Keywords for Southern Studies

PART I

Regimes

Incarceration

HOUSTON A. BAKER JR.

There is a United States northern narrative of incarceration. It is a story highlighted by expressive traditions that foreground legacies of Puritan and Quaker spirituality. Puritans migrating to the New World envisioned themselves as architects of a City on the Hill that would serve as a beacon and moral compass for Old World redemption. They conceived themselves as anchoritic sinners in the hands of an angry God, a God who, if provoked, would launch a fierce Quarrel with New England. The Jeremiadic Puritan imaginary features perilous ocean voyages and vigorous holy assaults by Puritans on savage Native Americans. There are also holy errands into the wilderness to hear God’s voice and receive his deliverance. From the first third to the middle of the nineteenth century, such fervid theocratic visions of mission, conquest, and salvation yielded to—or perhaps more aptly, morphed into—secular analogues. Religion, transcendentalism, urban industrialism, and bureaucratic state apparatuses converged in new formations.

Monastic solitude transformed into Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s transcendental and Walden Pond wisdom on the Over-Soul. Protestant gospels of faith and work, sin and penitence, were casuistically transformed into a carceral system that created, and then punished, social pariahs. Gallows and whipping posts were moved indoors, ending theocratic state-sanctioned spectacles of punishment in the public square. Demographics that had been civilly excluded from the republic’s founding were officially criminalized and incarcerated. The criminalized were stripped of personhood and cast into tight spaces of labor and confinement. Almshouses, orphanages, madhouses, poorhouses (as Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia make clear) were all historically parts of America’s colonizing polity. But like the instrumentalities of punishment such as public whipping posts and pillories, those criminalized for difference such as madness or insufficiency were hauled inside. They were banished from the sight and rights of civil society. No institution was more iconic with respect to the plight of what might be called the republican damned than the penitentiary.

Deemed penitents by Quaker protocols of punishment and rehabilitation, penitentiary inmates were deprived of all human contact. Absolute solitude was the prescription from their warders. Secular solitary confinement would lead the condemned on a journey of regret, remorse, and redemption. It was assumed that the journey also required profitable penitent labor. The profit from such labor would not, however, go to the penitent but would be confiscated to enhance the coffers of the state. Pennsylvania’s—the Quaker State’s—legislature approved architectural plans and financing for the Eastern State Penitentiary in 1831. The penitentiary was constructed during succeeding years on eleven acres located just outside Philadelphia. Hence, what might be termed northern, republican incarceration was established less than a morning’s walk from Independence Hall, birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.

With its symmetrical, radiating, glass-roofed cellblocks and central guard tower, Eastern State Penitentiary was a model Panopticon. The eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham first conceived of an architectural space that featured a way of viewing all inmates from a central guardhouse or tower. The panoptically incarcerated would always be under surveillance. The first prisoner to enter Eastern State Penitentiary was a black man convicted of burglary and sentenced to two years of confinement in solitude with labor. Eastern State, as its name denotes, was part of the state apparatus of punishment. Its operation demanded taxonomies of belonging and exclusion that served state interests. A phenomenology of inside and outside was indispensable to its project.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault persuasively analyzes in Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization how the birth and effective management of the modern state demands sites of incarceration. Asylums, jails, and prisons are placeholders—negations of the civil habitus meant to separate in-mates from the sociality of life outside. Such sites are meant visibly—in the eye of the law—to differentiate the in-sane and criminal from the prudent and rational man of the law. Foucault’s wisdom might translate in the idiom of everyday life as the following hypothetical statement: "We know we are innocent, law-abiding, sane, and blessed citizens at a glance. We have only to note that we are not restricted by: narrow cells, forbidding stone walls, razor-wire barricades, psychiatric-ward invisibility, and maximum-security isolation. We are not ‘in-mates.’"

Nineteenth-century French commissioners such as Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America to observe the marvels of the northern carceral regime at Eastern State Penitentiary. English novelist Charles Dickens did the same; he left with a dim view of what discipline and punishment—U.S. northern urban style—augured for man’s humanity to man. Tocqueville pondered what republican carcerality portended for the fate of the penitent and the larger society. He wrote: It is well known that most individuals on whom the criminal law inflicts punishment have been unfortunate before they become guilty.¹ Structural conditions, in short, breed insufficiency, harmful associations, and criminal behavior. Still, the complete-solitary regimen of Eastern State Penitentiary seemed calculated to drive inmates mad. Tocqueville felt that New York’s Auburn State Penitentiary (1819) offered a model of incarceration that was more conducive to rehabilitation leading to a restored citizenship. Inmates at Auburn State dined and labored in congregation, though also in silence. Its cells were tiny spaces intended principally for detention and sleeping. Like Eastern State, Auburn was a profit-accruing venture with no significant returns to the inmates who produced the profit.

