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blueinkedfrostThis book, published in 1878 (thirty-three years after Frederick Douglass' autobiography; seventeen years after Harriet Jacobs' narrative), is a white person's experience of the joys and benefits of American slavery. Today this counts as an easy target for indignation, but history is interesting and important.
A few actually good American books to compare and contrast with this one are:
Imagine waking up on the 13th with this glorious image staring at you with blazing eyes.
Additionally, Fanny Kemble is another white woman who wrote a plantation memoir, except Kemble was actually observant and reasonable. For fear of negative reaction from racist people such as Burwell and her family, Kemble couldn't publish her story until long years after it was written - Kemble's memoirs were taken from 1838-9, and published in 1863.
Livejournal cut follows for quotes of particularly horrifying excerpts from Burwell's book.
The narrator describes the blissful, beautiful experience of being a young white child petted by slaves owned by her parents.
My sister and myself, when very small children, were often carried to visit these cabins [the slave cabins], on which occasions no young princesses could have received from admiring subjects more adulation. Presents were laid at our feet—not glittering gems—but eggs, chesnuts, popcorn, walnuts, melons, apples, sweet potatoes, all their “cupboards” afforded, with a generosity unbounded. This made us as happy as queens; and filled our hearts with kindness and gratitude to our dusky admirers.
Since Burwell's a nice, kind person, she allows African-American people to serve her.
At such establishments one easily acquired a habit of being waited upon—there being so many servants with so little to do. It was natural to ask for a drink of water, when the water was right by you, and have things brought which you might easily have gotten yourself. But these domestics were so pleased at such errands one felt no hesitation in requiring them.
This is a sweet little piece of financial hypocrisy:
The negroes made pocket money by selling their own vegetables, poultry, eggs, &c.—made at the master’s expense, of course.
When the slaves make a little money on the side, it's 'at their master's expense', but the fact the master prospers at their expense is forgotten. GONE WITH THE WIND, published almost sixty years after Burwell, also puts a similar situation in much the same terms.
Burwell, to give credit where credit's due, sometimes praises African American people.
The plantation had been without a master or mistress twelve years; my father—the sole heir—having been off at school and College. During this time the silver had been left in the house, and the servants had kept and used it, but nothing had been stolen.
How wonderful it is to praise the noble character traits of a group of people on the one hand, and simultaneously insist that they are low beings who ought to be kept as slaves for their own good.
Fanny Kemble's plantation memoir, another take from a white woman, makes a better and stronger argument in this area:
Mr. ——, in his letter, maintains that they are an inferior race, and, compared with the whites, 'animals, incapable of mental culture and moral improvement:' to this I can only reply, that if they are incapable of profiting by instruction, I do not see the necessity for laws inflicting heavy penalties on those who offer it to them. If they really are brutish, witless, dull, and devoid of capacity for progress, where lies the danger which is constantly insisted upon of offering them that of which they are incapable. We have no laws forbidding us to teach our dogs and horses as much as they can comprehend; nobody is fined or imprisoned for reasoning upon knowledge, and liberty, to the beasts of the field, for they are incapable of such truths. But these themes are forbidden to slaves, not because they cannot, but because they can and would seize on them with avidity—receive them gladly, comprehend them quickly; and the masters' power over them would be annihilated at once and for ever.
Regarding the mistreatment of slaves, Burwell asks, "What man would pay a thousand dollars for a piece of property, and fail to take the best possible care of it?"
This person's name was Gordon, an escaped slave and a Civil War military veteran, and he could've explained this one.
When I reflect upon the degree of comfort arrived at in our homes, I think we should have felt grateful to our ancestors...[W]hat courage; what patience; what perseverence; what long suffering; what Christian forbearance, must it have cost our great grandmothers to civilize, Christianize and elevate the naked, savage Africans to the condition of good cooks and respectable maids!
What courage; what patience; what perseverance...must it have taken the slavers to teach their slaves to accept their captivity!
