INTRODUCTION

The Legacy and Human Cost of Slavery

In the spring of 1918, when Mary Turner made what a mob considered “unwise remarks” about the lynching of her husband, who she claimed was innocent of any wrongdoing, “the people took exceptions to her remarks as well as her attitude.”¹ Members of the mob, out for vengeance for what they called the “personal outrages and violence, especially against helpless women and children,” were not to be deterred from sending the message that no one in the black community could seek legal or extralegal justice and live. They took Mary from her house on a Sunday afternoon and strung her up by her ankles a few yards from Folsom’s Bridge in Lowndes County, Georgia. They poured gasoline on her clothes and set her on fire. After the clothes were burned off her body, Mary, who was eight months pregnant at the time, was cut with “a sharp instrument . . . her stomach being entirely opened.” Miraculously, her eight-month-old infant was still alive, and it fell out of Mary’s womb onto the ground. The baby made “two cries” but then was “crushed by the heel of a member of the mob.” The formerly pregnant woman was “riddled with bullets from high-powered rifles until it was no longer possible to recognize it as the body of a human being.” Mary was not even allowed the dignity of being buried by her own kinfolk; instead, she and her infant were buried by the mob “ten feet from the tree,” with a whiskey bottle and a cigar stub marking the location of this particularly brutal execution.²

At least eleven other African Americans in this part of South Georgia were lynched, and more than five hundred fled the region, fearing for their lives. Most African Americans living in the South during the Jim Crow era did not receive equal treatment by the criminal justice system. This did not deter Mary from speaking out, but clearly hundreds of other African Americans were so terrorized that, rather than confront the lawless mobs, they left Lowndes County. Horrific violence against black men, women, and children in the postemancipation South had a long and complicated history in America, and white southerners knew that they had the upper hand politically, socially, and economically. Without law enforcement on their side, African Americans “knew that they could not fight back effectively, they could not protect themselves, and . . . they could not expect protection from their persecutors.” “Any slight conflict . . . would bring down upon the head of the defenseless the full weight of naked physical violence,” something that Mary deliberately chose to take on when she called for justice in the murder of her husband.³ Racialized violence was a salient part of everyday life in the African American community in the Jim Crow South, but it also had roots in the historical legacy of slavery.

The silence surrounding the history of how and why racialized violence toward African Americans became inscribed in race relations in America, continuing throughout the civil rights era, is entangled with how certain narratives are privileged over others in the production and creation of what is considered fact or truth. This erasure is made manifest by the countless testimonies of African Americans about the violence they experienced and the trauma that such violent events caused in their lives, events that have not been acknowledged. Although the majority of African Americans lynched during and after the Civil War were men, many women and children were also murdered during the centuries when slavery reigned. The notion of the inevitability of America’s “Manifest Destiny,” which is entangled with ideas of white supremacy, obfuscates the fact that extermination was part of a racialized ideology used to sustain the institution of enslavement and the slave trade. For African Americans enslaved and free in America, however, their memories of the conflict and trauma remained significant well into the civil rights era. For those enslaved and free, racial extermination was not “unthinkable.”⁴ And here lies the chasm that this work attempts to fill, between historical production and memory, between authentic experience and the meaning of those experiences. Indeed, African Americans remembered the fear and trauma that this discourse generated among enslaved and free people with an exactitude that requires full acknowledgment.

Intuitively, we know that this sort of violence did not begin as a postemancipation South phenomenon, the South that saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, where white Americans set upon black Americans and where occasionally African Americans armed themselves in self-defense. It had a prehistory that extends back to the initial decades of English colonization and the development of slavery in America. Historian Claude Clegg argues that white Americans saw “blackness as a troubling counternarrative” that disrupted their vision of America as a “neo-European preserve” and precluded their ideas of ending slavery and implementing immediate emancipation.⁵ White ideas about what would happen if black Americans were given freedom and equality led to assertions of war and of black and white extermination during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ideas that shaped and nurtured racial violence well into the twentieth century. Tracing the origins of exterminatory warfare in the United States reveals why this particular strategy of violence emerged and how it became raced, because European ideas linking race to savagery and bar-barianism were evident in the Atlantic World. People defined as savages and barbarians were subjected to extermination, which was justified by theories of who was more civilized.⁶ The history of these ideas, in part, helps explain the ferocity of the violence that black women like Mary Turner experienced during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. It exposes the probability that white southerners did not develop a new emotional state after the Civil War but were rather perpetuating an inherited set of ideas about black bodies and, indeed, black humanity.

