Slavery, the Thief of Virtue: the Social Visibility and Alienation of Enslaved Black Women in Abolitionist Discourse

Introduction

Image: Frontispiece of "Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, Or, Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life."

The Christian morality and social and economic interests that have commanded American society since its colonial beginnings have ensured a public interest in the regulation of sex. Women understand this burden intimately. Both their gender identity and sexuality have been rendered into metrics for a society’s degree of civilization or culture by the West’s Christian and patriarchal valuation of marriage, honor, and virtue; their reproductive potential has made them the principal object of legal and moral scrutiny not afforded to men. Notions of chastity and virtue, arising out of the dominant interests of white, property-owning men, were among the ideal standards for womanhood embedded in patriarchal Christian morality. But before virtuous womanhood was significantly challenged as anachronistic, it played a critical role in abolitionist rhetoric. In the mid-nineteenth century, white Christian abolitionists would argue that to sanction slavery was to sanction rampant adultery by white male enslavers who were systematically engaging in extramarital sex with their enslaved Black women and thereby depriving them of their virtue. Adultery and loss of virtue thus provided the “socially visible” language abolitionists needed to encourage popular condemnation of slavery in a Christian America that had not yet developed the language to condemn rape but feared illicit sex.¹

Nowhere in American history was the exploitation of women and their reproductive role more violently systematic than through the enslavement of Black women, whose status as property left them subject to the ruthless demands of the colonial plantation economy. Enslaved women, like their male counterparts, were expected to contribute productive (largely agricultural or domestic) labor, but their potential to bear children also led to expectations of reproductive labor—the birth of chattel offspring to augment an enslaver’s labor forces.² Moreover, where mixed-race children threatened racial ambiguity, the enslaved woman’s reproductive capacity became a critical site for regulating fragile racial ideology.³ Enslavers sustained their terror-fueled power by sexually abusing enslaved Black women, who became conduits for sexual pleasure. As property, they could not refuse their enslavers’ advances. Enslaved Black women were, overwhelmingly, at the mercy of merciless white men.⁴

This paper aims to examine the emergence of the language of virtue as a socially-visible means for condemning sexual violence under slavery, specifically through abolitionist pamphlets written by Christian ministers Parker Pillsbury and Charles Elliott and the narratives of previously enslaved Black women Harriet Jacobs and Louisa Picquet. Historians like Jennifer Morgan, Kathleen Brown, and Kirsten Fischer have demonstrated how gender and reproduction contributed to the construction of racial ideology, but less attention has been devoted to how the fight against slavery sustained gendered ideology according to patriarchal structures.⁵ What did the language of virtue accomplish? What did it obscure? In the absence of today’s language of consent (which attempts to define the parameters for sexual assault more explicitly), the language of virtue appealed to America’s Christian conscience, which already held extramarital sex as a well-established sin. However, the language of purity also lobbed an additional strike against violated enslaved Black women by highlighting their forsaken morality (albeit forced) before the public eye. Christian morality ensured that enslaved Black women who were sexually abused would not only suffer the aftermath of the violence done to them but also public censure for lost virtue and degraded womanhood. The language of virtue reinforced the cult of white femininity that defined respectable womanhood as sexually demure.

To examine the emergence of the language of virtue as a socially-visible means for condemning sexual violence under slavery, this paper will first look to existing historiography regarding the interplay of slavery with Christianity, gender, and the reproductive role, taking up the question what is socially-visible language? Having laid out the terms of socially-visible language vis-à-vis slavery, this paper will then draw on abolitionist pamphlets and the narratives of enslaved women to analyze the legacy and efficacy of the socially-visible language of virtue. Ultimately, I argue, the enslaved Black woman who submitted herself to the social visibility of abolitionist discourse to participate in the call for the end of slavery represented herself as irrevocably alienated from virtue, from dignity, and from femininity. This self-imposed alienation may well have been the only way for her to denounce the sexual violence of slavery, since, at the time, the vocabulary of consent had not yet taken shape. Still, no matter how politely or circuitously conveyed, the public disclosure of her sexual violation stripped her of any remaining claim to proper womanhood not already wrested from her in the gendered conception of race undergirding her enslavement.

