Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America

Notes

Notes Introduction: The Slave-Marriage Plot 1. Bibb, Henry, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself. 1849; repr., Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. 2. George L. Christian and Frank W. Christian, “Slave-Marriages,” Virginia Law Journal 1, no. 11 (November 1877): 644. 3. William Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography , 1760–1855 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 144–45. 4. William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853; repr., Boston: Bedford /St. Martin’s, 2000), 84. All further quotations from Clotel will be from this edition. 5. Brown, Clotel, 83. 6. I use the term “higher law” in this context to distinguish the slave-marriage as a union formulated on moral grounds. While there are a number of different and often conflicting definitions of the term, it can be summed up as drawing upon a moral understanding of laws that look to a heavenly authority for ratification. For a full discussion of the term and its use during the period in which Brown writes, see Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–55. 7. I borrow this phrase from Jane Tompkins, who uses it to great effect in her influential account of the political import of nineteenth-century domestic fiction with particular emphasis on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Jane Tompkins, Sentimental Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 125. I use the term in relation to Brown, however, to mark the difference between his fictional and nonfictional accounts of slave-marriage. In his autobiography, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, published six years before the first edition of Clotel appeared, Brown presents a less-sentimental picture of slave-marriages. Based upon his personal experience, Brown explains that slaveholders used marriages between slaves as a fairly effective method of dissuading slaves from running away. Unlike the “many slaves” who did marry, Brown, he tells us, had the good sense to wait until after his escape from slavery. Chapter 1 discusses the differences between Brown’s fictional and nonfictional i-x_1-150_Chakk.indd 113 5/20/11 2:05 PM representations of slave-marriage by drawing upon the particular, and highly unusual, circumstances of Brown’s own marital experiences. 8. I borrow this phrase from Sutton E. Griggs, who uses it as the title of the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of his novel, Imperium in Imperio (1899). 9. John Locke’s Subjection of Women (1861) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) provide early and particularly persuasive accounts of the connection between slavery, marriage, and freedom. Needless to say, their ideas about slavery differ significantly from the writers who are the subject of this study. 10. Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2. Although the term “contract” does operate both literally and metaphorically in the nineteenth century, the slave-marriage is defined by its place outside contractual relations. While legal and literary historians are quick to equate contract with freedom, the slave-marriage suggests the capacity for marital relations to be formed without or despite its refusal to recognize slaves. We might therefore think of the slavemarriage both symbolically and literally, an instance in which slaves act against the law without acquiring freedom of contract. On the metaphorical resonances of contract as a symbol of freedom during the post-emancipation period, see Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), x. 11. Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain (New York: Routledge, 1988). 12. Frances Smith Foster’s recent editorial and critical scholarship on Love and Marriage in Early African America is a significant exception to this rule. See ’Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) and Love and Marriage in Early African America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007). 13. Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 20. 14. Histories of slave culture experienced something of a boom in the mid-1970s with the publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous “Report on the Black Family.” The list of histories I provide here represents some of the most influential accounts of...