Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
5 - To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
By
Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
Summary
This essay explores the vast range of treatments that black corpses received in the antebellum South, arguing that death and the dead bodies of the enslaved were important sites for expressing and challenging social claims in others. The treatment of the dead in the slave South reflected, in magnified terms, how planters and bondspeople thought of themselves and each other. Death and the dead body are important sites for historians' analyses, precisely because Southerners used them to stake claims of kinship and respectability. The bodies of enslaved people were valuable to slaveholders in two distinct ways: as sources of labor and as sources of ideological power. For masters seeking to control their slaves through violence and terror, the black corpse was disposable. The dead body of a slave could no longer produce material wealth, but the ideological profit was still there for the stealing.
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- Death and the American South , pp. 110 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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