There's a second-hand interlude about famous novelist Fanny Burney that shows that Burwell's empathy has a sign on it marked 'Whites Only'. Here's the account of Burney's horrible time in which she was not a slave:
“And now began,” says Macaulay, “a slavery of five years—of five years taken from the best part of her life, and wasted in menial drudgery. The history of an ordinary day was this: Miss Burney had to rise and dress herself early, that she might be ready to answer the royal bell, which rang at half after seven. Till about eight she attended in the Queen’s dressing-room, and had the honor of lacing her august mistress’ stays, and of putting on the hoop, gown and neck and kerchief. The morning was chiefly spent in rummaging drawers and laying fine clothes in their proper places. Then the Queen was to be powdered and dressed for the day. Twice a week her Majesty’s hair had to be curled and craped; and this operation added a full hour to the business of the toilet. It was generally three before Miss Burney was at liberty. At five she had to attend her colleague, Madame Schwellenberg, a hateful old toadeater, as illiterate as a chamber-maid, proud, rude, peevish, unable to bear solitude, unable to conduct herself with common decency in society. With this delightful associate Frances Burney had to dine and pass the evening. The pair generally remained together from five to eleven, and often had no other company the whole time. Between eleven and twelve the bell rang again. Miss Burney had to pass a half hour undressing the Queen, and was then at liberty to retire."
(The quote's from a book by Burney, but this section is by Lord Macaulay.)
Burwell's position is this:
...An ignorant and unlettered woman would doubtless not have found this life in the palace tedious, and our sympathy would not have been aroused for her; for as long as the earth lasts there must be human beings fitted for every station, and it is supposed, till the end of all things, there must be cooks, housemaids and dining-room servants, which will make it never possible for the whole human family to stand entirely upon the same platform socially and intellectually. And Miss Burney’s wretchedness, which calls forth our sympathy, was not because she had to perform the duties of waiting-maid, but because to a gifted and educated woman these duties were uncongenial.
There it is, that charming and cheerful ignorance that assumes other people are so much coarser than you, and only those with your own fine feelings could possibly resent servitude.
(I'd like to note that it's Burwell, not Burney, who makes the offensive comparison of this sad period of employment to the horror of slavery. Burney was a decent prolific writer who didn't ask to be included in this horrible book.)
This book contains allusions to Uncle Tom by someone who never, ever read the book. (Which is imperfect and tries to make the case that black people should be free because some black people are superhumanly virtuous, rather than the case that black people should be free because they're human, but even so was a very well-intentioned story and highlighted many of the abuses in its time.)
whoever would now write a true tale of poverty and wretchedness, may take for the hero “Old Uncle Tom without a cabin.” For “Uncle Tom” of the olden time in his cabin with a blazing log fire and plenty of corn bread, and the Uncle Tom of to-day, are pictures of very different individuals.
It's odd how emancipated African-American people could suffer so many strange problems while trying to make a living. For example, in 1892, Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart were three African-American men who owned a prosperous store. A white rival disliked this. Moss, McDowell, and Stewart attempted to defend themselves from violent attacks on their property, but they were lynched. Or, for example, generous white men kindly allowed sharecropping for African-American people to constantly put themselves into debt and lose land.
There's also a take on the Pocahontas story which reads as Disneyfied before Disney did it (John Smith liked to misrepresent and exaggerate Matoaka's story).
This historic stone, near the parlor window, was only an ugly, dark, broad, flat stone, but imagination pictured ever around it the Indian group; Smith’s head upon it; the infuriated chief with uplifted club in the act of dealing the death blow; the grief and shriek of Pocahontas, as she threw herself upon Smith imploring her father to spare him—a piercing cry to have penetrated the heart of the savage king!
And there is an interesting bit where Burwell meets someone equally bigoted but in a different way. The Ask A Slave web series has a similar instance of these two forms of horrible attitude colliding, although that example takes place at an earlier time than Burwell's (Revolutionary War, not Civil War).
I once met in traveling an English gentleman, who asked me: “How can you bear those miserable black negroes about your houses and about your persons? To me they are horribly repulsive, and I would not endure one about me.”
