Confinement

As the negation of liberty, slavery necessarily entails a confinement of agency and restriction of spatial and social mobility. Before the eighteenth century, to be sure, most freeborn Europeans seldom ranged far from the settlements where they lived and died, and were strictly governed in their physical movement by custom, law, and social status. Before the advent of market society, the impulse to gain more than a competency—a sufficiency of material goods defined by one's station in life—was largely absent. Few rose far, at any rate. Similarly, until the antebellum era, notions of individual identity were culturally constrained. Within African cultures these tendencies toward social stasis were even more pronounced. Slavery as a mode of confinement gained full expression only as the capitalist regime that contained it rose to political hegemony. As mobility of all kinds increased across the nineteenth century, slavery came to be seen as repressive, outmoded, and inhumane. That its defenders still admired the conservative traditionalism bondage made possible only underscored its incompatibility with modern life and the need for its destruction.

Africans experienced slavery first as a form of physical confinement, and often of captivity, in the coffles that moved them from the interior to the coast, in the factories where they were sorted and sold, and in the ships where they endured the Middle Passage that carried them to a terrible New World. For those who passed through this ordeal of disruption, restriction, and displacement, those who passed into slavery from a different social status in a different cultural environment, bondage was experienced as a persistent and unnatural set of restrictions. For those born into slavery across later generations, however, alternative cultural and political models drawn from African experience were diminished or wholly lacking. New ideas of belonging struggled with old feelings of confinement. Though slave communities generated their own notions of ethics and of freedom that sustained African Americans, those achievements were limited by the community's objectively defining itself, and confining itself, as slaves. Though the hours from sundown to sunup were commonly regarded as time beyond the master's control, slave patrols restricted physical movement and community norms nurtured caution. New scholarship emphasizes how bondpeople used fields and forests, as well as their own quarters, to create spaces of freedom within slavery's regime. To date, however, these historians have not shown whether such zones gave rise to the anguish, doubt, and confusion such liminal spaces usually engender. As much as working people, free and slave, black and white, have always admired liberty, they have also drawn considerable comfort—if not contentment—from the safety, order, and predictability that confinement confers. Understanding the conflict between those two impulses is central to making sense of the slave experience.

As a mode of punishment and managerial discipline, confinement was used in tandem with physical tortures of various kinds from early colonial days. Because chattel bondage served primarily as a mode of coercing labor, however, physical restrictions on the performance of that labor were self-defeating. The problem for most masters was to keep their slaves' hands moving at the tasks they had been set to, not to rein them in. By the antebellum era, physical confinement usually was reserved only for persistent runaways, using either shackles, or employing various collars designed to impede flight without preventing labor. On some plantations, slaves slated for a whipping were locked in sheds or cells beforehand to increase dread and inspire penitence. In southern cities such as Charleston, masters disciplined slaves by confining them in the cells of the workhouse and coupled their confinement with punitive labor. In its most extreme form, confinement was employed as a form of political terror, as on the Singleton family plantation, where Jacob Stroyer remembered slaves being buried alive. Such barbarism was rare, but its root impulse extended back to the beginning of the slave regime itself, and to its central meaning.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christopher, Emma. Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Lowery, Irving E. Life on the Old Plantation in Antebellum Days; or, a Story Based on Facts. Columbia, SC: State Company, 1911.

Weld, Theodore D. American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839.

                              Lawrence T. McDonnell