From the issue dated December 14, 2001
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The Volume of History: Listening to 19th-Century AmericaBy MARK M. SMITHIn simple Quaker dress, determined face framed by dark curls, the 33-year-old South Carolinian stood before a packed Massachusetts legislature in Boston on February 21, 1838. Nervous and apprehensive, she prepared to convince her audience why Southern slavery should be abolished and to explain women's role in the process. Her jitters were understandable. While sympathetic ears filled the hall, scoffers doubting whether a woman should speak so publicly and politically abounded. Angelina Grimké was not the first American woman to denounce slavery, but until that day none had spoken to an American legislative body. A hush fell. "Mr. Chairman," she began. Her words punched the stillness with the force of novelty. She hit stride, regaling listeners with thoughts on the religious and political enormities of bondage. Her voice rang with the authenticity of someone who had witnessed slavery firsthand. In her choice of images, Grimké conveyed the wretchedness of the peculiar institution in a way that touched hearts and hardened resolves: "I stand before you as a Southerner, exiled from the land of my birth, by the sound of the lash, and the piteous cry of the slave." What she said was heard in more than one sense. Enabling and urging her audience to hear not just her words but also the sounds of bondage was a way to tease at her listeners' guts and hearts. For many in the hall who had never actually heard slavery, they could now imagine how it sounded. Of course, there were many Northerners who could not or did not have the inclination to hear Grimké's aural representation of slavery. But actual hearing was not necessary, because her speech was reprinted in the antislavery newspaper the Liberator a few days later, on March 2. Her aural depiction and its authenticity were replayed via print, and readers, too, could now hear, imagine, and reimagine what she had heard and wanted them to hear. Angelina Grimké was neither the first nor the last to represent slavery aurally. Abolitionist travelers to the Old South and, especially, escaped slaves who recounted their experiences to Northerners did the same. While there was doubtless some recognition that they exaggerated the frequency of screams, lashes, and clanking chains, their characterizations of Southern sounds gained widespread acceptance among abolitionists of all stripes and, later, among supporters of free soil and free labor. For many Northerners, the South became a place alien and threatening because of how it sounded. In following years, other speakers added their voices and constructed the South as at once resounding with the noises of bondage and the silence of Southern political tyranny and economic backwardness. Increasingly, abolitionists, free soilers, and Republicans constructed the South as aurally distinct and depraved. Northern advocates of progress also increasingly applauded the virtues of their own soundscape, in contrast to the noises of slavery, for in the hum of industry and the buzz of freedom they heard a society that not only was different from the South but also reaffirmed their belief in the superiority of industrial, urban, free-labor modernity. William M. Bobo liked to travel. In the early 1850s, the genteel South Carolinian jaunted north to New York City, and in 1852 he published his impressions of the place in a brief travelogue, Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian (Who Had Nothing Else to Do). "A stranger to New-York City," he began, "has many things to see and hear, most of which he does not really understand." Part of his job was to explain. Resounding with rush and crowd, Gotham was a place where emphatically large and fashionable hotels suffered from too much noise and confusion. The city echoed with the excesses of wage labor and Northern capitalism, and its dissonance became more grating the farther he ventured. Bobo prepared his readers' senses: "Any one who walks the streets of New-York with his eyes and ears open, sees and hears many strange and horrid things." Poverty, sickness, filth, crime, and wretchedness echoed in one ear while, in stark aural contrast, silk rustles of the sashaying skirts of bourgeois women sounded in the other. Islands of tranquility could be found, of course, but they only accentuated city noise. Just outside the city, in Yonkers, he found residences "free from the musquitoes, dust and noise of the city." But time was not on the side of such quietude: "New-York will be out here one of these days." The expansive tendencies of Northern capitalism would introduce "the noisy and vexatious walks of the living" to Yonkers and places even farther removed. The future sounded bleak to this man of the South. Back in the city -- this time at Five Points -- Bobo ventured into one of several drinking and dance houses. "There lies a drunken female, screaming and yelling" while men were "cursing and swearing in the most blasphemous manner, a sort of medley which is indescribable." Overwhelmed, he abandoned his narrative: "Let us get out, my senses refuse to behold longer such scenes." Massive immigration, the exploitation of young factory