Tocqueville’s sense of the structures and implications of the carceral are analogous to Foucault’s observations. Those marked by signs of a reputed religious condemnation (e.g., born black like the scriptural Ham) or burdened by economic misfortune (e.g., conceived in poverty) are the socially damned who are criminalized into incarceration. To maintain civil society and the content of its privileged rulers, staff, and administration, it is deemed necessary to create a damned caste that is convicted in the womb.

There is a construction and account of U.S. history that makes clear the inalienable conjunction between the Constitution of the United States of America and the proximate architectures of American incarceration. The Constitution is rife with taxonomic exclusions and anatomical chimeras (e.g., three-fifths of a person). It has been remarked that when Tocqueville toured the United States, the only fully franchised citizens were white men. The most privileged of that white male demographic were rich by financial account and pseudoaristocratic by self-proclamation.

Perhaps none were more pseudo in their aristocratic protestations and wealthy in their accounts than large plantation owners of the American South. Hence, the Constitution had to be hammered out in terms that would satisfy both a northern narrative of nationhood and the tale of an immensely wealthy and irrepressible southern sphere. That southern sphere’s immense profits derived from the labor-in-bondage that was American chattel slavery. Statesman James Madison observed that southern slavery—the incarceration of black laborers by the millions in abject plantation servitude—formed the line of distinction between northern and southern delegates at Independence Hall. The Constitutional Congress that convened at Independence Hall—well in advance of Tocqueville’s tour—was, not surprisingly, constituted by an all-white, male-bonding exercise in compromise and exclusion. The convention arrived at common cause not so much by a fierce commitment to liberty for all as through a mutual northern and southern devotion to a plutocratic autonomy and ideological cohesion predicated on racial and gender exclusion.

We know the success of the Independence Hall constitutional project from its boundless and continuing legacy. It guaranteed untold inherited wealth and privilege for countless white American generations. Madison’s line of distinction was, ultimately, a demarcation between the privileged white male rich and the populous and punished damned other. Ultimately Madison’s line was the economic bottom line of plutocratic self-interest. The final draft of the Constitution approved by the convention is marked by the delegates’ self-interested fictions and denials. Women are granted no suffrage. Native Americans are designated beyond the pale of settled civilization. Black slaves are legally fictionalized as creatures never seen: three-fifths of a man. Specifically, Articles I and IV of the Constitution and their clauses mandate the following: continuation of the African slave trade to the United States until 1808; apportionment of representation among the several states on the basis of a definition of black slaves as three-fifths of all other persons (three-fifths clause). There is also the fugitive slave provision mandating that escaped slaves must, by law, be returned to their owners.

Calculated deletion of the word slavery from the Constitution by the delegates in no way compromises the truth and the historically verifiable record that slavery was written into the founding legal document of the United States. The national legal bright line was constituted and conditioned by an order of incarceration complementary to the state apparatus of penitence and penitentiaries. Chattel slavery, through constitutional compromise, exclusion, and fiction, became a template for American incarceration. Such slavery was the very engine of plantation production in the Middle and Deep South of the republic. Commerce, labor, social stigmatization, expropriation of revenue, and punishment on a grand scale are foundational in the U.S. southern narrative of incarceration.

In The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism, scholar Leigh Anne Duck astutely analyzes how the South’s imputed backwardness and refusal to modernize have served to reinforce a dubious regionalist definition of the nation. The telos of regionalization is to differentiate—putatively in the national interest—the abject, backward id formations of the South from the supposed rational and progressive modernization of the North. Economically grounded in plantation slavery, the South’s colossal wealth produced by servile labor and brutal punishment is something on the order of an outside embarrassment to northern religious protestations and boasts of liberty for all. The North’s penitentiaries hide punishment out of sight.

A myth of regionalism is not, of course, sustained and maintained solely by those who deploy it negatively and by projection to boost their positive image of the nation. Once crafted, as Duck and others have demonstrated, those who are vilified by myth may very well take up at least the exceptionalism of the myth as a point of pride. The South, that is to say, in both memory and present articulation, can proclaim its most redolently abject formations such as plantation chattel slavery a proud and defining institution, ordained by God and sanctioned by the laws of man. However, any memorial romance of the South’s old plantations bathed in southern charm would seem immediately to fade before the term prison farm.

The historical backstory of the South’s agricultural economies of labor and profit forms a longue durée commencing with the gang production of sugar as a cash crop in the Mediterranean. With European navigational successes such as the fifteenth-century voyages past the Cape of Bojodar financed by Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator, the West Coast of Africa became accessible for trade, expropriation of gold, and the securing of African bodies for labor. Sugar and other forms of plantation production (tobacco, rice, cotton) demanded monumental numbers of laborers in order to turn their greatest profits. The African slave trade produced such labor.

