Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Gender of Violence
- 2 “Beyond the Limits of Decency”
- 3 Making “Better Girls”
- 4 “Nothing but Deception in Them”
- 5 Out of the House of Bondage
- 6 “A Makeshift Kind of Life”
- 7 “Wild Notions of Right and Wrong”
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
5 - Out of the House of Bondage
A Sundering of Ties, 1865–1866
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Gender of Violence
- 2 “Beyond the Limits of Decency”
- 3 Making “Better Girls”
- 4 “Nothing but Deception in Them”
- 5 Out of the House of Bondage
- 6 “A Makeshift Kind of Life”
- 7 “Wild Notions of Right and Wrong”
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Sacrificed for nothing!
Emma Le Conte, ex-mistressIt was the fourth day of June in 1865 I begins to live…
Katie Rowe, ex-slaveThe word home has died upon my lips.
Mary Jones, ex-mistress…the conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs, convinced me that we have all been laboring under a delusion. Good masters and bad masters, all alike, shared the same fate – the sea of Revolution confounded good and evil.…I believed for a season that these people were content, happy, and attached to their master. I have lived to change all these opinions.
Augustin L. Taveau, ex-masterAt the end of March 1865, with the war closing in, a group of female slaves left their chores to take a ride in their mistress's carriage. When they returned, their mistress whipped one of them, Laurie, and sent her away with instructions never to return to the yard. Two days later, Laurie, her mother, and her sister took four oxen and an ox cart, piled their belongings into the cart, and left. A party sent after them found them still on the road, dumped their belongings from the cart, and left the women where they stood. The path to freedom was never straightforward, but freedwomen were determined to take it. Laurie no longer had to put up with beatings from her mistress. Her mother no longer had to witness them silently or impotently.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Out of the House of BondageThe Transformation of the Plantation Household, pp. 137 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
References
, March 30, 1865, in A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881, ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), p. 454Google Scholar
, , , , and , eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1862–1867, ser. 1., vol. 1, The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 151
, “Patrician Society, Plebian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 382–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “‘Good Cooks and Washers’: Slave Hiring, Domestic Labor, and the Market in Bourbon County, Kentucky,” Journal of American History 84 (September 1997): 440–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, comp., Letters from Lee's Army or Memoirs of Life In and Out of the Army in Virginia During the War Between the States (1947; reprint, New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1962), p. 174Google Scholar
Journal, 11 January 1865, in The Children of Pride: The True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 1244Google Scholar
, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 3, pt. 3, p. 247
, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 557Google Scholar
, Georgia Narratives, Supplement Series 1, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 19–20
to mother, May 20, 1865, in James A. Graham Papers, 1861–1864, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928), p. 214Google Scholar
, ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), February 16, 1865, p. 715
and , eds., The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 257
, Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), pp. 122–23Google Scholar
, ed., The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Thomas, 1848–1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), May 29, 1865, p. 272
, “Journal of a Secesh Lady”: The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, ed. and (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History and Department of Cultural Resources, 1979), October 1, 1865, p. 717Google Scholar
, ed., A Northern Woman in the Plantation South: Letters of Tryphena Blanche Holder Fox, 1856-1876 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), September 10, 1865, p. 158
, “‘Worser dan Jeff Davis’: The Coming of Free Labor During the Civil War, 1861–1865,” in Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy, ed. and (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), pp. 36–37Google Scholar
, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 347–51Google Scholar
, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 74–79Google Scholar
, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 240–64Google Scholar
, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 207–11Google Scholar
, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 185–206Google Scholar
, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 310Google Scholar
and , Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Soul Murder: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” in , Southern History Across the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar
, “Peasants and Rural Protest in Africa,” in Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America, ed. , et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), pp. 205–317Google Scholar
, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labor after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 27–28Google Scholar
, Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman, ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), May 30, 1863, p. 501Google Scholar
, U.S. Government, Report of the Committee of the Senate Upon the Relations between Labor and Capital and Testimony Taken by the Committee, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), IV: 315Google Scholar
, , , , , and , eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 1, vol. 3, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 246 and 248
, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), p. 136Google Scholar
, “A Special Kind of Problem: The Response of Household Slaves and Their Masters to Freedom,” Southern Studies 20 (Summer 1981): 158–162Google Scholar
, “Women's Talk? Gossip and ‘Women's Words’ in Working Class Communities, 1880–1939,” in Workers' Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880–1939, ed. and (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 49–73Google Scholar
, The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864–1865, ed. , Jr. [Macon, GA: Ardivan Press, 1966], p. 320Google Scholar
, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987)Google Scholar
, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar
, Between Women: Domestics and their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985)Google Scholar
, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, Telling Memories: Domestic Workers and their Employers in the Segregated South (New York: Schocken Books, 1988)Google Scholar
, A Heritage of Woe: The Civil War Diary of Grace Brown Elmore, 1861–1868 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 121Google Scholar
, “The Dining Room Door Swings Both Ways: Food, Race, and Domestic Space in the Nineteenth-Century South,” in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, ed. and (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), pp. 245–47Google Scholar
, Freedom's Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 62Google Scholar
, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), pp. 69–71Google Scholar
, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1881, ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), p. 359Google Scholar
, “The Reconstruction of the Cotton Plantation in the New South,” in Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy, ed. and (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985), pp. 95–119Google Scholar