Confederate „Heritage“ Month 2020, April 24: the history Zombie of the happy slaves

A new popular history by Peter Charles Hoffer takes a debunking look at some common assumptions among Americans about our own history, Zombie History: Lies About Our Past that Refuse to Die (2020).

One such “Zombie” he discusses is the “Sambo” image, “the happy darky, the slave who loved his master.” This particular historical Zombie “sang and danced through the pages of antebellum southern writers and intellectuals.” It was a propaganda narrative, of course. In the real world:

When slaves gave testimony from firsthand knowledge, they revealed that slavery was inherently a brutal and brutalizing institution. In law, it reduced human beings to chattel - pieces of property that could be bought and sold, inherited and gifted away, at the will of the owner (or his creditors). In practice, it allowed all manner of physical and psychological abuse so long as the owner, his agent, or any free white person called it “correction.” In law the slave could offer no resistance to such punishment, as in law the slave was not a person with any rights.

Defenders of slavery then and later offered the following response—in practice, slavery was far gentler than it was in law. [my emphasis]

That “later” includes today, when advocates of a Lost Cause view of American history do invoke a version of the “sambo Zombie,” often as part of a common arguments from Republicans that African-Americans today are lazy and look for the government to take care of them, because they got used to be so well cared for under slavery. Whites opposing Reconstruction took up that argument as soon as the Civil War ended. So Zombie really is a good name for it. It’s undead self has been staggering ever since.

Hoffer writes further:

In response, abolitionists then and observers now demonstrate that free persons never wanted to change places with slaves, denouncing more onerous callings as slavery. For example, female household help in the antebellum North rejected the term “servant” and wanted to be called “maid” because servant was a code word for slave. Slaves wanted to be free. The constraints on acting on this desire were familial - slaves did not want to be parted from their children, parents, or other relatives. In fact, while few slave families were intentionally severed, at auction and in wills mothers were separated from children. Every slave family would have known or seen such separations, and the threat of them, perhaps more terrifying than physical correction [i.e., beating and other forms of abuse including murder], hung over every slave family. In particular, the expansion of slavery from coastal regions farther to the south and west broke up families. When slaves could run away from bondage safely, for example during the Civil War, they did so in the hundreds of thousands. [my emphasis]

It's very remarkable from the point of view of the slavery apologists' Zombie claim, that there was no clamor from Southern whites to be allowed to become slaves so they could enjoy that allegedly cushy lifestyle!