In minimalist description, one might say that in the transatlantic African slave trade, European and American trade goods and firearms were bartered in Africa for human bodies to be carried to African coastal barracoons or prisons. After the captives were factored or brokered to slave-ship captains for trade goods, they were packed into the dark holds of ships to endure the Middle Passage to New World plantations. From The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, The African (1745) comes the following description of the hold:

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crouded [sic] that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspiration, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought sickness amongst the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling chains, now become insupportable, and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children fell, and were almost suffocated.²

The Middle Passage could last as long as four months. Ships’ captains used tight packing methods—taking on hundreds of shackled African bodies, each allotted no more space than the length and breadth of a body on its side in a fetal position—to maximize profits. If there can ever be such a situation as normal incarceration, the Middle Passage certainly constitutes X or Extreme Incarceration. In The Slave Ship: A Human History, Marcus Rediker describes the overwhelming violence and constraints of the slave ships to which the hold was privy:

The slave ship was a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory. Loaded with cannon and possessed of extraordinary destructive power, the ship’s war-making capacity could be turned against other European vessels. . . . The slave ship also contained a war within, as the crew (now prison guards) battled slaves (prisoners), the one training its guns on the others, who plotted escape and insurrection. Sailors also produced slaves within the ship as factory, doubling their economic value as they moved them from a market on the eastern Atlantic to one on the west. . . . The ship-factory also produced race. At the beginning of the voyage, captains hired a motley crew . . . who would on the coast of West Africa, become white men. At the beginning of the Middle Passage, captains loaded on board the vessel a multiethnic collection of Africans, who would, in the American port, become black people or a negro race.³

The carceral economics of slave ships were driven by global mercantile capitalism and informed at every turn by a dehumanizing regime of racial terror. Such economics were forebears and models for the southern prison farms romanticized as plantations of chivalric courtesy and manners. Degraded by captivity and the abjection of the ship’s hold and above-deck terror, Africans shackled into circuits of Atlantic slavery suffered a mortality rate in the millions. They were lost to fire, storm, disease, sadism, suicide, and murder. The transport of the prison ship and its discipline were exemplars of the dehumanization that the Martiniquan statesman and poet Aimé Césaire calls thingification. In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire writes: No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production. . . . My turn to state an equation: colonization = ‘thingification.’⁴ Enslaved Africans in the American South were deemed chattel—movable property. What comes together not in southern incarceration but as southern incarceration is chattel slavery in plantation economies of racial terror.

In such economies, the forlorn jail is little more than an allied instrument of the plantocracy’s power. In some accounts, such as Jonathan Walker’s Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola, Florida, for Aiding Slaves to Escape from Bondage (1845), the jail is a surrogate structure, designed as a secondary terror station for the paddling, whipping, and derogation of slaves accused of behavior insubordinate to the planter class. Slave owners’ power and authority were deemed absolute. Their physicians, ministers, lawyers, judges, overseers—the entire administrative cast of apparatchiks in the world that the slaveholders made—were bent fully to the will of the masters. They invented diseases, sculpted slaveholding homiletics and apologetics, and, most importantly, crafted a body of law designed to make the enslaved stand in fear.

One outcome of the state dominance and subjugation of the plantocracy was the accumulation of untold southern slaves and the production of almost inconceivable wealth. More than 40 percent of African captives who entered the economic arrangements of the British mainland colonies arrived at the port of Charleston. Savannah’s wharfs came to set the global value of cotton. For Frederick Douglass, such accumulation and power amounted to fiduciary piracy writ large and at the price of carceral horror. Douglass has but one name for the nation’s constitutional endorsement of southern economics: The Prison House of Slavery. The South constructed itself as a carceral state, one predicated on the thingification of race. But not without northern complicity designed to move white wealth and privilege meters upward. The conjugation and conjuring of the law (especially constitutional law) required to make the U.S. South a prison house of slavery was written as law at the Constitutional Convention. The Constitution and its additions and evacuations through the years—especially as they pertain to race—have been vastly determinate in the U.S. dynamics of law, criminal justice, and incarceration. In The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, scholar Colin Dayan writes:

If we turn for a moment to the definition of the slave as a person in law, we realize just how strange legal logic had to be in order to birth this being. For this piece of property became a person only in committing a crime. The crime proved consciousness, mind, and will. No longer disabled in law, the slave could be recognized as a thinking thing. He was treated as a person, capable of committing acts for which he might be punished as a criminal. It is quite possible if we push this reasoning further, that all definitions of personhood, whether applying to a free citizen or a slave, rest ultimately on the ability to blame oneself.⁵

Dayan compellingly analyzes how legal fiction, magical thinking, and tortured logic serve the carceral ends of power in one instance through a discussion of Ruffin v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1871). Woody Ruffin, an incarcerated black felon, murdered a white man while working in chains on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. He was sentenced to hang but entered an appeal. His counsel based the appeal on the fact that Ruffin had been denied his Sixth Amendment rights of an impartial jury and a speedy trial. Justice J. Christian ruled for the court that since Ruffin was a convict and had been so at the time of the murder, he was in fact civilly dead and thus possessed no rights guaranteed by the Constitution to freemen and citizens. Ruffin, as a slave of the state, was civilly dead. Dayan writes: The prison walls circumscribe the prisoner in a [legal] fiction that, in extending the bounds of servitude, became the basis for the negation of rights, thus reconciling constitutional strictures with slavery.⁶