The foundation for race-based violence in America emanated from a type of warfare used for centuries by Europeans and some Africans. What we today call “total warfare,” which military historian John Grenier calls “unlimited war” or “petite guerre,” is a strategy where one side attempts to destroy its enemy’s will to fight by “killing and intimidating” the enemy’s noncombatant populations, namely, women, children, and the elderly.⁷ But for Europeans, extermination referenced the killing of women and children generally. In Europeans’ view, West African nations practiced extermination in war as well. Thus, historically, the term “extermination” was used to describe the envisioned slaughter of large populations of white and black people in the Atlantic World.⁸ The institution of African enslavement, as it was practiced, was always poised to disintegrate into an exterminatory war, a war that white Americans were determined black Americans would lose. Yet over time, most African Americans deliberately sought strategies of nonviolence to win their freedom from enslavement and oppression. Anglo-Americans, however, continued to believe in the potential necessity of black extermination if a race war should ensue, making the threat of extermination an essential tool for maintaining the institution of enslavement and white supremacy.

The psychological cost of slavery is unveiled in the way that Africans and Europeans dealt with racialized codes of war.⁹ Racial extermination was, for the most part, used by masters to make the enslaved “stand in fear.”¹⁰ But Europeans also had a deeply rooted anxiety about the cataclysmic nature of slavery because they understood that those they enslaved were human beings who valued their freedom. This created “a condition of tension” between black and white Americans, between master and slave, which perpetuated the idea that exterminatory violence was necessary for black liberation and for white self-defense and racial control.¹¹ The phenomenological experience for those threatened by a race war and extermination, however, differed for the perpetrators and victims. For African Americans, enslaved and free, the potential for one-sided violence—white on black—was always present and traumatic, especially, as theologian Howard Thurman has argued, when experience and the law taught that “you do not count.”¹² The type of trauma that enslaved people experienced, the type that shatters a person’s sense of self and creates fear for one’s well-being, was handed down from adult to child, from one generation to the next, through oral and “written acts of remembering.”¹³ This was certainly the case with the advent of racial violence after Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, John Brown’s insurrection at Harpers Ferry, and during and after the Civil War. Indeed, the significance of challenges to white supremacy was remembered well into the twentieth century by the black community. Even if we have sufficiently examined the “origins of [African American] trauma narratives,” we have not looked closely enough at the experiences themselves. The “history of trauma,” especially this type of trauma—internecine violence, fears of racial extermination, and the demise of the black family, of black women and children—needs to be explored for what it tells us about everyday life for those enslaved and free. Trauma can also function, anthropologist Aaron Denham argues, “as a carrier of cultural and family identity . . . strategies of resilience, for holding on, for surviving. [It is a] non-pathological adaptive response and ability to maintain or ‘spring back’ . . . after experiencing adversity.”¹⁴ This ability to “spring back” is evidenced by the black community’s determination to create a “collective memory” or social memory of its experiences as an enslaved and free people, an essential part of African American history for what it tells us about how African Americans endured hardship, how they continued to achieve and prosper despite the challenges they faced, how concerns about racial extermination did not deter their determination to achieve social justice and equality. Thus the social and psychological costs of a war between the races were not the same for those in the oppressed group as for those in the dominant group; therefore, the teleological underpinnings of this rhetoric are paramount to this study.

Extermination as a category of analysis forces us to reevaluate the conditions in which slaves and free blacks exerted power. An examination of black thought and culture reveals these ideas in the “common wind,” the tradition of carrying information through oral communication that Africans retained in America.¹⁵ Black people enslaved and free were well aware of what they were up against, as they were shaping their own communities within the African diaspora while Native Americans were being exterminated in their efforts to resist the colonization of their land. Those who were enslaved valued life and consciously saw it as their communal obligation to help keep the black race alive. And although some slaves transgressed the boundaries of white supremacy by attempting to foment insurrections, for most Africans in the Americas, survival was their form of resistance. At the same time, the difficulty of coping with a traumatic form of violence that went beyond the whippings, rape, and separation of families is also apparent, revealing a psychological cost of slavery not accounted for in economic terms.