“Neither would they have been my choice,” I replied. “But God sent them to us. I was born to this inheritance and could not avert it. What would you English have done,” I asked, “if God had sent them to you?”
“Thrown them into the bottom of the sea!” he replied.
As a minor appendix, Burwell can't stop being a bigoted fool in every possible context, even those that affect her.
Although presenting an infinite variety of mind, manner and temperament, all the gentlemen who visited us, young and old, possessed in common certain characteristics; one of which was a deference to ladies, which made us feel that we had been put in the world especially to be waited upon by them. Their standard for [white] woman was high. They seemed to regard her as some rare and costly statue set in a niche to be admired and never taken down.
The problem with pedestals is that people can look up your skirts. Plus, they're not known for being comfortable to stand on for any length of time. Burwell's tiny sexism problem is insignificant compared to her huge racism problem, but it's ever so fascinating to come across a datapoint of someone who's so awful and so lacking in even basic self awareness in every possible way.
In terms of redeeming features, Burwell tells an anecdote about a real-life Scarlett O'Hara which would be charming, if you can forget for a moment that the protagonist of this story and all her white acquaintances believed it was their God-given right to call other human beings property.
Among these old cabin legends we sometimes collected bits of romance, and were often told how, by the coquetry of a certain Richmond belle, we had lost a handsome fortune, which impressed me even then with the fatal consequences of coquetry.
This belle engaged herself to our great uncle—a handsome and accomplished gentleman—who, to improve his health, went to Europe; but before embarking made his will, leaving her his estate and negroes. He died abroad, and the lady accepted his property, although she was known to have been engaged to twelve others at the same time! The story in Richmond ran that these twelve gentlemen—my grand-father among them—had a wine party, and towards the close of the evening some of them becoming communicative, began taking each other out to tell a secret when it was discovered they all had the same secret—each was engaged to Miss Betsy M——. This lady’s name is still seen on fly leaves of old books in our library—books used during her reign by students at William and Mary College—showing that the young gentlemen, even at that venerable Institution, allowed their classic thoughts sometimes to wander.
Burwell's dedication to this book claims that she wrote it so her nieces wouldn't think of her with certain apposite epithets.
Dedicated to my nieces, who will find in English and American publications such epithets applied to their ancestors as: “Cruel slave-owners;” “inhuman;” “Southern task masters;” “hard-hearted;” “dealers in human souls,” &c. From these they will naturally recoil with horror. My own life would have been embittered had I believed myself descended from such; and that those who come after us may know the truth I wish to leave a record of plantation life as it was.
Unfortunately, Burwell's wrong and all these epithets apply.
If you take this book at absolute face value, then it has a few points:
Points one and two don't make slavery any less evil. Douglass and Northup and Jacobs and many of the voices in Slave Narratives have a lot of inhuman violence and torture to describe, which makes point three the interpretation that 'willfully, maliciously, and oppressively ignorant' is the best moral credit that the adult writer can be given.
Burwell and her ancestors were cruel, inhuman, hard-hearted slave-owners and dealers in human souls. She could have gained back some moral credit as an adult by trying to help people, or at least trying not to make things worse. She chose poorly.
A few actually good American books to compare and contrast with this one are:
- Incidents in the life of a slave-girl by Harriet Jacobs. An honest, intelligent, heartbreaking, and searing autobiography.
- Autobiography of Frederick Douglass - Douglass needs no introduction as one of the foremost thinkers, writers, orators, and activists of his age. Also, this was how he looked:
Imagine waking up on the 13th with this glorious image staring at you with blazing eyes.
- Works about George Washington Carver - inventor, educator, writer, philanthropist, born a slave.
- Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup - I haven't seen the movie but I have read the book; like Harriet Jacobs' book it's an imporant primary source.
- Up from Slavery by Booker T Washington - educator, orator, writer, political adviser, born a slave in Virginia, 'Wizard of Tuskegee'.
- Slave Narratives - Also important primary sources from a wide range of people, collected by the United States WPA (Work Projects Administration) (also an example of extremely useful government work in America during the Great Depression).