At the end of the Civil War, there was great jubilation as more than four million slaves in the South were freed. Their new freedom was putatively guaranteed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The amendments respectively mandated: abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude; the guarantee of citizenship, due process, and equal protection under the law; and the right to vote. In any analysis of U.S. incarceration, it is the Thirteenth Amendment that provides firsthand evidence of the coextensiveness of the law and American incarceration. The Thirteenth Amendment reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction (my emphases). One might say the phrase except as a punishment for crime" is veritably the hold of the law. It provides a gaping maw, a semantic open hole that is not unlike the opinion of Justice Christian in Ruffin v. Commonwealth. For what constitutes crime, conviction, or punishment in the United States but the bizarre hermeneutics of America’s always already racialized justice and its magistrates?

The South’s white supremacists and vigilante factions at the end of the Civil War believed that a great crime had been committed against their regional interests and peculiar institutions by a War of Northern Aggression. They meant to take back their southern way of life at the end of smoking gun barrels or by gruesome spectacle lynchings on landscapes where black men’s mutilated bodies swayed at the end of a rope. Violent white terrorists specialized in burning crosses and torching black dwellings. Their acts were seldom deemed crimes by either North or South. There was no unified call, that is to say, across regions for a national or executive offensive to restore law and order to black American life.

The wave of violence that beset black freedom was, of course, not without parallel. The entire South in its dimensions of plantation power and endorsement of a carceral black slavery was the essence of unloosed white violence against the black body. Rather than a residual violence, the unleashed white vigilantism of the postbellum era was merely an avatar, indeed an arriviste doppelgänger of the normal state of southern society.

Establishment of the Federal Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees, and Abandoned Lands was meant to institute Reconstruction. Reconstruction was supposed to carry the force of law into territories of white supremacist violence. Only the presence of federal troops on the ground in the South, however, gave Reconstruction a glimmer of a chance at success. When federal troops were withdrawn from the South as a condition of a national presidential election compromise (Hayes-Tilden, 1877), white violence reigned unchecked, and white supremacy was the über-law of the South.

One might say that on the day after the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, the legal and carceral agents of the South commenced to create a set of regulations transparent in their intent, which was to criminalize and thrust back into virtual slavery the black southern millions just granted freedom by the war amendments. There were pig laws, Black Codes, antiloitering laws, and other laws targeting black surliness and black petty larceny. But there were no Eastern State Penitentiary emulations in the South. The South had relied on plantation protocols of violence and terror for disciplining blacks. The absence of southern prisons was due, at least in part, to the South’s aversion to the federal state supervision that marked, say, the Quaker State’s penitentiary organization and operation. The South’s postbellum substitute for the carceral prison house of slavery was a system of convict leasing.

Blacks convicted of a criminal offense (e.g., stealing a pig, being without money, whistling at a white woman) were not to be housed or warehoused inside. They were, instead, hired out by the law to public and private industries to work off their fines and sentences. Scholar David Oshinsky’s striking monograph Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice offers a persuasive account of the ways in which the South conspired to dragoon black bodies into the project of rebuilding the infrastructure of a war-torn land. Contractors leased black prisoners from the states in partial payment of the convicteds’ assigned fines. The contractors could work their leased property brutally for the duration of their sentences. Black chain gangs building roads and laying railroad tracks. Prison farm black convicts generating enough revenue to pay an entire state’s education budget. Black convicts transported in barred cars designed for animals to clear southern swamps. Black convicts laboring in turpentine camps and logging camps providing profitable revenues for their white lessors. All of these were the incarcerated. They were chained to a system of convict lease labor no less draconian in its deprivations and terror than the transatlantic slave trade that ensnared Olaudah Equiano.

Convict leasing was worse than slavery because it was cheaper and nearly maintenance free. To lease black labor, the lessor paid a pittance and had no vested protective interest in the welfare of the laborers. By contrast, a slave from the Charleston auction blocks might cost a master as much as eleven thousand dollars. By rational choice, the purchaser would be at least minimally cautious about the health and welfare of his purchase. By contrast, working leased convicts to death and punishing them brutally to accrue greater profits was economic pragmatism in the convict lease system of southern incarceration. Then came Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) as a further southern instantiation of racialized and procrustean offices of U.S. law.