Socially-Visible Language: Religion, Gender, & the Reproductive Role

The earliest justification for the enslavement of African people provided by the European powers that dominated the early Atlantic slave trade was the spread of Christianity—particularly, the religious conversion of those enslaved by their enslavers.⁶ As the gospel extended to distant regions, it became the earliest socially-visible vocabulary for sanctioning systematic oppression. That which is “socially visible” has been described by Alyssa Bellows as the historo-culturally available language permitting discourse and denouncement of violence.⁷ This paper advances social-visible language as that which makes use of the normative public understanding of morality to denounce a violent act (i.e., sexual assault) in a society arrested in an immature understanding of the full implications of that act.

Within this belief system, to convert an enslaved African to Christianity was to save a pagan soul from eternal damnation. In practice, European colonizers were not uniformly in favor of conversion, however, because colonial planters and enslavers feared that the “egalitarianism implicit in Christianity” would subvert enslaved-enslaver hierarchies and incite the resistance of enslaved people.⁸ In his sermon for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel delivered in 1740 or 1741, Bishop Thomas Secker astutely observes, “some, it may be feared, have been averse to their slaves becoming Christians, because, after that, no Pretence will remain for not treating them like Men.”⁹ Enslavers feared the converted slave’s claim to fellowship would undermine the ideology of slavery, which rested on a fundamental difference in the humanity of enslavers and those they enslaved, to justify their exploitation as purely economic instruments of labor. 

Constructing proslavery ideology was a precarious endeavor driven by the fusion of economic and spiritual interests of the enslaving class. Justifying slavery required a constant molding and remolding of socially-visible spaces—namely the public conception of morality—to accommodate its perpetual abuses. As a socially-visible ideological framework, Christianity held a claim to mainstream morality. Drawing from Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, this paper understands morality as a set of values encoded in socio-cultural interaction by a dominant will to power or the priestly desire to command life with an intellectual scheme—the Christian will to truth.¹⁰ When Christianity threatened to evoke egalitarianism for enslavers and enslaved alike, enslavers sought to put a stop to the conversion and baptism of enslaved people. In response, Christian ministers, to protect their livelihood and the spread of their religion, were then compelled to remold Christianity around enslavers’ staunch economic interests. These ministers began to differentiate between spiritual and temporal equality, and they pitched Christianity to enslavers as an education in obedience and productivity for their enslaved. Prioritizing the interests of enslavers under the pretense of religious virtue, Christian ministers divided the temporal domain from the spiritual realm. They helped construct a proslavery ideology under which enslaved people were bound to a social law that severed their bodies from their souls.

In order to distinguish between spiritual and temporal equality, Christian ministers often cited the following Biblical passage: “The Scripture, far from making any Alternation in Civil Rights, expressly directs, that every Man abide in the Condition wherein he is called, with great Indifference of Mind concerning outward circumstances.”¹¹ In their appeal to resistant enslavers, ministers asserted equality before God did not necessarily correspond with material equality and increasingly argued that converting enslaved people to Christianity would make them more obedient, better, more productive laborers.¹² The enslaver’s economic interests ensured that Christianity was not an idealized belief system for guiding upright living but a battleground for justifying material interests disguised as righteousness. Enslaved Black women faced this dissonance in Christianity’s attempts to distinguish material and spiritual morality to the greatest extreme.

To make sense of the labor expected of enslaved Black women, oppressors found it necessary to characterize them “as simultaneously unwomanly and marked by a reproductive value that was both dependent on their sex and evidence of their lack of femininity,” as Jennifer Morgan has argued.¹³ Socially-constructed femininity consigned women to domesticity and motherhood, while productive, agricultural labor was decidedly masculine. Codifying Black women as productive laborers thus required a denial of their femininity, without entirely revoking their sexuality, a requisite for their codification as reproductive laborers. In other words, Black women remained vindicated in the physiological condition of their sex but were not cast to perform the gender role of white femininity. Framing African women as sexually deviant served to rationalize their violation and further their Othering according to European notions of civilization.¹⁴ European colonizers had long looked to women and their sexuality to evaluate how civilized other societies were, and, for them, “[d]eviant sexual behavior reflected the breakdown of natural laws—the absence of shame, the inability to identify lines of heredity and descent.”¹⁵

