Read Diaries of Slave Owners for Free
Plummer'south diary, in curt, is both a small record of a life and something far more stark and horrifying, the notes of an American owned by someone else. It belongs to an exceptionally small body of writing: documents written by slaves while they were still enslaved. Most writing about American slavery came from freed slaves living in the Due north, like Frederick Douglass, or from sympathetic white authors similar Harriet Beecher Stowe. Just in a few cases, actual slaves wrote messages, diaries, and other private snippets for themselves—oftentimes at great personal risk.
Now, in a new book, "Word by Give-and-take: Emancipation and the Art of Writing," Christopher Hager has undertaken the outset total-length study of these writings. Hager, who specializes in 19th-century American literature at Trinity College in Hartford, spent years reading—and, in some cases, discovering—more than than 200 documents written by slaves. By analyzing them closely and thinking virtually their cultural contexts, he argues, we can uncover "an intellectual history of a group that past most accounts had no intellectual history."
Historians have done a lot of archival digging to understand slavery, of course, but Hager believes they've missed an opportunity to think specifically about the individuals behind the scraps of newspaper—to study what, how, and why some slaves learned to read and write. That takes some effort—Hager has plant that most slave writers were, like Plummer, only "marginally literate"—but information technology likewise offers us a hazard to hear these writers speak in their own voices, to their ain audiences. And while sometimes those voices can be hard to make out, in many ways that'due south the betoken. "What's hard to read most these documents isn't an obstacle," Hager says. "Information technology'due south the most interesting affair nearly them."
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T he experience of slavery has long fascinated the American public, whether it'southward in listening to the music of former slave spirituals or in watching new blockbusters similar "Lincoln" and "Django Unchained." There's also shelf after shelf of books that merits to show, one manner or some other, what slavery was really like. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is perhaps the nearly famous example, just during the 19th century one-time slaves were themselves prolific authors. In fact, there was a pop genre known as slave narratives.
In a classic slave narrative, a one-time slave recounts the story of his or her bondage and escape. Since religious groups and antislavery societies often commissioned (and paid for) these narratives, they tended to follow a "built-in again" script, in which the narrator experienced a series of life-changing epiphanies. I of the more common of these involved learning to read or write. In his "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," which may be the most famous slave narrative today and was a bestseller when it appeared in 1845, Douglass remembers trading pieces of bread to poor white children in exchange for reading lessons. "The more I read," he writes, "the more I was led to abominate and detest my enslavers."
The potential for revelations like that worried slave owners, and many Southern states passed laws making information technology a offense to teach African-Americans to read or write. (In some cases, slave owners threatened to cut the fingers off any slave caught writing.) The best estimates suggest only 5 or ten percent of slaves became even marginally literate. Well-nigh of what they wrote while withal enslaved has not survived, and what has survived can be difficult to read.
That difficulty is what starting time caught Hager's attention. As a graduate student in English at Northwestern University, he wrote a dissertation on how the contend over slavery influenced American novelists. Near the terminate of that project, he decided to include a tangent on blackness soldiers. Before long he plant himself sitting on the floor of Northwestern's library, unable to stop reading a copy of a short handwritten certificate signed by "A Colored man."
The author, a Louisiana slave writing in 1863, begins past simply transcribing sections of the Us Constitution. Presently, however, he starts going on tangents of his own: "it is retten that a man can not Serve ii masters," he writes at one indicate. "Only it seems that the Collored population has got two a reble master and a union master the both want our Servises."
The unruly text captivated Hager, both for its startling originality and for the way it seemed to exist exterior the literary canon. "There I was, four months away from getting my Ph.D.," Hager says, "and I had no idea how to interpret this."
And so Hager began searching for more documents. He took trips to the University of Maryland's Freedmen and Southern Society Project and to the National Athenaeum in Washington, D.C. While doing this research, Hager realized that the historians who studied the written records of slavery were often far more than interested in the raw data than in the writings or authors themselves. Several times, he says, he discovered multiple letters written by the same slave—merely filed in different places. "They weren't paying attention to authorship," he says. "They were proverb, 'This is a letter of the alphabet about religion, this is a letter about marriage.'"
For an English language professor, though, authorship was fundamental. Hager wanted to study the content of the writing—along with the process of composition and the reasons information technology sounded similar information technology did. "You're seeing an actual historical event right there in front of you," he says. "Someone sat down and tried to write this letter."
Take a letter Maria Perkins wrote in 1852 to her married man, who worked on another plantation forty miles away: "Dear Married man I write y'all a letter to let you know of my distress my master has sold albert to a trader onmonday court day and myself and other kid is for auction also."
Information technology's a letter of the alphabet that, like much slave writing, mixes poor spelling with clunky rhetorical formulas ("I write y'all a letter to let you know…"). But Hager says at that place are reasons for that. The first, and virtually obvious, was the terrible conditions under which slaves learned to read and write. Another was the period's explosion in epistolary writing. Between 1840 and 1860, the menstruation of letters in America increased nearly fourfold. There were even popular manuals that explained how to write the perfect missive, and an inexperienced author like Maria Perkins would have relied on their conventions more well-nigh.
