Fatherhood

The language of fatherhood became central to the ideological debate over slavery in the United States, while biological paternity and the contested power dynamics of parenthood were defining features of American slavery.

For their most persistent defense of legal bondage, proslavery ideologues in the antebellum South argued that the relationship of master to slave was analogous to that of husband to wife or father to child. The argument was grounded in the belief that a patriarchal model of family was sanctioned by the Christian Bible and constituted the basic unit of all government. According to this model, the male served as the head of household—as did the Old Testament patriarchs—whereas wives and children were his subordinate dependents. By arguing that slaves constituted part of the master's extended household, slaveholders and politicians, wrote historian Stephanie McCurry, "attempted to endow slavery with the legitimacy of family" (1992, p. 1251). Indeed slaveholders frequently employed the term "our family, white and black," to suggest an ideology of slaveholding paternalism so pervasive that nineteenth-century legal codes concerning masters and slaves were grouped under the category of "domestic relations" along with the legal headings of "husband and wife," "parent and child," and "guardian and ward" (Genovese 1991, p. 69; Bardaglio 1995, p. xi).

The term "our family, white and black" and the analogy of slaves as children served as political propaganda that concealed the violence and power dynamics inherent to the master-slave relationship. But it also resonated literally in the biological paternity of children conceived through slaveholders' sexual exploitation of slave women. As abolitionist and ex-slave Frederick Douglass wrote, the slaveholder "may be and often is master and father to the same child … thousands [of slaves] are ushered into the world annually, who—like myself—owe their existence to white fathers, and most frequently, to their masters" (2003 [1855], pp. 18-19).

In the American colonial period, colonists initially followed English tradition by which a child born of a slave parent and a free parent inherited the status of the father. But beginning with a 1662 Virginia law, children of slave women followed the condition of their mother. The law addressed the increasing difficulty of determining the children's paternity; it also reinforced the power and property rights of the master by assuring him chattel ownership of his slave descendants. In addition, slaveholders' estates were shielded from any legal claims by slave mothers or their children. "This arrangement," wrote Douglass in his 1855 autobiography, "admits the greatest license to brutal slaveholders, and their profligate sons, brothers, relations, and friends, and gives to the pleasure of sin, the additional attraction of profit" (2003 [1855], p. 18).

Moreover, the arrangement mystified the parentage of slave children such as Douglass. Though his master was rumored to have been Douglass's father, his actual paternity remained his entire life "shrouded in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate" (2003 [1855], p. 14). Slave mothers were often forbidden to name their baby's fathers or feared the repercussions of doing so. This could include sale or reprisals from jealous mistresses who misdirected their wrath over their husbands' infidelities to the slave women on whom the slaveholders forced intercourse. Children were taught not to inquire about their paternity or told incredible stories to account for human reproduction. When a planter's son was introduced as her father, one child replied, "I ain' got no father … buzzards laid me an' de sun hatch me; an' she [mother] came' long an' pick me up" (Schwartz 2000, p. 100).

Annie Burton knew of her father, a neighbor of her master and mistress, though she only saw him about a dozen times around the age of four when he was driving by her master's. Whenever Burton's mistress saw the man going by, she would take the child's hand, run to the piazza and shout, "Stop there, I say! Don't you want to see and speak to and caress your darling child? She often speaks of you and wants to embrace her dear father. See what a bright and beautiful daughter she is, a perfect picture of yourself. Well, I declare, you are an affectionate father." Years later in her autobiography, Burton recalled, "I well remember that whenever my mistress would speak thus and upbraid him, he would whip up his horse and get out of sight and hearing as quickly as possible. My mistress's action was, of course, intended to humble and shame my father. I never spoke to him, and cannot remember that he ever noticed me, or in any way acknowledged me to be his child" (1909, p. 8).

Burton's recollection of her father demonstrates the unwillingness of white fathers to acknowledge slave children. According to historian Marie Jenkins Schwartz, slave-owning fathers rarely favored their multiracial children. To the abhorrence of slaves, who believed fathers should take responsibility for their children, most slaveholders sold or simply ignored their slave progeny.

Depending on whether slave family relationships had been disrupted by sale or whether slave couples had chosen partners who lived abroad or who were owned by the same slaveholder, enslaved fathers might or might not live in the same household as their children. Those who lived at home shared family responsibilities with their partners. Fathers might supplement the family's rations by fishing. Because mothers could only breastfeed infants during scheduled rest periods from their field labor, fathers shared in the child care by bringing water to their nursing partners. Facing the threat of family separation, slave fathers might run away and send word to their masters that they would return if the threat abated. In this way, slave fathers used their own labor to negotiate the preservation of families.