The inability to trace kinship was the most threatening effect of unregulated sexuality, because as Kathleen Brown states, marriage was “the institution that safeguarded private property and ensured the dependence of women and children on male providers through patrilineal systems of inheritance.”¹⁶ Extramarital sex jeopardized European social order by undermining patriarchal authority and thus the integrity of the family unit. Adultery was not just an issue of morality; it was also an economic concern. Who would provide for bastard children? If the father, then the wellbeing of his lawful family was understood as compromised. If the state, then the wellbeing of the lawful public.¹⁷ By contrast, enslaved women were relieved of the patriarchal scrutiny that discouraged bastardy because enslaved children were a desired commodity, constituting a ‘natural increase’ in property.¹⁸ They were excused and indeed precluded from adhering to traditional, socially-constructed ideals of refined femininity and its mandate of virtue, expected instead to further the enslaver’s property yield by procreating as an animal of husbandry. Used as an instrument to support slavery, femininity became racialized.

When African women threatened a legitimate claim to femininity, by nature of their female bodies, they were relentlessly sexualized and reduced to their productive and reproductive potentials. Traditional femininity emphasized gentleness and weakness and chastity, so racial thinking molded a perversely resilient and sexualized Black woman, less akin to a fellow woman of paler complexion than to an animal of husbandry. Religion and femininity constituted the socially-visible battlegrounds for evaluating an exploitative and dehumanizing economic practice. At first the economics of slavery prevailed, bending religion and notions of femininity to its will. With time, Christian voices that saw through the precariousness of slavery-endorsing religion grew louder and more abundant.¹⁹ But those same voices did not challenge acquiescent and demure femininity. They relied on traditional femininity to argue that enslaved Black women had been deprived of true and virtuous womanhood. The abolition of slavery signified the victory of a particular set of morals that condemned holding fellow men and women in bondage—that viewed spiritual and temporal equality as inextricable, but it also perpetuated a preeminent concern with the patriarchal family unit. Black women who submitted to this thread of abolitionist discourse exchanged a permanent stain on their morality for entrance into the social sphere. Rather than being forever relegated to only their sex as an object for exploitation, they accepted the conditions of white femininity for the opportunity to perform their gender, compromised, as it were, by the sexual violence of enslavement.

Abolitionist Discourse: Reinforcing White Masculinity & Femininity

Abolitionist discourse was fueled by the writing of Christian ministers and those who had been previously enslaved. It was clear to both parties that slavery permitted systematic sexual abuse. To effectively address the public, abolitionists and previously enslaved people framed their argument by appealing to established notions of sex and gender: they denounced slavery’s sexual violence with the socially-visible language of moral virtue. Well-known Christian abolitionists like Parker Pillsbury and Charles Elliott reasoned that slavery was adultery, and the writers and editors of women’s narrative of enslavement collaborated to frame slavery as the thief of enslaved Black women’s virtue. These arguments drew attention to the cruel sexual behavior permitted under slavery without offending the Christian public. However, the effectiveness of the ‘slavery is adultery’ argument depended on public concern with the integrity of the institution of marriage and, thus, the patriarchal family unit. Following Kathleen Brown’s understanding of marriage as protecting female reliance on male providers, ‘slavery is adultery’ functioned as a campaign to restore credibility to marriage and white men as the protectors of society. Abolitionist discourse thus not only signified a transitional period out of the institution of slavery but the continued reinforcement of white masculinity and femininity.

In 1847, Parker Pillsbury—a nationally-recognized abolitionist and Christian minister who served as an editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard—published his most recognized pamphlet, The Church as It Is; or, The Forlorn Hope of Slavery, to expose the hypocrisy of American religion in its endorsement of slavery.²⁰ He readily deploys the ‘slavery is adultery’ argument throughout the polemic, leveraging the socially-visible language of morality to condemn the sexual behavior endorsed by slavery practices. Earlier in the pamphlet, Pillsbury parodies one letter defending slavery, replacing each mention of “slavery” with “adultery”:

Never before, I presume, has the defence of slavery [emphasis added], on Christian principles, been so ably conducted. Never before, I think, has anything been written so ably conducted.