women, and the general misery and wretchedness of wage-labor society only "sickens the senses." Northern capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization had introduced more "poverty, prostitution, wretchedness, drunkenness, and all the attending vices, in this city, than in the whole South." Minimizing the extent to which similar sounds could be heard in the urban South, Bobo remarked, "This is a comment upon Northern institutions." William Bobo's aural representations of New York City and Northern modernity were hardly new, and similar examples can be found beginning principally in the 1830s, when Southern defenders of slavery began to hear the rise of what they perceived as an aggressive and threatening Northern society. Often in response to abolitionists' critiques of slavery's evil strains, Southern elites and politicians countered with the kind of aural critique of Northern society offered by Bobo. Southern representations of the Northern soundscape and all that it stood for were expressed in print, communicating the failings of the North to many Southerners who had never actually heard it. The pro-slavery thinker George Fitzhugh, for example, did not visit, see, hear, or experience the North firsthand until 1855, but he, like Grimké's audiences, had read enough to learn how to listen and what to hear. In all likelihood, Fitzhugh had at some point in his life heard sounds of slavery similar to those that assaulted Grimké's ears, but he, like Bobo and other elite white Southerners, rarely commented on those aspects of the Southern soundscape. Instead, Fitzhugh listened for what he and others believed were the keynotes of Southern society -- tranquility and quietude, punctuated by a healthy dose of humming industriousness and the melodies of singing slaves -- and contrasted them with what they believed was the destructiveness of Northern modernity. In his 1850 Slavery Justified, Fitzhugh argued that the social arrangement of slavery and its harmonizing of labor and capital meant that "we have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages," and "but few in our jails, and fewer in our poorhouses." The consequence was heard as much as seen: "At the slaveholding South all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment." Following his visit North, in 1857 Fitzhugh published Cannibals All!, a scathing critique of the dangerous tendencies of wage labor. What he had previously read about how Northern society sounded was confirmed by the cultural bias of his hearing and selective listening. The competition between labor and capital, he maintained, led to revolution, and its beginnings could be heard in the noises of poverty, wretchedness, and strife that would reach a crescendo in a destructive cacophony of social dislocation. When capitalists' efforts to tame workers' demands had failed ("We must use violence to keep you quiet," Fitzhugh imagined them saying), "the maddening cry of hunger for employment and bread" would culminate in "the grumbling noise of the heaving volcano that threatens and precedes a social eruption greater than the world has yet witnessed." The rumblings of class conflict and social revolution could be heard in the noises of industrialism, capitalism, and unfettered exploitation. While exceptional in several respects, Grimké, Bobo, and Fitzhugh were typical in how they understood, imagined, and projected their abstract and actual environments and sectional identities. Most 19th-century Americans experienced their worlds through their senses. At times they understood by using -- deliberately and unwittingly -- all five senses at once (if they had them); at other times one sense took primacy, but rarely to the exclusion of the others. It seems almost audacious to point out that in the past, people sensed their worlds, their environments, and their places. Obvious though that fact is, however, it warrants stating, not least because we are prone to examine the past through the eyes of those who experienced it. While people interpreted their worlds visually, it is also worth iterating that seeing was but one way in which they experienced. Yet, for reasons that have to do with the 19th-century preoccupation with visuality, the rise of print culture, and the long shadows cast by those developments, it seems fair to say that a good deal of historical work interprets the past principally, if unwittingly and implicitly, through historical actors' eyes. Historians rarely consider in any explicit or systematic way the other four senses, and so a good deal of what we know about most historical experience is really a history of what people saw. In this sense (literally), we understand the past in one-fifth of its texture and scope, and historical analyses of how people sensed -- heard, tasted, smelled, and touched -- are staggeringly few and far between. Without listening to what and how 19th-century Americans heard, we will remain only partially aware of the depth, texture, and nature of sectional identity and deny ourselves access to a fuller explanation of how that identity came into being with such terrible resolve. Sectional consciousness was sensed, and hearing and listening as much as looking and seeing were important to its creation. Sounds and their meanings are