De Lan’ of Sweet Dreams
De Lan’ of Sweet Dreams
Suffering and Suicide among the Enslaved
Suicide among the enslaved has been well documented, with most historians arguing that slave suicides were evidence of resistance. Adopting a ‘neo-abolitionist’ approach, this chapter, building on the exposes of abolitionists who wrote about slave suicides, takes seriously the individual reasons the enslaved killed or tried to kill themselves in order to move beyond attributing these acts ideologically. This approach honors the suffering and full humanity of the enslaved and the experiences that led some to self-murder. White southerners ignored evidence that the enslaved suffered from depression or committed suicide, in order to mask the many causes of slave suffering including rape and sexual assault, punishment, abuse, separation of families, hopelessness. The enslaved embraced self-murder because it ended their suffering.
Keywords: neo-abolitionist, slave suicide, rape, sexual assault, separation of families, punishment, abuse, suffering, trauma
North Carolina Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
