Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840–1865

enslaved person. The fear of betrayal fundamentally characterized the master–slave relationship. With the Civil War and Emancipation, the formally enslaved made efforts to overcome their emotional oppression. They commemorated freedom through holidays, sought information about and reunion with separated family members, and wrote of their newfound happiness and freedom to their former masters. To regain the lost dominance of the old system, white elites employed legal and extra-legal means to reassert themselves emotionally via terrorism through the KKK and the Black Codes. Dwyer mentions a handful of times that her study offers the reader the ‘lived experience’ of slavery. But she is only partly there as the senses are present, but not analysed. Both the enslaved and slaveholding sources offer rich, sensorial clues as to how the emotions act and react. Most importantly, the sources offer us the performative nature of emotions. For instance, when Mary Chestnut and Harriet Jacobs record that men’s sexual abuse of enslaved women was a ‘sore spot’ of slave society. When one heard the quarrelling of a slaveholding couple, one knew and feared the retribution of either the enraged, jealous mistress or the reaction of the caught, angered master. Another example is how enslaved communities uncovered thieves within by combining ‘grave dust’, or dirt from the grave of the deceased, with water. No harm from drinking the mixture meant innocence. Dwyer’s work can assist historians to successfully employ both the emotions and the senses in recovering the historical lived experience. This is a valuable contribution to the history of antebellum American slavery and emotions history. Historians should add their own efforts to this methodological approach, which Dwyer has shown is achievable and greatly expands our understanding of the era.