While there are a number of published works (primarily generated by an earlier generation of scholars) that look at racial violence in the postReconstruction era, only a few secondary works allude to the rhetoric of a war between the races. But they do not analyze it from the African American perspective nor trace its origins back to Africa or Europe, where practices of petite guerre were organized out of already established cultural traditions. Ideas of a race war were linked to extermination and the deliberate killing of women, children, and old people, a lineage linking past to future that stands powerfully for that horrific objective. George Frederickson, in The Black Image in the White Mind, refers to what he calls the “racial prognostication” that early colonists like Thomas Jefferson espoused about the dangers of black freedom.¹⁶ Jefferson and other slave owners believed that there was always the possibility of a war between the races, because slave owners understood that slaves, just like white men, would always try to free themselves by killing off their captors. Historian Robert Abzug wrote on this subject as well, only he views the subject through the lens of William Lloyd Garrison’s fears about slave rebellions resulting in the extermination of either race.¹⁷ Garrison, an abolitionist and editor of the antislavery newspaper the Liberator, did not advocate that the enslaved use violence, but he did use the threat of violence to encourage the abolition of slavery. Like Frederickson, Abzug does not historicize the idea of extermination from the African American perspective, nor does he suggest how it shaped African Americans’ understanding of the political and social world in which they lived or how it influenced the institution of slavery and the business of the Atlantic slave trade. It is as if the rhetoric of a race war emerged in the public sphere with Garrison and the abolitionists’ calls for immediate emancipation instead of being an essential part of the institution of enslavement from the very beginning.

In his Crucible of Race, Joel Williamson discusses these ideas in an attempt to explain white violence in the post-Reconstruction South. However, Williamson’s central argument is that the threat of a violent black revolt, which first crystallized with Nat Turner’s rebellion, triggered deep psychological trauma for the first three generations of white Americans born after the Civil War. This thesis is deeply flawed in light of the centrality of exterminatory violence used against blacks to historically sustain white power from the very beginning. Williamson also creates the illusion that white southerners were the victims in the Jim Crow era.¹⁸ Leon Litwack also explains these ideas with some detail in his Trouble in Mind, but he focuses on the post-Civil War and Reconstruction era. Litwack states that blacks organized throughout the South to protect each other in their communities from white violence and abuse, increasingly using a show of arms in either self-defense or retaliation. Race relations became so explosive that concerns about a race war centered white energy on suppressing black aggression. These young blacks, Litwack argues, created a crisis within the white community in the South. Their behavior was grounded in the rejection of the accommodation of their slave fathers.¹⁹ The suggestion that it was black agency that created white aggression in the Jim Crow era does not stand up in light of the endless cycles of internecine violence, the massacres of black men, women, and children that occurred before, during, and after the Civil War. The young African Americans who were born out of slavery were not substantively different from their ancestors who were enslaved, they just took advantage of prevailing opportunities given to them by law. Both arguments have created a mythology about the origins of racial violence in America that needs correction.

Historian Gregory J. W. Urwin, in his examination of Civil War atrocities, Black Flag over Dixie, does connect the extermination of African American soldiers with the inherited ideas of racial prejudice generated during slavery, but he does not discuss the longer history of racial conquest through war²⁰ Historian Chandra Manning, in What This Cruel War Was Over, also discusses how ideas of a race war fueled southern white men’s participation in the Confederate army during the Civil War. Recruitment and the fervor to fight for the Confederacy were predicated on a fear of what would happen if slavery were abolished. Certainly, ideas of white extermination were used to stoke white fear of black emancipation and racial equality, and newspapers and politicians across the country imagined black freedom to be a problem because it would mean that black people would be equal to whites.²¹ But they also imagined that racial amalgamation would occur. In order to circumvent blacks acquiring social and civic equality and practicing miscegenation, a nineteenth-century term for interracial sex, whites would have to either migrate out of the South, force blacks to live in separate states, colonize blacks in some other country, or reenslave the entire black population. If one of these scenarios did not happen, a race war and black extermination would occur. There has been no examination of the considerable threats of extermination that were made against African Americans during and after the Civil War, and it is essential to examine what they thought about these ideas and how they coped with the deadly violence against them in the South and the North. Indeed, concerns about and prophecies of a race war continued into the twentieth century and were even expressed during the civil rights era in the writings and speeches of Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Williams, and Malcolm X.

