CWL on "The Blade Was At My Own Breast": A Runaway Slave Mother Kills Her Child

'The Blade Was At My Own Breast': Slave Infanticide in 1850s Fiction, Sarah N. Roth, American Nineteenth Century History, 8:2, June 2007, 169-185.

Anti-slavery authors searched for events to fictionalize so as to heighten the agitation of a northern readers. In January 1856 such an event occurred. In a year that included John Brown's Pottawatomie Massacre and Preston Brooks, one of South Carolina's representatives, attempted homicide of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, other attempted murders and a homicide occurred. On January 27, Margaret Garner attacked her four children and killed one of them, a two year old. Garner and her children had runaway from Kentucky but were surrounded by slave catchers in Ohio. It was a front page story in the North but never appeared in print in the South.

Garner's infanticide caused a dilemma for Northern authors. Would white, middle class readers have sympathy for a murdering mother? Having committed an 'unnatural act' such as killing her own child, would Margaret Garner's story turn audiences away from slave mothers? If slave mothers were savages then why should they be set free on Northern soil?

Later that summer, Harriet Beecher Stowe author of Uncle Tom's Cabin published Dred. It contained an instance when a slave mother killed her two children. Other authors did attempt to portray such an instance in their own fiction. Race, femininity, motherhood, enslavement and violence directed toward children became entwined in these novels.

Garner herself was of West African descent, lived her entire life as a slave, and had murdered one of her own children. Northern readers were far removed from her.
Authors added attributes to their fictional Garner in order to develop sympathy in the readers. In two novels, Garner became nearly white with only a tincture of black blood. In other stories Garner's character spoke of salvation of death for the female child who would later be sexually assaulted by a white slaveholder. In the Victorian ante-bellum world a mother who murdered a child violated the sacred charge given to all mothers to protect their children.

Authors stressed that the Garner character was fulfilling rather than rejecting this sacred charge. With only one option of putting a child out of harm's, mothers slew their children. Infanticide was not an act of beast-like violence but one of desperate sacrifice. Women characters in antebellum fiction could engage in violence in only one way---suicide. Suicide was self-determination. In suicide, women remained victims.

A large number of antebellum fictional characters who were female slaves, committed suicide. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Lucy drowned herself when she learned her child had been sold away from her. In another story, a female slave drank poison rather than submit to her new owner, a rapist. In Another story, a female slave threatened suicide after her rescuer from slavery attempted rape. When mothers killed children to prevent the child's destruction at the hands of a rapist, they were also committing suicide by suppressing their innate maternal instincts to preserve the child.

Women in antebellum sentimental novels resorted to violence to protect their chastity, their faith and the safety of their child. Violence became logical when the choice was made in the face of abuse and harm by a slaveholder. Yet during the course of the plot, slaveholders who attacked women and young adults were not assaulted by women. The slaveholders were undone by other circumstances in the story.

Traditional abolitionist images of women as victims were there in antebellum stories. Yet they became more assertive and defiant in the face of violent authority.

Text by CWL.

Top Image Source: Newspaper Clipping

Second Image Source: Painting

New This Month---The Hated President

The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of America's Most Reviled President Larry Tagg, Savas Beatie Publishing, 30 photos and illustrations, 456 pages, $32.95

Today, Abraham Lincoln is a beloved American icon, widely considered to be our best president. It was not always so. Larry Tagg's The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln is the first study of its kind to concentrate on what Lincoln's contemporaries actually thought of him during his lifetime. Be forewarned: your preconceived notions are about to be shattered.

Torn by civil war, the era in which our sixteenth president lived and governed was the most rough-and-tumble in the history of American politics. The violence of the criticism aimed at Lincoln by the great men of his time on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line is simply startling. Indeed, the breadth and depth of the spectacular prejudice against him is often shocking for its cruelty, intensity, and unrelenting vigor. The plain truth is that Mr. Lincoln was deeply reviled by many who knew him personally, and by hundreds of thousands who only knew of him.

Boisterous and venomous enough to be good entertainment, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln rests upon a wide foundation of research that includes years of searching through contemporary newspapers. Tagg includes extensive treatment of the political context that begat Lincoln's predicament, riding with the president to Washington, and walking with him through the bleak years of war and up to and beyond assassination. Throughout, Tagg entertains with a lively writing style, outstanding storytelling verve, and an unconventional, against-the-grain perspective that is sure to delight readers of all stripes.

Lincoln's humanity has been unintentionally trivialized by some historians and writers who have hidden away the real man in a patina of bronze. Once readers learn the truth of how others viewed him, they will better understand the man he was, and how history is better viewed through a long-distance lens than contemporaneously.

The bicentennial of Lincoln's birth will be celebrated in 2009 and will be the biggest year ever for public interest in Abraham Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission created and funded by Congress will "inform the public about the impact Abraham Lincoln had on the development of our nation." The year will also witness the release of Steven Spielberg's long-awaited movie on President Lincoln. Of all the Lincoln books slated for publication, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln will be the "must-read" title for general readers and scholars alike.