Never before, I presume, has the defence of [adultery,] [emphasis added] on Christian principles, been so ably conducted. Never before, I think, has any thing been written so ably conducted.²¹

For Pillsbury, the adultery is twofold: the rampant violation of enslaved people by enslavers goes unprosecuted as a crime of extramarital fornication, and enslaved people who are themselves married do not have the power to honor their marital contracts, should their enslaver decide to impose themself. In more concrete terms, he later proclaims, “There is not, then, a slave married in this nation. And hundreds of thousands of them are members of the church, and every one doomed to a life of adultery and prostitution.”²² Though enslavers were portrayed as the lecherous perpetrators of adultery and prostitution in this polemic, it is noteworthy that they are hardly criticized directly. The victims of this coerced adultery are identified (the enslaved people “doomed to a life of adultery”), but the culprit behind the sin is shielded from direct rebuke. Pillsbury points to the desecration of the institution of marriage by slavery without pointing to who is doing the desecrating, arguing ‘slavery is adultery’ rather than ‘slave owners are adulterous.’ It proved an effective method for commanding the attention of the Christian public: the suggestion is that the abolition of slavery will put a stop to rampant sin, restoring both the sanctity of marriage and the paternal culture to which marriage lends itself.

Pillsbury’s reluctance to condemn enslavers directly and emphasis on adultery rather than violence was not just a function of the social visibility of Christian morals but also of a broader unwillingness to challenge conventional gender roles. Historian Kristin Hoganson notes that proslavery ideologues in the South emphasized the preservation of slavery as a beneficial safeguarding of patriarchal social order. She contends:

Slavery apologists […] hoped to persuade the nation that the abolitionists’ threat to Victorian social mores was so radical that the long-established institution of slavery should be viewed as a desirable conservative counterbalance. They tried to align themselves with the conventional gender beliefs accepted as ‘natural’ by the Northern middle class and, thus, to demonstrate that the entire slave system was equally natural.²³

Abolitionists countered this proslavery rhetoric by not testing the public capacity for change on gender and explicit sexuality, steering as much attention as possible to the issue of slavery alone. Indeed, Franny Nudelman suggests abolitionists found credibility through “the proposed preservation of sexual purity and the dissemination of domestic value.”²⁴ Pillsbury fell within this tendency, by problematizing slavery without upsetting traditional gender roles or straying from modest discussion of sexual wrongdoing.

In the Sinfulness of American Slavery, Charles Elliott argues slavery was a breach of each of the ten commandments, including the seventh. He writes:

Slavery is a violation of the seventh commandment, which is, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Slavery places the slaves entirely in the power of their masters, to be sold and bought by new masters either in their own neighborhood or at a distance. And every female slave is completely in the power of her master, of his sons, his overseers, and his driver, or, in short, of any white man. The law does not allow the female slave to offer resistance to any white man, under any circumstances. Besides, female virtue on the part of the slave is treated with ridicule in a slave community.²⁵

Here, Elliott also cites the plight of enslaved women specifically, engaging with the ‘slavery is the thief of virtue’ argument. Like Pillsbury, he clearly takes issue with the sort of sexual behavior allowed and promoted by slavery. By highlighting an enslaved woman’s inability to resist a white man, he even begins to raise the issue of consent that Pillsbury completely elides in his exclusive focus on “adultery” and “prostitution.” Like other abolitionists of the time, however, both Elliott and Pillsbury avoid descriptions of graphic violence or promiscuity. According to their socially-visible polemics, the main effect of sexually abusing enslaved women is either patriarchal degeneration or a crisis of chastity, but not traumatic violence. In their approach to abolition, traditional gender roles were preserved as they appeased and appealed to America’s Christian conscience.