In 1892, a light-complexioned man of creole descent by the name of Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana Railroad and took a seat in the white car. Plessy was a participant in a black civil rights organization’s plan to test and contest the Louisiana Separate Car Act, which segregated blacks from whites on public carriers (not unlike Rosa Parks half a century later in Montgomery, Alabama). Plessy sat in the white section, identified himself as black, and was arrested. His case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States, where his lawyers (like Willie Ruffin’s counsel) argued that Plessy’s arrest was a violation of rights granted by constitutional amendments. In the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy, the sophistic point of legal reach was the distinction not between a felon civilly dead and a free man but rather between legal equality as stated by the Fourteenth Amendment and equality based upon color, that is, social equality. Supreme Court justice John Harlan dissented from this majority reading of matters because he knew the resultant doctrine of separate but equal would constitute a disastrous legal fiction. For the court’s majority ruled that as long as there are equal facilities for blacks, it is proper to keep everyday southern life safe from a commingling of the races. This was the infamous birth of separate but equal as an acceptable legal standard. Plessy marks the birth of Jim Crow and, in sad retrospect, the Supreme Court’s and highest law of the land’s endorsement of white supremacy and black subjugation as the national legal norm.

It is not without merit to argue that the horrors of the Scottsboro Boys case and its iterated trials of the 1930s could have happened nowhere other than amid the white supremacist venues and legal protocols of Jim Crow and its carceral imperatives. The Scottsboro case involved nine black boys who hopped a freight train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1931. They were pulled off the train in Scottsboro, Alabama, and two young white women who had also hopped the freight accused the boys of gang rape. There were eight trials, only one of which resulted in exoneration, and then only of the four youngest boys on the condition that they leave the state of Alabama forever. Scholar Dan Carter in Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South brilliantly analyzes all facets of the Scottsboro proceedings and demonstrates that the boys were known to be innocent from the outset. There was no physical or forensic evidence of rape. Though their plight became a cause célèbre for an international community of activists (especially those rallied by the Communist Party of the United States), the unexonerated Scottsboro boys languished in jail for decades. It was known that no rape occurred. But the law guaranteed that all the Scottsboro boys lived torturously and died tragically.

Michelle Alexander’s comprehensive and perfectly crafted book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010) provides the brilliant grid of connections that add detail and fullness to the foregoing account of incarceration. Alexander takes pains to demonstrate how, ironically, southern jails and even the prison enclave Parchman Farm became sites of black nonviolent resistance during the Civil Rights Movement. She analyzes the effects of the prison rights reform efforts of the 1960s and 1970s and fully explicates how U.S. politics have always been and continue to be utterly contingent upon race, depersonalization, and economic profit. Her felicitously argued condemnation of the politics of law and order, the war on crime, the war on drugs, and get tough on crime from the deregulating 1980s to the present day establishes unequivocally causal links between caste, law, and mass incarnation in America.

The essence of Jim Crow is the legal creation of a black underclass—a separate and indisputably unequal caste. When Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy, there was jubilation akin to post-Appomattox jubilee. The ensuing years, however, brought little legal remedy and, in fact, bled into the cataclysmic white violence of southern resistance to civil rights. Civil rights and voting rights acts became law, but enforcement was often tepid. By the end of the 1960s, law and order had become the rallying cry of the White House and its chief executive, Richard Nixon. Postindustrialism and the export of the U.S. manufacturing sector overseas for corporate profit were legalized by the courts and supported by the corporate plutocracy—northern and southern. A post-Fordist world had no civil or economic space or tolerance for those who were not skilled or educated enough to join a U.S. service economy. A prison-industrial complex to remove the excess and residue of past industrial good times was welcomed.

The United States today holds under the surveillance and discipline of its prisons, jails, Immigration and Nationality Act holding facilities, and parole and probation offices more than seven million people at any given hour of any given day. The largest prison populations and the highest incidence of executions nationally are in the southern states of the United States, leading some to talk of prison slavery, echoing Frederick Douglass’s Prison House of Slavery. Michelle Alexander’s cause and call is for a social movement to abolish the offices of mass incarceration in the United States. If a raison d’être is demanded, one might call to mind Colin Dayan’s caution that penal incapacitation in its many forms is accompanied by fabulous taxonomies that reword distinctions between human and inhuman, predator and victim, virtue and vice, even flesh and spirit. . . . Law words and legal fictions work wonders on the commonsense world of experience outside the courtroom. In the process of defining harm, assessing damages, or assessing blame, legal reasoning sometimes deforms the individual in its purview, or gives them a negative status in the civil order.⁷ In a sense far more than metaphorical, the law may be not only a white dog but also a ghost ship of the transatlantic slave trade.

NOTES

1. Tocqueville and Beaumont, On the Penitentiary System, 164.

2. Equiano, Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, 37–38.

3. Rediker, Slave Ship, 9–10.

4. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 42.

5. C. Dayan, Law Is a White Dog, 89.

6. Ibid., 61.

7. Ibid., 112, 205.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2010.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.

———. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Oshinsky, David M. Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow. New York: Free Press, 1997.

Smith, Caleb. The Prison and the American Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011.