- Poetry of Phillis Wheatley - African-American slave and talented writer, the first published African-American woman and second published African-American person. She made a lot of classical, learned allusions in her poems and subtly wrote about the cruel fate of slavery.
- Ida B. Wells at Project Gutenberg. Wells wrote the works here in the 1890s, long after the war, but these works on lynching show the horror of murder and terrorism. Wells' straightforward, factual, flawless writing style presents irrefutable arguments in great detail.
Additionally, Fanny Kemble is another white woman who wrote a plantation memoir, except Kemble was actually observant and reasonable. For fear of negative reaction from racist people such as Burwell and her family, Kemble couldn't publish her story until long years after it was written - Kemble's memoirs were taken from 1838-9, and published in 1863.
Livejournal cut follows for quotes of particularly horrifying excerpts from Burwell's book.
The narrator describes the blissful, beautiful experience of being a young white child petted by slaves owned by her parents.
My sister and myself, when very small children, were often carried to visit these cabins [the slave cabins], on which occasions no young princesses could have received from admiring subjects more adulation. Presents were laid at our feet—not glittering gems—but eggs, chesnuts, popcorn, walnuts, melons, apples, sweet potatoes, all their “cupboards” afforded, with a generosity unbounded. This made us as happy as queens; and filled our hearts with kindness and gratitude to our dusky admirers.
Since Burwell's a nice, kind person, she allows African-American people to serve her.
At such establishments one easily acquired a habit of being waited upon—there being so many servants with so little to do. It was natural to ask for a drink of water, when the water was right by you, and have things brought which you might easily have gotten yourself. But these domestics were so pleased at such errands one felt no hesitation in requiring them.
This is a sweet little piece of financial hypocrisy:
The negroes made pocket money by selling their own vegetables, poultry, eggs, &c.—made at the master’s expense, of course.
When the slaves make a little money on the side, it's 'at their master's expense', but the fact the master prospers at their expense is forgotten. GONE WITH THE WIND, published almost sixty years after Burwell, also puts a similar situation in much the same terms.
Burwell, to give credit where credit's due, sometimes praises African American people.
The plantation had been without a master or mistress twelve years; my father—the sole heir—having been off at school and College. During this time the silver had been left in the house, and the servants had kept and used it, but nothing had been stolen.
How wonderful it is to praise the noble character traits of a group of people on the one hand, and simultaneously insist that they are low beings who ought to be kept as slaves for their own good.
Fanny Kemble's plantation memoir, another take from a white woman, makes a better and stronger argument in this area:
Mr. ——, in his letter, maintains that they are an inferior race, and, compared with the whites, 'animals, incapable of mental culture and moral improvement:' to this I can only reply, that if they are incapable of profiting by instruction, I do not see the necessity for laws inflicting heavy penalties on those who offer it to them. If they really are brutish, witless, dull, and devoid of capacity for progress, where lies the danger which is constantly insisted upon of offering them that of which they are incapable. We have no laws forbidding us to teach our dogs and horses as much as they can comprehend; nobody is fined or imprisoned for reasoning upon knowledge, and liberty, to the beasts of the field, for they are incapable of such truths. But these themes are forbidden to slaves, not because they cannot, but because they can and would seize on them with avidity—receive them gladly, comprehend them quickly; and the masters' power over them would be annihilated at once and for ever.
Regarding the mistreatment of slaves, Burwell asks, "What man would pay a thousand dollars for a piece of property, and fail to take the best possible care of it?"
This person's name was Gordon, an escaped slave and a Civil War military veteran, and he could've explained this one.
When I reflect upon the degree of comfort arrived at in our homes, I think we should have felt grateful to our ancestors...[W]hat courage; what patience; what perseverence; what long suffering; what Christian forbearance, must it have cost our great grandmothers to civilize, Christianize and elevate the naked, savage Africans to the condition of good cooks and respectable maids!
What courage; what patience; what perseverance...must it have taken the slavers to teach their slaves to accept their captivity!
