Walter Johnson Quote

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Historian quote/argument

Connection to walter Johnson

““Among slaveholders, this peculiar mixture of ostensible moderation and outright threat was called paternalism.” p. 23

To keep slaves in place, slaveholders often urged that they could always sell them slaves, which would disintegrate their familial and social ties formed on the plantation. This symbolizes paternalism, where holders make their cruelty appear benign, though intertwined with threats and cruelty.

“The pro-slavery construction of slave-market ‘paternalism’ was highly unstable: it threatened to collapse at any moment beneath the weight of its own absurdity. One could go to the market and buy slaves to rescue them from the market, but it was patently obvious even to the most febrile reader of pro-slavery novels that the market in people was what had first caused the problem that slave buying paternalism claimed to resolve.” p. 109

Walter Johnson critiques the absurdity of paternalism, which states that slaveholders bought slaves to resuce them from the treacherous conditions of the market. Johnson argues that the human commerce slaveholders conducted created the problem paternalism preached to resolve.

“Because it was a way of imagining, describing, and justifying slavery rather than a direct reflection of underlying social relations, because it was portable, paternalism was likely to turn up in the most unlikely places - in slaveholders’ letters describing their own benign intentions as they went to the slave market.” p. 111

Because, paternalism was a simple oppurtunitie for slaveholders to justify slavery, rather than a deep reflection of the chattel principle’s moral standards, it was apparent in any place where slaveholder’s described their benign intentions as they entered the slave market.

“J. F. Smith was buying a self-renewing slave force for his family; his provision would be perpetually embodied in the reproduction of the slaves he bought. Through the remarkable alchemy of the slave market, a legacy pf white patriarchy could be passed on in the promise of black reproduction.” p. 94

Walter Johnson argues that through slaves, a white man could purchase a self-reproducing labor force for his family, where his laboral provision would be infinitely personated through the slaves he bought. Through the slave market, generations of white patriarchies could be distrubuted, dependent on the functionability of black reproduction.

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central argument/themes

“Slaves propped up their buyers’ post-sale performances of the varieties of slaveholding masculinity. Through the exhibition of their new slaves these men - the bale brother, the worthy adversary, the providing father - came into a higher form of public being.” p. 200

Walter Johnson states that slaves were bought uphold the masculinity of their masters. Through the exhibition of a newly purchased slave, these men could obtain a higher level of social status.

David Eltis

“countries least likely to enslave their own had the harshest and most sophisticated system of exploiting non Europeans”

“If Europeans had been able to give Africans the same rights as themselves in the early modern period, they would not have enslaved them”

Notions of insider/outsider status

Enslavement of Africans was not solely an economic choice but was shaped by the distinctions Europeans made between 'insiders' and 'outsiders.' Eltin argues that Christian charity & humanity didnt apply to africans they were trans-oceanic, and identified as “outsiders”. Africans werent given the same rights as Europeans, which diminished the moral principles of their ensavement an accelerated the trade.

“By liberating them from work their slaveholding neighbors did not do, slave ownership promised non-slaveholding white women as full a transformation as it did their husbands and fathers. A slave could wash away the unspeakability of a women’s work in the field and bring a white household into where previously there had been a conspicuous public silence. When Samuel Patterson wrote to his son about setting up housekeeping, he advised him that three things were necessary to make a household: a wife, a house, and a slave to workin it.” p. 90

Slaveholding was a prophecy that promised nonslaveholder women an equal transformation as it did to white men. The taboo of a white woman’s work on the field could be erased by a slave, and create a white household out of one without public status. In a letter to his son, a slaveholder argued that a wife, a house, and a working slave were all to make a white household.

Winthrop Jordan

The banning of the miscegenation between whites and Africans, and their general debasement appeared simultaneously with the appearance of slavery.

Both slavery and prejudices worked hand in hand in the debasement of Africans, gradually through the cultural disconnect between Europeans and Africans.

