Marriage, Family, and Other "Peculiar Institutions" in African-American Literary History

The new constitution [of the Confederate States] has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution-African slavery as it exists amongst us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.

Confederate Vice President, Alexander H. Stephens, "Cornerstone Speech"

The distinguished Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson opens his monumental study Slavery and Social Death (1982) with an assertion that may surprise some students of American civilization: "There is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery. It has existed from before the dawn of human history right down to the twentieth century, in the most primitive of human societies and in the most civilized." Why then, he asks, given its ubiquity and longevity, is slavery commonly referred to as "the peculiar institution"? Although he concludes that "it is hard to say," he goes on to suggest that the reason may lie in our tendency to avoid that which seems too paradoxical. And slavery was rooted in paradox. Not only was it ubiquitous, Patterson says, but it also "turns out to have thrived most in precisely those areas and periods of the world where our conventional wisdom would lead us to expect it least" (vii).

Patterson's award-winning book is a comparative study of slavery around the world and throughout human history. In this global, historical context, there may indeed be nothing peculiar about the institution of slavery, if we take "peculiar" to mean "unusual"; however, the term "peculiar institution" was specific to slavery in the US and local to its practice in the American South (although slavery in the US certainly had its Northern incarnations and commercial connections). In the antebellum South, white citizens of the slaveholding sort spoke possessively of chattel slavery not as "the peculiar institution" but as "our peculiar institution." More than a simple euphemism for slavery, the idiom "our peculiar institution" was a chauvinistic turn of phrase that claimed the systematic enslavement and exploitation of Africans not only as "the proper status of the negro" but also as the proprietary and pecuniary right of the southern states. "Peculiar," as it modified "institution" in both popular and political antebellum discourse, meant particular to, the private property of, from the Latin peculiaris, "not held in common with others," and peculium, "private property," especially "property in cattle" (the pecu of peculiar).

But, Patterson notwithstanding, history and literature seem to suggest that the institution of chattel slavery in the US was peculiar in the other sense of the word as well-not just particular to or characteristic of the South, like magnolias and mint juleps, but also strange, odd, unusual, unlike all other forms of human bondage, in degree, kind, and color. Southern slavery made itself and everything it touched peculiar in this second sense by figuring its African subjects as private property-"chattels personal"-and denying them even the most basic human rights, including participation in the venerated institutions of marriage and family, which white society otherwise prized.

It is with this second meaning of "peculiar" and these other social institutions that I am concerned in this essay. How did marriage and family become peculiar institutions under two hundred and fifty years of chattel slavery? In what ways did a system that depended on the forced labor and trafficking of human beings who could be separated from each other and "sold down the river" at any time make living and loving peculiar, odd, strange for the Africans it enslaved and for their descendants? How do we know what we think we know about the intricacies, intimacies, and particularities of lives lived in the throes of a system of oppression that purposely and purposefully sought to silence its subjected subjects? How can we trust history as usual to write the unusual history of these other institutions that slavery made peculiar?

These are by no means new questions. The debate over the nature of...