"The Skin of an American Slave": African American Manhood and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Literature

"THE SKIN OF AN AMERICAN SLAVE": AFRICAN AMERICAN MANHOOD AND THE MARKED BODY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ABOLITIONIST LITERATURE Jennifer Putzi The College of William and Mary When the Civil War began in April 1861, African American men attempted in vain to volunteer for military service. As Jim Cullen writes, "The efforts ofabolitionists to the contrary, secession, not slavery, was the pretext for the outbreak of hostilities, and the Lincoln administration assiduously courted slaveholding states still in the Union by avoiding any appearance ofrestructuring existing race relations."1 For all of their differences, most Northern and Southern white men agreed that this was, indeed, a white man's war, and objected to the idea that black men, slave or free, should occupy a role formerly reserved only for white male citizens. Yet military necessity would accomplish what abolitionist politics could not. The Emancipation Proclamation, effective on January 1 , 1 863, freed all slaves in states still in rebellion against the Federal government; it also provided for the lawful enlistment of African American men in the Union army.2 Eventually, 1 79,000 black men would serve in the army, the majority of whom came from Confederate and border slave states.3 Black soldiers would play major roles in a number of battles, including those at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Abolitionists, black and white, and most African Americans were well aware that the enlistment ofblack men into the Union army would challenge fundamental notions of race, masculinity, and citizenship, and would have a significant impact on the treatment ofAfrican Americans during and after the Civil War. On July 4, 1863, seven months after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Harper's Weekly responded to this controversial development with a drawing illustrating the transformation of one black man from slave to contraband and finally to Union soldier (Figure I).4 Gordon, the "typical negro" featured in the drawing, is portrayed in three poses, from left to right. The firstpanel, labeled "GORDON AS HE ENTERED OUR LINES," shows the subject sitting in a chair with his legs crossed. His feet are bare and his clothes are tattered. In the second panel, "GORDON UNDER MEDICAL INSPECTION," Gordon wears only his pants and sits with 182 Jennifer Putzi Figure 1 Studies in American Fiction1 83 his scarred back to the audience, his face turned just enough to reveal his profile. He stands upright in the third panel, wearing a uniform and holding a rifle in front ofhim; the panel is labeled "GORDON IN HIS UNIFORM AS A U.S. SOLDIER." The purpose ofthe illustration appears to be to demonstrate Gordon's ability to transform himself—or to be transformed—into a man and a soldier. However, curiously enough, the final panel is not the most conspicuous in the series. Rather, the second panel, depicting Gordon's scars, is the largest and presumably the first to attract the observer's eye. Despite the label, which asserts that this image is drawn from Gordon's medical examination while in the Union camp, the illustration and the scars that it highlights were more likely to remind readers that Gordon had been a slave, and a harshly treated slave at that.5 The accompanying text also emphasizes "the degree of brutality which slavery has developed among . . . whites," ratherthan the significance ofGordon's military service.6 While his skin color suggests that Gordon was a slave, the scars are presented in the drawing as proof of that fact. Gordon is ultimately labelled a slave because of his scars and the smaller representations of him as contraband and Union soldier do little to dispel that label. This depiction of Gordon accents the conflicts inherent in the visual and literary use ofthe scar in representations ofAfrican American men, both before and during the Civil War.7 Although "GORDON IN HIS UNIFORM AS A U.S. SOLDIER" marks a new opportunity for African American men, the spectacle of Gordon's scarred back is representative of a long tradition in abolitionist literature. As I will demonstrate in this essay, abolitionist texts had relied upon the rhetorical power of the scarred slave body throughout the antebellum period in order...