Hager besides shows how slaves could exist self-conscious about their writing. In his volume, he quotes another letter from 1865: "Pleass to Excuse bad writing & too mistakes." Nineteenth-century reformers like Noah Webster pushed for more than standardized spelling and punctuation, and slave writers did the best they could to navigate this world. Hager describes ane slave who kept calculation –ing suffixes to words that didn't need them—no doubt because someone at some point told him he had to. "He wasn't exactly sure why or how to do this," Hager says, "simply he wasn't going to go confronting that communication."
Stories like this make articulate how hard a person living in slavery would have had to work simply to be able to write at all. But the nigh exciting thing in Hager's volume is the writings themselves. 1 of his most significant discoveries occurred in Boston. Another bookish tipped him off that the Massachusetts Historical Society held a box of autobiographical writings by John K. Washington, a Virginia slave who eventually escaped in 1862.
When Hager arrived at the society'south reading room, he set upwardly near a window so he could take pictures of the documents with his digital camera. Flipping through folders, he found a brief and little-known memoir Washington had attempted a few months before he became gratis.
Washington was born in 1838, and his mother spent an hour or 2 each nighttime pedagogy him how to read. When he was 12, however, his mother was sent to another owner 100 miles abroad. Washington decided he had to learn to write, also. It was hard to observe supplies, simply one slave had a chore hanging wallpaper and saved any scraps. On a slice of wallpaper, Washington'due south uncle copied out i of those letter manual openings: "My Dear Mother, I Have this opporteunity to write you a few lines to permit you know that I am well." Washington skillful information technology over and over, until he could showtime writing his female parent.
But the Historical Society had more to offer. In the dorsum of that box, Hager establish something no other scholar had previously seen: an unlabeled folder containing 20 sheets of paper. It was a diary Washington had kept years earlier, in the late 1850s. Like Adam Plummer's diary, it included a lot of everyday material. Only Washington also described his courting of a woman named Annie Gordon. When Gordon rejected his proposal, Washington was heartbroken: "If She intended this from the first. She was incorrect to encourage my visits," he wrote. And then he added: "though I practice not regret any thing. I ever told her in confidence."
John Washington eventually married Annie Gordon. In 1873, he returned to writing, composing a long slave narrative of his own. He titled it "Memorys of the Past," and while it was non published in his lifetime, Hager points out that information technology—along with Washington's earlier writings, when the "by" was the nowadays—brand him the only known private to write his life story while he was enslaved and while he was free.
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The comparisons between Washington's slave narrative and his pre-emancipation memoir and diary are fascinating. Like most slave narratives, "Memorys of the Past" depends on epiphanies. Perhaps the biggest comes on the night Union soldiers finally freed Washington: "Before Morning," he writes, "I had began to fee like I had truley Escaped from the hands of the slaves master and with the help of God, I never would be a slave no more than."
In his writing as a slave, nevertheless, Washington avoids such polished revelations. In fact, he mentions the word "slave" only once in more 10,000 words of material—so just equally a romantic metaphor, in regard to his pursuit of Gordon: "why should I notwithstanding press on and be her slave. any longer. in a word."
It might seem foreign for a slave to avert the topic of slavery. Just where published slave narratives specialized in transformative moments and sculpted life stories, many of the writings discussed in "Give-and-take past Give-and-take" describe people just living their lives. "I did non see Douglass-like meditations on the pregnant of freedom," Hager says of his enquiry. "I did come across a lot of anxiety and concern about the fate of people's spouses and friends. The writing nosotros practise in our daily lives is much more well-nigh communicating with a network of people."
That writing, properly understood, can requite us a very unlike, very man glimpse at what life as a slave was like—and with information technology, a new sense of connexion to the people who had to live it. Like Adam Plummer and John Washington, nosotros all worry about our families, reflect on our daily experiences, send notes, and keep journals. These narratives help us empathise their authors every bit individuals. "We generally try to understand American slaves equally a group," Hager says. "And while that's certainly important, they're as diverse as any other group of Americans. Any group of 4 meg people is going to accept 4 million dissimilar experiences and perspectives."
But these narratives can besides remind us of the enormous disconnect betwixt their experiences and ours. It's a disconnect that comes habitation to usa not in the advisedly scripted drama of traditional slave narratives, but in the devastating shock of how those everyday lives could be interrupted.
For his next project, Hager plans to assemble an anthology packed with more of the slave writings he'south uncovered. Like "Word by Give-and-take," it volition remind us that for these Americans, the mere power to write was both precious and potentially costly. "To know that y'all're not supposed to take this skill, but to have it"—Hager pauses. "I can't brainstorm to say what I think that might have been like."
Craig Fehrman is working on a book well-nigh
presidents and their books. Electronic mail
craig.fehrman@gmail.com.
Source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/02/10/the-secret-writing-american-slaves/Lbem3fQ8viu8FmwXr2UcKO/story.html
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