Abolitionist Discourse: Enslaved Women’s Narratives as Alienation

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the most widely read woman’s narrative of enslavement, falls comfortably within the abolitionist tradition of leveraging the language of virtue to condemn sexual violence under slavery. Historians like Jean Fagin Yellin have argued that Jacobs offers an unconventionally candid account with Incidents “to insist that the forbidden topic of the sexual abuse of slave women be included in public discussion of the slavery question,” since sexual abuse was rarely addressed directly in abolitionist discourse.²⁶ But as Franny Nudelman avers, sexual abuse was a recurring theme in abolitionist discourse, referenced in the socially-visible terms of virtuous womanhood or family integrity.²⁷ The writing of Parker Pillsbury and Charles Elliott evince this tendency. Incidents does not veer from this language of purity, so it was not as unconventionally candid as Yellin suggests. In lamenting the loss of virtue and respectable womanhood, not the sexual violence of slavery itself, enslaved women’s  narratives like Incidents conformed to traditional gender roles and the standards of social visibility. The end result was an additional strike against enslaved Black women who survived sexual assault: the previously enslaved Black women comprising the subjects of these narratives sacrificed their respectability to further the fight against slavery, culminating in their alienation from socially-visible female society.

In Incidents, Harriet Jacobs writes under the pseudonym of Linda Brent to expose the experience of slavery particular to women. She asserts, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.”²⁸ The unwanted advances of her enslaver (Dr. Flint) began as early as fifteen; early on in her girlhood Linda learns enslaved women faced sexualization, undue attention, and additional abuse that enslaved men did not. Ultimately, she decided to exercise what little choice she had available by having an affair with white lawyer Mr. Sands, before Dr. Flint could force himself upon her. She gave birth to a daughter as a result of the affair. “I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation,” she declares triumphantly to her readers.²⁹ “There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.”³⁰

It is this active choice of another man that distinguishes Jacobs’s narrative. However, what follows is an account of inner turmoil, stemming from the consequences of this choice on her virtue and womanhood. Her moral despair functions as the central condemnation of the sexual abuse implicit to the institution of slavery. “I did not feel proud as I had done. […] I was lowered in my own estimation,” she begins.³¹ “My unconscious babe was the ever-present witness of my shame. […] I shed bitter tears that I was no longer worthy of being respected by the good and pure. Alas! slavery still held me in its poisonous grasp. There was no chance for me to be respectable. There was no prospect of being able to lead a better life.”³² Linda highlights the shame brought upon her by the conditions of slavery. Regardless of Dr. Flint’s threats to take her body, by choosing to protect herself with an alternate extramarital affair, Linda actively degraded herself in the eyes of chaste femininity. So, to condemn slavery, she condemns herself. “O Virtuous Reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; […] I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do.” ³³ Her narrative leaves little room for self-compassion. Linda does not challenge conventions of femininity; she challenges their application to enslaved women: she muses, “I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”³⁴

Jacobs’s contrition is not simply a rhetorical maneuver in service of abolitionist discourse. Her concern for her respectability lives on in her letters regarding the writing of Incidents. Before deciding to write Incidents herself, Jacobs had asked activist and friend Amy Post to inquire if Harriet Beecher Stowe might take up the work of writing the narrative. Naturally, Post enclosed a concise summary of Jacobs’s life in the proposal to Stowe. However, Stowe, in her eagerness to take on the project, responded by asking Jacobs’s employer Cornelia Willis to confirm the truth of Post’s letter, revealing Jacobs’s past to a woman who had not been privy to its details. This lack of discretion offended Jacobs, and she confided in Post, “I had never opened my lips to Mrs. Willis concerning my Children—in the Charitableness of her own heart she sympathized with me and never asked their origin.”³⁵ As a result of this breach of privacy, Jacobs opted to write the narrative of her life herself. Incidents “is in fact the result of her refusal to have all told, her insistence that she have some amount of control over the dissemination of her history,” elucidates Franny Nudelman.³⁶ Jacobs was willing to sacrifice some of her respectability in service of the fight against slavery but not all.