Tarter, Michele Lise, and Richard Bell, eds. Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Plantation

MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL

In the simplest of terms, we usually imagine that a plantation is a uniquely southern thing: a big, antiquated farm, set in the land of moonlight and magnolias, peopled by large numbers of poor, dark-skinned workers, and presided over by a small white minority. Its complex social structure echoes a certain stylized European feudalism, with both the farm and the social structure dependent on the abundant labor and service of African slaves and the proper functioning of race. We understand this representation of the plantation to be fixed in time, as an expression of the slaveholding South, from the settlement of the colonies until the Civil War’s conclusion. And we understand the plantation to be defined by its scale so that a small farm with one or two slaves does not, we presume, make a plantation; only something much bigger, more sprawling, fits the term.

Subjecting this familiar idea to critical scrutiny is important, because this too-simplified representation is itself an argument—it is somewhat accurate but also too narrowly drawn, and narrowly drawn with a purpose, I think. The labor regime of the slaveholding South has a long racial history, but it was re-created in the wake of the Civil War as part of an effort to domesticate the region, to transform it from the forward base of a hemispheric empire into a well-bordered region of a well-defined republic. After the war, describing the plantation as a medieval thing made it easier to imagine its supposed opposites as modern and democratic. So, then, to be critical of the plantation, one has to set it in a larger context, loosen it a little from its historic relationship to the stylized Old South, and rethink the question of scale and purpose. This requires reading and thinking broadly.

We might start this effort to regain critical scrutiny in the 1930s, a decade renowned for its fascination with the slaveholding past. In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, published in 1936, a young man with fevered dreams of wealth, racial domination, and brute power journeys to the West Indies to gain knowledge and then to the Mississippi frontier, where he hopes to bring that knowledge to real life. Newly settled there, he uses his captured French architect and his Haitian slaves to carve a realm of one hundred acres out of the wilderness. What Thomas Sutpen creates in Yoknapatawpha County—his settlement is soon known simply as the Plantation—is a powerful beachhead for slavery. As time moves on in Faulkner’s world, the site is surrounded by other parallel manifestations of white settlement and slaveholding practice and then fades into local legend as a reminder of the antebellum past, but Sutpen’s original idea—his rough-hewn settlement in the vanguard of the slaveholding world—clings to the bones of the place.

We learn many things from reading Faulkner’s story closely. We learn that plantations are everywhere—everywhere because they were conceived as stabilizing agents in a world marked by diffusion and movement. If we look up from the pages of Absalom, Absalom!, we see them still around us. The state of Rhode Island has the term Plantation in its official name, a reminder that its initial settlement was, like Sutpen’s, ambitious. Plimoth Plantation is a living-history museum, located in New England. The Parchman prison in Mississippi is described as a plantation. There are cities and towns, companies and furniture styles all named after plantations. If we think about this dispersion, we might note that a plantation seems to refer to any aspiring settlement, any outpost at the edge of civilization, any penal colony, or to the population established in any of these locations. Metaphorically, for Sutpen and for many others, plantation suggests implantation, often in rocky soil; growth dependent on luck and skill; cultivation; and perhaps most importantly, will. Affectively, the term is nostalgic, gesturing backward—and, strangely, with affection—to the original, to the thing transplanted in new terrain. Sutpen’s Hundred wasn’t just an outpost of slaveholding; it was also a transplanted idea, taken from the center of the slaveholding world to what was, in the timeline of Faulkner’s fictional narrative, a distant borderlands.

One can see this history—the growth and spread of plantations to match the expansion of the South and of colonialism more broadly—in the old maps of the antebellum Mississippi River, where the shoreline is inscribed with the names of the families who own the great (that is, large and productive) plantations. There is a history of empire to be found in the names of those plantations, with Creole owners living closest to New Orleans and Anglo surnames found upriver, where settlements came later. Like a DNA strand, the map captures the decline of old empires, the rise of new nations, and the rapid expansion of chattel bondage. One sees the way in which this institution reproduced itself—socially, politically, economically—as it climbed northward.

More than a big white house on a broad stretch of land with a handful of slaves, the plantation is thus a place, a practice, and a politics. As such, it is tied to histories of colonialism and slavery but also fixed on the land, in the way that a lighthouse marks the establishment of waterways. Imagined this way, the plantation has history, though not usually in the way we imagine such things, and not as a fixture of one particular moment in time. With roots, as Patricia Seed reminds us, in colonial settlement in the New World, the plantation endures as a symbol of race and power. Studying such a thing is a challenge.¹ To focus on the plantation, one needs to keep that long history in mind and to remember as well the varied meanings of the concept that make it possible for things as different as plantation shutters and plantation politics to resonate right up to the present day.