In the early years of the Republic and throughout the nineteenth century, concerns about the possibility of a race war were part of everyday life, and who would win was always contested terrain and uncertain. Guided by the framework of intellectual and social history, historical trauma, and memory, this study of slavery and race uses a breadth of primary sources from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century that reveal a previously ignored perspective of the African diasporic experience. Africans in America viewed the possibility of racial extermination as a serious threat throughout the nineteenth century, a threat that was still very much present in the civil rights era and continues to resonate with some African Americans even today.

If slaves from Africa were successful in killing any of their white oppressors, they were viewed as criminals and were sentenced to death for their crimes. Liberal-republican ideas of freedom, defined as personal “autonomy, or the capacity for human agency,” an individual’s ability to act and shape his or her own circumstances, ideas that historian François Furstenberg argues emerged during and after the Revolutionary War, never applied to people of African descent. The Republican concept of virtue, inscribed in an individual’s willingness to fight for his or her freedom, even if it meant death, was denied to those who did fight against their oppression, and their actions were instead defined as evil acts of savagery and barbarism.²² And the consequences for resisting enslavement went far beyond the individuals involved. In reality, those who were enslaved were attempting to free themselves from a system of oppression that denied their right to be free, their “personhood” and “humanity.” That system was “maintained by a constant climate of coercive violence.”²³ Indeed, some whites argued that slavery was an inhumane institution, even calling it a crime against humanity. Slave masters successfully controlled laws and customs that supported enslavement in the African diaspora, but they did not control the minds or the spirits of those Africans who believed that those who oppressed them did so unlawfully and were rightfully their enemies. This was as true for those African warriors on board slave ships during the Middle Passage, for Tacky in Jamaica, Court in Antigua, Jemmy in South Carolina, as it was for Toussaint L’Ouverture in Saint-Domingue, Denmark Vesey in South Carolina, Nat Turner in Virginia, and the thousands of men and women who believed in and supported what these courageous men attempted to do, despite the risk of unchecked retaliation and possible extermination. Black soldiers who fought in the Civil War held beliefs similar to those of African Americans who did their best to defend themselves and their families from white violence in the post-Civil War and Jim Crow eras.

Yet most people today, white or black, do not know that the history of racialized exterminatory warfare is an essential part of the American story. If “the memory of a people,” as scholar Catherine Reinhardt, argues, “is the key to controlling their dynamism, their experience, and their knowledge of their struggles,” then the “systematic silencing” of this history has been effective.²⁴ The reason that extermination as a central tenet of racial control has been obscured is that one side—white people—stood to gain from its usage in particular, yet ever-changing, ways over time. Ideas about race and freedom allowed for unobstructed violence to ensue against those who resisted slavery during the Civil War and Reconstruction and throughout the Jim Crow era. The language of extermination found in the personal letters, newspapers, pamphlets, travel narratives, and creative expressions of slave-owning men and women, as well as in slave narratives, congressional records, and abolitionist tracts, offers fresh insight into the everyday lives of those enslaved and free. It makes what we know about slavery and the nation appear incomplete. Something much bigger was at stake for African Americans. Indeed, the threat of racial extermination was a palpable reason why slaves did not rebel more frequently than they did, especially in the latter part of the antebellum era.

Is this “a history of the impossible,” an attempt to uncover what never happened—what never could have happened—a memory, which has been locked away and buried so long ago?²⁵ For Africans across the diaspora, deadly racial violence was not impossible, because extermination was a real threat, and the killing of black women, children, and the elderly remained part of the black lived experience. From the perspective of Enlightenment philosophers like Guillaume-Thomas, abbé de Raynal, and Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, exterminatory warfare was not impossible. Although these Enlightenment thinkers were not free from racial assumptions about African people being inferior to whites, men like French historian Raynal argued that those who were enslaved had a right to their freedom, a right inscribed in “natural law.”²⁶ He and others reasoned that “brutes are chained up, and kept in subjection, because they have no notion of what is just or unjust.” Africans, however, were well aware of the injustice of being enslaved, whether by other Africans on the continent or by Europeans in the “New World,” and therefore, Raynal argued, they had a right to fight against their enslavement. Moreover, Raynal warned in 1770: “Ye nations of Europe . . . Your slaves stand in no need either of your generosity or your counsels, in order to break the sacrilegious yoke of their oppression. . . . There are so many indications of the impending storm, and the Negroes only want a chief, sufficiently courageous, to lead them on to vengeance and slaughter. . . . In all parts the name of the hero, who shall have restored the rights of the human species will be blest. . . . [T]rophies will be erected to his glory.”²⁷ French reformer Condorcet went even further, calling the institution of enslavement a crime. Condorcet stated in 1781 that “reducing a man to slavery, buying him, selling him in servitude: these are truly crimes, and crimes worse than theft. . . . [I]n freeing the slave the law does not attack property but rather ceases to tolerate an action which it should have punished with the death penalty.” Government “therefore owes no compensation to the masters of slaves just as [it] owes none to a thief.”²⁸