Elijah Knox was the enslaved father of John and Harriet Jacobs, both of whom published slave narratives in 1861. Knox was a skilled carpenter, and though owned by a different slaveholder than his wife and children, he was allowed to hire out his time and live in the same household as his family. But that arrangement changed with the capriciousness of the family's owners. The children's mistress took Harriet into her lodgings and sent John to work in the office of her son-in-law. Harriet was nine; John was ten. Three months later, Knox was forced to move from his home in Edenton when his mistress married a man who forbade him to hire out his time. John Jacobs later recalled of Knox, "The knowledge that he was a slave himself, and that his children were also slaves, embittered his life, but made him love us the more" (1861, pp. 85-86).

Not only could families be separated at the slaveholder's whim, but the power of the slaveholder and the authority of enslaved parents held competing claims over the loyalties of enslaved children. Harriet Jacobs recalled a childhood incident in which John (called William in her narrative) was summoned simultaneously by his mistress and the children's father: "[H]e hesitated between the two; being perplexed to know which had the strongest claim upon his obedience." When he was reproved by his father for answering the call of his mistress, the boy replied, "You both called me, and I didn't know which I ought to go to first" (1987 [1861], p. 9).

Slave parents such as Elijah Knox had to walk a fine line between teaching children to privilege their mother's and father's authority without drawing the ire of their master or mistress. The complicated reality that probably contributed to John Jacobs's confusion was that slave children were subject to the punishment of slaveholders with little ability of parents to intervene. Henry Bibb recounted how, as an enslaved father, he was unable to shield his infant daughter from the cruelties of their mistress, in whose care the child was necessarily left while her parents performed the master's labor. When he recalled seeing the mark of his mistress' hand on his daughter's cheek, Bibb lamented, "Who can imagine what could be the feelings of a father and mother, when looking upon their infant child whipped and tortured with impunity, and they placed in a situation where they could afford it no protection. But we were all claimed and held as property" (1849, p. 49).

When he published his own autobiography in 1861, John Jacobs did not recount the childhood incident of confused allegiances recorded in his sister's narrative. But the politics represented by that incident were reflected in his conception of slavery. In his first chapter, Jacobs provided an indictment of slavery based on the same patriarchal model of family invoked by slavery apologists. Yet Jacobs rebutted the proslavery paternalism by implicitly arguing that the institution of slavery, along with the power of the slaveholder, obliterated for slaves the very model of family on which rests the notion "our family, white and black":

To be a man, and not to be a man—a father without authority—a husband and no protector—is the darkest of fates. Such was the condition of my father, and such is the condition of every slave throughout the United States: he owns nothing, he can claim nothing. His wife is not his: his children are not his; they can be taken from him, and sold at any minute, as far away from each other as the human fleshmonger may see fit to carry them. Slaves are recognized as property by the law, and can own nothing except by the consent of their masters. A slave's wife or daughter may be insulted before his eyes with impunity. He himself may be called on to torture them, and dare not refuse. To raise his hand in their defense is death by the law (1861, p. 85).

Jacobs defined fatherhood in terms of one's ability to wield authority and protection over one's family, in whom he must possess some figurative sense of belonging. And he literally must be able to own property and to be autonomous. "To be a man, and not to be a man" suggests that a bondman is biologically male but cannot conform to the definitions of manhood and fatherhood outlined here because slavery and the master's power deprives them of parental authority. Like the pro-slavery argument Jacobs intended to refute, this indictment of slavery rests on an adherence to gendered power relations within the family. Together, these arguments illustrate how the rhetoric of paternalism and fatherhood were employed and contested in the ideological debates over antebellum slavery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself. New York, 1849. "Documenting the American South." University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available from http://docsouth.unc.edu.

Bardaglio, Peter. Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Burton, Annie. Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days Boston: Ross Publishing Company, 1909. "Documenting the American South." University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available from http://docsouth.unc.edu.

Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.

Clinton, Catherine. "Southern Dishonor: Flesh, Blood, Race and Bondage." In Joy and Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, ed. Carol Bleser. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom [1855]. Reprint with notes by John Stauffer. New York: Random House, 2003.

Genovese, Eugene. "'Our Family, White and Black': Family and Household in the Southern Slaveholder's Worldview." In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, ed. Carol Bleser. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861], Jean Fagan Yellin, ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Jacobs, John S. "A True Tale of Slavery." Published serially in The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, February 7, 14, 21, and 28, 1861, (nos. 476-479), pp. 85-87, 108-110, 125-127, 139-141. "Documenting the American South." University Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available from http://docsouth.unc.edu.

McCurry, Stephanie. "The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina." Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (March 1992): 1245-1264.

Schwartz, Mary Jenkins. Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004.

                                        Christina Adkins