Breaking down the generally understood notion of the plantation forces us to ask some important questions: If the institution is a global expression of colonial settlement, what is the unique connection between the South and the plantation? How does a global object, joined to the history of imperial settlement, reproduced in many different contexts, become confused with the history of one specific region in one specific nation? What are the politics of that specific memory? These questions are important because they trouble our certainties that the plantation is fixed in time and space and ask us to look for it outside the Old South.

In the summer of 1937, for instance, the photojournalist Dorothea Lange toured the state of Mississippi. Hired—along with several other documentary photographers—by the Farm Security Administration to document the grim circumstances of rural life across the depressed, desolate South, Lange found herself at the Sunflower Plantation Project, a modernization effort in the Delta, aimed at reeducating African American tenant sharecroppers and turning them into productive wage laborers, and at replacing nineteenth-century technologies with modern machines, all in the midst of a big, productive cotton-growing complex. Here, we see the plantation reestablished as something that does the hard work of economic modernization, a philosophy of development at the very core of the emergent American century. Bewitched by the beauty of the region, Lange created photos of the plantation project that reproduced with stylized perfection a centuries-old representation: the aesthetic of the slaveholding southern plantation. But they also capture the dominant ideology of American empire, an emphasis on uplift through the improvement of economic infrastructure and related social systems that connects the Sunflower Plantation Project with the occupation of Haiti, the Marshall Plan, Cold War efforts in the Global South, and Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lange’s photos capture the idealized plantation in action. In one, a small child, wearing just a denim short-john and a hat, speaks to the master, who leans in, hands on his knees, bent over patronizingly. A white mechanic stands in the background, a bemused half smile on his face. The encounter is staged on a floor of dirt, creased and crisscrossed with tire tracks. A large barn with corrugated-tin siding sits in the background. Such an image was, for Lange, part of a series, not just a stand-alone shot. In another, thirty black workers—a small subset of a group numbering two hundred, brought to hoe cotton for a dollar a day—fan out across a carpet floor of the cash crop. There, in another, is a black woman cradling a hoe, her premodern figuration in juxtaposition to another image, this time of a black man astride a great, powerful tractor. There is a vast field, with rows upon rows of cotton, and here, in contrast, is a group of resting laborers, sitting on the stoop of the nearby grocery store, quietly attending to their boss, who seems oblivious to their presence. And another of the planter’s manse, positioned as the dominant, dramatic expression of power and privilege on the vast, flat terrain of the Mississippi Delta.²

Lange’s composite portrait of the plantation reminds us that it was—and is—a complex, a network of interlaced institutions, and not merely a big farm. It reveals the plantation to be an instrument of political economy, a beachhead of a certain civilizing mission. Here, through Lange’s eyes, we see the South imaged as a backward region in need of modernization—a central motif in American culture—but we also see that backwardness racialized, expressed as the Negro problem, with a simple solution (the reestablishment of the plantation) that dates back to slavery. Lange’s photos thus remind us that our vision of the plantation as a complex was drawn once more—in bright colors and bold lines—in the decade of the 1930s, at a moment when aristocracy was under direct assault, when social structures were called into question, and when the racial patterns set a century or so earlier were remade for a new, modern world.

This was the decade, after all, of Absalom, Absalom!, published a year before Lange’s photographs, a novel that, as mentioned earlier, featured a vicious and ambitious archetype who carved his one-hundred-square-mile plantation out of the wilderness, and whose notion of the plantation was shaped by his own hemispheric sojourns. Other points of connection are more disturbing. In the same year as Lange’s sojourn at the Sunflower Plantation Project, planters in Florida were under investigation for labor practices that bordered on slavery, evidenced in their systems of debt peonage and brutal regimes of discipline punishment. Popular novelist Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind in 1936—the same year as Faulkner’s text—and the novel was replete with images of heroic rascals with heart-melting grins and damsels wrapped in colorful fabric, all attended to by a vast, and generally contented, black population. The decade marked by the Great Depression, then, witnessed the reemergence of the plantation as something worth remembering and, strangely, restoring—as something that did critical economic and cultural work in American life.

Tara, the archetypal plantation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, is perhaps the most memorable—that is, durable—Old South icon created in this period. As visualized in the 1939 film, it is built at the top of a long, rolling hill, with a gently winding road leading up to it. Gerald O’Hara’s plantation house is a broad, whitewashed structure with four massive pillars, signifying strength and power, holding up a vast roofline. Everything about the house is big, from the staircase inside so large that human figures are miniaturized when they walk up and down, to the various bedrooms and libraries, so vast it can hardly be supposed that all these spaces and peoples can fit under one roof. The landscape is big. The rooms are big. The personalities are big, too.