The history of these ideas has also been memorialized by important nineteenth-century ethnologists like John Phillip, Sir Charles Lyell, James Prichard, and Robert Knox, who predicted the extermination of darker people of color around the world as early as 1828.²⁹ In his visit to America in 1845, Lyell noted that whereas a white Georgian aristocrat claimed to understand the “cruelty of slavery,” he harbored a strong “anti-negro feeling” that led him to “hope” and was “ready to precipitate measures which would cause the Africans [in America] to suffer that fate which the aboriginal Indians have experienced throughout the Union.”³⁰

Because the language of extermination was part of the cultural and political currency that European and American slaveholders used to sustain slavery and uphold white supremacy, the notion of paternalism, which is often used to dismiss black extermination as a possibility, becomes a false framework for interpreting what life was like for those enslaved and free.³¹ The idea that slavery was a paternalistic institution was first proclaimed in 1918 by historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who described it as an institution “shaped by mutual requirements, concessions, and understandings, producing reciprocal” labor relations on the plantation. Even Phillips, however, understood that whites were aware of the danger in having an enslaved population living in their midst, of the “possibility of [their] social death from negro upheaval.” A central problem for slave owners was “their unending task of race discipline,” considered necessary to keep blacks from overthrowing white authority and white control.³² The modern take on paternalism in the works of historian Eugene Genovese, for example, did not stray far from Phillips’s theories of reciprocity.³³ Although for many scholars the issue of paternalism as a real construct is a nonstarter, there remains a cadre of scholars who still believe in the notion of southern paternalism.³⁴ Some historians, for example, Lacy Ford, continue to argue that the idea of paternalism evolved because southerners were plagued with guilt over their involvement in the institution of enslavement.³⁵ But what value does guilt really have as a human experience if it does not change behavior? If guilt shaped the thinking of white southerners regarding slavery, why did violence against black people escalate instead of decline during the nineteenth century? In seeking an answer to that question, this research reveals that enslaved people were not viewed by whites as helpless victims in the long history of slavery in the Americas and that the enslaved were far from apolitical, as some historians have suggested.³⁶ We must also consider, in light of the mass violence that enslaved people experienced and their spoken and uns poken anxiety about racial extermination, how a transformational relationship like paternalism could have occurred. The rationale and theories surrounding paternalism, enslavement, race, and freedom that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fashioned for the sake of empire. These ideas, for the most part, were never real but were myths that have become history. Because the enslaved desired freedom, the anticipation of and potential for war between the races was a central tension within the institution. That fear of race war eliminated any real sense of reciprocity or familial sentimentality between whites and blacks and influenced the formation and evolution of the first racially based and most perniciously violent form of slavery in the history of the world. Nevertheless, through it all, and despite fears of mass violence and racial extermination, African Americans continued to fight for justice and freedom from oppression—to improve their lives and to preserve African American culture and communities in the United States.

The development of the United States into a powerful nation occurred not only because of the courage of the early pioneers and the political brilliance of the Founding Fathers but also through acts of incredible violence toward those enslaved. The manifestation of exterminatory warfare and violent conquest depicted throughout this book had roots in Europe and Africa that spread across the Atlantic World. As slavery became intrinsic to the American way of life, so too did ideas that blacks and whites could never live peaceably together as equals. Southerners remained determined that those enslaved could never be free without that freedom ending in a massacre of the black race, and they intentionally followed through on their convictions during the Civil War and post-Civil War era. Thus, this book looks at how the potential for a race war between blacks and whites shaped the human cost of slavery—and freedom—in ways that have been previously unexamined.