Jacobs’s desire to contribute to abolitionist discourse cannot be separated from her willingness to sacrifice her respectability. In the preface to her narrative, she assures the reader, “I have not written my experience to attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about my own history.”³⁷ Jacobs sought to lead a life of virtuous womanhood, to take pride in her moral character. She writes, “I wanted to keep myself pure; and, under the most adverse circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect.” ³⁸ Later, in explicit reference to religion, she even remarks, “If I could be allowed to live like a Christian, I should be glad.”³⁹ Ultimately, she was unable to protect herself and suffered not only her master’s abuses but also the undoing of her respectability. 

Albert Raboteau observes how the adoption of Christianity by slaves equipped them to take pride in their character: “While some slaves rejected the moral system preached by the master and his preachers, others devoted themselves to a life of virtue, in which they developed both a sense of personal dignity and an attitude of moral superiority to their masters—an attitude that could simultaneously support compliance to the system of slavery and buttress the slave’s own self-esteem.”⁴⁰ Nevertheless, Jacobs marks out that the overwhelming experience of enslaved women was to be presented with the path to salvation—the Christian faith—only to have it ripped from their grasp by the persecutions of lustful white men, against whom they were defenseless. She stresses this paradox, “[The enslaved female] is not allowed to have any pride of character. It is deemed a crime in her to wish to be virtuous.”⁴¹ She published her experience to draw attention to “the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what [she] suffered, and most of them far worse,” but, in doing so, she was forced to alienate herself from the chaste and virtuous attributes prescribed to morally upright women in society.⁴²

The narrative of Louisa Picquet provides an interesting contrast with Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents, because it was not a self-authored account but an interview conducted by Hiram Mattison, a white Methodist minister.⁴³ Picquet was born near Columbia, South Carolina to her fifteen-year-old mother—a “quadroon” enslaved seamstress—and her mother’s enslaver. At thirteen, Picquet was sold to John Williams in New Orleans to be his concubine.⁴⁴ Mattison inquires about Picquet’s time in New Orleans to condemn slavery as adultery in the abolitionist tradition.⁴⁵

Q.—“Well, now tell me about your life in New Orleans.”

A.—“Well, when Mr. Williams bought me he told me where I was goin’, to New Orleans, and what he bought me for. Then I thought of what Mrs. Cook told me; and I thought, now I shall be committin’ adultery, and there’s no chance for me, and I’ll have to die and be lost. Then I had this trouble with him and my soul the whole time.”⁴⁶

Picquet recounts this perceived adultery as participating in her own spiritual undoing. Like Jacobs, stripped of the power to stay true to her faith, she describes struggling to preserve her self-esteem. Nevertheless, by nature of being interviewed, Picquet does not address her audience with Jacobs’s sentimental flair. When Mattison prompts her to speak of it—to remember it—she replies matter-of-factly, and her alienation bleeds through his pen. The line of questioning continues:

Q.—“Did you ever say anything to him about this trouble?”

A.—“Yes, sir; I told him often. Then he would dam’ at it. He said he had all that to answer for himself. If I was only true to him, then I could get religion—that needn’t hinder me from gettin’ religion. But I knew better than that. I thought it was of no use to be prayin’, and livin’ in sin.”

“I begin then to pray that he might die, so that I might get religion; and then I promise the Lord one night, faithful, in prayer, if he would just take him out of the way, I’d get religion and be true to Him as long as I lived. If Mr. Williams only knew that, and get up out of his grave, he’d beat me half to death. Then it was some time before he got sick. Then, when he did get sick, he was sick nearly a year. Then he begin to get good, and talked kind to me. I could see there was a change in him. He was not all the time accusin’ me of other people. Then, when I saw that he was sufferin’ so, I begin to get sorry, and begin to pray that he might get religion first before he died. I felt sorry to see him die in his sins. I pray for him to have religion, when I did not have it myself. I thought if he got religion and then died, I knew that I could get religion.”⁴⁷