 “‘[Tibeats - Solomon Northrups first owner] … was without standing in the community, not esteemed by white men, or even respected by slaves’. In Tibeats Northrup was describing the mobile and marginal non-slaveholding white men who lived all over the slaveholding South - figures of uncertain reputation and imperfect respectability. For men like Tibeats, buying a first slave was a way of coming into their own in a society that had previously excluded them.” p. 80

Solomon Northrup’s first owner was secluded in his community, and respected by none. This man encapsulates the mobile and marginal nonslaveholding white men in the South, men with questionable status and distinguishment. Buying a slave was a process which introduced a man into a society that had previously excluded them.

Philid d Morgan

“The dishonor, humilation, and bestaliation that were universally associated with chattel slavery merged with blackness in the New world”

Argued that slavery was justified not only by economic necessity but by racial attitudes

Pure economic gain drove the intensification of slavery, which was a self-reproducing body that allowed flourishment.

Oscar and Mary Handlin

Prejudice was not preexisting slavery, but because slavery institutionalized and intensified racial prejudices because of cultural disconnects, rather than the origins of those prejudices

(little preexisting prejudice)

Quote

Context & Paraphrase

“From an early age, enslaved children learned to view their own bodies through two different lenses, one belonging to their masters, the other belonging to themselves.” p. 21

Through adolescence, enslaved peoples began to view their bodies from two different perspectives, one in possesion of their masters, and one belonging to themselves.

“These slaves were bought to be broken, to be turned from unruly subjects into perfect symbols of their owners’ will. Indeed they were bought to be the embodied registers of the indomitability of that will, for the slaves themselves were the ultimate audience for their buyers’ brutal performances.” p. 107

Slaves were bought to be broken and contorted into symbols of their owner’s desires. They were bought as victims to the violent extent of their master’s wishes.

“The greater the transformative hopes slaveholders took with them to the slave market, the more violent their reactions to the inevitable disappointment of their efforts to get real slaves to act like imagined ones. By punishing slaves for not fulfilling the roles assigned them in the slave market, slaveholders violently reasserted the identities they had bought their slaves to embody...”

As the impossible standard of slave labor increased throughout slaveholders, the punishment for slaves who failed to embody the imagined capabilities of their persona increased. Through violence, slaveholders reassrted the identities they purshased their slaves to reconstruct

Extra:

“Even as it transformed the geography of both white and black life in the South, the crisscrossed pattern of the slave trade knit the political economy of slavery into a cohesive whole”

As it reshaped the geography of both white and black lives in the South, the interconnected nature of the slave trade unified the political economy of slavery

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Historian quote

Central argument

“Even as it transformed the geography of both white and black life in the South, the crisscrossed pattern of the slave trade knit the political economy of slavery into a cohesive whole”. Long after intensive tobacco farming had eroded the fertility and profitability of the slave-cultivated fields of the Chesapeake, the slave trade enabled Virginia and Maryland planters to retain their ties to the political economy of the South.” p. 215

The complexity of Black-white relationships within the slave trade constructed the political economy of slavery into a cohesibe whole. For example, eroded slave-cultivated feild in vigrinia did not cause farmers to go bankrupt, because the slave trade allowed them to stay connected to the political economy of the South,

Daniel C. Littlefeild

Slaves from Gambia were highly valued because of their knowledge of rice production.

Africans were brought in as slaves not solely because they were unskilled and worked will in the field but specifically because they had skills the enslavers needed like knowledge of the cultivation of rice.

Peter Wood -

the image of African labor was more plausable, the convenience & cheapness of Black labor made whites no loger a labor source.

The unreliability of European and native slaves made the necessity for Africans more prominent. Thus, causing African slaves to propel the colony trades by being a pivotal workforce that sustained its economy.

Philip D morgan

Natives were an unreliable labor source, not surviving long enough to be benificial. And enslavement of Europeans raised principle & practical questions. Therefore, African slaves proved to be the best labor supply.

Agrees with littlefeild, that African slaves were better suited to toil compared to Native Americans . Beleives that African enslavement was not driven solely by race, but by neccecities and economic benefit.