There's a second-hand interlude about famous novelist Fanny Burney that shows that Burwell's empathy has a sign on it marked 'Whites Only'. Here's the account of Burney's horrible time in which she was not a slave:
“And now began,” says Macaulay, “a slavery of five years—of five years taken from the best part of her life, and wasted in menial drudgery. The history of an ordinary day was this: Miss Burney had to rise and dress herself early, that she might be ready to answer the royal bell, which rang at half after seven. Till about eight she attended in the Queen’s dressing-room, and had the honor of lacing her august mistress’ stays, and of putting on the hoop, gown and neck and kerchief. The morning was chiefly spent in rummaging drawers and laying fine clothes in their proper places. Then the Queen was to be powdered and dressed for the day. Twice a week her Majesty’s hair had to be curled and craped; and this operation added a full hour to the business of the toilet. It was generally three before Miss Burney was at liberty. At five she had to attend her colleague, Madame Schwellenberg, a hateful old toadeater, as illiterate as a chamber-maid, proud, rude, peevish, unable to bear solitude, unable to conduct herself with common decency in society. With this delightful associate Frances Burney had to dine and pass the evening. The pair generally remained together from five to eleven, and often had no other company the whole time. Between eleven and twelve the bell rang again. Miss Burney had to pass a half hour undressing the Queen, and was then at liberty to retire."
(The quote's from a book by Burney, but this section is by Lord Macaulay.)
Burwell's position is this:
...An ignorant and unlettered woman would doubtless not have found this life in the palace tedious, and our sympathy would not have been aroused for her; for as long as the earth lasts there must be human beings fitted for every station, and it is supposed, till the end of all things, there must be cooks, housemaids and dining-room servants, which will make it never possible for the whole human family to stand entirely upon the same platform socially and intellectually. And Miss Burney’s wretchedness, which calls forth our sympathy, was not because she had to perform the duties of waiting-maid, but because to a gifted and educated woman these duties were uncongenial.
There it is, that charming and cheerful ignorance that assumes other people are so much coarser than you, and only those with your own fine feelings could possibly resent servitude.
(I'd like to note that it's Burwell, not Burney, who makes the offensive comparison of this sad period of employment to the horror of slavery. Burney was a decent prolific writer who didn't ask to be included in this horrible book.)
This book contains allusions to Uncle Tom by someone who never, ever read the book. (Which is imperfect and tries to make the case that black people should be free because some black people are superhumanly virtuous, rather than the case that black people should be free because they're human, but even so was a very well-intentioned story and highlighted many of the abuses in its time.)
whoever would now write a true tale of poverty and wretchedness, may take for the hero “Old Uncle Tom without a cabin.” For “Uncle Tom” of the olden time in his cabin with a blazing log fire and plenty of corn bread, and the Uncle Tom of to-day, are pictures of very different individuals.
It's odd how emancipated African-American people could suffer so many strange problems while trying to make a living. For example, in 1892, Tom Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart were three African-American men who owned a prosperous store. A white rival disliked this. Moss, McDowell, and Stewart attempted to defend themselves from violent attacks on their property, but they were lynched. Or, for example, generous white men kindly allowed sharecropping for African-American people to constantly put themselves into debt and lose land.
There's also a take on the Pocahontas story which reads as Disneyfied before Disney did it (John Smith liked to misrepresent and exaggerate Matoaka's story).
This historic stone, near the parlor window, was only an ugly, dark, broad, flat stone, but imagination pictured ever around it the Indian group; Smith’s head upon it; the infuriated chief with uplifted club in the act of dealing the death blow; the grief and shriek of Pocahontas, as she threw herself upon Smith imploring her father to spare him—a piercing cry to have penetrated the heart of the savage king!
And there is an interesting bit where Burwell meets someone equally bigoted but in a different way. The Ask A Slave web series has a similar instance of these two forms of horrible attitude colliding, although that example takes place at an earlier time than Burwell's (Revolutionary War, not Civil War).