Picquet emphasizes that Mr. Williams is the obstacle to her piousness, so if God can forgive him, God can forgive her too. Unlike Jacobs, who alienates herself, Picquet’s experience is drawn out by the interviewer—a Christian divine, no less; the interviewer is also the editor of the narrative. Considering her interviewer’s abolitionist agenda, it seems reasonable to wonder to what extent the words were her own. Elsewhere her evasion of this agenda shows through, however, indicating Picquet’s representation is faithful to the best of her interviewer’s ability. When asked about the experience of being sold away from her mother, for example, Mattison asks, “It seems like a dream, don’t it?”⁴⁸ Picquet does not shy away from redressing his belittling of her painful past: “No; it seems fresh in my memory when I think of it—no longer than yesterday. Mother was right on her knees, with her hands up, prayin’ to the Lord for me,” she replies.⁴⁹

Mattison furthers Picquet’s alienation from white femininity on the grounds of virtue, by also commenting on her appearance at the beginning of the narrative. He writes:

She is a little above the medium height, easy and graceful in her manners, of fair complexion and rosy cheeks, with dark eyes, a flowing head of hair with no perceptible inclination to curl, and every appearance, at first view, of an accomplished white lady. No one, not apprised of the fact, would suspect she had a drop of African blood in her veins. […] A certain menial-like diffidence, her plantation expression and pronunciation, her inability to read or write, together with her familiarity with and readiness in describing plantation scenes and sorrows, all attest the truthfulness of her declaration that she has been most of her life a slave.⁵⁰

As an “octoroon” (the term used to describe and sell women who were one-eighth Black by descent), Picquet could pass for white, and Mattison suggests her conformity to white femininity conveys the position of a proper lady. According to Mattison, her mannerisms and lack of education, however, belie that she is not a proper lady but a woman who was previously enslaved. For Mattison, feminine respectability and the experience of enslavement are mutually exclusive. Though Picquet “is now, and has been for the last eight years, a member of the Zion Baptist Church,” she cannot shake her past.⁵¹ Her alienation has been cemented by it.

Since an analysis of Harriet Jacobs and Louisa Picquet’s narratives figure a significant role in this essay, a note on the decision to use these narratives is warranted. In his essay, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” John Blassingame warns against extrapolating individual narratives to universal experience.⁵² This essay does not aim to frame the experiences of Jacobs and Picquet as universal. Rather, their narratives stand out for their origins in abolitionist rhetoric and the appeal to Christian morality. They provide illustrative examples of how abolitionist discourse preserved traditional masculinity and femininity, unjustly carrying out an additional alienation of violated enslaved Black women in the popular imagination.

Conclusion

Abolitionists wielded the socially-visible language of moral virtue as a product of their time and devotion to the Christian faith, but they also recognized it would be central to persuasively galvanizing the American public against slavery. The entrenched traditions of masculinity and femininity they drew on lent their arguments cultural credibility. In drawing on these traditions, they passed them onto the next generation. ‘Slavery is adultery!’ they preached; ‘Slavery is the thief of virtue,’ they lamented. These polemics condemned illicit sexual behavior as directly as they could, without offending the public sensibility and rendering all their efforts for naught. In this context, enslaved Black women confronted the violence done to them in terms of their lost virtue. Their lasting trauma included an irredeemably lost respectability before the eyes of society, culminating in their concrete alienation—an enduring blow to their respectability. The language of virtue was rhetorically effective, but it propagated shame and thus muzzled and suppressed compassion for the experience of sexual violence itself. For women like Harriet Jacobs and Louisa Picquet who exposed their shame for all to see in service of abolition, the effect was magnified and encouraged. Their humiliation enjoyed no anonymity. After all, their narratives had been printed to incite public outcry against slavery.

Drawing attention to illicit sex would remain a hallmark of strategic political rhetoric through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States. Women’s sexuality would be the scapegoat of social disorder and urban degeneration. Fears of illegitimate births would be extended and indeed disproportionately projected onto Black women, though their illegitimate births had witnessed a horrifying rate of demand under the institution of slavery.⁵³ The imposition of traditional standards of white femininity that decried extramarital sex on Black women began with the abolitionist call to save enslaved Black women from their moral degradation under coerced reproductive labor. Slavery had ejected Black women from the sphere of femininity; abolitionists sought to reincorporate them. However, Black women continued to suffer inordinately under the expectations of femininity impressed upon them because the implications of race and gender had already become inextricably linked in the American imagination. The economy of the social-visibility of shame that protected the patriarchal family unit lives on in the everyday lives of women today, especially those of Black women. One need only flip through the pages of narratives like those of Harriet Jacobs and Louisa Picquet to be reminded of the origins and durability of this phenomenon.

