Scenes of Subjection

John Rankin was a Presbyterian minister and abolitionist. He was dedicated to the Underground Railroad in Ohio and had a large influence on some of the most prominent abolitionists of the 19th century, including William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Theodore Weld. He grew up in Tennessee with a mother who was a passionate abolitionist and was influenced by both the Second Great Awakening and Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 Rebellion.

Rankin was one of the founders of the Tennessee Manumission Society and preached against slavery. As a result of his sermons, he lost support from many in power in the Presbyterian Church, who insisted he leave Tennessee if he was going to continue to preach against slavery. He relocated to the southern border of Ohio, in the river town of Ripley, a location that allowed him to be an important conductor in the Underground Railroad. Upon arrival in Ripley, Rankin lived in a cabin where he was constantly assaulted by pro-slavery opponents outside his home. He later purchased a small house at the top of a hill overlooking the Ohio River, where he was able to use a system of lights to send signals to enslaved people crossing the river, in addition to securing more distance from his opponents. He constructed a stairway leading to his house that enabled fugitives to reach it, where he provided refuge before they continued on their way to Canada.

Hartman is interested in Rankin’s descriptions of slavery. More specifically, she focuses on his imaginative, empathic leaps that placed his family in the position of enslaved people in an attempt to turn his pro-slavery brother toward abolitionism. Hartman considers the violence of white empathy, tracing this violence to the fact that, in the very attempt to apprehend the suffering of enslaved people, this empathy erases enslaved existence through the imposition of white existence. Hartman does not argue against Rankin’s motives but sees his imaginative obfuscation of Blackness as a remarkable hallmark of abolitionist appeals to white readers. Her analysis of this insertion of whiteness into Blackness begins the book and is the foundation for the questions she raises about the limits of empathy.

Frederick Douglass was a famous Black abolitionist and author. Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland and became a fugitive in his 20s after he escaped to the North. The author of books, essays, speeches, and other texts, Douglass is most well-known for his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which he wrote while a fugitive and not yet “free.” This text was a crucial abolitionist text and provides a first-hand account of slavery (as opposed to the majority of slave narratives, which rely on a white amanuensis).

Hartman refers to Douglass’s Narrative repeatedly. She begins the Introduction to Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America with Douglass’s “reproduction” of the graphic and violent scene of his Aunt Hester being whipped. Hartman is intensely interested not only in Douglass’s textual reproduction of this scene but also the broader abolitionist insistence on such graphically violent scenes. In addition, scholars have easily and without concern reproduced this and other graphically violent scenes in their own scholarship. Though the violence of slavery is reproduced by abolitionists in order to argue against it, Hartman consciously resists such a reproduction in her own work. Instead, she focuses on scenes that do not look violent at all and instead are “practices” that might even provide a constricted pleasure within slavery and seek to redress slavery. These scenes are nonetheless embedded in violence even in their temporary and always limited resistances to that violence.

Harriet Jacobs is the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a slave narrative published in 1861 under the pseudonym of Linda Brent. Jacobs was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813 and was threatened with rape by her enslaver, Dr. Flint. As a means of resisting this rape, Jacobs “calculates” that sex with another white man will provide protection for her. Jacobs also removed herself to the attic of her grandmother, where she lived for seven years without being able to stand up or fully stretch out her body in an attempt to control her enslaved situation. This painful space that is removed from the enslaver but still within the space of slavery is described by Jacobs as a “loophole of retreat.” Jacobs’s narrative and, in particular, her description of her painful “retreat,” has been pivotal in slavery studies. There is no comfortable occupation of domestic spaces for Jacobs, who attempts to live in spaces that are designed against her.

Hartman is interested in Jacobs’s appeal to white women readers by way of her argument insisting that a different moral code is necessary for enslaved people than those who exist outside of the violence of slavery. Jacobs’s attempts to discuss her own “calculations” of desire cannot, Hartman argues, be considered “consent”: Slavery, in its extreme domination, makes consent an impossibility. Instead, Jacobs exists in a state of attempted calculation regarding her sexuality that lies between victimhood and agency.

The Freedmen’s Bureau was a federal governmental agency formed in 1865 and remaining in operation until 1872. The agency distributed food and other essential supplies to newly emancipated enslaved people as well as poor whites after the Civil War. In addition, the agency provided various forms of education in the South.

Hartman is interested in the educational materials of the Freedmen’s Bureau and its assumption that freed people needed to be taught how to become productive laborers, as if enslaved people had not been forced to become inhumanly productive under slavery and were not intimately familiar with labor.

In addition to the bureau’s concern that emancipated people not be “idle,” it also provided pamphlets aimed at teaching freed people how to organize their homes, with particular emphasis on hygiene and “moral” organization and control of bodies within homes. Thus, the bureau approached the domestic spaces of Black people as extensions of the control it attempted to exert through management of Black labor. Rather than a place of Black autonomy and refuge from the exploitative world of labor relations, the home was a space that served labor relations. Hartman thus concludes that the Freedmen’s Bureau took on the role of teaching “responsibility” within the context of the “burdened individuality” of emancipated people.