Born in Lincoln, Illinois, Larry Tagg graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. A bass player/singer of world renown, Larry co-founded and enjoyed substantial commercial success with "Bourgeois Tagg" in the mid-1980s. He went on to play bass for Todd Rundgren, Heart, Hall and Oates, and other acts. He currently teaches high school English and drama in Sacramento, California. Larry is the author of the bestselling book The Generals of Gettysburg, a selection of the Military Book Club.

CWL: Larry Tagg's The Generals of Gettysburg is an essential book for aspiring Gettysburg Licensed Battlefield Guide exam takers. CWL looks forward to putting this on the summer reading stack.

For a Reader's Review: James Durney

Text Source: Savas Beatie Publishing

CWL---Nat Turner's Rebellion

Nat Turner, Kyle Baker, Abrams Publishing, Paperback 208 pages, June 2008, $12.95.

CWL--- This critically acclaimed graphic novel, now in one volume, is---well---okay. As a first step for anyone who is clueless about the 1831 Nat Turner Revolt, CWL recommends it. With stark black and white art, Baker approaches the core of both the historical event and the myth. At times both inspiring and cautionary Nat Turner contains the tease of fiction and the substance of history. Hopefully after the last page readers will ask at the end 'How much of this is true?'

On that evening of August 20, 1831 Nat Turner and six other men met in the woods of southeastern Virginia several dozen miles from the Dismal Swamp. At 2:00 a.m., they went to the home of Turner’s master. They killed his master's entire family. Then they went house-to-house, killing other whites. In the process, they gained the assistance of fifty to sixty slaves who helped kill at least 55 white people. The rebellion ended when the militia began pursuing Turner and the other slaves. During the pursuit, some slaves were captured and about 15 were hanged. Turner escaped and hid out for about six weeks until he was captured. He was imprisoned, and was sentenced to execution on November 5, 1831. While in prison, he dictated his confession to Thomas R. Gray, the transcriptionist who immediately published the work. On November 11, 1831, Turner was hanged and skinned.

I have used with varying degrees of success, The Confessions of Nat Turner as required reading in an HIS 101 a college level survey course. Some students 'got it' and some students 'didn't get it'. The Confessions themselves are a slight document; it is the edited transcipt of an oral interview. The Bedford St. Martins edition that I use contains documents related to the historic event. The event occurred as the Virginia debated the gradual abolition of slavery; the revolt's most immediate affect was to extinguish the debate.

Nat Turner's story has been novelized by William Styron and researched by Stephen Oates. CWL has read both; one is an outstanding work of fiction, the other is an outstanding work of historical detection. Styron won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for his novel. Oates' 1974 work established him as a meticulous researcher and a strong narrator. To a degree, Nat Turner remains an enigma to CWL. Turner is part mystic, part sociopath, part revolutionary and not unlike the abolitionist John Brown. Brown's most recent biographer, David Reynolds, has explained subject quite well in the context of his times and the limits and strenghts of his personality. Readers will have to be satisfied with Oates' Turner. Kyle Baker has brought his talents to bear on Nat Turner in a way that reaches back several generations before Turner's life. CWL suggests that readers unfamiliar with Nat Tunner read and then read again Baker's Nat Turner, then turn to Oates' Fires of Jubillee.

Kyle Baker—writer, artist, animator, director, and publisher—has written and illustrated thirteen graphic novels and won multiple Eisner and Harvey Awards. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, Spin, Rolling Stone, The Voice, EW, and Details, and he has worked for Disney, Warner Bros., HBO, Dreamworks, Cartoon Network, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Random House, Nickelodeon, and Scholastic. He lives in New York City.


Online source of The Confessions of Nat Turner

Source of 19th Century Print: Maryland State Archives




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New---Clash of Democracy's Zealots, Full of Irony and Hypocrisy

Clash of the Zealots, Michael Kazin, New York Times, March 23, 2008, a review of the new book Throes of Democracy:The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, Walter A. McDougall, illustrated, indexed, 787 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95.

For historians of the United States, the middle years of the 19th century present an exceptional challenge. How does one capture the meaning of a half-century in which Americans elected first Andrew Jackson and, later, Abraham Lincoln president; fought the Mexican War and the Civil War; flocked to millennarian creeds; joined or clashed with movements for the rights of black people and women and workers of all races; endured the shift from a decentralized agrarian society to a united, industrial powerhouse; and lived in a country that more than doubled in territory and quadrupled in population?

The titles of major works attempt to convey the outsize significance of the times. “The Rise of American Democracy” and “The Market Revolution” produced “The Second American Revolution.” “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution” followed “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” The number of rich, absorbing narratives about this period easily outstrips the quantity of those devoted to any other slice of the nation’s past.