As a place, Mitchell’s version of the plantation is familiar to almost everyone who has thought about—or carefully studied—the slaveholding past. Invoking the word brings to mind clichéd images of tree-lined promenades, vast homes with sprawling porches centered on equally vast agricultural plots of land. Every plantation requires a master and a mistress, paired representatives of white supremacy and representations of the peculiarly feudal affect of the entire complex. And everywhere, the cliché dictates, there must be slaves or servants or peons—small and large, male and female, old and young. Populated by a small stratum of white overseers and masters and a dense layer of black slaves, the plantation is neither a farm nor a factory, but rather some deeply, disturbingly racialized combination of the two. Tara invokes the generally recognized representation noted at the beginning of this essay: the familiar idyll, fixed in one region and one time.

In this imagining, the plantation is marked as much by scale as it is by location. It signifies a complex, an intricate network of social and economic relations, an unequal, hierarchical prefiguration of the company towns of the Fordist economy, with their standardized production lines and citizen-consumers. Relations between masters and slaves—or, as Lange’s photographs suggest, between boss and field hand—appear amicable and not merely productive. The plantation, the myth of Tara proposes, provides everything necessary for everyone who lives there, so long as they keep to their respective stations.

This is an enduring myth, this idea of the plantation as an organic domestic space, with its various peoples arranged together in something like More’s utopia. Established after the Civil War as a feature of the Lost Cause mythology, this image flourished during the 1930s, was given new meaning during the massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, and survives to the present day as a touchstone for southern identity. It is at the root of the idea that the South is more courtly, more polite, more family oriented than the cold, hard North. It also supports the notion that rural plantations were, in their own way, the antithesis of the modern capitalist factory of the urban, northern city.

And yet Tara is also a productive homestead, a capitalist pied-à-terre, groomed and cultivated by the elder O’Hara, himself an immigrant eager to climb the social ladder, to join the ranks of great planters. For Gerald O’Hara, Tara isn’t just a set piece for the performance of race and class or a single site in a wide-ranging economic system—a node in a network. It is also a machine that produces great wealth and concentrates that wealth for a single person or family in the master’s house. O’Hara’s eager establishment of Tara—the fields, the slaves, the manse, and the affective and material relations that bind all of these things together—is no less a reflection of ambition than Thomas Sutpen’s more transparently, more brutally cruel establishment of his hundred acres. The plantation is supposed to make both men rich and perpetuate the institution of slavery. Plantations, we now know, courtesy of a generation of scholars from James Oakes to Ed Baptist, were fundamentally capitalist institutions seeking to wring profit from brutal, efficient labor regimes.

Critically studying the plantation, then, means refusing to prioritize that idealized, domestic comity. To understand the larger, global significance of the plantation, one needs to have a longer narrative in mind, to recognize that the movement of that complex institution across time and space is the story of the modern age, of slavery and exploration and domination; that one can trace the establishment of plantations in settler societies and extractive colonies and see the history of the modern world unfold, with the proliferation of such things—implantings, again, of Western domination—at the razor’s edge of empire and expansion; that plantations, in Philip Curtin’s history of the concept, originate as forward operating bases for ever-expanding empires and then become—as time moves on—critical bulwarks in the now-settled homeland for that continued, relentless expansion; that, by explicit design, the plantation makes some people rich and puts others in chains—literally or, as Lange’s photos unwittingly suggest, metaphorically.

As the plotlines of Faulkner and Mitchell suggest, the plantation of the Old South was also a sort of aspirational, if unachievable, ideal for many southerners, at odds with the much-celebrated, small-scale Jeffersonian yeoman thought to be the foundation stone of American democracy. Capitalist to its core, the plantation required—for growth—expansion across the open ground through the acquisition of more land and slaves. But it also demanded, as time went on, a certain degree of theatrical performance, as a landscape of small farmers might become, if the circumstances were right, a world dominated by great planters. That performance—so perfectly mythologized in Gone with the Wind and so routinely misunderstood by many as chivalric and courtly—was rooted in the stratification of the planter class and the slaveholding South in general, a class stratification built on a broad, thoroughly antidemocratic foundation of captured and enslaved labor. So deeply ingrained was this linkage between place, practice, and politics that the post–Civil War plantation, David Oshinsky reminds us, quickly became the model for an emerging penal system geared toward the enforcement of debt peonage and white supremacy.³

Given this gruesome history, one would imagine that the material remains of the plantation complex would be a source of shame, with commemorations that match—in emotional tone—the deeply contemplative, melancholic ruins of the concentration camps of Europe. One would think that the hoopskirts and big white houses and accented mannerisms of the great planter class would be subject to ridicule and consigned to the dustbin of history.

Perversely, though, the plantation has endured instead as a symbol of an Old South deemed worthy of restoration and visitation, a likely site for family reunions, weddings, and getaway weekends. The long line of old plantation homes along the banks of the Mississippi prospers as a site of visitation but only haphazardly communicates a full history of the institutions and networks that fostered the creation of these massive structures. These sites along what is known as the Old River Road seem more closely connected to the world of Dorothea Lange and William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell than to the actual nineteenth-century history of chattel slavery. Open the website for the Old River Road Plantation Adventure, for instance, and the theme music from