“Beyond the Limits of Decency”

Thavolia Glymph

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511812491.003

2 - “Beyond the Limits of Decency”

Women in Slavery

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

Thavolia Glymph

Show author details

Thavolia Glymph: Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Two-thirds of my religion consists in trying to be good to negroes because they are so much in my power, and it would be so easy to be the other thing.

Mary Boykin Chesnut, mistress

One day my mistress called fer me to come in to the house, but no, I wouldn't go. She walks out and says she is gwine make me go. So she takes and drags me in to the house. Then I grabs that white woman, when she turned her back, and shook her until she begged for mercy. When the master comes in, I wuz given a terrible beating with a whip but I did'ny care fer I give the mistress a good'un too.

Sophia Word, ex-slave

Nature has done almost nothing to prepare men and women to be either slaves or slaveholders.

Frederick Douglass, ex-slave

The plantation legend crafted before and after slavery enveloped mistresses in an aura of light and vulnerability, goodness and agreeableness, but slaves witnessed differently. Mandy Cooper failed to churn the milk fast enough and there was no butter for her mistress's noon meal. As punishment, she stated, “three white women beat me from angah [anger] because they had no butter for their biscuits and cornbread. Miss Burton used a heavy board while the missus used a whip.” She did not state what weapon the third woman used. Alice Shaw, assigned to fan flies and clear the table after dinner, dropped a dish. As punishment, her mistress beat her on her head.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Out of the House of Bondage
The Transformation of the Plantation Household
, pp. 32 - 62

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812491.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Cooper, Mandy in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, ed. Rawick, George P., Alabama and Indiana Narratives, vol. 6 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1972), p. 62Google Scholar

Weld, Theodore, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970), p. 26Google Scholar

Johnson, Clifton H., ed., God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-Slaves (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1969), pp. 153–54

Douglass, Frederick, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1969), p. 93Google Scholar

Painter, Nell Irvin, “Soul Murder: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” in Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), pp. 15–39Google Scholar

Stewart, Austin, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman (1856; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), p. 17Google Scholar

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 135Google Scholar

Blassingame, John W., ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), p. 218

Bleser, Carol, ed., Tokens of Affection: The Letters of a Planter's Daughter in the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 108

Weiner, Marli F., Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p. 82Google Scholar

Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 333Google Scholar

Percy, William Alexander, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), p. 9Google Scholar

Ellison, Mary, “Resistance to Oppression: Black Women's Response to Slavery in the United States.” Slavery and Abolition 4 (May 1983): 57–59CrossRef Google Scholar

Morgan, Edmund S., American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 315Google Scholar

Palmer, Alice Gaillard to Palmer, Harriet R., July 20, 1865, in A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881, ed. Towles, Louis P. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), p. 480Google Scholar

Perdue, Charles L., Jr., Barden, Thomas E., and Phillips, Robert K., eds. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), p. 1

Jordan, Winthrop D., Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), pp. 164–65, 167, 201–2, 276, 279, 281, 294, and 298Google Scholar

Robinson, Armstead L., “In the Shadow of Old John Brown: Insurrection Anxiety and Confederate Mobilization, 1861–1863,” Journal of Negro History 65 (Autumn, 1980): 287–88CrossRef Google Scholar

Davidoff, Leonore, “Gender and the ‘Great Divide’: Public and Private in British Gender History,” Journal of Women's History 15 (Spring 2003): 13–15CrossRef Google Scholar

Pollack, Linda A., “Living on the Stage of the World: The Concept of Privacy among the Elite of Early Modern England,” in Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and Its Interpretation, ed. Wilson, Adrian (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993)Google Scholar

Davis, David Brion, “The American Family and Boundaries in Historical Perspective,” in Davis, , From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar

Ballantyne, Tony and Burton, Antoinette, eds., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 6CrossRef

“The Journal of Ann Lewis Hardeman, 1850–67,” in O'Brien, Michael, ed., An Evening When Alone: Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827-67 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), p. 288

Taussig, Michael, “Culture of Terror – Space of Death: Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Dirks, Nicholas B. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 139Google Scholar

Scarborough, William K., “Slavery – The White Man's Burden,” in Perspectives and Irony in American History: Essays, ed. Owens, Harry P. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1976), p. 109Google Scholar

Scarborough, revises this position in his latest work, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), pp. 90–122Google Scholar

Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar

Faust, Drew Gilpin, “‘Trying to Do a Man's Business’: Gender, Violence, and Slave Management in Civil War Texas,” in Faust, , Southern Stories: Slaveholders in War and Peace (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992) p. 185Google Scholar

Faust, Drew Gilpin, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 64–70Google Scholar

Morgan, Sarah, Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman, ed. East, Charles (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), Jan. 30, 1863, pp. 414–17Google Scholar

Hall, Catherine, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 76Google Scholar

Fischer, David Hackett, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 320Google Scholar

Byrd, William, The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712, ed. Wright, Louis B. and Tinling, Marion (Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1941), pp. 34–35, 205 and 494Google Scholar

Manigault, Charles to Haynes, James, March 1, 1847, in Life and Labor on Argyle Island: Letters and Documents of a Savannah River Rice Plantation, 1833–1867, ed. Clifton, James M. (Savannah, GA: Beehive Press, 1978), p. 49Google Scholar

Stampp, Kenneth M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), pp. 177–78Google Scholar

Phillips, Ulrich B., American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), pp. 276–77Google Scholar

Cecelia, , “Management of Servants,” Southern Planter III (August 1843), p. 175Google Scholar

Brown, Kathleen M., Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar

Jordan, Weymouth T.Hugh Davis and his Alabama Plantation (University: University of Alabama Press, 1948, p. 99)Google Scholar

Faust, Drew Gilpin, “Culture, Conflict and Community: The Meaning of Power on an Antebellum Plantation,” Journal of Social History 14 (Autumn, 1980): 84CrossRef Google Scholar

Proctor, Nicholas W., Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002], pp. 67–75Google Scholar

Stevenson, Brenda E., Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 197Google Scholar

Rosengarten, Theodore, Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter with the Plantation Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822–1890) (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986)Google Scholar

Saussure, Nancy B., Old Plantation Days: Being Recollections of Southern Life Before the Civil War (New York: Duffield & Company, 1909)Google Scholar

Burr, Virginia Ingraham, ed., The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Thomas, 1848–1899 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), January 2, 1859, quotes at pp. 168 and 167

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 226Google Scholar

Jones, Norrece T., Jr., Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1990), pp. 7 and 57Google Scholar

King, Wilma, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)Google Scholar

Schwartz, Marie Jenkins, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar

Stewart, Mart A., “What Nature Sufferes to Groe”: Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996)Google Scholar

Cashin, Joan E., ed., Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old South (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 208

Bardaglio, Peter W., Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, & the Law in the Nineteenth Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 90Google Scholar

Morrison, Toni, Beloved (New York: Signet 1991), pp. 20–21Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Why this information is here

This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

Accessibility Information

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this chapter is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.