Walter A. McDougall is not impressed. He begins Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, his own fat survey, with a fire in 1835 that destroyed much of Lower Manhattan and concludes it with an admiring portrait of the prolific writer and editor Orestes Brownson, who abandoned his youthful radicalism for a steadfast conviction that the United States was doomed unless its citizens embraced the eternal truths of the Roman Catholic Church. While McDougall, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, covers all the major events and social forces of the era with great energy and wit, his tone is relentlessly ironic. All the sound and fury signify little to him besides Americans’ extraordinary talent for wrapping their bloodletting and money-making in thick layers of moralistic pretense.

McDougall keeps smiling at the foolishness of those mortals who spout and stumble across his pages. Daniel Webster, the great Whig orator, was “a man of strong Yankee principles, ... never religious except insofar as he worshiped himself.” The abolitionists, much honored by posterity, were actually “the most feeble reform movement” of the era, in part because their eccentric ideas and behavior alienated “ordinary Americans, just as the behavior of hippies damaged their peace movement in the 1960s.” And the unruly, plebeian throng that flocked to Jackson and made the Democrats the party to beat in the decades before the Civil War? “Americans of many sorts were in one bad mood or another between 1819 and 1850,” McDougall comments. “They were against many things and sensed that Jackson was, too.” Their discontent, he explains, was “an inevitable consequence of free markets in power, wealth and pursuits of happiness.”

Such judgments, like his regard for Brownson, reveal the author’s particular conservative worldview, an old-fashioned one closer to that of Edmund Burke than of Ronald Reagan (who was fond of quoting Thomas Paine’s line “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”). McDougall does not deny that the persistence of racial bigotry and urban poverty betrayed the ideals trumpeted ad nauseam by politicians and evangelical preachers. But all the mighty efforts to forge a more equal, more humane order strike him as overblown and oversold. The result is the most unromantic narrative of 19th-century America I have ever read.


McDougall is a Vietnam veteran, which may help explain why he is most sober when writing about war, both the war with Mexico and the bigger one between North and South. He goes beyond the now standard argument that the earlier conflict was an act of raw conquest justified by the messianic promise of Manifest Destiny. In McDougall’s mordant rendering, it was “the climactic achievement of the republic founded in 1776” because it exposed the notion of a peaceful democracy sharing its gifts with the world to be “a pretentious fraud.” The army that claimed the inglorious victory was a sorry lot as well. Large numbers of recruits “mutinied, deserted, malingered, rebelled and died.” And seven times more soldiers died away from the battlefield, mostly of disease, than in combat.

McDougall’s similar attitude toward the Civil War and its aftermath may elicit several gigabytes worth of academic controversy. He has no patience for the view that the fight to preserve the Union was justified because it led to the emancipation of four million African-Americans. In his view, zealots on both sides stoked an inferno of mistrust, as “each section’s rational measures of self-defense looked to the other like mad provocations.” The messy, incomplete Reconstruction that followed a war in which more than 600,000 died only increased the hatred white Southerners felt toward their former slaves. McDougall scoffs at those who praise Reconstruction as “a simple morality play” between crusaders for racial equality and their enemies. Instead, he compares it to the American invasion of Iraq, an adventure that began with high ideals and may end as an embarrassing failure.

The analogy is flawed: former Confederates had far more in common with Unionists than Iraqi insurgents do with American occupiers. But by proposing it, McDougall affirms his fundamental distaste for any attempt to remake one’s society, or any other. Like Mark Twain, a rare 19th-century figure whom he admires, McDougall mocks “in suitably palatable fashion” the myth that Americans were a decent people eager to share the blessings of democracy. Because he writes exceedingly well, this makes for a history that is bracing to read, even if one questions its premises and conclusions.

Yet the conception of the work is a good deal less satisfying than its parts. “Throes of Democracy” is the second installment in a projected multivolume history of America from its colonial birth pangs to the present. McDougall began the first volume, “Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828,” with the arresting statement that the United States was “the central historical event of the past 400 years.” It is, he declared, “the mightiest, richest, most creative civilization on earth — a civilization that perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing. Not only was the United States born of revolution; it is one.” But to interpret the Civil War era as a history of self-deception on a grand scale ends up making that civilization look rather small.

It’s useful to have a rebuttal of the progressive views most contemporary historians hold, and McDougall does so with verve, if not always cogently. However, one can find mendacious and deluded souls aplenty in any land, during any era. The critical events that took place at the heart of the 19th century did much to transform the United States into the power for good and ill it subsequently became. Depicting most of the people responsible for these radical changes as hypocrites and fools undermines McDougall’s own argument. To debunk what Americans thought they were doing does not help us understand the meaning of what they did accomplish. McDougall may view the United States as a revolutionary success, but his image of those pivotal years looks more like failure.

Michael Kazin’s most recent book is A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. He teaches history at Georgetown University.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Kazin-t.html?em&ex=1206331200&en=4b5437d21c751ebd&ei=5087%0A