Towards a History of Sound

Mark M. Smith. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 372 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Is it possible to hear the sounds and silences of history? These are the questions at the heart of Mark M. Smith's innovative new work, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, one of the first historical studies to make aural experience its analytical centerpiece. ¹ Smith's project is to explain "how people heard the principal economic, cultural, and political—hence social—developments of the United States in the nineteenth century and how their hearing at the everyday level affected their selective hearing and listening to, among other developments, the coming of the Civil War, antebellum class formation, slavery, freedom, modernization, the war itself, and Reconstruction" (p. 6). At a very basic level, Smith simply wants to fill out the historical sensorium, to "recover another, additional, often complimentary way" that "people experienced and made sense of their lives, environments, relationships, and identities" (p. 6). But these questions about the functions and meanings of sounds quickly lead to much larger issues including "what it meant to be northern, southern, slave, or free in nineteenth-century America" (p. 6). The historical work of "listening" thus serves as the foundation for a study of nineteenth-century identities, ideologies, and epistemologies defined in aural terms.

Smith's narrative thread is "aural sectionalism," and over the course of two hundred densely documented pages he builds the case for largely distinct northern and southern "soundscapes" by the time of the Civil War. His research is deepest on the antebellum South. For planter elites, Smith explains, the prevailing aural ideal was "quietude." This ideal extended through multiple realms of thought and experience. Southern elites valorized the plantation as a realm of pastoral peace, tranquility, and retirement. They created an aural order in which the volume of women, children, poor whites, and African-American slaves was continuously regulated. And they adhered to codes of gentility that prized aural self-control as a marker of elite status.

Quietude, however, was never equivalent to quiet. As Smith skillfully demonstrates, there were all sorts of disjunctures between elite ideals and the actual sounds that filled the world around them. The rural South positively roared during the antebellum period (as it does today) with the sounds of cicadas, alligators, frogs, and whippoorwills, while a wide range of man-made noises such as plantation bells and horns disciplined the daily lives of African Americans—from the chime that called slaves to work at four in the morning to the evening bells after which communication between house servants and field workers was forbidden. Plantation discipline had aural dimensions, too. Willful silence and excessive noise, for example, often led to beatings. Punishments included iron-bell harnesses, in which masters shackled disobedient slaves, so that they could be continually monitored. In one particularly wrenching episode, Smith tells the story of a fugitive slave who tried to escape through a swamp but was unable to survive because the bells locked to his body scared away potential food sources such as turtles. "Death by bell was the result," he concludes, "but nothing tolled to mark it" (p. 75).

Smith's discussion of slave resistance is often subtle. "Quietude," he notes, was "a hard thing to impose, and slaves shaped the limits of their masters' paternalism" through freedom songs, autonomous religious rituals, and coded language (p. 79). Yet Smith is careful to qualify previous scholarship that has emphasized ring shouts and ebullient singing as the apotheosis of cultural subversion. Controlling volume, he suggests, was even more important than making noise because it enabled the most fundamental forms of freedom: surreptitious movement, spatial autonomy, and ultimately escape. Such lessons about acoustic control were regularly passed down from parents to children. Harriet Tubman learned from her father "how to walk soundlessly through the woods," which in turn facilitated her later efforts as a...