I once met in traveling an English gentleman, who asked me: “How can you bear those miserable black negroes about your houses and about your persons? To me they are horribly repulsive, and I would not endure one about me.”
“Neither would they have been my choice,” I replied. “But God sent them to us. I was born to this inheritance and could not avert it. What would you English have done,” I asked, “if God had sent them to you?”
“Thrown them into the bottom of the sea!” he replied.
As a minor appendix, Burwell can't stop being a bigoted fool in every possible context, even those that affect her.
Although presenting an infinite variety of mind, manner and temperament, all the gentlemen who visited us, young and old, possessed in common certain characteristics; one of which was a deference to ladies, which made us feel that we had been put in the world especially to be waited upon by them. Their standard for [white] woman was high. They seemed to regard her as some rare and costly statue set in a niche to be admired and never taken down.
The problem with pedestals is that people can look up your skirts. Plus, they're not known for being comfortable to stand on for any length of time. Burwell's tiny sexism problem is insignificant compared to her huge racism problem, but it's ever so fascinating to come across a datapoint of someone who's so awful and so lacking in even basic self awareness in every possible way.
In terms of redeeming features, Burwell tells an anecdote about a real-life Scarlett O'Hara which would be charming, if you can forget for a moment that the protagonist of this story and all her white acquaintances believed it was their God-given right to call other human beings property.
Among these old cabin legends we sometimes collected bits of romance, and were often told how, by the coquetry of a certain Richmond belle, we had lost a handsome fortune, which impressed me even then with the fatal consequences of coquetry.
This belle engaged herself to our great uncle—a handsome and accomplished gentleman—who, to improve his health, went to Europe; but before embarking made his will, leaving her his estate and negroes. He died abroad, and the lady accepted his property, although she was known to have been engaged to twelve others at the same time! The story in Richmond ran that these twelve gentlemen—my grand-father among them—had a wine party, and towards the close of the evening some of them becoming communicative, began taking each other out to tell a secret when it was discovered they all had the same secret—each was engaged to Miss Betsy M——. This lady’s name is still seen on fly leaves of old books in our library—books used during her reign by students at William and Mary College—showing that the young gentlemen, even at that venerable Institution, allowed their classic thoughts sometimes to wander.
Burwell's dedication to this book claims that she wrote it so her nieces wouldn't think of her with certain apposite epithets.
Dedicated to my nieces, who will find in English and American publications such epithets applied to their ancestors as: “Cruel slave-owners;” “inhuman;” “Southern task masters;” “hard-hearted;” “dealers in human souls,” &c. From these they will naturally recoil with horror. My own life would have been embittered had I believed myself descended from such; and that those who come after us may know the truth I wish to leave a record of plantation life as it was.
Unfortunately, Burwell's wrong and all these epithets apply.
If you take this book at absolute face value, then it has a few points:
- Slavery was not melodramatic evil with whips and hunting dogs and branding and rapes one hundred percent of the time.
- Slavery was perceived as a normal state of being for those who lived it; some human contacts were made and some African-American people valued stability. (Such as an anecdote about a white Confederate soldier who fought for the right to keep his black servant in slavery, but who also brought her a bag of coffee he saved while he was starving on a handful of corn a day. Such anecdotes may be fairly taken with a pinch of salt or three from Burwell. The Slave Narratives, a better source, also show some human connections formed even between slaves and masters, despite the unambiguous wrongs of slavery.)
- Perhaps, since Burwell seems to have been quite young for most of her experiences of slavery, she was genuinely naive and ignorant at the time.
Points one and two don't make slavery any less evil. Douglass and Northup and Jacobs and many of the voices in Slave Narratives have a lot of inhuman violence and torture to describe, which makes point three the interpretation that 'willfully, maliciously, and oppressively ignorant' is the best moral credit that the adult writer can be given.
Burwell and her ancestors were cruel, inhuman, hard-hearted slave-owners and dealers in human souls. She could have gained back some moral credit as an adult by trying to help people, or at least trying not to make things worse. She chose poorly.