Notes

¹ Alyssa Bellows, “Evangelicalism, Adultery, and Incidents in¹ the Life of a Slave Girl,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 62, no. 3 (2020): 255.

² Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 3.

³ When miscegenation threatened the clarity of black-and-white racial thinking, legislators remolded the traditional (patrilineal) system of kinship to allow for a twisted, matrilineal conferral of bondage through the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem. See Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe 22, no. 1 (2018): 1-17.

⁴ Morgan, Laboring Women, 9.

⁵ Kirsten Fischer examines how illicit sex informed racial ideology specifically in slavery as practiced in colonial North Carolina in Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

⁶ Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 96

⁷ Bellows, “Evangelicalism, Adultery, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” 254-255.

⁸ Raboteau, Slave Religion, 102

⁹ Frank J. Klingberg, Anglican Humanitarianism in Colonial New York (Philadelphia: Church Historical Society, 1940), 217, quoted in Raboteau, Slave Religion, 102.

¹⁰Nietzsche argues the will to truth or ostensible desire to arrive at the truth of a matter is nothing but an expression of the will to power. This paper understands the Christian will to truth as being manipulated by the enslaver’s will to power. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

¹¹ Thomas Secker, Sermon before the S.P.G., 1740/1, reprinted in Klingberg, Anglican Humanitarianism, p. 223, quoted in Raboteau, Slave Religion, 103.

¹² Raboteau, Slave Religion, 103.

¹³ Morgan, Laboring Women, 14.

¹⁴ Ibid., 16.

¹⁵ Ibid., 16-17.

¹⁶ Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 189.

¹⁷ Brown, Ibid., 190.

¹⁸ Morgan, Laboring Women, 79.               

¹⁹ Enslavers even exhibited guilt for their actions before those who they enslaved according to Raboteau, Slave Religion, 291-293.

²⁰ Louis Filler, “Parker Pillsbury: An Anti-Slavery Apostle,” The New England Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1946): 315.

²¹ Parker Pillsbury, The Church as It Is; or, The Forlorn Hope of Slavery (Boston: A. Forbes, 1847), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000409058, 44-45.

²² Ibid., 76.

²³ Kristin Hoganson, “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850-1860,” American Quarterly 45, no. 4 (1993): 558-559.

²⁴ Franny Nudelman, “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” ELH 59, no. 4 (1992): 94.

²⁵ Charles Elliott and B. F. Tefft, Sinfulness of American Slavery: Proved from Its Evil Sources; Its Injustice; Its Wrongs; Its Contrariety to Many Scriptural Commands, Prohibitions, and Principles, and to the Christian Spirit; and from Its Evil Effects; Together with Observations on Emancipation, and the Duties of American Citizens in Regard to Slavery (Cincinnati: L. Swormstedt & J. H. Power, 1850), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007657310, 329.

²⁶ Nudelman, “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” 940.

²⁷ Ibid., 941.

²⁸ Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Joselyn T. Pine (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001), 66.

²⁹ Ibid., 47.

³⁰ Ibid., 48.

³¹ Ibid., 51.

³² Ibid., 65.

³³ Ibid., 49.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Nudelman, “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” 955.

³⁶ Ibid., 956.

³⁷ Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 2.

³⁸ Ibid., 48.

³⁹ Ibid., 65.

⁴⁰ Raboteau, Slave Religion, 301.

⁴¹ Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 29.

⁴² Ibid., 2-3.

⁴³ Hiram Mattison, “Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life (1861),” in Speaking Lives, Authoring Texts: Three African American Women’s Oral Slave Narratives, ed. DoVeanna S. Fulton Minor and Reginald H. Pitts (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 12.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 46.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 55.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 59.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 56.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 45.

⁵¹ Ibid.

⁵² John W. Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 83.

⁵³ Regina G. Kunzel, “Unwed Mothers, Social Workers, and the Postwar Family: White Neurosis, Black Pathology,” in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, ed. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 463-465.

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