shaped by the cultural, economic, and political contexts in which they are produced and heard. Because sound was so embedded in the various fabrics of antebellum American life and consciousness, we must listen as much to the economic and the political as to the cultural if we are to begin to recover the principal meanings that lay in their articulation. Treating aural history as simply a cultural, political, or economic project denudes the past of its interrelated texture and contributes to our deafness by denying us an understanding of how political sounds were shaped by, and in turn influenced, cultural whispers, economic booms, and social screams. Heard worlds, like the seen, were so intimately connected that to reveal their full complexity, we should listen to them in their entirety as best we can. Contemporaries' insertion of aural imagery into the medium of published discourse effectively gave lasting voice to what is sometimes wrongly considered the silent medium of print. Printed aural projections of sectional identity and a variety of other matters were powerful and palpable because the printed words used to convey the various sounds and their meanings rendered aurality permanent and rescued them from the ephemerality of voice. In this way, what would have remained temporary, elusive sound (many arguments were offered in the form of public speeches) gained permanence in the world. Unlike the modern ability to record and thereby reproduce sounds precisely, the antebellum aural metaphor and projection that were communicated through print (and actual hearing) allowed contemporaries to have access to a permanent image of how each section (and other things) supposedly sounded. Hearing the sounds did nothing to contradict those printed images and, in fact, largely confirmed and heightened them. Time and again the imagery of how each section of the country sounded was recorded first in the ear, then in a print version that stripped the sounds of their nuance and replaced them with a clumsy written representation, thus giving readers access to a captured record of sectional aurality that they, in turn, could repeat with their voices to other ears. Elite classes within each section varied enormously, and the term "elite" captures a general but evolving worldview broadly shared by men and women who articulated the principal ideas of their class and section. Whatever their specific differences, Northern patricians and the new bourgeoisie shared much not only in their assessments of the Northern laboring classes, but, critically, in their understanding and depiction of Southern slaveholding society. The Northern elite -- ranging from aristocratic Boston Brahmins to reform-minded abolitionists and capitalists -- believed in the virtues of gentility and highbrow culture and, for the most part, the desirability of free labor and virtuous political democracy. On some important matters, Northern elites disagreed, and their differences were manifest in their formal political-party loyalties. But their general preoccupation with gentility and, beginning in the 1830s, the question of slavery muted a good deal of their differences, so that in the 30 or so years before 1860, particularly in the 1850s, many Northerners of all political persuasions united in a broad agreement that slavery was dangerous to the future of the United States and debilitating to aspects of the American present. Southern elites were similarly variegated and diverse. Southern industrialists, merchants, and the urban middle class sometimes locked horns with the numerically smaller but far more influential planter class. Nor were planters in agreement on all matters (few ruling classes ever are). Again, though, the ways in which merchants, industrialists, and planters were linked through interest, kinship, and their broad support of Southern slavery ensured that major disagreements began to evaporate in the closing decades of the antebellum period. In the face of the Northern critique of slaveholding society, Southern elites, with the planter class at the helm, coalesced around a simple but powerful credo: Southern slavery and all that it stood for were not only desirable but deserving of protection. Whatever nationalist sentiment united Northern and Southern elites, whatever they shared in common, slavery proved the fundamental issue on which they could not agree. Sectional awareness was shaped by what elites heard at the everyday level of social, economic, and political interaction. Neither Southern nor Northern antebellum patricians considered their heard world utterly harmonious -- strains of discord were everywhere. North and South, antebellum workers used the transgressive nature of noise and the disturbing power of silence to limit and sometimes end their exploitation. In doing so, they initiated strategies and tactics of resistance that threatened to rupture the ideal soundscape and the social, economic, and political security that it represented to elites. For the most part, though, respective elites took considerable comfort in how their societies sounded. Northern elites reveled in the hum of industrialism and the satisfying sounds of free and wage labor. When they listened to class relations in the North, they heard discord and noise but