Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 153commentary on slavery. “I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to my land,”
she muses in an entry for March 8, 1861. “Men and women are punished when their
masters and mistresses are brutes and not when they do wrong – and then we are
surrounded by prostitutes.” That last remark picks up a recurrent theme in the diary.
Chesnut was acutely aware of the brutal, ironic fact that, while the ruling white
patriarchs in the Southern states insisted on their separation from, and even
difference as a species to, their black slaves, they did not hesitate to have sexual
contact with them. While they drew an absolute boundary between whites and
blacks, they crossed the boundary constantly; and the consequences of that were
large numbers of children neither “white” nor “black” but both. The most vivid
example, perhaps, of slavery as a violation of humanity was offered by the white, and
usually male, sexual use of their “property.” And the most striking illustration of the
slave system as hypocrisy in action was something Chesnut observed. “What do you
say to this?” she wrote in the entry for August 26, 1861. “A magnate who runs a
hideous black harem and its consequences under the same roof with his lovely white
wife and his beautiful accomplished daughters?”
“I hate slavery,” Chesnut confessed. What she hated about it, especially, was the
fact that, as she put it, “our men live all in one house with their wives and concubines,
and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children.” That
inspired her sympathy for white women forced to bear daily witness to the infidelity
and hypocrisy of their male kin but forced never to say anything – “supposed,” as
Chesnut expressed it, “never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as sunlight,
and play their part of unsuspecting angels to the letter.” But it did not inspire her to
any sympathy for black women who were, after all, the main victims here, subject to
constant sexual coercion. “My countrywomen are as pure as angels, tho’ surrounded
by another race who are the social evil!” Chesnut lamented. As she saw it, the slave
system was to blame for all this “nastiness,” but so were “facile black women.”
Ironically, Chesnut could see through the Southern myth of the extended family far
enough to notice that the white “father” was constantly violating his black “daughters,”
but not far enough to absolve those “daughters” of blame. She was too deeply
implicated in myths about black sexuality, and the supposed animalism of the black
race, for that. She could appreciate the hypocritical maneuver involved in placing
white women on a pedestal, as models of “purity and innocence,” and then turning
to black women for sexual gratification, the kinds of satisfaction that white women
were supposed neither to have nor to give. But she could not understand that both
white and black women were being used here, suffering from the maneuver, and
that, by any human measure, the sufferings of black women were far worse. This is
all to say that the diaries of Chesnut offer as much a symptom as a diagnosis of the
moral and material brutality of slavery. What she saw was limited, as well as
illuminated, by her condition as an intelligent white woman of the privileged class.
Her sympathies could only stretch a certain distance. And, at her best moments, she
seems to have sensed this. Attending a black religious service, for instance, Chesnut
confessed that she was deeply moved by all “the devotional passion of voice and
manner” and by the hymns – “the saddest of all earthly music,” she wrote, “weird andGGray_c02.indd 153ray_c 02 .indd 153 8 8/1/2011 7:54:40 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 40 AM