African-American Slave Culture

Slaves never gave up their hope for freedom or their will to resist total white control over them. They succeeded in creating a semi-independent culture centered on the family and church, which enabled them to survive the experience of bondage without abandoning their self-esteem and to pass on to other generations values that conflicted with those of their masters. Slave culture drew on the heritage of Africa. African influence appeared in dance and music, forms of religious worship, and slave medicine. The end of the foreign slave trade helped foster a particularly new African-American culture, shaped by American and African traditions and values.
The family was the center of slave community. Because of a natural increase of the slave population,
in the United States there was an equal ratio of male and female slaves, allowing for the creation of families. While slave marriages were not legally recognized, masters had to consent to them and marriages were often significant events on plantations. Most slaves stayed married for life, if not disrupted by sale, and families typically had two parents, although the sale of male slaves created a higher number of female-headed families than in white families. The threat of being sold, and thus disrupting families, was the slaveowners’ greatest weapon, and fear of being sold pervaded slave life. Many men and children were separated from families by sale, but so were women. Some masters simply ignored slave families when making decisions about selling slaves.
In some ways, gender roles for slaves were very different than those in the larger society. Slave men and women were equally powerless. The cult of domesticity, relegating women to the home, did not apply to slave women. Slave men could not provide for their families, protect wives from physical or sexual abuse by owners and overseers, or choose when and how their children might work. However, when slaves worked “on their own time,” traditional gender roles prevailed. Slave men worked outdoors while slave women cared for children and cooked. The slave family remained central to slave culture and allowed slaves to transmit their values and traditions and strategies for survival from generation to generation.
A distinctive form of Christianity also helped slaves survive and resist bondage. Slaves participated in the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening. Every plantation seemed to have a slave preacher, often with little education but considerable oratorical skill and knowledge of the Bible. Urban slaves often established their own churches. But masters used Christianity as another means of control and discipline. Some required their slaves to attend sermons reminding slaves that theft was immoral and that servants should obey their masters.
African tradition and Christian beliefs, slave religion was practiced at night in secret or in the open during the day.
These meetings were frequently interactive and emotional. The biblical story of Exodus in which God chooses Moses to lead the enslaved Jews of Egypt to the promised land of freedom, was central to black Christianity. Slaves saw themselves as a chosen people whom would one day deliver from bondage. Christ as a redeemer who cared for the oppressed was important. Other heroes from the Bible included Jonah, who escaped from the whale; David, who bested the more powerful Goliath; and Daniel, who escaped from the lion’s den. The Christian message of brotherhood and equality of all before the Creator seemed to repudiate slavery.
Slave culture rested on slaves’ belief that slavery was unjust and their yearnings for freedom. Despite proslavery arguments, slaves believed they were being deprived of the fruits of their labor by idle planters living lives of luxury. While most slaves knew it was impossible to directly combat their condition, this did not prevent them from desiring freedom. Slaves constantly talked and dreamed of liberty, and their actions during and after the Civil War flowed from their experience of slavery and their hope of escaping
it.