also the tremendous productive capacity of capitalism, and they considered the accompanying strains generated by lower orders as sounds necessary for the successful prosecution of their great experiment. Alternatively, Southern masters cultivated the hum of slavery and emphasized the serenity of Southern social relations. They, too, saw and heard discord within the South, but they prided themselves on their ability to levy quietude on their society. Slaveholders did not reject modernity in toto. They cultivated economic productivity and embraced its sounds. Railroads chuffed happily in their ears, and the sounds of timed labor anchored them to an idealized past and a prosperous future. Even limited urbanization and industrialization were acceptable. But the quietude of plantation life and all the conservatism that masters invested in that serenity were sacrosanct. In other words, while Northern elites often considered noise a necessary component of modernism, Southern slaveholders wanted modernity with quietude, a notion that differed from the image (and, increasingly, the reality) of the ideal soundscape peddled by Northern abolitionists and capitalists. While ruling classes in the two sections agreed on much, they argued vehemently over the preferred form of social and economic relations. In that debate, sounds took on profound meaning. A rapidly modernizing North listened to the South and heard the shrieks of slavery, the awful silence of oppression, and the unmistakable tones of moral, economic, and political premodernity. Southern masters listened to the North and heard, with increasing volume, so it seemed, the disquieting throb of a mob made reckless by industrialism, urbanism, wage labor, and passionate democracy. Elites both North and South constructed one another aurally; they attempted to change how one another sounded, and they used aural descriptions and representations to try to effect that change. Abolitionists shouted southward, exercising the throat of democracy to critique their perception of silent tyranny and cacophonous slavery. They wanted the masters to hear the benefits of Northern democracy, the productive capacity of free-wage labor, and the undesirability of slavery. A variety of ostensibly competing Northern voices joined the refrain in the mid-1850s, with Republicans and some Northern Democrats applauding the satisfying melody of free labor and castigating the economic and political sounds and silences of slavery. For their part, Southern masters shouted back and then applied tools of silencing that they had sharpened in their own society. Indeed, as parts of the masters' world came to sound vaguely Northern, they pushed hard to block out those sounds and deafen their population to the evil strains being flung southward. Both sectional ruling classes played on the ear to define themselves as legitimate and cast the "other" as reprehensible. Given that elites invested so much of their identity in how their society sounded, and given that they heard their pasts and their futures, it is hardly surprising that they acted with a degree of emotional commitment to the preservation of the aural integrity of their society that might strike modern observers as excessive and irresponsible. But precisely because they invested such authority in the heard world, their behavior is perfectly understandable. Sounds of social and economic relations, slavery, and freedom were so meaningful that they helped shape the psycho-acoustical perception of a region. Sounds, noises, and silences took on tactile qualities that proved real, substantive, and palpable for political elites from both sections. Northern and Southern ruling classes did not go to war solely because they listened to one another and disliked what they heard (just as the Civil War was not solely a product of what they saw of one another). Aural representations joined visual ones, and once we begin to understand how sectional consciousness was channeled, fed, and articulated through more than one sense, it becomes far more understandable how sectionalism assumed such concrete dimensions and ferocity. A reliance on visuality alone is likely to understate the emotional, visceral quality of the coming of the Civil War, but by adding acoustemological considerations we approach a fuller understanding of how sectional identities assumed such terrible force. Sounds of war, noises of loss, shrieks of death, and chortles of success and victory followed this aural sectionalism. In a way, the Civil War was an aural victory for a modern North, not least because it cleansed the Southern soundscape of the wretched noise of slavery and paved the way for capitalism's expansion south and west. Yet the noises associated with the Civil War, the boom of battlefields, and the increasing volume of dissatisfied labor on the Northern home front only encouraged Northern elites to turn eagerly to a quiet, tamed South once the thunder of cannon and tumult of war had ended. Mark M. Smith is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina. This article is adapted from Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, being published this month by the University of North Carolina Press. Copyright © 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education