteenth century, with slave men aspiring both to demonstrate physical prowess and to become culturally powerful teachers and negotiators.

The importance of fatherhood and family life to male slaves' identity was reinforced when a decline in transatlantic slave importation (beginning in the 1750s) and its legal termination in 1807 made natural increase the primary means of augmenting the slave population. Slaveholders encouraged marriage and family among their slaves, realizing that enslaved men with families were less likely to run away. “It is necessary that the Negroes have wives,” one of them wrote, “and you ought to know that nothing attaches them so much to a plantation as children” (Genovese, 452). Masters usually allowed male slaves some leeway in conducting their family relations, especially on large plantations, as long as they avoided violence and continued to work.

Yet slaveholders defined their own manhood through notions of racial hierarchy and patriarchal control of their farms and plantations, and they intervened in many ways to disrupt slave families and challenge the authority of men in the slave quarters. Nothing was more destructive to male slaves' participation in the family than the domestic slave trade. Slaveholders frequently divided families, and children rarely accompanied their fathers to a new location. In addition, many plantation owners threatened to sell disobedient male slaves away from their families. These men faced a horrific choice between two alternatives—submitting to their master's cruel authority or losing their families—either of which threatened their masculine identities. When allowed the choice, most stayed with their families, seeking new ways to assert their independence and manhood that would draw less attention from the master.

Violence and Submission

Slaveholders likewise challenged enslaved men's role as protectors of their families. Very rarely could slave husbands shield their wives from the whip, for example, although on some occasions a master would allow a man to stand in and be beaten for his wife. Enslaved men were usually powerless to prevent the cruelest of slavery's abuses: rape. On one occasion, an overseer attempted to rape a slave woman and her husband beat him nearly to death. The next day, when the overseer told the master, the slave received one hundred lashes with the whip, and then had his ear nailed to a post and cut off. Such punishments circumscribed, but did not obliterate, notions of slave manhood. Slave men were not expected, either by their families or by other men, to risk being maimed for something they were powerless to prevent.

...