Setting Slavery’s Limits: Physical Confrontations in Antebellum Virginia, 1801–1860 by Christopher H. Bouton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Setting Slavery’s Limits: Physical Confrontations in Antebellum Virginia, 1801–1860 by Christopher H. Bouton Sergio Lussana Setting Slavery’s Limits: Physical Confrontations in Antebellum Virginia, 1801–1860. By Christopher H. Bouton. New Studies in Southern History. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xxvi, 178. $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4985-7945-2.) In his new book, Christopher H. Bouton examines physical confrontations between slaveholders and enslaved people in antebellum Virginia. Scrutinizing a wealth of slave narratives, plantation records, and trial transcripts, the book documents the violent resistance of enslaved people to their dehumanizing circumstances. The slaves in Bouton’s study did not violently rebel to claim their freedom; instead, they struck out in defiance or exasperation, to protect their honor, to reclaim their masculinity, and to defend their femininity. These acts did little to ultimately change the conditions of slavery for enslaved people; however, such physical confrontation “provided enslaved people with hope against a system of oppression designed to destroy their humanity” (p. 156). Bouton examines the circumstances that provoked slaves to resist physically. He argues that the enslaved were often motivated by a failure of slaveholders to live up to their paternalistic obligations. When slaveholders employed excessive punishment, provided inadequate food, or denied slaves the right to visit family members, slaves responded violently. Bouton draws attention to the gendered dynamics of such resistance. For enslaved men, violent resistance was a vital way they could assert their masculinity. Violence was a hallmark of manhood in the antebellum South, crossing racial and class lines. Bouton argues that enslaved men who fought their oppressors “won respect and admiration” from fellow slaves (p. 41). Enslaved men fought to protect their families from punishment and to avenge the sexual abuse and whippings of family members. Enslaved women could not always rely on their husbands for protection. Bouton documents examples of women violently resisting their sexual exploitation by slaveholding men. He also documents examples of how enslaved female domestic workers suffered at the hands of cruel mistresses. These domestics struck out, in protest of brutal punishment and excessive workloads, against the mistress and the ideology of the southern household. However, white slaveholders rationalized this violence by interpreting it as evidence of the racial inferiority and brutish nature of enslaved people. Bouton ends with a discussion of three case studies, arguing that when physical confrontations threatened white supremacy, white Virginians did not [End Page 120] hesitate to take matters into their own hands and operate outside the law to protect the slaveholding hierarchy. For example, whites formed a lynch mob and murdered a Black man whose death sentence had been commuted to transportation by the governor. Some of the most interesting stories in this study come from Bouton’s sensitive and careful examination of Virginia criminal slave trial transcripts. This methodological approach is useful because it gives agency to enslaved people—particularly women—and highlights their efforts to resist. For example, we learn of enslaved women such as Peggy, who, in response to repeated efforts by her master to rape her, broke into his house with the assistance of other slaves, beat him to death, and set the house on fire. Some arguments of this study feel familiar in places—for example, the idea that some enslaved men equated violent resistance with an assertion of masculinity. I wondered whether more attention could have been paid toward regional variations within Virginia, particularly in the divisions between eastern and western Virginia—mentioned in the final chapter—and to what extent the nature of physical confrontations changed over time in Virginia from 1801 to 1860. Setting Slavery’s Limits: Physical Confrontations in Antebellum Virginia, 1801–1860 is an extremely well-written and well-researched book. The discussions are clear, the work is logically presented, and the case studies are intriguing. Sergio Lussana Nottingham Trent University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association